Thursday, July 15, 2021

Random Movie Reviews, Volume 13

Space Race Documentaries: 

Apollo 11 (2019): This was my gateway drug into space race documentaries in general and the moon landing in particular. This is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen, even if it was released by CNN Films! But no fake news here, friends; director Todd Douglas Miller has created a concise, 93-minute event picture that documents the July 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon, and there’s never a dull moment. There are no talking heads, either; everything you hear is vintage audio, from Mission Control to the astronauts to various newscasters (Walter Cronkite of course among them). And everything you see is material that was filmed at the time. It is an incredibly realized documentation of a specific moment in history. Matt Seitz at RogerEbert.com aptly described Apollo 11 as “a trip film like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Woodstock,” and that wasn’t mere hyperbole on his part – from this informative Vanity Fair article we learn that much of the footage in Apollo 11 started life as material for a projected big-budget MGM film. Miller has taken this material, much of it rediscovered in NASA’s vaults, and turned out the movie that should have been released at the time; the vibe is certainly trippy a la Kubrick, and the frequent split-screens are straight out of Woodstock. In other words, Miller has created the MGM NASA movie that never was, and he’s done a damn fine job of it. 

Miller’s goal, as recounted in the above article, was to retain a sense of legitimacy with the past, thus even the soundtrack, by Matt Morton, is composed on vintage instruments like moog and mellotron. While cool, Morton’s pulsing score sounds more ‘80s than ‘60s; for an idea of what an actual “Apollo 11” soundtrack of the day sounded like, check out the bonus record review section below. Regardless, everything works together seamlessly; we open with the “crawler,” ie the massive vehicle that moved the equally-massive Saturn V rocket onto the launch pad, all while various audio snippets inform us what’s going on. There’s emotional content here, too; when the three Apollo 11 astronauts are introduced (Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin), Smith serves up flashback montages for each of them, showing snippets of their military careers, their astronaut training, and their family life. It’s very understated but very moving, particularly Armstrong’s sequence; the look on his face, when Smith cuts back to the “launch prep” footage, is almost identical to the look on his face at the end of his montage, where he’s looking at one of his sons. Cronkite’s voiceover material here is also perfectly matched. 

The launch is treated like the spectactle it must’ve been, but the highlight for me is the footage of all the spectators, many of whom sport some groovy sunglasses. And don’t blink or you’ll miss none other than Johnny Carson among them, looking very uncomfortable in his three-piece suit here in the blazing Florida sun. Moorton’s synthy soundtrack augments the various stages of the launch, but his best work comes up later in the film, when he counterpoints the reunion of Eagle and Columbia (ie the lunar lander and the command capsule) with a very moving piano piece…a sequence that comes off exactly like something out of 2001. Actually the soundtrack work throughout is perfect; in particular we have a bit where the astronauts are homebound and we see Buzz Aldrin’s cassette player floating in zero-g, and Smith brings up on the soundtrack the Johnny Cash-esque song it’s playing (John Stewart’s “Mother Country”). 

As for the moon landing itself, the infamous “1202 alarm” moment makes for tense viewing…if you know what’s going on. Here’s the one part a narrator might’ve helped. But essentially as Armstrong was bringing the lunar lander down, the computer was giving an alarm no one had ever heard of before. The entire mission could’ve been scrapped, but it was soon determined that it was nothing more than a sort of “overload” warning message from the computer. At any rate, the landing is still tense, filmed from a camera on the bottom of the lander, so you can see the legs skimming over the lunar landscape as Armstrong seeks a safe place to land. The moonwalk footage is good – better of course than the ghostly images originally broadcast on TV – and of course we hear the “one small step” announcement in real time. We also have the famous Nixon phonecall, and then it’s back to reunite with Collins in Columbia so that Apollo 11 can return home. At this point you feel that you have been part of the experience, and further you feel so much respect for these three men; the burst of applause when they’re choppered onto an awaiting Navy ship is especially welcomed. 

I could rave on and on about Apollo 11. It’s a mystery why it didn’t win an Oscar, but I’d wager the overt patriotism didn’t do it any favors; unlike the Armstrong biopic that bombed in theaters the other year, Apollo 11 not only shows the planting of the US flag but also has multiple scenes of people proudly waving the flag. It’s everywhere, from the spectactors at the launch to the men in Mission Control who wave their flags when Apollo 11 safely returns. Hollywood can’t hack patriotism on this scale; after all, merely displaying the American flag is now seen as a threatening act by today’s Left. (Curiously though the American flag is being embraced by freedom fighters all over the world…although the US media blocks that story, too!) But man, even I felt the tug of patriotism across all these decades as I watched this documentary; Miller’s skillful cut to President Kennedy’s speech at Rice University in 1962 at movie’s end was especially touching – as was the last pre-credits shot of the film being Kennedy’s confident grin. 

The footage throughout looks so pristine that you could almost think it was filmed last week, let alone over fifty years ago. There is a luminous glow to the pre-launch material, and Miller’s cuts – he also edited the film – are perfect. Supposedly there was a lot of material left in the vault of spectators at the launch, and Miller has assembled this rediscovered material so that it flows together quite artistically; even minor stuff comes across so cool, like a shot of the Saturn V sitting on the pad, and then cutting to a model of the rocket sitting in someone’s camper as they wait for the launch. The end credits sequence is also nice, with a concise look at the astronauts’s two weeks in quarantine upon their return. Speaking of which, last year Miller released a followup, Apollo 11: Quarantine, a 25-minute mini-doc that follows the same format as Apollo 11 but focuses solely on the quarantine. I haven’t seen it yet, but hopefully someday it will be released on a two-fer Blu Ray along with Apollo 11

Chasing The Moon (2019): This 3-part, 6-hour documentary is right up there with Apollo 11, and indeed even surpasses it at times given that there’s just so much more to it, and also due to the emotional content (to quote my man Bruce Lee). I was a bit skittish about watching this one, not due to the length, but because it was a PBS production…and folks sure the hell enough, one of the very first things you hear in Part 1 is someone talking about “racism.” But thankfully this stuff is not nearly dwelt upon as much as you’d expect from a PBS venture, and truth be told the Left comes off so poorly in Part 3 that I’m surrpised some of the material wasn’t cut out! Overall though director Robert Stone has attempted the herculean task of taking us through the space race in 6 hours, focusing mostly on the Apollo Program and the race to the moon. What separates this from Apollo 11 is that, while everything we see is vintage film (and it looks just as spectacular here, remastered in high def), what we often hear is modern comments from the various participants. So while we never actually see them, we’ll hear the comments of astronauts like Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders, as well as newsreporters of the day and engineers and scientists from NASA. This is in addition to the vintage audio we’ll also hear. 

This modern, reflecting-back-on-events motif adds an extra dimension to Chasing The Moon. We even hear a good bit from Nikita Khrushcev’s son, who fills us in on the Russian side of the space race. Apollo 11 was awesome because it came off like this huge, 70MM document of July ’69, but Chasing The Moon is much broader-ranging and much more comprehensive. It isn’t the ultimate space race documentary, though; the Mercury Program is barely mentioned and Gemini is only detailed for a few missions, plus the post-Apollo 11 moon landings are almost humorously relegated to a postcript. But regardless this is such a well-crafted documentary that the 6 hours fly by…save, that is, for some of Part 1, which is the most ponderous of the three parts, mostly due to it being comprised mainly of black-and-white footage detailing the beginnings of the space race. That being said, Part 1 has an opening that surpasses anything in Apollo 11; Stone begins the documentary with the launch of Apollo 11, using the typical footage originally filmed for Moonwalk One (see below), but he pairs it with the song “Wait” by M83. This is Coldplay/Radiohead-type music I typically wouldn’t listen to, but it pairs so perfectly with the Apollo 11 launch that now I “hear” the song when I see the launch in other documentaries. This sequence was the highlight for me of Chasing The Moon (it gave me chills the first time I saw it, if you must know, and you can check it out here in the extended Part 1 preview on Youtube; I have it cued to start right before the launch).  But there are many more highlights. 

While Part 1 details how the space race began, closing with the sad end of JFK, Part 2 dives into the Gemini and Apollo Programs. Stone incorporates vintage footage of the actual space missions discussed – and again it looks incredible in high-def – including Neil Armstrong’s near crash in a Gemini mission, as well as the Apollo 1 disaster. This sequence is very hard to watch as we actually see the Apollo 1 crew get in the command capsule, even sitting in there and happily filming each other as they wait for the countdown sequence, and we know as we watch that these three men will not be leaving the capsule alive. The screen cuts to black and we hear their cries for help over the commlink as a fire rages in the cockpit. Stone well captures the effect of the program on the families of the astronauts.  The most emotionally-gripping sequence in the entirety of Chasing The Moon turns out not to be a launch or a moon landing, but astronaut Frank Borman’s wife Susan sitting in front of her TV set, with friends and family around her, as she watches her husband take off for the moon – the first crew to ever attempt it – on Apollo 8, in Christmas of 1968. This material, filmed originally by Life Magazine as a way to “help” NASA understand the effect of launches on families, is salvaged by Stone, who shows Susan Borman the entire time her husband is launching off into space. In other words Stone makes her – and her incredible anxiety – the focus, not the rocket launch itself. It is one of the most gripping things I’ve watched in a very long time; the misery on Mrs. Borman’s face as she watches the launch on TV is not faked or contrived for the media…and made all the more profound because the widow of one of the Apollo 1 astronauts is standing behind her. 

Speaking of Frank Borman, the poor guy did have a hard time of it; via voiceover, he and his fellow crewmen reveal that Borman was hit by stomach flu shortly after launch, and he spent the first few hours spewing out of “both ends!” That said, the Apollo 8 mission went on to great success; the three crewmembers were the first to actually leave Earth’s orbit, and took the famous “Blue Marble” photo of the Earthrise. Their initial trip around the dark side of the moon could’ve been a little more dramatized, but then I might just be spoiled by the way the group Public Service Broadcasting dramatized it in their song “The Other Side,” off their 2015 The Race For Space album. Apollo 8 is the centerpiece of Part 2, but curiously Stone ends the episode a little off-toned with a brief sequence on Poppy Northcutt, the first female NASA engineer who tells us that the sexism of the era made her become a feminist. Honestly though her story on sexism is a little undermined because they show various photos and film clips of her, and of course she’s a total babe (if you’ll pardon my male gaze – but then hardly any of us would be here if it wasn’t for the male gaze, now would we??), posing in various mini-skirts. I suspect Ms. Northcutt would’ve been hit on no matter what industry she worked in. That said, her comments are great to hear, as she was one of the techinicians who determined how to bring the spacecrafts back to Earth. 

Part 3 concerns the July 1969 moon landing of Apollo 11, and this entire sequence is also gripping, and also at times a little more emotionally-connecting than Apollo 11 because Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins share their thoughts with us. Since Stone already showed the launch at the beginning of Part 1, he doesn’t replay it here; instead he takes the interesting angle of cutting from the launch to CBS news’s coverage of the event. I found all this fascinating; Watler Cronkite, who features throughout the documentary given that he was the journalist who was most connected with the space pgrogram, ran special coverage of the launch, with a production that cost the then-unheard of amount of 2 million dollars. Running for 36 hours, the special featured live-in-the-studio actors playing out the things the Apollo 11 crew were doing in space, and also Cronkite had his very own “HAL” computer to converse with; we’re told that Douglas Trumbull, special effects man for 2001, was hired for the production. I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a modern-day CBS news production, but good grief I’d eagerly sit through this entire “Man On The Moon” broadcast! 

Given that Chasing The Moon has narration from modern-day experts and astronauts, the “1202” alarm is more fully explained here than in Apollo 11, and also it’s made very clear how close to the wire Armstrong was to running out of fuel on landing. That being said, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins actually had more compelling things to say in the 2007 documentary In The Shadow Of The Moon (to be reviewed next time); here Stone not only includes their comments but from various Mission Control people and newscasters as well. The moon landing is, rightly, the centerpiece of Part 3, but we do get back to that “racism” material that we saw in the beginning minutes of Part 1. Basically a delegation led by Ralph Abernathy, a reverend who picked up where Martin Luther King left off, arrived at the Apollo 11 launch and decried the situation, in which billions were spent on space but racism prevailed on earth. What’s great here is that a NASA exec comes out to talk to them and basically says, “Look, we’d love to press a button and solve your problems, but our mission here is a different one.” The exec then goes on to offer them some VIP tickets to watch the launch (the cynic in me suspects that’s what they were after all along), and everyone’s happy and the delegation applauds and all is well. 

