Showing posts with label Walter Kaylin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walter Kaylin. Show all posts

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!

Monday, August 17, 2015

Another Time, Another Woman


Another Time, Another Woman, by Walter Kaylin
March, 1963  Fawcett Gold Medal

It’s hard to believe that for a guy who cranked out so many men’s adventure magazine stories from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, Walter Kaylin only published two novels: this one, a Gold Medal paperback original from 1963, and The Power Forward, which came out in 1979 and never received a paperback edition. But this was Kaylin’s only crime novel, which is very puzzling, given that he even published a few stories in the legendary Manhunt magazine; you’d figure he would’ve been a Gold Medal regular. 

In the Kaylin anthology He-Men, Bag Men & Nymphos, editor Bob Deis features an interview he recently conducted with Kaylin, who is now in his 90s. This is all Kaylin had to say about Another Time, Another Woman: “It was pretty cheesy, but I got $2,500 for it. And $2,500 was a lot of money when you were getting $300 for writing a story, so I was very pleased with that.” Given that Kaylin wrote the book 52 years ago, you can forgive him for not having much more to say about it – and sad to say, but Another Time, Another Woman really is mostly forgettable. It only runs to 128 pages, and you keep waiting for something to happen, but unfortunately nothing much ever does.

I don’t mean to imply that Kaylin’s not a good writer; in fact it’s because he was so prolific in the pulp realm that you expect more of him. The aforementioned He-Men anthology opens with a short story titled “Snow-Job From A Redhead,” which appeared in the June 1956 issue of Male but is more the sort of thing you’d expect to read in Manhunt, just a very hardboiled crime story with plenty of action and thrills. Given this I expected Another Time, Another Woman to be along the same lines, but instead it’s more of a slow-boil thing that, well, never gets to the boiling point.

The first issue comes with our narrator, a 32-year-old jazz pianist named Harry Quist, who turns out to be a heel of the first order. Harry, we gradually learn, got in a head-on collision with another car three years ago, killing the entire family in it and also injuring his wife, Mildred, who was eight months pregnant at the time. The baby died shortly after. Harry wasn’t drunk or running from the mafia or anything; he was just being negligent, speeding through the Pasedena hills in the middle of the night. And rather than taking responsibility for his actions he covered up the accident and took Mildred to his old pal Dr. Emmett Gregg, knowing the guy would fix her up and keep it all hush-hush.

So yeah, our narrator is an asshole. But even worse is the way he tells us his tale. Somehow Kaylin must’ve decided he’d try his hand at like “beatnik hardboiled” or something. Being a jazz pianist, Harry is already “cool,” or at least thinks of himself so, and blabs his story to us in a breathless rush of pseudo jive talk that really comes off as pretentious more than anything else. For example:

Now you take fear. Fear hangs inside you like a deflated basketball bladder brushing so easily against heart, lungs, kidneys and intestines there are times you don’t even know it’s there. Not until it begins to inflate. Begins to press. Begins to crowd. Now try breathing. Try moving your bowels. Hard, ain’t it? Hurts, right? That’s because you’ve got something solid as a bowling ball in there and it’s squeezing the pee/paste/puss (five points f’r each k’reck answer) out of everything you own.

I just chose that example at random out of the book, but it’s like that throughout; what starts as an interesting paragraph or thought soon spirals into contrived nonsense. Actually, the biggest impression I get is that Kaylin was just trying too hard. And who knows, maybe after writing so much pulp for the men’s mags he was having fun letting his hair down and turning out a story that, for once, wasn’t about some square-jawed American soldier in WWII. But the cumulative effect of Another Time, Another Woman is weariness; at least it was for me. Harry’s way of telling his story got on my nerves quick. But then, he is an asshole, so maybe that was Kaylin’s point.

Harry’s wife Mildred, now ex-wife, is the titular woman of the novel (though the title could in fact refer to two other women, as mentioned below). A shell of her former self, she’s now married to Dr. Gregg, ie Harry’s old pal who saved her. She whores herself out to man after man in the hopes that someone can get her pregnant again, despite the fact that the crash Harry got her in has rendered her infertile. This is dark stuff, obviously, and it’s typical of Gold Medal that this aspect was hyped on the front and back cover (which refers to Mildred as a “slut”), making it sound a lot more salacious than what it really is – downright depressing.  Mildred also turns out to be the character on the cover; we are informed that Emmett has a painting of a fully-nude Mildred which hangs in their home.

Harry informs us that after the crash that night he left town, Mildred obviously wanting nothing to do with him due to the loss of her baby, but eventually he came back because he loves Hollywood. Now he plays in a nightclub, torch singer type stuff, with a new girl named Jessie doing the vocals. That Jessie doesn’t work the audience and play up on her natural sex appeal is something the owner of the club is constantly bitching about, and Harry’s always being nagged at to tell her to sex it up. But Jessie’s sort of a prude due to the fact that she’s already a widow in her early 20s, her husband, a writer, having contracted a rare disease and dying a year before. Now she cuts off her emotions and is constantly shutting down Harry’s advances. Hence Jessie was also “another woman” in “another time.” 

