Maneaters

Maneaters, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle

No month stated, 2021  New Texture

A big thanks to Bob Deis for sending me this copy of Maneaters some years back, and apologies it took me so long to get to it! Compiling a selection of shark-centric tales from the men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s through the 1970s, Maneaters comes highly recommended, and as usual Wyatt Doyle’s presentation of the art is both eye-catching and, more importantly, respectful of its sources. 

 

Unfortunately the same can’t be said about a particular modern interpolation that Maneaters has been saddled with, but more on that anon; I want to focus on the good stuff first. I wasn’t sure what to think about an entire book featuring shark stories, as other than Shark Fighter it’s a genre I’ve never cared much about; indeed, to this day I still haven’t seen (or read) Jaws, but I did see Jaws 3-D in the theater when it came out, when I was 9 years old, and for some unfathomable reason I had Jaws 4 on VHS several years ago…I think I bought it at a resale store for a quarter, and I watched it repeatedly; I came to the conclusion that it was so terrible that it actually achieved a sort of greatness. That said, I have the tie-in novels (by Hank Searls) of Jaws 2 and Jaws 4, and I keep meaning to read them… 

Well anyway, there are a lot of stories in Maneaters, ranging from ones that are only a page or two that ones that run a handful of pages. There are no “Booklength Extra” tales here; as any vintage men’s mag reader will know, the “Diamond Line” in particular would often publish epic-length stories, especially in the 1960s, and I wonder if any such shark stories exist. But I guess Bob wouldn’t want to devote much space to those, as they’d fill up practically the entire book; at least this way there’s more variety. 

Or at least, as much variety as several shark stories can provide. Because really, they all share the same setup: virile yank “skin divers” take on sharks all over the globe. What I found most interesting about the stores here was that the ones from the ‘70s were actually the best; usually the men’s mag stories from the ’50s and ‘60s are superior, before the mags descended into total sleaze and porn, with editors who were more concerned with telling good stories than in just showing bare breasts. Now personally, I like both (as my kid once angrily declared when he was around 3 or so after I kept pressing him on who he thought made the better French fry: Chic Fil A or McDonalds). But what’s interesting here is that these ‘70s tales are just as good as the earlier ones…no doubt because Jaws was such a big hit, and the anonymous authors were trying to compete with Peter Benchley’s big seller. 

Oh and one minor point of contention: Bob refers to these stories as “MAMs,” ie “Men’s Adventure Magazines.” I personally do not like this term; it is much too estrogenic for the virile men’s mags of mid 20th century. But then maybe Bob is just “taking the piss” as the British say, or at least they said in the few British sitcoms I’ve watched. 

For once I won’t focus on every story, because as mentioned some of them are very short, more so punch lines than actual yarns, like for example the story about the shark that “delivered the mail” to a particular ship. Indeed, the earliest stories are pretty short, indicating that shark tales were relegated to the back pages, and doubtless few and far between in the ‘50s. 

“The Shark Who Hated Women” is the first really good one; it’s by S.P. Free (a relative of I.P. Freely, perhaps?) and from the August 1960 Peril. This one’s narrated by a guy who worked as a marine biologist and then one day said to hell with it all, bought a boat, and sailed off to an island, which alone is a story in itself, of the sort collected in the vintage men’s mag anthology Yankee King Of The Islands. But the shark’s the focus, here; our narrator informs us of a “black shark” that has a mysterious fondness for women, and our stubborn narrator doesn’t believe it…leading to a horrific sequence where not only does this guy’s native bride suffer, but he too is wounded woefully in the climactic fight with the shark. 

“The Giant Shark That Guarded Rommel’s Treasure,” by Peter Fall and from the January 1961 Fury, is interesting in that the shark actually gets in the way of the otherwise good story. This third-person tale relates how a WWII frogman, a few years after the war, is hired by a scar-faced Austrian to recover gold from the bottom of the ocean, gold that was dropped there by Rommell when he was retreating from the Allies. Of course, the Austrian will turn out to be an old Nazi, but author Fall skips all that as he focuses on a great white shark that attacks the protagonist as he’s retrieving the gold. 

