Springblade #8: Betrayal

Springblade #8: Betrayal, by Greg Walker

August, 1991  Jove Books

I keep forgetting about the Springblade series…and then when I read one of the books, I remember why I keep forgetting it. Seriously though, this is military fiction more so than men’s adventure, and the escapism one expects from the latter genre is not to be found. It’s all military jargon, acronyms, and characters who talk about their time in the service. 

This one’s even more military-themed than the others, as the entire novel takes place during the Vietnam War. A more accurate title for this volume would’ve been Flashback, as that’s all we get for the majority of the 188 pages…series protagonist Bo Thornton flashing back to 1965 and all the shit he got into when he was in the SOG outfit in ‘Nam. 

What’s unfortunate is that the opening of Betrayal promises something else. Two DC politicians plot against the Springblade team and want to get them killed off; one of them holds a personal grudge, because back in #2: Machete his “balls were smashed in” by team member Jason Silver when Springblade was faking a hostage attempt for reasons I cannot recall. 

Well, these two guys have a plan up their sleeves to get Springblade, and it would appear that this is only so far as the copyeditor read the book…because that’s the story that’s sort of promised on the back cover, only it’s not the story we readers actually get. Instead, as mentioned, the entire damn thing is a flashback to Vietnam. 

Presumably occurring in the previous volume, Bo Thornton has finally married Lisa, aka the Smurfette of Springblade, the one who used to sit at home in the earliest books but has now been retconned into “the computer girl” on actual missions. Now she’s become Mrs. Thornton, and Betrayal opens the morning after their wedding, with the entire team hanging out at the Thorntons’ beachside home, which is where the wedding took place. 

Nothing says “men’s adventure novel” like telling us your main protagonist just got married, but Springblade is only packaged as men’s adventure. More than ever the focus this time is on the military life. While everyone else is asleep, Bo and Lisa sit on the beach and Bo lights a cigar and proceeds to tell Lisa, his new wife, all about his days in ‘Nam, down to the last Cong-blasting detail, and Lisa sits there avidly listening! But I guess Bo is smart to do stuff like this in the early days of a marriage…I could just imagine Springblade #25, in which Lisa tells Bo she’s sick to goddamn death of hearing about Vietnam, and when the hell is he going to fix that garage door?? 

We head back to 1965 and stay there for the duration. Betrayal tells the story of how young Bo Thornton become involved with SOG, the Studies and Observations Group, going deep in-country in ‘Nam and getting in various commando fights with the VC and NVA. His teammates are not ones who would eventually feature in the Springblade team, and there are also a few Montagnards who fight alongside him. Rather than telling a cohesive tale, the novel is more about the various things Bo had to do in SOG, like collecting dog tags at crash sites, and etc. There is also an extended bit in which they rescue some POWs, and curiously this is where the titular “betrayal” occurs, as there’s a turncoat soldier at the VC compound where the POWs are being held, so Bo and pals get double bang for their buck: freeing prisoners of war and killing off a traitor. 

The only enjoyment I got from Betrayal was that, apropos of nothing, it brought to the surface a memory I’d long forgotten, so I guess in a way I should be grateful. Back in college I was friends with this demented guy named Tim, a big football player type who I always thought looked slightly like Henry Rollins – this was back when the video for the Rollins song “Liar” would play on MTV, and we’d joke that it looked almost exactly like Tim at times. 

Well anyway, Tim was slightly “batshit crazy,” as one might say, and he’d go through various phases – like he’d go all-in, whole hog crazy over some new pursuit or activity, usually as a way to impress some girl (there were precious few girls at our college – as one very astute young woman once asked me, years later as she looked through my college yearbook and noted the lack of girls in the photos: “What did you guys do, jerk off all the time?”). 

For example, just a few of Tim’s phases were: “solving” the JFK assassination (which entailed Tim wearing a suit and tie every day, carrying around a briefcase that had nothing in it, and watching the Zapruder film over and over in slow-motion on the Oliver Stone JFK VHS); being a cowboy (which entailed wearing a cowboy hat, chaps, and learning to ride horses – we had an equestrian program in our college, and yes, one of the girls he was interested in for this particular phase was in that program); and also there was a brief phase where he wanted to play hockey, which entailed him wearing his hockey gear all the time, even at lunch and dinner. 

But my favorite of all Tim’s phases was the “mission” phase, where Tim would don black clothes, blacken his face, and go run around at night, like he was a commando in Vietnam. As I recall, the “mission” phase came soon after the “JFK” phase, so I guess it was a logical progression. Our college was in West Virginia, but it was early on the “multicultural” front, so there were literally students from all over the world, in particular from Japan. Well anyway, one night Tim insisted that I go out on a mission with him, and this is the memory Betrayal brought back for me. 

As it turns out, I also remembered that I’d taken a photo on this particular night! It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time it wasn’t very common to constantly take photos…I mean you needed a camera and you needed film. But for whatever reason, the night Tim insisted I go on a mission – which of course entailed dressing up all in black – I took a photo. And here it is, straight from the Glorious Trash Archives: that’s Tim with the blackened face, kneeling, and that’s me standing beside him: 

To the best of my knowledge, this photo was taken in late winter or early spring of 1995. Thirty-one years ago, as hard as it is to believe. I was a junior in college, and I would’ve been twenty years old at the time. That was my dorm room, and note the blacklight Grateful Dead poster, with the fun fact that I am not and have never been a Grateful Dead fan!! Also note the Japanese girl calendar on the wall…now that I think of it, I might still have both of those somewhere, the poster and the calendar. 

But as you can see, Tim went all-in when he was on a phase: note the blackened face and the thousand-yard stare. So this night we went out and our college was right in the woods, right in the mountains of West Virginia, and it was slightly cold and very foggy – very cinematic. Tim’s “missions” would have him sneaking around the dark woods and pretending to be a comando; I went along that night as an observer, because I realized even then it wasn’t too common to be around someone so batshit crazy, so why not enjoy the experience? 

Anyway, here is what Betrayal made me remember, and it’s a wonder I almost forgot it, because previously I’d always thought it was one of the more funny experiences in my life. There was a steep hill with a wooden bridge that connected two of the dorms, and as we were running around in the cold, misty night, Tim caught sight of two Japanese students coming toward us on the bridge – I remember we could just see their silhouettes in the moonlight, as it was pitch black out there, and the two Japanese couldn’t see us. 

Tim turned to me and whispered a certain slur you’ll often hear in Vietnam War movies, referring to the race of the poor unsuspecting Japanese students who were approaching us, and then he pushed me down so that we were crouching in the shrubs beneath the bridge as they walked over us. Folks it was just like a movie, I kid you not, because the two Japanese students even stopped on the middle of the bridge and each of them lit a cigarette, all while talking to each other in Japanese, totally oblivious of the fact that they were being watched by two American guys in black and facepaint – like something out of every single Vietnam War movie ever made! All the two of them needed was an AK-47 slung across their backs. 

Now I do recall at this point I was trying not to lose it, hiding below them in the dark, but one of the rules of a mission was to stay silent. But to make it even funnier, Tim leaned to me and whispered, “Give me the knife.” The two Japanese students obliviously went on their way, and then I recall Tim said something like, “That was close,” and then we were off on the mission…and I can’t recall much else, only that I got bored and decided to go back to my room and get drunk, which is pretty much how every night ended. And still does today, in fact! (Just kidding…sort of.) 

As I was writing this post, I realized the impact Tim had on my life: it was because of him that I moved to Dallas, back in 1996. He moved out here after college to get in the Dallas Police Department, but for reasons I cannot recall he did not get in (they probably found out about his JFK file), and he eventually left Texas.  But when he first moved here he convinced me to come down to Texas, and I stayed here after he moved on. I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had not come down here and eventually met my wife and had a son...and honestly I can’t imagine a world without at least one of those two people, so batshit crazy or not, I owe Tim a debt of gratitude.

Anyway, if not for Betrayal I might have forever lost this memory of that crazy Vietnam mission in West Virginia, which once upon a time was one that would make me chuckle. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the incident, but man for a long time I’d laugh, because I kid you not it was exactly like stepping into a Vietnam War movie. But otherwise this novel has nothing to do with the Springblade series; it starts off being about one thing, and then veers off into an interminable flashback…something I’ve attempted to replicate in my own review, as you might have noticed.

MIA Hunter #13: L.A. Gang War

MIA Hunter 13: L.A. Gang War, by Jack Buchanan

January, 1990  Jove Books

Stephen Mertz turns in one of the better volumes of the MIA Hunter series, which sees Martin “MIA Hunter” Stone and his erstwhile colleagues Hog Wiley and Terrence Louglin fully transformed into a government-sanctioned commando squad that handles any type of action, not just ‘Nam POW rescues. In this way they are now along the lines of the innumerable men’s adventure teams of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but what’s interesting is that Mertz, who created and edited the series, injects more background and character development into the tale than you would encounter in those other ghostwriter-written men’s adventure series. 

To wit, L.A. Gang War opens with a flashback to 1965, with Martin Stone 21 years old and a new Green Beret on his first patrol. Mertz well captures a greener, much-less-experienced Stone in this prologue; while he is not the experienced commando of the series proper, he still has the same determination. This opening also establishes characters who will factor into the novel, like Master Sergeant Chug Brown, “a big black bear of a man” who serves as Stone’s commanding officer, as well as the villain of the piece: Lou Conte, a turncoat Green Beret who, when we meet him, is working with some drug-running Cambodians to ambush Stone’s patrol. With a birthmark running across his face, Conte is easily the most memorable villain we’ve yet had in the series. 