The novel occurs over a few days and starts off with Harry being called away from the club in the middle of the set by Mildred, whom he hasn’t seen in years. He’s aware of her infedility, though, having kept in touch with Emmett, who himself is a bit of a lothario at the local hospital. Mildred was in the act of entertaining Sidney Flake, husband of the wealthiest woman in town, Vivian, but now Sidney is dead in the guest house, an icepick in his head. Mildred tells Harry that Emmett came home earlier than expected, caught her with Sidney, and the two men enganged in a brawl, this being the outcome. 

Now Mildred demands that Harry hide the body and ensure Emmett doesn’t get in trouble. If he does get in trouble, Mildred will go straight to the police and tell them about that fatal car accident Harry caused three years ago and then covered up. So Harry is blackmailed into it, though he soon finds out there’s more going on than this simple story. Harry goes back and forth, meeting with Emmett (who’s hiding in his hunting lodge and then in the woods), being pressured by Mildred, and being interrogated by the Gary Cooper-esque Sgt. Combs, a cop who goes around with a little pet monkey named Baked Beans that he keeps in his pocket.

This is not an action-packed tale by any means. In fact there isn’t a single shootout, fistfight, chase, or even sex scene in the entire novel. It’s all about style and mood, and as stated your mileage will vary. Kaylin does come up with some goofy characters, like Sgt. Combs, as well as the so-called Father Zosimus, a lunatic who preaches a bizarre off-shoot of Christianity which demands that you “wound God” by harming likenesses or representatives of Jesus, the idea being that to truly suffer you must hurt that which you love most. Zosimus has gotten his hooks in rich Vivian Flake, whom we’re told lives in a cave on her own expansive property and has for the most part gone insane. She then is yet “another woman” in “another time,” like Mildred and Jessie a shell of her former self. 

Gradually Harry learns that there is more to the story than a simple act of a husband’s rage; Combs employs an old drunk, the man who discovered Flake’s body in Emmett’s guesthouse, and the old man reveals that Flake wasn’t dead when Emmett staggered away after the fight. As for Emmett, he’s certain Mildred did it, as it’s revealed that Sidney Flake had a sadistic streak and was known for mercilessly beating and maiming women who ran afoul of him. So Emmett’s certain that Mildred, fearing that she would suffer reprisals from Sidney once he recovered from the beating Emmett gave him, took matters into her own hands and murdered him. Now Emmett presses Harry into his service, pressuring our narrator to help him set up fake clues that will exonerate Mildred – and put the blame on Vivian Flake.

Emmett wants it to look like the rich lady, who is insane anyway, secretly followed Flake, discovered him in bed with Mildred, and then took the opportunity presented to her and drove an icepick into Flake’s head as he lie there insensate in the guesthouse after Emmett beat him up. Harry goes along with all of this…only to eventually learn that this isin fact what happened, and Emmett has stumbled onto the truth without realizing it. However none of this is played out in any dramatic fashion, with Harry relegated more to the role of a reporter or something, just shuttling around Pasadena and Hollywood and meeting an assemblage of odd characters with affected personalities and habits. 

Indeed the tale is so in Harry’s thoughts that the main plot culminates in a depressing murder-suicide that happens off-page and is given no buildup or payoff. Instead more narrative space is given over to page-filling tactics, like when Harry reads a short story written by Jessie’s dead husband and Kaylin actually writes out the entire story, which takes up a few pages. More page-filling is handled by long chants and prayers courtesy the followers of Father Zosimus. I forgot to mention that there are no chapters in the novel, only white space to break up the various sections. But still you get the feeling that there’s either too little story here to justify 128 pages, or that Kaylin just left out too much of it. 

He does however end on a bit of a lighter note. Harry manages to break through Jessie’s hard shell, talking her into staying in Hollywood with him. But even here there is a touch of uncertainty, as a part of Harry wishes she would just leave and he wouldn’t have to worry about her – yet another indication that our asshole of a hero has still not learned to be responsible for himself or his actions. Have I mentioned that throughout the novel Harry doesn’t once show any remorse for his actions of three years ago?

I can’t give Another Time, Another Woman a ringing endorsement, either for Walter Kaylin fans or for fans of Gold Medal in general. As a crime story it’s lacking and as a character study it’s frustrating because our main character apparently learns nothing. However the theme of the three ruined women is skillfully played out by Kaylin and indication of the caliber of his writing, and the goofy characters are all memorable. But the contrived pseudo-hipster jive talk of our narrator quickly grates, and makes you glad when you’re finished the novel and can move on to something more rewarding.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Men's Mag Roundup: Blood Duels and Death Wish Patrols


Like the previous Male Annual I read, Male Annual 14 (1972) is chock full of stories, most of them retitled reprints of earlier Male, Stag, and For Men Only stories and articles. This particular issue is interesting because most of the material in it is from 1970, when the art/photography in men’s mags had become slightly more risque, but nowhere as exploitative as it would become in just a few short years.

