Neq The Sword (Battle Circle #3)

Neq The Sword, by Piers Anthony

No month stated, 1975  Corgi Books

This final volume of the Battle Circle trilogy by Piers Anthony was only published in the UK, until it came out in the United States in 1978 as part of the collected Battle Circle paperback. It’s curious that it did not receive prior publication in the US, but having read the book I would wager a guess that it was because Neq The Sword is a bit of a mess. 

Sadly, the first quarter of the novel is great, and had me ready to declare this final volume the best entry in the trilogy. But then the book took a dark turn, after which it took a goofy turn, before coming to a close in a very muddled fashion. Given that “narcotic flowers” play a big part in the second half of the novel, my guess is that Piers Anthony was ingesting some sweet leaf of his own, and this translated into the book itself. But then I always prefer to imagine that my pulp authors are messed up on some drug or other – even cheap booze would suffice – because the only alternative is that he just turned in a bad book. 

As with Var The Stick, Neq The Sword can be read separate from first volume Sos The Rope…to a point. As with the previous book, while this one starts off for the most part self-contained, eventually we get a lot of “so this is how such and such a thing happened, and why it happened” sort of stuff, as titular Neq gradually ponders and ultimately deduces everything that happened in the previous two books, at much expense to the narrative. Oh and speaking of which – this one is the longest book in the trilogy, and a lot of it could have been cut. 

As mentioned, the first quarter of Neq The Sword is really good. Neq when we meet him has just turned 14, now a man in this post-Blast world, and he’s chosen the sword as his weapon for the battle circle. After some misadventures he ends up in the empire of Sol, from the first book. Anthony skips through the ensuing years, already documented from the perspectives of other characters in the previous books: Sol’s empire grows, and Neq becomes one of the top “sworders” in the empire, even running his own army. 

But a decade passes and everything falls apart – the empire disintigrates, thanks to the disappearance of both Sol and “The Weaponless,” aka Sos, and Neq ventures off across the blasted United States to start a new life as a nomadic warrior. He meets up with the same “crazy” who briefly assisted Sos, back in the first book, and ultimately goes off on a road trip with the crazy’s twenty-something secretary, a hotstuff blonde who made eyes at Sos back in that first book; we learn here that she was formerly “wild” herself, having grown up in the wilderness and rescued by the crazies at a young age. 

Her name is Ms. Smith, but within a few chapters she will be Neqa, as she takes on Neq’s arm bracelet – a recurring gimmick here, that the bracelet indicates that a woman belongs to a particular man, even if just for one night. But here’s the thing: Neq is a virgin, having been too anxious to take a woman (as was his right, per the battle circle rules) for all these years. And here’s the other thing: Ms. Smith, aka Neqa, is also a virgin, and we have this sort of post-Blast setup straight out of a 1940s screwball comedy where two virgins must travel together via truck across America. 

There are also elements of The Road Warrior here, what with Neq insisting he’s the only chance the crazies have of surviving outside of their high-tech world; long story short, the crazy empire has also been destroyed, which happened off-page in the previous book, and Neq has realized that the setup needs to be reinstated, otherwise the world will plunge into anarchy. So he insists on acting as security for Neqa as she drives a truck to get supplies from Helicon mountain, ie the mountain where Sos went to become a metahuman in the first book. 

This part is all pretty great, with Anthony doing a swell job of building up the rapport and eventual love between the two characters, with frequent action scenes as Neq makes short work of attacking brigands (the novel, however, is pretty anemic on the violence factor). But it ultimately becomes goofy, because despite growing close and spending nights together, these two still can’t get over their hangups and just do it already. 

It is almost laughable to read as they hold each other, and tell each other they want to, but then one of them will chicken out, or there will be a sudden brigand attack to distract them, or whatever. I mean, I can understand the skittishness on Neqa’s part, but come on – Neq is like in his mid twenties, at this point, and still a virgin…how much incentive would this guy really need? Indeed one starts to wonder if Neq just has a whole ‘nother type of hangup entirely, and just doesn’t realize it. 

For that matter, Neqa is even older than Neq, and there follows a humorous bit where Neq can’t get over how “old” she is, what with her being in her mid twenties. (To make it even better, Neq keeps referring to Neqa’s breasts in this part, saying how they look like a younger woman’s.) But at least here Anthony makes clear what was only understood in previous books: the non-crazy world is a world of youth, where boys become “men” at 14 and fathers soon after, and where a 35 year-old woman thinks of herself as a grandmother. 

That said, the prepubescent factor that sullied Var The Stick is not evident in Neq The Sword, but Anthony quite makes up for it by taking the novel in an unexpected and dark direction. In fact it gets so dark that I laughed; but long story short – Neqa does end up losing her virginity, but not to Neq. Instead, it’s to like the 50-some men in a tribe who take their turns with her as a bound Neq watches on helplessly. 

After this insane bit of nihilism, there follows an equally-good part where Neq goes out for revenge. Only problem: the brigands cut off both his hands. Problem solved: Neq finds a crazy doctor who gives Neq a sword for a hand, and also gives him pincers for his other hand. How Neq feeds himself or cleans himself is unstated, but it’s all good – he soon goes out to kill the members of the tribe, one by one, chopping them down with his sword hand. Patrick Woodroffe well illustrates this on the cover; as Neq enjoys cutting off the heads of his victims and staking them as warning to the others that their time will soon follow; note that Woodroffe also gives us the sword for a hand in his artwork. 

The only problem is, Piers Anthony has decided he wants to lecture us on how revenge never solves anything. Fine, but save the messaging for a novel that doesn’t feature a dude with a sword for a hand, okay? So we get all this crap where Neq, at much expense, realizes that nothing can bring back Neqa and etc, and etc. Oh and meanwhile the dude is still a virgin. Well anyway, in another (possibly cannabis-inspired) change of plot, Neq next decides that his reason for being will be to restore order to the post-Blast world by rebuilding Helicon, ie the high-tech underworld that was destroyed in Var The Stick. 

Oh and speaking of Var – SPOILER ALERT – Neq kills him, folks! Seriously. There’s another change of plot as Neq is tasked by the crazies with finding all these people and bringing them to the crazies to help rebuild Helicon, for reasons never adequately explained. So he has to get Tyl the stick fighter, and also Sos, and Sol, and Sola, and Sosa, and even Var – but the thing is, everyone is still under the impression that Var killed the little girl who was sent to fight him…but as readers of the previous book know, she instead ran off with Var, grew up into a teenaged beauty, then married Var and became Vara. 

Well, so much for Var, and now we have another change of pace as Neq is disgusted with himself and wants Vara to kill him – and Vara is quite ready to, given that she’s lost Var due to Neq’s “kill first, regret later” policy. But here comes Tyl, a minor character from the previous books now thrust for some reason into the limelight, who gives a lecture on how revenge doesn’t solve anything…and it goes on and on, with the three venturing across the badlands while Tyl argues with them over whether Vara has a right to kill Neq, and etc. 

Then we get to these hallucinogenic flowers that cause nightmares to be real, and it just goes on and on and on, and it gets even more laughable because soon a flower-maddened Vara is trying to screw Neq, but even here Neq pushes her away (as Arsenio would say, “Hmmm…”), and then finally they do it, and Piers Anthony leaves it off page entirely. I mean Neq loses his virginity in his late 20s and you’d think we’d at least get more than a sentence about it, but we do not. 

But folks, things get even more befuddling, as the crew makes it back to Helicon, and there’s a debate over whether Neq should lead them…oh, and have I mentioned yet that at this point it’s Neq The Glockenspiel? Folks I kid you not. As a way to show how he has sworn never to kill again, Neq has a glockenspiel molded to his sword-hand, and thus goes around singing to people as he taps out a melody on his glockenspiel hand. Like seriously, they had some good drugs back in the ‘70s, didn’t they? I almost wonder if Piers Anthony didn’t make a drunken bet with someone: “Dude, I’m gonna write a book where a guy has a glockenspiel for a hand! Hey, is that Sabbath? Turn it up, man!” 

Then it’s old home week as various characters return to Helicon, some of them characters not seen since the first book, but again it lacks any resonance because Anthony must deliver a lot of exposition to explain where they’ve been for all these years. Oh and SPOILER ALERT, but neither Sos nor Sol return, indicating that they did truly have a heroic sacrifice in the previous book. 

Neq does pretty damn well for himself; by novel’s end he knocks up both Vara and her mother, Sosa, the sultry and built lady from the first book who is now “old” in her mid-30s…folks there’s even a bit where Neq argues with Sosa that lots of men will want her despite her age, because in Helicon women are shared by the men due to the scarcity of women. Neq and Vara even break up, in the most off-handed matter, because Vara too will be expected to, uh, screw every other guy in the place, and Neq doesn’t want to interfere with tradition. 

It’s only just occurred to me that Neq The Sword is a commentary on the turned-on ‘60s generation: the drugs, the rampant arguments against violence, the shared communal women, and of course the narcotic flowers. And let’s not forget the glockenspiel, shall we? I guess looked at from that perspective, Neq The Sword is a triumph. I can’t say I enjoyed reading it, though; the first part was good, yes, but once Neq has achieved his vengeance it’s as if Anthony finished his tale sooner than expected, and so he got some chemical inspiration on what to fill up the rest of the book with. 