Stone gets his trial by combat, one of the survivors of Conte’s ambush – and also Stone takes a shot at Conte, but sees him get away. We will learn that this has long been a sore spot for Martin Stone…and, of course, here in L.A. Gang War he will get his decades-delayed revenge. We cut to 1989, and Stone and team have just flown in to San Clemente, California, having just completed another mission in South America. Stone has his first post-‘Nam reunion with Chug, who works now as an anti-gang cop here in California. Stone’s team has been brought in by the Feds to rescue a reporter who has been taken hostage by a drug lord he was investigating – and the reporter is Chavez, another of Stone’s buddies (and who also was introduced in the 1965 prologue). 

This is a crafty way to stay true to the original series concept – rescuing prisoners of war – while expanding on it a little, and the action scene here could have come out of a contemporary action film, with Stone and comrades blasting away at Hispanic drug-runners on full auto. Mertz also captures the long-running banter between Louglin and Wiley, with even more of that background stuff thrown in; we’re told here that the two were partners back in ‘Nam, which is a tidbit I had forgotten. But there is a lot of bantering between the two, and Mertz does a good job of making the two characters memorable (I enjoyed the little note that Loughlin reads Robert Ludlum novels). 

Perhaps the best part of this sequence is the introduction of a sexy young black woman named Silky Brown: her first appearance has her in the passenger seat of a Mercedes (with none other than Lou Conte behind the wheel) as it escapes the drug lord’s place in San Clemente. Later we learn that Silky is undercover, merely posing as Conte’s latest girl for some unspecified reason. From her name to her looks, Silky seems to be a clear nod to Pam Grier’s Blaxploitation flicks, particularly Foxy Brown. I was hoping for some Coffy-esque “This is the end of your rotten life, you motherfuckin’ dope pusher!” shotgun-toting sass, but unfortunately – spoiler alert – it was not to be. While Silky is indeed a great character, probably one of my favorite ever in the MIA Hunter series, she does not turn out to be a Foxy Brown type. Hell, her name isn’t really even “Silky Brown,” and she’s just a wanna-be reporter who is trying to investigate the drug-running in the area, due to her involvement with the much-older Chavez. 

Those taking notes will realize of course that this means there will be no Stone-Silky conjugation, which would have been par for the course if this novel had been published two decades before (as hard as it is to believe, we’re in the ‘90s now, even though the novel is stated as taking place in 1989). This is because Stone has a steady girlfriend, something that would have been anathema in a ‘70s men’s adventure series; this of course would be April, who has been with the series from the start, and who has slowly integrated herself into the team in proto-DEI fashion. Even here Mertz gives us more background than is typical of most men’s adventure, with the note that Stone has been with April for a while, and that she still turns him on (in other words, they aren’t married). But as is typical of this series (or ‘90s men’s adventure in general), any sort of hanky-panky between the two must be a product of the reader’s own fevered imagination. 

For the most part, Mertz here delivers a crime thriller that has no parallels with the early volumes of the series; the closest point of comparison, men’s adventure-wise, would be G.H. Frost’s Army Of Devils, only without the drug-fueled zombies. Otherwise there are frequent scenes of Stone, Hog, and Loughlin suiting up and blasting away crack dealers in inner-city shitholes; one part, quite similar to Army Of Devils, has them trapped in a building as both the Crips and the Bloods set in on them. While not nearly as gory as Army Of Devils, we do get good word-painting like “reddish-gray mud” to describe blasted-out brains sitting on the street. 

Oh, and another “modern” intrusion here is the introduction of comlink-type headsets Stone and team wear on missions: “earsets” that allow them to stay in contact while in the field. Certainly this was novel in 1990, but here in 2025 I can’t tell you how sick I am of seeing action movies with commandos touching their ears and talking into their comlink headsets, or whatever the hell they’re called. It’s become just as much of a cliché as the ass-kicking girl who is a better shot and a better fighter than all of the guys put together. 

Well anyway, I sort of lost the plot there. Mertz also pays tribute to his writing mentor, with the mention of a top cop named “Pendleton.” And in many ways L.A. Gang War is sort of a “modern” take on a ‘70s Executioner novel, what with its cast of squabbling criminal gangs who prove absolutely no match for a hardened commando team. The only difference is, instead of Mafia goons, it’s black crack dealers. However Lou Conte emerges as the main villain, and Mertz delivers several scenes from his perspective; another similarity to Pendleton’s Executioner novels is that L.A. Gang War hops around a fairly large cast of characters, not just staying focused on Martin Stone. 

Overall, this one was an entertaining read, and to tell the truth I prefer urban action to the jungle exploits of the earlier MIA Hunter books. But speaking of which, the final sentence of L.A. Gang War informs us that Stone and team will in fact be heading back to ‘Nam, as new POWs have just been discovered. Like they said in the old NBC ads, “Be there!”

Women Of The Green Berets

 
Women Of The Green Berets, by Rand Michaels

No month stated, 1967  Lancer Books

I have to admit, I never would have thought of combining Robin Moore’s The Green Berets with Jacqueline Susann’s Valley Of The Dolls, but obscure author Rand Michaels thought of that very thing. Or perhaps it was publisher Lancer Books who came up with the genre mash-up and slapped a blurb on the back cover of Women Of The Green Berets, who knows. The important thing is that this paperback original of 223 pages does a fairly good job of juggling hellish ‘Nam battle sequences with soapy melodrama – the only problem is, there’s zero in the way of the exploitative stuff you might expect, with the novel ultimately coming off as rather anemic on the trash front. 

The novel also doesn’t really live up to its title, as it is more so concerned with the Green Berets themselves, instead of their women. Also, I was surprised that the entire novel is set in Vietnam; I assumed there would be stateside material with those lonely and sex-starved Green Beret women playing the field. Rather, there’s only one wife in the book, her name Evelyn, and she’s come to Saigon to see her husband, 27 year-old Captain Mike Colby. Otherwise we have a native woman who is involved with Ken Hubbard, another guy on Captain Mike’s force, and also a hotstuff doctor named Nina Field, who is involved with yet another of Captain Mike’s men, Dave Lawlor. And yes, “Captain Mike;” author Rand Michaels for the most part refers to all characters by their first names. 

It's Eveyln who serves as the main female protagonist, and Michaels takes her through hell over the course of the book. The plotting has you expecting that soap opera stuff, and what’s funny is the author seems to be catering to it…only to go in an entirely different direction. Long story short, Evelyn comes to Saigon to see Mike, but due to the war and all they’re unable to meet. Evelyn nearly gets picked up by another white guy here in Saigon on business, but he ultimately turns her down because as it turns out he is married, too, and wants to be faithful. So Evelyn then is determined to have some extramarital sex. She goes into a bar to get picked up, only to get drugged by yet another American here on business, one who thinks he’s accidentally killed Evelyn with an overdose, and thus orchestrates leaving her body to be found. As I say, the plotting is all over the place in this one. 

It only gets more frenzied, as it turns out Evelyn did not die of an overdose, just passed out. A kindly native kid takes her back to his home so she can change into clean clothes (the “faked death” orchestration entailed putting Evelyn’s “corpse” in a crashed car)…and then the kid’s dad comes downstairs, pulls Evelyn back up to his room, and rapes her all night! Actually, this does have a bit of a dark Jacqueline Susann vibe to it. Shockingly, this is I think the only sex scene in the entire novel, though its of course up to debate whether a rape scene even counts as a sex scene. Personally I’d say it doesn’t, but I’m only noting here because this is it so far as the sleazy stuff goes…and all of it occurs entirely off-page! 

So yes, folks, this is one of those curiously “dirty” books that isn’t dirty at all. Rather, it is as mentioned the war stuff that takes more of a focus in the narrative. Captain Mike can’t meet with Evelyn when she comes to Saigon because he’s been tasked with starting up a new base out in the ‘Nam hinterlands, and must put together an A Team to helm the base. So he spends the majority of the novel in the field fighting Charlie. Rand Michaels certainly has an understanding of the nightmarish life of an American soldier in Vietnam, with Mike and team alternately bored out of their wits or vastly outnumbered by an entrenched enemy. Michaels also has no qualms with killing off major characters in these battle sequences. 

Michaels also has no qualms with dropping potentially-interesting subplots. Nina Field, the hotstuff doctor who works the base and handles the injured GIs, has an early subplot that I thought was the most interesting thing in Women Of The Green Berets. She’s kidnapped early on, by the thugs who work for a native who is clearly wealthy, and taken to a place where a VC bigwig demands that Nina do plastic surgery to his injured face. Nina does so – and Rand Michaels displays some plastic surgery knowledge here, again giving the book the vibe of a Susann et al potboiler – but she also permanently disfigures the guy’s face with a “V” and a “C” on each cheek, so that he will be unable to hide his true nature. Nina manages to escape, and tells the military authorities…but nothing else is done with this. I envisioned a plotline of a guy with “VC” on his face coming after Nina for revenge, but it never happened. 

Instead, there is a lot of stuff about Mike and his crew out in the Vietnam jungle trying to get a base started while fending off frequent VC attacks. There is a definite air of defeatism to the battles, so this certainly isn’t a gung-ho combat novel. And yet, there’s no real violence, either. Mike and crew will “shoot down” VC and occasionally we’ll read of someone “blown to bits” by mortar or bomb traps. So this isn’t The Black Eagles, is what I’m saying, and is more of a prefigure of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, with the author managing to convey the nightmarishly surreal atmosphere of combat in ‘Nam. 

