Showing posts with label Emile Schurmacher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emile Schurmacher. Show all posts

Thursday, January 30, 2020

Adventure In Paradise


Adventure In Paradise, by Emile Schurmacher
November, 1958  Zenith Books

I love these vintage men’s adventure magazine anthologies. This is another one courtesy prolific men’s mag writer Emile Schurmacher, comprising five novella-length yarns from the Diamond Line. We’re not informed of the actual issues the stories came from, just provided a note at the start of the book of which magazine each originally appeared in. Also we don’t get an introduction from Schurmacher, as with Our Secret War Against Red China. In fact Schurmacher’s name isn’t even mentioned anywhere on the book, and on the title page we’re told the book is “as told to” Schurmacher.

Which means, somewhat unfortunately, that all five stories are narrated in first-person. I’m really not into first-person narrative in my escapist fiction, but it’s no big deal, and in a way it works for the stories assembled here. Each are heavy on the nature fiction tip, like men’s mag takes on Jack London or James Fenimore Cooper. Schurmacher as ever captures a rugged feel in his books, with great descriptions of the flora and fauna of uncharted regions of the earth. However, one thing I should also mention – as is typical with most every other men’s mag story ever written, the cover slugline has nothing at all to do with the actual contents of the story. There are no “savage women” anywhere here, and the cover painting, likely taken from a men’s mag as well, does not illustrate any scene in the book. For the most part, each of the stories is more focused on survival in the wilds, with the precious few women reduced to supporting status. Save that is for one or two stories – but even here the women in question are in no way “savage.” This isn’t a complaint, though; the stories are all entertaining and Schurmacher delivers gripping prose and memorable characters.

First up is “The Girl At Fat Wong’s Place,” which is credited to “Bill Harvey” and comes from Stag. This one, like all the others assembled here, follows the men’s adventure magazine template: it opens on some dramatic moment, then flashes back weeks or months earlier to tell us how the protagonist got here, before finally in the last pages returning to the opening incident for a harried finale. I almost think there was some men’s adventure mag school course somewhere that all these writers took, like the pulp magazine equivalent of DeVry or something. This story, more than any other in the book, spends most of its running time on the flashback portion.

Anyway Harvey is “free, white, and almost 28” (curiously a phrase you don’t hear very often these days!), and when we meet him his small schooner has just crashed on an atoll in Tahiti, stranding him with a sleazy Frenchman named Blois and a “pulse-stirring beauty” named Jeanne Lu who is Chinese-Tahitian. We flash back to months before and see how Harvey got in this predicament. His backstory is pure escapist fiction: he sees an ad in the paper for a shark hunting boat business for sale in Tahiti and decides to go for it. He flies over to Papeete, excited to get the schooner, only to be swindled by a Frenchman into buying a junker. As for the shark business, it too was a lie.

Eventually Harvey works at Fat Wong’s club, which is a dancing parlor with whorehouse upstairs – you can dance with the lovely native gals, and for a few dollars more take them upstairs. Harvey has his eyes on the gorgeous young Jeanne Lu, meeting her when he beats up the drunk who tries to take advantage of her. She takes Harvey up to her room for some off-page lovin’, and by the way all the sex is firmly off-page in this book, befitting the age of publication. Wong pays for the retrofitting of Harvey’s schooner and employs him on the copra trade, and after more adventures, including a few more bar fights, Harvey ends up on the schooner with his mate Blackie, Jeanne Lu, and Blois.

Finally we return to the opening sequence, which offers a half-baked suspense angle in which the increasingly deranged Blois lusts after Jeanne. Oh at this point Jeanne feels that Harvey doesn’t care for her, thus plans to return to her island or something. They live on the beach in what is an otherwise idyllic paradise, Jeanne using her childhood knowledge of survival on remote islands. Then one night Blois tries to kill Harvey and goes to rape Jeanne, who scratches him up like a wildcat. Harvey kills Blois, Jeanne buries him(!), and now the two live together happily until they are finally rescued. This one features an interesting finale in that Harvey and Jeanne get married; this is a trend that continues through the collection, and it’s different than other men’s mag yarns I’ve read, where the studly American protagonists usually go back home and leave their exotic foreign babes behind.

“I Found The Last Blonde Of Assam” is credited to Barry Ralston and is from Male. Despite having a misleading title, this one’s a better yarn than the previous, if only because it doesn’t spend the majority of its time on backstory. Ralston is a British “white hunter” who works for a London-based outfit and is responsible for big game hunting in India. When we meet him he’s just endured a massive earthquake (the date given as August 15, 1950) in which his native guides are wiped out. Now he must venture alone into the dangerous region of the Naga Indians, headhunters who put their brutal skills to work for the government in World War II. Harvey’s been asked to find Sandra Keith, a “snooty blonde bitch-on-wheels” director who has come here to India to make a documentary on the Naga, danger be damned.

As mentioned the title is very misleading: Sandra is the “blonde” of the title, not some exotic native beauty. Schurmacher as ever excels in the nature fiction vibe and really brings to life the rigorous terrain of Assam. Harvey encounters all sorts of setbacks and threats from the flora and fauna, and also Schurmacher adds an eerie layer of destruction thanks to the massive earthquake which just rocked the area. But when Harvey finds Sandra in the Naga village, run by a chief named Gtimi, the pulp vibe comes on full force: the Naga consider Sandra a “she-devil” and have locked her up. She was filming them with her movie camera when the earthquake hit, killing hordes of Naga, and thus the Indians believe that the woman and her mysterious device caused all this death.

Harvey’s able to talk some sense into the Indians, but ends up getting bashed on the head and knocked out (a recurring theme in the book). When he wakes up Sandra’s in the village temple, where she is to be sacrificed to the Snake God. Humorously, only one Indian’s even around, Gtimi and the others presumably out hunting or something. Harvey takes out the guard and finds Sandra about to become the meal of a massive snake. He chops it in half and the two make their escape. It’s back to the nature fiction vibe as the two fend through Assam – having some hot off-page lovin’ along the way – all the while hoping to evade their pursuers. Curiously, there’s no confrontation with the Naga; Harvey and Sandra escape to safety and leave “paradise” behind.

