So Wicked My Love

Following a prosperous writing career in the pulp magazines, Bruno Fischer became a crime-fiction success story. His novel House of Flesh sold 1.8 million copies, leading to a successful run of 10 books authored by the German-American throughout the 1950s. His 1954 novel, So Wicked My Love, was published by Fawcett Gold Medal. It originally appeared in a condensed form in the November, 1953 issue of Manhunt magazine. Crime-fiction scholars will often point to the novel as one of Fischer's best. Opening the book, I was hoping to agree.

When readers first meet Ray, he's a dejected, emotional wreck laying on Coney Island's sandy beach. His girlfriend Florence rejected his marriage proposal and ring the night before, explaining to Ray that she may still be in love with another man. As Ray ponders his life post-Florence, he spots a woman he once knew walking along the shore. Ray re-introduces himself to a beautiful vixen named Cherry and almost immediately becomes an accomplice in armed robbery and murder. Wicked love indeed.

After reading a brief newspaper headline about an armed car robbery, a mysterious woman and a band of criminals, Ray's one night out with Cherry proves to be a cornucopia of dark discoveries. He learns that Cherry has a car trunk filled with stolen cash and three violent men on her trail. Ray gives Cherry the engagement ring he bought Florence and the two decide to flee with the money together. But after a deadly, violent encounter with two of the three men, Ray drops the money at an abandoned farm house and anonymously calls the police to pick it up. Ray then reconvenes with Florence and the two become married and live happily ever after. Considering all of these riveting events happen in the book's opening pages, readers quickly sense that Bruno Fischer has an abundance of intrigue, suspense and violence left to explore.

Ray's lusty encounters with Cherry aren't explicit, but they're an enticing invitation for readers to take the journey with these ill-fated lovers. As Ray's average life becomes more complicated, readers can foresee the impending doom in Fisher's narrative. By its very definition, the idea of this average blue-collar man being trapped in a web of murder, robbery and blinding lust is crime-noir in its most rudimentary form. It's also the same ritualistic formula utilized by a mastermind crime-fiction veteran like Fischer to mesmerize readers, fans and literature scholars. From a reader's stance, it makes for an fantastic reading experience. So Wicked My Love is so wickedly good.

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7 Deadly Sinners

Between 1959 and 1961, Charles E. Fritch (1927-2012) wrote a quasi-series of five private eye paperbacks in which the main character’s name changed regularly as well as the pseudonyms used by Fritch when publishing the novels. In various installments, the protagonist’s name was Mark Wonder, Christopher Sly, or Nicholas Gamble while the author names were Charles Fritch, Christopher Sly, Eric Thomas, and Christopher Brockden. It’s a mess to understand and unsurprising that the books never took off commercially. The series order, heroes, pseudonyms and publishers are all hashed out below in the addendum to this review.

The fourth book in the series (although they can be read in any order) is 7 Deadly Sinners by Christopher Sly, starring private detective Christopher Sly from 1961. The novel is currently available as a trade paperback reprint from Wildside Press restoring Charles Fritch’s own name as the author. Fritch went on to have a successful career as the editor of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

Christopher Sly (the character, not the pseudonym) is a wisecracking Hollywood private eye with an assignment any red-blooded man would relish: he needs to guard seven starlets for a local movie studio to ensure they stay out of trouble before a publicity tour. The catch is that one of the seven beauties was a girlfriend of a deported mafioso. The syndicate wants to find her to ensure she remains silent forever about what she knows. The problem is that nobody knows which of the seven ladies is the girlfriend.

While Sly’s overt assignment is to keep all seven women alive, his secret mission is to identify the mobster’s ex-girlfriend. His only clue to get this done is the knowledge that she has a diamond-shaped birthmark down near her lady-parts. Yes, you read that right. Sly’s needs to discreetly examine each of the seven to determine which woman is the mob’s target and take extra care to keep her alive thereafter. His preferred method is seduction, but other opportunities arise as well. Okay, I’ll grant you that this is a stupid and contrived premise, but it’s basically a lighthearted sex-romp mystery in the same manner as a thin Carter Brown or Shell Scott novel.

