Death Flight (Airport Cop #3)

Death Flight, by Charles Miron
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

Charles Miron wraps up the Airport Cop series with this third volume; while the previous volume was a lurid murder yarn which often lost sight of its titular protagonist, Death Flight sees Miron apparently attempting to refashion the series into a sort of Airport thing (both Airport and Airport 75 are namedropped on the back cover), with a large group of characters going about their own adventures around Kennedy Airport.

At least I think I’ve figured out what kind of a cop main character Verban is; looks like I was correct in my assumption, last time, that he’s an NYPD detective assigned the Kennedy airport detail. But again Miron does nothing to bring Verban to life or to explain anything about his world, let alone what Verban’s first name is. There isn’t even any pickup from the previous book, with nothing mentioned on how long ago it was or anything. The reader is just thrust into the story, which to tell the truth isn’t that memorable…and by the way the title is as misleading as can be, as there’s no damn “death flight” to be found anywhere in the book!

Miron’s prose continues to be nearly psychedelic in how fractured and strange it is, with mindbending phrases like, “Verban sat between the two of them like some Buddha with a hernia,” or even “Everybody loved humility. Like lozenges for the soul.” And though Miron’s dialog has a natural ring to it, most of the time you have no idea what anyone’s talking about – as in The Twilight Strangler, Miron just sort of drops us in on the proceedings, as if were a fly on the wall. He at least maintains a healthy sleaze level, though like last time it’s rather awkwardly shoehorned in via flashbacks – though there is an “I’m gonna barf!” bit where a female character pleasures herself (quite explicitly) with a banana…

Anyway, Death Flight at least opens on an in-jokey moment, as Verban and his latest girlfriend, a psychiactric student named Alix who likes to psychoanalyze everything, are watching an Airport-type aviation disaster movie on TV at the home of Freddie Karp, Verban’s partner, and his wife, Ruth. Here Verban berates the over-the-hill star of the movie, Glenn Gibbons (a sort of John Wayne/Charlton Heston type), calling him a “screaming faggot,” much to Ruth’s dismay – she tends to believe Glenn Gibbons really is a hero, even though he only plays one on TV.

This bit with Glenn Gibbons might seem like a joke at first…but the dude actually turns out to be a character in the book. In fact, he’ll get what seems to be more narrative space than Verban himself, who sits out long portions of Death Flight. He’s a larger-than-life blowhard type of nitwit who confuses reality with the movies he’s made, but he’s fallen on hard times. Considered too old to star in the action movies that were once his forte, Gibbons’s idea for his latest film is rejected by the studio. To come up with money to fund it himself (at least, I think this is his plan – Miron’s kind of murky with the details), Gibbons plans to smuggle millions of dollars of heroin into the country. 

Perhaps this is what the “death flight” refers to (though no one dies on the flight); late in the book Gibbons flies an airline from France to America, the heroin with him. But there’s no action on this flight…other that is than a dual handjob/blowjob Gibbons gets from a stewardess and the ever-horny blonde traveling with him. Her name is Leona Bing and she’s the publicity person for a film festival being thrown in France; she’s hounded Gibbons for months to appear and provide commentary on a marathon of his movies, and he’s decided to take advantage of this opportunity for a free trip to France, where he can hook up with the underworld drug-smuggling contacts and pitch them his offer – for who will search the luggage of world-famous Glenn Gibbons?

Meanwhile Verban gets in completely-arbitrary action scenes, starting with a random trip to a black bar in the opening pages, where he and Alix run into racist patrons who resent Verban’s whiteness. Verban beats up three of them, but his biggest action scene is saved for midway through; Verban gets in a long chase with a triple-jointed conman the “Airport Cop” has run into before – this guy swindles people by staging falls, throwing his joints out of whack and pretending grave injury. This guy almost gets the better of Verban, kicking him so savagely in the balls that our hero is in the hospital with a “bleeding crotch,” uncertain if his equipment still works. For this Verban shoots the triple-jointed freak in the throat, something his “stupid chief” boss Captain Kinsella complains about.