In this regard there’s a lot of material about Captain Mike and team trying to fortify the base while winning the hearts and minds of the natives. “Pacification” is the concept Mike keeps drilling into his team. This is an especially hard lesson for Dave Lawlor, sort of the “Animal Mother” of the group, for those of who have read Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers…or seen the film version, Full Metal Jacket (which pales in comparison to the source material). Even here, though, Rand drops potentially-cool subplots. There’s a part early on where Mike and team get some R&R in Saigon, and Lawlor goes out with a sexy native babe he’s fairly certain is a VC honey trap. He goes along with her, pretending ignorance, laughing to himself how she’s so clearly leading him into a trap…and ready to kill her VC pals with his bare hands. 

And the reader keeps waiting to get back to this section – in true potboiler style, Rand Michaels tells Women Of The Green Berets in a sort of snapshot style, jumping from character to character – and the reader is disappointed. Ultimately we do not see any of it happen; when finally Lawlor returns to the narrative, it’s from the perspective of Nina Field, and she has to mend the beaten-up Lawlor who is carried into her operating room. Only through dialog does a bloody but grinning Lawlor inform us that he did indeed kill those VC scum with his bare hands. Strange decisions like this ultimately sink Women Of The Green Berets; it’s like the author cannot fully commit to either a soapy melodrama or a violent war yarn. 

On that note, Mike and wife Evelyn handle the brunt of the melodrama stuff. They spend the majority of the novel separated, until briefly reconnecting during another of Mike’s infrequent R&Rs, late in the book – and here again all the lovin’ is off-page. The soapy stuff is all from Evelyn’s perspective, as after the rape she’s decided she will divorce Mike, due to shame or somesuch, but after a week together with Mike she apparently changes her mind. But Rand throws another plot curveball and things pan out much differently than Evelyn suspected – and the author doesn’t even bother to give us a resolution to this subplot, as the last we see of Evelyn she’s flying back home to America. 

Meanwhile Women Of The Green Berets ends on a big battle scene – we’ve already had a long sequence detailing a Khe Sahn-like siege the base endured – with the Green Berets withstanding a big VC attack. We get more “Animal Mother” stuff with Dave Lawlor cruelly toying with his prey before killing them, and also more on the hell of war with VC “kids” being gunned down in the crossfire, even after the American soldiers have let them go. And here Women Of The Green Berets comes to a close, the titular “women” long forgotten about and ultimately inconsequential to the narrative. All of which leads me to conclude that it was in fact Lancer Books that slapped this “The Green Berets meets Valley Of The Dolls” tag on the back cover, because as it turns out that is not the novel Rand Michaels actually delivers.

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #10

Men's Adventure Quarterly #10, Edited by Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham

February, 2024  Subtropic Productions

This volume of MAQ focuses on the Vietnam War, and editors Robert Deis abd Bill Cunningham have done a great job, as usual, of selecting stories that run the gamut of the men’s adventure magazine field. There’s everything from factual reportage on the war to the escapist pulp one most thinks of when thinking of men’s adventure magazines, and you get even more of it in The Vietnam Issue, which is longer than the previous volumes of this series. 

I wasn’t sure I’d be as much interested in this one, as I thought Vietnam was a little too “real” for the pulpy stuff I prefer in men’s mags. Also, I’m not as much into military fiction, or war fiction in general. At one point in time I ranked Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers as the greatest novel I’d ever read, and Michael Herr’s Dispatches as the greatest “nonfiction” book I’d ever read, but that was like over 20 years ago. In fact, I reviewed both books on Amazon way back then; I even liked Hasford’s followup, The Phantom Blooper. But really, that Vietnam is not the Vietnam of the men’s mags; the surreal, drug-fueled vibe of Apocalypse Now has been replaced with something more akin to Robin Moore’s The Green Berets, or even the film version, only without the patriotic vibe of the film. The writers in the stories collected here never judge the merits of the war, or dwell on how ‘Nam was “the first rock and roll war,” but instead focus on the hellzones the soldiers had to battle through, on land, air, and under the ground. 

Bob Deis provides one of his typically-informative intros, in which he relates his own personal thoughts on Vietnam. Bob as well does not provide his views on the justness of the war, focusing more on how the growing public distaste with it gradually led to fewer and fewer ‘Nam stories in the men’s mags. That said, even the early stories here aren’t gung-ho in support of the war; it’s clear that even at the time the editors were putting a different spin on Vietnam stories than on the typical WWII combat stories. One thing I was curious about was whether soldiers in ‘Nam – or ones who served early in the war and then returned home – were readers of the men’s adventure mags. Or was the readership mostly limited to WWII vets and Korea vets? It would be interesting to see what insights the publishing companies had on their readers back in the day, but that’s just the marketing professional in me, I guess. 

Oh and Bill Cunningham’s art direction is as usual perfect throughout; one story is even graced with an original duotone that was not featured with the original men’s mag publication. The artwork is reproduced with meticulous care throughout, with even the usual “cover gallery” we’ve gotten with previous issues. That said, the “eye candy” of earlier books isn’t as prevalent this time; what with the focus on combat stories, there is little in the way of the female presence typically expected of escapist men’s mag yarns. But as with Cuba: Sugar, Sex, And Slaughter, I’m sure there had to be a few men’s magazine stories that focused on sexpot girl guerrillas waging lusty war in the jungles of Vietnam. Maybe we’ll read a few of them if there’s ever a ‘Nam MAQ followup. That said, there’s a great pictorial piece on Raquel Welch. 

First up is “The First Gis To Die In Vietnam,” by Jack Ryan and from the January 1963 Man’s Magazine. This long piece is factual in its approach, telling the grim story of the first two American soldiers to die in combat in ‘Nam. Sent there as “advisors,” the soldiers engage in combat with the VC and are injured; the story mainly focuses on the plight of the two surviving soldiers, who are taken prisoner by the VC. This is an affecting story, with the extra impact that it is not the pulpy sort of yarn expected from the men’s mags, again indicating that even very, very early in the war the men’s magazine editors were treating Vietnam differently than other wars. 

But the next tale is pulpy, and it’s not only for that reason that it’s my favorite in the collection – it’s also great because it marks the first appearance of Mario Puzo, under his men’s mag pseudonym “Mario Cleri,” in Men’s Adventure Quarterly. Hopefully someday we’ll have an entire issue devoted to his yarns, as Cleri/Puzo is definitely my favorite men’s mag writer…and I’m not just saying that due to some prejudice over Puzo later becoming a bestselling author. In fact, I’ve only read one Puzo novel, The Godfather of course, and I’ve read it twice…once in high school and then again a few years ago. On this second reading I couldn’t believe how much of a Harold Robbins-type novel it was. 

No, Puzo was just a talented writer, bringing a great touch to his men’s mag stories…and also he was the only men’s mag writer who realized he could expand one of his stories into a feature-length novel, with Six Graves To Munich. The tale collected here, “Saigon Nymph Who Led The Green Berets To The Cong’s Terror Tunnels,” is just as pulpy and fun as the other Cleri stories I’ve had the pleasure to read; it originally appeared in the August, 1966 issue of Male. As ever Puzo packs a lot of story into this one, keeping it fast-moving: we meet a 19 year-old new recruit in ‘Nam as he goes home with a local beauty he just met in a bar, but it’s a trap and wily General Fonh wants the kid, Johnny Blake, to tell all he knows about his older brother, Korea vet Colonel Victor Blake, who serves now as head of counter-intelligence. The kid says no and pays the ultimate price. 

Thus ensues a revenge yarn, but it’s atypical from the format in that Victor Blake, who arrives in ‘Nam shortly thereafter to set up counter-terrorism methods, goes about his vengeance a little more coldly than one might expect. There’s little emotional depth, and he’s more about using his combat-trained intelligence – not to mention his penchant for remembering the odd fact – to gradually set the trap for General Fonh. Hell, the dude even sleeps with the chick who set up his brother for death, the lovely Lilly (with her “dusky nipples,” Cleri as ever serving up the goods expected of men’s mag writers), but we’re told this in an off-hand manner…also, that Blake has to “get drunk” to screw her. The climax sees Blake staging a Green Beret raid on Fonh’s secret village hideout, but the finale itself brings the emotional impact Puzo denied us earlier in the story, featuring as it does a firing line execution that leaves Blake cold, despite his vengeance having been gained. 

“Ambush By The Bridge At Nam Nang,” by Jackson Boeling and from the October 1966 Man’s Life, answers the unasked question: “What if Joseph Conrad had written for the men’s mags?” This 6 and a half-page “Book-length novel” is quite tonally different from the average men’s mag story, featuring Vietnamese natives as the protagonist. The author gives us a glimpse of how war can not only rip a country apart but a family as well, telling the story through the perspective of an older Vietnamese who attended a Catholic school and who sees the war through the prism of the old ways, while his son has joined the Viet Cong. 

“The Million-Dollar Ballad Of A Green Beret” is by Garth Roberts and from the October 1966 Man’s World, telling the tale of how Green Beret Barry Sadler wrote the famous “Ballad Of The Green Berets” and had a hit from it. More interesting by far however is Bob Deis’s intro; decades removed from the original men’s mag story, Bob is able to tell the full story of Barry Sadler’s life, and it all seems to have come out of a John Steinbeck novel, complete with Sadler gaining and losing wealth and fame, even murdering someone later in life and getting away with it. Bob also mentions Sadler’s Casca series, and like most guys my age that’s how I came to know of him; man I used to always see those paperbacks at the local WaldenBooks, but I never read any of them because there were so many of them that I was daunted by the prospect. And also, so far as I can recall, I never came across the first volume, so that further made it all seem like a too-daunting prospect. 