“E Mao Ariki” is by Robert Edmond Alter and from the July 1968 Argosy. Alter was a crime author of the day and as expected his yarn is of a different caliber than the men’s mag average, with a lot of word-painting and characterization. That said, Argosy was unlike the average men’s mag in that it was up front that many of its stories were fiction, and not fiction gussied up as nonfiction. (Back in 2000 I met a girl named Gussie at a wedding in Tampa, Florida, a beautiful blonde-haired girl who for some inexplicable reason seemed to be interested in me, and to this day I think of her when I write the word “gussied;” isn’t that strange and sad?) This third-person narrative focuses on a scuba diver who’s been hired by a wanna be director who wants to get footage of a massive shark (the titular E Mao Ariki) that reportedly attacks the natives during a weird “get pearls from the ocean” test of manhood. The modern reader will easily detect that Alter implies the director is gay, but that aside, this is a good story, with the protagonist becoming a hero despite himself as he goes after the huge shark with his spear gun. Yet at the same time the yarn is inferior to many of the others here because Alter is too focused on word-painting and introspection, thus his narrative misses the weird fire typically found in men’s mag stories. 

“A Man-Eating Shark Pack Against Scuba Divers,” by Walther Sturm and from the January 1975 Action For Men, is my favorite story in Maneaters. As mentioned above, these later stores are superior to the earlier ones, as post-Jaws the authors were more focused on exploiting the sharks. This one’s cool because a shark is randomly attacking people along the New Jersey coast and the president of a scuba club puts all the various “scuba teams” together into a sort of shark attack squad, and they wage war on the sharks along the coast. Then a marine biologist comes along to get in the way, but really he just wants the killer shark alive to study its brain. I liked this one, particularly the off-hand revelation that the protagonist was a plumber by day; even the heroes of men’s mag stories were blue collar, same as the readers. 

“The Headhunting Shark That Destroyed A Texas Family,” by Bob Trotter and from the January 1976 For Men Only, was my second favorite story. It’s another fast-moving third-person narrative that could easily have been expanded into novel length, featuring a trio of Texas brothers who take on the same shark: the surfer, the ‘Nam vet, and finally the “cattle rassler.” Trotter writes the yarn with a style uncommon for the men’s mags, focusing on the unusual Texan diction in his narrative. But otherwise it’s a cool story, however the character I thought would be the main hero, the ‘Nam vet, is dispensed with quickly – even though he has the most typical men’s mag story setup, jumping into the drink with nothing more than a knife and the will for vengeance. 

“The Madman Who Ruled A Killer-Shark Pack” by Brett Harper and from the January 1976 Man’s World is the last story here, and another good one. It’s also the only one in Maneaters that follows the traditional men’s mag setup: an opening incident (usually depicted by the splash page art), then a flashback to how the opening incident came to pass, and then a harried resolution. In this case the third-person yarn opens with a guy and a girl (“one lovely breast” exposed due to her torn shirt) being towed by a boat through shark-filled waters, the girl’s insane husband laughing madly at the prow. The backstory doesn’t really meet the craziness, but then they rarely do: the girl’s husband is a nutjob marine biologist obsessed with sharks, and insists on catching sight of some great whites. Unfortunately his wife likes to come on to the various men the biologist employs; she sleeps with one of the men, who later “accidentally” falls off the boat and is eaten by sharks. Then our hero is merely suspected of having an affair with the girl, and next thing you know they’re both bound and being dragged in the water…a harried climax in which some other guy saves them and the nutjob villain receives the exact fate you expected he would. 

Now, the one thing I don’t like about Maneaters is that each story is given a “Biting Back” postscript in which modern marine biologists, scuba divers, and other assorted pearl-clutchers have been invited to point out all the errors in the stories. The concept alone is baffling; men’s mag stories are fiction, and should be treated as such. But what’s worse is the insufferable condescending tone of many of these postscripts; I kid you not, one of them literally begins with the comment, “The racism and sexism aside…” One can almost imagine the snowflake crying softly in his soy latte. But after each story the vintage fun is buzzkilled by modern virtue-signallers who tell us what the men’s mag authors got wrong about sharks in their stories. Well, who cares? Even worse, many of them try to mock or poke fun at the stories. I mean, if I wanted smarmy attempts at comedy from an unfunny pearl-clutcher, I’d watch Jimmy Kimmel. 

Fortunately, you can do what I did, and just skip the “Biting Back” stuff entirely. I do want to note that one or two of them are written by Bob Deis himself, and these as expected are worlds better than the others, showing a true appreciation for the genre and being respectful to the authors. 

But honestly, that’s my only criticism. Overall Maneaters is another excellent publication in the Men’s Adventure Library, and I highly recommend it. With summer coming up it’s the perfect beach read, though like James Reasoner said, you might want to read it far away from the water. 