Miron seems to want to expand upon Verban’s world, with more scenes focusing on Kinsella and the other cops in his aiport detail, among them the lovely Candance Reuscher, who we’ll recall worked with Verban last time (and also occasionally slept with him, though none of that here). This time she’s on canine patrol with a black cop named Crockett, and Miron fills pages with abitrary background details on the dude. We also get lots of stuff from the perspectives of Glenn Gibbons and Leona Bing, who by the way is the character who pleasures herself with a banana, and also, apropos of nothing, flashes back to one time she was screwed in high school. She also has lots of sex with hero Gibbons, though Miron doesn’t go into it too much, just relaying from Gibbons’s perspective that he’s “balled” her.

The separate plots have nothing to do with one another for the most part; Verban’s tangle with the conman turns out to be his major setpiece, and his and Karp’s investigation of a suspected heister doesn’t pan out, though it does feature an entertaining bit where they run into a group of young bikers outside a diner. Candace and Crockett get the brunt of the action, running into a pair of Hispanic theives who try to make off with some cargo, leading to a shootout which climaxes with poor Crockett being gutted by a knife-wielding crook. As with The Twilight Stranger, this leads to a hilariously rushed finale in which Verban tracks down the Hispanic thieves, corners them in a gym frequented by gays, and after a hasty firefight decides to just arrest and not kill them.

Meanwhile there’s Glenn Gibbons on a flight back to the US, where he manages to get a stewardess to feel him up while Leona Bing goes down on him. He’s made a deal with a French drug kingpin to deliver some horse to a California-based mobster, but unknown to Gibbons a New York mobster has plans to intercept. Indeed, Miron as ever is so haphazard in his plotting that Glenn Gibbons, a primary character throughout most of the book, is dispensed with in such a casual, uncaring manner that I actually had to go back and re-read the part again. But there’s no part where his plot connects with Verban’s or anyone elses’s.

Overall I found Death Flight to be pretty muddled and dispirited, as if Miron had gotten the contract to turn his novel Airport Cop (which I don’t have and don’t plan to seek out) into a series, and just barely managed to eke out a second installment before giving up entirely with this third one. Indeed one can easily see why the series ended here. I have some standalone crime novels Miron published with Manor around the same time, so I’ll check those out next – here’s hoping they’ll be more enjoyable.

The Twilight Strangler (Airport Cop #2)

The Twilight Strangler, by Charles Miron
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

First of all, thanks to Justin Marriott for bringing this obscure, three-volume series to my attention. But then, judging from the dearth of information and reviews on the web, it doesn’t look like too many people have heard of it. All I know is that Charles Miron was a real person and published a handful of novels through Manor Books, this being the only series.

Typical of other Manor series books of the day (like Kill Squad), there are no volume numbers: Airport Cop was the first one, The Twilight Strangler was the second, and Death Flight was the third and final volume. I don’t have the first volume, but if this second one’s any indication Airport Cop is one weird “action series” indeed.

My friends, I may have found another Gannon here, at least so far as the bizarre writing style goes. To be sure, The Twilight Strangler is nowhere as nutzoid, violent, or extreme as anything in the Gannon novels, but it is written in a somewhat-similar screwed-up style. As with Dean W. Ballenger, you wonder if Miron was writing this way purposefully, sort of how Ballenger proved he could write straight narrative in his standalone WWII novels and his men's adventure magazine work.

But then, if this is the way Miron naturally writes, the guy is definitely on a different wavelength. The Twilight Strangler reminded me mostly of that psychedelic “crime thriller” I reviewed a while back, Mystery, only without the fantastical elements. But style-wise it’s very similar, with the characters seeming to exist in a world that is only tangentially related to the book itself. The reader is thrown in and must fend for himself as the author hopscotches perspectives, situations, settings, even time periods, sometimes within the span of a sentence.

For example, I read the entire novel and I still don’t know if the titular airport cop, Verban, even has a first name, let alone what sort of cop he is. The back cover states he’s “chief of airport security,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case in the book itself. In fact it seems like he’s a regular cop, one who possibly specializes in airport crimes. For that matter, it wasn’t until page 60 that I got confirmation that Verban was based out of New York; before that I honestly couldn’t tell if it was Los Angeles or NYC. Actually Verban is identical to the type of cop protagonist you’d meet in one of William Crawford’s novels, and the novel is just as mired in police-world details.