We’re back to the pulpy escapism with “Saga Of ‘Mad Mike’ Kovacs and His Battling Lepers of Vietnam,” by Glenn Infield and from the January 1967 Male. I’ve read and reviewed some other Infield men’s mag stories here on the blog, and also I know his name from various military paperbacks he published, so I appreciated Bob’s intro piece on the author. Otherwise this is an entertaining story of Kovacs, who is dropped into a leper colony to figure out how the VC are smuggling weapons across the Cambodian border, and he uses the lepers as his commando squad. Not much as done with this setup as you might expect, and indeed more detail is placed on the “blunderbuss,” a sled made out of the bed of a helicopter with two .50-caliber machine guns and a grenade launcher mounted on it. Kovacs places this on a path in the jungle and blasts the VC to oblivion in a memorable finale that brings to mind the climax of the 2008 Rambo. 

Robert F. Dorr provies the realistic war fiction he would become known for with “MIG Bait Over North Vietnam,” from the February 1968 Man’s Magazine. This one features Major Paul Gilmore getting in an aerial dogfight with a MIG over ‘Nam in 1966, and is very much in a “military fiction” style – and, per Bob’s insightful intro, is based on a real event, as typical of Dorr’s men’s mag work. 

“Mission Imperative: Smash The Cong’s Terror Tunnels” is by Eric Breske and from the November 1968 True Action; despite the sly callout to a famous TV show of the time in the title, this one’s not a spy yarn, but instead focused on the famous “Tunnel Rats” of the war. Here we read the claustrophobic tale of Captain Horten and his 3-man Tunnel Rat squad as they chase Charlie beneath the Earth, encountering incredible heat and fire ants and booby traps. A tale that again brings to light the plight of the average soldier in ‘Nam, and what was expected of them, and also one that concludes on an unexpected emotional touch with the note that Horten’s squad – as well as others – often adopted children who had been orphaned by the war, making them the “official mascots” of their squads and such. 

Likely the most gripping piece in Michael Herr’s Dispatches is the long, surreal piece on Khe Sahn, which I believe was originally published in Life or something, years before Dispatches came out. The next story here, “Ambush! The Horror At Khe Sahn,” provides the men’s mag take on this nightmarish siege. It’s by Dave Graham and from the June 1969 Bluebook. While not capturing the psychedelic soul-horror of Herr’s piece, Graham’s nonetheless documents the “hell in a very small place” that was Khe Sahn, where American soldiers at the titular base endured a four-month siege. 

This MAQ ends on a downbeat note with “Uncle Sam’s Universal Shafting Of Viet Vets,” by Ed Hymoff and from the November 1972 Saga. The author tells us of the dispirited post-war lives of vets who gave so much in the war, “shafted” by the very government they gave so much to. But again it’s Bob’s intro that has the most impact, telling from his own observations how vets were ignored back in the day – compared to how they are given their due today. 

In addition to all the above there are some great pieces throughout, like one on Army comics of the war by Bill Cunningham, and also Paul Bishop serves up a great piece on the Vietnam-focused men’s adventure paperbacks that were ubiquitous in the ‘80s. As mentioned before, I quite remember this as well, and indeed had a few volumes of The Black Eagles (if for nothing other than the covers!), and also I had several volumes of Eric Helm’s Vietnam: Ground Zero, which I got every other month in a package from Gold Eagle, but I never, ever read a single one of them. 

So, once again this volume of Men’s Adventure Quarterly is a winner, so I highly recommend you pick up a copy of MAQ #10 yourself! 

Good Guys Wear Black

Good Guys Wear Black, by Max Franklin

March, 1978  Signet Books

This marks the second Chuck Norris tie-in I’ve reviewed; the first one was Invasion USA, which is still one of the best film novelizations I’ve ever read. I can’t say the same about Good Guys Wear Black, though, and it’s not solely due to author Max Franklin (apparently veteran crime writer Richard Deming), but due to the middling nature of the story itself. An awesome premise – the former members of a ‘Nam special forces team being killed off one by one – is neutered by an uncertain “comedic murder mystery” tone and a sluggish pace. What with the romantic bantering between the lead male and female characters and the infrequent – much too infrequent – action scenes, it almost comes off like Chuck Norris starring in The Thin Man. 

Unlike Invasion USA, I can’t compare this novelization to the film itself, as I’ve never seen Good Guys Wear Black. Even as a kid who would dutifully watch any and all action movies in the ‘80s I never watched it; but then, it seemed “old” to me, given that it was from the ‘70s. And at the time I even tried to watch all of Chuck Norris’s movies, if for no other reason than I studied karate for a few years via a school aligned with his United Fighting Arts association, or whatever it was called. Chuck himself never came to the school for a lesson, but one day Bill “Superfoot” Wallace did; I think he’d featured in one of Chuck Norris’s films, but I can’t remember which. I just remember him doing some demonstrations for the class and knocking the teacher around a good bit. So far as I can remember, this would’ve been summer of 1985, and I was ten years old. 

Anyway, Good Guys Wear Black predates Norris’s ‘80s action stardom, and judging from the trailer seems to have been an attempt at launching him as an action star, with an appropriate cast to back him up. I mean, “guest starring Jim Backus!” However judging from the trailer it looks like it might just be a slight cut above the average grindhouse/drive-in fare of the day. I’ve been told that the trailer features the majority of the film’s action sequences, most notably the bit where Norris’s character jump-kicks into a car windshield (a stunt actually performed by Chuck’s brother, I’m also told). Having read the book, I can believe it, as there’s hardly any action in Good Guys Wear Black, and instead it comes off more like an investigative thriller with a lot of comedic banter and occasional karate fights. 

But really, the martial arts don’t play too big a part in the storyline. In fact Norris’s character, Major John T. Booker, seems more prone to using a gun than his hands or feet. He’s also a lot more verbose and witty than the characters Norris would become known for, plus he has a penchant for reading the classics. We meet Booker in the final days of the Vietnam War; the novel opens like a prefigure of the later Black Eagles series, with Booker’s Special Ops squad The Black Tigers being rounded up by CIA handler Saunders for one more job. In the novel’s opening we’ve learned the political background to this; about a hundred and fifty CIA operatives have been captured by the North Vietnamese, and despite the upcoming peace talks the NV want to kill them off. It will be up to the twelve-man Black Tigers to save them. 

Franklin, if Deming he really be, isn’t very flashy with the action scenes. This certainly couldn’t be confused with a men’s adventure novel; the author rushes through the action, telling the majority of it via very long, convoluted sentences – ie, “As Gordie started to cut at the wire with his postasnips, one of the guards from the barracks who had cut down the Black Tigers’ rearguard team, then in turn had been cut down by Potter, Holly, and Walker, opened his slitted eyes.” I mean it’s almost like something out of a William Burroughs cut-up. I did get amusement out of how Minh, the Vietnamese member of the team, would throw around “Sirakens” in battle. But it’s all spectacularly bloodless, and since you don’t know any of the characters you don’t react very much to their heavy losses. 

For Booker has soon discovered that this is a trap. Half of the team is wiped out, and Booker manages to get the survivors to safety and trek through a few hundred miles of enemy terrain – all of which is curiously left off-page. When next we see Booker he’s back at the army base, where Saunders tells him he himself was unaware it would be a setup. The CIA thinks that Minh, the Vietnamese, was a traitor, but Booker doesn’t buy this given that Minh was killed in the battle. This incident will set up the plot of Good Guys Wear Black, but we cut forward a few years, to the late ‘70s, and meet up with Booker again: now he teaches political science at UCLA and, the author notes, sports a moustache. He also drives a Porsche, though how he could afford such a thing isn’t elaborated on. 

In an unexpected development, Booker and Saunders have maintained their friendship post-‘Nam, with Deming (let’s just assume it was him) including such stuff as Saunders attending Bookers’s graduation. Saunders is still CIA, though, and one day he’s approached by a hotstuff brunette reporter who calls herself Marilyn Cook. In a sequence that’s a little hard to buy, Marilyn manages to get this veteran CIA agent to blab classified intel about the last Black Tigers mission, a subject which the reporter seems to know a bit too much about. From there she goes to meet with Booker himself, now referring to herself as Margaret Cash: “By the way she jiggled when she rose to her feet, Booker realized she was wearing no brassiere.” 

Booker’s a bit randier than one might expect; he hits on Margaret like a regular Butler, with a lot of goofy innuendo in the witty rapport. When the two perform the inevitable deed, Deming keeps it well off-page. This is where I got those Thin Man vibes, as Booker and Margaret turn into a murder-solving romantic duo, trading witty banter throughout, even when their lives are in danger. It soon becomes apparent that someone is killing off the surviving Black Tigers, and Booker and Margaret shuffle around the country just in time to see two of them get wasted – in true pulp fashion, just as they’re about to reveal pertinent information. 

Along the way Booker learns that this goes to near the top of DC, and also that Margaret is a lawyer and not a reporter. He also learns that someone he thought was dead is still alive, and this leads to the novel’s sole martial arts scene as he and this character fight it out in a ski lodge. But as mentioned there’s just as much gun-play, like for example when some guy puts a gun to Margaret’s head and Booker, “an expert snap-shot,” shoots him in the head. But Deming’s method of relaying action leaves a lot to be desired. As in the example above, it’s mostly made up of overly long sentences, ie “this happened, then this happened, then that happened.” There’s no impact to any of it, no dramatic thrust. 

Even when Booker himself suffers a loss, the reader is robbed of much emotion given the way it’s handled in the narrative. Also it’s worth noting that the climax is not a big action affair, as one might expect, but instead sees Booker squaring off against the DC jackals who were behind the fiasco. In many ways it’s like the producers of Good Guys Wear Black weren’t certain what type of movie they wanted: an action feature or a political thriller, and they tried to combine the two with a bit of a romcom overlay. But, as the muddled nature of this novelization implies, it didn’t really work out, leaving me to conclude that there was a much better story here than what we got. Now maybe one of these days I’ll watch the movie!