“My Six Years With The Amazon Women” is credited to George Ravenal and comes from Stag. This one also has a misleading title, but it’s a great story with the feel of an epic, like the James Fenimore Cooper of men’s mags, or even Dances With Wolves. This is one of those yarns where I wonder why the author didn’t develop it into a full-blown novel. There’s certainly the makings of one here, as Schurmacher packs a novel’s worth of events into a 40-page short story. Like the other protagonists in the collection, Ravenal is a rugged individualist who seems happiest far away from civilization. But Ravenal takes it to greater lengths than any of them, as here he spends six years living in the wilds, and only returns home because a shaman pushes him to it. An anthropologist, he tells us what brought him to the High Andes of Ecuador was “to find places no white man had ever seen before.”

This story is total nature fiction, all about surviving in the rain forests of South America and encountering a variety of flora and fauna. Snakes are a particular threat throughout the book but in this story in particular. Ravenal also has an encounter with vampire bats. As mentioned the story packs the details of a novel, just in rushed form: early on Ravenal’s informed that many Southerners fled to Ecuador after the Civil War, and now their descendants live deep in the Andes(!). Further, he’s told that one of them, who lives alone in the jungle, might be able to point him in some good directions to explore. Ravenal does meet this guy and spends like a month with him, but it’s mostly told via summary; there was a lot of potential here to flesh this out, particularly the bonkers “Civil War descendant” bit. Instead it’s back to the nature fiction, with Ravenal spending months venturing into the rain forest, at one point caught in a torrential downpour which pushes his raft into an unknown direction.

He ends up in the land of the Piji, the very same dangerous Indians the Civil War guy warned him about. As an anthropologist Ravenal is able to communicate with them using the base Indian language of this area, but still he’s attacked promptly by them, coming across an adult male and a twelve year-old boy. Ravenal somehow manages to kill the male, after which the boy proclaims that Harvey has become his new bodyguard, given that he just killed the old one! The two go to the Piji village, which is run by the boy’s father, Chief Tacla. While there are a few Indian babes here, going around in the expected skimpy clothing, it’s worth noting that these “Amazon Women” hardly even factor into the narrative. Indeed, Ravenal’s set up with his “own woman” upon entering the village – of course, the widow of the brave he just killed – but he turns down her blunt offer of sex. This was a “hmmm” moment, particularly given the fact that the dude by this point had spent around a year in the jungle by himself, but later he hooks up with Tacla’s lovely daughter, even marrying her.

While the women are supporting characters (if that), the men take the focus, especially the village shaman. Schurmacher is very good with foreshadowing, or introducing something early in the narrative which pays off satisfactorily toward the climax. This story features the best instance of this in the collection: Ravenal shows the shaman some of his belongings from civilization, and ends up giving the shaman his wristwatch as a gift. Ravenal has realized he himself no longer even tracks time: “Somewhere along the line I had become a white savage.” He lives with the Piji for years, as I say a sort of Dances With Wolves thing, until the day that Tacla’s son runs afoul of a rival tribe and the Piji go to war. Ravenal takes part in the raiding parties, only to return one day to find their own village destroyed – Ravenal’s wife and newborn son among the massacred. He becomes a one-man army of vengeance, but sadly – and again a reminder of how this story would’ve benefitted from a longer length – all this is rendered in a few sentences.

But the ending packs an unexpected emotional wallop: after his latest vengeance raid, Ravenal passes out in exhaustion and wakes to find the shaman trying to purge “the demons” from him. After this the shaman escorts Ravenal out of the village, to the trail that will take him home, and presents him with a parting gift. Later Ravenal opens it – to find the watch he gave the shaman years before. A reminder from the medicine man of the civilized world he knew Ravenal would one day have to return to. This one’s definitely the strongest story in the collection, but I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite, at least so far as the pulp element goes. The only thing pulpy about “My Six Years With The Amazon Women” is the title.

“We Crashed Into An Unknown World” is by Roger Oakes and is from Male. This is another one that features a misleading title, as it’s more of a survival mini-epic. Protagonist Oakes is a World War Two vet who now acts as a foreign correspondent in Mexico. He tells us of that “terrible day last June” when the small plane he was in crashed over Copper Canyon, which we’re informed is an uncharted no man’s land about the size of the Grand Canyon. Also onboard is sexy Mexican actress Maria Vegas, along with her simpering heavyset assistant. Only these two and Ravenal survive the crash, after which it’s all about survival in the jungle, as they’re in the sort of underworld of the Canyon and Oakes tells them there’s no chance any planes will come looking for them, given the dangers of downdraft and whatnot.

So, they have to hike over hundreds of miles of jungle terrain, with the usual dangers both flora and fauna. Once again snakes are the top threat, one of them causing the untimely demise of Maria’s assistant. After this it’s just Oakes and Maria, living together in the jungle; when they find a nice spot by a lake, they build a sort of campsite and live together for weeks, eventually having the expected off-page sex. This one’s really more of a hunting and fishing in the wild sort of yarn, with Oakes snaring fish or bagging game and Maria cooking up nice meals. When some jungle cats show up the two realize with regret that they’ll need to leave, and eventually they hook up with a pair of Indians who lead them to safety. This one too features the unusual ending of the protagonist marrying the exotic foreign babe, but Schurmacher doesn’t follow up on movie star Maria Vegas’s miraculous return to civilization and the public which assumed her to be dead.

“I Was A Slave Of the White Savage Queen” rounds out the anthology; it’s credited to Jerry Gibson and is from Hunting Adventure. Well finally folks in this one we have a pulpy jungle tale that lives up to its title, and for that reason it’s my favorite in the book. We meet Gibson just as his two Indian guides are killed by an anaconda, and now he’s venturing all by his lonesome into a deep, uncharted area of Paraguay. A botanist in the employ of a Chicago pharmaceutical company, Gibson is here to find some plants to be used to make new medicines. This gives his character an interesting element which Schurmacher well factors into the plot, particularly given that it trades on a mysterious native drug that can control a man’s mind and turn him into an obident slave. Throughout the tale Gibson puts to use his knowledge of the various drugs in the area, making him like the men’s mag version of Terence McKenna.

