$500

$500, by Nancy Weber

December, 1976  Ace Books

In late July I went to Montreal for vacation, my first time there in around 17 years, and I was surprised to discover this ultra-scarce PBO – so scarce that it isn’t even listed on author Nacy Weber’s Goodreads page – at a cool little book and record store called Encore Books.  And they only wanted five dollars Canadian for it! 

Many years ago I created a few Amazon Wish Lists of paperbacks I was looking for, and I see that I added $500 to the “Trash Fiction” list in April of 2014. So I guess I discovered it sometime around then; not sure why I didn’t order a copy at the time. Maybe no copies were available (which seems to be the case now), or the few copies listed were overpriced. At any rate, patience as they say is a virtue, so one can imagine my surprise to discover a copy of the book, wedged behind a stack of vintage sleaze novels at Encore – and I mean real sleaze paperbacks. (Curiously, there was a ton of vintage English-language sleaze paperbacks scattered in antique stores throughout Montreal…those dirty French Canadians!) 

But this sleaze packaging is part of the curious, mysterious story of $500. First of all, it has a stepback cover – the black outer cover opens to reveal a photo of a model (Nancy Weber herself?) lying on a groovy 1970s bed, complete with princess phone in the background:

There is no info at all on the back cover; just a wraparound shot of the groovy bedroom: 

Curiously, the “back cover copy” is on the back of the inner cover, and only here could a prospective reader in 1976 actually learn what $500 was about: 

Note the reference to Life Swap. This was a nonfiction book Nancy Weber published in 1973, which from all accounts caused quite a stir at the time (I was born the following year, so was a bit outside of the target reading audience). A stir that still resonates today – or at least still did in 2006, when Life Swap was reprinted and The Guardian tracked Weber down and interviewed her. 

Life Swap concerned Nancy Weber trading places with another woman – to the extent of sleeping with this woman’s husband and working in her office – and in a way $500 sort of deals with the aftermath of this, at least in a fictional context, as main character Anne Gilbert is a pretty and sophisticated journalist who has carried off a similar experiment, one that caused her much notoriety. 

Indeed, Ace Books even saw fit to remind us of the stir Weber caused in the Author Bio at the end of the book:

So by all accounts $500 should have been a big thing…a novel from an up-and-coming young author who had recently made waves in the publishing industry. And yet $500 came out as a paperback original, one packaged like their other sleaze books – something like Massage Parlor or, uh, Massage Parlor II – courtesy an imprint that was more known for its science fiction line. 

So what happened? I’d love to know. Maybe Weber’s agent got a bum deal, or maybe none of the hardcover imprints were interested…and yet Weber certainly writes the book as if she intended it to be a hardcover, a big bestselling followup to Life Swap. Instead, $500 is so obscure that it’s not listed anywhere online, save for that Amazon listing I came across in 2014…which even then didn’t have a cover photo. 

This is a shame, as $500 is a good book, and certainly not on the level of a sleazy cash-in of the day…though humorously, Weber actually mentions such books in her novel, with Xaviera getting two name-drops, as well as an obscure “hooker-turned-writer” named Shannon Canfield – whose 1975 Dell PBO Why Men Call Girls is so obscure I didn’t even have it listed on any of my old Amazon Wishlists! 

Taking place during the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 (I believe my earliest memory is actually of the Bicentennial…and I would’ve been two and a half years old at the time!), $500 concerns the aforementioned Anne Gilbert, a writer with a penchant for doing outrageous things, who goes undercover as a hooker for a magazine article…up to and including having sex with paying johns. But then Anne goes even further undercover when she vows to take down her pimp, Lenny Michaels, who might have killed another hooker, an Irish beauty named Mary Connolly whom Anne fell in love with. Not only that, but it develops late in the novel that Lenny “turned the ultimate trick,” pimping out Mary’s corpse to a necrophiliac customer for $500,000!! Man, and I thought $500 was expensive!! 