Deathmate

Deathmate, by Martin Caidin
October, 1982  Bantam Books

Here’s another review I’ll begin with thanks to Zwolf, who mentioned this novel in my review of Martin Caidin’s subpar drug smuggling yarn Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve. I found a copy of Deathmate immediately after I read Zwolf’s endorsement, and luckily this one turned out to be a lot more affordable than Caidin’s other books, particularly his Six Million Dollar Man novels.

But speaking of Caidin’s famous creation, it would appear that by 1982 Caidin himself wasn’t a “name” author, for Deathmate was a paperback original. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer paperback originals, always have and always will. But anytime I see an author moving from hardcover, with all the prestige, industry reviews, and marketing that entails, to the sometimes-obscure world of paperback originals, I figure his popularity has waned. The same thing even happened to Herbert Kastle, who briefly was relagated to paperback originals in the mid-‘70s.

Regardless, Deathmate is a lot more entertaining than that earlier Caidin novel, and for the most part avoids all the goofs and clunky writing of Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve. Until the very end, at least. The first third of Deathmate barrels along at a crazy clip, featuring a “hero” who massacres thousands of men, women, and children in early 1960s Vietnam.

I put hero in quotes for several reasons. For one, protagonist Ron Previn is such an emotionless cipher that it’s hard to feel anything for him in the course of the novel (which by the way runs to a too-long 226 pages of small print). But also because, as mentioned, he kills literally thousands of unarmed villagers in pre-war Vietnam, either blowing them up or ripping them apart with his .22 Magnum “Spaghetti gun” (presumably the machine pistol depicted on the cover).

Curiously, Caidin doesn’t inform us at the beginning of the book that all this is occuring at least twenty years before the publication date. In fact, the majority of Deathmate appears to occur in the early ‘60s or even the late ‘50s. When we meet him Ron is fresh out of college, heartbroken from a bad breakup, and is making pretty good money on a small crew working deep in the jungles of ‘Nam laying oil pipes.

The opening of the novel is pretty much horror fiction. First we see a series of innocent Americans getting butchered by the Vietnamese natives they considered their friends. We readers know this is the work of the Viet Cong, but it’s so early in the confrontation that the Communist group is totally unknown to the Americans who have come here as missionaries, civilian contractors, or whatever. There’s no revisionism here, either – the VC are brutal scum and they massacre people in the most horrific ways. A later bit even has them getting their hands on a prepubescent American girl.

There’s more “horror novel” stuff besides with a creepout description of the massive insects Ron and his fellows encounter deep in the jungle. But that’s just for starters; Ron’s unaware that Americans are being butchered around the country. Then the natives he works with begin acting stranger and stranger, stealing stuff from the site and not showing up for work. One day they set something to blow and one of Ron’s coworkers is killed. They make the grueling trip back to the main site and are met with total disaffection; there’s so much strife here that human life has absolutely no value.

This we’re informed is the inciting incident that makes Ron a killer. While we’re often told he’s just a normal guy and etc, we never actually see it; instead we meet him as he’s reacting to the growing horror of Vietnam, and as he comes out of the shock he realizes there’s something dark deep within him. It’s this spark that makes Ron a natural born killer, the sort of man the Company would love to hire. Soon Ron and Gary, his muscular but otherwise simpering coworker, are being propositioned by some suited spooks, who offer the two the chance to deliver Charlie a little payback.

They’re trained by a muscle-bound merc named Mike who basically steals the novel but only appears in this sequence. They’re trained in everything from explosives to firearms, and even here Ron has the edge because he grew up hunting and has worked on construction sites so he understands how to blow stuff up real good. Mike also tells them to select a firearm that will become their main gun. Gary gets a regular submachine gun but Ron selects the aforementioned .22 Magnum machine pistol which Mike refers to as a “Spaghetti gun” because it rips out like a string of bullets in one go.

The spooks have offered Ron and Gary the mission of going into a VC camp and rescuing a kidnapped American child, a little girl who was taken a few weeks back and might not even still be alive. The three go off in the night and this is probably the most thrilling scene in the book because it actually plays out in “real time,” whereas the later ones are relayed mostly via summary. It’s also an indication of the type of “action scene” we’re going to get in Deathmate. I mean there isn’t a single part where Ron gets in a gunfight with anyone; the entire book is comprised of him massacring unarmed civilians in a variety of methods.

So here Mike sets up some explosives and wipes out most of the village, after which Ron and Gary will do these sorts of jobs themselves. In fact it gets to be a bit humorous because as mentioned these guys waste literally thousands of Viet Cong villagers in the first few hundred pages of the novel, and the reader has to wonder if just two non-soldiers could be so devastating to the enemy then why did the war drag on for so long? I mean these two guys alone could’ve wiped out the entire population of Vietnam in a couple years.

Throughout this Ron becomes even more of a cipher, but an asshole of a cipher. He’s brutish and rude to everyone and bosses Gary around like a peon. He takes increasingly risky jobs and eventually even demands that only he and Gary go out as a two-man team instead of being a part of a larger force. I mean the government could’ve saved millions if these two guys really existed – oh, and I forgot to mention that Caidin opens the novel stating that there really were people like Ron and he even dedicates the book to him. WTF?

This goes on for the majority of the novel, with absolutely no topical details of what year it is, what’s going on with the war, or anything. Ron lives in a daze, only living for his massacre missions. But then on one mission as he’s blowing up another village he cuts down a little figure with the Spaghetti gun and to his horror sees it’s a little American boy, the son of a missionary who was in the village. Ron abruptly quits the massacre business and even hands over the few hundred thousand dollars he’s amassed on his missions to the boy’s parents, after informing them that it was he who accidentally murdered their son!

Unfortunately the novel continues after this point, and here the clunky writing of Maryjane Tonight At Angels Twelve returns in full force. I figured the CIA would just terminate Ron upon his resignation, but instead they send him back to the States and put him up in a nice cabin in the woods. They even provide him with a woman who serves him up some off-page lovin’. After this Ron decides to live in rural New York, and here the novel again descends into unintentional humor.

Caidin flashes forward seven years and tells us everything Ron’s been through in summary – I mean we’re told he met and married some lady on one page, and on the next we’re told that she’s developed a blood disease and is confined to the hospital! We’re also informed he has two little girls. I mean none of the characters live or breathe, they’re just wallpaper – the intention is for us to feel for Ron, to empathise with him, but in reality it’s hard to care about his wife or kids because Caidin does nothing to bring them to life.

It gets even more humorous when Ron is confronted by some guy in a bar one night, tired from working two jobs to support the sick wife, and the guy claims to remember him from ‘Nam – which the dude mentions is now a full-scale war, so my assumption is we’re now in the late ‘60s, not that Ron bothers to notice his own era. Ron shuts the dude down permanently – surprisingly, the only true “action scene” in the book, and it’s really just Ron nailling the guy with a bottle – and gets bailed out of jail by his CIA handler, the first he’s seen him in all these years. 

But here comes the goofy stuff. Ron keeps getting hassled by a woman who claims to be the widow of the guy he killed in the bar. She just keeps pestering him and calling him, claiming to know the “truth” of what he did in Vietnam and how she’s going to tell everyone unless Ron does what she asks, etc. What exactly she wants is never explained; the implication I got is that she wants to get laid, even more humorously enough, because apparently the two have all sorts of hot off-page sex…however Caidin completely forgets to inform us of this until we have a scene where Ron is visiting his wife in the hospital and feeling guitly.

But apparently Ron did the deed with this lady, Helen, and from here it becomes like a proto-Fatal Attraction. Ron’s wife gets out of the hospital, still frail, but Helen starts calling them, following them in her car, and even standing outside her house and staring at their house all day – goofily enough, her house is right across the street. It’s just some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever read in a novel, particularly given that Ron, the object of her obsession, killed thousands of people in Vietnam but for some reason can’t bring himself to kill off this nuissance of a woman.

It gets dumber. Ron’s wife, pushed into depression by the constant harrassment, kills herself with an overdose of pills, and Ron’s family is removed from the narrative just as half-assed as it was introduced. Ron sends the daughters he supposedly loves so much off to stay with an aunt and that’s it for them – he’s already forgotten about them. Caidin wants us to understand that Ron’s shock has broken down the safeguards he erected post-Nam and now the true killer is coming back.

He’s also a psychopath thanks to CIA brainwashing, with a “chorus of voices” in his head vying for control. But again the narrative spirals in an arbitrary detour. Ron goes to San Francisco…and does nothing except walk around. This part was so immaterial to anything I wondered if it was there to fill a word count. Then Ron goes down to Florida and hooks up with a group of “friends” he’s supposedly made at some point, even though previously it’s been implied that Ron has no friends because he talked to no one in ‘Nam and just lived a simple life with his wife and kids the past few years.

However these dudes are all former Company mercs and they let Ron know he’s being tailed and all that jazz. Then Helen shows up again and Ron figures she too must be a Company plant. At least he finally gets rid of her after some off-page sex…in another goofy bit, she basically tries to blackmail Ron into living with her(!?). Instead he kills her in a complicated manner involving makeshift explosives, which is pretty hard to buy given that all his previous kills in the jungle were courtesy the Spaghetti gun and ready-made explosive devices.

Even more humorously, Ron here transforms into like the ultimate secret agent, again displaying training and skills we never knew he had – in fact, skills that would be next to worthless in the jungle. He’s losing his CIA shadows via convoluted schemes, setting up bombs in decoy vehicles, and making elaborate plans of vengeance on the Agency. However he does get back to his chief m.o. of massacring unarmed individuals.