But The Twilight Strangler is almost psychedelic in how it hopscotches across perspectives and situations, Miron never bothering to set up or explain anything; it’s almost the men’s adventure equivalent of Rudolph Wurlitzers’s Nog. I’ve complained before about “POV-hopping,” where an author changes character perspectives without warning the reader through a chapter break or a few lines of white space: Charles Miron takes this to a whole different level, with POVs sometimes changing within the same sentence. Before I read this novel I would’ve said such a thing would be impossible, that every writer would know not to do this. But Miron proved me wrong.

So anyway, Verban, sometimes called “Verb” by his partners, is a New York cop who apparently works the airports. There’s absolutely no description of the character, so I guess the cover painting will have to suffice. When we meet him he’s already on the case; in the first of the novel’s brief murder scenes, a highfalutin model is strangled while shooting a commercial in an airport (I think it’s at JFK, but I never could figure out for sure). Verban is put on the case by his superior, Captain Kinsella, and works it with his new partner, a black cop named Reggie Wasson who is trying to fill the shoes of Verban’s regular parner, Freddie Karp, who is on vacation but returns later in the novel.

There’s also a “policewoman” in the crew, Candace Reuscher, and she serves more as Verban’s partner (both on the streets and in bed) than any of the other characters. Also it must be mentioned that Miron has no qualms with referring to his characters by multiple names in the narrative; it took me a few pages to realize that Wasson’s first name was Reggie, for example. Just like in a William Crawford novel we get a lot of immaterial stuff where these cops brainstorm who the killer might be, going out and tracking down leads, even checking their files for potential suspects.

All this stuff is pointless because we readers already know who the killer is, and he’s not on any of Verban’s lists. His name is Milo Kline, and he is a reclusive sadist who reminded me for all the world of Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy Of Dunces. He has the same pretentious, stentorian tone and everything. However I couldn’t figure out if Milo was skinny or heavyset, or ugly or handsome; he seemed to be described either way. Why he gets his jollies strangling women is never explained, but he does have the arrogance of Ignatius, thinking of his victims as “immoral women” and etc, so I guess we’re to infer he’s just wiping them out for the betterment of the world or something.

Milo also likes to strangle with antique tools – a barber chair strop, an old hemp cord, even the antenna of a ‘40s television set. This is something which eventually has Verban hitting the antique stores in Manhattan, tracking the guy. A yet another unexplained subplot has Milo calling Captain Kinsella to taunt him before each kill. The murders aren’t limited to New York, with Milo flying around to different aiports to murder various women, among them a lesbian fashion designer, a stewardess, and even a teenager. In almost each case we get several pages from each woman’s perspective, hopscotching around their thoughts with no concern over plot or narrative structure. All of it of course rendered moot when the woman is dead and never mentioned again.

After the “twilight strangler” (so called by the cops due to his penchant for killing at this time) taunts Kinsella that he’s going ot kill someone at Chicago’s O’Hare aiport, Verban goes “off duty” and flies there on his own time, Candace accompanying. Miron builds up a rapport between the two which takes the expected route, though our author is very shy when it comes to actual sex scenes (nevertheless, characters will often reflect back on whopping orgasms they’ve had, in those wily-nily flashback POV sequences). They butt heads with the O’Hare chief cop and, worse yet, find that the Strangler’s struck again, despite their efforts. This gets Verban thrown on a week’s unpaid leave; he uses the time to scout out those antique shops.

The novel gets even more bizarre when Milo goes on vacation(!?) in the Caribbean, where he’s hit on by this hotstuff divorcee who has become a millionaire thanks to her ex-husband; her name is Elyse and she talks like a Bringing Up Baby-era Katherine Hepburn. She takes an immediate sexual interest in Milo, demands he come back to her hotel with her, and further announces they’re to be married(!?). Milo acts again like Ignatius Reilly throughout, fending off her advances and protesting how forward she is. She sticks around for a long time and, surprisingly, does not get killed by Milo, who instead finally manages to “escape” from her several weeks later.

But this is another of those pulp novels where so much time is wasted on inconsequential stuff that the climax is hurried. For example, we could’ve done without a lot of the stuff in the middle half, like Milo’s ordeals with Elyse, or the arbitrary part where Verban just happens to stumble upon an auto theft ring (mirrored in a later scene where Candace stumbles upon a pickpocket). These parts do offer a little action – and Miron doesn’t exploit the violence at all, in fact I don’t think you even read about a single drop of blood in the entire novel – but they ultimately come off as chaff, especially when you consider how abrupt the finale is.

