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.

Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah

Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah, by Marc Olden

April, 1975  Signet Books

Marc Olden throttles it back for the penultimate volume of Black Samurai; I’m not saying Sword Of Allah is bad or anything, but it’s certainly a step down after the insanity that was the previous volume. I’d also say it’s my least favorite volume of the series yet, but again, that’s only when compared to the other volumes, all of which have been great. 

As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, a recurring schtick of Olden’s is to fill pages by jumping willy-nilly into the various perspectives of his characters – and he always features a lot of characters in his books. He does that probably more so in Sword Of Allah than any previous Black Samurai installment…with the ultimate effect that series protagonist Robert “Black Samurai” Sand is seriously lost in the narrative shuffle. He’s almost a supporting character in his own book. 

Sand features in a memorable opening which sees him becoming more personally involved in a mission since way back in the first volume. There’s no detail on how long ago The Warlock was, but we do learn straightaway that Sword Of Allah is essentially a sequel to earlier volume The Inquisition, the events of which we are told occurred a year ago. 

But when we meet him, Sand is once again in Paris – a recurring locale in this series if ever there was one – and he’s sitting on a plane about to take off with some woman he’s met in the past couple mounths, a woman he’s totally in love with and etc, etc. You don’t need a men’s adventure doctorate to know what’s going to happen to this woman. Meanwhile, due to the rampant POV-hopping with which Olden will fill up the pages, we already know a group of radical Muslim terrorists have hijacked the plane Robert Sand just happens to be sitting in. 

This is a tense scene as Sand quickly sees that the handful of terrorists who have overtaken the plane will no doubt kill everyone on board, and Sand must figure out how to get himself and his girlfriend, Ann, to safety. A curious thing is that Olden as ever wants us to understand that Robert Sand, despite being a badass samurai with years and years of training, is not a superman, so he doesn’t even try to take on the terrorists; instead, he searches for a way to get off the grounded plane without being detected. 

The terrorists are part of the Sword of Allah, a violent terrorist group, but again a reminder that such groups were less vile and deadly in the ‘70s, as these guys are more concerned with getting publicity for their cause – and with saving their own skins after they kill their victims. In other words, not the suicide vest radicals of today. But they are still vile, as Sand’s prediction is soon proven correct and the terrorists open fire on the occupants of the plane, blowing away men, women, and children. 

This is no doubt the darkest the series has ever gotten, with kids falling beneath the gunfire as Sand watches helplessly; and also, unsurprisingly, Ann gets blown away. This isn’t a spoiler; you know like within a sentence or two of the girl’s intro that she isn’t fated to be in the book for very long. Sand manages to engage a few of the terrorists in close-quarters combat; in a strangely unelaborated-upon tidbit, we learn that one of the terrorists is a Japanese martial arts expert Sand has fought in the past, who is now working with the Muslim terrorists. 

The Baron digs the knife in by letting Sand know that these very same terrorists were the ones the Baron tried to set Sand on, a few weeks ago, but Sand had been too busy boffing his British girlfriend Ann and so turned down the assignment. And now Ann’s dead, killed by the very terrorists Sand might have stopped if he’d heeded the Baron’s request. Thus Sand is driven by both personal loss and self-anger throughout Sword Of Allah. 

That is, when we see the guy. For the most part, the novel is made up of the random thoughts of the terrorists, their leader (“The Prophet”), and right-wing American terrorist Neal Heath, who last tangled with Sand in The Inquisition. Olden even works in the waning days of the Space Race into the plot, with an unexplored subplot about a joint US-USSR space venture – which a right-wing senator wants to stop at all costs, leading to the hard-to-buy teaming up of Heath’s group and the Prophet’s group. 

Olden tosses so much into the blender that he misses opportunities; for example there’s the Prophet’s sexy daughter, Laila, whose memorable intro has her about to bed some poor astronaut, only to kill him. The veteran pulp reader would expect that Robert Sand and Laila would hook up at some point, but this does not happen, and indeed it is not until the very final pages of the novel that the two even meet. 

So far as nookie goes, Sand goes unlucky in Sword Of Allah, too driven by the loss of Ann to notice any other women. That said, “driven” is a good way to describe Sand, as he is more vicious this time out than previous volumes, leading to a surprising finale where he employs an axe to execute some unarmed opponents. 

Olden specializes in long-running action scenes that really put his heroes through the wringer, and Sword Of Allah features a great such sequence that takes place on a small ship off the coast of France. Sand does a frogman and swims to it, planting explosives like a regular Tiger Shark, and then he goes onboard to “kill the Prophet,” who happens to be hiding on board. Instead Sand gets in a running gun battle with legions of terrorists, gradually pushed up against a wall with little opportunity to escape. 

Another thing Olden specializes in is pulling a deus ex machina to get his hero out of these scrapes; as in previous volumes, this tense battle on the boat ends with Sand’s apparent death, then the next chapter opens later and he’s all well and good – and we learn in quick summary how he got out of his predicament. It’s a copout, but Olden does it so well that you don’t even realize it until later. 

One thing he doesn’t pull off as well as giving Robert Sand his impetus for revenge. We only meet Ann in the opening scene, and Olden really lays it on with a trowel, how much Sand loves her, how great of a woman she is, and etc, to the point that she might as well have “DOA” stamped on her forehead. But this is all we see of her, and from there on Sand is burning and yearning for revenge, killing in cold blood at times, and it’s all cool and well done, but it does lack a little meaning because Ann is a new character who is not given opportunity to make an impression on the reader. 

The uncredited cover artist shows material that does happen in the narrative, with the caveat that Sand’s use of an axe in the finale is more “axe murderer” than “axe-wielding warrior;” it’s probably one of the most surprising finales in Olden’s work, as we see how cold and merciless the Black Samurai can really be. Otherwise, the scantily-clad babe on the cover must be Laila, but it’s not Sand she’s disrobing for – it’s the hapless NASA guy she wastes. Speaking of which, Olden continues to push buttons, as the only sex scene in Sword Of Allah features the Prophet and his daughter! But Olden does leave this scene of incest mostly off-page. 

Overall Sword Of Allah was entertaining, but as mentioned it was also my least favorite Black Samurai yet. It’s not bad or anything, just too mired in hopscotching perspectives from one-off characters, and the impression is given that Olden might’ve just been worn out by the previous volume and turned this one in quickly.

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2, by Stan Lee and Frank Springer

October, 1977  Signet Books

The second (and final) volume of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant is better than the first volume. This slim, 121 page paperback picks up directly after the preceding volume, which collected the strips from October 11, 1976 through January 15, 1977; The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 collects another three months: January 16, 1977 through April 17, 1977. 

Curiously, the last page states that a third volume would be released soon, but it was not to be – no doubt because The Virtue Of Vera Valiant had already been canceled by the time this paperback was published, the last strip having been published on August 28, 1977. My assumption is The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 went to press before the cancellation happened. 

But even then, another insallment could have been published; the April 18, 1977 through August 28, 1977 strips could have comprised a third and final paperback, thus completing the series for those few readers who were interested. But I guess that is the key point; it seems clear that The Virtue Of Vera Valiant was not a succes, neither in newspapers nor in paperback. And, as I mentioned in my review of the first volume, it has yet to garner any kind of interest, or even any cult fame – to this day the full strip has not been collected. 

