After the pulp magazines disappeared, they were largely replaced by a more gritty and realistic magazine genre collectively known as Men’s Adventure Magazines (MAMs). These glossy, color publications featured stories and artwork by the same people servicing the men’s paperback original market in the 1950s and 1960s. Magazines like “Adventure” and “Real Men” were filled with colorful illustrations and stories designed to appeal to working class men returning home from the wars of the Mid-20th Century.
The Men’s Adventure Library Journal is a labor of love for Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle with a mission of preserving the salacious stories and art from the MAMs in beautiful-themed compilations that both entertain and put the stories in some historical context. Their latest release is “Cuba: Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter,” and it’s a total pleasure to read and own.
One of the conceits in MAMs is the fictional story presented as non-fiction, and several of the Cuba stories in this volume fall into that category. “Brotherhood of the Scar” is a fictional story from a 1959 issue of “Adventures for Men” by Jack Barrows that falsely claims to be “an eye-witness story of an ex-GI who was brutally tortured by Batista’s savage Gestapo and lived to join the secret underground army that swore vengeance at any price.” The story itself is a 33-page torturous bloodbath that will make fans of the men’s adventure series paperbacks of the 1970s and 1980s feel right at home.
Another highlight was “Kiss the Skull of Death My Beautiful Muchacha” allegedly by Linda Rogers as told to Jim McDonald (actually a work of complete fiction by McDonald). The story originally appeared in the September 1965 issue of “New Man” with graphic cheesecake art by the great Norman Saunders lovingly reproduced in this anthology. The soft-core sex opening grabs the reader as the American female nightclub singer is ravished by her Cuban lover during Fidel’s revolution. One thing leads to another and our heroine is captured and turned over to “El Toro” for torture and interrogation. This is exciting and lurid stuff for men of any era.
The stories collected and preserved here were an important part of America’s literary history and the Men’s Adventure Library Journal guys are doing important work keeping this stuff available. Arguably, the violent and sexy art of this genre was just as historically significant as the stories themselves. Fortunately, the editors of “Cuba” have reproduced scads of cover art and interior illustrations to further give the stories further context and provide a feast for the reader’s eyes.
More information about the MAMs can be found at the website menspulpmags.com, and all of the themed reprint books compiled thus far can be bought on Amazon. In the meantime, “Cuba: Sugar, Sex, and Slaughter” is an essential anthology for fans of sexy, blood-on-the-knuckles fiction and illustration art. Highly recommended.
Edward S. Aarons released “Terror in the Town” in 1947, just two years after finishing his service in the US Coast Guard and nine years from his debut novel “Death in a Lighthouse”. While known prominently for his long-running espionage series 'Assignment', typically called 'Sam Durell', Aarons wrote nearly 30 mystery and thriller novels under the pseudonym Edward Ronns (among others) and his own. “Terror in the Town” utilizes Aarons' early experience with those genres to create a suspenseful Gothic thriller that shapes up as your typical whodunit.
A sleepy seaside town in the northeastern US sets the tone and pace of the novel. I hesitate to use the term “Gothic”, but it does seem to fit with the narrative's isolation and atmosphere – windswept dark streets, shadowed manors, suicide cliffs and robust rooms cast in deep shadow. The town has it's “terror” to contend with – a strangler on the loose knocking off citizens. Young and beautiful Verity is the import, new to the town and married to the newspaper owner Jess. Early on she learns that an escaped inmate from the local asylum, Manuel, may be on the loose and the killer behind the most recent murder. As the book plods along, more murders occur and Verity begins suspecting her own husband as the killer.
“Terror in the Town” left me lethargic in places, counting down pages until the murderer is revealed. There's a little backstory regarding a famed ship, a family secret and some lost diamonds, and that aspect might be just enough to lure in the mystery or action genre fans. For me, I was planning on enjoying an early slasher entry. It is, but just not a very exciting one. The seaside town harboring secrets with a killer on the loose is strong, but Aarons in his early development just boggles it all down to a lot of nonsense. Ultimately, the cover is far better than the book.