In short, the “climax” occurs over the span of a mere two pages; using Candace as strangler bait, Verban and team scout JFK airport and manage to put the hammer down on Milo just as he’s knocked out the girl and shoved her into back of a Jaguar. Milo slams into Verban’s partner Karp as he speeds away (we never do learn if Karp lives or dies) and Verban gives chase in a Dodge Charger. Half a page is left. Comedically, without the event even being described, Verban is somehow magically able to teleport himself out of his car and onto the hood of Milo’s Jaguar! Like a regular TJ Hooker he manages to pull Candace free as the Jaguar plunges into the Hudson.

And that’s that! We’re informed Milo’s corpse is eventually fished out of the river, but there’s no wrapup or anything. We never learn why he was on his kill-spree or how he even knew who Captain Kinsella was. But while the writing style was unusual and the action sporadic and flimsy, I can’t say The Twilight Strangler was terrible. It had a weird sort of appeal, like an ugly dog you can’t help but keep staring at.

Also Miron has a definite gift for dialog, with the characters trading banter with aplomb. The minor characters sort of spring to life, in particular a kid calling himself “The Big E” who shows up for a single page and steals the entire novel; he offers legal counsel when Milo falls while running along a beach on vaction. I could’ve read an entire book about that kid. Anyway, I have Death Flight, which appears to be about hijackers, so eventually we’ll find out if it’s written in the same sort of impenetrable style.

To Kill A Snowman

To Kill A Snowman, by Charles Miron
No month stated, 1978  Manor Books

It looks like after Airport Cop failed to get off the ground (clever pun alert) Charles Miron went on to publish several standalone crime novels for Manor Books…crime novels with some of the most psychedelic narrative you’ll encounter anywhere. Seriously folks, halfway through To Kill A Snowman it occurred to me that I had no idea what the hell was going on.

First of all, the cover art implies that this novel has something to do with heroin, but in fact it’s about coke smuggling, as evidenced by the title. I was hoping for a Cocaine-inspired sleazy ‘70s crimefest set on the mean streets of New York, but To Kill A Snowman actually takes place in…Sweden. This is just our first example of how skewed Mr. Miron is…not to mention that the plot, such as it is, is sort of ripped off from a subplot in his earlier Death Flight: a struggling filmmaker uses a coke deal to finance a movie. I mean, that’s what the plot’s supposed to be about. What actually happens in the book is a different matter.

For one, I don’t think Miron ever even informs us where in Sweden the novel opens; initially I thought it was taking place in Copenhagen, which of course is in a different country. Finally though “Sweden” emerges as the locale, and it would appear Miron must’ve visited the place, as he peppers the narrative with egregious references to Swedish words, places, and cuisine. Our hero is Jeff, a young American fillmmaker who has come here to Sweden because…honestly I don’t know why the hell he’s here. Apparently there’s like a screening of an unfinished documentary he made, or something like that…really, just like with the Airport Cop books, I spent the entirety of the novel feeling a sort of contact high, so a lot of the “plot” escaped me.

The novel opens with Jeff attempting to rip off some coke dealers, working with Lena, his Swedish girlfriend. If I understood it correctly, and I’m not sure I did, the plan is for Jeff and Lena to act as couriers for other buyers, but they intend to take the coke for themselves and sell it. I think. But Lena, after picking up the cocaine, doesn’t show at their prearranged meeting place, and Jeff starts to suspect he’s been had. Spoiler note for anyone who attempts to read this damnable book: Lena won’t return. I mean you’d think it would be a given that Jeff would have a reunion with her, at least for revenge, but nope – that’s not how Charles Miron rolls. I mean folks you can’t expect basic storytelling elements when your author turns out prose like this:

Wet film flooded over [Ulla’s] perfect marble-shaped eyes. “Puries” Jeff called them when he knelt as a kid outside round circles in the dirt where potfulls of gaily speckled globollas lay waiting to be knocked out from a three-finger heist.

What does that even mean?? Or how about:

Who understands the phalarope, his dreams or flights of fancy? Now [Jeff] drove masochistically through the nutcracker drill, football’s two-on-one suicide formation propelling a lone ballcarrier between a pair of Neanderthal shoulders with no necks, only blind desire to bust head, claw inside his birdcage face mask, using callous stumps for hammers, gouging his eyes before the body fell limply forward. 