The unfortunate thing is that The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 is much better than the first volume, and indicates that Stan Lee had figured out how to write the series. Whereas the first volume came off as tepid, given that Lee was spoofing soap opera melodrama and pathos without bothering to offer compelling storylines, in the strips collected here he has realized he needs to deliver a plot that pulls readers in, while still coming off as overly melodramatic. 

Again, though, Stan Lee has a tendency to jettison subplots without warning. The Virtue Of Vera Valiant ended with Vera Valiant being approached by elderly but dashing network CEO Martin C. Martin to be the star of a soap opera that would be real – in other words, reality TV before reality TV. The stories at the beginning of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 sort of follow on from this…but the “reality TV” thing is dropped posthaste, Lee focusing more on Martin C. Martin’s abrupt love for Vera. 

The reality TV stuff is ignored, save for a staff writer who sporadically appears, “taking notes” on the goings-on of the Valiant family (as a refresher, in addition to Vera there’s air-headed Aunt Gladys and portly loser Herbert). But even here the focus is more on romance; Aunt Gladys develops feelings for the writer, leading to the crazy-for-a-newspaper-in-1977 revelation that the writer is gay. I was a little surprised this made it into a mainstream newspaper; as it is, “gay” is never specifically stated, but twice we are informed the writer “doesn’t go for women.” 

But really the main focus of the first half of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 is Martin C. Martin pushing himself on Vera, who meanwhile pines for her boyfriend, Winthrop, who by the way has abruptly “disappeared.” It’s all very soapy and melodramatic, but done much better than such stuff was in the first book. Also, it gives artist Frank Springer a chance to do more than the threadbare, humdrum surroundings of the previous book; there’s a part where Vera and Martin C. Martin’s lothario son go to a disco, and there meet a femme fatale with the awesome name Ramona Rapture. 

This leads into a bizarre twist where a goon, who happens to be Ramona’s boyfriend, kidnaps Vera – but it turns out the goon works for Martin C. Martin, who moonlights as a crime kingpin! The whole “reality tv” angle is gone and forgotten and the second half of the book is all about crime boss Martin trying to blackmail Vera into being his woman. 

Herbert, the loser brother, has been talking about a new business deal he’s working on, and it turns out he’s been working with Martin C. Martin. But the crime boss opens an adult bookstore in Herbert’s name, and will only take Herbert’s name off of it if Vera agrees to be his woman – the adult bookstore, by the way, also being a bit more risque than what I would’ve expected from a 1977 newspaper strip, but the only thing we see of it is the marque out front with “Herbert’s Adult Books” in big letters. 

Stan Lee also opens up the storyline with the return of Winthrop, and also the brief “awakening” of his wife Melba, who has been in a coma for the past 14 years. Melba, whose face is never seen, starts talking in her sleep, providing oracles and whatnot, and her latest revelation is that Vera Valiant will soon die. When Vera claims that Melba never met her, thus throwing into question how accurate Melba’s predictions could be, Winthrop responds that Melba “didn’t know Jimmy Carter, either, but she predicted his election!” 

This brings a subtle but interesting supernatural bent to The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2, as Vera is freaked out in the final strips collected here that Melba’s prophecy will be fulfilled. Again it’s played for laughs, and Stan Lee has a hard time being both serious and funny – for example, Martin C. Martin’s goons take Herbert into a back room to torture him for not paying on his loan, but in the next strip we see that all they’re doing is forcing him to watch three soap operas on three televisions. 

Still, though, I enjoyed The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 more than I thought I would, given that I didn’t enjoy the first one very much. Stan Lee has better found his footing and Frank Springer’s art is great as it was the first time, but it did seem as if some of the panels here were a little blurry. Not sure if it’s just my particular copy or if the reproduction process wasn’t done as well as it was for the first volume. 

Until the series is fully collected – that is, if it ever is – we’ll just have to wonder what else happened in the ensuing (and final) four months of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. As mentioned the last page of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 mentions what will happen in the never-published third volume, noting a stranger who comes into the life of Aunt Gladys.  This no doubt refers to her runaway husband – the one who ran off with “a defrocked television repair person.” Recently I came across an eBay listing for a few Virtue Of Vera Valiant strips, and the seller happened to have the final strip listed. Here it is: 

This is the August 28, 1977 strip, aka the final strip of the series, so not only did Aunt Gladys get a Happily Ever After, but it looks like Vera and Winthrop did as well – Melba herself being on the phone was a perfect way to end the series, as she’s remained off-page the entire series…sort of like Niles’s wife on Frasier, now that I think of it. 

It’s debatable if Lee and Springer knew that the series was cancelled at the time. I’m betting they did, as the “cliffhanger” climax is in keeping with the series, and also brings the storyline full circle, as Melba, Winthrop’s wife with “sleeping sickness,” was one of the first subplots. Also the final “Next” caption, which is in keeping with the overdone, “melodramatic” tone of all the preceding such captions, plays in on the joke: “Did he say Melba?” 

Despite knowing that it no doubt played out on a goofy angle, I still find myself interested in the mention of the “psychic spell” that Vera falls under on the last page of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2. I wonder what that refers to. And also it sounds like poor Herbert is sent to jail, but I bet all of that was lame; as I mentioned in my review of the first book, Herbert seems to have come out of another strip entirely. Thankfully he’s hardly in the series. 

Anyway, I’m glad I picked up these two books back in 2009, and I’m still surprised that the entire run of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant has yet to be collected. If it ever is someday, I will be sure to read it. And also, it’s only now occurred to me that the series title is strangely similar to one of the more famous newspaper strips in history: Prince Valiant. I wonder if Stan Lee did this on purpose?

Here are more random photos of the inside of the book, but same as last time: the binding is so tight I could barely get a good photo of the interior!

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, by Stan Lee and Frank Springer

June, 1977  Signet Books

Last weekened I was in the room we use for storage and going through a bunch of boxes of junk. I came across a big printer box that had books in it, all of them still in the padded envelopes in which they’d been mailed to me (not sure why I never put them in a bookcase or whatever, but anyway). The majority of them were hardcover editions of the Greek/Roman poetry I was into many, many years ago (I guess my estrogen level must’ve been high at the time), but on the sides of the box were two smaller padded envelopes with mass market paperbacks in them. 

Of course, those were the packages I opened first – and they turned out to be this book, The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, and the sequel The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2. According to the postage stamps, each book was mailed to me in June of 2009…pre-blog, baby! As I mentioned before, one of the reasons I started Glorious Trash was to force myself to actually read all the books I bought, so these two Vera Valiant paperbacks would’ve been read back then if I actually had a blog. 

I am not sure how I discovered these books, which were scarce and obscure then and apparently even more today; I am surprised to see that The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, a daily/weekly newspaper strip by Stan Lee and Frank Springer that ran from October 11, 1976 to August 28, 1977 has still not been collected, other than in these two old paperbacks.  And even then the full series was not collected, so even if you get these two paperbacks you aren't getting the entire strip run.  This perhaps shows how obscure the series really is, as even Lee’s other newspaper strip, The Amazing Spider-Man, has been collected. But then, it’s kind of unfair to compare Spider-Man to The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. 

I think I found out about these books shortly before I bought them from online sellers in June of 2009 thanks to the then-recent DVD release of soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. This was a soap that mocked soap convention, and since it was before my time (I was born in 1974, so would’ve been 2 years old when it was on TV) I’d never seen it. But I recall thinking the commercials for the DVD release were funny (to this day I still haven’t seen the show, though I still think it looks funny)…and somehow, somewhere, I learned that Stan “The Man” Lee had done a short-lived newspaper strip “inspired” by Mary Hartman. 