In addition to writing scripts for the TV shows “Kojak” and “Adam 12,” William McGivern also authored some highly-regarded crime fiction in the 1950s. I asked around and learned that his best noir novel is arguably 1957’s “Odds Against Tomorrow.”
The book is a classic heist thriller with an interpersonal twist. Earl Slater is a Texas ex-con who reluctantly joins a four-man crew planning a bank robbery with an estimated take of $200,000. The catch is that the outfit’s fourth man is an affable black guy named John Ingram (played by Harry Belafonte in the 1959 film adaptation), and Slater is more than a bit of a racist. Blame it on his humble, white-trash roots. Can Earl set aside his prejudices for the greater good of The Plan?
The man with the plan for this bank job is ex-cop-turned-crook, Dave Burke, and he’s thought of everything. He’s the consummate professional of the group. All he’s got to do is convince the crew to stick to the foolproof plan and convince Slater to set his bigotry aside for the duration of the job. If you’ve ever read a heist novel, you can guess that things go sideways and that no plan is truly foolproof.
For his part, McGivern does a fantastic job of introducing us to the key members of the heist crew, their backgrounds, and motivations. The flashbacks and exposition happens fast and never diminishes the excitement of the planning, the heist, and the getaway. The scenes depicting the canny local sheriff who senses that trouble is brewing are also terrific and really bring the “will they get away with it?” pot to a rolling boil. Some of the post-heist sequences dragged a bit, but the conclusion landed on solid ground.
Fans of heist paperbacks would rightly cite Lionel White and Richard Stark as the high-water marks in the genre. “Odds Against Tomorrow” doesn’t quite reach those heights, but it’s a worthwhile effort and a fun ride. Recommended.
According to Bradley Mengel's resourceful “Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction”, author John Quinn is a pseudonym for Dennis Rodriguez. Rodriguez worked with Ed Wood Jr. at Pendulum Press and served as editor for XXX mags. Other than the novel “Pachuco”, I can't locate any other titles that Rodriguez wrote. Further, it's odd that his debut of the six-book series 'The Terminator' doesn't feature anything that would connect him to his “day job” work as porn editor. No explicit hanky-panky in “Mercenary Kill”. Fans of the genre may require that stuff...but I've never needed it.
Protagonist Rod Gavin was a Marine in Vietnam and now works assignments as an assassin for the CIA. His contract with Langley, under supervisor Chet Barnes, requires eight hits before he can either retire or opt into another military branch. After departing his rural home in High Card, Colorado, he receives some intel regading his eighth and last assignment – kill Jorge de Leon, a supposed rogue trooper under command of Colonel Rojas in Costa Bella. What the reader knows that Gavin doesn't is that de Leon hasn't gone rogue, instead he's an inside man sent by the US President to spy on Costa Bella's government and their treatment of the civilian uprising. So, why is the CIA interested in killing a US operative? Because Barnes and Rojas are connected on a backdoor deal that funnels drugs and money into the US. Unfortunately, de Leon is an unwanted accessory and needs to be removed.
Gavin, none the wiser, enters this country and kills de Leon...but has doubts on what exactly is happening and if he's been crossed up by Barnes. Soon, Gavin not only has Colonel Rojas and his militants on his back trail, he must also contend with escaping the country without the aid of the US. This pushes him into propelling firefights with Costa Bella's army and the armed rebellion. Teaming with Duffy, Gavin eventually makes it to the US only to discover a contract on his head from Mob enforcers working for Barnes.
I have to wonder how many casual readers picked these titles up thinking they were 'The Executioner'? Published by Pinnacle in 1982, the font and layout is identical with artwork created by Bolan mainstay Gil Cohen. In terms of quality, I'm shocked that Rodriguez didn't write more novels. “Mercenary Kill” offers a plethora of gunfights and espionage while cruising at a high-octane pace. At the typical 180-pages, there is a lot of events to unpack for the reader. The skeleton is this character, Rod Gavin. I really like him and love the fact that throughout this book his eyes are on the prize – finish the kill, end the career, retire to peaceful tranquility in the Colorado mountains. In a way, Gavin is a human character that we can all relate to. I really enjoyed this book and will be actively searching for more of the series out in the wild.