“Girl, open your eyes, the ones you closed everytime we made love. Touch me, a bit of a user, selfish, but Christ, not the shadow of anyone’s mind blowing incomplete man.” 

Ulla watched as Jeff nervously picked loose skin from the corner of his cuticle. She tried remembering intimate details [her old boyfriend] Jurgen had left outside his window for her. Back of the hand over his left eyelid, as if the sun always shone too brightly for him.

Mind you, that’s exactly how those three paragraphs appear in the book – I mean that’s in sequence. And it’s like this through the book. Soon enough it devolves into a near-psychotic blur of senseless narrative. And speaking of psychotic, the infrequent violence comes out of left field and hits hard: when rounded up by the men who financed the coke deal, Jeff fools them into thinking he’s hidden the stash somewhere, and as they’re driving him to get it he uses a surprise “karate elbow” to knock a dude’s eyeball out of its socket! Bloody cord dangling down the guy’s cheek and everything. And previously Jeff’s been portrayed as a harmless movie-fan…though he did get “commando training” from his high school gym teacher(?!).

The “Ulla” of the excerpts above is Lena’s 18 year-old roommate, who professes no knowledge of where Lena’s run off to, and this after Jeff’s slapped her around a bit. She asks to come along with him, as apparently she’s attracted to him, and during the escape they get around to having sex: “I’m going to spunk you like you are a jungle goddess” being the unforgettable words Jeff initiates the act with. Oh and I forgot, at this point the two are on a ship, escaping wherever the hell the novel opened, and Jeff’s just taken a big shit! Yep folks, you read that right…we have a scene where Jeff sneaks into the restroom while everyone onboard is sleeping and tries to hide the sound of his, uh, “evacuations” with the flushes of the toilet. This takes place directly before the sex.

One would think Jeff would be a nervous man, with Swedish and American mobsters and the cops looking for him, but again, Charles Miron doesn’t roll that way. Instead our hero blathers endlessly about classic film, or makes obscure references to film or literature, and instead of hiding out he goes to a little village and works on his film script. Then one day he ditches Ulla and tries to get a boat to Copenhagen. Instead he’s caught by more drug-world denizens, but these ones are more professional and just want Jeff to work for them and find the cocaine he lost.

Instead Jeff makes off with Elizabet, sexy babe of this drug kingpin, and is right back to watching movies and talking about movies instead of worrying about his life. In fact the “climax” occurs at a screening of Jeff’s unfinished film, where the cops, thugs, and Mafioso who have been trailing him all congregate. Hopefully at this point no reader is expecting an action-packed finale, or even a sensible one. Jeff throws a “brick” of cocaine that turns out to be candy, and the thugs squabble for it, and the cops take custody of Jeff and lead him out, passing by the audience that wants to ask Jeff about his movie.

Honestly To Kill A Snowman was a hot mess, and I have to say I’m not sad that I don’t have any of Miron’s other Manor standalones.

Airline Investigator: Ryan's Flight

Airline Investigator: Ryan's Flight, by Howard Harris
No month stated, 1975  Manor Books

First Airport Cop, now Airline Investigator: someone at Manor Books must’ve really had a flying fetish. Unlike the Charles Miron series, Airline Investigator only lasted for one volume, even though it seems pretty clear that it was designed to be an ongoing action series.

Also unlike the Miron series, this one’s about a private eye.  His name is Ed Ryan and he’s a tall, redheaded, former Air Force pilot turned commercial airline co-pilot. He served in this capacity for two years until being laid off; we’re informed this is a standard situation, with senior pilots getting to stay on while newer pilots are the first to go anytime there’s an economic hiccup. Ryan got sick of it and became a private investigator – in quickly-dispensed background material, we’re told that he’d already been making ventures into this arena, having studied with an old P.I. who was about to retire.

Now Ryan operates out of Queens and as the novel begins he’s looking to capitalize on his own flying background to hire out his P.I. services to airliners. The back cover tells us that “Howard Harris” is a pseudonym of a real commercial pilot who has used his insider info to give us an action-packed, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of airliners. I assume this is a lie and that the author was just someone under contract to Manor, but at any rate Howard Harris isn’t listed in Hawk’s Author’s Pseudonyms, nor is there any information in the Catalog Of Copyright Entries about the book.