How inspired? Well, just check the back cover of this first Signet paperback collection, which even mocks the title of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, repeating “Vera Valiant” twice: 

So, Signet Books was aware that this strip was intended to be a soap opera spoof, same as Mary Hartman was. I wonder if actual newspaper readers knew this. I’m guessing not, hence the short life of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. The book, by the way, is copyright The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, so I’m assuming they too were in on the joke. It’s also my understanding that some papers printed the series under the title “Vera Valiant, Vera Valiant,” to give further evidence of the strip’s inspiration. 

But the sad fact is that, judging from this 126-page paperback that collects the first three months of the series (October 11, 1976 to January 15, 1977), The Virtue Of Vera Valiant just isn’t very funny. This really surprised me; just the other month I mentioned how funny Stan Lee’s work was in the The Amazing Spider-Man strip. Here though his humor falls flat; the jokes do not seem very natural, given the artificial nature of the series itself (it’s intended to be a spoof of a stilted, melodramatic soap opera), and the jokes themselves are often of the groaner variety, or just lame in general. Also, there is a lot of repetition in setups and payoffs, but that seems to be standard in the disposable, ephemeral world of newspaper comic strips. 

We don’t get any setup or intro, and the strips are arranged on each page without the series banner. The Sunday strips, as they are longer than the dailies, take up a few pages – and more often than not they cover the same material as the dailies, only offering a little “new” material. And the Sundays are here printed in black and white, even though they were in color in the original newspaper printings. 

As I say, there is a lot of repetition, given that the audience might not be with the series every day; there could be weekend readers who only saw the Sunday strips, or weekday readers who didn’t see the daily strips, so Lee has to ensure the story is understandable for both parties. 

This also means there isn’t much in the way of continuity; subplots come up and are dispensed with wily-nily, with no explanation. This was another surprise, as the Spider-Man strips did have continuity, so my assumption is Lee was either finding his footing with this series (and perhaps dealing with editorial mandates), or he was spoofing the often surreal nature of soap operas themselves. But still, this makes for an unsatisfying read at times. 

The setup is simple: titular Vera Valiant is a young, dark-baired beauty in Hackensack, New Jersey – a lot of the easy jokes come from the fact that the story occurs in Hackensack, by the way. She lives with her Aunt Gladys (parelells to Peter Parker and Aunt May) and her brother Herbert; Aunt Gladys, in the little we see of her, is a doting but air-headed older lady, and Herbert is a heavyset buffoon. A lot of the repetitive “groaner” comedy comes from Herbert; there’s a lot of jokes about him flunking out of various correspondence courses, his latest subject being podiatry. 

There’s even more repetitive jokery around Vera’s boyfriend, Winthrop, a meek C.P.A. That Winthrop is a C.P.A. is constantly mentioned, usually in a facetious light – Winthrop going on about how being a C.P.A. is a noble profession and whatnot. It’s funny the first time, sort of, but by the tenth time it gets old. Also, Winthrop happens to be married, but for the past 14 years – since his wedding night, in fact – Winthrop’s wife Melba has been a victim of “sleeping sickness.” Thus she is asleep in a hospital and has been so throughout the marriage; Lee plays up the melodrama of Vera wanting to be with Winthrop, but feeling he should be true to his wife, even if she’s asleep, and etc…all of it done in a satirical way, of course. 

Thus each strip ends with a big “shock” moment, usually with Vera putting her hand to her mouth in terror, but it’s always something goofy or dumb that causes this…like late in the book a limo keeps circling the house and “strangers” barge in, and Vera is terrified..but it turns out the strangers are from a TV show and want to make Vera a real-life soap opera star. It’s stuff like this throughout, but then again this particular subplot is a curious prediction of reality TV. 

The bit with the “sleeping sick” wife takes up the first storyline, then we have a random storyline where Aunt Gladys falls for a guy who claims to be from Beta-III and who wants to sell condos on other planets; he has a spaceship that apparently is a hunk of metal sitting on the Valiant lawn, but the black-and-white reproduction of the panels kind of prevents us from seeing what Frank Springer intended it to look like. There’s more lame, repetitive comedy with the joke that Gladys’s husband “ran off with a defrocked TV repair person.” 

As for the supposed alien, he too is presented as a meek looking CPA type; overall The Virtue Of Vera Valiant occurs in a rather bland world, with most panels taking place in the Valiant home. There is little of the escapism of a true soap, with rich characters in rich surroundings, and it’s altogether more of a threadbare, humdrum sort of affair. 

Then there’s the problem of Vera Valiant herself. She’s such a cipher she is hard to relate to, but then I’m not sure it was even Stan Lee’s intention that we would relate to her. She’s there to act as a spoof of the perennially-shocked and worried female protagonist common in soap operas, so her dialog is generally reduced to voicing concerns or gasping in surprise. Her brother Herbert meanwhile seems to have wandered in from an out-and-out comedy, and doesn’t fit with the vibe Lee is trying to create for the series. 

It’s interesting how Stan Lee seems to lose interest in his subplots so quickly, but again this could be his reacting to editorial demands. The subplot with the Beta III salesman is lame, and Lee himself seems to get sick of it; after spending so many strips on the storyline, he abandons it with Vera being sent to an insane asylum (a cop shows up and doesn’t believe her when she says that Aunt Gladys’s boyfriend is an alien), and the Beta III guy is never mentioned nor seen again. 

The next storyline is no less annoying, and just as long; Vera in an insane asylum, where the hunky psychiatrist seems to have a thing for her (he’s also treating Winthrop’s sleeping wife, by the way) and thus won’t let Vera check out. But Lee gradually loses interest in this plotline, too, with the abrupt reveal that Vera works in a library and is visited by a coworker, an outspoken feminist who rails that there are more men in the insane asylum than women. 

This takes us into the homestretch, where a dashing, older man who runs the network’s biggest soap operas (Martin C. Martin) shows up at Vera’s home, having seen her on TV (another gag has Vera being put on a late-night TV news program while in the insane asylum), and coming up with the idea of making a real-world soap about her life. 

That’s it for The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, but more of the storyline was soon published in the second paperback, which I’ll be reviewing soon. A curious note, which I’ll belabor in the next review, is that the second volume states that a third volume would be forthcoming, but one never was – so The Virtue Of Vera Valiant not only failed to secure a long newspaper run, but also failed to garner paperback readers. 

Here are some random photos of the book, but the photos suck because the binding of my copy is so tight I could barely hold the book open with one hand while snapping pictures of the pages with the other. At any rate, Frank Springer’s artwork is great throughout, fully capturing the spoofy pathos of the series and giving each character their own look. However, unlike the Spider-Man strip, there is little in the way of risque material; Vera wears a full dress throughout the series and there’s nothing in the way of sex appeal. It’s just not that kind of story, I guess, but still the creep in me wishes there was at least a little of it…but then maybe I was just spoiled by the T&A John Romita brought to the Spider-Man strip. 

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock (Second Review)

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock, by Marc Olden

January, 1975  Signet Books

It’s hard to believe, but it’s going on 15 years since I reviewed this sixth installment of Black Samurai. This was the first volume of the series I read, and at the time I was unaware that it had been the source material for the film adaptation. I loved the book when I read it back in 2010, and reading it again now in 2025, I loved it again. 