In a brief flashback we see how Gibson came here to Paraguay, hired a few native guides, and bullied them into taking him down a river into a particularly dangerous region of the jungle. This is because, the previous day, Gibson came across a mysterious plant which one of his guides warned him to stay away from – the yala plant, which the Indian claims will rob a man’s mind. He says it’s used by the “Blonde Witch” of the jungle, then buttons up about it, clearly having said more than he intended to. Gibson pesters both Indians for info on this Blonde Witch but gets no answers. But anyway now they’re both dead and he’s alone on the river. He hears screams for help one day and goes onto shore to help, only to realize too late he’s been trapped. The scream was a diversion and mean-looking Indians with red-painted faces close in on him, strapping him to a pole like a “bagged tiger” and carrying him into their village.

This is the domain of the Blonde Witch, a hotstuff blonde babe in a revealing robe: “no ordinary pretty-faced blue-eyed blonde.” Early in the story, when gaining permission from the local government to venture into this part of the country, Gibson was told of other South American explorers who came down here and disappeared, one of them a female anthropologist from Argentina. Gibson quickly deduces that the “Blonde Witch” is none other than that missing scientist, Luisa Monte. But now she’s crafted herself into the merciless ruler of thse Indians; it’s a matriarchal society, Luisa later reveals to Gibson, noted for the usage of the yala plant: the women use it to turn their men into mindless slaves.

Luisa is truly sadistic; her intro features her sending a drug-controlled man to his death, bitten by a poisonous snake. This turns out to have been her previous lover – and she’s decided that Gibson will be her new one. The scene where she seduces him is a highlight of the book, inviting him to the house she’s had the natives build for her and casually reclining on animal skins while Gibson tries to throttle her. Instead her uber sexiness wins out and they have some of that off-page good stuff; Gibson serves as Luisa’s latest stud for a few days, but Luisa either finds him a subpar lay or just tires of his constant criticisms of her sadism, as she sends her henchman Felipe to round him up and force him to take the yala drug.

Schurmacher does a swell job of conveying the ensuing days from the viewpoint of a man under mind control. Gibson finds it easy to not have to think for himself and goes around doing slave jobs for Luisa, who presumably has no further use of him in the sack. But here’s where those botanist skills pay off; yala is addictive, Gibson finds, hence why these natives stay hooked on it. When it’s time for his next dose he finds some plants that cause vomiting and pukes it all out. That night he exacts his vengeance on Felipe but stops short of killing Luisa in cold blood. Instead we find out that eight months later, once he’s returned to Chicao, Gibson learns of a“skeleton of a white woman” which has been discovered in a remote Indian village; his supposition is that, with Felipe gone, Luisa was no longer able to keep her subservient Indians in check and they ran roughshod on her.

Overall I really enjoyed Adventure In Paradise. Schurmacher’s writing is skilled and evocative and he really brings to life these green hells of the world. Granted, the pulpy exploitative stuff isn’t as strong, but again that’s more so a case of the publisher’s misleading sluglines. I think the biggest indicator of the strength of some of these stories is that I would’ve enjoyed reading more of them – “My Six Years With The Amazon Women” in particular would’ve made for a great novel. However, Shcurmacher did eventually publish a story that totally lived up to the “savage women in the wild” tag – “Captured By Assam’s Amazon She Devils,” which came out several years later.

Monday, April 10, 2017

Terror In Algiers


Terror In Algiers, by Emile C. Schurmacher
July, 1962  Paperback Library

Here we have yet another vintage men’s adventure magazine anthology, another one devoted to the work of prolific writer Emile C. Schurmacher. And this is a topical publication for sure, capitalizing on the Algerian War that was raging at the time; the four stories collected here all take place in the conflict, featuring French Foreign Legion soldiers, Algerian terrorists, French revolutionists, and even the occasional “Yank” who has become involved to make a buck or two.

Once again Schurmacher delivers a Preface in which he makes the claim of being a globe-trotting reporter, same as he did in his (superior) men’s mag collection Our Secret War Against Red China. Even the cover makes the claim that Schurmacher was an Algiers-based reporter. My assumption is this is all b.s. and Schurmacher, like the majority of men’s mag writers, was just producing straight-up fiction, but in reality it turns out that at least some of the stories in Terror In Algiers are more along the lines of potted histories, as some of the protagonists are real people.

Such is the case with the first story, “The Rape Of Algiers,” which was originally published in the August 1962 issue of Bluebook. The hero of this yarn is real-life ass-kicking French soldier Colonel Yves Godard, who we’re informed is known as “Colonel X” among his enemies in battle-strewn Algiers. Godard is a founding member of the SAO, the Secret Army Organization of General Salan, the objective of which is to keep Algieria in the hands of the French. They hate “traitor” De Gaulle for insisting that the Algerians run their own country, thus they are at war both with the Algerian FLN as well as the French.

Schurmacher starts with the action as Godard, on the run from some pursuing FLN assassins, hops into the apartment of a sexy French streetwalker who happens to be an undercover SAO agent – we’re informed most French people here in Tangiers support the secret army. Godard whips out a handy “burp gun” and mows ‘em down, knowing he’ll get away scot free because the police are also on the side of the SAO. But that “batard” De Gaulle has sent in a new police force with the express intent of taking down General Salan’s force. In the course of which the sadists even capture the poor streetwalking gal (with whom Godard does not have sex, thus ignoring all laws of the world of men’s magazines) and slit her throat.

Before Godard can launch a vengeance strike we jump back in time, as is mandatory for most men’s mag stories, and have a long backstory on how Godard came to serve Salan and how the SAO came to be. A former Green Beret in French Indochina, Godard wracked up some serious battlefield experience before eventually finding himself in Tangiers. Salan first assigns him to look into an FLN plot in which sexy European hookers are somehow causing French Foreign Legion soldiers to leave the service. Godard poses as a new recruit, has (off-page) sex with one of the hookers, and soon uncovers the spy network, which extends to Paris.

The FLN is the main villain here, and Godard swears an oath that he’ll kill “eight Moslems for every one European.” We learn that hundreds of French and FLN are indeed killed by Salan and Godard, but the tale ends with them escaping Tangiers when the heat really moves in. From Wikipedia I learned that Godard never returned to Algieria, despite Schurmacher’s proclamations at the end that he would; he died of natural causes in the ‘70s.