“A Bullet For The Enforcer” by W.J. Saber is the reason I tracked down this issue. The magazine’s misleading cover blurb had me expecting a Godfather ripoff, or at least a lurid Mafia novella; instead, the story turns out to be a retitled reprint of “Hit Man For the Aiport Heist Mob,” which appeared in the September 1970 issue of Stag. Earl Norem’s awesome splash page is retained for this Male Annual reprint, with only the title being changed. Here’s a screengrab of the original version:


With opening dialog of “Come on, spike me harder. Nail me to the mattress,” you know a different era has dawned in the world of men’s adventure mags, and the ensuing sex scene is fairly explicit (though again not as explicit as such tales would be within a year or two). But this is how “A Bullet For The Enforcer” begins, and it follows the same template as every single other men’s adventure mag story I’ve read: we open on a sex or action scene (or both), before cutting back “three months ago” for the looong buildup, before meeting back up with the opening section and then hurrying through the rest of the tale for a rushed finish.

Faber is a new men’s mag writer for me, but his prose is of a piece with everything else I’ve read in this particular genre, with that polished, professional feel. I have to say though the dude isn’t much for scene changes, or maybe that’s just lame editorial work afoot; seriously, we’ll change scenes, locations, and even times without a line space or anything. It gets to be a little confusing at first, but otherwise Faber has that firm command you’d expect of a men’s mag writer, doling out a tale about an antihero who is very much in the Parker mold.

Only this guy, Carl Strand, is a lot meaner than Parker ever was. As noted Strand’s getting busy as the tale begins, boffing a buxom blonde stewardess in a hotel room. But he hears hit men sneaking in, and knows the “stew” has set him up. So the dude punches her out just before she climaxes, gets the jump on the hit men, shoots them point blank in the head…and then shoots the stewardess point blank in the head! This is how our “hero” is introduced to us, and it isn’t for several pages that we learn the girl set him up, and thus “deserved to die.”

Strand is a former ‘Nam Special Forces badass with a penchant for judo. He’s recently been imprisoned for beating to death some dude he loaned money to. Strand’s knack is for heisting the heisters; originally just a regular crook, he moved on to robbing criminals. A team of government officials in some unstated city need a certain specialist; airport cargo in their city is being looted and heisted, and they have no leads. It appears to be an independent syndicate at work. What they need is a professional criminal who can infiltrate the syndicate. They settle upon Strand and offer him the job. But first he has to break out of prison in a belabored sequence.

Strand’s contact is “The Controller,” who answers Strand’s calls from a payphone and hooks him up with cash, clothes, a gun (Strand’s choice of weaponry is a snub nosed .32 revolver), and whatever else he needs. Strand follows leads and ends up in a “swinger’s apartment” that’s filled with, you guessed it, horny stews. That’s just how it goes in the world of men’s mags and I for one am not complaining. Strand gets laid asap by a petite-but-busty brunette named Janice who does him, I’m not kidding, like five seconds after they meet. She just shows up at his door, asks for a drink, and offers herself while she’s reclining on a barstool. Once again, the ensuing sex scene isn’t as vague as it would be in the earlier decades of this particular genre.

Janice is a stewardess and Strand uses her to test out his own heisting scheme, coming away with a bunch of gems. When he tries to make off with them on his own, the Controller gives him a call – eyes are watching Strand from everywhere. So instead he uses the gems to broker a deal with Dryden, a fence who apparently works for the mysterious air cargo heisters. These guys, in the form of a boss named Robinson, eventually make contact with Strand. But when he rubs some of the higher-ups the wrong way, they send some hit men after him – cue the opening sequence, in which Strand’s getting lucky with another stewardess, this one a blonde who is one of the heisters, unlike Janice.

Both the hit men as well as the blonde stew dead, Strand moves in for the big score. He talks Robinson into hitting the airport bank. Meanwhile the Controller will be sending in cops in gas masks, to compensate for the knockout gas Strand will be using on the bank. All of this, as you can see, as shown in Earl Norem’s splash page, which actually turns out to illustrate the final few paragraphs of the story. And true to the men’s mag template, the finale is rushed, with the crooks hitting the bank and the cops hitting the crooks, and Strand himself gets blown away by Robinson, living only long enough to tell the Controller that it’s better this way – he doesn’t want to go back to prison.

“Traitors Die Slow” by Grant Freeling is not only another “smash book bonus,” but it’s also another retitled reprint. It was originally published as “They Crippled Hitler’s D-Day Defenses” and appeared in the September 1970 For Men Only, and I reviewed it here.