It would be difficult to overstate how much I enjoyed the first two books in the 'John Gail' series of British espionage paperbacks by Stephen Frances, so I was beside myself with excitement to begin book three. The paperback was originally released in the U.K. as “The Sad and Tender Flesh” and then in America by Award Books (home of Nick Carter: Killmaster) as “The Ambassador’s Plot.”
The setup for the series is pretty simple: John Gail was an unremarkable everyman who answered a mysterious job posting and found himself working as an operative for a non-governmental spy agency funded by a cabal of benevolent millionaires. Gail is an imperfect and amateur spy who makes a lot of mistakes. The first two books were sexy thrillers peppered with scenes of shocking torture and violence bringing about awful outcomes for the women with whom Gail developed romantic relationships. The dreadful things that happen to women in these books cannot be understated, and they significantly raise the stakes for our hero in these international adventures.
“The Ambassador’s Plot” was released in 1970 - five years after the first installment in the series - and we find Gail in Paris recovering from the events of Book 2 (This is a series best read in order). His controller comes to visit with an unusual assignment: embarrass and discredit a British ambassador to France who has gone rogue and is taking independent actions that could spark a bloody Arab war. The plan is for Gail to photograph the ambassador having sex with a teenage girl in hopes of blackmailing him into resigning his governmental position before the ambitious ambassador can mount a political rise that might produce the next Hitler.
The catch is that Gail is responsible for the care and feeding of plucky 15 year-old Lilly, the teenage temptress recruited for the seduction job. The interaction between Gail and Lilly combined with the horror John feels for orchestrating a sex sting involving a teen is pure gold. Their partnership on this assignment eventually catapults them into a “couple on the run” plot peppered with extreme violence throughout the 160 page paperback.
It wouldn’t be a “John Gail Spy Chiller” if it didn’t have at least one brutal, stomach-churning torture scene, and this novel has a handful. While these scenes are all in service of the plot, you’ll still need a strong constitution to get through the most gory of them. Consider yourself warned.
When he was writing bawdy hard-boiled crime novels as Hank Janson, Stephen Frances sold upwards of 10 million copies. The John Gail books were substantially less commercially successful, but it really is a stellar series that holds up nearly 50 years later with no diminishing returns in this third installment. Highly recommended.
1970's “Flashpoint” is the fourth novel in Dan J. Marlowe's 'Earl Drake' series. It's in the series minority as only one of three books in the 11-book run not to adopt the title of “Operation” something or another (although the reprinted Prologue version adds "Operation"). The book's predecessor was “Operation Fireball” and it's successor is “Operation Breakpoint”. While most Marlowe fans will look to the early series as the author's best work (“The Name of the Game is Death”, “One Endless Hour”), the heist-gone-spy formula is still enjoyable knowing it's a decline in quality compared to those genre classics. I'm probably in it for the long run just because I enjoy the Drake character so much and coupled with Marlowe's gift of storytelling...well there aren't many negatives to the series thus far.
In “Flashpoint”, Drake boards a plane in New York headed to Las Vegas. His girlfriend, series mainstay Hazel, has asked that he transport $75K and deliver it in person to an unknown individual. None of this is important, because the plane is hijacked in flight by Turks. They kill the jews, stewardess and pilot, take all the cash and valuables from the passengers (including the 75K) and force the plane down in a stretch of rural desert. Drake, pulling his .38 (it was a flight of hardmen that I couldn't quite figure out), shoots one of the hijackers but the rest escape. Drake heads back to Hazel's ranch and explains how he lost the cash.