For one, I’m a bit more familiar with the work of Marc Olden at this point, so I see how his style is so evident in The Warlock. Stuff that I might not have noticed in my first reading of his work, all those years ago. But it’s all here – the large cast of characters, the frequent cutting between perspectives, the occasional lapse into stream-of-consciousness as we dip into the thoughts of various characters. 

Yes, it’s all here, but this time Olden reins it in, to the point that very little of The Warlock comes off as padded. And it’s pretty impressive because Olden clearly indicates he has not become bored with the series; six volumes in, and he turns in the most entertaining installment yet, filled to the brim with crazy characters and situations. It’s almost like he took a brief survey of the mid-‘70s men’s adventure field, saw how lurid everything had become, and decided to turn the dial of his own series to 10. (Or 11, for you Spinal Tap fans.) 

But man, Marc Olden really threw in the kitchen sink with this one, and not to sound redundant, but it’s impressive. I mean it opens with Robert “Black Samurai” Sand being attacked by a pair of transvestite dwarves, for pete’s sake, with the dwarves wielding razor blades and slicing them at Sand. Not long after that our hero is attacked by “Lion Men,” brawny black dudes in leopard costumes, like they came out of a ‘30s Tarzan movie. (Tarzan And His Mate of course being the best of the lot – complete even with full female nudity in an underwater swimming scene…pretty impressive for a movie from 1934!) 

Again it surprises me that Al Adamson chose this volume to adapt for his movie version of Black Samurai. Reading the book again, after having finally seen the movie a few years ago (as mentioned in my review from back then, I was waiting forever for the uncut version to come out), I see how much content Adamson changed, likely for budgetary reasons…yet, at the same time, he added a bunch of stupid shit that wasn’t in the book that certainly increased his budget. Like a sportscar for Sand. Not to mention a friggin’ jetpack a la Thunderball. And even a moronic fight with a vulture. 

No, none of that stuff is in The Warlock. In fact, Adamson could’ve done a straight adaptation of the source material and he could’ve done it with the limited budget he was working with. He also toned down on the lurid element Olden brought his tale. Janicot, the titular “Warlock,” is a total freak in the novel, filming black magic snuff films for his jet-setting followers and making scads of money off the proceeds; as I mentioned in my review of the movie, the Janicot of the film comes off more like a poor man’s Uncle Arthur from Bewitched. 

Femme fatale Synne also suffers greatly in the movie. I’d forgotten how much Olden puts into her character in the novel: here she is a force of unbridled sex, a hotstuff black babe with silver hair and lipstick. In fact I wish she was in the novel more than she is. She’s Janicot’s second in command, and Olden has it that she’s so blown away by Robert Sand that she jeopardizes her standing with Janicot. That said, nothing much comes of this, and Sand bluntly turns down Synne’s offer for sex – indeed, Sand goes without for this particular volume. 

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Looking at my surprisingly-short original review of The Warlock, I see that I failed to note what the plot was about. Well, in this one Sand is tasked by his boss, former president William Baron Clarke, to take down Janicot, an Aleister Crowley type who runs a satanic cult. Janicot specializes in getting politicians in compromising positions in his sexual rituals, which are filmed for blackmail purposes, and an old colleague of Clarke’s has gotten in too deep. 

We meet Sand as he’s already in France, researching. As with most Black Samurai novels – and, come to think of it, a lot of Olden’s Narc books as well – the action takes place in Paris. I’m not sure if Olden lived there or was just fascinated with the place, but he constantly has stuff taking place in Paris. And that’s where Sand is as The Warlock opens, walking into an ambush courtesy a pair of leather-clad transvestite dwarves. 

Olden really brings home how sadistic these little bastards are; they are the bodyguards of Janicot, we’ll later learn – cross-dressing psyco dwarves who carry razor blades. The opening of the book features a great bit where Sand kicks one of the little bastards. Olden wisely keeps the dwarves a minor presence (lame pun alert); I don’t believe he even names any of them. Nor does he name any of the “Lion Men” who also serve Janicot – burly black men in leopard costumes who battle Sand in the opening sequence, but who then essentially disappear from the narrative. 

This is because Olden, as usual, has a ton of other characters he focuses on. As ever this means Robert Sand himself is lost in the shuffle, but the villains this time are so colorful the reader doesn’t much mind. I mean, there’s Bone, who serves as Janicot’s henchman, a gay albino sadist. There’s Rheinhart, a friggin’ werewolf, who was raised (as a cub?) by Janicot and is the most fierce fighter in the Warlock’s employ – and also we’re told of the creature’s various attacks on women, Olden building on the overall lurid tone of the narrative. 

There’s also Chavez, returning from the fourth volume; in belabored backstory that doesn’t make much sense, Chavez has hired Janicot to capture and kill the Black Samurai. We briefly met Chavez at the end of The Deadly Pearl, where he swore revenge for his brother’s death; the dude certainly has a roundabout way of getting revenge, as he’s hired Janicot to track down Robert Sand, capture him, drug him, and kill him on-camera in a black magic ritual or something…which is the sort of thing Janicot does. 

Reading the book again, I was impressed once more with how lurid Marc Olden got, particularly with Janicot…I’d forgotten the hinted-at backstory that Janicot was a Nazi in the war, one who renamed himself and gradually drew an international following as a mystic guru. Olden delivers a few jet-setter party sequences Janicot throws in Paris that could come out of a contemporary trash paperback. There are also a few scenes where Janicot kills off people who have run afoul of him or his cult, and Olden really brings to life the plight of the unfortunates; some of the material here could come out of the sweats of the era, focused on torture and suffering. 

What’s interesting is that Olden has enough for a novel with this setup, but he also throws in Toki, Sand’s Japanese beloved, not seen since (I think?) the first volume. Janicot has also been hired to blackmail a Vietnamese politician who has campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, and this dude just happens to be married to Toki. Janicot is supposed to get the guy and film him in some depraved satanic orgy to use as leverage on him. And meanwhile, Janicot has learned that this guy’s wife is also the love of the Black Samurai’s life (how Janicot’s learned this is left vague), so the Warlock figures he can get double bang for his buck – kidnap Toki and use her as Black Samurai bait. 

And yet even this isn’t enough for Olden; Sand is already on the trail of Janicot at novel’s start, unaware of the Warlock’s plans for Toki. This is because Janicot has pulled the same blackmailing trick on a French politician the Baron is friends with, and so the Baron has asked Sand to go over to Paris and get the goods on the Warlock. So in other words “it’s personal this time” for this particular installment; there’s no big global threat the Black Samurai is looking to stop. 

Curious, then, that director Al Adamson gussied up the plot with so much fluff. For those who have seen the film but never read the book: Sand doesn’t drive a sportscar. He does not, at any point, put on a rocket pack straight out of Thunderball. He doesn’t fight a vulture(!). And he doesn’t wear a tracksuit at any point of the novel. Indeed, watching the movie again after re-reading The Warlock, it blew my mind that Adamson was too foolish to just do a straight adaptation, as the ensuing film would have been more senastionalistic…and likely cheaper, too. 