But the author very well might’ve been a first-timer, as there’s an amateurish or at least rough quality to the writing, with characters for example who are “literally fuming” in anger. The author also has a strange tendency to refer to his female characters by their last names, even if they’re super-hot stewardesses. It’s like he doesn’t realize the last-name-only thing only applies to villains and tough-guy protagonists. The author also delivers some awkward sentences that in many cases can be easily misconstrued, such as this humdinger:

Flyod Kortum had died a month ago, and Ryan was just finishing the change-over to make the detective agency exclusively his. He had been the junior partner in the business three months before Kortum was involved in the four car collision on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. Eight days on the critical list, then surgery, then complications, then death followed shortly for the 63 year old private detective who was rammed from the rear.

Anyway, Ryan drives a Pontiac Grand Am and carries a .357 Magnum, and is almost immediately hired by an old Air Force commander, Leonard Manning, who now acts as Vice President of Trans-Continental Airlines, which operates out of LaGuardia Airport. A lurid murder opens Ryan’s Flight, with an annoying Trans-Continental co-pilot and his stewardess girlfriend being killed off by “Mr. B” and his cronies. The co-pilot was acting as a mule for Mr. B and was skimming the profits. For his treachery he and the stewardess are stripped and suffocated.

Now, a few weeks later, Leonard Manning is worried there might be more drug or whatever smuggling going on in his airline. Rather than bring in the cops he hires Ryan. Our hero instantly gets in a lust/hate thing with Manning’s “plain but attractive” secretary, Linda Volstead – referred to as “Volstead” throughout the narrative, instead of the more-sensible “Linda.” Ryan takes umbrage that the lady is initially frosty to him, but then she starts coming on strong, to the point where she’s propositioning him; cue an off-page sex scene.

To tell the truth, Ryan does pretty well for himself in a 190 page book with big print, banging just a few pages later another lady, this one a hot-to-trot stewardess named Karen Webber (referred to as, you guessed it, “Webber”). This bit is a little more explicit than the previous one, but nothing too major. In fact Ryan’s Flight is PG-13 at most, with even Ryan’s few kills being practically bloodless – which is a tough feat to pull off when you’re shooting someone with a .357 Magnum.

As for his P.I. skills, Ryan’s method basically amounts to asking a few questions and jotting down notes in his notepad. He quickly deduces that someone is running drugs and whatnot through the airline, and determines that stewardess Karen and a heavyset captain named Zello are behind it, but that they report to someone higher in the chain. This turns out to be Captain Jack Davenport, sort of the villain of the piece; there are several scenes of Davenport standing in his office in the terminal and watching Ryan run around down on the tarmac, trying to put pieces together.

Ryan gets in a few dangerous situations, such as a laughable bit where he’s almost killed – by a runaway baggage cart! His accomplices fare much worse, and Ryan doesn’t prove himself very sharp when Karen is clearly and obviously set up for a hit, once it’s learned that she’s blabbed to Ryan, but our hero tells her “don’t worry” and basically escorts her off to her own assassination. This plays out in a long car chase on the streets of Queens, with Ryan unleathering his .357 and shooting a few dudes.

The author does pepper the book with a lot of background detail about commercial airliners and airport life; Ryan is able to figure out how Davenport et al are smuggling stuff due to his own experience as a commercial pilot. The finale also plays up on this, with Davenport, Zello, and Mr. B meeting on a DC-9, the three of them the only people on board – save for Ryan, who has hidden in a lavatory. And when your hero is a former airline pilot himself, there’s no cause for concern when he blows away the dude flying the DC-9; all Ryan has to do is get behind the controls and bring the big plane in for a nice and easy landing!

There really wasn’t much notable about Airline Investigator: Ryan’s Flight, and it would appear either Manor or its readers felt the same, as this was it for Ed Ryan. The fact that the book was given a subtitle implies that it was in fact planned as the start of a series, but it wasn’t to be – Ryan’s first flight was his last.

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #8

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #8, edited by Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham

June, 2023  Subtropic Productions

This latest installment of Men’s Adventure Quarterly focuses on Hitmen, and is a rare volume that doesn’t have a story from World War II, which is the era most associated with men’s adventure mag yarns. Editors Robert Dies and Bill Cunningham once again turn in a high-quality publication filled with full-color art, including a risque photo section. I love how they include this nude (or at least mostly nude) photography each issue, which really captures the “hide ‘em from your wife” spirit of vintage men’s mags. 