“Death In The Casbah” is another shortish story, originally appearing as “I Hunt Terrorists” in the March 1958 issue of Man’s Magazine. The only tale in the collection to be told in first-person, it, like the previous story, wasn’t part of the Diamond Line of men’s magazines, thus this story is not only shorter but also strives to be more realistic, coming off less like the rugged adventure fiction of the Diamond line magazines.

Lt. Rene Laroche informs us how he came to work for the French Intelligence service in Algeria, mostly because he can pass for a native; when the tale opens he’s in a firefight with some FLN terrorists who have come after a source of intel. This story is really two long siege pieces nearly back-to-back; after escaping this assassination attempt, Laroche flees back to HQ and rounds up a team of Foreign Legion Green Berets. They head into the district where the terrorists have holed up and shoot it out with them overnight; one’s killed by a sniper and the other blows himself up in an early version of a suicide vest – the saddest thing about this collection is how little things have changed.

The second siege follows immediately after, as Laroche gets word that a top FLN terrorist, as well as his equally-deadly mistress, have holed up in yet another apartment and are shooting it out. The “female terrorist” angle had me expecting the usual men’s mag luridism, but the lady stays off-page and is unexploited, save for a lame and strange denoument in which the girl’s boyfriend, as part of a surrender bargain, requests that the lady’s clothes be brought up to the apartment, as she’s been fighting in the buff! And that’s that for this one, easily the least-entertaining story in the book. 

“Planes, Gold, Guns and Women,” takes us back to the Diamond Line yarns, not to mention the novella length of their “True Booklength” features, which this one certainly was, originally appearing as “King Of the Gun And Girl Smugglers” in Male Magazine, October, 1957. Wonderfully-named Yank hero Tex Fargo, a “hard-bitten, self-exiled pilot,” is an interesting dude because in the previous two stories he’d be considered the villain, given that, as a mercenary pilot-for-hire, he sometimes flies wanted FLN terrorists out of Tangiers, evading pursuing French planes.

This story’s very much in the classic men’s mag mode, starting on the (bedroom) action, with Tex getting offered a job from sexy French babe Monique, who tells a story about a stash of diamonds in Cairo before going up to Tex’s room. But in the midst of all the (off-page) sex, Tex realizes Monique is really an undercover French operative, here to snuff out whether Tex is really about to fly two much-wanted FLN terrorists to Cairo that night. He is and does, again evading the French pursuing planes, chuckling over the free sex he got in the bargain from the sexy French spy babe.

From here to the usual flashback, in which we learn that Tex was a young hotshot pilot in WWII and then got involved in the post-war black market thanks to another sexy Eurobabe: Jeanne, a Belgium lady who approached Tex with the offer to fly bootleg cargo for her sort of startup black market operation. But after that one came to an abrupt end, with Jean in jail and her colleague dead, Tex hooked up with an Italian gunrunner named Golpe who ran his business from a villa in Rome. In between all the bootleg-flying Tex has frequent (off-page) sex with “the Contessa,” who shows up later in the tale to be flown to the Middle East to be some sheik’s latest wife.

When the Golpe business also runs out, Tex next moves on to Algeria, figuring he can set up his own black market flying service in the midst of the war. This part is given less focus than the other parts, and also has a strange downer of a finale in which Tex is hired to rescue a prince sentenced to death in Benghazi; Tex fails in the escape attempt and the prince is killed anyway, which proves that Benghazi is a bad-luck place even in vintage fiction. The tale ends with Tex excited to reap more illicit profit (and off-page sex) in the burgeoning market of the Algerian war.

The final tale is also a long one: “Legionnaire Charney of the Bat d’Af,” which was first published as “Mike Charney: The Vanishing Legionainnaire” in the February 1959 issue of Man’s World. This one’s sort of a French Foreign Legion desert adventure mixed with a prison story. Mike Charney is a half-American, half-French Legionnaire who is currently serving time in the Bat d’Af prison compound in the middle of the desert. Gradually we’ll learn he’s here due to getting in a firefight with FLN forces that he shouldn’t have; he and his entire unit were sent to the harsh prison in reprimand.

Charney’s history is probed; starting off as a mechanic in French Indochina, he got so sick of the VC atrocities that he joined the Foreign Legion Green Berets. After the French withdrawal Charney moved on to Tangier, where as mentioned he got into trouble and was sent to prison. When we meet him he’s running his “camion” along the dusty roads and encounters sexy babe Monique, daughter of some VIP who will soon be withdrawing from the area, too, given all the FLN trouble. Charney spends his nights thinking about her and can’t even bring himself to touch the fat and ugly hookers provided for the imprisoned Legionnaires. We get lots of prison fiction stuff, from the cliched sadist in charge to quickly-stifled revolts.

The action doesn’t come to a head until the final quarter, when the FLN get more bold in their attacks; Charney and compatriots kill several of them in a vengeance strike. When they find that Monique has been abducted, they set off across the desert in pursuit. Only Charney survives the melee, saving Monique after killing her captors. Here the story becomes a desert survival epic where the two budding lovers endure the elements while getting to safety – and not having sex! Not, that is, until a massive sandstorm hits one day, and while burrowing into the ground for safety the two get busy (off-page, naturally).

This time we’re given an upbeat finale in which Charney, who has decided to go AWOL, gets Monique to civilization and tells her so long – he’s going to live like a refugee or something in Tangiers. But then word comes down that Monique’s father, a VIP in the French government, is so overjoyed that his daughter was saved that Charney’s not only been exonerated from his prison term but also given a medal and a promotion.

And that’s it for the collection – to tell the truth, none of these stories were very compelling, and I’m sure there were better Foreign Legion tales in the men’s mags of the day…perhaps just none by Shcurmacher. Anyway I’d definitely recommend Our Secret War Against Red China over this one.

Sadly, all these stories about ‘50s/’60s Tangiers, and not a single appearance by William S. Burroughs! Now that would’ve made for one helluva messed-up men’s mag story…

Monday, March 28, 2016

Our Secret War Against Red China


Our Secret War Against Red China, by Emile C. Schurmacher
October, 1962  Paperback Library

We have here another vintage anthology of men’s adventure magazine stories, similar to Women With Guns but focused on tales of “secret commandos” working against the Red Chinese. Unlike that other collection, this one solely features the work of Emile C. Schurmacher; there were a few other such anthologies published under his name, and if they’re as entertaining as this one I look forward to reading them.