This is a very horny paperback with a fair amount of sexually explicit content. We get lots of moaning animal sounds, heaving breasts, and expectant thighs, but the descriptors seldom take it to the next level. The sex scenes - and there are quite a few - are more graphic than a Shell Scott book but less explicit than a Longarm western. The original publisher, Athena Publications, was a sleaze fiction paperback house that pushed the limits far more than the Ace Double housing Fritch’s 1959 private eye novel, Negative of a Nude.

The twisty solution to the paperback’s central mystery is so painfully obvious that any reader will see it coming from a mile away. The ending was also abrupt as if Fritch hit his contractual word count and just stopped writing. Despite its simplicity, 7 Deadly Sinners was a mostly fun, low-impact read. Only you can decide if the $8.49 price tag for the paperback reprint is worth the cost of this mindless diversion. Paying much more for a bawdy murder mystery really would be a crime.

Addendum: Charles Fritch’s P.I. Series Chronology

- Negative of a Nude by Charles Fritch (1959), Ace Double starring P.I. Mark Wonder
- Strip For Murder by Eric Thomas (1960), Kozy Books starring P.I. Christopher Sly
- Psycho Sinner by Eric Thomas (1961), Athena Books starring P.I. Mark Wonder
- 7 Deadly Sinners by Christopher Sly (1961), Athena Books starring P.I. Christopher Sly
- Fury in Black Lace by Charles Brockden (1962), Carousel Books starring P.I. Nicholas Gamble

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Steve Ashe #02 - I Like It Tough

I was thrilled to see that Cutting Edge Books has chosen to reprint James A. Howard’s fantastic Steve Ashe novels as ebooks and new-edition paperbacks. The four-book series from 1954-1957 stars a rough and ready pilot-boxer-reporter unafraid to fight dirty. The series served as an early prototype for the kinds of serial vigilante adventures popularized by Pinnacle Books in the 1970s. I Like It Tough from 1955 is the second Steve Ashe adventure, and it’s probably best for the series to be read in its proper order.

The story opens with Steve regaining consciousness in a Colorado hospital room a day after using his body to stop some bullets during the climactic ending of I'll Get You Yet, the series debut installment. The opening chapter does a thorough job of bringing readers up to speed on the events of the first novel. As such, if you read this second series novel first, you’ve just spoiled the prior book. The short version is that Steve successfully dismantled the upper-echelon of the Denver syndicate. Are they gone forever? Or will The Outfit regroup?

A package bomb arrives at the hospital room killing Steve’s girl, so we know that Steve’s one-man war against the mafia definitely isn’t over. Steve’s new eye-for-an-eye target is Vito Gaesinni, a mobster filling the void left by the dead wise guys from the previous novel. The path to find Vito brings Steve to Los Angeles and into the orbit of some interesting side characters who become part of Steve’s manhunt plan. As with the first novel, the fact that Steve’s career as a journalist has zero relevance to the plot. He’s just a badass adventurer cleaning up the streets of L.A.

Early in the novel, Steve befriends (and lays) a prostitute with a heart of gold named Sylvia. Vito had paid Sylvia for sex and companionship in the recent past, so the hope is that she can provide Steve some insight into his prey. In Los Angeles, he connects with a psychologist operating a sanitarium treating a narcotics-addicted magazine illustrator with a sexy personal secretary. The scourge of drugs - particularly the terrifying and insidious “marijuana” - lurks in the background of the paperback and takes a human toll on many of the characters.

There’s a legitimate mystery to solve in the heart of I Like It Tough, and it involves a shadowy corporation paying the bills for the drunken illustrator and their possible connection to the narcotics trade. Is it a publishing industry outfit licensing illustration art? Or a mob front insuring the silence of people who know too much? The vendetta story and the mystery compliment each other nicely throughout the violent, fast-moving pages leading to a climactic conclusion.