This part was for me the most depressing sequence in Chasing The Moon. I didn’t exactly need a reminder, but it was just more of an indication of how far we have fallen as a society and as a country. Civil discourse as shown here no longer exists. Now the mob rules in America; the louder you scream and shout, the quicker your demands are met. Could you imagine if Apollo 11 was happening now and a delegation of BLM and antifa rolled up to protest? Do you think they would engage in rational, civil discourse with NASA like Abernathy’s delegation did? Of course they wouldn’t. They’re incapable of it. Which brings me to another sad element of Part 3: Frank Borman relates that he was hired by President Nixon to go around college campuses in 1969 to talk about the space effort. Borman says that he met irrational anger everywhere, that he was spat upon as a representative of “the Establishment;” at one point he had to be helicoptered onto a campus because it was blocked off by rioters. Stone shows clips from this – including a great bit where Borman takes on a radical hippie chick – and it gave me flashbacks to our recent “summer of love” with its “mostly-peaceful protests.” Just another reminder of the irratonal hate and anger that has always consumed the Left. And of course those college kids went on to get into politics and education and God knows what else…which honestly goes a long way in explaining the chaos and increasing totalitarianism of the modern day. (But hey, at least we don’t have to deal with mean Tweets anymore, right??) 

So if you can’t tell, Chasing The Moon not only entertained me, but it involved me emotionally. And not just in how I was swept up in the spectacle of it all, with the sacrifices of the various people involved, but also in how it made me angry – angry that America was once capable of this type of exceptionalism. I was born five years after the first moon landing…actually, two years after the last moon landing, in ’72. So at no point in my life has there ever been anyone on the moon. The argument put forth by the various protesters in Chasing The Moon is that the billions could’ve been used to stop poverty, and racism, and injustices, and etc. Well, NASA was basically gutted in the early ‘70s…and yet all those problems are still here. Maybe the country should have kept putting money into the space effort; who knows where we’d be by now. Neil Armstrong was certainly upset with how it turned out (per an interview he gave before he died, which I’ll mention next time). Speaking of which an interesting nugget I learned in the final half of Part 3 was that Vice President Spiro Agnew, immediately after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, challenged the country to get to Mars before the end of the 20th Century…! 

Indeed, Part 3 ends with a lot of “could have beens.” Most interestingly we see that Werner Von Braun, in the weeks after Apollo 11, proposed to Congress an extensive plan to get to Mars by 1986 – using nuclear reactors as an additional stage on new Saturn rockets – but he was met with disinterest. (We get to see a lot of the NASA art for this material, and it’s very cool.) We also see current plans in the reborn space era, of SpaceX and whatnot, with CGI of future landings…CGI which honestly looks pretty clunky when compared to the cool vintage animation elsewhere in the doc. The “Man on the Moon” CBS special in particular boasts some cool ’60-style animation. But the feeling in the last minutes of Part 3 is one of sadness, and Stone makes his own feelings clear – humanity achived greatness in the ‘60s, but totally turned its back on it in the following decades. There’s no telling what could have been, but there’s also no denying the greatness that was achieved. 

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed watching Chasing The Moon. I plan to watch it again someday. It’s available to view for free on the PBS website. I heartily encourage you to watch it. 

Moonwalk One (1972): I wasn’t even aware of this documentary until I read the Vanity Fair article article I mentioned above, in the Apollo 11 review. The story as recounted there goes like this: MGM had a deal with NASA in the ‘60s to make a big-budget film about the Apollo program. But for reasons unknown MGM backed out shortly before Apollo 11. NASA took the film that was going to be used for the project – big 70MM stuff that was used for “event” roadshow movies of the day – and hired a documentary filmmaker named Theo Kamecke to make a documentary about the launch, just a few weeks before it was scheduled to occur. Further, NASA requested a sort of “time capsule” of the era itself. Kamecke filmed the astronauts preparing for the launch, and the launch itself – with the novel idea of turning the cameras around on the spectactors – and then spent the next two years finalizing the documentary, complete with material on how the spacesuits were made and how the astronauts were trained. In ’72 the movie was released, but on a very limited scale; indeed, it never even got outside a few select showings, ultimately relegated to a forgotten (aka “cult”) status. The official explanation is that by 1972 no one was much interested in the moon landings anymore, and that may be, but viewed now Moonwalk One comes off as a wonderfully unique and “vaguely trippy” (as the article above so aptly describes it) document of its era. Later filmmakers, in particular Apollo 11’s Todd Douglas Miller, have taken Kamecke’s footage – including material he left in the vaults – and included it in their own documentaries. 

NASA’s official Youtube channel has put up a 4k print of the theatrical release, and friends Moonwalk One is such an awesome document of the late ‘60s that I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it before. Kamecke was so insipred by Kubrick’s 2001 that it hurts – I mean the flick even opens with shots of Stonehenge and, a la the twirling bone cross-fading into an orbiting spaceship in 2001, we fade from the ancient monument to the massive “crawler” that moved the Saturn V rocket. Everything, from the way the movie’s directed to the pretentious, New Agey narration, just screams “1969,” and it couldn’t be cooler as a result. What’s fascinating is that so many later directors took their footage from Kamecke’s shots of the spectators at the Apollo 11 launch, as well as the launch itself, but whereas Apollo 11 treated it with gravitas and Chasing The Moon treated it with a sort of elegiac sadness, Kamecke just shows it as-is, with worbly “sci-fi” music on the soundtrack. 

More importantly, Moonwalk One is more of a documentary than any of the other movies reviewed here; Kamecke tells us how Apollo will fly to the moon, how the astronauts have trained for space, and even how their spacesuits were sewn. This bit in particular is fascinating; we see the old sewing machine these ladies used to create the suits, all while we hear them talking in voiceover – including the great detail that each of them wonder if it’s “their” glove that Neil Armstrong will be wearing when he gets to the moon. Also cool is the footage on astronaut training, complete with guys being thrown around on catapult-like chairs, biking in extreme heat, and being put through other obstacles. And through it all we have this late ‘60s aesthetic of off-skew camera angles, oscilating sci-fi synth blips, random avante-garde montages of people on earth (including even people dancing in a psychedelic discotheque), clips from the Flash Gordon serial, and other randomness. And the narration is so worthy of vintage Shatner that you wonder why Kamacke didn’t just hire him…I’m talking stuff like, “It is good to see the whole Earth. It is good to see the Earth…whole.” 

I went into Moonwalk One thinking it might be the worst of the lot, but damned if I didn’t find it the most entertaining, just for its trippy vibe. And I love how it is absolutely without sentiment. But Kamecke was not privy to a lot of the footage that so many of these later documentaries rely on; moon footage is scant, and mostly relegated to the ghostly images seen originally on TV. Also the docking of Eagle and Columbia isn’t as fleshed out as it is in other documentaries, particularly Apollo 11. As a snapshot of the era, of what people were thinking and feeling at the time, it can’t be beat, though. There is none of the wistfulness of Chasing The Moon; this is future stuff, and one gets the impression that “Moonwalk One” will just be the first of many, many more moonwalks. But all those later documentaries have taken so much from this one, so Moonwalk One is essential viewing for anyone interested in the Apollo program…and it’s a mystery to me why it’s so little known. 

In 2007 Moonwalk One was remastered and released on DVD in a “Director’s Cut,” running a few minutes longer than the original release. Supposedly this was also released on Blu Ray (in the UK only), but damned if I can find a copy anywhere. In fact it’s baffling that this movie hasn’t been re-released on a greater scale. Anyway the Director’s Cut certainly looks better, with a much wider screen image, than the 4:3 upload on Youtube – but then I’ve read that Moonwalk One was released theatrically in 4:3, the widescreen picture cut down in the process. Thus the Director’s Cut rectifies this, but at the same time the picture is cropped when compared to the 4:3 original release; a small portion at the top and bottom is cut off of the Director’s Cut. 

As for the new footage, I compared the original cut and the Director’s Cut and found that the Director’s Cut contains the following “new” footage: More shots of random people during the opening song montage, including some employes flipping burgers in a Burger King(!), a kissing couple, and more shots of people dancing in that awesome psychedelic discotheque; more footage of the crowd waiting for the rocket to launch, including a somewhat patronizing bit where the narrator asks “Why did they come here?” of the crowd, stating that they could see everything much better on TV (I mean duh, they’re here to witness history…you know, the very history you are documenting with this movie!!); and finally the most extensive cut material: an avante-garde montage of news snippets from around the world, including butchered Nixon speeches, which plays right after we see Buzz Aldrin fixing himself a sandwich in zero-g. This part alone is incredibly “late ‘60s,” with rapid-fire cuts of newscasts – Kamecke skillfully playing off how Mission Control is reading Buzz the news over the commlink – but it’s also clear why it was cut from the original release. Other than that, there is no additional “new” footage I could detect in the Director’s Cut. 

I’ve watched more space race documentaries, but I’ve ran on so much here that I’ll have to write about them in a later Random Movie Review. In the meantime… 

SPECIAL BONUS RANDOM RECORD REVIEW SECTION – BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT! 

Sound Of Genesis – Journey To The Moon (Buddah Records, 1969): I mentioned this one before. To this day this is the best “blind purchase” I’ve ever made in the clearance rack of a vinyl store. Journey To The Moon could be seen as a cash-in on the moon landing (or “moonsploitation” as I like to call it), but I’ve played this LP many times since I got it. What we have here are actual NASA recordings, from the astronauts to Mission Control, taking us from launch to return…with super-groovy psychedelic mod easy listening music throughout. Fuzzy guitars, electronic SFX, a muted horn and orchestra section straight out of the Barbarella soundtrack, the works. I mean nowhere else will you hear Nixon’s call to Neil and Buzz while an electric sitar plays in the background. It’s both corny and cool. The LP alternates between instrumentals and “vocal” sections in which we hear narration as well as actual recordings of the launch and landing – and even these sequences have music in the background. 

I loved this LP so much that I actually digitized it to MP3, though admittedly I did it on my old setup: Audio-Technica AT-LP60 turntable with an ATN3600DLX conical stylus. (I’ve become such an audio geek that I wouldn’t even think about playing a record on that turntable these days!!) Anyway, I’d love to share Journey To The Moon with you all; it clearly didn’t do well, as it only received this initial Buddah pressing. No CD or digital releases as of yet. So, please follow this Mega link to download it – and let me know what you think!

Monday, July 12, 2021

Pulsar #1: The London Switch


Pulsar #1: The London Switch, by Robin Moore and Al Dempsey
July, 1974  Pinnacle Books

Pulsar was a short-lived series courtesy Robin “I wrote The Green Berets and The Happy Hooker” Moore and a collaborator named Al Dempsey, with whom I’m unfamiliar. When I say “short-lived” I mean it; Pulsar only ran for a whopping two volumes. This first volume leaves absolutely no mystery why that was. 

I am in full agreement with the proprietor of Spy Guys And Gals that the authors were likely inspired by the obscure TV series Search, which ran a few years before these books came out. That TV series concerned a security agency that sent agents across the globe, keeping in contact via high-tech gear; some years ago the complete series was released on DVD and I got it, only to lose interest midway through given the static pacing. At any rate, Pulsar is also similar to two other men’s adventure series: The Big Brain, in that protagonist Tim Kyle is super-duper smart and stuff, and The Mind Masters, in that Tim is so smart that there’s this weird implication that his brain is actually a separate entity from his body. 

The only difference is that, judging from The London Switch, Pulsar is a helluva lot less entertaining than either of those series – and to tell the truth, The Big Brain really isn’t even entertaining to begin with. This isn’t just because The London Switch is leisurely paced, lacking much action or violence; it’s also because, when the action does occur, it’s hamstrung by some of the most grueling prose ever, as the authors focus so much on Tim’s thoughts and impressions that he almost comes off like a robot. Take for example this opening action sequence: 


And sadly it doesn’t get much better from there. As you can see, Tim’s brain is almost a separate entity, a la The Mind Masters. The ensuing action scenes – what few of them there are – will be similarly hamstrung by this sort of bicameral breakdown of man and brain. Not only that, but throughout the novel we’ll have these parts where Tim studies the case “item” by “item,” to the point that he seems more machine than man. And like a machine he even happens to possess an “instant replay technique” in which he can “rewind the tape” (in his mind, natch). So we’ll read stuff like, “Tim’s analyzer began to function again, urgently.” It would be okay if the dude was like part cyborg, but he’s not. He just separates his mind between the “action part” and the “casual part,” and it comes off as ultra-annoying…not to mention it kills the forward thrust of any action. 