Schurmacher opens the collection with a Preface in which he conveys the conceit that all this is true. I’m sure he had a chuckle as he wrote these few pages of introduction, delivering a brief overview of some of the tales to come and stating how he was “journalistically hungry” to tell the true story of our secret war against the Chicoms. But it goes without question that, like 99% of everything else to ever appear in a men’s adventure magazine of the era, everything here is straight-up fiction.

“My One-Man Raid On Red China” is not only the shortest tale in the anthology but also the only one written in first-person. It’s from the January, 1958 issue of Champ, and doubtless appeared there with a fake “as told to” credit which is shorn from this anthology reprint. Thus, we have no idea who our narrator is! He’s briefly referred to in the dialog as “Mr. Barclay,” so I guess that will have to do. At any rate he’s a Korea vet who now plies a schooner around Hong Kong and has been hired by the silk nylon-clad Mary Tzu to transport 18 coffins upriver into some remote part of China.

But as the tale begins (and likely the incident which was illustrated in the original story), the coffins open up and out come several Chinese guerrillas. Led by Chau, these dudes fought in WWII and are looking to free their homeland from the Reds. Our narrator still hates the Chinese as well and agrees to fight with them. The plan is to make a beachhead landing in some Chinese town and take it over or something, but my friends this is the lamest “invasion” you will ever read about. A dozen men and one woman with “burp guns” and a few explosives are going to take over China?? The majority of the tale is a running action scene, which ends with our hero, his engineer, and Mary Tzu the only ones alive; he makes it for Macao and later receives a check from Mary for his troubles.

The next story is more like it – and is also the novella length of the average Diamond magazine line “true book bonus” feature. Titled “Deadly Siren of Hong Kong,” it originally appeared under the less-evocative title “China’s Mystery Girl And The Air Force Hostages” in the October, 1959 issue of For Men Only. Very reminiscent of the work of Edward Aarons in his Sam Durell books, this one’s about a former WWII Intelligence officer named Bill Locke tracking down the titular “Deadly Siren,” Gay Yung, a Chinese operative described as a sexy Eurasian with nice legs and “sculptured breasts.” She’s also, so far as Locke thinks, “the most dangerous woman in Southeast Asia.”

Locke is a businessman based out of Tokyo but he still has all his Intelligence-world contacts from the war. He’s hired by the State Department to arrange the release of several US pilots who have been imprisoned by the Chinese on false spying charges. This eventually puts him on the trail of hotstuff Gay Yung, who is familiar with high-ranking Chicoms due to her spying for them, despite the fact that she sells her skills to the highest bidder; she drives around Hong Kong in a black Jaguar. Locke himself is very much in the Durrel mode, with a bit of Fleming’s original James Bond thrown in; his choice weapon is a “.38 automatic.”

The story is more espionage than action. Locke spends most of the time waiting in his hotel room and listening to radio reports about an India-bound plane carrying several Chicom top brass which has exploded in midair; the Commies are blaming agents of Taiwan (here called Formosa) for planting a bomb during the stopover in Hong Kong. Locke meets the lovely Gay Yung, asking for her help on the captured airmen scenario, but his coincidental prescence raises the suspicion of Ivan Sandor, an Eastern European Communist agent. Later we’ll learn that he and Gay were part of the plane-bombing plan, one concocted by Chicom agents to hopefully trigger WWIII.

Locke saves Gay’s life from Sandor and thugs, and she rushes to his hotel room one night, clad only in a trenchcoat, black nightie, and high heels, looking “sexy as hell.” Another confrontation with Chinese stooges on the Hong Kong docks, and then it’s to Gay’s opulent junk on international waters between Hong Kong and mainland China. After a few heavenly nights of Gay cooking for him and the two dancing to the radio, the inevitable (fade to black) sex ensues…then the next day Sandor tracks them down and poor Gay dies in a gunfight with him. Locke kills them off and rushes to safety, goes back home to Tokyo and tells the State Department he failed his mission! We learn in a postscript that the airmen still haven’t been freed.

Next up is “Yankee Spy On The China Coast,” which originally appeared as “Yankee Spy Called X” in the January 1959 issue of Stag. I didn’t much enjoy this one; it’s told in that pseudo-factual style of some men’s adventure mag stories, meaning that the majority of the tale is rendered in summary, recounting the various exploits of our titular yankee hero. He’s Russ Smith, an American known as “X” in the Intelligence community, a spy who worked against “the Japs” in WWII and who now works for Taiwan against the Red Chinese. A lot of the story recounts his various adventures in WWII. This was my least favorite story in the anthology, mostly due to the summary-style narrative. Luckily it isn’t very long.

“Assignment: Nepal,” the next story, improves things in a major way, and is my favorite story in the anthology. Originally appearing under the more lurid title “The Spy Trap They Baited With Sex” in the February 1958 issue of For Men Only, this story encapsulates everything you could want from a book titled Our Secret War Against Red China. Hero Steve “Dusty” Rhodes is a 31 year-old former Air Force Intelligence officer who is hired by the CIA to head into Nepal and find out if there’s any truth to the purported secret airstrip the Red Chinese are supposedly building there. The concern is the Chicoms might be planning to launch an atomic attack from this airstrip – the US thinks the Red Chinese don’t have any atomic weapons, but isn’t sure.

Like Bill Locke in the earlier story, Steve uses something called a “.38 automatic.” This tale however is more in the action-adventure mold and should’ve been expanded to novel length. The action basis is displayed posthaste; while on the Calcutta-Katmandu flight Steve is attacked by a poisonous snake, one left for him by a duplicitous fellow passenger. (Snakes on a plane!) The Bond-esque fun continues when Steve gets to his hotel room in Nepal – and a sexy Eurasian gal is there waiting for him. This is the awesomely-named Poppy Velho. She is “Macao-Portuguese mixed with Chinese,” which we are reminded at length is Steve’s favorite kind of woman, all exotic and passionate and etc. – and Poppy is the sexiest and best-built one he’s ever seen. And she makes it clear that she’s in the mood for some good ol’ American lovin’.