All told, Battle Circle really does not work as a trilogy. There is too little connecting the three books, and too much repetition in the parts that do connect with each other. Piers Anthony would have done just as well to leave it at Sos The Rope; as it is, the following two books only served to dilute the mythic impact of that first book. 

Here’s the cover of the Battle Circle book I read, which contains all three volumes; it was published in 1978 by Avon Books. I picked this up around 8 years ago and completely forgot about it until I came across it in my garage, of all places! The cover for this one is also by Patrick Woodroffe, and is taken from the original UK paperback edition of Sos The Rope:

They Thirst

They Thirst, by Robert R. McCammon

May, 1981  Avon Books

Robert McCammon was a name I knew well in my horror-reading teen years; you’d often see copies of his super-fat paperbacks in middle school and high school. I was a Stephen King guy, though, and rarely ventured outside his world to other horror fiction. I do recall attempting to read McCammon’s Swan Song at some point in high school – yet another super-fat paperback, this one about the end of the world – but I couldn’t get over how similar it was to King’s The Stand (which I’d read in its recently-published uncut version shortly before), so I put it aside. Literally the only thing I recall about Swan Song was the description that one of the characters, a black professional wrestler, had a stomach that had gone to “marshmellow” due to his eating donuts or something, and that “marshmellow” description always stuck with me. 

 Well anyway! I’ve been on a horror kick lately, though to tell the truth it’s starting to wane now (it actually lasted longer than previous horror fiction kicks!), and I decided to give McCammon another chance. But as usual with me it couldn’t be easy. The book that really caught my interest was this one, an early novel of his, yet another super-fat paperback, about vampires in Los Angeles. Another one seemingly inspired by King, in this case Salem’s Lot. But folks They Thirst ain’t easy to get hold of. The days of Robert McCammon’s paperbacks being ubiquitous are long gone, especially when it comes to the first four he published, which McCammon himself has kept from being reprinted. They’re now known as the “Condemned Four.” 

Predictably, this means that those first four books are overpriced on the used books marketplace, even though they each went through a few printings. And They Thirst is the most overpriced of all. Hell, there isn’t even a digital scan of it on The Internet Archive. Sellers want $30 and up for copies. I became so obsessed with finding this book that I actually purchased a coverless copy of the original Avon Books edition…and it cost me a dollar. The thing is in super beaten shape, but hey, I just wanted to read the book, you know…I don’t really get worked up about “mint condition” and etc these days. Plus the cover’s kind of lame on this edition. And also, for the first time I’d been called for jury duty, so I thought I’d bring the book along to read. You don’t have to worry about maintaining the condition of a book when it’s already missing the front cover, has a broken spine, and in general looks like it was carried in a backpack on a trek across Europe. I also thought if they saw me reading a book about vampires in L.A. they wouldn’t pick me for the jury, but unfortunately that didn’t work and I was picked anyway. 

Running to 531 small-print pages, They Thirst is not a quick read. Not by a long shot! It took me a few weeks to read it. And I have to say, there were times when I was sufficiently caught up in it that I wanted to read nothing else. (I’m not always faithful to long books when I’m reading them.) I thought They Thirst might be this year’s Colony or The Tomorrow File, a long book that could’ve just kept going on and on, such was my enjoyment. And speaking of Ben Bova’s Colony, it seems to me that Robert McCammon was attempting the same sort of thing, like also what Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle did with Lucifer’s Hammer: a genre novel written in the style of the bestselling mainstream fiction of the day. They Thirst is ostensibly horror, but like those other novels it offers a panoramic view of a large cast of characters interracting across a large canvass of action, with the idea of appealing to a larger readership than just horror fans. 

But here’s the thing. They Thirst is usually loglined as “vampires in Los Angeles.” It wasn’t until around page 400, though, that I realized IT WASN’T EVEN A VAMPIRE NOVEL. I have no real knowledge of Robert McCammon, haven’t researched him at all, but if I am correct he has “banned” They Thirst and the previous three novels because he considers them subpar, or at least not good indications of his writing. I don’t know what he holds particularly against They Thirst, but my own personal guess would be because the novel suffers from identity confusion. I mean the first two hundred pages are like a crime novel about a serial killer in L.A., sort of a prefigure of Marcel Montecino’s The Cross Killer. Then They Thirst turns into an end-of-the-world disaster novel, before transforming yet again into a quest novel in the final quarter. Actual vampire stuff is scant, and like John Steakley’s later Vampire$, the vampires that do show up come off more like zombies. 

To be sure, this is not a Dracula type of yarn; these vampires are not the suave sinister types who lure in young women (or men) and have their way with them one by one. Hell, Thirst is more of a “traditional” vampire novel than this is. Rather, They Thirst is more of a virus contagion sort of yarn, with vampirism quickly spreading across sections of Los Angeles and turning regular everyday folks into bloodthirsty vampires who thirst for blood. To me, it just all seemed more like a zombie apocalypse sort of story, only McCammon wants his cake and to eat it, too, as he tries to have it both ways – vampirism spreads to such an extent that almost the entirety of L.A. has become vampires, or knows about vampires, yet our author also wants to have it that the actual existence of vampires is still questioned by most people, especially those outside of L.A. This becomes especially hard to buy as the action becomes more and more apocalyptic in the final section. 

Oh and I almost forgot: above I wrote that They Thirst clearly seems to cater to the bestselling fiction template of the day, but one thing I was bummed to learn was that it was very tepid in the sleaze arena. I believe there’s only one sex scene in the novel, early on, and it’s minimal at best. What I’m trying to say is, this is certainly no Live Girls. And hell for that matter, McCammon doesn’t even exploit the setting much. When I saw this novel was about “vampires in L.A.” I imagined, you know, vampires running amok in the neon glow of Sunset Strip, but that never happens in the book. We get a lot of namedropping of various streets, buildings, and sections of the barrios, but for the most part the zombie-like vampires lurk in the shadows of empty houses, and the king vampire himself lurks above the city, in a castle built by a murdered horror movie actor. 

Now this bit really grinded my gears. Another thing the McCammon of today might not like about They Thirst is that there’s so much setup with little payoff, from characters to subplots. One of the latter concerns the wonderfully-named Orlon Kronsteen, a Bela Lugosi-type horror actor who starred in a movie about Jack the Ripper (and other stuff, though we are told woefully little of him) and had a castle built above Los Angeles. But “several years ago” Kronsteen was murdered, apparently in some sort of ritual deal, with his head cut off or something…and Prince Vulkan, the king vampire of They Thirst, decides this castle will be his perfect home base. But nothing whatsoever is made of Kronsteen, the entire mystery of why or how he was killed just totally dropped from the narrative…even worse is that some random biker seems to imply that he was there the night it happened, but this biker too is dropped from the narrative. 

It's like that throughout. In pure “bestselling fiction” style, Robert McCammon introduces sundry characters at the start of They Thirst, but he turns out to be like a pet-sitter who takes on too many animals to watch. I mean pretty soon most of these characters are just plain gone, and folks by the end of the novel they still haven’t come back! In fact it’s a wonder Avon Books didn’t package They Thirst like a blockbuster-type novel, giving a quick logline of the many main characters: 

Andy Palatazin – Los Angeles police captain who knows vampires are real and ultimately sees himself as the only man who can stop the infestation. Plus he’s haunted by the ghost of his mom. 

Gayle Clarke – Hotstuff reporter for a tabloid; when her boyfriend tries to drink her blood she realizes vampires might exist. Intermittently disappears from the narrative, only to return hundreds of pages later. 

Prince Vulkan – Dead since the 1400s, turned into a vampire as a teen, with the appropriate temper tantrums of an undead teenager. The chosen disciple of “The Headmaster” (ie the devil in all but name), for reasons not explained he’s only now decided to conquer L.A., despite being hundreds of years old. 

The Roach – Serial killer freak with a penchant for murdering hookers who look like his dead mother and stuffing cockroaches in their mouths. Serves as the would-be Renfield to Prince Vulkan’s Dracula. 

Kobra – Albino biker with the memorable intro in which he blows away some rednecks in a bar with his Mauser for absolutely no reason. Perhaps the most wasted character in the novel; Kobra is developed as this super cool badass but anticlimactically drops out of the narrative, only to return sporadically afterward. 

Tommy Chandler – Another teen, this one alive, a monster movie fan with posters of Orlon Kronsteen on his wall and also who knows how Kronsteen’s castle is layed out, thanks to a feature in an old issue of Famous Monsters Of Filmland. 

Wes Richer and Solange – He’s a rising star on the comedy scene with a hit show in which he plays a moron Sherlock Holmes; she’s his “Afro-Asian” mistress, a stacked beauty with a penchant for reading ouija boards and whatnot. In fact it’s through one of these that the title of the novel comes into play, as Solange receives the message “THEY THIRST” from the spirit world. 

Ratty – A ‘Nam vet who lives in the sewers beneath L.A., where he grows his own drugs. In his “Timothy Leary for President” shirt he’s the highlight of the novel, though only appears in the final quarter. 

