Men’s Adventure Quarterly #6

Men's Adventure Quarterly #6, edited by Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, and Paul Bishop

October, 2022  Subtropic Productions

Every issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly has been great, but this sixth volume was really up my alley. It’s devoted to heist yarns, and some years ago I personally was on a hunt for men’s magazine heist stories. In fact, a few of the stories I hunted for but never acquired are actually collected here. So once again Bob Deis, Bill Cunningham, and guest editor Paul Bishop have done everyone a great service by bringing these long-lost tales back into print. 

Even better, many of the stories here are from the ‘70s, which to me was the decade that crime fiction was at its best. This also means that the stories here are slightly more risque than the men’s adventure stories of the decades before. It also means the stories are a little shorter; even the “Book Bonuses” collected here are shorter than those from the ‘50s and early to mid ‘60s. All told though, the editors have done a swell job of putting together a great “snatch” (lame pun alert) of men’s mag heist stories. In fact it would be an even sweller idea if they did another heist theme in a future MAQ. 

A cool thing about the heist stories in the men’s adventure magazines is that they usually lack the fat of a longer novel in the genre. While you still get the planning of the heist and the carrying out of it, the timeline is much accelerated. Also, there’s more than likely going to be a full-breasted babe in various stages of undress (perhaps even more than one such babe) at some point in the story. The protagonists, while criminals, are generally the same square-jawed “Yanks” (as they were always referred to in the original mags) that would feature in the WWII stories the men’s mags were more known for. That said, many of the protagonists are vets; there seems to have been a requirement from the editorial department that the heroes be combat veterans. 

As usual we get nice intros from each editor, with overviews of favorite heist movies and novels. There’s a lot of Bill Cunningham’s usual great art direction here, with movie posters and stills augmenting the text. There’s also a great beefcake section on Angie Dickinson. Completely random TMI moment: I recall seeing a glimpe of Ms. Dickinson in the 1980 movie Dressed To Kill, shortly after it came out and was on HBO or something – my parents had one of those boxes on the TV set that would get HBO or “The Superstation” (aka TBS). I was only six or seven at the time, but man, what I saw was Ms. Dickinson in the shower – I don’t even think she was nude – and we’ll just say I was, uh, moved by the sight. To this day I’ve still never seen Dressed To Kill, but I’ll always remember it for that. 

Well anyway, on with the show. Things start off swimmingly with “The Flying Bank Looters,” by Tom Christopher and from the October 1967 Man’s World. In one of his typically informative intros, Bob Deis notes that “Tom Christopher” was really author Thomas Chastain…and it occurred to me I’ve never read one of the guy’s novels before. Oh and one thing I had to laugh about – the slugline on the splashpage (with art by my favorite of them all, Earl Norem) says that the story features a “whirlpool of greed and laughter” (emphasis mine)! I’m assuming that’s supposed to be “slaughter,” and I’m curious if that’s how it appears in the original Man’s World printing. 

Chastain’s story is a fast-moving piece of crime fiction that dwells a little more on the setup than the other stories collected here. It concerns a dude named Frank Cage, hiding down in Colombia as a ranch hand after some criminal business in the States. He concocts a scheme to heist the “Jetbanco” venture, which is a sort of flying bank for the remote ranches in the area. Cage’s American girlfriend, with her “thrusting breasts,” also shows up for some men’s mag-patented off-page lovin’. All told a fun story that sets the tone for the rest of the magazine, complete with the mandatory “complications ensue” finale. 

Next up is a novella that’s more in-line with the typical men’s mag story in that it’s a long one that takes place during World War II: “G.I. Stick-Up Mob That Heisted $33 Million In Nazi Gold,” by Eugene Joseph and from the November 1967 Male. This is the longest story here, and somewhat reminded me of Mario Puzo’s men’s mag story that became a novel, Six Graves To Munich, in that the framing story takes place after the war, with a long flashback to the war itself. It’s not revenge that centers the tale here, but hero Steve Brock’s quest to collect the titular Nazi gold he hid near the Elbe in January of 1945. 