One thing the movie did get right with its “fluff” is more in the way of sex and nudity. There’s little of either in the novel. Robert Sand does not have sex in this one, though the, uh, carrot is dangled – courtesy Synne, certainly the most interesting female character yet in the Black Samurai series, if not the entire men’s adventure genre. She’s a black beauty who serves as Janicot’s vassal (or something), a former hooker from the American South who was discovered by Janicot and turned into essentially the embodiment of sex; the Warlock uses her to screw VIPs, and though there is not a single sex scene in the novel, we’re informed that Synne can keep a man happy. Oh, and she has long, straight hair that’s been dyed silver, and also she wears silver lipstick and silver nail polish. This is something Al Adamson also chose to ignore in his film adaptation…but then, actress Marilyn Joi doesn’t look much like how Synne is described, anyway. 

Even Robert Sand is taken back by her staggering and exotic beauty; we are told that his stern, “samurai!” façade is tested by Synne. But it’s all simmer and no boil. Synne catches sight of Sand, and – in the frequent cutovers to Synne’s perspective that occur through the novel – we learn she’s developed a thing for the Black Samurai. He’s a real man, she can tell, and not like the sadistic brutes she has to screw to keep Janicot happy. Men like Chavez…who, by the way, engages Synne twice in the novel, off-page, as does another guy Janicot is keeping happy, a stuffy British doctor. 

As I mentioned in my original review, the Sand-Synne stuff is ultimately anticlimactic. They have a “meet cute” early in the book, when Sand, dressed like a movie cowboy with a Lone Ranger mask, crashes a Paris party of Janicot’s. He runs into the silver-haired Synne, and there’s a clear mutual attraction. But when they have their actual face-to-face, later in the novel, not much comes of it. Synne offers herself to Sand, but as usual he’s all business – plus at this point he’s learned that Toki is in danger – and Sand turns Synne down. Something that makes the silver-lipped beauty freak out in rage, as no one spurns her. But man, that’s it – there’s never another meeting between the two. 

Olden does deliver on the action front, though. And not since that first volume has Sand been so put to the test; he must rely on his samurai resolve quite often in the narrative, being outnumbered and outgunned at frequent points. There’s a fight with the werewolf late in the tale that’s pretty cool – again, shocking that Al Adamson, who made schlocky, low-budget horror movies, didn’t include the werewolf in his film adaptation – and, though brief, the fight is brutal, with the additional element that Sand is injured at the time, with a broken wrist. 

There isn’t a big fight with Chavez; indeed, Olden follows his usual template in that the novel is so busy that he must hurriedly bring everything to a close in the final pages. Chavez is for the most part a secondary character; in his frequent cutovers we see him mulling over how whacko Janicot is (which of course makes the reader wonder why Chavez hired Janicot in the first place), and also chomping at the bit for “the black man to die.” 

The action takes place for the most part in Paris, including an extended action sequence where Sand tries to kill Janicot at a small airport – leading to a tense capoff where Sand commandeers the plane on the tarmac. This leads to a strange bit where the Baron, all the way back in Texas, somehow knows that it wasn’t really Janicot at the airport, and it was all a fake-out to get Sand. Another strange miss is all the stuff with Toki; this is another bit Al Adamson made more of a deal of. But in the novel itself, Sand and Toki don’t even really have a moment together; Sand saves her, but she’s out cold at the time. 

Since I’m on a spoiler kick, skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens. But the resolution with Synne is also lame. She’s killed off-page…by Chavez! Olden delivers one of his customary rushed finales with Janicot’s people all holed up in a remote house once the action has moved Stateside, and Sand leads a team of the Baron’s men into the compound to kill everyone. When Sand storms into the house, he catches Chavez as Chavez is coming out of a room. Sand kills him without much fuss – there’s no big dramatic payoff – and then Sand discovers Synne’s corpse in the bedroom. Material from her perspective has already hinted that Chavez is rough and sadistic in the sack, so this turns out to have been foreshadowing on Olden’s part; Chavez apparently killed Synne during some rough sex. Still, it’s a bit of a letdown. I wanted more from this unusual character. 

As mentioned in my original review, Janicot is still around at novel’s end; there’s a horror-esque finale where his ghostly voice calls to Sand in the dark of the night, and we’re to understand the Black Samurai is properly bugged out. But I do not believe Janicot returns; the series only lasted for two more volumes, and looking at the back covers I see no mention of the Warlock’s return. But then, villains not getting their comeuppance was a staple in Olden’s Narc series. 

Overall though, I enjoyed The Warlock just as much on this second reading, and I was very impressed with the level of insanity Marc Olden injected into it – comparatively speaking, it’s a lot crazier than the previous five volumes of Black Samurai, and displays a more pulpy side of Olden than those familiar with his work might expect.

The Numbers Man

The Numbers Man, by David J. Gerrity

May, 1977  Signet Books

The “Cordolini trilogy” by David Gerrity wraps up with this novel, which was published two years after the first volume (hard to believe I reviewed that one over ten years ago!). As with the other two books it’s a slim paperback, coming in at 153 pages, and as with The Plastic Man most of the running time is given over to Mafia types bickering and bantering with each other, with “series protagonist” Frank “The Wolf” Cordolini essentially reduced to a walk-on role. 

The action occurs about a month after The Plastic Man. Gerritty does not seem to have any grand intentions in mind and I get the impression he was turning this book out solely because the first two sold, and accordingly he wings his way through the narrative. The Numbers Man is dull and unnecessary, and doesn’t even have an eleventh-hour twist like The Plastic Man did to liven things up. Given that a lot of the dialog either recaps what happened in previous volumes or is given over to random musings on the life of a Mafia thug, my assumption is that Gerritty’s heart wasn’t in this one. Also my assumption is that Signet wanted more “Mafia” books, so Gerrity was catering to the publisher to make a sale, or hell maybe he just wanted to write a third novel so he could have a “trilogy.” 

The only problem is, The Never Contract told the complete story; the second and third volumes kind of just spin their wheels, dwelling on the ramifications of that first book. The Never Contract established Frank “The Wolf” Cordolini as an almost mythical character in the Mafia, a killer who went after the Family and got his revenge. In The Plastic Man, Cordolini was shuffled off to the side, with even major incidents – like his starting a family after the events of the first book, and then losing them to the Mafia – given short narrative shrift. The Numbers Man goes one better, by killing Cordolini himself in the opening pages! 

But then, even someone entirely new to the trilogy will doubt Cordolini’s truly dead. As it is, we get a harried opening sequence in which some Mafia thugs ambush Cordolini’s car in upstate New York, blasting it and sending car and driver into a lake, where the car submerges, with Cordolini’s body conveniently inside. Apparently this is like a few weeks after The Plastic Man. From here The Numbers Man turns into an oddball book in which a bunch of low-level mobsters shoot the shit and plot against each other while a mysterious figure begins to sow trouble between two families in New York City. 

This figure first shows up as a cop, and later as a mailman. The title of the book refers to a particular incident in which the mysterious figure hits a numbers operation that is run by one of the families. The curious thing is that these action scenes are over and done with in the span of a few paragraphs, but Gerrity will spend pages and pages on one-off mobsters discussing the events that transpired. The two characters who most rise to the surface are Don Albert, presumably returning from the previous volume(s), who is consigned to an iron lung thanks to traumatic injuries he suffered in Cordolini’s attack at the denoument of The Plastic Man, and Mike Sachetto, a goombah with designs on becoming a don himself. 