Father Silvera – A brawny priest with a hidden disease that’s killing him, he takes the expected route of denying that vampires exist, then realizing it, then refusing to go on the quest to the Kronsteen castle to kill Vulkan, and then instead saving his flock…before finally heading to the Kronsteen castle. 

There are sundry other characters, many of them unnecessary, like the hotstuff real estate lady who helped Vulkan buy the castle. She gets a few chapters, then just flat-out drops from the narrative. Same goes for the owner of a funeral parlor chain. Or Rico, who is searching for his lost girlfriend in the barrio. Or a doctor at a hospital who realizes too late that her “dead” patients are really vampires. Many of these characters are of course turned into vampires, but even then they disappear afterwards, with no “I’m a vampire now!” shock return. It’s a bit disappointing, but it must be said that, while you’re reading the book, you don’t realize that the majority of this stuff isn’t going to pan out. I mean it’s about the journey, not the destination, as I’m sure Ratty would say, but still. It wasn’t until around page 500 or so that I realized so much of this stuff was not going to be resolved. 

The first couple hundred pages were by far my favorite. McCammon delivers a taut suspense thriller with only minor supernatural overturns; this opening section is almost a standard crime novel, with Capt. Palatazin obsessed with finding and stopping a serial killer the papers have dubbed the Roach. It’s very much a police procedural, with no action, just Palatazin going about the work of deduction and following clues. And we have stuff from the Roach’s point of view; curiously, his day job is as a pest exterminator, same as the serial killer in Lou Cameron’s The Closing Circle. The horror novel stuff gradually develops, mostly through the strange bit of corpses being mysteriously dug out of graves at night. Palatazin, whose father was bitten by a vampire when Palatazin was a child in Hungary, knows something is going on. 

But the “vampire virus” stuff builds up and soon it’s more of a zombie apocalypse yarn, with whole sections of the barrio for example overrun by vampires. Then the end of the world vibe begins; Vulkan uses his powers to bring down an apocalyptic sandstorm on Los Angeles, blocking the city off from the world and keeping people from leaving. Phone lines are down, planes can’t leave, etc. This section goes on for a long time and again made me think of King’s The Stand. It’s very much a piece of disaster fiction now, with long sequences of various characters getting trapped in cars or in their homes and trying to get out before the daylight goes away so they can kill vampires. This part was my least favorite in the novel. 

Then the final quarter takes on a quest angle. Some of the characters band together to get to the Kronsteen castle, where they figure the “king vampire” might lurk. This too takes up a large brunt of the narrative; I mean they aren’t like “Let’s go there,” and then they’re at the castle the next chapter. It’s almost grueling and again takes away from the vampire stuff the reader might want. It’s really just characters fighting their way through blinding clouds of sand and trying to figure out where they are. To tell the truth it was exhausting to read. What makes it worse is that McCammon drops the ball in the finale. Major characters are dispensed with in an almost offhand fashion, and worse yet the entire point of certain characters even being here is rendered moot. No spoilers, but Palatazin in particular. I mean this guy’s dad turned into a vampire, so he has a personal, uh, “stake” in the matter, but he doesn’t contribute much to the climax. 

Even funnier, McCammon doesn’t seem to know when to end the novel. So even after the good guys have sort of won, we get like an extended 20-page bit where Gayle Clarke, who has mostly disappeared from the novel at this point, tries to escape from the military base in which survivors are being held. And it just keeps going on and on. All so she can get out to the real world and tell the story that vampires exist…not that anyone believes her. Even though the entirety of L.A. turned into vampires, complete with even the deejay on a radio station taunting the last few humans in the city. But like I said, McCammon wants his cake and to eat it too. 

So yeah, I was a bit underwhelmed with They Thirst. I do think though that I enjoyed it more than Will did, over at Too Much Horror Fiction. I was sufficiently caught up in it, at least for the first few hundred pages. But once it got to the apocalyptic sandstorm bit it started to lose my interest. I also felt the climactic assault on Vulkan in Kronsteen’s castle could have been more thrilling, but McCammon was so focused on showing how dire the plight of his characters was that he did succeed in making it all seem hopeless. But then he makes it seem so hopeless that the climax is a bit hard to buy. 

I’ve got some more Robert McCammon novels which I might read someday; one of them, Wolf’s Hour, about a werewolf in World War II, is one I really wanted to read back when it came out, but just never got around to.

Total Recall

Total Recall, by Piers Anthony

June, 1990  Avon Books

(original hardcover edition 1989)

While it didn’t make much of an impression on me when it was released, Total Recall has gone on to become one of my favorite Schwarzenegger movies, second only to Commando. In hindsight one can see it as the apotheosis of ‘80s action movies: a big budget, the biggest action star of the decade, gory violence, one-liners aplenty, good special effects, an incredibly dark sense of humor, and a positively hard R rating. After this Schwarzenegger and Stallone and the other ‘80s action stars went for a “kinder, gentler” approach in the ‘90s, so in many ways Total Recall was the end of an era, even though it didn’t seem like it at the time. 

I was 15 when it came out in the summer of 1990, but I didn’t see it then – either the commercials didn’t do much for me or I couldn’t get an adult or guardian to take me. It feels like a million years ago that Hollywood would churn out mega-budget flicks that were 90% targeted toward teens, but put an R rating on them, thus blocking out that target audience. I finally saw the movie on VHS shortly after it was released in that format, over at a friend’s house, but I recall not being able to get into the movie at all. In fact I had this eccentric friend – it was a group of us watching the movie, I remember – and at the climax he said, “I think this is the part where we’re supposed to be on the edge of our seats,” and then literally jumped onto the edge of his seat. Super stupid I know, but not only is this an example of this kid’s eccentricity (I think he went on to become an airline pilot), but it’s just something that’s stuck with me over all these years, despite how super stupid it was. 

Somehow my opinion changed over the years, watching the movie on TV or laserdisc…I had another weird/eccentric friend (I’ve had a bunch of them, honestly), and this one who was a major movie fan, particularly anything with Schwarzenegger or with copious gore. So as you can expect, he was in seventh heaven with Total Recall. He was really into laserdiscs and I seem to “recall” I watched the movie again in that format some years later and realized how good it was. In retrospect, it’s the action movie Terminator 2 should have been; while T2 was a massive hit, in hindsight you could see it as where Arnold’s movies would be headed in the ‘90s – softer, less darkly humorous, less violent. Total Recall is the complete opposite, and in fact it’s a smarter movie than Terminator 2, and smarter than most action movies, given its multiple layers. 

Everyone who enjoys Total Recall likes to engage in the “did it happen or didn’t it?” game, or even wonder if the entire thing was just a dream. There will never be a correct answer to this, as Paul Verhoeven pointedly directed each and every scene with “both realities” in mind. So you could just as easily argue that the movie is on the level as you could that it’s all a delusion, a “schizoid embolism” that gets out of control until the hero is lobotimized at film’s end (ie the flash of white before the credits). Or you could argue the entire movie is just a dream, given that it opens and closes with a dream – the last line even a winking reference to this: “Kiss me quick before you wake up.” But then, I’ve found that it’s just as easy to take the movie at face value, that it’s all really happening to Douglas Quaid, a mild-mannered (but herculean-sized) blue collar worker who finds out he’s a secret agent with an erased mind who holds the key to a planet’s survival. 

This I think is just one of the many things that makes Total Recall so entertaining. And the gore, action, occasional nudity, and super-dark humor doesn’t hurt. (“See you at the party, Richter!” is still my all-time favorite Arnold line, and it pops in my head at random intervals.) But it would be difficult to carry this “is it a dream or is it reality” vibe in a novel, and truth be told Piers Anthony seems for the most part to treat everything on the level in this tie-in, first published in hardcover in 1989 and then in softcover when the movie came out. Given that his book was published a year before the film was released, Anthony most likely was working from an earlier draft of the film; most notably, the protagonist is named “Douglas Quail” in the hardcover, but this has been changed to “Douglas Quaid” in the paperback to reflect the movie. (The Avon editors did a good job of changing almost all the “Quails” to “Quaids” in the paperback, but they did miss one – on page 58.) 

Quail was the name of the protagonist in Philip K. Dick’s story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” which “inspired” Total Recall. Verhoeven I believe is the one who changed it to “Quaid,” which is a more fitting name for a Schwarzenegger character. The script had been in development hell for some years, with a tide of writers, directors, and actors becoming involved with it, making changes, and then jumping ship. Once production began someone must’ve thought it would make sense for this new story, which was wildly different from Dick’s original (I was going to write “the original Dick,” but thought it would sound too sophmoric), to receive its own novelization. Piers Anthony somehow got the gig, and as mentioned this one even received a hardcover edition, meaning it received appropriate industry coverage in 1989 – even a review in Kirkus. 