This one really does read like the typical men’s mag war yarn, with Brock leading his tank squadron against the Germans in various pitched battles. The author works in the mandatory full-breasted babe, in this case a hotstuff “fraulein” who engages Brock in a “brutal bout of love” right on some rubble! I mean the poor girl’s back must’ve hurt like hell! This girl is the one who informs Brock of a stash of gold the Nazis have plundered, and Brock talks his men into routing the Germans and stealing it – even though they’ll have to go up against the Russians, too. 

The “1946” story finds Brock with yet another hotstuff German babe, this one a nurse, as he tries to figure out who among his men is trying to kill him. It’s more on the suspense angle here, but the revelation of who was the double-crosser wasn’t as shocking as the author likely intended. A curious note about this tale is that the yank hero marries the native gal at the end of the story; as I noted ten years ago in my review of Women With Guns, in the majority of the men’s mag stories the yank heroes would bang foreign gals with aplomb, but would generally go back home and marry an American girl in the end. 

“Stop California’s Iron Shark Heist Commandos” is pretty much everything I was looking for in this volume of Men’s Adventure Quarterly. It’s by yet another famous author in disguise: Martin Cruz Smith, credited as Tom Irish in the December 1967 issue of For Men Only. Oh, and that’s another note – all the stories collected in this issue are from the “Diamond Line” of men’s adventure magazines, meaning that the quality of the writing is always good. Cruz Smith proves that here, in a fast-moving tale in which a group of heisters take on a floating casino in Baja. 

Smith also works in a bit of a cold war angle in that the hero of the tale is an undercover agent who infiltrates a specially-selected gang of heisters. After some training they carry out the heist, outfitted in scuba suits and hoisting Stoner subguns. There’s a bit more action in this one but truth be told, I found the writing to be harried, as if Smith had to jettison chunks of plot due to limitations on the word count. The finale is especially rushed, with various reveals and turnarounds happening so quickly that they don’t really resonate. 

Don Honig, one of the few men’s adventure magazine authors still with us today, shows up in another MAQ with “Band Of Misfits,” from the January 1970 Action For Men. I really appreciated Bob’s intro for this, as in it Don Honig himself shares the background on the story, which he came up with while on vacation. This yarn is a bit more smallscale than the previous ones, seeing a somewhat smalltime heister planning to hit a casino in Mexico. But then he runs into a hotstuff blonde divorcee with “huge, soft breasts,” and just as our hero predicts the female presence only serves to “louse up” the heist. Then he runs into a fellow ex-con, which louses things up even more. Overall an enterntaining, fast-moving piece. 

Next up is a story I reviewed here back in 2015, and thanks to Bob for mentioning my review in his intro: “The Great Sierra Mob Heist,” by C.K. Winston and from the December 1971 Male. Now, do not go back and read my review, unless that is you’ve already read the story and know everything that happens in it. Back when I wrote that review, I had no idea that one day Bob Deis and cohorts would be bringing these men’s adventure stories back into print. But I read the story again in this issue of MAQ, and I have to say I really enjoyed it. It was my favorite story in the issue, in fact. I also appreciated Bob’s intro, with more background from Don Honig on who exactly C.K. Winston was. 

One thing I noticed in my second reading of “The Great Sierra Mob Heist” was the increased focus on sleaze; “hero” Asherman gets it on with both the nubile babes who are involved in the heist, and author Winston heightens the sleazy vibe of the remote gambling resort with a part where a couple have sex in a sauna – an act of cheap showiness that prudish Asherman doesn’t think much of. There are also minor sleazy details like Asherman putting his hand down the “hot pants” of one of his conquests, and the girl “widen[s] her stance to accommodate him.”  There’s also more violence, like the opening bit of Asherman brutally and gorily killing off an ex-con who recognizes him; an interesting parallel to an event in Honig’s “Band Of Misfits.”  