Another big difference about the series is that Tim’s not only slightly older than the genre average, but also married with children. He’s got a wife and three kids back home, and has been the VP of Pulsar Security since 1954, when he co-founded the company with buddy Glenn Luther. So all the hanky-panky is handled by one-off characters, though we do get a random digression flashback on the first time Tim had sex with his wife (a super bizarre bit where he peers into her nether region and exclaims, “Hey, it’s dark inside!”). Otherwise the wife and kids don’t even appear in The London Switch; the novel opens with Tim sneaking into Ireland, called away from a family camping trip by Glenn Luther to look into possible poaching by a rival outfit. 

But man the novel is hard going. The back cover has it that a “sadistic rape-murder” gets pinned on Tim, and while that happens it takes a while to do so, and besides it’s all off-page anyway. You see, Tim is being hounded by a pair of assassins, young Germans named Kurt and Karen, and while they escape early on Kurt keeps coming back to try to kill Tim…and also people he knows, so as to frame him. One of his victims happens to be Tim’s sister-in-law, a nun; we learn she has been “indecently attacked” before being murdered. But the authors often cut over to Kurt and Karen – mostly so they can provide a middling sex scene between the two – nullifying any potential for suspense or drama. It’s all very rote and by the numbers, and plus with all the “Item:” stuff you feel more like you’re just reading a very slow-going cozy mystery. 

The action stuff you’d expect from Pinnacle is absent. Tim doesn’t carry a gun, but late in the game briefly gets his hand on Kurt’s; the would-be assassin carries something called a Boremite 4.5, and the authors must be in friggin’ love with this gun because they go on and on about it. It’s like a small pistol that fires caseless ammo or somesuch, and is an experimental job only given to select CIA agents and whatnot. I looked it up but couldn’t find anything about it. But man this Boremite (not to be confused with Dolemite, of course) thing is the star of the show. Kurt’s got one, not that he’s able to kill his prey with it. You can forget about the cover image, of Tim wielding a gun. He kills one guy in the novel, very late in the novel – with a screwdriver to the heart! And we learn this is Tim’s first-ever kill! 

The authors do find the opportunity to provide some random sleaze when Von Kirkman, Kurt’s boss, picks up some hot-to-trot vacationer in London and takes her back to his hotel. Here we learn of the man’s “huge organ,” which the girl takes to calling “dicky-boy,” to her “puss.” Just super-weird stuff and having nothing to do with anything, other than to pad out the too-long 209 pages. I thought there might be some action on the way for Tim when he stumbled across Karen, but instead he just hits her (so hard that she pukes!) and then makes her take him to their safe house. But here Tim proves again he doesn’t have the right stuff for Pinnacle, as within seconds Karen and Kurt turn the tables on him. He’s knocked out and strung up, grilled by Von Kirkman, and consigned to death…but the story’s so lame that Tim discovers he’s merely being kept in a house, and thus sneaks around until he finds a window to break out of! 

Eventually the action moves to Luxembourg, where Tim discovers why he’s being hounded and who has betrayed him. None of this comes off as shocking as the authors intend, as we don’t know any of these characters and thus have no investment in them or the series. But as mentioned Tim does manage to kill someone with a screwdriver. The majority of the killing is handled by a friend turned enemy turned friend again; Tim literally just stands there in shock. With all the loose ends tied up, The London Switch comes to a close with Tim Kyle now determined to take Pulsar into new realms of security…but man I’m gonna need a breather before I get to the next one.

Thursday, July 8, 2021

The Secret Of Bigfoot Pass (The Six Million Dollar Man)


The Secret Of Bigfoot Pass, by Mike Jahn
October, 1976  Berkley Books

Mike Jahn, who wrote the earlier Six Million Dollar Man tie-in Wine, Women And War, returns with another tie-in paperback, this one novelizing the famous Bigfoot episodes of the series. Actually I should make that the first Bigfoot episodes, as the creature returned in a later two parter. Anyway at 154 pages of big print, The Secret Of Bigfoot Pass comes off more like a novella, and Jahn does not go for the same sort of crafted approach as he did with that earlier tie-in. This one reads like what it is: a quick novelization of a goofy story. 

Whereas Wine, Women, And War almost had the vibe of a paperback produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel, with an adult or at least mature vibe, this one’ a lot more juvenile. But then I wonder if this is due to the edition I have; only after reading the book did I notice that it has “Special Scholastic Edition” on the cover. It’s possible that Jahn’s original edition was rewritten (ie “dumbed down”) for younger readers…but then no notice of this is given in the copyright, so I’m assuming this is just how he wrote it. Perhaps it just became increasingly evident to Jahn that The Six Million Dollar Man was more of a hit with kids than it was with adults, hence the mature vibe of that earlier tie-in being almost wholly removed from this one. 

Of course, this is true of the series itself, so Jahn is not at fault here. And in fact he does try to inject a little naughtiness; in the book Steve Austin meets a hot alien chick (seriously!) and Jahn goes out of his way to document the “meaningful” looks the babe gives Steve. However as expected absolutely nothing comes of it, and also there’s zero in the way of exploitation of the alien babe’s ample charms, other than that she’s pretty and wears a “comfortable jump suit.” Jahn clearly knows that kids would be his prime readers, thus he focuses more on Bigfoot and the various action scenes (all of which are bloodless). But again this could just be some Scholastic editorial tinkering; I haven’t been able to find anything online that would confirm whether this edition was edited. 

First of all, I love that this is titled “The Secret Of Bigfoot Pass.” How much of a secret are we really talking about here? Anyway the title is about as juvenile as the story: in this one, friends, Steve Austin meets up with Bigfoot, or “Sasquatch” as Jahn refers to him, not to mention a couple aliens who live underground. Speaking of which, Steve himself is referred to as “Austin,” one of the few holdovers from Jahn’s previous tie-in. And also again Jahn harkens back to the source novels of Martin Caidin, with Austin having a couple different bionic configurations than his on-screen counterpart. This actually factors into the finale, in which Jahn detours from the actual episode. But otherwise Steve here is the same as he was in the shows, and not the Caidin books…more of an affable but laconic country boy type. 

The part of the novel I found most interesting was the rundown Jahn gives of Steve’s background, likely taken from Caidin’s initial novel Cyborg. Here we learn that Steve got into the Apollo Program late, but still managed to command the final lunar mission, Apollo 17 – replacing the real world’s Gene Cernan (who isn’t mentioned). After that, Steve, trying to stay in the space program, test flew a shuttle design and crashed spectacularly. Here we get into the “we can rebuild him” stuff, with Jahn’s version of Oscar Goldman coming off like Steve’s original icy boss, as played by Darren McGavin in the first Six Million Dollar Man telefilm. Jahn makes concessions to the tone of the series with the note that, as time went on, Oscar became less icy, with he and Steve almost becoming friends. This is different than the show, in which Steve and Oscar call each other “pal” or “buddy” so often that you could make a drinking game of it. 

But wait, we were talking about Bigfoot. Let me briefly diverge on that. The Six Million Dollar Man was slightly before my time. I was born in late ’74 and was aware of the show, mostly due to my brother, who at 7 years older than me was the prime audience for the series. He had the Steve Austin doll with the plastic eye you could look through and the weird fake plastic skin on the leg and all that stuff, and I was fascinated with it. In fact I was obsessed with all of my brother’s toys, including his GI Joe doll with the beard that collected dust. My cousins also had the Maskatron, which I thought was even cooler than the Steve Austin doll. Also my brother had the space capsule, or whatever it was, complete with a space suit for Steve and this sort of operating table you could put him on. Well anyway I thought all this was great but I heard there was also a Bigfoot toy, but no one I knew had it. 

We’re talking here about the time right after the show had gone off the air, so I knew from my brother that finding a Bigfoot toy might be difficult – only many years later would I learn that the Bigfoot doll was hard to find to begin with. I also really wanted my own Steve Ausin doll and somehow my parents found one for me; I still remember the thrill I had when they came back with a new-in-the-box Six Million Dollar Man doll. Actually now that I think of it, this must’ve been around 1980, so the show had been off the air for a year or two. I’m assuming this doll must’ve been on clearance, or they just found one somewhere. Well anyway, I still wanted Bigfoot. Now there was this kid in my class (we’re talking first grade) named Steve Middleton who swore up and down that there was a Bigfoot doll at some store somewhere nearby. I pleaded with my mom and dad to look for it for me (no idea why I didn’t just go shopping with them), but they said there was no Bigfoot toy there – they’d looked and looked. 

I bring this up because this was the first time I learned that people could lie. When I told Steve that my parents couldn’t find the toy, he not only insisted the Bigfoot doll was there, but that there were dozens of them. And his tales would only become even taller. I was only six years old at the time, but I vividly recall that Steve Middleton was the first person who had so actively lied to me. And to this day whenever I think of the Bigfoot from Six Million Dollar Man (which is damn often!), I think of Steve Middleton. Actually I have another humorous story about Steve: later on, when we were in middle school (aka “junior high” if you’re in Canada or whatever), I always got amusement out of how he tried to get by in class. He never did very well academically, so he somehow came up with the idea of feigning interest in whatever the teacher was talking about. But I mean major interest: if the teacher said, for example, that the pyramids were a few thousand years old, Steve would bug out his eyes, gape in amazement, and wag his head back and forth. Of course he’d still fail the tests, but this feigned look of amazement only became more and more outrageous…sort of like his tall tales about the mythical Bigfoot toy he claimed to have seen.* 

Okay, we’re back; sorry for the divergence. I don’t belive I’ve ever even watched the episodes Jahn novelizes here, though I have the complete series on DVD – I stalled out at Season One. One can tell though that Jahn seems to have stayed pretty close to his source material; everything’s kind of threadbare, sort of like the low production values of the series itself. As usual it opens in the cheap showiness of nature (that way you don’t have to pay for sets), with Steve hanging out in a mobile command center in Northern California while a married pair of scientists set up some earthquake monitoring devices. Also here we have Oscar Goldman and a local scientist named Joe Raintree. When the scientist couple is mysteriously abducted, Raintree claims that Bigfoot took them – hence the big footprint left at the scene. 

However there’s no mystery for us readers. Jahn often cuts over to Bigfoot’s point of view, referring to him as “Sasquatch.” The opening is a bit slow-going as Sasquatch creeps around and Steve uses his bionics to run through the forest and look for the missing couple. This of course leads to the expected confrontation with Bigfoot, which goes on for a while and doesn’t have much bite to it; there’s absoltely no vibe here that Steve’s life is in danger. Everything’s very safe and cozy and by the numbers, with Steve even making quips as he battles the seven-foot beast. The fight ends with Steve accidentally ripping off Sasquatch’s arm – and discovering that it’s bionic like his own. 

From here things open up a bit, with Steve being captured and put in “electrosleep” so he can be monitored by a trio of jumpsuited aliens. Aliens who apparently look just like humans, with one of them, a babe named Shalon, apparently pretty hotstuff. As mentioned we get a lot of stuff about her making insinuating comments about Steve as she watches him on a giant monitor. Oh and meanwhile there’s an entire colony down here, and Sasquatch is a robot the aliens created to keep people away from their hidden base. There’s some hokey “science!” stuff with some sort of time scrambler device the aliens have created that lets thousands of years slip by in seconds, or somesuch, which makes your head hurt if you think about it too much. 

The gist of it comes down to the fact that the quake detectors have picked up a new earthquake that’s about to happen right here in the colony, but the aliens plan to divert it so that nearby cities take the damage. Steve screams at them that thousands will die, but the aliens don’t care. This leads to more running and fighting as Steve tries to prevent the massive quake and then also save the aliens from catastrophe. It’s a very bloodless and G-rated affair, and also the Steve-Shalon relationship is so scuttled that you wonder why Jahn spent the time building it up. In fact reading these novelizations you realize that the writers could likely turn in something better than the source material – given the time and inclination, I bet Jahn could’ve written a novelization of The Secret Of Bigfoot Pass that would’ve been entertaining even for adults to read. 