I’ve never read any of Piers Anthony’s sci-fi, but I have read his Jason Striker series, and his Total Recall novelization is of the same caliber: a fast-moving plot with good description, but an occasional tendency to overexplain things, either through exposition or authorial lecturing, plus an inordinate fondness for goofy puns and malapropisms. The lecturing especially tends to make the story come off as a bit too stuffy and ponderous at times. To be fair to Anthony, he had his work cut out for him, trying to make sense out of this film; it’s my understanding that the third act of Total Recall was the most problematic in the development stage, and Anthony does his best to give more depth and explanation to what’s going on. Indeed, he works in a galactic threat in the finale; Mars and the rest of the solar system will be wiped out if Quaid doesn’t prevail. There’s also an entire storyline about the aliens who lived on Mars eons ago. But then again, perhaps this material was in the script Anthony was working from – it’s also my understanding that a lot was cut from Total Recall for budgetary reasons. 

If you have seen the movie, the book really isn’t all that different. In fact it’s a classic example of what a tie-in should be: it tells pretty much the exact same story as the film, only with minor changes, and also fleshes out the characters and the world a bit more. The question here though is how much of this extra stuff is Anthony’s imagination or stuff that was never filmed. For example, one of his most notable changes blows the most memorable moment in the film – a moment which was blown in the trailers, too. I am of course talking about the heavyset woman disguise Quaid wears when he enters Mars, which goes haywire and keeps saying “Two weeks.” The audience is just as surprised as the people in Mars in the film, but in the novel we already know Quaid’s in the costume; but then, in the novel we’ve also seen his trip to Mars, which we didn’t see in the film. 

And also to his credit, Anthony does cater at times to the idea that this is all a dream; Quaid, even though on the run, constantly questions things and wonders over how bizarre everything has become. But unfortunately in many cases Anthony will then go out of his way to over explain what’s happened, or why it’s happened, or how it could have happened; this is why I say he mostly treats the story on the level, as he seems to be at pains to work out every little detail and make it fit. Of course in dreams (or schizoid embolisms, I assume) things don’t always fit, so what could be seen as gaping plot holes in the film (ie changing an entire planet’s atmosphere in minutes) could also be seen as just the usual random events of a dream. Even here though Anthony will over-explain how indeed an atmosphere could change so quickly, so the book would be beneficial for those who do take the film at face value but want to understand how all of it could have really happened. 

The novelization also world-builds more than the film does. We’re not told what year all this is occuring, but we are told that the solar system has been colonized, and the 1980s are now considered “ancient” history. Interplanetary travel is common, and technology is so good that you can have real-time videophone conversations between Earth and Mars. We’re also told of things like “Venusian wine” and glasses that are cut from perfect crystals grown in zero-g. Anthony also finds the time to work some left-wing sermonizing into the text; we’re lectured on how gas-guzzling cars were finally banned (even though the government didn’t want to!), and it was about time because they were destroying the atmosphere and such. Indeed, getting rid of them allowed the ozone layer to “finally repair itself.” That one really took me back; I’d completely forgotten about the ozone layer panic, which was the early ‘90s version of climate change. Actually the world of Total Recall is the one we’re rapidly heading toward: a vaguely-socialist overpopulated hellhole of crime and poverty, ruled over by mega-corporations that are outside of the law. 

I’ve gone this far and haven’t mentioned the tone Piers Anthony uses throughout Total Recall. Just as the film was for the most part aimed like a heat-seeker for a young male audience, so too is Anthony’s novel. I hate to use modern progressive terms, I mean they’re just such passive-aggressive bullshit, but folks the “male gaze” is strong as hell in this book. And in fact, the only way we’re going to win this culture war is to appropriate the other side’s words, sort of like how us Americans supposedly took the insult “yankee doodle” from the damned British and wore it as a badge of honor. So yes, the male gaze runs rampant throughout Total Recall. We are told of the breasts and appearances of every female character we meet, with even ruminations on what their sex lives must be like. Mind you, this isn’t a complaint; I loved the unbridled testosterone of it all. I mean here’s just one example – a notable example, though. Here’s Quaid in bed with his wife Lori (Sharon Stone) at the beginning of the novel:

This my friends is an author who knows his readership is made up of similarly-horny men. Lori’s “impressive architecture” will be mentioned throughout the novel, even in sequences where she’s not even around. Here we have the novel’s sole sex scene, as Quaid and Lori enjoy a little roll in the hay before Quaid heads off for work. I found it difficult to imagine Schwarzenegger in such a scene, so it’s just as well there’s no more such material in the book; I recall reading years ago that his character was supposed to kiss Vanessa Williams in Eraser (1996), but this was cut, because per Williams it just “didn’t work:” 

Quaid’s still so turned on by his hotstuff wife that he almost considers round two, but knows he’ll be late for work. Here we have a bit more world-building than in the film: we’re informed that Quaid and Lori have been married for eight years, and she’s well above him in the social strata, a daughter of wealth who for inexplicable reasons fell in love with meathead Quaid. He assumes it’s because she was turned on by his muscles! And as you can see by the mention of the “dream woman” in the excerpt above, the novelization follows the film; Quaid has just awoken from a dream of Mars, in which he explored a structure with some beautiful, brunette woman (whose bust, we’ll eventually learn, is “fuller” than Lori’s!), and then he was separated from her and fell into a chasm. 

And indeed, the book just goes on to follow the film as faithfully. Quaid seeing the Rekall commercial on the crowded subway to work, going there himself, and freaking out before the implant can happen. From there the novel, just as the film, turns into an extended chase sequence, with Quaid’s former work friends the first who show up and try to kill him. Here we see one of the biggest differences between the film and Anthony’s novelization: the book lacks the ultra-gore of the film. While there is a lot of violence and killing, Anthony does not dwell on the sprays of gore and whatnot; the action scenes are more nondescript, along the lines of “Quaid shot down two of them.” In that regard, it would’ve taken someone like David Alexander to write a Total Recall tie-in that matched the ultra gore of Verhoeven’s film. 

But even here Anthony is at pains to explain things that the film doesn’t; Quaid is such a bad-ass, able to kill three men with his bare hands in a few seconds, because of his “hidden, alternate self.” Throughout we will learn that this “alternate self” will come to Quaid’s rescue when his survival instincts kick in gear, even imbuing him with a sixth sense at times. Ultimately this will of course turn out to be “Hauser,” the “real” Quaid, same as in the film. Anthony even explains around this: near novel’s end we’ll learn that Quaid’s full name is Douglas Quaid Hauser! I don’t believe this was stated in the film. Again, maybe it was in the script Anthony worked from. It’s just another example of his striving to make everything “make sense” in the book…otherwise the reader might question where the name “Quaid” came from, if “Hauser” was the guy’s original name. But this too comes off as clumsy, as why would all of Hauser’s old colleagues keep referring to him as “Quaid,” even when the cat’s out of the bag and Quaid is aware he’s nothing more than a “personality construct?” 

The trip to Rekall is another fun demonstration of the male gaze at work. First there’s the receptionist, who same as in the film is changing the color of her fingernails with a stylus, but unlike in the film she’s also topless: 

You’ve gotta love how Quaid instantly decides Lori will need to get a similar top! Quaid is not only much more introspective in the novel, he’s also more horny. Earlier, when getting on the subway, we had a bit where he hoped that the X-ray machine would go haywire and he'd instead see the nude bodies of the women boarding, instead of their skeletons. Now, for no reason at all, he even broods over the sexual proclivities of the frowzy Rekall scientist who is about to put him under for the memory implant (this, by the way, after he’s imagined “being in bed” with the nurse who set up the IV): 

“He did not care to be victimized by her imagination.” Awesome! That’s how you turn the tables, folks! Another of the key bits that make Total Recall’s second half seem like a haywire memory implant also happens here: the technicians are able to recreate the spitting image of Quaid’s mysterious Mars woman, who is “wanton…and demure,” just like the woman of his dreams. In the film, we see her face on the screen before the implant procedure begins, and eventually will learn her name is Melina (Rachel Tictotin). However in the novel, toward the very end, Anthony also explains away this seeming incongruity; Melina, despite the fact that she and Quaid are at the moment running for their lives, mentions that she once “did some modelling” for Rekall! But then again, this could be another facet in the entire “did it happen or didn’t it?” scenario. 

However Anthony is at pains to tie up any loose ends the film might’ve had, no matter how minor. For example there’s the part where Quaid, hiding in the slums of the city, is contacted by a mysterious guy who has a package for him. We’ll learn that this guy is named Stevens, and he was “pals” with Quaid back in the Agency, ie the sadistic government agency which runs roughshod in this future – the guys trying to kill Quaid are all agents of the Agency. Chief among them is Richter (Michael Ironside), who is depicted here almost exactly as he is in the film. The only character who seems different, for that matter, is Mars boss Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), who in the novel is described as being nearly as muscular as Quaid is. Well anyway, in the film this mysterious helper leaves Quaid a bag and takes off. In the novel, we see that Richter eventually gets hold of him and kills him. We’re also informed that Richter has killed off the Rekall office workers who tried to implant Quaid. 