The longest story in the book is “My Blood Duel with the Texas Cycle Brutes,” which is “as told to Mark Petersen,” aka the guy who wrote it. Labelled as a “true extralength,” it really is a novella, and follows the same template as “Bullet For The Enforcer;” opening en media res, to a long flashback, to a hurried-off finale. The story is officially credited to Quint Lake, who relays the story in first person, however the majority of the story is courtesy another character: Virginia Carley, a smokin’-hot blonde who shows up nude on Quint’s Arizona ranch one afternoon, having driven there on a stolen Harley chopper.

After recuperating for a few days, Virginia is well enough to tell Quint her story, which makes up for most of the narrative. She’s in her early 20s and was born and raised in some nowhere section of Texas. Bored with life, she was happy one day when the Devil’s Disciples showed up, “the most vicious cycle gang ever to roar down the highways of the Southwest.” Led by Killer Joe, an “All-American type” who wears a WWI German helmet with a spike and leads a group of leather-clad psychopaths, the gang offers Virginia a chance to escape her humdrum life.

Becoming Killer Joe’s woman, she aids and abetts them in their theivery; they like to steal wallets from motorists and knock over gas stations. But in some town in Arizona Killer Joe finds a place that fixes up and sells hot cars, and he decides to knock it off. So they send in Virginia as the honeytrap; she goes home with the owner and Killer Joe busts in just before the naughtiness begins, threatening the dude for the twenty thousand Joe knows he has. But the owner swears the money’s gone and says Virginia stole it. So the Devil’s Disciples string her up and begin beating her, Killer Joe using a belt and another dude stabbing out cigarettes on her skin.

This is where we came in, as Virginia manages to escape, beaten and fully nude. She slices the tires of all the bikes save for Killer Joe’s and takes off on it, eventually ending up in the home of our hero, a young ‘Nam vet with a fondness for guns who has, would you believe it, managed to fall in love with Virginia over these few days he’s tended to her. Cue a super-vague sex scene that is very much like those in earlier men’s mag stories, just immediately cutting to black. Dammit! But anyway our narrator is a dolt. Virginia has begged him to tell no one of her presence. So what does he do after she’s been with him for a month? He decides to surprise her by fixing up that wrecked chopper of hers…you know, the one she stole from Killer Joe.

Sure enough, our dumbass hero is out smoking his “last cigarette of the day” one evening when he’s knocked out by a biker. He wakes up to find himself tied up and Virginia, once again, nude and being tortured. Killer Joe and pals are back and they want that twenty thousand. Our hero manages to free his bonds through sheer strength and takes out Killer Joe and a few henchmen in the strangest way possible: putting bullets in small holes in his wooden firing range and slamming rocks into them, which causes the cartridges to explode and hit the bikers!

The strangest thing about “Blood Duel” is that Virginia’s role in the theft of the twenty thousand is never explained. After killing off Killer Joe et al and rounding up the other bikers, Quint discovers that the blonde is gone, running away without even bothering to see if he’s okay. A month or so later he receives a letter from her, saying that she misses him, loves him, and if he wants her she’s waiting for him at some hotel – she knows she has a lot of explaining to do. And Quint figures to himself, well, if she does actually have that twenty thousand bucks, then he’ll suggest she invest it in some steers for an old rancher he knows…! The end!

“My Body For The Taking” by Michael Sarris is labelled as “Daring Fiction” but it’s about as tepid as you can get – it’s a short tale about a dude on a bus ride to Connecticut who meets up with some hot chick who offers him a job at her uncle’s amusement park. He fixes a few lights and whatnot and then one night she’s waiting for him on one of the rides – cue a vague sex scene. The end.

“Captured by Assam’s Amazon She Devils” harkens back to the glory days of men’s adventure mag pulps, most likely because it’s by an old master of the craft: Emile Schurmacher. This tale isn’t as long as those in editor Noah Sarlat’s days of the early ‘60s, but it packs an entertaining adventure tale in its otherwise brief length. Even though it sports a not-fooling-anyone “as told to” credit, the tale is straight-up fiction, written in third person. Schurmacher has a sure hand of the genre and indeed makes you realize how the older men’s mags stories were generally better, particularly in the Diamond line of publications.

Anyway, it’s 1970 and ruggedly virile anthropologist Bill Kudner is on the Assam-Burma border, searching for the wreckage of a DC-3 that crashed in this area back in 1949. There were nine “white women” on board, nurses all, and no one knows if anyone survived the crash. However tales have leaked out of savage-looking white women running around in the jungle; in other words amazons. So Kudner’s looking for them, only for his sherpa guide to get killed by his cowardly followers, none of whom want to go into the supposedly-haunted valley in which the amazons, referred to by the natives as “Miguri,” apparently reside.