I mentioned the unique finale; one of Caidin’s creations that didn’t make it into the series was that Steve Austin had a metal plate in his head. At novel’s end, the aliens insist that Steve must be given amnesia so he’ll forget about them and their colony. Steve allows them to do this. It’s my understanding that Jahn’s conclusion is unique to the novel. After leaving, Steve turns around in the woods and speaks to the air – confident that the aliens are watching him (and we know they are) – and informs them that the metal plate in his head blocked their amnesia rays! Thus he remembers everything, and eagerly blabs about it to Oscar later that day. But man when one of the closing lines of the novel is Oscar’s “So Bigfoot is a robot,” you know we aren’t talking about a weighty piece of work here. Steve’s time with the aliens is basically brushed aside so that he can get back to his camping trip or whatever. 

Actually Jahn does include what seems to be a bit of mockery; when Steve first meets the aliens, he is so blasé about them that they almost take affront. Steve informs them they “ain’t the first” and that he’s met other aliens, casually going on about his various adventures. Not sure if this is in the actual episode, but the humor was nice here as it came off as Jahn spoofing the entire thing. And indeed Jahn’s own prose is so quick, the settings and characters barely described, that you suspect he just wanted to be over and done with it as quick as possible. That being said, The Secret Of Bigfoot Pass is at least a swift-moving read. 

*Steve Middleton’s feigned look of amazement made such an impact on me that I recorded a “song” about it many years later, in 1997. This was with my buddy Ken Zerby, who handles “lead vocals;” I provide backup on the chorus and play very rudimentary guitar. The “you’re a Commie!” bit midway through was our impromptu tribute to the ‘60s Fantastic Four cartoon.  You can hear it here if you’re bored.

Monday, July 5, 2021

The Executioner #15: Panic In Philly


The Executioner #15: Panic In Philly, by Don Pendleton
March, 1973  Pinnacle Books

Mack Bolan is all business in this fifteenth volume of The Executioner, which opens on the action and stays focused on the action throughout Bolan’s short stay in Philadelphia. There are no pickups from any previous volumes, Bolan at this point a one-man army who roves around the country in his War Wagon, making calculated strikes on various Mafia strongholds. Don Pendleton has his template down pat, with Bolan making initial blitzes before going undercover to really mess with his Mafia prey. 

One thing to note is those looking for a period view of Philadelphia will be disappointed; Bolan spends the entirety of the narrative everywhere but the city, hitting hideouts in the rural surroundings, scoping out residential areas, and spending the last third of the novel in a mansion. Local color is provided by the usual Pendleton staples of one-off characters who helpfully exposit on stuff we’ve already seen happen; in this case it’s some cops and firemen who periodically show up to clean up the Executioner’s messes. Another thing to note is that Gil Cohen’s typically-great cover is misleading; Bolan doesn’t wield a rifle at any point, the action does not take place around any Philly landmarks, and, while there is a curvaceous babe in the book, she only appears on two or three pages and has no real, uh, interraction with Bolan. 

This time we get a few entries from Bolan’s journal; I can’t recall if we’ve had these before, but it’s a bit humorous to imagine Bolan writing in his little diary after a gory hit on the mob. While reclining in his War Wagon, of course. But then escapism is the name of the game with this genre, though as ever Pendleton tries to retain a semblance of reality. Perhaps a bit too much of one; other than Bolan’s superhuman skills (which Pendleton frequently explains away in his narrative digressions), The Exectioner is nowhere in the surreal ballpark of its imitators, a la The Sharpshooter and such…which is one of the reasons I’ve been looking forward to reading the following volume, Sicilian Slaughter, even if it’s written by William Crawford

The opening sequence is an indication of Bolan’s superhumanism; the story opens with Bolan making a few blitzes on various Philly mob fronts, even at one point blowing away some thugs in an auto shop. After this we get hasty setup that the mob here, run by old Don Steffano, has been importing soldiers from Sicily. A group of them are staying in an old whorehouse out in the rural area northwest of the city; we get a bit of background that the place used to be a school at the turn of the century, then the Don’s son, Frank, turned it into a top-notch whorehouse, only to get shutdown when he gave a complimentary ticket to a conservative judge. Now the soldiers are there – complete with foxholes – and Bolan hits them in one of his typical frontal assaults. 

At this point Pendleton has toned way down on the violence; Bolan makes many kills as he storms across the compound, blasting away with his Automag and Beretta, but there’s not much gore on display. But also this is an indication of Bolan being a bit too superhuman, hitting a pseudo-military compound all on his lonesome and making an escape in just a few minutes. He’s even almost bulletproff like Superman; someone fires a friggin’ shotgun at him and Bolan survives it because the person pulling the trigger goofs. This is a quick setup for a later revelation that has more dire repercussions for Bolan. At any rate he gets away with no troubles and moves on to his second phase of attack: infiltrating Don Steffano’s organization and sowing havoc from within. 

Borrowing a plot from previous volumes, Pendleton has Bolan bluffing his way into this, posing as some roving Mafia troubleshooter. In this case Bolan gets wind of a hotshot hitman heading to Steffano’s to help out, Bolan picking up the info thanks to a tap he’s put on the don’s phone. Here Bolan also learns that one of the Talifero brothers has survived Bolan’s attack in #9: Vegas Vendetta, which certainly is setup for a future volume. The top hit man being sent on his way to help Don Steffano is a “Black Ace” or somesuch who is known for changing his face after every job and thus conveniently no one knows what he looks like; Don Steffano is informed that he’ll recognize the Black Ace by the new Maserati he’ll be driving. 

Before that we have a fun bit where Bolan’s almost caught by the cops; as he dangles there on the phone line, listening to his tap, he’s hit by floodlights and a cop tells him on a bullhorn that he’s surrounded. Bolan goes into a quick fantasy where he can see the fallout: he’d be taken in but turned into a celebrity, with even a movie to follow (perhaps Pendleton speaking through his protagonist about the possibility of an Executioner movie in the real world – something the covers always promised but never delivered on). But Bolan knows he wouldn’t survive twenty-four hours in jail; he’d be murdered by some Mafia flunky or other stooge and the death covered up. I can just see the “Bolan didn’t kill himself” bumper stickers now. 

Bolan’s confrontation with the Black Ace guy is memorable; he sneaks onto Don Steffano’s grounds and is able to get the guy alone as soon as he’s arrived. From here Bolan becomes the Black Ace, bluffing his way into Don Steffano’s world and bossing people around. At this point the action slackens off and Panic In Philly becomes more of a suspense tale, with Bolan trying to maintain his cover while sowing dissent – he maneuvers it so that Don Steffano’s people think that the don’s son, “Frank the Fuckup,” is orchestrating a takeover, while also maneuvering it so that the don’s men kill a delegation of hoods who have been shipped in from another family – Bolan having fooled Don Steffano’s men into thinking this delegation has come here to harm the don, whereas in reality they’re here to provide backup. 

The curvaceous babe mentioned above is Philippa, aka “Philippa the Bitch,” Don Steffano’s 32 year-old daughter who still lives at home and resents the old man. She makes no real impact on the narrative – at least not on-page – and only shares two brief scenes with Bolan, who basically tells her to leave. As with many of the volumes the events of Panic In Philly occur over the span of several hours, leading to a definite sense of urgency to Bolan’s schemes. We also get an appearance from Leo Turrin, Bolan’s inside man on the mob who has appeared in previous volumes; Leo shows up per Don Steffano’s request, as a guy who has seen Bolan and lived, and is only saved from the firing squad Bolan’s set up for the delegation thanks to Bolan himself. 

But it’s Don Steffano whom Pendleton most brings to life; he’s a King Lear type who is falling apart just as quickly as his kingdom is. Pendleton nicely brings to life the old mobster, who sits in shadows in his study and relunctantly leaves the decisions to the Black Ace. The climax between Bolan and Steffano is another highlight of the book; the revelations mentioned above come into play and Steffano’s given a hot tip. But Pendleton plays it more on the suspense angle, and a darkly humorous one at that; Bolan has stuffed the corpse of the real Black Ace in the trunk of the Maserati and has shown it to a few of Steffano’s men, claiming the body is Bolan’s. The highlight of this sequence is that he manages to sell the corpse to Frank for a whopping $110k…so Frank can high-tail it for New York to show off his booty to the Mafia overlords! The part where Don Steffano finds out about this is another highlight. 

As expected Pendleton ends the novel on the action; a new delegation shows up unexpectedly, these ones a cohort of the Taliferi, and Bolan knows he won’t be able to maintain his cover. So as usual he goes out via a frontal assault, hitting them hard with his Automag again. Here he actually takes some damage, getting hit in the calf and with a bullet lodged between his ribs and his skin – only deflected by a shoulder holster. In his Maserati it appears Bolan is headed directly for the next installment, but as it turns out he’d have a slight detour thanks to Crawford penning the next volume. 

According to his interview with William H. Young in A Study Of Action-Adventure Fiction, at this point Pendleton was in litigation with Pinnacle. The Executioner was doing very well for the imprint but Pendleton was not receiving his fair share of the royalties. To keep the series going, Pinnacle hired William Crawford to write the following installment, Sicilian Slaughter, as “Jim Peterson.” What’s interesting is that the one-page epilogue of Panic In Philly sets up Sicilian Slaughter, with an injured Bolan thinking about heading to Sicily for a frontal assault. I suspect this epilogue was written by series editor Andy Ettinger; it doesn’t have the same ring as Pendleton’s prose, and also we know from Pendleton’s interview with Young that Pendleton himself never even read Crawford’s novel – thus the entire “Sicily assault” was a creation of Pinnacle’s, and likely the setup for it here was written by Ettinger.

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #2


Mens Adventure Quarterly #2, edited by Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, and Tom Simon
April, 2021  Subtropic Productions

I really enjoyed Men's Adventure Quarterly #1 a lot, but as expected I enjoyed Men’s Adventure Quarterly #2 even more. The first one had great stories and wonderful production quality, but Westerns have never really been my thing, so I knew that this second volume, with its focus on Cold War spy stories from men's adventure magazines, would be more up my alley. Once again the issue comes off like a vintage men’s magazine, only with much higher print quality, complete with risque vintage ads, a gallery of beautiful women, and even letters to the editor to go along with the stories themselves. 

As with the first volume we get a series of nice intros from each editor which are broad outlines of men’s mag spy stories and how they intersected with paperbacks. I thought this would’ve been a good opportunity to mention a few vintage paperbacks that actually had their origins as spy fiction in men’s adventure magazines: Spy In Black Lace, Assignment X (an Emille Schurmacher men’s mag spy anthology I keep meaning to read), Our Secret War Against Red China, and Six Graves To Munich. Well, the latter is really more of a post-WWII revenge thriller, but it operates very much like the Cold War tales presented here in MAQ #2, and also is one of the few (only?) men’s mag stories that got expanded into a novel. I still don’t understand why that didn’t happen with more men’s mag stories; I’d give anything to read a full novel of “Blood For The Love Slaves” (and still keep thinking about just writing the damn thing myself). 

I’d read some men’s mag spy yarns in the past, but luckily the ones here were all new to me, and I was especially happy to see a few I’d looked for in the past. These stories reminded me of what I’d learned from the previous ones I read: the espionage yarns in the men’s adventure magazines were not really escapist fantasy in the mold of the James Bond movies; they weren’t even similar to the original Ian Fleming novels. For the most part they were much more “realistic” (comparatively speaking), with little in the way of exotic villains or sci-fi gadgets. For that, you’d need to look to the paperbacks of the day, particularly Nick Carter: KillmasterMark Hood, or Don Miles

However that isn’t to say the stories here aren’t enjoyable. And indeed, two of them do have exotic villains and other Bond-esque trappings. But for the most part, the stories in MAQ #2 are similar to those in the vintage anthologies I mentioned above; Cold War thrillers with yank protagonists who go about their assignments with stone-cold professionalism. Speaking of paperbacks, the closest comparison I could think of would be the Sam Durell books; if you like those, you’ll certainly enjoy the spy yarns assembled here. Otherwise the stories follow the same template as most every other men’s adventure story I’ve ever read: a memorable opening (usually depicted on the splash page), followed by a flashback to how the characters got to this moment, followed by a hasty wrap-up. This is the template that the men’s mag editors stuck to, regardless of the genre. I mean seriously, they could’ve done a story on Jesus and it would’ve followed the same format. 