As mentioned the package has the “fat lady” disguise in it, and Anthony explains how it works. This all was a surprise reveal in the film, but here we know Quaid has it from the get-go. And we see him try it out when he boards a passenger spaceliner bound for Mars, a scene which also includes Richter and his Agency minions searching the ship for Quaid – who walks right by Richter, in the fat woman disguise. But here in the novel the mask’s glitch is it keeps asking “Where is my cabin?” instead of “Two weeks.” We also learn here that Richter is a passenger on this same ship to Mars, but Anthony doesn’t describe the voyage itself; Quaid decides to take the trip “in stasis.” I don’t believe we’re even told how long the voyage to Mars takes. The reveal of Quaid in the fat lady disguise is kind of the same as in the film, only as mentioned the glitch that outs Quaid is “Where is my cabin?,” which his mask keeps asking as he disembarks the ship on Mars. 

And again from here on it follows the film pretty faithfully. Other minor changes would be that Tony, the Resistance member on Mars who was played by a pre-fame Dean Norris in the film, is not stated as being a mutant. As fans of the film know, Tony in the film had a seriously mutated face, and thus was the recipient of one of Quaid’s more insensitive one-liners. (Tony: “You’ve got a lot of nerve showing your face around here.” Quaid: “Look who’s talking.”) Here in the novel Tony just appears to be a regular human, as no mutation is mentioned. But I’m sure you all want to know about the most famous mutant in the film: the three-breasted lady, of course. Yes, she’s here, but curiously in the book she isn’t topless in her memorable intro: 

Dude, “farted and oozed.” WTF? Glad that wasn’t in the film! Melina comes off the same here as in the movie, though more of a deal is made out of how she is both “wanton” and “demure,” per Quaid’s request at Rekall – she merely poses as a wanton whore here in a cheap bar in the Venusville district of Mars, but in reality is a fiery member of the Resistance. The novel at this point really turns into a sequence of action scenes, but the most memorable bit is the visit by “Dr. Edgemar,” the Rekall rep who claims to be visiting Quaid in his mind and tells him all this is a “schizoid embolism.” This sequence plays out pretty much identically to the film, as does most everything else that follows. Only the violence is minimized; for example, that “See you at the party, Richter!” part in the film features Quaid memorably holding aloft Richter’s severed arms before tossing them away. Richter meets his fate with both arms intact here in the novel. 

By far Anthony’s biggest change is to the explanation of what happened to Hauser. Not only does Anthony provide a long backstory on who the Martians were, but he even includes a subplot that Hauser was not a double agent, as revealed in the film’s finale, but really a triple agent. The film has it that, as Cohaagen’s minion, he ingratiated himself into the Resistance, and then “Quaid” was created to truly get in their confidence and to bypass the mental probes of the mysterious mutant leader Kuato. Anthony however develops a whole new plot out of this: Hauser actually fell in love with Melina, who made him find the good in himself, and thus he tricked Cohaagen by going along with the “Quaid” gambit, all in the hopes of wiping out his mind and protecting Melina and the Resistance from the truth he, Hauser, discovered in the ancient ruins. 

And this is the other big change. When Kuato does his mind-meld with Quaid, we are treated to a long chapter that comes off like its own separate short story. This part is the most “sci-fi” bit in the entire novel. Hauser, when separated from Melina while exploring a massive pyramid on Mars, discovered a cavern built by the ancient Martians who lived here 50,000 years ago. He enters into a chamber which takes him on a mind-meld sort of trip into Mars’s past, were he sees the No’ui, ie the human-sized bipedal telepathic ants who once lived on Mars. A “star seeder” race, the No’ui looked forward to the future and realized that the humans would one day come to Mars, and so have prepared this test sort of chamber thing, and it all works out that now Mars can either be saved – the atmosphere turning into one like Earth’s – or both it and the rest of the solar system could be destroyed by an artificial supernova the No’ui also prepared all those eons ago. It’s all very unwieldy and hard to grasp, and comes off like an entire change to the storyline in the eleventh hour. The question is whether it’s all Anthony’s creation or was material excised from the film. 

And that really is the main problem with the final quarter of Total Recall. Anthony tries to develop this massive galactic threat, with his hero outed as a former sadistic agent who found redemption in love and now can save the entire cosmos. It’s just too much to keep up with, and feels ungainly, not helped at all by the massive amount of exposition. I mean Quaid explains – sorry, “mansplains” (remember, we’ve gotta co-opt those bullshit terms) – everything to Melina as they are running from Cohaagen’s goons. But we do get the stuff from the film, like the cool watch that projects a hologram, complete with even the goofy as hell part where Quaid fools the dumb soldiers into thinking he’s a hologram when he isn’t. Anthony seems to have his tongue in cheek while writing this scene; it’s very clear that the author himself thinks the whole sequence is ridiculous, but he dutifully transposes it from the script. 

But as mentioned the changing of Mars’s atmosphere is explained here (actually, over-explained); it’s just something else the all-mighty No’ui set up all those millennia ago, and Quaid’s hand is necessary to trigger it. There’s even more exposition here as he and Melina ponder, “Can an entire atmosphere change in only ten minutes?” But then that’s one of the few areas in which films trump books; this whole sequence can be handled by fast cuts and crazy CGI (ie the eyes bulging out of heads on the surface of Mars), but poor Piers Anthony has to make sense out of it all. Oh and something I forgot to note – one of the biggest clues that the second half is just a Rekall program is the Rekall tech’s off-hand comment, when Quaid is about to be implanted: “Blue sky on Mars – that’s interesting!” This line does not appear in Anthony’s novelization; in fact, the entire “it’s all a figment of Quaid’s mind” scenario isn’t nearly as on the nose as in the film, and really only comes up via Quaid’s own pondering. 

But then to me a big sign that it isn’t all a Rekall mind trip is because Quaid kills all his friends in the opening act, and his wife is outed as a secret agent – indeed, he further learns that he’s only been married to her for six weeks, which is how long Hauser has been Quaid. The Rekall salesman, who is just as sleazy in the book as in the film, offers the “secret agent” element as a bonus to the Rekall Mars trip, and further he insists that Quaid will not be able to tell between his real memories and the Rekall procedure upon his “return” from Mars. So then, killing his friends and finding out his wife is also an enemy would very much conflict with Quaid’s real-life memories…but then this also plays into the idea that a “schizoid embolism” is creating this new wrinkle in the Rekall program. Or it could also mean it’s all a dream, hence the opening and closing “blue skies” on Mars. 

In the end though, I think this constant questioning of what’s “real” only adds to Total Recall’s appeal. (Hey, that rhymed!) And also, as Alan Moore once asked, “Aren’t all stories imaginary?” But then to continue arguing against myself, at one point a sequel to Total Recall was planned, one that would use Dick’s Minority Report as inspiration. I’ve yet to find the script for it (it was written by Gary Goldman, who so revised the third act of the film that he received billing credit), but I’ve read that it features Quaid on Mars heading up a police unit of pre-cog mutants. So then if that film had happened, there certainly wouldn’t have been a question whether the events of Total Recall “really happened.” There seems to be no question from Anthony, at least; after Melina tells Quaid “Kiss me quick before you wake up,” Quaid takes her in his arms, and Anthony ends the novel with: “[Quaid] was through with dreaming; reality was much better.” 

Anyway, Piers Anthony does a good job of making sense out of Total Recall and conveying at least some of its manic spirit. His version of Quaid is just a little too ponderous, though, and the frequent bouts of exposition kind of take away from the fun. But Anthony definitely succeeds in making a 278-page book seem half its length. I wouldn’t say the novel is better than the film, but it certainly adds to it, expanding on the world and particularly on Quaid; it just lacked much of the movie’s blood and thunder. But then it also inspired me to watch the movie again, which I plan to do posthaste.

Women Without Morals

Women Without Morals, by Richard F. Gallagher

No month stated, 1962  Avon Books

Check it out, an entire book devoted to my favorite kind of women! Seriously though, Women Without Morals is yet another vintage men’s adventure magazine anthology, this one featuring stories by Richard Gallagher, whose men’s mag work I’ve reviewed here over the years. Interestingly, the book is copyright Gallagher, implying that at least some of the authors who worked for the men’s magazines retained the copyrights on their work; I was under the impression that all of the stories would be copyright the various publishers (with those copyrights now having expired). 

Gallagher is a good writer, and like the better writers in the field he worked for the so-called Diamond Line of magazines, ie Male and Stag and the like, which is of course where the stories collected here are taken from. Another note: the copyright page lists which issues the stories came from, however as it turns out they are not listed in order. Thus I had to do a bit of research to determine which stories came from which magazines, and I’ve noted this below, as well as their original titles. Also worth noting is that Women Without Morals did well enough to receive a second printing, the cover of which I’ll place below; I prefer the cover of this first edition, with the Nazi She-Devil-esque topless babe wielding a whip…a scene that sort of occurs in the first story collected here. 

And in fact, this first story is the closest we get to a Nazi She-Devil tale in the entire book. This I found perplexing; the Nazi She-Devils were the epitome of “women without morals” in the world of men’s adventure magazines, yet I’m assuming Gallagher didn’t write too many stories in the subgenre. At least, so far I’ve only read one story by him that nearly fits in the category: “G.I. On The Ship Of Lost Frauleins.” The story in this book, though, “Hanne Jaegermann, The Sweatered Fraulein,” is actually more of a Nazi She-Devil yarn than that later one, even though the titular Hanne is not specifically stated as being a Nazi. But really it’s just splitting hairs, as gradually we learn that Hanne has attained her position of power thanks to her casual affair with none other than Goebbels. So I’d say she’s a Nazi She-Devil by default. 