“The G.I. Wild Bunch” is by prolific men’s mag author Grant Freeling and from the March 1975 Male. This one detours from the heist vibe of the other stories in that it’s more about a guy trying to clear his name. There’s a “Yankee Gang” hitting places in early ‘70s West Germany, and it appears to be a group of American G.I.s behind it. Our hero, Landers, is a ‘Nam vet with a shady past who is set up by the heist mob, falling for a “fraulein” honey trap who steals his ID. This bit contains the phenomenal line: “[Landers] realized, to his astonishment, that the large, round, but thrustingly firm breasts beneath her dress were not supported by a bra. The unseen nipples hardened instantly…” Of course the lovin’ happens off-page, but still, great line. Otherwise this one’s like The Fugitive, with Landers evading the military police while tracking down the heisters who framed him. 

More G.I.s-turned-heisters hijinks ensue with “G.I. ‘Hayseeds’ Who Pulled A $2 Million Gold Heist,” by Frank Porter as told to Michael Cullen and from the July 1975 Male. This one rides on the rednecksploitation vibe of the mid-‘70s, with a “hayseed” narrator telling us all the misadventures he and his two buddies endured while trying to hijack some counterfeit coins up in Canada. An interesting note about this one is that it’s the only story here without a female presence. Instead, things play out more on a dark comedy nature with the narrator telling us how one thing after another goes wrong in the heist, as it turns out the coins belonged to the Mafia. The “G.I.” nature isn’t much played up in the actual story, and is just more indication that these men’s mags tried to cater to a readership likely made up of ex-G.I.s. 

The final yarn is even more oddball in its riding of current trends: “Arizona’s Incredible ‘Kung Fu’ Vengeance Heisters,” by Grant Freeling and from the November 1973 Male. This is another longish yarn, and also the second story in this MAQ by Freeling, who has always been one of my favorite men’s mag authors. Here Freeling combines three setups: a heist, revenge, and kung-fu. He also gets the sleaze in, with the story opening with hero Hal Brice checking out a “voluptuous” blonde. Of course, within a few paragraphs he’ll be in bed with her, this being a men’s mag story. 

In his intro Bob Deis notes how Bruce Lee’s image was ripped off for the story’s splashpage, but I couldn’t help but notice the similarity of the hero’s name, as well: I mean, Hal Brice. He too is a former G.I., and in quickly rendered backstory we learn how his father was rendered destitute by an evil land baron. This guy had teenaged Brice beaten up, after which our hero went to ‘Nam – where he, of course, learned kung-fu – and now Brice has returned to the States to get a little revenge. The voluptuous blonde is part of his vengeance scheme, being as she is the secretary (and of course mistress) of the evil baron. 

This is the rare men’s mag story that also makes reference to the more liberal times; one of Brice’s associates is a former ‘Nam pilot who now does marijuana runs across the border, but has had to stop due to the recent crackdown. This is relayed bluntly, with no condemnation or anything. Now that I think of it, how I wish there was a men’s mag story about dope-running pilots. Hell, maybe there is – Bob Deis would know. Anyway, the kung-fu stuff only factors in the frequent action scenes, with Brice insisting “no guns” and using only hands and feet during the heist of the baron’s coffers. But like so many other stories here, the tale ends with a surprise betrayal or two. Overall, this was a great way to round out the issue. 

It came out a few months ago, but Men’s Adventure Quarterly is still available at Amazon, and would make for perfect escapist summer reading. These stories can be brain-rotting, though. This is also TMI, but one day I was at work, and I’d just been reading this issue of MAQ in the morning, and this lovely young coworker happened to walk by my desk, with a tight top showing off her ample charms (which us male coworkers aren’t supposed to notice, of course, I mean the toxic masculinity of it all). No lie, friends, but the phrase “jutting breasts” popped unbidden into my head. Unfortunately, she did not saunter over to my desk to offer her services in whatever heist I might be cooking up. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men's Mag Roundup: U-Boat Hit Men, Cycle Breakouts, and Yank Saboteurs

Amid all of the sex articles and advertisements there’s actually a pretty good pulp WWII tale in the June 1975 issue of Male: “The US Navy’s U-Boat Hit Men,” by Charles Kennon, a True Book Bonus that, while not as long as earlier such features, is still long enough to provide an enjoyable tale. It’s late summer 1942 and Navy Intelligence officer Tom Sapinksy’s mission is personal; earlier in the year his younger brother was killed when his ship was attacked by a merciless U-Boat that even gunned down the American sailors as they clung to lifeboats. Now Sapinsky is putting together a team of killers to even the score.