Deceit And Deadly Lies (Kevin MacInnes #1)

Deceit And Deadly Lies, by Franklin Bandy

No month stated, 1978  Charter Books

I picked up this fat paperback original many years ago, excited to read it, and typically it took me all this time to get to it. Running over 400 pages, Deceit And Deadly Lies won the Edgar Award and was the first of two novels featuring protagonist Kevin MacInnes, a former Army Intelligence officer who now makes his living as “The Lie King,” going around the world with a lie detector and working for high pay. 

I believe it was the 1980 Mystery Fancier review for the second MacInnes novel, The Blackstock Affair, that made me aware of this book several years ago; it’s hosted at Mystery*File.  (The reviewer mentions an earlier review for this first MacInnes novel, but I don’t think that one has ever been uploaded.) Anyway what got my interest was the note that author Franklin Bandy (real name Eugene Franklin) included “all the sex and violence modern readers want,” which of course set my sleaze instincts a-tingling. 

Well, folks, maybe that’s true for The Blackstock Affair. As for this first book, Deceit And Deadly Lies, both the sex and the violence are nil. Indeed, I ultimately found the novel a chore to read, wondering why a few hundred pages hadn’t been cut from it. More than anything else I got the impression that Bandy was another contemporary author influenced by Lawrence Sanders; there is the same clinical prose style, the same meshing of the crime genre with the trappings of the standard “airport fiction” of the day, and of course there’s the bloated page length. The big difference is that Sanders’s novels are, judging from the ones I’ve read, entertaining and fast-moving. (And also I’ve come to rank The Tomorrow File as my favorite novel ever.) 

What makes it most egregious is that the potential is there. MacInnes, in his 40s and wealthy, goes about the world with his mistress, a stacked blonde named Vanessa. There is not a single sex scene between the two, and Vanessa is not exploited at all; the most we get is that she’s beautiful. This is acceptable, but where the problem arises is that Bandy spends the narrative having MacInnes wonder if Vanessa is in love with him. There are entire chapters where he will sit around and ponder whether Vanessa truly loves him; he even secretly records their conversations and plays the tapes back on his Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), trying to gauge whether or not Vanessa is lying to him. Lame!! 

Bandy works a host of “crime novel stuff” around this main story – MacInnes figuring out if his mistress loves him, because he loves her – and none of it is compelling enough to save the book. One big demerit is that a lot of it takes place in Mexico, with MacInnes talking to a lot of Spanish people with easily-confused names who speak in the polite, formal diction that Spanish people use in novels of this type. The main “crime” plot has to do with MacInnes stumbling on to a plot to assassinate a major political figure, but the setup for this plot – a taxi driver overhearing two guys discuss the plan in a Bowery bar – is so ludicrous that the believability factor is ruined. 

Well anyway, MacInnes is incredibly wealthy; he rents out his services to all and sundry, and his prices are high. Probably the highlight of the book is the first sequence, where we see MacInnes at work; a group of businessmen have hired him to find out the rock-bottom price they can pay for some land they want for development, land that is owned by a man who claims he wants ten million dollars. Here we see that MacInnes doesn’t parse truth from lies, per se, but uses his machine to detect stress levels, allowing his instincts to figure out whether the person is lying or not. In this way it is made clear that the PSE is more so an instrument, and how well it performs relies on the skill of the user. 

It doesn’t sound like the setup for an action-packed novel, and Deceit And Deadly Lies certainly is not. MacInnes carries around a .45 and we are reminded of his Army background, but the action scenes are usually over and done with quickly, and more time is spent on introspection and pondering. Folks I kid you not, there’s a part in the final quarter of the novel where MacInnes is bored and he’s suffering from inexplicable impotence, and it goes on and on and on. I mean if you’re writing a 400+ page crime thriller, never have a part where your protagonist is bored…it’s like even the character himself is letting you know your novel is too long. 

After dealing with the land-buying job – and later on MacInnes reads in the paper that the dude selling it has killed himself, and MacInnes brushes off any sense of responsibility – we get to the main crime plot, the assassination. An Assistant DA in New York calls MacInnes and brings a taxi driver over to his hotel, and there the guy tells a ludicrous story about hearing two men discuss killing someone “big” in a bar. MacInnes judges the cab driver to be telling the truth, and ultimately this will take us into a storyline involving a “Hitler” of a third-party candidate who is the target of assassins. 

But this is not the only lie detecting work MacInnes does. There’s also an overlong sequence where he goes to Mexico to find out whether a man in prison killed the son of an influential crime boss, or if it was an accident, or whatever. Bandy works in the assassination plot with MacInnes also tracking down one of the men the cab driver saw in the bar, an Australian who serves as the novel’s main villain, even though most of his appearances feature him slipping into wherever MacInnes is staying, trading banter with him, and then slipping off. Truly the novel is nothing but 400 pages of stalling. 