It gets even more difficult to root for our “hero” as he not only wipes out otherwise-defenseless CIA agents but even their families. But he doesn’t stop there. Next he takes out an entire airliner filled with innocents so as to kill more Agency targets. And Caidin even resorts back to his flying fixation with an overlong scene of Ron renting a plane (somehow he learned how to fly, too) and setting up a bomb on a remote control airplane he launches from it, basically an oldschool drone.

It’s all just really over the top and crazy but ruined by the fact that we care nothing for Ron and all this happens without much dramatic thrust. Worse yet we learn in the finale that the CIA is watching all this and indeed is appreciating the skill on display – Ron had a tracer implanted in him courtesy an operation he got without his awareness while drugged in ‘Nam, and the CIA is now shadowing his every move. It’s implied they’re maneuvering him to become an Oswald type who will kill the President.

However here Deathmate ends, on a total cliffhanger. But really after 226 pages of small, dense print the reader is more relieved than frustrated. I was glad to say goodbye to Ron’s adventures and kind of wished the book had ended a good hundred pages before. The Vietnam stuff was crazy in a good way, and well written, but everything after it was a chore to get through, stymied by an author who seemed unable to convey any tension, drama, or emotion.

Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood

Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood, edited by Pep Pentangeli
No month stated, 2015  Deicide Press

It’s a good time to be a fan of men's adventure magazines. Over the past few years anthologies of actual men’s mag stories have been published; previously the only books out there focused on the lurid covers and interior art, usually ignoring the stories entirely.

But that’s finally changing. Bob Deis at MensPulpMags.com has published Weasels Ripped My Flesh! and the Walter Kaylin-focused He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos, and someone by the awesome name of Pep Pentangeli (any relation to Frankie Five Angels?) has published three anthologies, this being the most recent of them.

All men’s mag fans owe Pentangeli a debt of gratitude, for he has focused on “the sweats,” aka the sleazy and sick men’s mags that focused on torture, violence, and eroticism…usually all three at once. These were the mags that featured covers with busty, half-nude women being tortured in innovative ways by lecherous Nazi sadists. And these are the mags that go for big bucks today – likely because the originals were either thrown away or ripped to shreds by mothers who caught their sons with them, back in the day.

And speaking of eras, Pentangeli only appears interested in the genre up to the mid-‘60s; the stories collected within Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood are mostly all from 1963, as you can see in this cheapjack photo I took of the table of contents (which also shows author/artist attributions for each story, as well as which magazines the stories originally appeared in):

The book is a feast for the eyes, printed on glossy paper, with the original black and white splash pages for each story faithfully reproduced. I’ve seen some online complaints that this book and the previous two Pentangeli anthologies feature b&w artwork, but this is true of the original magazines. However, as with the previous two anthologies, Pentangeli does include a color section in the back of the book, featuring reproductions of the garish cover art of several sweat mags. Thumbing through the book is a great experience, transporting you back to a long-forgotten era.

An interesting point is that, while they’re all very lurid and exploitative, none of the stories here are truly pornographic or overly explicit. The copious sex scenes are all in the “fade to black” mold, or at the very least are quite vague when it comes to the juicy details. And yet, these stories still bridle with a dangerous air, even in today’s era – likely because they’re just so unabashedly “un-P.C.” In our modern watered-down era, these savage, bloody tales, in which women are constantly abused and ravished, in which square-jawed, white American men are the constant and only heroes, still pack a punch, perhaps even more of a punch than they did when they were brand new.

I have all three of Pentangeli’s books but started with this most recent one due to the amount of Nazi She-Devil stories in it; as should be obvious, I friggin’ love Nazi She-Devil stories. And the ones in this book are great – in fact, Pentangeli has scored a major victory because all of the stories in this anthology are pretty good, which is really a major coup. I’m sure I’m not the only person to be unsatisfied with many of the sweat mag stories I’ve read, many of which often fail to live up to the lurid artwork or the crazy title. That’s not true here. All of these stories are sick little works of art.

As you can see from the table of contents photo, this book features 35 stories. Here are reviews of most of them, with a little more detail about the Nazi She-Devil stories:

“I Was A Call-Girl’s Boy Friend” – August 1961, and our narrator is hired to figure out where corruption is stemming from in NYC. He picks up a whore named Lucy, who “joy-pops” cocaine. Next night she takes him “behind the Bearded Curtain,” ie the second floor of her bordello, where everyone lays around smoking high-grade grass. Turns out the main importer is her boss, Menotti. But our narrator falls in love with Lucy, who snidely asks, “What do you think you are, my boyfriend?” He slowly realizes he does think of himself as so.

It ends with the narrator and Menotti in a fight, during which Menotti suffers a heart attack; Lucy kicks his pills out of his hand so that he dies. Then she gets in a shootout with a few guards, allowing the narrator to escape! Now he’s on the run, hoping for the day he can evade the syndicate’s wrath and return to Lucy, “to claim my right as her boyfriend.” Goofy but fun, with a nice hardboiled vibe. 

“Cool Broads, Hot Rods!” – This one’s about a “new breed” of teenaged hot-rodders, or as a cop in a “Midwestern city” says they should be called, “Hell-rodders!” Taking on a pseudo-factual approach, as if it were an article in a real magazine, the story’s all about the latest rash of teenaged atrocities. We’re informed of such Hell-rodder practices as “choo-choo,” in which they race trains (usually dying in spectacular crashes), or also “Trail 2,” in which they speed through city traffic without brakes.

And after all of these events there will be a “post-race sex-party.” Indeed, these coke-sniffing teens sometimes have sex while racing, usually dying in spectacular crashes. “If no plan is put into action – and put into action immediately – then more and more lives are gone to be taken by the deadly highway ‘games’ and ‘tests.’ The Hell-rodders will live up to their name – and turn our thruways, highways and city streets into blood-drenched, corpse-littered hells!”

“I Was Eaten Down To The Bone” – The narrator tells us how he and his buddy went on a long-planned trip to Polynesia in 1951. Buying a sloop, they plied around the paradisiacal islands. Vague mentions of how they enjoyed the local native gals. But the narrator’s buddy wanted to visit a remote island one day, and so they went, meeting up with a local chief who bridled at the French Jesuit rule and spoke in a strange hipster patois.

Drunk on the man’s local brew ani, our heroes were so out of it that they walked the wrong way back to the sloop and ended up sleeping on an atoll – only to awake into hell, being eaten alive by white ants, ie “cannibal ants.” The author goes to town here, with horror fiction descriptions of the ants eating them down to the bone, the narrator’s buddy losing his head and arms. The narrator himself loses both hands and most of his legs. The end! I related to this one because ten years ago I was attacked by about twenty fire ants; like an idiot I was walking barefoot in my yard one night. My right foot swelled up to the size of a football!

“Nude Virgins For The Serpent Of Lust” – It’s 1669 and beautiful, blonde, Norweigan Hortense Cerlabaud acts as the Goddess of Set in “the jungle citadel of Iztopolopo,” in Ecaudor. This pseudo-factual piece reports the story of how Hortense went from being a bloodthirsty pirate wench to ruling over the natives; her boyfriend, the depraved Chevalier, worked a white slavery angle into the scheme, with Hortense tossing the women who refused to have sex with her to the massive anaconda in a pit below her citadel.

“A Soft White Throat For The Devil’s Hangman” – This first-person narrative is a bit longer than most of the others in the collection, and it’s pretty entertaining “Nazi Horror” that the sweats excelled in. Our hero relates how he became involved with the French resistance near Limoge in ’44, after his plane was shot down. Hiding in the attic of beautiful resistance fighter Simone, he soon finds himself living the dream life: “My adventure was the kind that recruiting posters are made of.” The two engage in a months-long affair, our hero helping out the cause while engaging Simone in undescribed sexual shenanigans up in the attic.

But when the sadists of the Das Reich Division show up, aka “the chief interrogators of the Panzer Division,” things go to hell – these bastards enjoy stripping down young French women, beating and raping them, and then hanging them. Unspurprisingly, they capture Simone. Going in disguised as a German soldier along with his French companion Henrique, our hero watches as Simone is tied to a chair and strangled a bit – the act illustrated by Norm Eastman’s artwork – before he swoops in and carries her off to safety.

“The Orgiastic Gates Of Hell” – It’s 1945 and our narrator is a prisoner on an island off Singapore controlled by “the Japs.” His two fellow prisoners are Fran McKendrick, a gorgeous redhead chemist who is only kept from being raped and killed due to her work in the island’s rubber plantation lab, where she turns out latex for the Japanese war effort, and another woman, Maya, “the Malay girl, beautiful as a bird, with tiny upturned breasts that trembled when she walked.” This story’s unusual because it’s more about the horrific torture of the male protagonist rather than of the women.

When the fat major who runs the prison hears on the radio that Japan has surrendered, he goes nuts – he bashes our hero’s balls with his boots, grinding into them, and then he chops one of his eyeballs out! As the major takes away the two women to hurl them into a watery abyss, our hero staggers to his feet, picks up a samurai sword, and Pulp Fiction style gains his bloody revenge, gutting the fat major. After a “spell of surgery” he awakens to find the two women waiting worshipfully at the foot of his bed…

“Prison Break Massacre From Chawcagee Hell Hole” – It’s 1960 and the narrator is a former soldier who has worked as a guard at the titular women’s prison since 1953. The story opens with an unforgettable image: a gang of gorgeous female prisoners running half-nude through the darkened woods, their leader a stunning blonde wielding a machete, the severed head of the prison’s sadistic matron cradled in her arm.