In pure Dirty Dozen style Sapinsky deliberately chooses the nastiest dudes he can find. Chief among them is Rick Jackman, a Chicago button man who Sapinsky had many dealings with back when Sapinsky was a cop in the pre-War years. He also gets a demolitions guy, a marskman, and finally rounds out the six-person team with Gretta Wulff, a Czech lady who has lived in Germany and will use her beauty per men’s mag tradition to ensnare horny Nazis. Unfortunately the brevity of the piece hampers Kennon from filling out the majority of these characters; it would be nice if there really was a true “U-Boat Hit Men” book.

Sapinksy considers the team to be “hit men,” and they really live up to the mantle; sneaking into Hamburg they go about murdering several U-Boat commanders who are all stationed here. The hits are carried out Mafia style, with captains getting gunned down as they leave whorehouses or being blown up by car bombs. There’s even a Godfather riff where Jackman walks right up to a captain as the guy’s having dinner in a restaurant and blows the dude’s head off, then calmly turns around and walks out.

Earl Norem’s cover painting actually illustrates a scene in the story, as the team converges on their last mission, ambushing a ribald party that goes down inside of a docked U-Boat. Kennon vaguely describes the lurid activities as drunk sailors cavort with whores while three of Sapinksy’s men get in frogmen gear and plant explosives on the U-Boat. This leads to a brief action scene with the team blowing away the emerging Nazis. Even the finale of The Dirty Dozen is followed, with the team suffering major losses – even moreso than in EM Nathanson’s novel.

The rest of the material is the expected “sex research” stuff, but there’s also “The Texan who Terrorizes the Sicilian Mafia,” a Joe Dennis tale about Vincent D’allesandro, a Texan on honeymoon in Sicily where his wife is gunned down when the couple stumbles upon a mob war. D’allesandro trains himself in the use of the lupara, aka the mini-shotguns favored in this part of the world, and hooking up with a pretty local gal he wages war on the Sicilian mob responsible for his wife’s death – in between bouts of sex, of course, D’allesandro quickly learning to move on after the loss of his wife.

The extra-length story in the April 1971 Male is even better: “Cycle Breakout Across Nazi Germany,” by Charles Warner, a fast-paced tale in which an OSS agent named Arnold Wassserman ventures into Germany to find a woman that has valuable intel and then deliver her into Allied hands. However the woman, Utta Wulf, happens to be a Nazi officer, and Wasserman is uncertain if he can trust her. The “cycle” is a BMW motorcycle with side car that will serve as their sole means of escape to Switzerland.

Warner opens the story with Wasserman and Utta already sleeping together – again, per men’s mag tradition, the gal freely gives herself to the guy mere moments after they meet – and Wasserman still wondering if he can trust her. She’s a high-ranking member of the SS and has the double lightning bolt sigil tattooed beneath her right arm, “marking her now and forever as a member of the Nazi party.” Wasserman’s uncertainty is compounded when a savage pounding comes at the door of Utta’s apartment, and she cracks it open, sticks out her Luger, and blows away whoever’s standing out there, sight unseen!

Of course it turns out they were Nazis – “Only the SS knocks on doors like that,” explains Utta. Wasserman is here because Utta’s uncle was a Nazi scientist who worked with the jelly needed to create bombs; sickened by the war he turned on the Nazis, contacting the Allies and offering to let them know where the secret jelly-producing plants in Germany were in exchange for exfiltration from Nazi Germany. He was killed before this could happen, but Utta has the info, which she has memorized and won’t give away until she’s safely out of Germany – she too claims to now be against the Nazi party.