Action is infrequent but at least handled well, like a part where one of the Mexican gangs adbucts MacInnes and takes him out to the countryside, where they’ve dug him a fresh grave. Working with the CIA on this caper, MacInnes has been given a bunch of spy tech out of a Eurospy flick, like for example a pen that fires projectiles. What’s interesting is that the action scenes are over and done with quickly, and Bandy will spend more time on MacInnes brooding over whether his mistress Vanessa really cares about him. 

Even more ridiculous, MacInnes finds out that Vanessa is a best-selling author, and indeed has been publishing books the entire time she’s been with MacInnes, but “The Lie King” was oblivious to all this, just thinking of her as his deluxe mistress. I mean WTF?? And then there are all these parts where he sits around wondering if Vanessa is writing about him in her books, and then he goes out and buys one of them, reading it to see if there are any parts that seem to be about himself(!). 

This is the sort of thing I mean when I say Deceit And Deadly Lies is such a misfire. It’s stuff like this that takes the center stage, and MacInnes’ lie detector work is not interesting enough to salvage the novel. I mean for that part, Bandy even repeats himself with the setups; there are two different jobs MacInnes is hired for that concern a murdered child. And there are a lot of sequences of him just talking to cops, feds, CIA agents, or district attorneys. 

The climax plays out in Madison Square Garden, where MacInnes has discovered the assassination attempt on the third-party candidate will occur. MacInnes at least is personally involved in the finale, blowing away one of the main villains, but a curious note is that MacInnes himself is shot in the chest at the end of the book, and the novel ends with Vanessa appearing there, crying over him (yes, friends, she does truly love him!!), and telling him to keep breathing. Bandy ends the novel by informing us that MacInnes does exactly that, but it could in fact be taken the other way: that MacInnes does not keep breathing. 

But the dangling cliffhanger is moot, as MacInnes returned two years later in another papberback original, also published by Charter Books. I have that one too, and here’s hoping it’s better than Deceit And Deadly Lies.

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance

The Specialist #11: American Vengeance, by John Cutter

November, 1985  Signet Books

Boy, I forgot all about The Specialist, didn’t I? The first volume was one of the first reviews I posted on this blog, back in the summer of 2010; I bought the entire series from a single seller back then, and at the time I had no idea it would take me sixteen years to read all eleven books. 

It’s been over six years since I read the previous volume, and unfortunately American Vengeance serves as a direct sequel. I’d pretty much forgotten the entire story, but John Shirley (aka “John Cutter”) does a good job of catching up readers who missed the previous book – or, like me, who just plain forgot it. Long story short, Jack “The Specialist” Sullivan is all fired up to take down Hassan the Red, an Iranian terrorist who was responsible for every Iranian attack on American citizens. 

Yes, this was a timely read. But in a way it was a refreshing reminder of how once upon a time America understood that the terrorist-supporting regime of Iran was evil, something our leadership has forgotten in the ensuing decades...with such notable “progress” as sending Iran billions of dollars and even helpfully putting them on the path to attaining nuclear arms. Gee, what could go wrong? 

Indeed, author Shirley dedicates American Vengeance to “the resistance fighting for freedom in Iran.” One wonders if he still supports the Iranian resistance, or if TDS has rotted away his brain (as it has for so, so many others). Some years ago I attempted to read Shirley’s Eclipse trilogy from the ‘80s – I dutifully picked up the original paperback printings many years ago – and as I was reading it I happened to come across a recent interview with Shirley (I think this was around 2019 or so). Eclipse is about characters in a cyberpunk future fighting a fascist government, and folks if you think Shirley in the 2019 interview compared his fictional future fascist government to the Trump administration, you win a no-prize. He even did the old leftist trick of comparing populism with fascism, when the two are altogether different (but then people today conveniently forget that the Nazis themselves were socialists…“Socialist” was even in their damn name!!). 

Does the Iranian resistance get any love today? We get stories and stories about the people suffering in Ukraine, even the friggin’ king of England proclaiming we must defend Ukraine to the US Congress(?!!), and yet not a peep about the countless thousands who have been butchered in Iran. It’s curious, isn’t it. Back in the late ‘90s I dated a girl from Iran, and for several years her dad had been a prisoner of the regime, kept in a cell and beaten. Somehow he’d managed to get free and immigrated to the US with the rest of his family. What was most curious was how blasé they were about it: “That’s my dad. He was a prisoner in Iran for a couple years. Hey, you wanna watch The Nanny?” But anyway even then, as a non-political idiot in my 20s, I wondered why the US still hadn’t taken that goddamn tyrannical regime down. 