Backtrack to the beginning, which has it that the matron, a “bull” with the body of a “tank,” would demand lesbian favors from the female prisoners. When one of them, the gorgeous blonde, rebuffed her, it led to a prisonbreak, in which the narrator was unwittingly caught up. The story ends with all of the culprits dead save for the narrator, whose story no one believes; he ends his tale begging someone to believe him, as they’re planning to hang him!

“A Crypt Of Agony For The Screaming Beauties Of Belgium” – Another longish piece of Nazi Horror written in third-person. Going for a slow-burn approach, it also doesn’t begin at the ending, like most every other men’s mag story does. Instead we meet young Beatrix, a Belgian resistance fighter, as she’s riding her bike to the nearby college, where she plans to secretly broadcast news of British victory in the air.

But the Gestapo closes down the college and takes all the girls captive, in vengeance for a raid some Belgian fighters made the previous night on Nazi forces. Beatrix is taken to a furnace-heated crypt in which women are stripped to undergarments and chained up, roasted over a fire. She watches as one girl is tortured, then the eunuch sadist in charge jams a hot poker into Beatrix’s belly – right before his head explodes, Beatrix’s hotstuff rebel boyfriend showing up at the last moment to save the day.

“Blast Out Of Hell With The She-Beast Of Ploesti” – The first Nazi She-Devil in the book is also one of the best I’ve ever read. Martha Zent, female commander of Stalag 606 in Romania, “the sadistic Nazi bitch…beauteous assassin of 133 American and British plane guys,” is trying to escape her camp as it’s being bombed when we meet her, our narrator holding a gun to her back. He’s only been here for a few weeks, but he’s seen the lady’s sadism. She enjoys stripping down to her underwear and parading before the male prisoners. “First they made love to her, then she killed them.” Here’s the splash page – is it just me or does the dude look like Adrien Brody??

Stalag 606 we’re informed is “noted for its unspeakale depravity and oversexed guards. All Nazi SS women.” Save for the chief commander, Paul Koch (brother, we’re informed, of the infamous Ilse Koch), “a hermaphrodite maniac who not only devised the system of making lampshades of human skin, but also, as a matter of policy, executed at least three prisoners a day – one with every meal.” The sick imaginations of these sweats authors is a joy to behold – on his first day at the stalag our narrator watches in shock as a prisoner is gutted and Martha orders three other prisoners to piss on his dying form! When they refuse they’re gutted by bayonets wielded by “blonde and bosomy” Nazi She-Devils.

Our narrator isn’t one of the lucky hundreds who gets to pleasure Martha Zent, though she comes on strong to him as a ploy when the Americans strike; instead he blows away Koch and then shoots Martha in the face – “I pulled the trigger till the gun clicked empty.”

“Hideous Secrets Of Hitler’s Mad Doctor Of Agony” – Another longish tale of “Nazi Horror,” courtesy Jim McDonald, who was very prolific in the sweats. Like “A Crypt Of Agony” above, this one’s in third-person and takes its time, but it’s even better – and it’s definitely more twisted. Norm Eastman’s art shows lovely young women being frozen by Nazi sadists, and that’s exactly the tale McDonald delivers. Odette, a pretty young Maquis (ie French rebel), is captured by the “traveling circus” of Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, who now goes about France capturing women for his sick medical experiments.

He takes Odette to a building with a freezing-cold vault in which other pretty young French girls are encased in blocks of ice. For spurning the obese freak’s advances, Odette will suffer the slowest of deaths, forced to watch as one of the girls is frozen in a block of ice. McDonald excelled at torture-porn, thus this story is quite unsettling as the poor girl is crushed to death by the pressure. Odette’s turn comes up, but she’s saved, just like the heroine in “Crypt Of Agony,” by the last-second appearance of her commando Maquis boyfriend.

“Writhe, My Lovely, In The Tent Of Torture” – It’s Cairo, 1957, and a gorgeous, well-built young Frenchwoman named Suzanne is our main protagonist for this long if slightly tepid slice of Nazi Horror, which is also written in third-person. An orphan of the war, Suzanne now makes her living as as a sort of bar girl at the Kit Kat Club, overseen by a lecherous Arab. Suzanne pines for a handsome American named Gary Larkin whom she bedded down with a few weeks before; Larkin is consumed with vengeance, hunting around Africa for Kurt Eisle, a Nazi fiend who tortured Larkin in the war and killed Larkin’s girlfriend through some vile torture.

But Larkin’s gone now, and besides the Arab is pushing Suzanne to become friendly with a VIP at the club – who of course turns out to be none other than Eisle. He drugs her and takes her away to a tent in the middle of the desert, where he strips her down and plays a massive spider over her, taunting her with horrifying death. Then he burns her feet with a flaming brand, all to find out what she knows about Larkin. But then the man himself appears, unsurprisingly, blowing Eisle and his Neo-Nazi goons away with a submachine gun and making off with Suzanne…we’re informed the two go on to spend a full two days in Larkin’s bedroom.

“Torture Of 1,000 Cuts” – This one’s unusual in that it’s set in the early days of the Vietnam War. It’s also told in convoluted fashion, the entire first half nothing but backstory. It is however redolent with gore; our narrator informs us how two escaped Vietcong mutilated a few Vietnamese soldiers in their escape from the narrator’s US Army base. But the two cong are themselves horribly killed, as a monstrous-sized Asian dude tracks them down, bashing one’s brains out with his bare hands and then crushing the other’s head into a pulp, again with his hands. The author gives copious detail of the juicy brain matter and gore.

This monstrous dude proclaims himself a “samurai wrestler” and has the strength of ten men. He hangs out on the base for a while, but then disappears – turns out it was all a ruse, and he’s really a Japanese Communist, dedicated to killing Americans for the loss of his wife in WWII. He captures the pretty nurses at the base and vows to slice them all up with the titular thousand cuts, but our plucky narrator chases after him and engages him in a brawl, drowning the heavier man in a lake. 

“Fettered Nudes For The Monster’s Collar Of Agony” – Another pseudo-history piece, this one takes place in 15th century Spain and is about Lucrezia Mantua, a sadistic beauty who rides into battle with her lover, rebel leader Ugo Sorcate: “Clad in black armor, scarlet velvet and leopard skin, her shimmering auburn hair cascading about her shoulders like living flames, Lucrezia Mantua was the incarnation of the warrior female…” Does she also have sapphic tendencies and enjoy stripping down nubile young women and torturing them? You bet!

The majority of the tale is given over to Lucrezia’s torturing of the wife and daughters of the Viceroy, ie the Spanish ruler who has just been defeated by Lucrezia and Ugo in battle. While Ugo wears pantaloons and a mask, Lucrezia wears a revealing costume of black satin; they put the Viceroy’s wife in a garrotte and laugh as she slowly dies. The two daughters follow. We learn that Lucrezia was born in Naples, and her parents killed during the Spanish invasion, which was led by the Viceroy. We’re further informed that Ugo eventually became enamored with a teenaged girl, who compelled him to have Lucrezia condemed to death for being a witch.

“Secret Nude Weapons Of St. Belvedere” – June of 1944, and our narrator is in a rifle company that’s just come into St. Belvedere, a small town in France. The German tanks must come through here and it’s up to his company to stop them, but the only problem is the squad with their anti-tank weaponry is two days away. The townspeople rally to the cause, in particular four beautiful young women; their leader, a knockout named Marie Delmot, claims that she and her fellow women have “secret weapons” to stop the Germans long enough for the weaponry to arrive. Grabbing her own breasts, she proclaims, “These are our secret weapons!”

The four head on over to the nearby town in which the Germans are camped out, and from here the story switches into third person. The girls invite themselves into German lines for a party and soon whore themselves out to the entire regiment, four lines of men standing outside each door. But their treachery is soon discovered, and the German commander has the women, still nude, tied to the front of their tanks! Now as the German tanks invade St. Belvedere the Americans are unable to employ their just-arrived anti-tank weapons lest they kill the women.

But it’s back to first person now, and our narrator tells us how he figures out that when the tank commanders open up their hatchways to look out at the destruction they’ve caused, he can drop a grenade right down in there with them. The Germans all killed, Marie and her three friends declare another party – this one for the Americans, who split right up into four lines and wait their turns… 

“The Ordeal At Jap Camp Agony” – This longish, third-person piece is like a “Yellow Peril” variant of the Nazi She-Devil subgenre. But as is typical with these Japanese-themed tales, the women are a lot more sadistic and lack the pulpish charm of their Nazi She-Devil counterparts. Rather, the evil Japanese women, at least in the sweat mag stories like this I’ve read, are just plain scary. It’s Formosa, January of 1945, and an American B-24 is shot down.  The crew of ten is taken prisoner, led to Akasaki Prison Camp, which is overseen by female guards.

In control of the camp is a busty Japanese beauty named Okatsu. She and her fellow guards, particularly her two junior commanders, despise the Americans. This is proved posthaste as Okatsu cuts out the tongue of a crewman who dares to speak to her out of turn. Okatsu and her second in command, Yuka, run roughshod over the men of their camp over the next months, gutting them, jabbing out their eyes with their thumbs, the works.  Sgt. Richard Moss gradually becomes the hero of the captured crew; the other male prisoners are bedraggled by constant starvation and horrible treatment.