I have no idea if Don Pendleton ever read the work of James L. Howard, but they were certainly flying in the same airspace 20 years apart. I Like It Tough is another winner in the short-lived Steve Ashe series. Thank heavens these books are back in print as this series certainly deserves to be remembered. 

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Run for Your Life

Bruno Fischer was born in Germany in 1908 and emigrated to the U.S. at age five. He wrote for the pulps in the 1930s and 1940s, and transitioned seamlessly into the paperback original market of the 1950s with the majority of his output published by the Fawcett Gold Medal imprint. I’ve found his writing to be reliably excellent, so I was pleased to find a ratty paperback of 1960’s “Run for Your Life,” one of his many novels that has not yet been digitized and released as an ebook.

Our narrator Willie Farrington has lived a posh life. He grew up wealthy and avoided WW2 combat because of his influential family who made their fortune in the railroad industry. Willie estimates that he’s worth around $50 million, and modern readers should keep in mind that this was in 1960 when that was a lot of dough. Willie lives on a sprawling Arizona ranch with his spoiled, cheating wife, and is visiting New York City as the novel opens.

An unusual sequence of events finds Willie dresses like a bum in Central Park in the middle of the night without any money. Mistaking him for a vagrant ruffian, a young woman named Nina solicits Willie to break into an apartment and recover a manila envelope containing documents. Willie accepts the engagement to see if he actually has the capacity to be good at something other than writing big checks.

Willie enters the apartment while Nina waits outside, and if you’ve never read a Fawcett Gold Medal crime novel before, you’ll be surprised to learn that there is a murdered body inside the place. Willie also finds the envelope he was tasked to recover, and it’s filled with what appears to be sensitive national security documents. The cops arrive, and Willie finds himself running for his life along with Nina just like the paperback’s title promised.

If you’re thinking that this all sounds a little contrived, you’d be right. The mid-novel revelation disclosing the reason for the murder and the significance of the envelope is pretty lame and as a straight-up mystery whodunnit, “Run for Your Life” fails. However, as a pursuit and survival adventure paperback, it’s pretty darn good.

By 1960, Fischer was a pro at pacing an exciting novel that keeps the pages turning, and who doesn’t like a well-told couple-on-the-run story? The obstacles Willie and Nina are forced to navigate on their road to freedom and redemption make for some genuinely-exciting reading, and by that measure, “Run for Your Life” is worth your time. Recommended. 

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Barbarians on Bikes: Bikers & Motorcycle Gangs in Men's Pulp Adventure Magazines

When it comes to post-apocalyptic and men's action-adventure, Paperback Warrior has featured a number of reviews of books featuring bikers and biker gangs. From sprawling doomsday sagas like 'The Last Ranger' and 'Outrider' to gritty vigilante novels like 'Hell Rider', the inclusion of motorcycles and their riders is a consistent aspect of the freewheeling warrior spirit.  While most of our attention has been given to the 80s and 90s action paperbacks, in all actuality the motorcycle-fiction genre reached a fevered success much earlier. Between the 1950s to 1970s, men's action-adventure pulp magazines featured wild, colorful and over-the-top biker paintings and illustrations. The stories themselves ranged from harrowing military feats to Hell's Angels styled escapism for blue-collar males. It was an immensely popular and competitive market for the publishing industry.

Esteemed scholars Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle (The Men's Adventure Library, MensPulpMags.com) have collaborated on a number of historic accounts and publishing trends in vintage Men's Pulp Adventure Magazines (MAMs). Their 2016 coffee-table archive is dedicated to the biker sub-genre within the publishing industry of the mid-20th Century. Titled “Barbarians on Bikes: Bikers & Motorcycle Gangs in Men's Pulp Adventure Magazines” (New Texture), this 130-page book chronicles hundreds upon hundreds of magazine covers, gate-fold spreads and a brief introduction that cites 1947's “cycle-rally-gone-wild” in the Northern California town of Hollister as a real-life catalyst for America's fascination with biker culture. The book also features an analysis by author Paul Bishop, a former LAPD detective and author of the terrific 'Fey Croaker' detective series.