Another interesting thing about this MAQ is that it has some stories from the ‘70s. This makes sense, as after the WWII yarns tapered off the men’s mag editors of the day started focusing on more topical things, and after the success of The Godfather (courtesy former men’s mag writer Mario Puzo) one of those topical things was crime. Somehow Bob Deis has found long stories from this later men’s mag era; the majority of the ‘70s men’s mags I have all feature short stories, even the ones billed as “true book bonuses” being pretty short. But the last story collected here, from 1975, is the longest. 

This issue also features a host of guest editors…I mean a bunch of them! They all provide overviews of crime-centric books and movies of the era, and all are informative and well-written. I never have much to say about the opening pages of each Men’s Adventure Quarterly because it’s kind of hard to review an introduction! But they all offer nice insights into the field. A problem though is that some of the time these intros – and I don’t just mean the ones in this issue specifically – are a little too broad-based in their outlook, as if written for an Entertainment Weekly audience. I would imagine most readers of Men’s Adventure Quarterly are quite familiar with vintage pulp fiction and movies, and don’t need much in the way of background material on the subject. 

This is why Bob Deis’s intros for each story are always one of the highlights – he tells you all there is to know about the (usually uncredited) writers and artists. He also goes above and beyond by looking up how “true” some of the yarns here really are. This lends the books a bit of a snarky vibe, as it’s usually clear that the vast majority of these men’s adventure stories are wholly the product of the writer’s imagination. Actually I’d say more so of the editor’s imagination – I’m betting in most cases the editors would come up with an idea, get the artwork underway, and hire some writer to do a story that followed the setup, with scenes catered to the art. But hell I wasn’t there and don’t really know, so it’s just my guess. 

The issue follows the chronological format as the previous issues, thus the stories begin with the earliest piece in the anthology, “Setup For The Kid,” by Bill H. Hunter and from the Februrary 1957 Stag. This short piece reads like an excerpt from a Parker novel, featuring two hit men from a crime outfit as they go about a job. Interestingly, it’s mostly told via dialog, and thus has a different vibe than the standard men’s adventure mag yarn; it would be more at home in Manhunt. This one’s all about the prep for the hit, which goes down rather anticlimactically. Indeed the story itself is rather old hat, but it’s told with a nice crime-pulp vibe. I also liked how the titular “Kid” had a special scope for his rifle. 

The next one’s on more of a factual tip: “I Was Al Capone’s Hatchet Man,” by Dave Mazroff and from the March 1958 Man’s Odyssey. Bob delivers one of his typically-insightful intros here, detailing how Mazroff, unlike most men’s mag writers, wasn’t just making up this tale whole-hog. Mazroff, who did work for Capone, here tells a tale about Capone that’s interestingly formated like the typical men’s mag yarn. Many years ago I visited that old state pen in Philadelphia, and one of the cells there had been inhabitated by Capone; they’d decorated it like he supposedly had it in his time, complete with a radio and all these other deluxe trimmings, so even in prison he was a high-roller. 

Next up is “Killer With One Thousand Faces,” by Donald J. Brock and from the February 1963 Man’s True Danger. I also enjoyed Bob’s intro for this one, as he tells of his failed quest to prove that this story – touted as “true” per men’s mag conventions – really was true. As Bob notes, even the author credit is fake; supposedly this story is told to us by a cop who worked the case, but he doesn’t even insert himself in the tale until the end. The story itself is told in third person. It concerns an actor named Johnny Driscoll who has a penchant for disguise, and puts his acting skills to work in the life of crime. This one was pretty fun, with Driscoll impersonating mobsters – and even, as one test of his acting skills, sleeping in one night with eleven girls, all of them the girls of various stooges, and Driscoll able to fool each gal into thinking he’s their stooge! I also got a chuckle out of how we’re told, almost casually in the final few paragraphs, that this story takes place in 1929! 

“The Specialist” is by Greg Joseph, from the April 1963 Fury. This one’s about Vince Weber, a “death insurance salesman,” who goes to great lengths to concoct cover stories for his true job: syndicate assassin. We see him on a few hits, and are also reminded of the jiggly charms of the “top syndicate hooker” who poses as his wife in the suburbs. But crime never pays in these men’s mag yarns, thus it’s another tale with a “shock” finale. 