Soon, Drake's old pal Karl Erikson shows up at the ranch. In the prior book, Erikson was an undercover operative that swayed Drake into assisting him in stealing money from Cuba. Drake didn't realize until the end that it was a government job and that Erikson was on the up and up. To show his appreciation, Erikson agreed to sort of wipe the slate clean on Drake's criminal record and keep law enforcement off of his back trail. In a threatening way, Erikson asks that Drake join him on a hunt for the hijacker given he's the only passenger on board that really got a good look at the gunmen.
From here, the show takes off to New York City where Erikson puts Drake on the trail of the hijacking coordinator, a Middle-Easterner who is running drugs in the city for profits that go back home to train terrorists to fight Israel. 1970. Nothing ever changes. Drake scouts a bar for a number of days and eventually finds the money runner, a horse-hooked beauty that Drake boinks on three occasions. With her help, Drake infiltrates the network and does what he does best – the old bank heist routine.
Marlowe gives us a great deal to snack on with “Flashpoint”. He knows his audience and he puts Drake into the heist bit to please the readers. As an added bonus, there's the safe cracking adventure and a unique scene where an envelope's contents must be captured without breaking the glued seal. Fascinating. The author also gives us a pitiful, doped up flower child that Drake attempts to rehabilitate. The negative is the slow build in the bar scenes, the lengthy stake-out that even has Drake wondering if he should just walk away out of boredom. There's also really odd scenes where Drake is peeping on a nude-shoot that takes place next to Erikson's office. Later, he comes back with a camera and films a covert porn scene from a janitor closet. These scenes don't necessarily add anything to the narrative and seem like filler to get the book to the required 180-page objective.
“Flashpoint” is a fine 'Earl Drake' entry, slightly better than “Operation Fireball” with an ode to what makes this series and character great – bank heists, safe cracking, moving money and violence. I hope to see more Hazel next time though.
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I have a confession to make: I’ve always thought the crime novels of Elmore Leonard were total crap. They are filled with smarmy characters passing themselves off as “quirky” with cartoonish villains, garbage dialogue, and hack plots. They’re written with a self-assured prose that only a bestselling author can muster - a wealthy guy phoning it in with the knowledge that whatever garbage he squeezes out will be clogging airport bookstore shelves for generations.
No thanks for me.
Then there are Elmore Leonard’s Westerns.
Pure genius. Man, this guy is a true talent who knocks it out of the park every time. Leonard began writing Western stories for the pulps in the 1950s and continued quietly cranking out brilliant genre work well into the 1980s while making his living selling crappy crime novels to dimwits at the airport.
In 2004, HarperCollins released an essential collection called “The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard.” The beautifully-packaged 500+ page volume contains an interview with Leonard and then 30 of his Western short stories spanning the length of his writing career. It would be hard to overstate how great this collection is.
My favorite Leonard story collected in this volume is “The Tonto Woman.” It was also compiled in a smaller 1998 collection called “The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories” as well as a 1982 Western Writers of America anthology. But don’t be a cheapskate. Shell out the couple extra bucks for the big collection. You won’t regret it.
“The Tonto Woman” tells the story of a roustabout, horse thief, and womanizer named Ruben Vega who spots a topless woman bathing at a water pump in the desert one day. He notices that the woman’s face is tattooed with strange lines marring her otherwise attractive features.
Ruben quickly learns that the woman is Mrs. Sarah Isham, and she was forcibly tattooed by Indians in the wild. Her wealthy husband sent her away to live in exile in the desert because he’s embarrassed of her looks. Ruben takes the time to befriend her, and a relationship of sorts develops.
It’s a sweet story with very human characters, some Old West violent tension, and a good bit of humor. Moreover, Leonard navigates this simple story with some great writing and a fantastic final line that will stay with you long after you finish reading.
Someone adapted “The Tonto Woman” into a 38-minute short film in 2008. Maybe I’ll seek it out, but nothing will replace the pure joy this short story provides. Essential reading. Highest recommendation.