As with Men’s Adventure Quarterly #1, the production quality of this issue is first-rate, with eye-popping visuals faithfully reproduced from the original covers and interiors throughout. Also the typeset is much easier to read than those original magazines, but one minor issue I had was that occasionally full-color art would be placed beneath the print on pages that were otherwise comprised solely of copy. This was never done in the original mags, at least none I’ve ever seen, and likely is a concession to our modern “more artsy” approach to printed materials. While it looks great, I personally found it made for difficult reading, like for example the cover of Colonel Sun (by Kingsley Amis) beneath the copy in the example below. But there are only a few instances where this happens; otherwise the print is nice and bold and, as mentioned, much more pleasant to the eyes than the original magazine layouts. 


“The Kremlin Agent Will Be Wearing A Pink Nightgown” by Martin Faas starts off the issue; it’s from the October 1961 issue of Male. A fairly low-key opening, this one’s a pseudo “true” tale that occurs in 1957; the titular agent, a “blonde woman of staggering proportions” named Magda Karoli, spies on the US at the behest of a Hungarian communist cell. This one’s identical to the stories in Spy In Black Lace in that Magda isn’t a female agent in the Baroness mold, but instead a shapely blonde who uses her ample charms to get horny men to do her bidding. It’s also an indication of the type of “spy stories” to be found in the men’s mags, in that it literally is a spy story, with no fantastical elements; Magda works as a secretary for a studly dude named Major Mancuso, head of US intelligence in Frankfurt, but she’s secretly a spy for Miklos Tarash, “one of the Soviet Union’s slickest agents.” 

As with the spy-babes in Spy In Black Lace, Magda sleeps with Mancuso while stealing info from him; we watch her in action as she snaps some photos in his office while he’s out. From there we have a recap of how Magda, a Hungarian, was drafted into the commie spy game by Miklos, who poses in Frankfurt as a famous businessman. Mancuso starts to suspect something is amiss, and Magda nearly blows it when she slips out one night and hooks up with some random guy. Otherwise this one’s kind of a mess in that Mancuso seems a little easily fooled for a top intelligence guy, and only comes to the conclusion that Magda is the mole a little late. But there’s no bloody action to be found in this particular story, nor any deaths, though Miklos does fall in a vat of hot chocolate at one point. We have a goofy finale in which we learn the prison terms these various characters were given, complete with “this writer,” ie Faas himself, visiting Magda in prison…to discover she’s still super hot. 

“How Would You Do As A CIA Spy?” is by David Norman and from the September 1961 Male. The longest piece in MAQ #2, this is a nonfiction account of what one might expect in the spy game…at least as it existed at the time. Being a Korea vet and having various military abilities would be a bonus, Norman advises, with also pointers on how your undercover life might conflict with your everyday life. The most interesting thing about this one was how it compares to the CIA of today

“The Deadly Spy Mystery Of The Formosa Joy Girls” is by Brand Hollister and from the March, 1963 issue of Man’s Action. “Brand Hollister is the pen-name of a counter-espionage agent,” an intro informs us; something Bob Deis rightfully pokes fun at in his own intro to the story. Told in first-person, this one starts with the action as Brand blows away a Chinese agent who is strangling his “best friend.” We’re in Formosa, now known as Taiwan, and after the expected flashback we learn that intel has been leaking from Formosa into “Red China” and Brand and his best bud have been tasked with finding out how. But now his buddy’s dead, as is the Chinese agent who killed him. Brand searches the Chinese dude’s eyes and suddenly the “mystery” is revealed to him – it has to do with “Fu-Ming’s night club” with its “naked girls.” 

Here the story gets wild as Brand goes back to Fu-Ming’s and checks out the naked dancing girls – you can of course take ‘em upstairs for a fee – but this time he gets a whole ‘nother view thanks to the “infra-red contacts” he’s put on. Contacts that belong to someone else. Sounds uncomfortable! This bit, with secret messages uncovered on the babes, is so crazy it could come out of a Eurospy flick. Otherwise this yarn didn’t do much for me; like most other Man’s Action stories I’ve read it was just too short and too rushed to make much of an impact. 

“Belly Dancer Raid To Spring Russia’s Top Rocket Man” is by Roger Tetzel and from the May 1964 issue of For Men Only. This is another that follows the men’s mag template with the “faux-true” approach (as Bob so aptly describes it in his editorial intro); we’re to understand that protagonist Whitney Trumbull is a real person, as are the other characters in the story. This one’s in third person, and per tradition opens with the incident that really takes place toward the end – Trumbull and a group of Turkish actors, one of whom is a “girl,” enter a whorehouse in Batumi, Georgia, looking for a place to hide from the KGB. But just as they get to hide – with the girl posing, naturally, as one of the hookers – the KGB come in, with the officer in charge immediately deducing that “the new girl” doesn’t belong here, as she’s too hot for the typical hookers. He kicks over a chair and uncovers Trumbull, who is hiding there; Trumbull darts out and begins to strangle the officer. 

And, per usual, we flash back to how we got here…Trumbull was a Navy Intelligence guy in Korea, then retired, then got re-hired again six months ago; we’re informed this tale occurs in 1961. Trumbull’s assignment had him going to Istanbul, where he establishes himself as a professor of English and drama. After doing this for half a year he’s given his assignment – naturally, by a hotstuff belly dancer named Yasmin. Trumbull’s job is to put together a touring drama company, go through the Black Sea area and finally into Russia, and there smuggle out a Russian rocket scientist who wants to defect. Part of the drama group includes a sexy student of Trumbull’s, Inci. Tetzel injects some suspense into the tale with Trumbull, who is of course engaged in some off-page sex with both Inci and Yasmin, suspecting that one of them is a traitor. 

The story is a bit longer than some of the others in the issue, and some of it per tradition is padded; there’s a random digression where Trumbull’s group runs afoul of a mountain tribe while on the tour. This entails a lot of strongman stuff from Trumbull to prove his worth. We finally get back to the opening sequence, which occurs almost immediately after the group springs the Russian scientist; the KGB was aware of the plot all along, thanks to a traitor in Trumbull’s group, and have allowed it to proceed so as to catch them all in the act. But Trumbull’s able to get him and his people loose, thanks to a KBG guy who is so eager to defect that it comes off as humorous. After this we get a quick finale with the group rushing into Turkey in a Rolls Royce, followed with a b.s. “where are they now?” wrapup. All told, a pretty fun tale, and very much along the lines of the stuff you’ll find in Our Secret War Against Red China and the like. 

“Detective Willian Clive: Is He The Real James Bond?” is by Walter Kaylin in his “Roland Empey” pseudonym, and from the January 1966 issue of Male. I was already familiar with this one, given that it appeared a few years ago in Deis and Doyle’s He-Men, Bag Men & Nymphos anthology, which was dedicated to Kaylin’s men’s adventure magazine work. I read that anthology right when it came out, but for some reason never got around to reviewing it. Re-reading the story again now these years later, I still think “Detective William Clive” is basically a piss-take on the Bond novels…not to mention an almost lazy rewrite of them. 

Kaylin borders on plagiarism by riffing on the various Fleming novels, with the aspect that the titular Clive is the character Bond was based on – and each of his assignments in the “real world” were ones Fleming lifted for his novels. So everything is an inversion on the novels and movies: Clive hangs out in Trinidad, not Jamaica, and instead of a hulking Korean who tried to kill him on one caper (ie Oddjob in Goldfinger), it was a hulking Fillipino. A fun tale, framed as an interview with the fictional Clive, but still I found it a little irritating, as I would’ve preferred a legit spy pulp tale from the always-entertaining Kaylin. 

“Operation Maneater” is by Don Honig, and from the February 1969 issue of For Men Only. This is one I’d thought about picking up in the past but just never got around to it; the Mort Kunstler cover, of a guy and a buxom blonde dangling over a pool full of pirhana, promised a fun read. And Honig delivers, though same as with his story in MAQ #1, “Shoot-Out At Mad Sadie’s Place,” it seems a bit rushed. This though I’ve found is common for latter-day men’s adventure stories; whereas the ones from the ‘50s and ‘60s had a bit more narrative meat to them, the later ones were shorter, likely due to lower page counts and/or the need to show more nudie photos to drive sales. Anyway, this, along with Kaylin’s yarn, is the only other story in the issue that approaches the vibe of a Bond flick. 

Narrated by a character who proclaims himself a “freelance” agent named Brackett, “Operation Maneater” concerns a plot to sow chaos in Europe with counterfeit currency. Brackett’s called away from the poolside in Palm Beach for the assignment, and he spends a humorous amount of time turning down the job; in fact, this stuff gets more narrative space than the actual climax, which per men’s mag tradition is rushed to the point of anticlimax. The government’s traced the scheme to an ex-Fascist named Luigi Brunetti who has a compound in Brazil, guarded by some ex-Nazis. Brackett heads over to “High Street Weaponry” where he’s hooked up with grenades that look like guavas and a belt that shoots “flat, deadly rockets.” 

The middle part of the story is a Brazilian jungle travelogue along the lines of the stuff in another vintage men’s adventure mag anthology, Adventure In Paradise. Things pick up when Brackett scopes out Brunetti’s compound – and instantly runs into his blonde mistress, a Canadian girl named Ariel who has “the lushest body [Brackett had] ever seen.” After some skinny dipping the two enjoy some off-page lovin,’ and here we see that the men’s mags were slightly more risque at this point, with Brackett copping a feel. Brunetti isn’t as memorable as a Bond villain, but he’ll do; there’s a fun part where he shows Brackett – who’s posing as a travel writer – all his exotic and dangerous pets. The climax features the cover sequence, of Brackett and Ariel dangling over a pool of pirhana, but Brackett’s able to get out with some bluffing, leading to the memorable use of that rocket belt. The finale’s a bit rushed, but features the cool bit of Ariel wielding a flamethrower on the counterfeit currency. Despite being a little underdeveloped, “Operation Maneater” was definitely the highlight of the issue for me. 

At this point the editors take a page from Chris Stodder’s Swingin’ Chicks Of The ‘60s (2000), with a “Gal-lery” of beautiful babes who starred in ‘60s spy movies and TV shows. So for example we have Ursula Andress from Dr. No and The Tenth Victim, and also Diana Rigg from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and of course The Avengers. Great photos, but I was bummed that there was no mention of Minikillers

Up next is “Castro’s Bacterial Warfare Chief Wants To Defect – My Job, ‘Get Him,’” by Hal Gorby as told to Robert F. Dorr, from the April 1971 issue of Man’s Illustrated. Another story told in first-person, not to mention another of those “faux-true” yarns, this one concerns a marine bacteriologist who gets special passage into Cuba to take part in a conference. Before leaving some mysterious dude from the US government hassles our narrator to look into a particular Cuban scientist who wants to defect. Hal makes for an unusual men’s mag protagonist in that he’s not only a scientist, but he’s also married – indeed, promptly upon arrival in Cuba he’s set up with a hotstuff babe named Celia, from the “government visitor’s bureau,” and he will ultimately turn down the opportunity for some shenanigans with her. 

This is another yarn that of course opens at the ending before flashing back for the setup, so we already know that Hal ends up holding a .38 on Celia and heading for an awaiting hydrofoil with her. We learn when we get back to this point that Celia wants to defect – a recurring theme in the stories collected here, and a nice reminder of when the US was the place you’d go to escape socialist tyrannies – and there follows a sequence in which MIG fighter jets come after the hydrofoil. A fast moving yarn, one that would feel at home in Deis and Doyle’s Cuba: Sugar, Sex, And Slaughter anthology…which I will certainly be reading one of these days. 

The cover gallery is great and features some spy-themed stories I’ve been meaning to find for years now, in particular the March 1967 For Men Only with its “Jet-Sled Raid On Russia’s Ice Cap Pleasure Stockade,” and the “Book Bonus” novella “Strangekill” by W.J. Saber, from the October 1969 Male. Here’s hoping either (or both!) of these stories will appear if there’s ever another spy-themed issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly

The final story is “She Knew Too Much To Live,” by H. Horace, from the October 1973 Man’s Life. Bob spends a bit of time in his intro talking about the artist who handled the cover and interior art for the story, Vic Prezio, with the cool tidbit that Prezio handled the covers of the early ‘60s comic Brain Boy. This comic was actually written by none other than Herbert Kastle; an anthology of it came out a few years ago and I read it (and enjoyed it), but for whatever reason never got around to reviewing it. Anyway, H. Horace’s story seems more of a hardboiled yarn than a spy one, mostly due to the tone of its narrator, a tough intelligence agent operating in Cairo. We meet him as he is in the process of killing a rival agent, but a hot blonde happens to see it and runs off screaming murder. 