There is (are?) a plethora of Italian names to keep track of in the novel, and as if doubling down on it Gerrity even makes the sole non-Mafia character in the novel an Italian, too! He’s a cop and his name is Gino Coletti, and given that Gerrity most often refers to him as “Coletti,” I kept misreading his name as “Cordolini.” Not only that, but Gerrity has doubled down on “C” names, as if intentionally making it hard for his readers to keep track of who is who. Seriously, we have Cordolini, Coletti, Colmo, and a guy named Cookie. What, no Cobretti? Also I should mention here that there isn’t a female character in the novel, other than the hapless wife of one of the thugs, who appears for a page or two. 

I don’t exaggerate when I say that a lot of The Numbers Man is given over to dialog. There’s even a lot of stuff with Coletti shooting the shit with his partner, particularly over Coletti’s frustration with how the Mafia gives Italian-Americans a bad name. Meanwhile everyone tries to figure out who is honing in on Don Albert’s operation, and the reader will have figured out long ago that it is indeed Cordolini; no spoiler, as one of the mobsters figures this out early on, though he’s not believed. I did find it humorous how all these mobsters kept insisting that Cordolini was killed in that upstate New York ambush, even though his body was never found and also because “The Wolf” was, you know, a friggin’ legend in the Mafia, so you’d think these people would be a little more willing to suspect he faked his death. 

And on page 75 we learn this is indeed what happened, as Cordolini is introduced to us in the narrative without much fanfare, sitting in an apartment in Brookyln and planning his next hit. He was in fact the fake cop and fake mailman, and his goal is to start an internecine war to wipe out the two New York families. We only have a cursory reminder of his war on the Mafia, started for real when they killed his wife and son, but just like last time Cordolini’s off-page more often than not. In The Never Contract David Gerrity established that Frank Cordolini was more myth than man, so apparently Gerrity’s goal was to follow through on that in the narrative itself, with Cordolini more of a shadowy figure than a protagonist the reader can root for. The problem is Cordolini is too aloof and distant from the reader. 

Even more of a problem is that this leaves the heavy narrative lifting to one-off characters, same as in The Plastic Man. And given that they all turn into a bland retread of each other, The Numbers Man quickly becomes a chore of a read. Gerrity introduces so many characters that he seems to lose sight of them; one major character dies in the final pages almost anticlimactically. And speaking of which, the “climax” itself is almost an afterthought, a quick shootout on 57th Street in Brooklyn. 

Gerrity leaves Don Albert’s comeuppance off-page, but The Numbers Man ends on a nicely-handled scene in which the don’s fate is clearly implied. But curiously the door is left open for future tales of Frank Cordolini, as by novel’s end he has more money in his pocket thanks to hitting more numbers operations, and he still has a score to settle with the mob. But this was it for Cordolini, and I believe this was it for David Gerrity’s writing career, as I don’t believe he published anything else after this one…but then, The Numbers Man seems clear enough indication that the well had run dry.

The Making Of The Happy Hooker

The Making Of The Happy Hooker, by Robin Moore

October, 1973  Signet Books

A few years ago I reviewed The Happy Hooker, a book I had been meaning to read for years and years, as I’d picked up the majority of the books Xaviera Hollander published at the time. But that review is a bit of a sore spot for me, given that Blogger for no reason whatsoever put it behind a sensitivity filter, flagging it for adult content. I tried editing the title, the image, etc, but nothing worked and to this day the review is stuck behind a privacy screen, and stuff like this makes me laugh because it’s yet another reminder of how things are becoming more and more restricted in our otherwise “progressive” age. (To be filed under: “Sex parties are for me, not for thee.”) 

Well anyway, The Happy Hooker is credited to the titular hooker herself, Xaviera Hollander, but “co-written” by Robin Moore and Yvonne Dunleavy. Published a few years after that bestseller, The Making Of The Happy Hooker is by Robin Moore himself, telling the tale of how The Happy Hooker came to be, and the fallout from the book’s publication. Interestingly, Xaveria published a few more “nonfiction books” under her own name, without Moore or Dunleavy, so I wonder if those books – with titles like Xaviera! and Xaveria Goes Wild! – cover the same ground. I’m betting not, as glancing through them they appear to be more focused on Xaveria’s robust sex life, whereas The Making Of The Happy Hooker is more focused on the uninentional criminal and federal ramifactions that were spawned in the research and writing of The Happy Hooker. 

Moore was an incredibly prolific writer and I’m surprised I’ve yet to review one of his books on here. When I was 10 years old I picked up a paperback copy of his early ‘60s bestseller, The Green Berets, and it’s one of the few books from my childhood that I still have. (It has a lame cover photo of a soldier wearing camo facepaint.) But to this day I have not read the book, nor have I read any of Robin Moore’s many other books. I even have some PBOs he did through Manor Books in the late ‘70s, which might indicate that Moore gradually lost his “name” in the literary world; but then, The Happy Hooker itself was a PBO, and according to this book was the number one selling PBO of all time, with 7 million copies sold. 

I only bring up the “name” stuff because Robin Moore is at pains to remind us that he’s a big-name author throughout the entirety of The Making Of The Happy Hooker. He so often informs us that he’s well-known – at one point he even has a character directly state that “[Moore] is a big-time author” – that I got the impression the guy already knew his “name” was slipping, and was trying to double down on the fame he previously enjoyed. But that’s just my impression. There’s just a level of arrogance to his narrative that is not too disimilar from Norman Mailer’s, in Of A Fire On The Moon. That said, he also just as often reminds us of how skillfully-researched his books are, but then Moore is reportedly the only civilian to ever graduate Green Beret training, all during the course of research for his book on them. 

Well anyway, one suspects he published this book as a further boon to his rapidly-fading literary star; the only reason it seems to exist is so that Moore can provide his own interpretation of the bestselling The Happy Hooker, which is strange given that he was credited as the “co-writer” of the actual book. And a lot of the same material is covered herein, with the caveat that Moore’s “making of” book becomes more of a crime thriller, or at least more of a sub-The Anderson Tapes yarn, with its focus on illegal surveillance and the ensuing fallout of such. The plot is also less focused on Xaviera’s whoring life than it is on the Knapp Commission, which was tasked with rooting out corruption in the NYPD; basically, Xaviera’s cathouse became an illegal listening post for various cops who were trying to bust people. 

But then, Moore cagily asserts in his intro that The Making Of The Happy Hooker is “faction,” stating that some of it is “the fantasy of a middle-aged man who may wish more may have happened under certain exotic and erotic circumstances.” On that note, Moore tells us straight out that he had sex with Xaviera, and a few times at that. Indeed, their first meeting led to the inevitable; Moore has it that he was finishing up work on a book titled The Khaki Mafia, co-writing it with a lovely young dish named June who apparently had nice breasts (in true sleazy early ‘70s style, Moore does indeed tell us about the breasts of his female co-writers), and Moore started getting calls from a foreign-voiced chick who wanted him to visit her. Moore quickly deduced that she was a new hooker in town (this being 1970), and she’d bought the “black book” of another hooker – one who had Moore’s name in her book. 