Kudner is captured posthaste by a group of white jungle women, all of them of course smoking hot, in particular a “lithe blonde” named Nadja. Their leader is a bit older and thus evil, per the reasoning of men’s mag logic; her name is Temeh, and she orders Kudner put in a cage. But Nadja has the hots for Kudner and comes to his cage that night, after giving him a meal for his virility. Cue an off-page sex scene which apparently goes on all night. Nadja has limited English and informs Kudner that she is the daughter of one of the nurses on that crashed plane, the wreckage of which sits nearby. Her mother and the other nurses are dead, as are the men of the village, all of them killed in a war with a rival tribe.

The usual stuff happens; Kudner is left alone during the day, only to receive nightly conjugal visits courtesy Nadja. But his presence sows dissent in the tribe and Nadja and another hot amazon named Pantho get in mortal combat over him. Temeh breaks up the fun and orders the two women to kill Kudner; with him out of the picture harmony can return to the camp. But Nadja breaks Kudner out and the two make their escape into Burma, where we are informed they eventually get married in a Buddhist temple. This was a fun story, filled with that adventure-fiction vibe of the old pulps, with very good writing.  I have a few Schurmacher books and look forward to reading them.  


Speaking of the later years of the men’s mags, this August 1976 issue of For Men Only is a sterling example. The sleaze runs rampant, with full-color, full-frontal shots of a variety of ‘70s chicks with feathered hair. The letters to the editor and various features are all about sex and foreplay and how to pick up chicks and etc. The stories are greatly reduced, with none of the “true extralength” yarns you would get in the earlier days, and even those few stories which are here are more so presented as actual articles like you’d read in Playboy.

“Sex Lives of Female Private Eyes” by Sam Phillips is one of those “factual” articles which, instead of being a narrative, is instead quick interviews with a few ladies who are willing to go all the way for a case. There’s hardly any explicit detail at all, and it’s basically just a bunch of dialog from (fictional?) women. However, the artwork this baby is graced with is phenomenal. Someone should’ve colored it and put it on the cover of some paperback novel about a female private eye; it would’ve been perfect for HatchettFernanda, or better yet one of the Jana Blake books:


“Mercenaries – Soldiers of Fortune or Hired Killers?” by Robert Joe Stout also goes for the pseudo-factual approach, coming off as a sort of interview with Gregory Lyday, an Irish mercenary who recounts his tale of going from the army to working as a soldier of fortune in Greece and Tel Aviv. But our fictional mercenary is more focused on sex, telling us about the awesome blowjobs he’d get from a whore in Tel Aviv. Again, nothing overly graphic, but the focus on sex is an indication of the changing times in the genre. As for the action material, it’s threadbare, with “Lyday” more intent on telling us about how he’d blow up stuff.

“The Man with the 10-Inch Magic Wand” purports to be an interview with Dave Gregory, a well-endowed commercial artist in New York; the “interview” is credited to T.J. Roberts. Mr. Gregory tells us about his various sexual exploits, from appearing in a porno “for the fun of it” to taking bets to heat up notoriously-frosty women.

“Death Wish Patrol That Nailed A Rapist” is the reason I sought this mag out; it’s written by Roland Empey, which is a pseudonym for well-regarded veteran men’s mag writer Walter Kaylin. Tapping into the Death Wish craze, this one’s summed up entirely in its title. A dude named George Wheeler, who lives an idyllic life with his family in Pleasant Valley, goes to some unnamed “big city” once a month for work. There he stays in a sleazy hotel, gets drunk, and then goes out and savagely rapes a woman. He’s raped seven women in just as many months, and the locals have had enough of this shit.

Kaylin doesn’t go for the exploitation, really, with the assaults obviously focusing more on the horrors perpetrated on the unfortunate women. One thing that holds “Death Wish” back is its too-short length. It’s several pages long but could stand to be fleshed out more, as the street toughs who band together to take down the mystery rapist are a bit vague to the reader. I’ve often wondered why guys like Kaylin didn’t expand their stories into novel length; the ‘70s were the time for paperback fiction, the more lurid the better, and something like “Death Wish Patrol” could’ve made for easy paperback fodder.

The locals use their smarts to figure out that these rapes are happening once a month, and decide an out-of-towner is behind them. The cops meanwhile have more pressing concerns, given that the rapes are occurring in a sleazy part of “the big city.” So it’s up to the local toughs, who band together and eventually get the lockdown on Wheeler. There’s no action, really, no Charles Bronson-style fighting or violence; the patrol just finds Wheeler after his latest assault and chases him down, capturing him on a rooftop and beating him, then tying him up and briefly lowering him over the building as a sign to all potential rapists. After which Wheeler is arrested and hauled away.

Here’s Bruce Minney’s art for the story, which illustrates the final scene:

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Men's Mag Roundup: More Nazi She-Devils


Since the last batch of Nazi She-Devil stories I read were mostly subpar, I thought I’d take a look at similar stories published by the Diamond line of men’s adventure magazines. Unfortunately it appears there wasn’t too many of them – while the Diamond line offered very pulpy tales, it looks like they never really exploited the Nazi She-Devil subgenre. A shame, really, as the stories in these mags are all better than those I reviewed in the previous batch.