The story first appeared in the February 1959 Stag, where it was titled “Fraulein Barracks.” As with the other stories collected here, it’s fairly long, running to around 40 pages of small, dense print, and it was labelled a “True Book Bonus” in the original magazine edition. Those Diamond Line mags didn’t short-change their readers, that’s for sure. Also, this story, like the others collected in Women Without Morals, is written in third-person. (As usual though the illustrations that graced the original magazine editions are not featured here.) Taking place in the last months of the European theater of WWII, “The Sweatered Fraulein” concerns Sgt. John Leonard, an injured airman who, along with other Allied prisoners, is taken to a prisoner of war camp in an old fortress called Alpenhaus, in the Bavarian Alps. 

Alpenhaus, Leonard soon discovers, now serves as a “cat house,” a rather beaten-down one at that, reserved for Nazi VIPs. It’s patrolled by old guards, most of them vets of the First World War who have little interest in Hitler but are “doing their duty” for Germany. But most importantly it’s overseen by Hanne Jaegermann, a young, beautiful, and built blonde (her hair so blonde it’s almost white, we’re informed) who likes to wear tight sweaters that are always either white or black. And in true “Nazi chic” fashion her apartment in the fortress is decorated solely in black and white. There’s an old vet here who is officially the commandant, but Hanne is clearly in charge, and this puzzles Leonard. He soon runs afoul of the woman, though; when he’s called into her presence because he speaks fluent German, Hanne demands that Leonard act as her official translator for the American prisoners. When Leonard refuses, he soon understands he’s made a powerful enemy, one who will enjoy toying with him. 

So begins a twisted sort of psycho-sexual tale in which Hanne constantly abuses and humiliates Leonard – making him scrub the floor and then dumping the bleach-filled water on his face, having him beaten up by her sadistic henchman, punishing (and killing) other prisoners as a warning to him, and etc. While Hanne toys with Leonard, saving him “for a rainy day,” she is even more brutal with the other prisoners; she has a few people taken down by her Dobermans (one of the victims a young prostitute who refuses to sleep with a certain Nazi official), orders some other people shot, and in the most harrowing example she has one guy stripped and then beats him to death by smashing him in the groin with a sharpened belt buckle! This is his punishment for trying to kiss one of the hookers in the establishment. 

With her ground rules set that this will be the treatment for any prisoner who tries to touch one of the women, Hanne then sets upon toying with Leonard. In another memorable bit she calls him to her apartment, strips nude, and has him read Faust to her – but as Leonard soon learns, she’s really trying to arouse his lust so that he can try to touch her…and then be beaten to death for it. In another bit she calls Leonard once again and both she and some of the establishment girls are all nude or half-nude, and again Leonard does his best to avoid them. Suprisingly though, Leonard never does have his way with Hanne; Gallagher I’ve noticed tries to be relatively realistic in his stories, all things considered. While Hanne is certainly a smokin’ hot babe, Leonard is more concerned about his safety and thus never falls into her trap. 

Overall this was a very good, very fast-moving story, coming off like a twisted take on Hogan’s Heroes. It doesn’t get as wild as you’d like, though, save for the parts where Hanne is dispensing her twisted brand of justice. Even the parts where the Nazi elite come over for an orgy or two are relatively tame, Gallagher focused more on Leonard’s broiling anger than the sleazy fun. Speaking of which the finale is very memorable, as the Americans arrive in April 1945 and Leonard takes the opportunity to get his hands on Hanne and beat the living shit out of her. Certainly one of the few stories I’ve ever read that ended with a male character beating a female character unmerciful, up to and including slamming her face into a brick wall several times. However Hanne manages to live, and in the epilogue we’re told she was sent to prison, then later to a sanitarium for the violently insane. 

Next up is “Meiko Homma, The Japanese Iwasaki Maiden,” which originally appeared as “Imprisoned For Six Months In Japan’s Secret Female Garrison” in the June 1960 Stag. It also appeared in the first Male annual, in 1963, and I reviewed it a few years ago here. This one also stays relatively realistic throughout, despite the giant birdcage the American soldier is kept prisoner in, but a big difference between this story and “The Sweatered Fraulein” is that the hero of this tale scores with the villainous babe. 

The third story is “Bandana Husseini, The Lebanese Guerrilla Girl,” which originally appeared as “Nude Girl Raiders Of Beirut” in the January 1959 Men. This one’s notable in that it’s shorter than the other stories in Women Without Morals, is the only story in the book that doesn’t take place in WWII, and also features a female protagonist. This would be the titular Bandana, a “beautiful Arabic-looking girl” with “hair in pigtails” and “sport clothes from Paris.” It’s early 1957, and Bandana has made waves in Lebanon for her bandit activities – plus the rumor that she carries “a tommygun with a rose-colored cartridge clip.” This is another one that would’ve fit in the Women With Guns anthology, but Gallagher already had another story in that one. At any rate, “The Lebanese Guerrilla Girl” also has a different tone than the other stories here, almost coming off like a fable; there’s no real peek into the mind of Bandana Husseini, as there is with say John Leonard in “The Sweatered Fraulein;” instead the focus is on her wild deeds, with the anti-heroine coming off like a mythical figure at times. 

Bandana is in her early 20s, the daughter of a wealthy Lebanese man and a graduate of an American university, but when we meet her she’s in jail for having stolen to give to the poor. She escapes, finds safe passage with an old merchant who ends up raping her (his two drivers also getting in on the act), and then ultimately falls in with a group of rebels led by a guy named Hulim. From here she gets her own tommygun, painting it red, and begins a series of brazen acts against the establishment. Per the original men’s mag story title, she often does so in the nude, her and her two female accomplices in the group stripping down for their various commando missions. The story’s most memorable scene has Bandana getting revenge on the old rapist, orchestrating his fall off a bridge and waiting patiently for two days for him to die. Otherwise “The Lebanese Guerrilla Girl” doesn’t have the “meat” that the other stories here do, coming off more like a quick, action-packed tale with a wild child protagonist. 

Next is “Claire Molyneaux, The Commandant’s Wife,” which originally appeared as “Madame Penal” in the June 1959 Male. This is the longest story in the anthology, coming in at almost 50 pages. It’s another prisoner of war yarn, and a bit too similar to “The Sweatered Fraulein.” While it’s a fine story, I think it was a mistake including this one in Women Without Morals, as it’s inferior to that previous story, mostly because this one lacks the twisted psycho-sexual subtext of “The Sweatered Fraulein,” coming off more like your typical prison camp yarn. But given the theme of the anthology, the sadistic commandant is of course a woman, in this case Claire Molyneaux, young wife of the official commandant of a French prison camp in Latakia, Syria (Latakia being one of the places where Nick Carter gets the tobacco for his special cigarettes, at least in the volumes by Manning Lee Stokes – random factoid alert!). 

It’s 1939, and the brief intro informs us that merchant seaman Joseph Kolinsky, of Chicago, has been arrested in French territory on false chages of being an Axis ally, this being shortly after France and Germany have declared war. Along with other falsely-accused prisoners he’s hauled off to this prison camp in the middle of the desert. Soon enough he encounters Claire Molyneaux, the hotstuff commandant’s wife who is given to wearing a military tunic, shorts, and high boots; curiously though we’re informed she isn’t that hotstuff, but still pretty enough to attract attention. Her husband, the supposed Commandant Molyneaux, is old and enfeebled (we’re informed he married Claire just a few years ago and is desperate to keep her), and Claire runs roughshod over the camp, ruling the soldiers and brutalizing the prisoners. But the focus this time is much more on the hardscrabble life of Kolinsky in the prison, losing all the pulpy nature of “The Sweatered Fraulein.” 

At least, Kolinsky is a bit more of a rugged hero than John Leonard, and spends most of the novel fighting back, whereas Leonard didn’t put up as much of an effort. It’s become clear after reading several stories by Richard Gallagher that his protagonists are for the most part normal guys…perhaps a bit too normal, as they lack the square-jawed, ass-kicking virility one might expect from men’s adventure magazine protagonists. Thus, instead of swinging into action, Gallagher’s characters are more introspective and, while they will initially put up a fight against their tormentors, ultimately they will decide that life is more important than dignity. Indeed there’s a part in “The Sweatered Fraulein” where John Leonard suddenly understands why millions of cowed German Jews obediently allowed the Nazis to cart them off to the death camps: because there was always the promise of living another day. The parallels to today were quite strong, here – the hope that someday, as we continue to give up one individual right after another (all for “our safety,” of course), things will get better…despite the grim certainty that things will only get worse. For, as the stories collected in this book demonstrate, once tyrants get a taste of power they will never give it up. 