“Bugsy Siegel’s Ever-Lovin’ Top Gun” is by Anthony Scadato and from the August 1963 Stag, and like the Capone story is another based mostly on fact. It’s even more like a typical men’s mag story, complete with an opening in which Capone, in a hostpital, pulls a hit and then returns to his hospital room – to find the busty blonde nurse waiting there for him in his bed! This one has a very nice vibe, like a men’s adventure mag variation on Truman Capote in how it’s nonfiction (mostly) told like fiction. 

We get another of those fake “as told to” stories next: “I Hit The Hit Men,” by Jerry “Red” Kelly, as told to Win P. Morgan, from the November 1974 Male. This is an issue I have wanted for a long time, mostly because it contains that “frog man” story by Walter Kaylin I was obsessed with reading for years, until Bob fortunately included it in MAQ #5. This story clearly seems to be a take on that Joey book that came out at the time, the autobiography of the Mafia hitman which I still haven’t read. Like Joey, this one’s by a top Mafia killer who tells us about his job in practical, business-like terms. There’s some tongue-in-cheekery at play: “Red” tells us how a lot of the hitman stuff we see in movies is “crap,” as no real hitman would go for the fancy kills seen in such movies…and as the tale progresses, Red pulls off a bunch of fancy kills, like scuba-diving beneath a boat and planting explosives on it. This one has a great crime-pulp vibe, with memorable lines like, “His eyes were wide open as the bullet plowed into his brain.” 

“The Hit Man Who Turned Out To Be A Woman,” by Craig Campbell and from the March 1975 For Men Only, is notable because it’s another of those men’s adventure mag stories where the illustrations have nothing whatsoever to do with the story. The cool artwork shows a hotstuff female assassin putting on makeup and disguising herself for hits…but the story itself relegates the female assassin to supporting-character status, focused more on the determined Fed who chases her. Indeed there’s almost a horror vibe to this one, as the hitwoman is presented as a mysterious presence, one who shows up and whacks some Mafia stooge, then disappears…and then cops assemble and try to put the pieces together. But more importantly, now that we’re in the ‘70s things are a bit more risque: for her first kill the hitwoman wears a see-through blouse, and we’re told how the soon-to-be-victim is “staring down at the boobs.” Actually the writing for this one is very different from the men’s mag norm, with such oddball phrases as, “Gargulio’s chinless face…reminded Ross of the underside of a toilet bowl.” Bob doesn’t have much to say about author “Craig Campbell” in the intro, so I’m wondering if it’s a pseudonym. Indeed, the weird phrases and unusual story structure had me flashing back to the similarly-oddball work of contemporary crime fiction author Charles Miron. Oh, and I have to note for posterity: Ross, the hotshot Fed on the case, does not have sex with the sexy hitwoman! You’d figure that would be a given in a men’s mag yarn, but it doesn’t happen. 

Finally we have a suprisingly-long men’s mag story from the ‘70s with “The Day Castro Beat The CIA’s Mafia,” by Wayne C. Ulsh and from the October 1974 For Men Only. Another great intro, complete with James Reasoner stating that Ulsh was one of his favorite men’s adventure mag writers of the day. This story is more long-simmer, with a CIA agent named John Cogan trying to orchestrate Castro’s assassinatino in early ‘60s Cuba, Cogan retaining the services of a Mafia hitman named Marzano. It too features a memorably downer ending, with Cogan going to extreme ends to ensure silence…a secret job that’s now openly being discussed in a men’s adventure magazine several years after the fact. I do enjoy how some of these writers seemed to have so much fun with the “true” conceit. 

Otherwise there are a handful of pieces on various topics, most notably the very much in shape Betty Brosmer, and also a feature on the men’s adventure mags published by her husband, Joe Weider. I got into weight-lifting in the early ‘90s so have been aware of Weider for a long time; seeing his name always makes me chuckle, as the first car I ever bought was a 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit (this was in ’97, so the car was not new), and it didn’t have power steering, so it was quite an arm workout to drive it. My buddy Ken would always call it “The Joe Weider Car.”

Anyway, Men’s Adventure Quarterly #8 is yet another highly-recommended installment of this excellent series, which will hopefully continue to run for years and years!