The titular cycle plays only a small part, Wasserman driving as Utta sits in the side car. There’s only one action scene in it, as they break through a Nazi gatepost, Utta mowing down the young soldiers with her “special SS” submachine gun. Wasserman himself doesn’t do much, and Warner plays up more on the characterization, with Wasserman given more depth than the average men’s adventure protagonist. Haunted by past missions, ravaged both physically and mentally, he just wants to get this final mission done so he can escape to a desk job. Given this, he makes numerous mistakes throughout the story and is fraught with self-doubt.

Utta handles the brunt of the action, and also provides convenient shelter for when they head into a massive snowstorm; Utta’s conman cousin, who lives near the German/Switzerland border. But the dude tries to turn in Utta for the reward, and in the quick fight Wasserman’s forearm is mostly blown off and Utta wastes her cousin. Wasserman wakes up to find himself safely in Switzerland, where Utta has brought him; after giving the Allies the intel she stays there, and we learn in a postscript that she was actually a deep-cover Russian spy.

On an adventure fiction tip there’s “We Survived Africa’s Island of Killer Baboons” by Ken Dawson, a first-person narrative about an adventurer who is hired to fly an anthropologist and his sexy daughter onto infamous “Ape island” in Mozambique. This is a fairly long story and of course plays up to the expected tropes, with our hero and the daughter, Ilse, getting cudly as they make their way to the island, culminating in lots of violence as the legendary man-sized baboons attack them.

There’s also “The Nude Pays Off,” a “special fiction” piece by Pat Dowell; another first-person narrative, this one about a bartender who is approached by one of his many female patrons/conquests to help her in a robbery. Otherwise we have the usual assortment of sex research pieces, including yet another one that’s given over to (fake) transcripts as a reporter checks out the porno shops in Denmark.

It isn’t just a “True Book Bonus” in the September 1970 For Men Only; no, it’s also “soon to be a major motion picture!” But this is a double lie, as there was never a book or a movie made out of Grant Freeling’s “They Cripped Hitler’s D-Day Defenses.” A shame too, because while it isn’t as good as the “Sex Circus Stalag” story I recently read by Freeling, it’s still a lot of fun, if perhaps focusing more on intrigue and suspense than lurid thrills.

It’s May 1944 and Captain Jack Maitland, a “yank saboteur” with the OSS, once again ventures into Occupied France to work with a branch of the French Resistance he’s fought beside many times before; the OSS believes that one of the three leaders of this branch is actually a Nazi informant. Maitland stays on a farm, put there by Coutard, one of the Resistance leaders and thus one of the suspects. Also staying in this farm is Angelique Dubois, a Resistance member who is hiding out after an attack on her own branch – and you wouldn’t be surprised to know that she has the mandatory brick shithouse bod and the looks of a supermodel.

Coutard however has a definite interest in Angelique, so Maitland plays it cool, focusing instead on his mission. He sets it up so that each man must go on a perilous assassination mission, Maitland going along, the idea being that, if one of them is a traitor, he will take advantage of it being just Maitland and himself and thus do away with Maitland if the opportunity arises. However none of the men prove to be traitors as they kill the Germans. The hits are a bit novel, for example one of the Germans being taken out by an elaborate bombing scheme as he rides along in his staff car.

Angelique eventually demands that Maitland have sex with her (one thing I’ve learned from these men’s mags is that curvy and busty European women just friggin’ loved American men in WWII). But Coutard finds out and goes into a rage, so that Maitland figures he must be the traitor. But it’s an obvious red herring, and while Coutard drops out of sight Maitland plans a Force 10 From Navarone style blowing of a bridge. But then Coutard appears, proving who the real traitor is (one of the other leaders, who faked the car bombing murder of one of the Germans), and we learn in postscript that Coutard eventually got Angelique to marry him, once Maitland was back home.