Almost immediate fade-to-black sex ensues, as Poppy, claiming to have intimately known the missing British agent who preceded Steve here, takes Steve back to her place and throws herself at him. Steve suspects it’s a trap, but what the hell. When he goes back to his hotel the next morning, he’s almost killed in an explosion; someone left a bomb in his suitcase the previous night while he was out, but then another person came in, rummaged through the pack, and inadvertently set off the bomb. Either way, Poppy was bait for the trap. Steve later learns she’s a spy for the Red Chinese and is quite dangerous; she’s more so a “Deadly Siren” than Gay Yung was in the earlier story.

The adventure-fiction vibe Schurmacher excels at returns as Steve heads into the mountains of Nepal with his trusty native guides. The secret airstrip exists, not far from the base of Everest, and the Chicoms have a big plane there, awaiting its atomic payload. The natives say that there are only six Red Chinese there, but they have a native force at their command. Steve spies the place out just in time to see sexy Poppy Velho arrive and meet with the Chicom commander.

An assault ensues, Steve and his companions blasting away with Sten guns and grenades. They kill all the Chicoms and blow up the plane. Poppy runs to Steve in the confusion and he takes her along back to Katmandu, to turn her over to the authorities as a spy. But due to her “magnificent Eurasian body” and “exotic beauty” he can’t help but bang her again, right there in the cheap showiness of nature during the trek back to Katmandu. He ends up letting her go free, wondering what will become of her.

“Jim Poole’s Monstrous Secret Weapon” originally appeared under the less-ridiculous title “The Yank Who Stole An Island From Red China” in the April 1959 issue of For Men Only. This short tale recounts the adventure of Jim Poole, skipper of a schooner plying its way through the Philipines. Like every other protagonist in the collection, Poole is a virile stud in his thirties who has military experience. One day his schooner is boarded by Taiwanese soldiers, 900 miles outside of their jurisdiction; this is due to the nearby island Pagasa, aka Freedomland, which lies in the contested territorial waters of the Spratly archipelego, an area which Taiwan and Red China are fighting over. 

Poole heads on over to Pagasa to check it out. The natives are Filipino and the island nation was founded shortly after the war. Poole hobknobs with the local authorities and goes for long swims with sexy native wench Maria; this tale skimps on the sex but it’s implied the two soon become an item. Then the Red Chinese show up, saying they are going to evict the populace. Poole, weaponless due to the Taiwanese soldiers early in the tale, turns to history for his “monstrous weapon.” Inspired by General Washington’s “solar guns” from the Revolutionary War battle for Boston, he erects these big cannons of glass and aluminum foil, which can direct beams of concentrated sunlight that hopefully start fires. More of a mental trick, the “ray guns” succeed in diverting the Chicoms until the Taiwan force can destroy them. After which Pagasa is free again and it’s back to bed with Maria.

Up next is “Mystery Of The Vanishing U.S. General,” from the September 1961 issue of Stag and thus the latest story in the collection. Unfortunately it’s the least interesting story here, mostly due to how it’s relayed via summary. One of those stories that purports to be actual reportage, this one concerns Brigadier General John Heintges, a graying-haired WWII badass who disappeared in 1958, his name even omitted from the Army Register. But we learn Reid took a “civilian” job as part of a top-secret task force of military trainers in Laos, helping the locals stave off the Red tide.

The Pathet Lao, under the command of Kong Le, have been making their way across the border, Chicom soldiers in tow, and the Laotians need help. Heintges takes the job, even though he must give up his military commission. The summary-style storytelling recounts the various frustrations the Americans endure as they train the Laotian troops, all of it like something out of a military comedy movie like Stripes or something. Since none of the Americans are allowed to engage in actual combat, it all comes down as synopsizing how this or that happened as Kong Le was fought out of Laos. Not much action and no sex – there isn’t a single woman in the story. Luckily it’s pretty short.

“Kidnap The Shan Princess!” rounds out the anthology, and it’s another great story, not to mention the longest in the book. First appearing as “Find And Kidnap The Orient’s Promiscuous Vice Queen” (damn those men’s mag editors knew how to come up with a title!!) in the June 1961 issue of Stag, this one definitely could’ve been expanded into novel length. I’ve said it before, but it blows my mind that these men’s mag authors never thought of turning some of their stories into full-on paperbacks. The only such author I know of who did is Mario Puzo, whose Six Graves To Munich started life as a story in Male – and speaking of which, I finally got a copy of the original Banner edition of that one and will be reading it soon.

Ruggedly virile Vance Reid is our hero, a 32 year-old Korea vet with CIA ties who takes a job for $10,000 plus expenses to venture into Burma and “rescue” opium-smoking Princess Jala of the Shan Hills frontier. Reid’s offered the job by a rep of the Taiwan NSS (ie their CIA), who tells the sordid tale: the Taiwanese planned to train some of the tough Burmese mountain tribes to fight against the Red Chinese, with the intent that the Burmese could even slip over the border and cause havoc in China. A badass named Captain Mong Tsing was put in charge of a dozen Taiwanese soldiers and dropped into the Burma mountains to train the natives. Instead, they all disappeared, and about a year later Mong Tsing showed up selling opium!

Turns out Mong Tsing has apparently taken over Shan, ruling beside the depraved Princess Jala. He has an army of tough mountain fighters at his disposal and likes to kill the Chicoms in addition to selling his opium, thus giving the tale an Apocalypse Now kind of vibe. Shan is wealthy due to the copious amount of poppies which grows there, poppies which are cultivated into opium. Reid learns that Jala might not exactly want to leave Shan, thus he isn’t rescuing her so much as he’s kidnapping her. Taiwan wants her so as to show her off to the world and make Mong Tsing leave in shame, or something. But anyway if Reid is caught both the NSS and the CIA will disavow his existence. He takes the job anyway and parachutes into the rugged mountains of Burma. His plane is promptly shot down by a Chicom jet fighter.

Turning himself over to Mong Tsing’s men per his plan, Reid is escorted to the palace of Shan deep in the mountains. It’s all very adventure-fiction exotic, like Lost Horizon or something, and it’s this sort of vibe that these early men’s mag authors were so great at capturing. Posthaste Reid checks out some bikini-clad babes in a pool, “exotically attractive brunettes with high, proud breasts” whom he figures to be Laotian whores. As for Princess Jala herself, she’s described as a “nymphomaniac” who smokes a lot of opium and goes through a new man every few weeks, calling him to her palace and ravaging him until she gets bored and sends him off.