Well, Moore does visit, and he informs us that Xaveria “wasn’t really a pretty girl,” but she carried herself like a “superstar.” Also, according to this book Xaviera had a tendency to say things like, “I would like to suck your cock” to a man shortly after meeting him, which certainly goes a long ways in making of up for her not being “really pretty.” “[Xaveria] encouraged me into positions I had never tried…taking me deep up into her,” Moore informs us in what will be one of the very few sexual scenes in the book – and one that only lasts a paragraph, at that. We get another Moore-Xaveria boff later in the book, when a horny Xaveria insists Moore stop working on the book and come back into her room: “Xaviera was astride me…begging me to ejaculate in her.” This part is funny, though, as Xaveria’s boyfriend Larry (who wrote his own book on Xaveria, believe it or not – and yes, I have it and will read it someday) comes back, knows what Moore and Xaviera are doing in there, and gets mad – not because of Xaveria’s infidelity, but because he knows Xaveria is giving Moore a freebie! But all is well when Moore hands over fifty bucks, after which Larry’s treating him like his best friend. 

As for The Happy Hooker, Moore has it that he hit upon the idea after that first tustle with Xaveria. But then, he states he’d already been thinking about a book on prositution, and indeed the prologue of the book is perhaps the best part, as Moore relates another funny story. It’s 1968, and Moore has brought in 18 Green Berets for the New York premiere of the film version of his book The Green Berets. They ended up at a fashionable East Side townhouse after the premiere, and Moore piles on the sleazy description of the madam’s five-floor bordello…which is raided by the cops the next day, after Moore and the Berets have left. But it’s from this that Moore got the idea to do a “Hookerbook,” which he informs us was his original title for the book that became The Happy Hooker. 

Moore also makes it clear that Xaveria Hollander did not write The Happy Hooker. He breaks it down in movie terms: “Produced by Robin Moore. Written by Yvonne Dunleavy. Starring Xaveria Hollander.” But then, Moore doesn’t even tell us much about Dunleavy’s contribution, other than her frequent run-ins with Xaveria. Dunleavy is apparently Australian, and is another lovely young thing with “nice breasts” that Moore hires to co-write with him, arguing that a book on a hooker needs a “woman’s touch,” indeed a woman who would understand that Xaveria’s blatant whorish attitude would seem alien to the average female reader. But really, all we learn of Dunleavy is she gets annoyed with Xaveria, who is constantly asking Dunleavy to “help out” at the cathouse, ie serve as a hooker for a group of men who are coming in, etc. 

The book starts off on the sleazy footing we’d expect, with Xaveria casually informing Moore and Dunleavy of her kinky customers and her history of hookering…but it’s also gross, because we get a lot on the “freak” aspect, complete with a dude who likes to eat shit. Literally. But The Making Of The Happy Hooker changes course with the introduction of “Ben the Bugger,” a wiretapping expert Moore hires to bug Xaveria’s place…so Moore doesn’t have to be there all the time, picking up material for the book. Essentially Ben bugs all the rooms, with Xaveria’s blessing, so Moore and Dunleavy can later listen to the tapes and transcribe the sleazy details for “Hookerbook.” 

The only problem is, Ben the Bugger starts tapping the phones and calling over cops, and Moore soon discovers that Ben is part of the Knapp Commission, and Moore has essentially funded an illegal surveillance scheme. This is what The Making Of The Happy Hooker ultimately becomes concerned with, and in fact Xaveria sort of gets lost in the narrative, only appearing willy-nilly, and usually being duped iby Ben the Bugger. At one point he even puts a video camera behind her mirror, controlled by “laser,” so that he can videotape Xaveria as she’s having sex…and since he’s broadcasting on “the high band” of the UHF spectrum, it so happens that one day something slips and the real-life hardcore stuff s being broadcast on “a Puerto Rican station” in New York City, until the Feds hear about it and shut it down…but really they just ask Ben to stop, given that they all are aware of him. I suspect this material could be that “faction” stuff. 

The book does take on the tone of a crime thriller, with Xaveria even agreeing to work with the Knapp boys, using her girls to ensnare people they have their eyes on…like a group of Arabs. Oh, and there’s also a subplot about Ellen, a married British lady Moore likes who takes a job secretly at Xaveria’s so she can get enough money to leave her husband, and Ben the Bugger falls in love with her. The stuff with Ben also has an unintentionally humorous aspect to it, because at one point he zeroes in on a dirty cop named…Don Johnson. And humorously, “Don Johnson” comes off exactly like Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice, just a too-cool cop, but unlike Crockett he’s essentially corrupt. So I guess he’s more like Sonny’s alter ego, Sonny Burnett. 

We do get a recreation of the scene that opened The Happy Hooker: Xaveria and her posh girls thrown in jail with a bunch of street-hardened black hookers. It’s even more outrageous here, with the lead black hooker taking a “small, phallus-shaped gravity knife” from out of her inner recesses and threatening to cut up Xaveria. Also, we learn that Xavera did not like the title “The Happy Hooker,” arguing correctly that she was not a “hooker,” but a “madam.” She wanted the book to be titled “The Happy Madam,” but Moore – who suddenly claims he was the proponent of titling it The Happy Hooker late in the book, despite his earlier statement that he wanted to call it “Hookerbook” – prevails, and soon enough they have a bestselling monster on their hands. 

Moore basically makes The Making Of The Happy Hooker a behind the scenes meets “where are they now?” affair, telling us of the fallout of the book – Xaveria on the witness stand, due to serving the Knapp commission, Ben the Bugger fleeing to England and fighting against extradition, and Moore moving on to his next book. He says nothing of Xaveria’s many other books, no doubt because he wasn’t involved with them (and also none of them were published by Signet). Moore also doesn’t tell us much about his own life, other than mentioning his various books and research for them. He casually informs us he’s unhappily married – and this only after we’ve had a few conjugal visits with Xaviera – but the wife isn’t even named. 

At 184 small, dense pages, The Making Of The Happy Hooker moves at a fairly fast clip, but be advised that the title is a bit misleading. The actual writing of Xaveria Hollander’s book is sort of the framework that Robin Moore uses to tell a tale that is more concerned with wiretapping, bugging, and other illegal surveilling techniques. It also has a topical relevance, as the wiretapping entrapment scheme with the New York-based Knapp Commission and Xaviera seems quite similar to whatever is going on with Puff Daddy today.

Port Wine Stain

Port Wine Stain, by Jerry Oster

August, 1980  Signet Books

Jerry Oster is a prolific crime writer whose work I have only recently discovered; it appears he has reprinted most of his novels as eBooks. Port Wine Stain, a Signet Books paperback original, was his first novel, and it appears to be relatively unknown. It’s never been reprinted and isn’t available as an eBook, possibly indicating that Oster would prefer it to remain unknown. 

But man, once again kudos to the Signet copywriter(s) who handled these early ‘80s crime PBOs. As with Phone Call and The Ripper, the back cover copy goes out of its way to imply that Port Wine Stain is naughtiness of the first order, filled with willing women and graphic sex. Heck, the book’s even sluglined “A thriller for the adult ‘80s” on the back cover, and the copy lends the impression that it’s about a guy with “too many women in his life” who falls in love with an actres he sees in a porno flick. All of which is sort of what happens in Port Wine Stain, with the additional note that there is zero in the way of explicit sex in the novel, and even the exploitation of the female characters is nonexistent. Once again I am impressed with the copywriters of these ‘70s and ‘80s paperback houses and their ability to make any book come off like a sleazefest. They’d probably describe Gone With The Wind as “An untamed woman’s sexual odyssey in the passionate, lust-fueled world of the Antebellum South!” 