“How Call Girls Work as Airline Stewardesses” seems tailor-made for Curt Purcell over at The Groovy Age of Horror. It’s by Linda Ann Sanders “as told to” Barry Jamieson and is the first-person narrative of a hooker who inadvertently became a groovy stewardess, taking advantage of the fact that the job put her in touch with wealthy men, men she eventually turned into her johns. Eventually she puts together a group of stewardesses who all do the same thing, but for the most part Jamieson’s story is more of a background piece on how Linda Ann got started on her “cathouse on wings” scheme.

“Infiltrate, Destroy, Saigon’s Black Market Money Changers” by Don Honig immediately shows its fiction roots: it’s credited to Honig but it’s in first person, and the narrator says his name is “Doug” and that he’s a spy in Saigon! The story though is tepid, our hero going undercover to find out where all the disappearing war funds are going in Saigon; this leads him to a group of black marketers, culminating in a shootout. More faux-“true” stuff is found in “Held Hostage in the Grand Canyon by Three Sex-Starved Convicts,” a survival epic by Larry Wilson “as told to” Sean Sterling, in which the narrator and his wife are kidnapped by the titular convicts, who rape the narrator’s wife before the narrator is able to turn the tables on them.

The “special fiction” tale is “Doctor In The Nude” by Alex Austin, a hilariously pre-PC story about a ladies man who is in the hospital for minor surgery and is shocked to not only discover his doctor is a woman, but also that she’s smokin’ hot. He fantasizes about screwing her, and eventually finds himself having vivid dreams of her coming to his bed each night. Turns out these aren’t dreams – no, the good doctor is merely drugging the guy and then slipping into his bed after the meds kick in, screwing his brains out!

Finally there’s “I Smashed a Killer Baboon Pack,” another faux-“true” deal, this one by Pat Hollister “as told to” Tom Christopher; similar to the baboons story above, this one’s about an American engineer building a hospital in Africa where roving baboon packs are sowing hell, so he heads a party into the bush to blow the little bastards away. Man, the guys at Diamond magazines must've really had something against baboons.

Men's Mag Roundup: Sex Circuses, Female Barracks, and Hooker Stalags

The October 1971 issue of Male contains one of the best men’s adventure stories I’ve yet read: “Raid on the Nazis’ Sex Circus Stalag,” a “true book bonus” WWII pulp mini-masterwork by Grant Freeling. It bears some similarities to Mario Puzo’s “Barracks of Wild Blondes” in the April 1968 Man’s World, but I enjoyed Freeling’s tale even more. Puzo’s story was very good, but Freeling really delivers a fun and lurid tale with more action, sex, and Nazi-killing. Plus it’s slightly more risque; obviously the censor constraints had lessened in just a few years, to the point where even the nipples are drawn on the busty, half-dressed women in the splashpage illustration.

Taking place in July 1944, “Sex Circus” more than lives up to its title and illustration, except for the “stalag” part. Our hero is Frank Becker, an OSS agent whose left hand was chopped off by a Gestapo sadist on a previous mission. Freeling instantly captures a pulp air with Becker posing as a German officer as he rides on a train with a real SS officer, one who too is missing a left hand. Becker puts a dagger on his stump and kills the Nazi; his mission is to take this man’s place as the head of the Fontaine Circus, a French circus taken over by the Germans that now goes around with their infantry, providing thrills and women.

Becker looks enough like the slain German to pass for him; the main element was the missing left hand, but other than this intriguing opening scene Becker’s amputation doesn’t have much to do with the plot. The Fontaine Circus we learn features twenty gorgeous young girls who, in addition to performing in the circus, are also the most skilled prostitutes in Europe, and three of them are secretly Resistance agents. Arriving at the circus Becker meets up with one of them: Brigitte, a contortionist, who immediately tells Becker they’re going to have sex – she’s slept with enough real Nazis that it will be a pleasure to sleep with a fake one! And as a contortionist she promises an unforgettable time.