While I enjoy book and magazine covers, my expertise is typically dedicated to the in-between pages. I love reading and reviewing great fiction, but have a soft place in my heart for the artwork adorning all of these great paperbacks. It's rewarding to find that same passion lies within Robert and Wyatt's labor of love. The astronomical prices of vintage magazines, combined with the rarity of finding intact 70-year old magazines, makes “Barbarians on Bikes” a must-have for anyone that appreciates the action-adventure culture (films, comics, magazines, paperbacks). The high-quality, full blown scans of these hard-to-find magazines is an all-you-can-devour eye candy buffet. Personally, this book is about as close as I'll ever come to holding and owning these vintage and antiquarian men's magazines.

“Barbarians on Bikes” showcases Bob and Wyatt's undying love for a time and place in history that we'll never experience again. Their dedication and hard work unearthing these historic treasures for today’s generation are an absolute delight. For readers, collectors, historians and anyone else remotely interested in men's action-adventure literature, pulp magazines and motorcycles, “Barbarians on Bikes” is mandatory for your home library or coffee-table.

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The Vengeful Virgin

With over 30 novels in a career that spanned 1951-1970, WW2 veteran Gil Brewer is considered a cornerstone of crime-fiction. His mid-era novel, “The Vengeful Virgin”, was originally published by Fawcett’s Crest imprint in 1958. Cited as one of Brewer's strongest works, Hard Case Crime reprinted the novel in 2006 with new cover art.

Jack Ruxton is a young owner/operator of a floundering television retail and repair shop. His life drastically changes the day he meets Shirley Angela, a primary caregiver for an elderly invalid named Victor. In a combination of desperation and hot-blooded lust, Shirley asks Jack to assist her in killing Victor. The payoff? About $300,000 that's been promised to Shirley in the event of Victor's passing. With a tumultuous tuition, Jack's life becomes an education on sex, greed, jealousy and murder. Does he make the grade?

With “The Vengeful Virgin”, Gil Brewer may have hit his high-water mark. The story's placement on Florida’s Gulf Coast parallels the author's own residence in sunny St. Petersburg. Like his contemporaries in Dan Marlowe, Day Keene and John D. MacDonald, Brewer makes use of a crime-fiction staple: the Florida waterfront cabin. It's here where the book reaches its violent crescendo, the crossroads of regret and guilt through the murky haze of hard liquor. Brewer's tale incorporates all of the genre tropes but still remains remarkably engaging and timeless. The paperback showcases the downward spiral of a man's ruin, lovers on the run and the inescapable, ever-consuming law enforcement dragnet.

In its utter simplicity, “The Vengeful Virgin” is a riveting masterpiece and should not be missed. It’s absolutely essential reading for fans of the genre.

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Jason Savas: Unmasking the Hero

Beginning in the Mid-20th Century, model Steve Holland found plenty of opportunities to influence the look and feel of men's action-adventure poaperbacks. Transitioning from a mediocre acting career, Holland went on to become the “Face That Launched a Thousand Paperbacks”. Collaborating with artist James Bama, Holland would be the face of pulp icons Doc Savage and The Avenger and later era heroes including Richard Blade and Mack Bolan. After Holland's immense impact on the genre from the 1950s through the 1970s, a new face began to emerge, seemingly a successor to Holland's photo-realistic throne.

That man was Jason Savas.

After years of rigorous investigation, Paperback Warrior was finally able to locate Savas. In a revealing interview, we discussed his childhood, modeling career and his current endeavors as an aspiring Hollywood screenwriter.

Jason Savas currently lives in the same New York City apartment he was born in. Surrounded by his large collection of sports memorabilia, the 65-year old explained that athletics at an early age led to his eventual introduction into the lucrative world of modeling.