But as you might have guessed, the title refers to the cost for the services of Lenny’s stable; his is an elite class of “courtesans,” high-class and sophisticated and ultra-beautiful. We only get cursory overviews of these women and their various specialties, and Weber pulls no punches when it comes to the raunchy stuff…save for the actual sex scenes! While there area few sex scenes in $500, they are nowhere near the sleazy, explicit level one might expect from the way the book is packaged. Again, the impression is that this was intended as a hardcover novel from a more prestigious imprint…soon to be a major motion picture, etc, etc. 

No, we get a lot of dirty talk and ribaldry, but when Anne has sex with her first john, a congressman with a penchant for sleeping with hookers (ah, simpler times), Weber doesn’t so much go for the juicy details as she does the aftermath of it, with Anne’s mind well and truly blown by the experience: “So that’s what it’s really all about!” 

Like many novels of the day, $500 hopscotches around a fairly large group of characters, to the extent that Anne is often lost. Also, halfway through the book Weber pulls a narrative trick and goes back in time to focus on Mary Connolly, the hooker whose death initiated the novel’s events. I didn’t find this character nearly as interesting as Anne – Mary is an Irish wallflower who comes to the US, falls for a tennis player turned movie star, gets her heart broken, and becomes a hooker for Lenny Michaels – and thus I wasn’t as much into the latter half of the novel. Fortunately the final quarter returns to the “present day” of summer ’76. 

Weber very much brings New York to life – hers is a trendy Manhattan, of people dining at ‘21’ and going out for cocktails after…and a little coke-snorting to boot. From this book I learned the existence of “tooters,” fancy little “nozzled” metal straws for snorting coke; Marc Olden I don’t think even mentioned these in his otherwise-comprehensive Cocaine. Weber also has a great sense of humor, as there are several funny sequences and dialog exchanges in $500, in particular a chapter that is narrated from the perspective of a vagina:

This is just one of Lenny’s girls, and Weber has a chapter for each of them – there’s Veronica, Lenny’s “token black girl,” who has a child and got into hooking after her husband’s death, and also a blonde California girl with a host of STDs (“That’s one very busy vagina, kid,” her gyno informs her), but unfortunately they each only get the one chapter, after which they sort of fade in the background. Instead, the crux of the novel concerns Anne and her desire to get revenge for Mary Connolly – and as mentioned, Mary herself takes up an unfortunate brunt of the novel. 

There’s also the tennis player turned actor who has now also become a late-night talkshow host, but he’s more of a hostile type than a Carson type. Apparently he’s known for ranting about hookers and pimps on his show, given his hatred of them – and we learn why much later in the novel. Anne’s appearance, in costume and wig on this show, is what sets off the novel, there to expose the kinky a-doings of Lenny Michaels, whose tentacles reach all the way to Washington. 

This has the setup for a taut novel, but instead Weber hopscotches around her diverse group of characters. Like Anne’s first john, the senator; this guy has his own brief patches of the narrative, as does his pregnant wife, and we even get a little from the perspective of Lenny’s lawyer. The cumulative effect is that Weber has crowded far too many characters in the book. The problem is that she doesn’t really resolve all of the subplots…especially the main one! Anne appears on the talk show, rats on Lenny, then spends the rest of the novel afraid Lenny is going to figure out that it was her in disguise on the show, and that Lenny will be going after her for revenge…but Weber ends the novel without telling us what happens! Indeed, Anne essentially gives up on the whole thing, deciding on the last page to run off with her lover-slash-publisher. We do at least learn the handy tidbit, courtesy Lenny’s lawyer, that a person can’t even be arrested for pimping a corpse!! You can bet I jotted that down for future reference. 

Despite the lack of resolution, and also despite the latter-half detour into the mostly-uninteresting life of Mary, $500 was still a decent read, and certainly better than the sleazy paperbacks its packaging imitates. Weber writes with a definite panache, and one can tell she was using the narrative to work out the ramifications she experienced after Life Swap. 

This makes it even more curious that $500 isn’t mentioned anywhere. Perhaps Weber disowned it. I came across a 2014 interview with her, where the focus was again on Life Swap, but even here $500 goes unmentioned – however, Weber’s first novel, a paperback original titled Star Fever, is mentioned in the article…and folks it’s a Rock Novel, one that I’d never even heard of (and I’ve spent more time searching for them than you’d want to know), so of course I immediately got myself a copy…and will be reading it soon!