Becker’s two other female comrades are Yvette, a redhead with “massive breasts” who serves as the circus’s “human fly,” and Lena, an elephant trainer whose physical attributes aren’t elaborated on. She gets the best scene in the story, though, commanding her elephant, Francois, to lay down on a car full of Gestapo agents! But it’s the women who do the majority of the work, using their convenient poses as prostitutes for the circus: Brigite sneaks an infrared camera (“inside of a body cavity”) into the local castle that serves as Nazi HQ and takes photos of wall reports – with her toes – while she has sex with a German officer.

Yvette’s scene is just as fun, with her screwing and then drugging a Nazi cryptography expert, and then scaling the castle wall outside his window to a loft area where she can take intel photos. When discovered, she chops the dude in the throat and hurls him out the window to the abyss below. The finale is also great, with Becker setting the Gestapo up on “what promises to be the greatest afternoon orgy of the war,” and then Brigitte driving a jeep as Becker, with a vise on his left stump to better grip his submachine gun, mows them down. Plus he later escapes with a truck filled with wild and hungry circus animals, periodically stopping off and letting them loose on German fortifications! All told, a great, fun story, long and entertaining, and I’ll be looking for more of Freeling’s work.

“The Truth About Black and White Sex” by Hugh Hettrich, PHD, is really in touch with the early ‘70s vibe, an article posing as “research” conducted by Dr. Hettrich, speaking to white men who have slept with black, Hispanic, or Asian women. (Indian women are not counted because they’re technically of the Caucasian race, you see.) Hilariously pre-PC, we learn from these guys what the female reps of these three races are like in bed, and, even more hilariously, “how their sex life has benefited” from sleeping with them! I got the most chuckles reading the Asian portion, given that my wife is Malaysian Chinese.

“Manhunt in the Amazon Jungle” by Charles Kennan is a fast-moving revenge tale about a guy named Ron Goodwin who has gone down to the Mato Grosso region of Brazil to kill Kunkler, a jewel prospector/pirate who killed Goodwin’s brother. Goodwin works his way through each of Kunkler’s stooges before finally dealing death to Kunkler in the same way Goodwin’s brother was killed – tying him down on an ant hill. “Texas’s Bloody Treasure War” by Archer Scanlon is along the same lines, about a trio of Americans (two girls and a guy) who are looking for Pancho Villa’s fabled lost gold when bandits attack them, rape the woman, and leave them for dead – they track the bandits down but don’t kill them, just take their weapons.

“Cycle Nymph” by Larry Powell is a “special fiction” piece that caters to the then-popular biker scene. Our narrator is Pretty Boy (called that because he isn’t, of course), a biker mechanic who runs into Chance, an up-and-coming professional racer who screwed Pretty Boy over years before. Chance is now hooked up with “the blonde,” a stacked looker who Pretty Boy instantly deduces gets off on racing action. Pretty Boy eventually gets a chance to prove his theory, screwing the blonde on the race track after giving her some thrills in an impromptu race. The sex scene is actually a bit explicit, more indication that writers and artists were able to get away with more in these mags by the early ‘70s.

“World’s Wildest Sex Club” by George Younger is another piece very much of its time – the “taped transcripts” of a “Male reporter” as he’s sent to the Soho district of London to research some fabled new club where sex is for sale. Instead he meets up with a virgin hooker(!) whose skills lay in the oral department, and after a session or two she sets him up by telling him she can get him into this fabled club in exchange for 200 pounds; instead she takes the money and runs. Otherwise the story has nothing to do with the title or the photos.

The October 1962 For Men Only is from the earlier days of the Diamond line, when Noah Sarlat was still the editor. I picked this one up for the “Untold Story of the Red Army’s Female Barracks” cover story, hoping it would be something along the lines of the material in the Sarlat-edited Women With Guns. Credited to the no doubt fictional Matyas Kodaly, this first-person narrative is pretty boring and underdeveloped. Matyas is a member of the underground in Budapest, and as the story opens he and his comrades are in the midst of torturing one of the “Soviet Amazons” who have descended upon the city; we learn that this particular one took part in the burning of one of the resistance members’s family.