However the first story, from the November 1960 Male, is misadvertising of the worst sort. The “true book bonus” is the promisingly-titled “Prisoner in Fraulein Anna’s Private Compound,” by Eugene Heimler, and the title has you expecting one lurid read. And check out the splashpage art by Charles Copeland, which makes the story come off like the ultimate piece of Nazi She-Devil pulp:


And yet…there is no such scene in this story. There’s no “private compound.” There’s no “man-hungry Nazi prison mistress.” There isn’t even a “Fraulein Anna!!” In short, nothing in this illustration or its captions takes place in the actual story – which in fact is an excerpt from Heimler’s book The Night of Mist (later reprinted as Concentration Camp), a nonfiction book about Heimer’s life in a concentration camp. It’s actually pretty despicable that editor Bruce J. Friedman would put such a sensational, lurid splash illustration on what is a true account of the unimaginable horrors of a Nazi camp…not to mention that the rest of the story is graced with grisly photos of corpses in the camps.

Anyway Heimler’s account is as expected harrowing and depressing and comes off very strange placed here in a pulp magazine filled with pulp fiction. “Fraulein Anna” in reality turns out to be a young gypsy girl named Anna who is the daughter of one of Heimler’s fellow prisoners in the camp, and the story details the horrors of the camp and how ordinary people were faced with the ultimate evil. It’s hard to realize the magnitude of what the Nazis did, and I feel that publishing this excerpt in a pulp mag with misleading captions and art cheapens it. I wonder how editor Friedman could stoop to such a thing.

Luckily the other stories are the more-expected pulpy and fun tales. “The G.I. Who Holed Up with a Cossack Brigade” by Peter Lee takes place in 1918 during the Russian civil war and is about an American, Corporal Leon Vonsky, who is sent to help a battalion of Cossacks fight the Reds. It turns out this is an all-female battalion, the balshiye svitski, aka the “big-bosom brigade,” made up of sturdy Cossack women. The story follows the expected path with the chief of the women, Dayra, making advances on Vonsky as soon as he arrives, with other women following suit as he stays with them for a protracted time. It builds up to a climactic assault on Communist forces, but overall the story was a bit underwhelming.

“There’s A Psycho at the Controls of the Lazy Lil” by Glenn Infield is an unintentionally funny piece about a bomber pilot who goes nuts after a crash landing during heavy fighting in WWII; he breaks out of his asylum and steals a B-17, heading for Germany. His brother, also a bomber pilot, goes after him, trying to call him back. Goofy stuff, with the sane brother calling to the insane one over the radio, and the insane one has no idea where he is or what’s going on as he takes on German planes.

Another long story is “TheYank Who Flew 20 Partygirls Out Of Red-Held Soochow,” by Martin Fass – this one is about Joe Haskell, a pilot who after the Korean War stuck around in Asia to fly his own plane service. His old airplane is a waste, though, and he’s offered a job by Shanghai crook Pei, who tells Haskell that if he can get into China and take back Pei’s old plane, returning with it and Pei’s brother to Shanghai, then the plane will be Haskell’s. But it turns out that the “brother” is really infamous Red Chinese VIP General Soo, and in addition there are twenty convent girls: pretty young things who, in exchange for being smuggled out of China, will work for a year in one of Pei’s brothels.

The story instead becomes a survival epic, as the plane crashes due to enemy fire and Haskell takes it in on an idyllic, deserted island – one complete with streams and beaches and basically anything a person could want. They build huts to live in and in between warding off the increasingly-insane Soo, Haskell develops a thing for one of the girls, Dora. But eventually the other girls get sick of Dora hogging all of the lovin’, so Dora asks if Haskell wouldn’t mind spending time with a different girl every night? Finally Haskell’s able to get the plane off the island, but the girls want to stay, and we’re told that now each year Haskell finds the time to “leave civilization” and spend a few months with them on their island!

“The Day Big Murphy Became God of Tiera Del Fuego” by Martin Sol is another goofy piece, this one about a redheaded Bostonian in the 1920s who shipwrecks off an island where his red hair makes the natives think he is a representative of their god. The expected stuff, with Murphy getting in some quality time with the native beauties who worship him, while meanwhile the old chief begins to hate Murphy and plots to feed him to “the fire god,” aka the island’s live volcano.


The December 1960 Male is much better. And the Nazi She-Devil story here is the best one I’ve yet read: “Baron Klugge’s Strange Fraulein Cult,” by Gregory Patrick. Whoever Patrick is, he has a great sense of humor and delivers a long story that doesn’t take itself seriously in the least. It’s 1945, four months after the German surrender, and Corporal Peter Decker is picked up by an attractive fraulein in Stuttgart. The lady, Helga, tells Decker she’s taking him to a wild party, but instead takes him to Castle Doomsday, the domain of insane Otto von Klugge, a former Gestapo sadist who has sworn to continue the war against the Allies despite Hitler’s death.