Cherry Delight #3: Silverfinger

Cherry Delight #3: Silverfinger, by Glen Chase

No month stated, 1973  Leisure Books

Other than Where The Action Is, which was written by Len Levinson, I’ve never had any interest in Cherry Delight. Like Ted Mark’s books, it’s another of those spoofy spy-parody series with goofy acronyms and lame attempts at comedy and, even worse, it’s written in first-person -- a male author writing in the voice of a woman. But then I saw this third volume for a few dollars at an antique store and figured what the hell. 

There were actually two series: this initial Cherry Delight, which ran in the early 1970s, and then the later The All-New Cherry Delight (which is the series Len wrote one volume of), which ran in the late ‘70s. Veteran writer Gardner Fox handled all 24 volumes of the initial Cherry Delight, which is another reason I’ve never had much interest in the series; I’m not the biggest fan of his writing, as noted in my reviews of his two Commander Craig novels. 

But for a few bucks I couldn’t say no. However, Silverfinger turned out to be another reminder of how I just don’t like Gardner Fox’s work. It’s a slow-moving caper that operates on a threadbare setup with few thrills and hardly any action at all, only livened up by the occasional sex scene – sex scenes that are admittedly odd in that they’re written by a man but relayed in the first-person narrative of a woman. The conceit has always baffled me. 

In the 1960s Fox was one of the authors on the similar Lady From Lust series, another spoofy spy-fy series featuring a lusty female protagonist. But by the ‘70s The Executioner had overtaken James Bond and thus Cherry Delight is a spy who fights the mob, and she works for NYMPHO…the goofy and punny (and unfunny) ‘60s acronym titles making their unwelcome way to the ‘70s. 

Otherwise Cherry is essentially a spy who takes on the Mafia, and she’s a redheaded beauty with huge boobs (which she often reminds us of), and somehow she finds the time to narrate her adventures for us. The same thing Nick Carter began to do around this time. Personally I think any editor or publisher who demands a men’s adventure series be written in first-person is an editor or publisher who doesn’t know what the hell he or she is doing. 

 But then, one might argue that Gardner Fox doesn’t know, either. Case in point is this third volume, titled Silverfinger. Clearly it’s a take on Goldfinger, and the reader might envision a sex-and-violence-filled yarn about Cherry Delight taking on a Mafia chieftan with a penchant for painting women in silver and having his own personal army at his disposal…maybe with grand plans for taking over Fort Knox or somesuch.

Instead, the reader gets a threadbare, mundane, humdrum yarn about a Mafia boss in rural Italy who wears silver clothes, drives a silver car, and goes around to a shipyard to try to talk the employees into working for him. This, folks, is the threat Cherry Delight is up against in Silverfinger. It’s baffling how mundane and inconsequential the story actually is. 

What’s even crazier is that Fox writes like his life depends on it; the book runs 150-some pages of small, dense print; Silverfinger is similar to the “sleaze” paperbacks of a few decades before in that for the most part it’s made up of crafted narrative…but frequently will cut over to hardcore sex scenes. But as mentioned these sex scenes are odd because “Cherry” tells us all about the dudes she’s banging, and she has an odd way of referring to her anatomical parts. 

In the course of Silverfinger Cherry will have sex with a brother and a sister (not at the same time), and then later on she’ll conjugate with her NYMPHO handler, Mark Condon. Bizarrely enough, back in high school I dated a girl named Jennifer Condon…the name being so unusual that I of course remembered it. Plus she was a dead ringer for Elizabeth “Bewitched” Montgomery…but built like Barbara “I Dream Of Jeannie” Eden. No, I don’t know why I didn’t marry her, either!

I really need to stop drinking before I write these reviews. Okay, I’ll focus. Cherry is in Italy, with her red hair dyed black, trying to convince a trio of siblings that their shipyard is about to be taken over by the Mafia. The siblings, all young jetsetters, don’t believe Cherry…until mobsters start showing up to make threats or try to kill them. 