And Claire Molyneaux is certainly a tyrant, lacking even the wanton charm of Hanne Jaegermann. Her custom outfitt, you’ll note, is almost identical to the one Sergeant Homma wore in the earlier story, but unlike the previous gals in the anthology Claire doesn’t seem to have much interest in men…other than torturing them. So begins an overly long but still suspenseful tale in which Claire brutalizes Kolinsky in various ways, often humiliating him. She also often has other prisoners shot, and enjoys making them toil endlessly on the construction of a pointless road in the desert. The focus though is on the lot of the prisoners, and the villainess disappears from the narrative too often. But as mentioned Kolinsky has a bit more backbone than the protagonists in the other prison camp stories here, and at one point tries to kill Claire, but of course he fails and is tortured more. Also at one point she strips and offers herself to him – the story’s sole concession to the sleaze men’s mag readers demand – but Kolinsky won’t play because he knows he’ll suffer. Luckily Claire is drunk and passes out, seemingly forgetting her sexual proposition. 

Gallagher takes an interesting direction in the finale, in which the Germans liberate the camp, France having declared defeat and the Nazis move in. Claire Molyneaux is placed under arrest and put on a kangaroo trial for her transgressions against the prisoners. Suddenly the sadistic harlot looks like a scared little girl, and the story ends with her being pulled in front of a firing squad and strapped to a stake. She’s crying and desolate and Gallagher has it that you start to feel sorry for her. Even Kolinsky, who has finally been granted his freedom, seems to be moved by the spectacle. Claire sees him as he is leaving the compound and screams for his help, pleading with him to stop them from shooting her. Kolinsky goes over to her…and then slaps her in the face and leaves her for her execution! This unexpected gutting of the maudlin sap was the highlight of the story, but truth be told “The Commandant’s Wife” was my least favorite story here. 

Last up is “Colette Le Gros, The French Blonde,” which appeared as “The Castaway Fraulein And Her Strange Partners” in the September 1960 Male. Even though this story also features an American prisoner of war as the protagonist, it departs from the prison camp setup of the other stories, featuring the unusual plot of four men and one woman escaping across the Atlantic in a 30-foot whaleboat. It’s November of 1944 and as the story opens Robert Corti, a downed airman who served as navigator on a bomber, is held at gunpoint as he boards a boat on the coast of France. With Corti are SS Captain Wolfgang Klausewitz, Klausewitz’s bookish aid Leitner, a mysterious Frenchman known only as Pierre (I kept picturing him as the Danger 5 guy), and finally Colette Le Gros, a stacked French beauty (the most beautiful woman Corti’s ever seen in person, in fact) who is Klausewitz’s mistress. 

The shaky setup has it that Klausewitz, knowing Germany is about to fall to the Americans, wants to escape to Nazi-friendly Argentina. The commandant of a war camp, he knows he’ll hang from a noose for the brutalities he’s carried out on his prisoners. He’s plotted out his seaborne escape, but has been waiting “months” for a navigator to be shot down. Corti, finally, is that navigator, and thus he’s been drafted into this escape attempt. Leitner is coming along because he too is a Nazi, and Colette is going along because the French natives will cut her hair off and brand her as a Nazi-loving whore. As for Pierre, his background and motives are mysterious; a former member of the Maquis resistance fighters, he’s only here due to Colette, who has insisted Klausewitz bring him along. Colette also has the thoughtful insistence that Corti, Leitner, and Pierre “have a woman” before boarding the boat, to slake their needs before beginning the voyage – she’s not bound to get on a boat with four horny men, even if she does “love to be loved.” 

It’s kind of goofy…I mean they’ve stocked the boat with crates of food and gallons of water, and lots of liquor and all, but someone’s constantly holding a gun on Corti so he won’t try to escape. But you’d think that he’d get a chance at some point during the 50-day voyage to Argentina. However Corti is another Gallagher protagonist in that he’s not super willing to risk his skin. About the only difference is that he dishes out a lot of passive-aggressive backtalk; Klausewitz, for example, he takes to calling “schmuck,” explaining to the buzzcutted Nazi sadist that the word is American slang for “boss.” Gallagher seems to have more fun with this tale than the others in the book, giving each character a memorable personality; Leitner, for example, bides his time reading from a book of quotations, always trying to find the right quote for the right occasion. 

Given the setting, the lurid angle isn’t as much exploited. Corti’s early tumble with the native French gal Colette finds for him, before leaving on the voyage, is so vaguely-described that you wonder if anything even happened. But once the voyage starts the only shenangians that occur feature Klausewitz and Colette…who enjoy going off in the whaleboat’s sole cabin for a little loud lovin,’ even leaving the door open so the others can see. Colette later informs Corti that exhibitionism turns her on. And, true to the vibe of these stories, she’s often sporting a bikini during the voyage. She’s more along the lines of Bandana Husseini than the other three villainesses in Women Without Morals; she’s not a sadistic commandant, but does enjoy a nice killing or two, most notably demonstrated when a Spanish gunship stops them and Claire frags them – hiding a “potato masher” in a bag and passing it over as if it were their papers of transport. 

But what starts out as a promising suspense yarn turns into a sea survival yarn. I mean it’s good and all, with a lot of cool survival tips – like eating plankton, or a part where a hapless albatross lands on the boat and Corti catches it and they cook it (after drinking the blood and eating the uncooked liver for all the iron). But it turns out that this is the story, not the interesting opening material like who Pierre really is, or what Klausewitz hopes to do once they reach Argentina. Rather, it becomes a sea story, with all the expected tropes: a massive storm knocks out their provisions, including Corti’s navigational equipment, followed by a hardscrabble existence as they try to figure out where the hell in the Atlantic they are. And all the while someone keeps holding a damn gun on Corti, even though he’s literally the only one on the boat who knows how to survive at sea. 

Suprisingly, Gallagher finds the opportunity to include some sleaze; one night Colette comes to Corti and offers herself to him. But once again Gallagher delivers zero in the way of lurid details; indeed, he informs us that, because of the roughness of the wooden deck and the fact that they’re afraid Klausewitz will discover them, the act is “not pleasant.” Furthermore, Gallagher is not an author who tells us much about the ample charms of his female characters. The word “breasts” rarely appears in this book, in fact. For the most part, Gallagher will tell us a woman is pretty, with a nice build, and leave it at that. Even in the supposedly risque scenes – like when Colette strips down, or wears a bikini – he yields no juicy details, just stating the bare fact that the chick’s now in her bra and panties, without any word painting. Perhaps he assumed the artist would handle the T&A and figured his words would just be redundant. 

As I read “The French Blonde” I started to experience déjà vu, and realized that it was similar to another Gallagher story I’d read – “Buried Alive: A Jap Lieutenant, Three Pleasure Girls, An American G.I.” The two stories are pretty similar, despite that one being set underground and this one being set on the sea. Again Gallagher takes a plot rife with exploitative potential – I mean a hot and horny blonde stuck on a boat with five randy guys (one of ‘em a friggin’ SS officer!!) – but ignores the exploitative stuff and goes for a reserved, “realistic” tone. As I say, the writing is fine, and the character touches are great, but the issue is that this “survival” stuff takes over the story and all the promise is ultimately jettisoned. For that matter, the finale is a harried postscript in which we learn that, upon reaching Portugal (once Corti takes the helm…after the others have been incapacitated by the DTs, a shark attack, and a salt water-jammed Luger), Corti split away from the group, recovered for a few months, and returned to England to continue fighting in the war…and he has no idea what happened to Klausewitz, Colette, Leitner, or Pierre! 

And that’s all there is to Women Without Morals, which I picked up some years ago and intended to read at the time. I’m surprised it took me this long to get to it, as it seemed to promise all I could want from a men’s adventure magazine anthology. But as it turns out, Gallagher’s stories are a little too conservative for the men’s mag genre…I mean these particular “women without morals” seem positively saintly when compared to some of the women in, say, Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood. But on the other hand, as mentioned Gallagher is a very competent writer, providing a lot more character and narrative depth than you’d ever encounter in “the sweats.” Yet personally, if we’re talking of Diamond Line authors, I much prefer the work of Mario Puzo and Emile Schurmacher.

Here is the cover of the second edition:

The Survivor (Peter Trees #2)

The Survivor, by John Q.

August, 1965  Avon Books

For some inexplicable reason I decided to read this second volume of Peter Trees, even though the first one bored me to tears. The helluva it is, I want to like the series; there’s something undeniably cool about an uber-masculine WWII vet still kicking ass and picking up babes in the mid-1960s. Plus he’s a secret agent! And he has his own fighter jet!! But once again author “John Q.” (aka John Quirk) has turned in a slow-moving yarn that features little in the way of the spy action promised on the cover. 

First a note on Quirk himself. In my review of The Bunnies I stated that he’d died in 1969. The other day I began researching Quirk and discovered this date is wrong – like, really wrong. John Quirk actually lived until 2012, and per this memorial is remembered more for his equestrian pursuits than his writing. I’m not sure where the 1969 date came from – I see it all over the net where Quirk’s novels are mentioned – but it does appear that his last published novel was The Tournament, the final Peter Trees novel, which came out in 1966 and was published by Signet. (Clearly Avon wasn’t fond of the series either and dropped it!) I came across a 1969 interview with Quirk where he mentions three novels he’s working on (one of them sounding very promising – a businessman getting involved with drugs and hippie sex!!), but none of them were published. Quirk was also a Detroit-based businessman, so maybe he just lost interest in the writing biz. Or maybe he just couldn’t get published anymore. 