As for Mong Tsing, he’s a “dandified” type save for the left side of his face, which from below the eye to the chin is covered by “a grotesquely shaped shrapnel scar.” He rules Shan with his mountain bandits as well as his fellow turncoat Taiwanese soldiers, among them Hok Sun, who chops off the heads of some Chicom soldiers when he first finds Reid. Our hero poses as the rep for a US crime syndicate that’s looking to buy opium straight from the Shan region; Mong Tsing believes his story. Princess Jala finally appears; she’s 27 and “exotically beautiful,” and at dinner Reid can’t figure out if she still rules alone or if the Chinese have taken over. That night she comes to Reid’s room, smokes some opium, and gives herself to him – about the most detail we get is that she throws her arms around his neck.

Reid learns that Jala is a prisoner in her own palace; Mong Tsing and his comrades took the place over and have been slowly killing off Jala’s staff. Reid is concerned for her, and she’s willing to escape with him. But Mong Tsing gets wise, lopping off the head of one of Jala’s eunuchs as a warning. Reid and the girl – after getting friendly some more – make a nighttime escape, with our badass commando hero killing several men with knives and fists. This leads to more adventure fiction as he and Jala head across the Burmese countryside, at one point staying in Jala’s old village. It climaxes with a battle against Mong Tsing’s men, Steve and some of Jala’s countrymen blasting away with burp guns and grenades.

After crossing the border into India, the two fly to Rangoon, where Reid and Jala say goodbye – after one more roll in the hay, naturally. Jala for her part seems to want Reid to stay with her, but as usual with these virile men of vintage men’s mag fiction, he can’t be tied down with a foreign babe, no matter how exotically beautiful she might be. The same sentiment was displayed in the stories contained in Women With Guns. We learn in a postscript that Jala’s story of escaping her own homeland due to the Chinese invaders finally spurred the Burmese government to crack down on them, eventually kicking them out of the country so that Jala could return to Shan as ruler.

And that was our secret war against Red China – we won, baby!!

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, May 9, 2013

Women With Guns


Women With Guns, edited by Noah Sarlat
April, 1962  Paperback Library

Noah Sarlat was the editor for several men’s adventure magazines, among them For Men Only and Male, the magazines in which the five stories collected in this paperback originally appeared. Sarlat appears to have been a genius in that he realized that "girls + guns = guaranteed sales," and this collection focuses on such stories. Unfortunately though the “girls with guns” motif is not the main focus of any of the stories, so the title is pretty misleading. On the plus side, all of the stories here offer up quality writing, with strong characters and plotting.

First up is “Warrior Women of Viet Nam” by Emile C. Schurmacher, which originally saw print in the March 1959 For Men Only. Like the other stories in the book this is a long one, nearly 40 pages of small print – the Sarlat-edited mags always ran a “True Booklength” feature in each issue, ie extra-length short stories (which of course were passed off as “true stories”), and this story as well as the other four were such features, hence the length. Anyway this story is unusual because it was written before the US involvement in ‘Nam, and occurs a few years after the French withdrawal.

Our hero is Sam Dallas, a square-jawed adventurer type who makes his living flying a cargo plane in Southeast Asia. He’s become friendly with a Eurasian prostitute named Nan Luke, who has told Dallas that there’s a lost cache of gold in the jungle. Dallas and his partner and Nan Luke head into the jungle and get the gold – the story opens after they’ve already snatched it and are flying away. Dallas’s plane breaks down midair and they crash into the jungles of ‘Nam. The story plays out here; after their crash Dallas and company are surrounded by pretty ladies who emerge from the jungle; they are the Hoa Hao, a legendary band of all-female warriors who live in the mountains and wage war on both the Communists and French.

Their leader, Repan Sirik, holds Nan Luke captive so that Dallas can help her distract a local warrior Repan and her warrior-sisters want to kill. Schurmacher doesn’t much play up the “women with guns” angle; Repan and her ladies hack up a few of their enemies with knives, but otherwise only one of them carries around a Sten gun, which she casually holds on Dallas to ensure he doesn’t bolt. Repan makes the expected advance on Dallas, who spurns her – he’s dedicated to Nan Luke – and Repan disappears from the narrative. Her comrades return Nan Luke to Dallas, and they escape into the jungle, the rest of the story playing out in summary as Dallas is only able to collect a small portion of the gold. All told, a sort of middling story, but the writing is good.

The second story is the weakest of the collection, despite having the best title: “Hitler’s Hustlers of Bremen,” by George Mandel (which I believe was a psuedonym of Neil Pritchie, or vice versa). This one originally appeared in the September 1959 issue of For Men Only and takes place in post-war Germany, in the summer of 1947 to be exact. Jim Wilbur of the CID goes undercover as an arms supplier to root out a smuggling and black market operation which is apparently funding a neo-Nazi movement.

The plot and title are good, but Mandel writes this thing like it’s a piece of literature, spending more time on description and character, so that it comes off as very plodding. Suspense and subterfuge play a bigger factor than action or adventure. Only a late development where we meet a widow who oversees a group of pretty gals who are all still Nazis has any of the sensationalism hinted at on the back cover of the book. But this sequence is over quick and besides once again it’s the men doing all the fighting – this story doesn’t live up to the anthology theme at all, and I’m certain Noah Sarlat could’ve found a more fitting story to put here.

The third story is the strongest, and of them all most lives up to the book’s theme: “Five Greek Girls to Istanbul,” by Richard F. Gallagher, from the April 1960 issue of Male. It’s 1940 and the Nazis have just invaded Greece. Morgan Farrell, a young American civil engineer living in Athens, is approached by some VIP local citizens; these rich families want Farrell to escort their daughters to Istanbul, where they can escape the Germans and move on to safer locales. Farrell takes the job, setting off through Greece with his five female charges, all of whom as you would expect are pretty, in particular two of them: Katina, who seems game to do whatever Farrell orders, and Persephone, a fiery beauty who is just as headstrong as her father.