Cherry soon deduces that the mysterious “Silverfinger” is behind the group, and ultimately she’ll discover the otherwise dapper and silver-garbed older man who is indeed in charge of them…but for a main villain, he lacks bite. Then again the same can be said for the entire novel. 

Probably the highlight is a random bit where Cherry and Ines, the hotstuff sister of the trio, goes to a friggin Satanic ceremony in an old abbey, one attended by the shipyard workers. Cherry and Ines get so turned on by the nude congregants that they enjoy a brief lesbian fling, Cherry informing us that she’s done this sort of thing often. A lesbian fling that features the memorable image of Ines dipping her nipples in Cherry’s womanhood before dining at the Y. Hail Satan! 

The sex goes on for pages when it happens, but truth be told it lacks any heat and is undone by the bizarre decision on Fox’s part to suddenly become guttural; Cherry, otherwise highfalutin in her narrative, will suddenly be referring to her “pussylips” and her “girly-girl body.” There were parts, honestly, where I got the impression of an AI program attempting to write hardcore sleaze from the perspective of a human female. 

And really, the sex is the only thing Silverfinger has going for it. There certainly isn’t any action. Cherry takes on a few thugs with her bare hands early in the book, and gets in the odd shootout or two, but there’s no big action scene and for the most part the novel operates on a long-simmer approach, with Cherry more concerned with figuring out what Silverfinger’s plans are. To this end she goes undercover as a country girl working on the shipyards, gaining her way into Silverfinger’s confidence. 

More frustratingly, the finale comes on us without us even realizing it; Cherry gets in a protracted catfight with Silverfinger’s girlfriend, and some of Cherry’s hair is pulled out and she sees that her red roots are showing, so doubtless Silverfinger will realize that Cherry is the mysterious redhead who has been hitting his places. Then suddenly someone is sniping at Cherry moments after she’s had sex with Mark Condon, then there’s a harried action scene…and then the novel’s over…and Silverfinger has gotten away; Cherry figures she’ll see him again. 

Personally, I don’t give a damn whether she did or didn’t. Len’s Where The Action Is was worlds better than this, so unless I ever come across more volumes of Cherry Delight for a pittance, I figure I won’t be reading another volume of this particular series. I know Gardner Fox is well respected and all, but his writing just isn’t for me.

Code Name: Gypsy Virgin

Code Name: Gypsy Virgin, by Max Nortic

No month stated, 1971  Midwood Books

A big thanks to Johny Malone, who recently left a comment on my review of Black Swan #2: The Cong Kiss, and suggested I read the source novel for that series, Code Name: Gypsy Virgin. His suggestion hit me at just the right time, and now I’ve read the book and by god I’m here to tell you about it! 

As I mentioned in my review of The Cong Kiss, author “J.J. Montague” of the Black Swan series was clearly the same person as the “Max Nortic” who wrote Code Name: Gypsy Virgin (and whose real name, as Johny so helpfully informed us, was James Keenan, of whom I can find nothing). This is because the plot of Code Name: Gypsy Virgin is the same as the plot of the first Black Swan novel, The Chinese Kiss: a hotstuff nympho secret agent takes a crash-course in lesbianism so she can take down a hotstuff nympho Commie secret agent who has “an obsession with cunnilingus.” 

I read The Cong Kiss nearly ten years ago, so memories of it are dim. Per my review I found it overly literary and stilted, and also per my review I’d given up reading Code Name: Gypsy Virgin not long before I read that Black Swan novel; I’d read it recently enough that I was able to detect the same writing styles, characters, and plots between the two books. I’m not sure why I stopped reading Gypsy Virgin at the time, because reading it all these years later I thought it was pretty great – perhaps proving once again that the more pulp you read, the more your brain rots. Well, brain rot is very popular now, as anyone who has a kid will know, so I’m fine with that. 

I went into the details in my review of The Cong Kiss, but simply put, Nortic/Keenan published Code Name: Gypsy Virgin via Midwood Books in 1971, focused on hotstuff brunette spy babe Erica Wilson, who had sex every Friday with a random pickup, exclusively focusing on well-hung guys, given her “obsession with big pricks;” even her apartment in Newport Beach was filled with phallic sculptures. 