Rather, Port Wine Stain is a darkly humorous crime thriller with hardboiled tones, mostly due to the witty rapport Jerry Oster skillfully gives his characters. Indeed the final quarter of the novel seems to be a Thin Man riff, with narrator Charles Ives trading witty banter with his lovely female acquaintance as they try to solve a murder mystery. Dialog appears to be Oster’s strong suit, judging from this novel, with a lot of memorable exchanges between Ives and the people he encounters…most of whom do happen to be women, but again the kinky and naughty stuff is more a product of the Signet copywriter’s imagination. 

Charles Ives is somewhere in his 40s, a newspaper reporter in Manhattan, and he covered the war in Saigon before being pulled from the job because his editor said readers weren’t interested in stuff about far-off places. This Vietnam stuff still serves as a thorn in Ives’s side, and given that he still works for the same editor there’s occasional bantering about it between the two. But here’s the curious stuff. We know the war has ended, as Ives at one point mentions it…but I almost get the impression that Port Wine Stain occurs in the past – meaning, not in ‘80s. If so, then the “thriller for the adult ‘80s” tag on the back cover is also misleading. I say this given that Ives often begins his sentences with “In those days,” or “Something I remember even unto today,” as he recounts to us the story that is Port Wine Stain, clearly giving the impression that our narrator is telling us of events that happened long ago. Or maybe this is a novelistic conceit and the story does occur in 1980, but narrator Ives is writing in some distant future (let’s say 1994 and he’s a big NIN fan!) 

Jerry Oster went on to focus on crime and mystery thrillers, and Port Wine Stain is no different. Ives when we meet him is working night shift and his editor gives him a job to look into a recent murder “downtown.” Ultimately Ives will become entangled with the widow of the man who was killed, a lovely young woman who sports a nevus flammeus mark on her right cheek – the “port wine stain” of the title, as it’s a crimson mark that looks as if the lady has spilled wine on her cheek. Ives will become infatuated with this woman, Pamela Yost, to the extent that he is constantly putting off the advances of his latest casual bedmate, a teacher named Kate. And also to the extent that he’s putting off the advances of the new girl on the paper, a pretty young thing named Ann Roth. 

Yes, Charles Ives spends the entire first quarter of the novel turning down offers of sex, which must have given those Signet editors apoplexy. So much for that “liberated sex” promised on the cover! Kate in particular hounds Ives, at one point even trying her damnest to convince him to invite her up to his apartment for the night. But our narrator is unmoved; he’s too smitten with the “idea” of Pamela Yost, a woman he has only briefly met. But he felt a spark and now is obsessed with her, the fantasy of her that exists in his mind. And this is weird, too, ‘cause when Ives meets Pamela her husband has literally just been killed and he’s feeling the “sparking” between the two of them as they exchange glances and Ives sees that port wine stain and just wants to run his hand over it. This is like an hour or two after Mr. Yost has been shot to death by someone who broke into the Yost’s apartment. 

This obviously makes our narrator seem a bit “sus,” as the kids of today might say, but what’s even more curious is that the other characters don’t make too big a deal out of the fact that he’s smitten with a fresh widow. That is Pamela Yost on the cover, by the way; the uncredited cover artist got fairly good direction, as she is described as lovely and patrician, and the next time Ives sees her is at her husband’s funeral, where she’s dressed in black mourning clothes, as also depicted on the cover. But it appears the artist missed the “port wine stain” bit, unless you really stare at the picture…I mean the cheek is kind of crimson, but it also looks like makeup. There is no mistaking Pamela’s port wine stain for makeup in the novel, and in fact, she unsuccessfully tries to cover it up with makeup in the porno flick she appears in, so as to disguise herself. 

Ives learns of this “adult movie” (which would appear to be a relatively new term, given how Ives is unfamiliar with it) from Ann Roth, the “new girl” on the paper (in a sign of the changing times, Ives informs us that newspapers are “a man’s world” which made me laugh out loud when thinking of the papers of today), as Ann has been given the story of Mr. Yost’s murder. Even though it began as Ives’s story, his wily editor has changed course and given it to Ann (it’s revealed in an unexplored subplot that he’s been courting her, but hasn’t made the sale – meaning even other guys aren’t getting laid in this novel). It’s Ann who discovers that Pamela Yost features in a new porno flick that happens to be playing in the city. This she reveals to Ives by taking him to the movie, and Ives’s realization that the pretty woman with the heavy makeup engaging in onscreen sex is indeed Pamela is so blasé that Ives comes off like a robot. But then, he reacts with a similar blasé attitude to major deaths in the course of the novel. 

This I felt was the biggest failing of Port Wine Stain. Jerry Oster wants his cake and to eat it, too, to borrow a lame cliché. He wants the novel to be acerbic and arch-hardboiled, yet at the same time he strives for an “emotional connection” with Ives slowly coming to terms with the fact that he’s in love with a “fantasy.” This makes for a very self-absorbed narrator/protagonist. To his credit, though, Ives does manage to bed three women in the short, 216-page course of the novel, though as mentioned it is all entirely off-page. Even the “adult film” Pamela stars in is so vaguely described that I had a hard time understanding it even was an adult film, as Ives gives zero details about the movie, or what – or perhaps that should be who – Pamela does in it. But the fact that he beds both Pamela and Ann is almost a passing thought, particularly given the developments of the plot – it makes Ives come off like quite a cad, as he seems quite unconcerned over what has happened to both women. 

Rather, it’s Kate, the schoolteacher who realizes she wants kids, who factors the most in the final quarter of Port Wine Stain, and for those keeping score, Ives, uh, scores with her, too. She is the Myrna Loy to Ives’s William Powell in the Thin Man-esque vibe of these final pages, as the two banter while solving a murder mystery. I should mention that a lot of the dialog is about novels and literary works and characters in novels; in some way the dialog throughout almost reminds me of early Don DeLillo, in how the characters are so insular, talking avidly about subjects the author is clearly interested in. Speaking of “interesting,” there’s a nice bit where Ives and Kate discuss how The Magus has recently received a revised edition, and Ives sniffs that he thinks it’s a bad idea, because “authors should only get one shot.” Perhaps this explains why Port Wine Stain has never been reprinted. 

Because honestly, the finale of the novel is a hot mess, and no doubt it would benefit from some revising. Basically the novel ends, with Ives uncovering who was behind the murder and why it happened – a very hardboiled bit of Ives strapped to a chair and bullshitting his way out of it while trading witty rapport with the bad guy – and then Port Wine Stain goes into freefall for several pages. Because…for some reason, we are treated to a letter Kate has written Ives after leaving him, with her thoughts on their relationship and where she’s going on her trip, and all this stuff that makes the reader scratch his head, because he thought he was reading a mystery-thriller, not a rom-com. 

Overall Port Wine Stain is mostly a success in its witty dialog, some of which made me chuckle. I also enjoyed the topical details, like Ives and Pamela having lunch at Windows On The World, in the World Trade Center, and also there was a super-random Neil Young reference; Ives tells us a jukebox is playing a song with the lines “Love is a rose/but you better not pick it,” and that’s a Neil Young song – actually Linda Ronstadt had the hit with it, and that’s probably the version Ives is hearing on the jukebox, but Young wrote it and recorded it first, even though he released it after Ronstadt. Well, I sort of lost the thread here, so I should wrap it up now.