The story then becomes more of a standard action-piece fare, with background on how Matyas started up the resistance movement and how they fought against the Commies. The female soldiers only enter into the narrative arbitrarily, as Maytas suddenly reveals that the resistance’s ultimate goal was to get rid of Colonel Novikanya, aka “the Bitch of Budapest,” who commands the female garrison. An unpleasant finale ensues as they kidnap her after monitoring her activities and then tie her to a statue, setting her on fire. The end.

“Colonel ‘Flip’ Cochran’s Daring Glider Ambush” is a popular history piece by Glenn Infield, an author who later went on to a bit of a cottage industry churning out senastionalistic, men’s mag-style books about the Nazis. I’ve had one of his books for about twenty years now, and have been meaning to read it since then: Hitler’s Secret Life, from 1981. Anyway this story is about the Pacific theater of the war, and how Flip Cochran got his start with the “air commandos” and the tactics he taught them. A bit bland, and more of a “real” piece of WWII reporting than the pulp I wanted.

The longest story here is “Hardboiled Doll,” by Nick Quarry, an exceprt from Quarry’s 1958 novel Hoods Come Calling. There’s also “The Frankfurt-To-Hell Ordeal of Hitler’s Flying Death Trap” by AA Hoehling, which turns out to be an excerpt from Hoehling’s much-less-sensastionalistically-titlted book Who Destroyed the Hindenburg? Finally Leo Guild’s “Hollywood Sex Scenes You Never See” (an excerpt from the book Hollywood Screwballs) shows how the Censor was still making unbelieveable demands on filmmakers even in the early ‘60s.

As the cover of the January 1977 Action For Men attests, men’s mags gradually became slick Playboy-esque skin rags by the end of their existence. However they’d still run the occasional pulp piece amid the sex articles, and this particular issue features “The Breakout Bastards of Hooker Stalag,” a five-page story by Joe Dennis. I picked this one up because I was curious if, given that the magazines themselves were more explicit by this point (the nudie photos within are full-frontal), then would the WWII pulp tales also be explicit?

“Hooker Stalag” actually is – mentions of “throbbing organs” and “quick climaxes” in the sex scenes place it outside of the more-conservative pulp of earlier years. However for all that the story is mostly subpar, playing out like an episode of Hogan’s Heroes as written and directed by Bob Crane himself. The “Breakout Bastards” are a group of American and British POWs in Stalag 3Z in the final months of the war; they are under the watch of Colonel Streichmann, a German very much in the Colonel Klink mould – he is chummy with the prisoners and orders that none of them are to be harmed, as he wants to be in the Allies’s good graces once the war comes to its inevitable end.

Streichmann’s latest plan to keep the prisoners appeased is to bring in some hookers. After “balling their brains out,” the Breakout Bastards, under the leadership of one Sergeant John Fargo, continue with their plans for escape – the prisoners of Stalag 3Z are notorious escapees, having broken out of several stalags in the course of the war. Fargo and team use the whores as bait, luring one German away from a guardhouse (the whore wants to kill him, but Fargo insists on just knocking him out) so the Bastards can get past the guardhouse and tunnel their way out. A forgettable story, but it was interesting to see how these tales had changed so much toward the very end of the men’s mag genre.

“Trucker Mob Who Took Over Nevada’s Brothel Row” by Ken Lanier “as told to” Martin Crawford is a goofy narrative tapping into the redneck trucking fad of the time, and is all about a mob that takes advantage of a Nevada whorehouse and the trucker who defends the whores. Even more explicit is JD O’Hare’s “special fiction” piece “The Snatch,” a short rip-off of John Fowles’s The Collector about a guy who “collects” women and keeps them handcuffed in his apartment so he can screw them when he wants. Nasty and off-putting, it suffers from an atrocious ending where the woman, after being freed, comes back because she learned to love it!

The other stories here are mostly sex research articles, from hooker interviews to informationial pieces on “orgasm extenders” and the like. Even the letters page is completely sex-focused, with guys writing in to let the editor know how their girlfriends like to screw or whatever. In a way it’s kind of sad to see what had happened to men’s magazines – the days of stories like those collected in Women With Guns were unfortunately long gone.