So anyway, The Survivor (a nickname Trees was given by reporters, given his war record or somesuch) takes place “fifty-two hours” after the end of The Bunnies, and opens with Trees flying his modified Crusader fighter jet into Puerto Rico. This immediately gives us the impression that we’re in for a thrilling read…I mean the hero’s even got his own high-tech helmet, personally designed for him by Toptex, with a full-face visor providing him with oxygen instead of the usual mask. But folks, this will be it for Peter Trees’s Crusader. He lands it, parks it, and that’s that. The rest of the novel, believe it or not, is mostly composed of Trees engaging in glib conversations with a host of jet-setters here in Puerto Rico. That is, when he’s not lighting a cigarette or “swimming a quick forty laps” in the hotel pool. 

Also, the opening threw me for a loop; within the first two pages we’re informed that Trees just killed Jo Court, the pretty young secretary of Trees’s boss, billionaire Archangelli. It’s not every day you’re told right off the bat that the friggin’ hero just killed an unarmed woman…and that he feels absolutely nothing about it, as it was something “that needed doing.” I had to go back to The Bunnies immediately to remind myself what had happened, and yep – turns out at that novel’s climax the “lovely” Jo Court was outed as a traitor aligned with Archangelli’s archenemy Martinelli, and the novel ended with Trees taking her up in his Crusader…and cutting off her oxygen. Then dumping her corpse in the ocean and flying along on his merry way. Just to remind you again – he’s our hero! 

But then Quirk is at pains to let us know that Peter Trees is not your everyday white hat hero; he’s amoral, ruthless, and only appreciates fairness when it comes to sportsmanship. A female character in this novel often goes on how “cold” Trees is. What makes it curious is that Quirk clearly wants us to understand this. It makes for a hard-going read, though, as the hero is hard to root for. Peter Trees is so tough, skilled, and world-weary that he’s hard to relate to. I’m also getting annoyed with Quirk’s lack of follow-through on his own setup. So Trees is the personal pilot of Archangelli, but on the side is an agent for the top secret Program Committee, reporting to Broderick Whitehead, who ultimately reports to the President. Hardly anything is made of this setup, and as with the previous book more focus is placed on Trees’s affairs in the line of duty for his employer, rather than for the government. 

To this end Trees has flown to Puerto Rico to get “revenge” on Martinelli for the previous book’s affairs, but once again Quirk hits the brakes and puts everything on a real low boil for the duration. The plot, or at least what I could make out of it, has to do with Trees trying to get a lucrative “rail spur” from wealthy native Alvarez, so that Archangelli can add this to his acquisitions and beat Martinelli from getting it. There’s also something about a fuel injector, which I think is leftover plot from The Bunnies. What this entails is Trees lounging around the hotel and playing golf and trading taunts with Alvarez and his minions, among them a sadistic Brit named Pelham. 

I came across an interview once where Quirk stated that Peter Trees was his attempt at filling the void left by Ian Fleming’s death. But of course the big miss on Quirk’s part was that Fleming gave us entertainment in the James Bond novels. Regardless, Trees does a little literary borrowing with a clear reference to Goldfinger as Trees plays golf against Alvarez and his boys – Trees, just like Bond, shocked to discover that Alvarez is a cheater on the course, just as Goldfinger was. There’s also a lot of brand-naming, again per Fleming, with all of Trees’s stuff the best money can buy. But as for action, forget about it. Pelham clearly wants to fight Trees on the golf course, but everything blows over until the finale. Not that there’s any concern on Trees’s part. He's almost ridiculously macho, content that he can take on anyone; indeed, one almost gets a dose of second-hand testosterone from these books. 

As mentioned last time, Quirk clearly identified with his character, or at least wanted to; the back cover features the same tiny author photo, Quirk appearing ruggedly virile in an orange flightsuit, a fighter jet behind him and a Toptex helmet like Trees’s in his hands. This might’ve been author identification along the lines of Fleming, who would pose with a pistol on the back of the Bond novels. Or perhaps it was some satire on Quirk’s part (as it could’ve been on Fleming’s part as well). Maybe it was a bit of both. Trees though is famous, known for his war exploits and magazine spreads and whatnot, and the book features an unintentionally humorous part where Trees lounges in the hotel restaurant and wonders how many people there recognize him. It’s a wonder Quirk didn’t go all the way with it and have Trees be one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts; I mean he’s really that idealized. 

Things sort of pick up with the intro of Elizabeth Martin, a pretty young American woman who approaches Trees at Dorado Beach and says she needs his help. It will take a long time for her to tell him what she needs; the two trade world-weary barbs for pages and pages. Every single character in the novel is cynical and world-weary, and as I read The Survivor it occurred to me that this particular style would be the last thing I’d expect from an author who was himself a WWII fighter pilot vet. Quirk’s style is so smarmy and contrived that it comes off like some modern-day coastal hipster trying to write a spy novel while sipping soy lattes at the latest trendy coffee bistro. Nearly every line of dialog from nearly every character is an urbane, witty bon mot, as if these people were all fervent readers of The New Yorker. This makes for a very curious – one might even say “quirky” if one were given to lame puns – sort of read. Peter Trees is an alpha male of rugged virility, but he and the other characters talk like they’ve just wandered out of a John Cheever story. 

Well anyway, Elizabeth needs Trees’s help; something about her husband having been taken prisoner by Alvarez and only Trees can rescue him. She’s also to offer herself to Trees, though he puts her off a bit. Our hero is quite aware of his charm with the ladies, and if he plans to ravish them he’ll let them know when he’s good and ready. He is quite brutal with women; there’s a part where he comes upon an innocent Pan Am stewardess and, using her as bait, ties her up and leaves her in his hotel room bed as a decoy. He even tapes her mouth despite her begging him not to, which of course reminded me of the repercussions of doing such things, as seen in The Hunter. But hey, at least he’s polite; as with last time, “Mr.” and “Ms.” is incessantly used, even when characters are holding guns on one another. And Quirk also has an obsession with using the word “your” to denote (and mock) affiliations, ie “Your Mr. Archangelli” and “Your Mr. Pelham” and etc. 

Trees does eventually take Elizabeth up on her bedroom offer, though as with last time Quirk cuts immediately to black. He’s not even one to exploit the ample charms of his female characters. Oh, and now that I’m thinking of it, that sexy scuba babe on the cover (artwork credited to Ben Wohlberg) does not exist in the book! I was really bummed about that. Elizabeth is Trees’s sole conquest in the book, and he mostly seems to go through the motions; there’s no impression that he even finds her attractive or wants her. Again, the connotation is he’s more machine than man, merely a conqueror taking his rightful reward. Elizabeth is the character who often goes on about how cold and uncaring Trees is, not that he cares much what she thinks. In fact, he takes the bait to rescue her husband more because he looks forward to the challenge and the danger, and also because it somehow ties in to the whole rail spur plot. 

The climax is spectacularly underwhelming. Trees spends most of it off-page, leaving the heavy lifting to some Puerto Rican soldiers he’s aligned with. Then he gets Elizabeth Martin’s husband on a plane and escapes. Trees’s sole kill in the novel occurs when a villain slips into his hotel room, boasting how Trees will soon die, but our hero of course is unfazed by the threats – and quickly proves them hollow. While there’s no blood or excitement or anything, Trees does have a great badass line when he nails the would-be killer with his throwing knife: “You die an amateur. Now get on with it.” Otherwise our hero doesn’t even get his hands very dirty in the course of this installment. 

As mentioned Avon Books dropped the series after this one, but Signet picked it up for one more volume: the following year’s The Tournament, which I don’t currently have and am in no hurry to acquire. Quirk does try to develop some plot threads for future books: in exchange for his help, Trees promises a Puerto Rican colonel that he’ll come and train his men to battle communist insurgents, and by novel’s end Trees is already planning for this. There’s also another part where Broderick Whitehead tells Trees that one day soon the Program Committee will want to know the story behind Archangelli, and that Trees will have to snoop on his boss to see whether he’s secretly on the side of the Reds. 

Even to the end of The Survivor our protagonist is a merciless prick; Archangelli has a new secretary to replace Jo Court, just as young and pretty and all that, and she too has her share of witty repartee, even when she’s holding a gun on one of the bad guys. The novel ends with Trees figuring that one of these days he’ll probably have to give her a little sexing – and may even have to kill her, too, if it turns out she’s just as traitorous as Jo Court was! So the novel opens with our hero thinking about how he just murdered one unarmed girl and ends with him musing that he may need to kill another unarmed girl someday. Yeah, I seriously won’t miss this series. 

In addition to the Peter Trees novels, John Quirk also published three standalones. As a random note for anyone who researches him sometime, be aware that one of these novels, 1962’s No Red Ribbons, is abridged in the paperback edition. The original hardcover, which apparently focuses on a pair of WWII fighter pilots and their business and political affairs after the war, runs to nearly 600 pages. The paperback, released the following year, is around 300 pages, and per the copyright page the abridgement was by Quirk himself…so even he must’ve felt his novels were a little bulky and slow-going. But as mentioned the Peter Trees novels were his swan song so far as the publishing world went, so maybe he just lost interest in writing anyway.