Next day the narrator’s chief orders him to round up the chick, who has appeared in all the papers telling about the “murder” she saw, and to get her to take back her story – or kill her if necessary. Turns out her name’s Nadine and she’s a college student here from the US. The narrator gets her and holes her up in a villa, trying to talk her out of what she saw; we have more concessions to the “modern age” when the narrator says he thinks about sleeping with her, but she’d probably consider it rape! This wouldn’t even be a concern in the earlier examples of the genre. Indeed nothing happens between the two save for a promise from Nadine that they’ll go out sometime! Otherwise the short tale has a hasty wrapup in which a pair of “commie” agents try to abduct Nadine from the villa and the narrator gets in a shootout with them…not even killing either of them. 

And that’s it for Men's Adventure Quarterly #2, save for a brief preview of the next installment, which will focus on lone wolf justice and feature the condensed men’s mag version of The Executioner #1. I’m definitely looking forward to it. This was another fun and expertly-produced trip back to the days of the men’s mags, and I hope Bob Deis, Bill Cunningham, and their revolving cast of guest editors continue to publish Men’s Adventure Quarterly for many years to come. Buy a copy for any millennials you know!

Thursday, June 24, 2021

The Baroness #10: A Black Hole To Die In (unpublished volume)


The Baroness #10: A Black Hole To Die In, by Paul Kenyon
Undated manuscript, circa Fall 1976

I’ve been interested in this unpublished volume of The Baroness since I learned about it years ago on the Baroness Yahoo Group, where series author  Donald “Paul Kenyon” Moffitt revealed – via an interview with ppsantos – that the plot concerned a black hole in outer space. Given Moffitt’s later ventures in sci-fi, A Black Hole To Die In offered a lot of potential; each volume of the series had an overlay of science fiction, at least insofar the gadgets Penny “The Baroness” St. John-Orsini employed on her assignments, but this one sounded like it could go even further in that direction. But as it turns out, A Black Hole To Die In stays fairly grounded for the majority of the narrative, until literally blasting off into space in the final pages. 

One thing to point out at the start is that this manuscript made me revisit my assumption of when Moffitt was writing. Internal evidence, which I’ll document, indicates that A Black Hole To Die In was written no earlier than September of 1976. This changes everything I speculated about in my review of the previous unpublished manuscript, #9: Death Is A Copycat.  It is now evident that Moffitt was writing this manuscript long after the last official installment of the series, #8: Black Gold, was published, in February of 1975. In that Yahoo Group Moffitt also stated he became ill after writing Black Gold and took some time off; when he returned he wrote these two manuscripts, only to find out later that the series was cancelled. However we know that Death Is A Copycat was published in France, in January of 1976, given the info at this site. This would indicate that Moffitt certainly wrote Death Is A Copycat in 1975, or even late 1974. Given this, I propose that Moffitt, writing on that Yahoo Group many decades later, had his dates and titles confused – maybe it was after he wrote Death Is A Copycat, not Black Gold, that he became sick, hence the delay until he wrote A Black Hole To Die In in late 1976. 

Unfortunately, as will be seen from the screenshots below, the 285-page manuscript of A Black Hole To Die In is in pretty bad shape. The paper is very yellowed and the typescript has faded over the decades, making for a sometimes-difficult read. I get the impression that this is a copy Moffitt made for himself before mailing the original to Engel, given the sometimes-blurry nature of the print, but who knows. Again, it’s a miracle it even exists, and I’m only just pointing this out now so as to explain why the screenshots might be a little hard to read. Also as you can tell by the manuscript title page above, so far as Moffitt was concerned this was the tenth volume of the series; in other words there’s no accounting for Robert Vardeman’s also-unpublished installment, Quicktime Death.

As with the review for Death Is A Copycat, I’ll be even more comprehsensive in this review than I usually am…as before, this will be more of a blow-by-blow account of the manuscript, given its unpublished nature. Off the top I’ll say I mostly enjoyed A Black Hole To Die In, save for some issues with the climax, but as with the previous unpublished installment it’s a shame it never made it to print. Moffitt continues to be fully invested in the series, resulting in a very entertaining read. There was also a special vibe to this one given that it was the last Baroness novel Moffitt ever wrote – indeed, there is a definite air of finality to the climax. That being said, I don’t think Moffitt intended this as a “series finale,” as I’ll detail below. 

The opening gets back to the usual series template; as we’ll recall, Death Is A Copycat was unique in that it opened with Penny herself, driving in the French countryside. Most every other installment opened with some world-threatening incident, followed by a meeting of US intelligence chiefs who would argue over who should handle the situation, with the Baroness ultimately getting the gig. All this happens here; the inciting incident however isn’t of the dire ramifactions of previous threats. At least initially. In what seems a tribute to the film version of You Only Live Twice, we read as a Russian spacecraft, looking to hurriedly build a 50-man space station to get superiority over the US, vanishes in space…to the total confusion of the control center back in Russia. 

From here to the usual intel briefing, where the CIA et al argue with each other; they monitor all Russian space activities and are under the mistaken assumption that the commies have developed the ability to cloak their spacecraft from monitoring devices. Ultimately “Coin” gets the assignment to find out what’s going on, with the caveat that the Russian bear must not be poked too much. This leads to the fun sequence of John Farnsworth, aka Penny’s handler “Key,” looking at himself in his bathroom mirror as he’s about to shave and then suddenly finding his NSA contact looking at him through the mirror. More of Moffitt’s spy-fy stuff, with the mirror actually being a video conference screen that masks Farnsworth’s face from the NSA man. 

After getting the assignment Farnsworth calls in “Coin,” aka Penny, who happens to be on vacation: “The Baroness had spent most of her summer playing with her new seven-million-dollar toy, a 300-foot yacht that she’d christened the Reynaldo”, after her second husband, the Baron Orsini.” Farnsworth records his orders to Penny and sends the message to Greece, where she’s vacationing, via MESTAR satellite. More weird sci-fi stuff ensues as Tom Sumo abruptly appears on Farnsworth’s TV screen – another “bug” the electronics wiz has set up to keep in contact with the various team members – and cries that Penny’s “dead,” or at least will be: the Athens CIA branch has been compromised and Farnsworth’s message will be intercepted, just as Sumo himself has intercepted it. Thus when Penny goes to pick it up via prearranged scenario at the Athens branch she’ll be walking into a hit. 

Penny’s intro has her scuba diving topless near Aphros, Greece (“One ought to swim naked in the Aegean.”), searching for an ancient Phoenician statue of the love goddess Astarte. As I predicted, Hughes from the previous two volumes is gone and not once mentioned; when we meet her, the Baroness’s latest stud is Valentin Stark, “a bronze, slightly dissolute Apollo with a big, golden-curled head and devil-may-care face.” As with most of Penny’s men he’s rich and handsome, “heir to a supermarket fortune and a playboy reputation.” He also has an interest in archeology, hence this effective intro in which he and Penny search for the statue. An unusual element here is that some of Penny’s team are on vacation with her: Skytop, Wharton, Inga, and Eric are all also aboard and helping with the underwater search (and apparently unfazed by the sight of Penny’s “bare breasts” as she traipses around the yacht). Penny’s discovery of the statue is especially apt: 


Penny furthers the image by stripping off her trunks and floating here forty feet underwater in the same position as the statue – kneeling, offering her breasts to her supplicants. She then takes her scuba knifes and hacks at Val’s crotch(!), as if inspired by those ancient supplicants who would literally castrate themselves for the goddess. Instead Penny’s goal is to slice a “gash” in Val’s wetsuit, which she somehow manages to do rather than castrating him. This leads to an underwater sex scene, which on my initial perusal of the manuscript I mistakenly assumed was a zero-gravity sex sequence. Given the “floating” imagery, it’s not easy to see why I was confused: 


Moffitt pours on the kink factor here; complete with Penny taking off her mouthpiece long enough to give Val a b.j., and then Val returning the favor – his mask rubbing against her thighs and adding “piquancy to the delicious sensasion.” Not to mention the “little orgasm” Penny enjoys given the “icy shock” of the seawater that gets inside her as Val spreads her legs further. This leads to a “rotary” style of underwater sex, as Penny “rotate[es] like some massive piece of machinery around the shaft that [Val] had plugged into her socket:” 


Before long we have the memorable image of Penny “fondl[ing] one of the [statue’s] golden breasts in sisterly salute!” This is probably one of the most out-there sex scenes in the entire Baroness series, Moffitt leaving no kinky stone unturned – we’re even informed how that gash Penny cut in Val’s wetsuit has resulted in “flaps of rubber” that “whisked round [Penny’s] mound of Venus like an erotic gasket.” A sequence that comes to the usual whopping mutual-climaxes finale we know and love from the series, with Penny “sandwiched between the metal breasts of the goddess and Val’s broad, rubber sheathed chest.” This leads to that other mainstay of the series, one that went missing in the previous volume – when Penny finds Val immediately ready for round two, she checks her watch to see how much time’s left in their tanks, only to see that she’s receiving a secret coded message from Farnsworth. Duty calls. 

One thing I enjoy about reading older books is to see how long certain phrases have been in the vernacular; here I learned that “banging” was being employed for sex even in the mid ‘70s (I was under the impression “balling” was more frequently used at the time, but maybe that was a hippie thing). Val is ready for another round despite the dwindling air tanks, because, “Even five minues was worth it when you were sampling the Baroness, but they’d been banging one another an average of seven or eight times a day since the start of the voyage, and he wouldn’t mind waiting till they got topside to do it properly.” But Penny has to get going, which leads to another humorous image of her, Val, and the statue being lifted out of the sea to the awaiting crew – with Penny still “stark naked” and Val’s “prong…sticking out of a hole in his rubber trunks.” Val takes umbrage at Penny’s sudden “impulsive” announcement that she must go to Athens, but Penny’s crew intervenes as our heroine goes to her quarters to change. Once again Moffitt brings a trash fiction vibe to men’s adventure with the opulent décor: 


As predicted Penny walks into a trap; Farnsworth’s coded message has her entering the Acropolis to meet her CIA contact. But Penny, armed only with her small automatic, quickly discovers it’s a hit attempt. This leads to the first action scene in the novel, as well as a surprise appearance, as Penny turns around in a darkened colonnade to find an “old man” – a tour guide she passed on her way into the Acropolis – has snuck up on her and is holding a .45 pistol: 


Farnsworth explains that he’s gotten to Athens in three hours via “The SR-71 experimental job,” ie the Blackbird. But there’s another hitman, one with a heavy machine gun hidden in an old-fashioned camera tripod, and Penny takes him out in her preferred method: using her bare hands while she’s completely naked: 


After taking out a few more of the terrorists – including one whose eyeballs Penny stabs out with her fingers – Farnsworth and the Baroness repair to a tavern, where Penny’s clued in on the assignment. Humorously, both of them discount the theory of the “idiots in Washington” that the Russians have come up with a way to cloak their spacecraft; clearly something bad has happened to the ship and the Soviets are trying to hide it. Given that “détente” prevents Penny from going into Russia via Afghanistan with a commando team, she decides to head to England along with Eric and Skytop. They meet with Sir Percival, the Astronomer Royal; Penny declares that she’s “doing journalism” because it’s “all the rage this year. Candace is doing it, of course, and Pia, and Jackie and Marisa and Margaux.” 

Here Penny learns via radar data that the Russian craft mysteriously vanished. This leads Penny to Professor Ralph Earle, who has Percival’s data on the disappeared ship, and who might be a target for Russian assassins because of it. This leads to the introduction of the most outrageous villain yet in The Baroness, “the Zhook,” a creepy Russian assassin who seems to have lurched in from a horror novel:


The Zhook turns out to even be stranger, with “empty eyes” and scarred sockets hidden by goggles, and anatomy that clicks when he moves. I have a hunch Moffitt was inspired by Peter Lorre’s character Dr. Gogol in the 1935 horror flick Mad Love.  This leads to a bizarre fight in a darkened computer room as the Zhook, on all fours “like a beetle” and able to see in the dark, gets the better of Penny, Skytop, and Eric. In fact he only doesn’t kill them because he’s in a hurry; even man-mountain Joe Skytop is injured badly, Eric gets a concussion, and Penny considers lucky that “her liver and transverse colon [are] unruptured.” 