Then in 1974 Keenan changed Erica Wilson’s name to Shauna Bishop, changed his by-line to “J.J. Montague,” and retitled Code Name: Gypsy Virgin as The Chinese Kiss, sellling it to Canyon Books and getting a series deal in the process. Yes, the exact same thing J.C. Conaway did when he switched publishers and turned Nookie into Jana Blake, and when Nelson DeMille switched publishers and turned Ryker into Keller. So, a pretty common practice in the wild and wooly world of ‘70s paperback publishing! 

So then, Erica Wilson in Gypsy Virgin is the same character as Shauna Bishop in the Black Swan series, just with a different name – her code name is different, too. Per the title of this Midwood publication, Erica’s codename is “Gypsy Virgin,” and Shauna’s codename is “Black Swan.” Regardless of her name, she is 24, a trained spy who has killed (but only in self-defense, we’re told), incredibly beautiful and built, the daughter of “a Polish janitor and a Swedish maid.” She is not patriotic and works only for the money, and has total control of her emotions – and, we’re informed, her, uh, womanly parts. 

She is also “obsessed with big pricks” and has littered her home on Newport Beach with phallic sculptures and paintings. She lives a quiet life of solitude, but every Friday she lets out her pent-up energy by spending the afternoon looking at her “vintage erotica books” and then going out at night to a bar to pick up a guy…and, somehow, she’s always able to get a guy with a huge dick. Perhaps she has X-ray vision which Nortic/Keenan has not informed us of. Her most recent lay was over ten inches long(!), and we’re informed Erica implored him to take her in the rear, so she could be “hurt.” Good grief! 

We know about these backdoor shenanigans because the agency Erica works, ICS, has bugged her home, something Erica is well aware of; Nortic deftly injects a ‘70s paranoia into the yarn, as Erica figures that everything she does and says is being watched by someone, and she’s always right. Code Name: Gypsy Virgin opens with our heroine being stymied out of her usual Friday tussle, much to her mounting chagrin, suddenly summoned by her agency for a top secret assignment – flown off to Baltimore where she will spend the next several days locked up in a room and learning to become sexually attracted to other women(!). 

Nortic displays a gift for dark humor with the sardonic Erica knowing she is being subjected to head-fuckery, being monitored in her private room and laden with aphrodisiacs in her food as she watches lectures on lesbianism on closed-circuit TV, complete with female models acting out lessons in cunnilingus. And plus there’s that stacked blonde beauty Shirley who brings Erica her food and looks at her with those limpid blue eyes...Erica knows she’s being brainwashed into going lez, and she also eventually knows there’s nothing she can do to stop it from happening. 

The reason behind all this is Erica’s latest assignment: Nitro Five, another hotstuff secret agent, but one who works for the Chinese. She is, however, Caucasian (hence the title of the retitled Shauna Bishop story is a bit confusing), and while the woman’s background is known – roughly the same age as Erica, a hardship life that saw her essentially raised into becoming a merciless field agent who uses her beauty and body to ensnare victims for the Chinese government – we also learn she has never been photographed. 

Nortic opens up the tale with chapters from Nitro Five’s perspective; or, Loraine, which is the name she happens to be going by as she sets her sights on a scientist who specializes in ultrasonics. Posing as a socialite in DC, Nitro Five corners the professor at a lecture, coming on to him and taking him back to her place where an explicit sex scene ensues, but as with the Black Swan books, the author brings a literate touch even to the sleaze. We also learn that Nitro Five is deadly, as she takes out a man who inadvertently snaps her photo via some sort of mind control; an eerie scene that has the man waking up, after a short visit from Nitro Five, receiving a phone call from her, and then, his mind panicked, jumping out of a tenth-floor window. 

Like with a lot of these sleaze novels, Keenan/Nortic writes a worthy novel, to the point that the extensively-detailed sex scenes become a nuissance…something I rarely complain about. But as we know, sleaze writers were expected to deliver sleaze, and Nortic does throughout, with a focus on girl-on-girl. He varies it up with occasional scenes of straight sex, in particular with the ultrasonics professor, who is seduced by both Nitro Five and Gypsy Virgin, in sex scenes that are pretty similar, the good doctor under the effects of cantharides (aka Spanish Fly) and unable to orgasm, even after superhuman bouts of sex, all of which is detailed. Erica’s success at getting him off is pretty crazy, involving her fondness for those backdoor shenanigans. 