This story exudes a machismo long since vanished from popular fiction: Farrell is, in our modern era, pretty much a dick, bossing the girls around and slapping them when he feels it necessary. For example, Persephone disagrees with him early in the journey. Farrell puts her over his knee and paddles her ass! And you won’t be surprised to learn that, after this, Persephone starts to see Farrell a whole lot differently…and in fact turns out to become Farrell’s girl, instead of the more-expected Katina. (Who herself has a run-in with Farrell…asking him one night which girl he’ll sleep with first, then kissing him, then pushing him away, and then Farrell slapping her twice. To which she replies, “I deserved that.” Imagine how it would play out in a movie, people!)

Gallagher, who it appears churned out a plethora of men’s adventure stories, really captures the vibe of a group of freedom fighters going up against Nazi bastards. Also this tale lives up to the anthology’s title, with the girls getting hold of weapons after Farrell kills a few Germans. There’s a fun scene where they are escaping from an SS patrol across an empty festival grounds; the girls appropriate a chariot and take off in it, firing at the Germans with Schmeisser submachine guns. After this though the girls fade into the background as Gallagher hooks up with Planko and his rebel army on the outskirts of Greece, and the story becomes a pissing contest between the two men as they try to outmatch one another in killng Germans. Still though, this was a fun story and offered pretty much all you could want in WWII pulp.

“Slaughter and the Sexton’s Daughter” is the next tale, courtesy Burton Shean. It originally appeared in the February 1960 Male and is another early WWII story, occuring in Denmark in 1940, just as the Germans have invaded. Dennis Norden, an American-born Dane, is returning home from Sweden, to which he fled five years ago after knocking up a sexton’s daughter. Word came to Norden that his aunt and uncle ran afoul of the Nazis and were killed for it, so he’s coming back to dish out a little revenge. And he gets off on the right foot, wasting a Nazi mere moments after arriving.

Norden runs into his old flame, Minerva, the sexton’s daughter. (The sexton by the way never even appears in the story!) She slaps Norden for running out on her, informs him that their child was given up for adoption, and says to hell with it anyway, she’ll join him in his war against the Nazis. Norden puts together a team of locals, dubbed the Norden Liberators, and they wage smallscale warfare on the Germans in that pulp fiction way that makes it all come off like fun – using the gals as bait to snare officers, sneaking toilet paper into German HQ with Hitler’s face on it, stealing a printing press and writing up news advances about their terrorist activities, etc.

Things get real when Minerva is killed by the Germans – once again a “woman with a gun” is quickly removed from the story. From there it continues on apace with Norden becoming increasingly vicious, even gunning down a parachutist who claims to be a British agent sent here to help the cause. (We learn at the very end of course that the dude really was a damn Nazi.) There’s also a memorable bit – one that the back-cover copyists surprisingly didn’t capitalize on in their misleading sensationalistic blurbs – where Norden gets some plastique that a comrade fashions into fake bosoms. The female members wear them on their way to work inside a German plant, then strip them off and set them to blow. So anyway, overall a fun story even though again it was another one that didn’t live up to the book’s theme.

The final tale takes us back to Southeast Asia: “The Violent Virgins of Laos,” by James Collier, originally from the November 1961 For Men Only. This one goes back to the pulpy adventure feel of the opening tale, but it’s a lot better, featuring more sadism and violence. As for the sex, it’s there, too, but like all of the sex scenes in the stories collected here they are over before they start, merely alluded to in an ellipsesed sentence, no doubt due to the years when these were written.

Anyway our hero this time is Sgt. Philip Jackson, a veteran of Korea who is here in Laos training locals how to fight against the Pathet Lao. The story opens with Jackson and his corporal Tuli already imprisoned and watching as the Pathet Lao leader executes some locals for Jackson’s “enjoyment.” (Humorously, the back cover incorrectly states that Tuli is the “woman with a gun” in this story!) Jackson is strung up to be eaten by a tiger unless he tells the Pathet Lao he will help them, but as these things happen a lovely female warrior emerges from the jungle and kills the Pathet Lao guard. She is from a “Meo village” and is against the Commies; she further helps Jackson free Tuli and together the three of them make off into the jungle.

The pulp stuff really comes to the fore when we learn there is a “sacred grove of virgins” where Meo women will go when they have a hankering, shall we say. Jackson gets wind of this and sneaks on a boat filled with the latest voyagers to the grove, and Collier intimates that Jackson and the Meo warrior-woman, Hak Soun, get friendly themselves. (Though again, it’s kind of hard to tell what with the bowdlerized writing). The Pathet Lao catch them, though, only for Tuli to show up to the rescue astride an elephant. He manages to knock over a temple in the process, and there follows a goofy but fun scene where an old monk keeps following the trio as they move on through the jungle – Tuli is certain the old man is casting a spell on them for destroying his temple.

The pulpy thrills continue as the monks force the trio up into the Tower of Silence, a tower prison alongisde a cliff with only one way out: a forty foot drop. As usual our hero’s resourcefulness saves the day; everyone strips, using their clothes to weave a rope. From there the tale becomes more standard, with the three of them constantly evading Commie patrols and getting in skirmishes, finally commandeering a boat and escaping. Hak Soun is used throughout as bait for traps – as are all of the other women in these stories, in fact. If there’s one thing I learned from Women with Guns, it’s that if you’re ever part of an invading army you should never follow after a pretty native woman, as more than likely she’ll be leading you into a death trap.

But it’s interesting really how the women are used throughout the book…other than a few instances where they gun down their opponents, the girls here are instead forced to use their looks and bodies to ensnare some horny enemy soldier, after which the men will do the dirty work of killing. This actually serves to put the women in more danger, as they are the ones who have to lure out the enemy; Hak Soun in particular has to do this for four different Pathet Lao soldiers in this story, and you know it’s only a matter of time before they get wise.

Another interesting thing here is that the male protagonists never end up with these native women; in each case we are informed at the end of the story that the dude headed back to America and never heard from the native woman again. I wonder if this is due to the traditional “man who can’t be domesticated” vibe of pulp fiction or if it’s more of a matter that these white American males can’t sully themselves with foreign women…at least not permanently. Anyway, it’s an interesting question, or at least seemed to be as I typed this paragraph.

Noah Sarlat edited several other anthologies of men’s adventure magazine stories, and I have picked up most of them, as well as others published under the names of various authors, so I look forward to reading more. I usually don’t like short stories and I much prefer novels, but these stories were long enough to provide sufficient plots and characterizations, so I really had an enjoyable time reading the book.