Decker becomes the prisoner of Klugge and his five “daughters;” in addition to Helga (a former actress in Nazi Germany), there’s Therese and Bertha (a pair of twins), Erna (a “busty” dancer) and Lisa (a former concentration camp guard). All five of them are of course gorgeous and devoted Nazis – save for Erna, who is only in it because Klugge has given her the opportunity to dance for a paycheck again, whereas in the previous months of German hardship she’s had to sell herself just for a Hershey bar. Also each of the girls wear revealing outfits emblazoned with swastikas, like Nazi superheroines or something.

Klugge’s method of guerrilla warfare however is pretty nutty. His castle doubles as a bar and once a week he hosts a live theater for secret Nazi loyalists where he puts up a straw dummy “prisoner,” hands out whips, and allows the patrons to whack on them as if they are back in the concentration camps! Then later he’ll go out with his five girls and one of them will get the interest of a horny American G.I.; another girl will sneak up and knock the guy out cold, and then Klugge will paint a Hitler moustache on the guy! Meanwhile Decker is trussed up throughout, made to watch and still unsure why he’s here.

Klugge’s attempts at “breaking” Decker are also goofy, making him drink endless pitchers of “good German beer.” (This is when Lisa isn’t rolling cannonballs at a bound Decker or the other girls aren’t making him play horsey and carry them across streams!) Along the way Erna develops a thing for Decker, as he’s the first man to be nice to her in forever, so of course she eventually starts coming to him at night. Finally Decker learns that he’s been kidnapped because he has access to a prison where a former SS officer is being held, and Klugge wants the man freed. Instead with Erna’s help Decker gets loose, blows off Klugge’s head with a Luger, and we learn that the “daughters” were eventually tracked down and served a few years in jail.

The “true booklength” piece is “Buried Alive: A Jap Lieutenant, Three Pleasure Girls, An American G.I.” by Richard Gallagher, who is one of my favorite men’s mag authors. And this story really lives up to its “booklength” tag…I mean, this story goes and on and on. But unfortunately it’s for the most part a snoozer. Sgt George Trumbull is a prisoner in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6th, 1945 when the atom bomb hits; Trumbull, the Japanese overseer of the POW camp, and three members of the Iwasaki Women’s Labor Battalion manage to find shelter in a massive underground bunker.

Due to the massive amounts of rubble the quintet are stranded below, in what is otherwise a great shelter, complete with a few years’ worth of food. Gallagher chooses to play it all on the level, though, delivering a mostly-serious tale of survival, with Trumbull and the “Jap,” Lt. Hirata, in an endless battle of wills, while meanwhile the three women (Toshiko, Helen, and Mary – and yes they are Japanese despite their names) give their support to whichever of the two men they think is the strongest.

The problem here is Trumbull himself, who is basically a square and who takes too much of Hirata’s shit. Also you would figure that Gallagher would really play up on the “three pleasure girls” angle of the title, but Trumbull continuously spurns Toshiko’s advances, to the point where you start to go hmmm. (Another curious tenor arises when we learn that Helen and Mary develop a lesbian bond when neither Trumbull or Hirata will give it to them!) Finally though Trumbull “violently takes” Toshiko…but it’s a quick scene and not a fun one because by this point Gallagher has constantly reminded us how filthy everyone is, as Trumbull has banned anyone from “wasting” their precious water on baths.

It all just keeps grinding on, with only the occasional fun bit, like when Hirata and the gals go temporarily goofball, chasing each other around like idiots while Trumbull watches on in confusion. There’s also a fairly epic sewer rat attack. But for the most part it’s a tepid tale, monstrously blown out of proportion; it would’ve been so much better if “Baron Klugge’s Strange Fraulein Cult” had been the true booklength and this story had just been a regular extra-length tale. But anyway it all of course ends with Trumbull finally killing Hirata after yet another of the Lt’s insane attacks, and finally he and the gals reach freedom, two months after being stranded below.

“The Yank Who Escaped From Mussolini’s Secret Stockade” by Walter Kaylin is a little better; there’s an interview with Mario Puzo in the book It’s A Man’s World where Puzo states that Kaylin was his favorite of all the men’s mag writers. But this piece here treads the line a bit too much into fact-based or at least potted history, about a guy named Tony Frank who runs afoul of the fascists in Italy in 1925 and is thrown in the infamous Lipari stockade. It comes off as too much of an article and isn’t as pulpy as I would’ve preferred.