After this per series template the Baroness assembles her team and sends them out on various assignments. Since Professor Earle has been killed, the goal is to find some other scientist who might’ve made some headway on the data about the missing Russian ship and figure out what happened to it. We get what appears to have been the start of a new series gimmick in that this is the second volume in a row in which someone smokes a joint during Penny’s team briefing; this time it’s Fiona. (“Real Panama gold, from Nippy’s private stash!”) Also here we get what I believe is the first indication that Fiona has her eyes on the ultra-reserved Wharton, thinking of him as “one of her unfinished projects.” 

Speaking of Fiona, she and Tommy have a run-in with the Zhook shortly afterwards; sent to round up two prominent astrophysicists at a conference, they find that these men have been abducted by the Soviets. Fiona has an off-page encounter with the Zhook, sprawled unconscious with her “breasts spilling out” of her torn dress when Tommy finds her. When Tommy asks “Are you…,” Fiona responds, “Did he rape me, you mean? Lord, no! Even a Russian isn’t that quick.” Again the team is lucky to have survived, as they find the corpse of a girl in the scientists’s bathroom, “broken in half like a doll,” same as Professor Earle was. This is a specialty of the Zhook with his superhuman strength, and the only reason Fiona wasn’t killed too was because the Zhook was in a hurry. Meanwhile Wharton heads to Harvard to check on an Indian astrophysicist who may be able to help out. Here Moffitt indulges in his obvious science interests, with the professor, Singh, giving a lecture on black holes and how they threaten the stability of the universe: “Since a black hole must continue to collapse until it reaches the point of zero volume and infinite density, the whole universe will necessarily become such a Swarzschild singularity – go down the drain, in other words.” 

Wharton also strikes out – Singh is abducted seconds before he arrives – and next we move on to Paul and Yvette (ie the black members of the team) in California. Moffitt doesn’t mention the grim torture Yvette experienced in the previous volume, but then The Baroness never had much in the way of continuity to begin with. We meet them as they are having a candlelit dinner, but in a humorous reveal this turns out to be a commercial they’re filming for a product called Orasan, “The oral spray with sex appeal.” Sumo’s sci-fi electronics strike again, as he and the Baroness give Paul and Yvette their assignment – to find another scientist – through the mirror mounted inside Yvette’s makeup case. They strike out as well when they hunt down their scientist, getting in a fight with the Russians who take him, as well as a pair of redneck cops. The two get out of custody, and next we see them they’re back with the Baroness in England, “their eyes red-rimmed with jet lag.” 

Here we learn that Dr. Hunnicut, yet another astrophysicist, has also been abducted, right out of a CIA safehouse. The difference with Hunnicut is that we briefly met him at the start of the novel; the intel heads retained his services to look into the data about the disappeared spacecraft. The narrative picks up here as Penny decides to hit the Russians, détente be damned. They’ll abduct a Russian astrophysicist themselves; one happens to be staying at the Russian embassy. Meanwhile we learn that a Russian spy has somehow figured out that Penny is the elusive “Coin” who is wanted dead by the Soviets, and plans to make the score solo for his own benefit. 

The Baroness puts on a disguise and passes herself as “a rich, crotchety old woman,” with Inga as her nurse. Meanwhile Fiona poses as the Baroness, and the guys on the team pose as “rock musicicians on their way to a gig,” complete with Paul hiding a Galil assault rifle in a hollowed-out guitar. Penny’s disguise is so as to fool the KGB watcher, while meanwhile a car with Skytop and Paul try to divert the Russians who are escorting the astrophysicist out of the embassy. In the firefight Skytop loses an earlobe: 


Penny, still disguised as an old lady, manages to take out the KGB crew shepharding the Russian scientist to Heathrow. This is a nicely-done scene which sees Yvette sporting a big false afro that hides a bomb. They manage to capture the scientist, but then Penny herself is captured – by the solo Russian agent who has figured out she is the infamous Coin. This leads to a somewhat goofy bit where an injured Paul limps back to the others and informs them the Baroness is “dead,” which comes off as repetitious given that Tom Sumo declared the exact same thing at the opening of the novel. Heck, maybe Moffit subconsciously suspected this would be the final installment, hence all these “The Baroness is dead!” freakouts. Meanwhile we see that the solo Russian who abducted Penny is…none other than Alexey, the GRU commando who first appeared in #3: Death Is A Ruby Light and then again in #9: Death Is A Copycat

Penny delcares “It’s been a long time” since she last saw Alexey, and we get a brief rundown of their time in Death Is A Ruby Light, with the events of Death Is A Copycat rendered as a mere “The last time we met, you let me live,” from Alexey. Who by the way has Penny completely nude; she awakens to find her entire body stiff and her private parts feeling “greasy” from obviously having been searched. Given that Alexey appeared in the previous volume, this makes one wonder how long A Black Hole To Die In occurs after Death Is A Copycat; the Baroness herself clearly thinks it’s been a while. But as I noted above, I think this is because Moffitt was writing this volume over a year after he wrote Death Is A Copycat

Alexey is under the impression Penny has been “murdering KGB agents and kidnapping Nobel Prize winners;” he has no idea that this is an “eye for an eye” retaliation for the American scientists the Russians have been kidnapping. In fact, Alexey was here in England to spy on the Shah of Iran and only discovered Penny’s presence by accident; he knew she was Coin from Death Is A Ruby Light, and decided to capture her for his own advancement. But at this point the two are, once again, uneasy allies; Alexey informs Penny that “the Zhook” is really a guy named Zhukalov, his nickname Zhook (Russian for “click-beetle”) courtesy the KGB agents who fear him. (We also learn by this point that Alexey and Penny have already “made love once, on the leather couch, just to take the edge off.”) 

We learn that the Zhook came to his mutilated state courtesy the Germans, who captured him when he was very young and working behind German lines in the last days of WWII. They “tore his arms and legs out of their sockets,” which now results in that clicking sound when he moves. And did more horrible things: 


As for the Zhook’s ability to see in the dark, that is due to Chinese agents in 1960 throwing “some sort of caustic substance into his eyes” which blinded him. However only the lens of his eyes were destroyed, leaving behind a scarred reitna and iris in each eye. The lenses were replaced with clear glass; Penny surmises that this is what gives the Zhook the ability to see in the dark, but Alexey scoffs at the idea as “supernatural.” Penny insists that the Zhook “can see beyond the spectrum of visible light,” as “his ultraviolet filter is in his glasses, not his eyes,” meaning the Zhook can “switch from one sort of vision to the other whenever he wants.” Oh and he gets his “source of illumination” from a “black-light lantern hidden in that shroud of a suit he wears.” 

Given that the Zhook basically runs his own team in the KGB, both Alexey and Penny assume he is the one behind all the scientist snatches, and Alexey decides to help out, for once again it is in “the interest of both our nations” to free all these various kidnapped scientists. After that’s decided, it’s on to the hardcore sex; we rejoin the Baroness and Alexey as they’re about to enjoy their ninth round, Penny having to encourage Alexey to go at it again. Moffitt injects some humor in the scene with the buttons on the leather couch hurting Alexey’s back, so they repair to a wooden chair for the, uh, climax:


Next we jump ahead a week. Penny’s relaxing in her opulent London hotel with Inga as ever at her side. No mention is made of how the team thought Penny was dead just a few pages ago; Moffitt has left the reunion between Penny and her team off-page. Alexey sneaks into Penny’s hotel, posing as a waiter, to inform her that “The Zhook is holding your scientists prisoner in a fortified villa on the Black Sea coast, near Yelta.” While Alexey says the prisoners have not been ill-treated, he says it is a “bad place…the scum of the Soviet intelligence services are assigned there, sadists, psychopaths…the KGB brass stay away from the place.” We see that the place is beautiful on the outside but nightmarish on the inside; a Russian official visits the villa to check on the condition of the scientists, who are kept in a rat-filled dungeon. Again it’s like a horror novel as the Zhook follows a scientist who has escaped down a sewage tunnel and breaks him into pieces. 

The Baroness and team head to Istanbul, where Tom Sumo reveals “experimental wetsuits” he’s created from NASA spacesuits that were designed for “exploring planets with corrosive atmospheres.” Described as a “snakeskin,” it has “friction pads” on the fingertips so you can grip a gun and hold things; the suit itself is too slippery to even pick up. It sounds very much like the “plastic suit” in another series produced by Lyle Kenyon Engel, John Eagle Expeditor


Penny quickly proves this “slipperysuit” is effective in combat. She challenges Skytop to attack her: “And no faking. If you break one of my ribs, I’ll buy you that Zeiss F 0.7 lens you’ve had your eye on – the one Kubrick used.” But try as he might, Skytop’s unable to even get a hold of the Baroness, who continuously slips out of his grip. Indeed I get the impression Moffitt might’ve been inspired by that other Engel-produced series, as the slipperysuit is next proven to be knife-proof. Penny commands Paul to come at her with a knife, and it merely “slither[s] along the surface of the fluorocarbon fabric without penetrating it.” Penny suspects the suit could only stop a “glancing hit” from a bullet; “I felt that knife edge! With a high-velocity bullet, the shock wave travelling through your body fluids would kill you.” As readers of John Eagle Expeditor recall, Eagle has a special pair of infrared googles for his plastic suit. And so too does the Baroness for hers; the “snake eyes,” which Sumo just made for her:


As usual Penny’s plan is to make a show of herself, thus she has a big party on her yacht in Instanbul, inviting all her jet-setting friends. It’s a big affair, complete with a “rock band from London” that’s “taking a hash break” as the chapter opens. This is the Baroness’s “Black Sea Bash,” with all the glitterati in attendance, so close to the Crimean coast that Soviet jets are doing flybys and a submarine is tracking the yacht. We get the usual cast of partying nobles and jet-setters, complete with a jokey reference to Peter Benchley and Jaws: one of the guests is “the young novelist whose book about a killer whale was making its second million dollars.” 

Penny slips off and begins a 12-mile swim to the coast with the rest of the team, all garbed in the wetsuits (Skytop and Wharton wear jocks under theirs, we’re informed, while everyone else is naked), pulled along by “screws” created by Sumo that are made of “synthetic resilin protein – same stuff that lets a flea jump hundreds of times its own length.” So as to not set off any monitoring devices they have no metal on them; even the guns are made of “radar-transparent plastic.” The screws look like black whips and churn the water “in a rotary motion;” given the frequency of how often “rotary position” appears throughout A Black Hole To Die In, I’m going to chalk it up as some intentional thematic work on Moffitt’s part. The team goes in through the rat-infested sewer – the offal sliding right off their suits – and breaks out the scientists one by one. Penny’s appearance through the latrine drain in one scientist’s cell is particularly memorable: 


The team begins springing the other scientists from their individual cells. After this Penny puts the slipperysuit in action against some guards, also wielding the trident she used during the swim here:


There follows a big gunfight with the Baroness and Eric (whose foot is broken by a bullet that glances off the suit) holding off hordes of approaching Russians. Penny ends up holding them off on her own as Eric makes his escape: 


Penny’s trapped in the cell, and gets out in a novel way – she takes a hostage, straps all of her plastique to his “testes,” and shoves him back out into the cell to his waiting comrades! In the diversion she makes her escape. But on her way through the sewer to reconnect with the others she finds the Zhook waiting for her – Eric’s twisted body in his grip, “limp as death.” An effective sequence as the two size each other up, Penny just as able to see in the dark as the Zhook is, thanks to her infrared goggles. Despite her own superheroic skills, the Baroness is no match for the Zhook, who does his best to crush her to pulp. When all seems lost Penny snaps him with her backup “screw,” which Sumo earlier warned could be used as a brutal weapon – its coils are wound up to slowly power a 12-mile swim. But if they were to be unwound all at once on a human victim it would make for a gory spectacle, as the Zhook discovers. It goes on for a while, the Zhook being crushed to death to the point that he screams for his mother, until finally we get this memorable image: 


As with the fakeout with Yvette at the end of Death Is A Copycat, Eric’s wounds turn out to be a lot less terrible than Moffitt implied; we learn he just has a few cracked ribs. The scientists are taken to Penny’s yacht, and we get more of the “Black Sea Bash” stuff as we jump ahead a few hours and see Russian soldiers boarding the boat and looking agog at the drunk and high revellers aboard. The Russians leave after being threatened with starting a diplomatic incident, and after this…Moffitt applies the breaks. A Black Hole To Die In descends into a mire of exposition and TV-watching as first the scientists explain what the Russians have discovered…then the Russians discuss it amongst themselves…then the US President discusses the exact same stuff with the scientists, and etc. 