“My mother put me into the dojo when I was six-years old. I studied Judo and practiced it for a long time. I was a jock and competed in Judo tournaments and then in high school I did wrestling and lacrosse. I wanted to be a jock, and jocks played college sports. I wanted to play professional sports. This was 1977 and I had long hair down to my shoulders. My girlfriend in college was with me and we were walking by a poster or sign of a model and she said you look like that guy up there.”

After graduating from the City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.), Savas found himself walking through Central Park and bumped into a former wrestling competitor from high school named Joe. Little did Savas know that this quick exchange would effect the next 11-years of his life.

“Joe told me he had become a model and said I could do it too. He gave me a name and a number. We ended up going to the beach and someone took some photos. I stumbled into fashion modeling during the summer of 1979 and was lucky enough to work almost everyday for years after signing with Wilhelmina Model Agency. My earliest work consisted of trade publications...newspaper and magazines...catalogs, designer press kits and magazine work such as G.Q. and Men's Wear doing both editorial and advertisements. I was still new to the industry and both surprised and excited by the wide variety of modeling work available.”

In December 1979, Savas began modeling for the first of several Gianni Versace ads and by 1980, he was all over the fashion world posing everywhere from cigarette ads to cosmetics. But in 1981, Savas also found himself doing a different type of modeling.

“I found myself in a studio shooting a book cover. It was very strange because I had never done illustration work and it was different. I got to wear a costume and it was over in a flash because a shoot only lasted one hour and you were done. Very simple, but fun. Then I started doing more and more book covers. I guess I took over the reins from Chad Deal [a popular 1980s cover model]. I did over 1,000 covers and interestingly, I did more romance novels than action or western. Romance was the largest market and many times we got to wear period clothes which makes it even more fun. The one-hour shoots allowed a modeling agency to slip us into several photo shoots a day and/or in between 'real modeling' jobs. Book covers were a bit like play acting. I enjoyed shooting the covers because you never worried how you looked because you would be painted.”

Savas explained that these shoots originated with the publisher contacting the modeling agency and requesting a certain type of model – rugged, blonde or dark hair. He stated that 99% of the time the illustrator was present at the shoot. Once the photos were taken, the illustrator would then paint the photo and insert various location settings. For the majority of Savas' career, he paired with photographer Robert Osonitch.

“Robert Osonitch was the king of illustration photographers. He had the operation down pat for every type of shoot: lighting, back drops, clothes. His studio had a major wardrobe collection and he was an excellent director as well.”

Savas adds, “I own one oil on Masonite, 20” x 30” without the type (pictured) that I bought from the artist Steve Assel. He used me many times for western covers, including a half-dozen Louis L'amour stories. He was an excellent artist and I enjoyed working with him. Also there is a vast difference in talent among the artists, very noticeable. It seemed to me that Harlequin used the lesser artists while Zebra, Warner, Fawcett and several other companies had more money to pay for the better artists.”

The model's painted photo can be found on a majority of Stephen Mertz's 'M.I.A. Hunter' series published by Jove. He is also featured on noteworthy action-adventure series like 'Avenger', 'Eagle Force', 'Out of the Ashes', 'Vietnam Ground Zero' and a number of stand-alone titles like “Black Moon”, “The Raid” and “Long Ride Home.”

“I have a list of over 1,000 covers and probably found close to 250 physical books mostly in airports. One of the Harlequin romance writers, who lived in Iowa, requested me several times and showed up to a shoot one day. We became friends and she gave me a book cover of myself in nine different languages.”

After his 11-year modeling career, Savas invested in a business and his passionate sports memorabilia hobby (click HERE to see videos of his vast collection). He even authored his own action-adventure novel titled “The Messenger” in 1999. These days, Savas is hard at work writing screenplays and hopes to find some Hollywood interest.

Find a paperback featuring Jason Savas? Email us a photo or the book's title at paperbackwarrior@yahoo.com.