“Sgt Ivarson’s Harem of Fighting Aleut Girls” by Martin Fass is more like it. Another long story, one that actually lives up to its title. I wonder why it wasn’t included in the Noah Sarlat-edited anthology Women With Guns, as it also lives up to that anthology’s title and theme moreso than any of the actual stories in the collection. Anyway it’s August 1942 and native Alaskan Sgt. Ivarson has spent the past two months training an indiginous group of guerrillas in the Aleutian islands, stemming the Japanese invasion.

However Ivarson’s guerrilla force is actually just five teenaged girls, all that was left on Amchitka island after the initial “Jap” assault. Ivarson, along with old Eskimo guide Cumjak, trains the girls into a fierce team, and pretty soon they are pulling raids on Japanese encampments and blowing them away. And the “harem” stuff really comes into play when the lead girl, Mae, tells Ivarson that the girls have planned a celebration before their initial assault…a celebration which includes copious sake intake, dancing, disrobing, and a mass orgy, Ivarson handling all five of the gals by himself!

The pulp thrills continue with a climatic assault by the Japanese and Ivarson and the girls hiding in a mummy-filled cave; Ivarson begins hurling the mummies down at the “superstitious” Japanese, who promptly run away in fright! This was a very fun, very pulpy tale. But Martin Luray’s “The Daring Daylight Raid on Germany’s Mile-High Fortress” takes us back to the potted history route, a factual piece on a December 1943 special forces raid on La Difensa, an impregnable Nazi fortress in the Italian mountains. This campaign was also the basis for the 1968 film The Devil’s Brigade, which I’ve never seen.


The Nazi She-Devil tale in the May 1961 Male is another one that just barely qualifies – the Nazi She-Devils in Richard Gallagher’s True Book Bonus “G.I. On the Ship of Lost Frauleins” are in actuality members of the German Navy’s female auxiliary battalion. Anyway it’s September 1944 and Lt. Jesse Marcher is one of twenty Allied POWs who have been put on the SS Brunhilde, a German ship under the drunken command of Captain Voightlander. All of the POWs are airmen, but due to incorrect info on their records the Germans believe they are marine repairmen, and thus Voightlander claims that the men must be so, because German records could never be wrong.

Also on the ship are fourteen attractive German women – never expressly referred to as Nazi gals, but again the story falls into the subgenre by default. They helm various things on the ship, like the radio; the most attractive of them, Lena Schaatz, tells Marcher that she “greases Captain Voightlander’s driveshaft,” after which Marcher nicknames her “Fraulein Driveshaft.” The POWs are put to work shoveling coal in the bowels of the ship, punishment for not “admitting” they are really repairmen. This takes up a goodly portion of the narrative, Marcher coming off like a union rep as he bickers with Voightlander, who truth be told doesn’t come off as evil at all, just a guy who enjoys running a tight ship.

However this does lead to more inerraction with the gals; Voightlander keeps Lena as his personal mistress and, during one of their bicker sessions, Voightlander passes out from overdrinking and Lena takes March into the captain’s bedroom where they have sex just a few feet from Voightlander’s slumbering form. Eventually March sets it up so that the POWs sneak over to the women’s quarters each night, taking turns with the randy women. As for Lena she is up for anything, gamely sleeping with Voightlander, Marcher, and any other guy on the ship – “Germany is going to lose, and I’m just wild, wild, wild about men.”

As with the Gallagher story above it just grinds on and on with little pizzaz. Again rather than taking advantage of the salacious nature of the story’s concept and title, Gallagher instead focues on the squabblings among the men as Marcher continues to piss off Voightlander and the Germans. It all culminates with Marcher and a pal strapped as punishment to a boom mast during a heavy storm, but they survive the night, and the next day the POWs launch an assault, which itself goes on and on, the ship finally running into a Russian vessel that saves the day – and meanwhile Lena has already latched on to the Russians.

Speaking of Russians, there’s also “The Russian Spy Wore Black Lace Panties,” by Arnold Alexander. This long story is about Irma Schmidt and takes place in 1958, detailing how she got into the espionage game, sleeping with a variety of VIPs and getting information from them. “The Doomed 500 in Rommel’s Prison without Guards” is by Owen Truex and is fiction posing as a true story; Truex narrates how he was a captured POW and was sent to Stalag 353 near Tubruk in Africa, a hellish place where the commandant played games with the prisoners, letting them think they were able to escape but then cutting them down.

“The Angry Vets who Massacred a Crooked City Hall Gang” is by none other than Peter McCurtin, and it’s a very long but unfortunately tepid story about how a few hundred WWII vets banded together in Athens, TN in 1946 to wage war on a corrupt city hall regime that was ruling the populace with an iron fist. Finally “The Extraordinary Survival of James Kipness in Red China” by Martin Fass is another long tale about a Korean War vet in Tungchow province and his escape from the Reds, holing up with native Alice Kwok and waging a guerrilla war as he makes his way to safety. Okay but nothing spectacular, which pretty much sums up the majority of the tales in this review roundup.