Thus it’s Moss and friends who get to play horsey as Okatsu and Yuka hop on their backs and whip at each other, tearing up their human mounts with the barbs on their boots. Finally Moss can take no more and storms into Okatsu’s room, planning to “sexually assault” her, but finds himself unable to do it, such is his hatred for the woman (meanwhile he’s already gotten lucky – even here in this hellhole – with a geisha conscripted into duty at the prison). He beats Okatsu instead, after which he’s taken into custody and thrown into a pit filled with leeches. But just then news arrives at camp that Japan has surrendered; Okatsu and her sister guards walk off, and later we’re informed they each commit ritual suicide.

“Blood-Soaked Queen Of Buchenwald” – Technically a Nazi She-Devil tale, this one’s about Gerta Holland, a hot tramp who is really more so just a prostitute, but one that caters to SS sadists; so it’s a fine line, you see. Indeed, the tale opens with Gerta laughing as rabid dogs tear apart a prisoner in the camp. Gerta is mistress of an SS bigwig at Buchenwald concentration camp, but when he’s sent to the front lines she’s cast adrift, seeking a new sugar daddy. A new SS goon named Ludwig uses her but quickly grows sick of her – after all, he says, there’s a love camp just down the road, where nubile German gals are throwing themselves at SS men for free! But Ludwig comes up with a money-making scheme for Gerta: she can prostitute herself to the prisoners!

In what is the most darkly comic story in the collection (and likely also in the poorest taste), Gerta now services prisoners in the basement of the crematorium; the author (this being another third-person story, by the way) informing us how the fires rage during the day, immolating prisoners, but at night Gerta lies down in the eerie darkness and waits for her clients. And the prisoners beat and kill each other to find money to pay her; Ludwig knows that prisoners can always find a way to smuggle in money. Things go along swimmingly until Patton’s forces arrive, and in the mass exodus Gerta meets her just end – run to ground by the same rabid dogs she found so delightfully vicious in the opening of the story.

“Trapped By The Nazis’ Kissing She-Devil Of Agony” – This is the best Nazi She-Devil tale I’ve yet had the pleasure to read, and due to that it’s my favorite story in the book. It’s a work of sleazy art. Our narrator is an American soldier who is captured in 1943 and, since he’s half Jewish, the Nazis send him to Aschenwald concentration camp, in Germany. Here he gets his first glimpse of the Nazi She-Devil who runs the place:

I saw the red leather whip she gripped in her black-gloved hand. She wore polished jackboots and black jodhpurs that molded her powerfully-curved hips like rubber…Inga Hein was as sadistic a bitch as ever cracked a whip for the glory of Der Fuhrer.  She was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite officers of the SS-Totenkopfverbande Madel (Women’s Deaths-Head SS Units), a distinction she undoubtedly owed to her singularly German predilection for flogging human beings to death.

Beautiful Inga, “the Blonde Bitch of Aschenwald,” with her “incredible, upthrusting breasts,” lives in a palatial room with a “Hollywood bed,” attended by Angel, her “pert little lesbian maid.” After nude massages courtesy Angel, Inga likes to put on “sheer, Paris-made lingerie…tight black jodhpurs, stiletto-heeled boots, and a smartly tailored SS jacket lined with leopard skin” and entertain male guests. Our narrator is one such guest. He’s tossed scraps of food by the merciless woman; he’s so starved he drops to his knees as ordered and scoops the morsels off the floor. All as illustrated in the awesome splashpage:

The story is filled with sadism, full-on torture porn as various POWs are beaten and whipped to death in brutal ways, all for Inga’s enjoyment. The narrator himself is frequently beaten by her, in between lots of taunting. One evening Inga strips and offers herself to him, but he snatches her gun, puts it in her face, and pulls the trigger. It jams. “Again,” Inga demands, getting off on it. He pulls the trigger again, but the gun jams again, so he punches her, and this gets her off even more – cue a vague but sleazy sex scene, with our narrator beating Inga during the act.

Afterwards he’s her “love slave,” chained up in her private quarters and used by Inga whenever she wills it.  Months later the US Army liberates the camp. The freed prisoners drown the male camp commander in the latrine while the narrator chases down Inga.  He beats her to a pulp and then hangs her from the fence that surrounds the camp, fashioning a noose out of the barbed wire. He smokes one of her cigarettes as he watches her die, realizing that Inga was right all along: sometimes there is joy in the suffering of another.

“Fantastic Lust Plot Of The Nazi Harlot Spy” – One of the longer stories in the book, this third-person tale with an awesome title is only a Nazi She-Devil yarn by default. It’s the end of the war in Europe and Else Streit, beautiful young “personal prostitute” of Stauffer, a high-ranking general in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, is planning her escape route. The Russians are on the outskirts of Berlin and time is limited. After a bit of vague lovin’ with Stauffer, Else, who enjoys the obese lecher’s obvious fear, waits until the big man is asleep and roots through his secret office, looking for some intel to sell to the Reds as barter for safety. But Stauffer finds her and Else blows him away with his “Lugar.” Else is not a Nazi She-Devil – she isn’t even a Nazi, just a hooker – but she has the same kind of sadistic streak.

After getting a ride from a horny young chaffeur she’s allowed to screw her before (so as to ensure his loyalty), she blows him away, too. But the story turns out to be the sweat mag variant of an O. Henry morality story – after giving herself to the Red commander in Berlin, Else is slapped around and called a whore; the intel she stole is already known to the Russians, because Stauffer gave it to them: he was an undercover agent! Hence his promises to Else that he was her only chance of escape were true. The story has a memorable if bleak ending where our heroine gets her comeuppance – tossed into a house filled with lust-crazed Russian soldiers, whom we’re told will carry out Stauffer’s dying promise: “You deserve the Reds. They will grind you into mincemeat.”

“Blood Beast Of The Third Reich” – The author claims to have been a Luftwaffe pilot who came down with “a mild case of TB” and was thus removed from air duties. Due to his skill with the camera he was soon given a plush new assignment – cameraman for Herman Goering’s porno films! It all starts in 1936, before the war, and the narrator informs us it lasts on until 1940 as Goering’s film crew travels around Germany and newly-conquered territory, scoping out hot chicks for porno flicks. 

Goering demands realism and when he takes the porn into darker realms of torture he gets attractive female prisoners from the camps. Vague details of a lesbian shoot, another with a German dude and two women, and another strange bit where Goering himself appears in a film where he screws three generations of women – a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter!!  We’re informed that the “actors” were always dipped in acid afterwards, so there could be no survivors to tell of it. This is one of those stories where you can tell the author was chortling to himself as he wrote it:

American readers may be interested to know that we used many American men and women in our films. Some of them were excellent in their parts, so good that they would have undoubtedly become Hollywood stars if we hadn’t been under the unfortunate necessity of liquefying them in acid.

I remember one girl, from California I believe… She was a delightful creature. After Goering finished with her – in this case he personally went through a bondage-rape scene with her – we all made use of her fine figure and soft, yielding flesh. She was a very interesting girl. We permitted her to live an extra forty-eight hours and then, because she had been so sweet to have around, we knocked her unconscious before plunging her into the acid, instead of dropping her in alive and fully awake as was customary.

The fun and games come to an end with the official start of WWII, and our narrator – who informs us he himself occasionally stepped before the cameras, to “act” with some newly-captured maiden in yet another of Goering’s films – has to say goodbye to the movie life. As for what happened to Goering’s stock of porn, the narrator has no idea.

“Torture Trap Of The Nympho Schoolgirls” – This goofy piece of teensploitation is narrated by a “hygeine” teacher who is taken captive, along with a history teacher and a school cheerleader, by a sadistic pack of sweater-and-skirt wearing teen girls. But these “ponytail punks” are vicious. One evening at school our protagonist hears a girl screaming, only to find a half-nude cheerleader strung up to the school gate, the beginning of a letter “B” carved on her chest. Her name is Doris and she claims the cut was made by Millie, mad-dog boss of a group of tough girls; Doris hooked up with Millie’s old boyfriend, and Millie got vengeance by starting to carve “Busted” on her chest – only the narrator showed up in time to stop it.

Instead of telling Doris to call the cops, the narrator tells her to forget about it!! Soon enough Millie and gang swoops in for more revenge, tying the two teachers up in a room, stripping them, whipping them. They strip Doris and go to work on her, finishing out the word “Busted.” But one of the gals gets horny over the scene and implores the narrator to take her; she drops her .38 and he gets the upper hand. When Millie tries to run, he body tackles her, smashing her head into the marble floor! Not dead, but suffering from a severe concussion, Millie is sent with the rest of her gang to the state pen for three to five years.

“Screaming Virgins For The Nazi Rites Of Agony” – The final story in the collection is another piece of Nazi Horror, which really is what these sweat mags were known for. Like most other such tales it opens with an unfortunate young woman, Gerta, being thrown into a dungeon. Her “crime” is that she dismissed the advances of a game-legged Nazi lech named Heinrich Brauer. But what she doesn’t know is that Brauer is one of Hitler’s favorite people, a sadist who puts on pagan-themed occult shows of bondage, torture, and murder for a Nazi elite audience. Gerta is stripped to lingerie and chained in a small amphitheater, to watch as six tall, nude, oil-covered blondes carry out another attractive young woman. This one they tie to a bed, and soon Brauer appears, with a ceremonial blade; he carves up the girl for the audiences’ delight. Now it’s Gerta’s turn.

From here it’s a history lesson, as we’re informed how Brauer came from nothing in 1923 to being Hitler’s go-to guy for pagan-bondage-torture scenes, eventually opening up a “health club” in Munich that was really just a Nazi bordello. Brauer, we’re told, disappeared after the war – and this is one of the few torture/horror stories in the book in which the female, Gerta, is not saved at the last moment by her commando boyfriend/invading Americans/some other lucky twist of fate; she dies, just like “thousands of other women.”