Anyway I digress. It just makes me sad when smart people say stupid things, and Shirley’s TDS comments were enough to make me drop reading the Eclipse books. (Plus I found the first volume ponderous and lacking any of the spark Shirley brought to the men’s adventure novels he was writing at the time, so there’s that.) But this political digression has a point: there was a time when the despotic government of Iran was seen for what it was. It’s unfortunate it has taken so many years – and so many presidents – to finally address the situation. And I’m curious if the people who felt so strongly about stopping Iran back in the ‘80s have become so brainwashed by their own leftist bullshit that they no longer feel that way today. I mean, it’s not like the Iranian regime has become a kinder and gentler government, is it? How many protesters did they butcher last year alone? Then again, we live in a country where losers can stand beside a Starbucks with a “No Kings” sign for a couple hours and declare themselves heroes of democracy, so clearly we’ve lost all sense of what heroic struggle actually means. 

So since nothing was being done then, Shirley has his hero Jack Sullivan taking on the brunt of “American vengeance,” squaring things away with an almost mythical Iranian terrorist leader called Hassan the Red. Sullivan’s been chasing the bastard since the previous volume, and as American Vengeance opens he’s busting into the hotel room of a pair of Hassan’s followers, a scene artist Mel Crair depicts on the cover. 

Hassan’s army is called the Warriors of Islam, and a lot of them are in France; the majority of the novel plays out in Paris. It seems to be not too long after the previous volume – merc Merlin is still in the hospital, we’re told – yet it’s long enough that a little time seems to have passed. Sullivan’s colleagues this time are a group of Israeli Mossad agents (yet more timely material! One wonders if you’d encounter heroic characters from Israel in today’s woke publishing landscape…). 

I wonder if Shirley knew this would be the final volume. There isn’t much indication he did, other than a random part where Sullivan calls Bonnie, his hotstuff girlfriend back in the States…and tells her he loves her. This is usually a bad sign for things, either for the series overall or just for that particular character. Also, we are informed the two have “unofficially adopted” the little orphan girl Sullivan saved a few volumes ago. One wonders if, had there been another volume of The Specialist, either of these characters would have encountered a rough time. 

Humorously, just a few pages after telling Bonnie he loves her, Sullivan is having somewhat-explicit sex with a beautiful Israeli secret agent named Sabra. While reserved when compared to the overdone sex scenes of earlier volumes, it still has such humorous lines as, “Sullivan slowly lowered her onto his prong.” Which of course made me think of the metal band. 

The problem with American Vengeance is that it lacks the pulpy fun of earlier volumes; this one is a standard “terrorist of the week” yarn, similar to innumerable other Gold Eagle publications of the day. In fact I wonder if Shirley wasn’t given orders from the publisher to cut back on the weird stuff and do what Gold Eagle was doing. 

Thus, a lot of the book is repetitive; Sullivan will track down Hassan in Paris and just miss him, lending everything the unintentional (or not) vibe of a Looney Tunes cartoon. It happens over and over in American Vengeance, with the wily terrorist bastard setting bombs in the places he was staying, resulting in several innocent bystanders getting killed. And each scene caps off with Sullivan becoming even angrier and more determined to kill Hassan. 

The climax takes place in Iran, where Hassan has managed to get a nuclear bomb. Again working with Mossad, Sullivan is able to slip into Hassan’s base and prevent nuclear Armageddon, and the bomb actually goes off, but humorously Shirley quickly retcons everything that “it wasn’t a big bomb” and thus the damage is only relegated to Hassan’s patch of Iran – in other words, the poetic justice of the terrorist blowing up his own country. But again, American Vengeance was written in the days before Muslim terrorists strapped bombs to their own children, so the finale doesn’t have the impact today that it likely did then. 

The last we see of Jack Sullivan, he’s on an airplane, looking down at the nuclear blast, affirming to himself that America has been avenged. And this is the last we’ll ever see of him, as no future volumes of The Specialist were forthcoming. The book does not promote itself as the final volume, so I’ll wager that low sells quietly killed the series; the question is whether Shirley wrote any further volumes that went unpublished. 

Overall The Specialist was mostly entertaining, particularly the middle of the run, when Shirley had fun with various crazy things like Sullivan achieving “Hulk power” or fighting Satanic subway mutants. But as the series progressed it appears that he was asked to write more “standard” fare, and the series suffered as a result, coming off like too many of its contemporaries.