Long story short, the Russian space ship disappeared due to a “mini black hole” in Earth’s orbit, one that’s “no bigger than a virus.” Despite its microscopic size, it has the weight and density of a star, thus sucks anything into it. The Russians, we learn, plan to send multiple spaceships up there to harness the black hole into a source of unlimited energy; Moffitt capabaly makes it all seem possible as a Russian scientist explains his plan to the Premiere. Meanwhile we learn from the US scientists – the ones Penny rescued – that the black hole threatens the Earth, given that it’s entered Earth’s orbit and could easily wipe out the planet. Moffitt works in the mysterious Tunguska explosion of 1908, which is often theorized as being caused by a meteor; one of the scientists explains it was really the black hole, which follows a “comet trajectory” and actually passed through the Earth that time. This time, given that the hole is bigger, the impact will be even more catastrophic. 

But the US can’t do anything because, given the “dwindling” funds for the Space Race, there are no operational Saturn rocks left over from the Apollo Program. So friends believe it or not but the first half of this climax features the Baroness and team watching television as the various networks report on the mass Russian spacecraft launches – complete with Barbara Walters and Walter Cronkite giving reports! So basically the Russians are turning it into a media spectacle, launching three ships at once with several men in space at the same time. The intent being that they are staking the black hole as their own. And going about the process of harnessing it for energy: 


Then the Chinese launch their own spaceship to interfere, having gotten the intel thanks to one of the scientists Penny’s team freed; a guy named Dr. Hsu who managed to escape her and get back to China with the info. So ridiculously enough, Penny and team continue to watch television as now the Chinese enter the race for the mini black hole. Our heroine finally gets re-engaged with the plot when she calls Farnsworth and demands that he scramble an SR-71 for her – with Wharton flying it – so Penny can parachute over the Chinese rocket complex at Shwangchengtze. Aerial photography implies that the Chinese are about to rush up another rocket, “to get in the black hole business.” Penny plans for there to be another “passenger” on that rocket – herself! When Farnsworth says she’d be unable to jump out of an SR-71, given that it basically flies in space, she responds, “Then I’ll need a space suit, won’t I, darling?” 

Before we can get to this, though, Penny watches more TV, as NBC reports that the Chinese spacecraft has “extracted a cylindrical module from the booster…about the size of the special docking adapter that allowed the American Apollo craft to link up with the Russian’s Soyuz ship back in 1975.” The Apollo-Soyuz linkup occurred in July of 1975. So here we have our first internal indication that A Black Hole To Die In was written at least by then. We get more confirmation of this as Penny, who flies her LearJet to Hawaii to rendevous with the SR-71, watches even more TV – and this time it’s “Yuri Fokin, the veteran announcer who had covered the Apollo-Soyuz mission.” However as we will soon learn, Moffitt was writing even later than the summer of 1975…something that is also indicated by that “back in 1975” in the dialog above. 

At any rate, once again action is relayed via TV coverage as the commander of the twelve-man Russian space station informs viewers that the Chinese spaceship is being “extremely reckless” with its close approach. We also see how the times have changed, as per Penny the “worldwide audience” is clearly rooting for the Russians, and “whatever happened could be turned into anti-Chinese propaganda.” You don’t see too much of that these days! But again, Penny here just watches TV as the Chinese “ram” the Russian space station and overtake it, killing all the cosmonauts with weapons that look like “underwater spear guns.” 

More TV coverage ensues as the Chinese overtake the station and “blackmail” the US and USSR with threats of destruction. This is a great bit from Moffitt, who has the Chinese issuing their demands but insisting they are a “people of peace.” How little things change!  More exposition follows as the President argues with his intel chiefs that nothing can be done, as does the Premiere with his underlings – both leaders also try to cancel a mission a sole agent of theirs is undertaking to stop the threat, only to be told its too late. Meanwhile Wharton flies the Baroness over the Gobi desert and she bails out, dressed in an astronaut helmet and an experimental NASA pressure suit: 


It’s night in the desert when she lands and she’s immediately spotted by a trio of Mongols. After killing one of them, Penny – who is still in her spacesuit and helmet – bluffs that she’s from the rocket base, speaking in perfect Mandarin. The Mongols demand she take off the helmet, to prove she’s Chinese. Penny hesitates a moment, and then: 


We later learn that her body has also been “dyed to make her look Chinese, and even her nipples ha[ve] been colored brown.” The disguise works for a while, but Penny ends up fighting the last two Mongols anyway, crushing one’s throat in her usual favored move. But then she’s caught unawares by another guy who comes out of the darkness – one who knows who she is. It is of course Alexey, who returns to the narrative once again – he was the solo agent the Premiere was trying to stop. Alexey says he recognizes Penny despite the Chinese disguise, because “nobody has a body like yours.” Alexey relates how he’s gotten here on his own desperate solo quest to stop the Chinese, and again he and Penny decide to work together. It’s curious that Moffitt has shown this sudden interest in Alexey; after appearing in the third volume he was gone and forgotten, until abruptly reappearing in the last pages of Death Is A Copycat, to return again here. 

Regardless, he and Penny once again get on famously – despite the fact that the world’s about to end and they’re alone in the middle of the desert, surrounded by a few million enemy, Penny and Alexey find the time to engage in some hardcore shenanigans: “She rode his long, stiff shaft with a steady in-and-out motion, taking it slow at first, lifting her tail at the end of each stroke.” As typical with the series this goes on for a few pages, and we learn that, once again, it’s their tenth round! The show gets back on the road as Alexey and Penny split up to get into the base; Penny is buried in the sand and manages to secretly board a train headed for the rocket site. 

Penny wants on the base because earlier she planted a bug up the ass of Hsu, the scientist she rescued who turned out to be a Chinese agent. (One that’s “too small” for Hsu to even notice, we’re informed!) She wants “fifteen minutes” with him to ask him a few questions. Using a directional finder that’s locked on the bug, she hunts him down in the rocket base. We also learn that the Baroness has no plans to “get out of here alive.” It always surprises me how brutal Penny can be; she tracks Hsu to a blockhouse from which various scientists are entering and exiting. Penny spots her chance when a tall Chinese woman comes out, a nurse or somesuch. Penny lassos her into the darkness and, after saying “Sorry, sweetie,” proceeds to strangle her. “She made it as quick and painless as possible, but it’s never nice.” Just imagine Mack Bolan or John Eagle strangling a nurse! 

Here we get our firmest indication of when A Black Hole To Die In was written; part of Penny’s disguise is a Mao button she takes from the dead nurse. This triggers one of the guards, who starts yelling at her, and Penny realizes, “Mao was barely in his grave, and already the factions were squaring off.” So this confirms that the manuscript was written sometime in the Fall of ’76, as Mao died in early September of that year. Penny – after killing a few technicians and a doctor – corners Hsu in the “astronaut prep” room; despite his advanced age, the old man is going up in space. He recognizes the Baroness despite the disguise. He won’t tell her why he’s insisting to go into space, as the trip will clearly kill him. Penny uses a “synthetic hypnotic” to get him to talk, and here, in the eleventh hour, Dr. Hsu is revealed as the main villain of the piece: 


Hsu has “falsified” his calculations so that the Chinese think that the black hole will merely pass through the Earth if their demands are not met; they are unaware Hsu has set it so the black hole will stay in Earth’s orbit and render everything into “nothingness.” He’s also set it so that the plan will go into effect even if the Chinese don’t launch the hole themselves; even if the nations were to give in to their demands, the mini black-hole would still descend into Earth’s orbit. And it’s going to happen “within the next twenty-four hours.” Penny strangles Hsu – he’s very casual about his death, given that drug – and then she takes a page from Connery’s Bond in You Only Live Twice by putting on Hsu’s spacesuit and passing herself off as one of the Chinese astronauts. In the chaos – caused by Alexey firing SAM rockets into the installation from afar – she mows through the crowd, slicing and dicing doctors, technicians, and other astronauts with a scalpel as she makes her way toward the rocket, which is about to launch. 

Indeed the finale is a bit preposterous – and rushed – as Penny storms across the crazed compound as the SAM rockets fall around her. Here she uses an “AR-7 survival rifle” which she’s brought along with her, sniping technicians and soldiers from afar as she climbs the 30-story scaffolding to the rocket’s cockpit. More soldiers are on the way, and MIGs are bombing Alexey’s position (“Goodbye, Alexey!” Penny thinks to herself). It’s incredibly apocalyptic, and there are only two pages left in the manuscript. At this point I started to get a sinking suspicion; there was no way Moffitt could suitably end the tale in just two pages. And folks it turns out he doesn’t; as maddening as it is to believe, A Black Hole To Die In ends on a cliffhanger! 

Penny gets into the cockpit, the only person aboard. She straps herself into the bamboo astronaut couches, turns on the AC and the oxygen supply, and cuts off mission control. She then figures out how to launch the rocket! “And then a huge gentle hand was pushing at her chest, presssing her into the couch. She lay back and willed herself to relax while the G-forces built up.” As Hsu told her, “the launch sequence had been wired in automatically,” meaning that the second and third stages of the launch sequence will go down without Penny having to do anything: “She had a free ride all the way.” 

We’re now on the last page of the manuscript, and our heroine is launching herself into space! “It was the most thrilling sensation she’d ever felt in her life.” And folks this is how A Black Hole To Die In comes to a close, as Penny’s rocket passes through the atmosphere into the zero-gravity of space: 


This is the most bonkers finale I ever could’ve expected, and I would love to know if Moffitt even intended for this manuscript to see print. (Though I have to admit it’s pretty great how he still found a way to mention Penny’s breasts one last time!) But as the handwritten and typed edits throughout attest, this wasn’t Moffitt’s first draft, so clearly it was the draft he submitted to Lyle Kenyon Engel for publication. It’s all just so crazy as to be ludicrous; Penny has absolutely no plan on how to even stop Hsu’s plot, and what will she do in space? It’s about as irrational and ridiculous as Doomsday Warrior #14. This also begs the question of how Moffitt planned to follow this installment up. Would his next volume have been entirely in space? Or would the climactic events of A Black Hole To Die In be skirted over in the intro of the next volume? What’s interesting is that no other volume ever ended on a cliffhanger, with little in the way of series continuity to link together the installments. 

As mentioned at the start of this review, there is an air of finality here – note the last line of the manuscript: “Nobody would ever see it again.” Was Moffitt referring to the series itself? Maybe he intentionally delivered this apocalyptic finale – with no resolution – knowing that it would never see print. Or maybe he wrote it in the hopes that if it were printed, reader demand to know what happened next would be sufficient to keep up sales and thus continue the series. 

Unfortunately we’ll never know. Moffitt passed away in 2014, taking any answers with him. Here’s hoping ppsantos also got to read this manuscript and was able to discuss it with Moffitt. If you are out there my friend, I’d love to hear from you! Otherwise I have to say my feelings on A Black Hole To Die In are mixed. It started strong, then got a bit sluggish, only to become incredibly crazed in the final few pages. It’s hard to judge it given the nightmarish climax, as the adventure doesn’t seem complete – particularly given that we’ll never get to see what Moffitt intended to happen next. In a way then I’m almost glad this one was never published; Death Is A Copycat would’ve made a much more suitable series finale (and indeed it was – in France!). 

One day I’m sure I’ll read this again, and I look forward to it because then I’ll just be able to read it and do a “normal” review (as part of my re-reading of the entire series; the most recent I’ve re-read is #2: Diamonds Are For Dying), and not have to worry about documenting everything. I have to say, doing these overly-comprehensive reviews of the two unpublished Baroness novels has really been exhausting! Again though I was very grateful for the chance to read them. But man I wish Moffitt had gotten to write another volume, to tie up the loose ends. 

There is of course one more unpublished Baroness novel: Robert Vardeman’s Quicktime Death, which we at least know was submtted to Engel before A Black Hole To Die In. (Vardeman has said Engel told him that “the next volume” of the series would concern a black hole.) I’ve reached out to Vardeman to see if he would mind sharing any detail on his unpublished manuscript, but haven’t heard back from him – hopefully I will, though!