The author works in a grim Cold War storyline that concerns Gypsy Virgin being assigned to find out how Nitro Five assassinates from afar and to also try to get her to defect; meanwhile, Nitro Five’s assignment is to lure an ultrasonics scientist into defecting to China, seducing both him and his virginal teenaged daughter in the process. These characters all engage in sex either together or in groups, the longest sequence featuring both female agents making use of the professor’s daughter in an all-girl three-way that would press a lot of readers’ buttons, given that the girl is underaged. 

But then there is a strange focus on adolescent girls, par for the course in the grimy world of ‘70s sleaze paperbacks, I guess. Nitro Five is obsessed with adolescent Chinese girls and there is a lot of stuff about the excitement of deflowering the professor’s virgin daughter. Even Erica, who we’ll recall just got into the sapphic scenario courtesy agency programming, finds her heart pounding in excitement at the thought of sharing the girl with Nitro Five. 

What’s crazy is that, as proven with The Cong Kiss, the author is quite capable, delivering a narrative style that is more refined than scuzzy. He has a definite knack for dialog and for characterization, and the sex scenes are more erotic than repugnant, as is too often the case in a lot of these dirty books. I find it interesting that he did not write mainstream trash under his own name, but we do know from this Pulpetti post by my man Juri that Keenan was quite prolific as “Max Nortic.” 

I don’t have a copy of The Chinese Kiss, but it would be interesting to read it, for the ending certainly had to be changed. Code Name: Gypsy Virgin has a mega-downer ending that to be honest isn’t very surprising, as novel maintains a mean-tempered vibe throughout. 

SPOILERS: Well basically, Nitro Five’s grim backstory has it that she was taken in as a child and abused thoroughly by her trainers in Peking as they molded her into a remorseless killer, and this same fate awaits the professor’s daughter and Erica/Gypsy Virgin; Nitro Five has traded the two of them as well as the Professor in exchange for her own freedom (as an extra dig of the knife, we learn that Erica’s agency was in on the exchange from the start), and the novel ends with the villainess going off to her Happily Ever After while our heroine (and a teenaged girl) are shipped off to be raped, abused, and trained into becoming remorseless spies by the Chinese. End spoilers! 

So then, clearly this was changed when Erica Wilson became Shauna Bishop, and I’d be curious to know how it was changed. Not much pickup was provided in the second Black Swan, The Cong Kiss, which as we’ll recall was a flashback story to Shauna/Erica’s first mission, four years ago, so I guess I’ll just have to wonder unless I get really stupid some day and pay the exorbitant prices for a copy of The Chinese Kiss, which isn’t very likely. 

Anyway, a big thanks to Johny Malone for suggesting I read this, and also to Tiziano Agnelli, who recently left a comment on my review of The Cong Kiss to confirm that JJ Montague/Max Nortic was in reality a writer named James Keenan!

The Thing! (aka Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The Thing!, by J.J. Madison

No month stated, 1971  Belmont Tower

(Originally published by Midwood Books as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying)

The copyright page makes no mention that this grungy little paperback original was originally published by sleaze purveyors Midwood Books, but the title page does somewhat confusingly inform us that The Thing! was “first published as Ohhhhh, It Feels Like Dying.” At any rate, the re-titling of this Belmont Tower edition bears no relation to the contents of the novel; The Thing! is not a monsterama creature feature, but is instead what Grandma would’ve called a “stroke book,” with the horror stuff only a secondary concern to the sleaze. 

Which is to say, I loved the hell out of the book. I loved it! But then, I’m a sucker for Belmont Tower at its most grungy. What made this most surprising was the authorship of the book. According to The Vault Of Evil, “J. J. Madison” was in reality British author James Moffat – from all accounts a notoriously “prolific” author whose books are often considered subpar. And yet, I have only read and reviewed one other Moffat novel, the Nazi She-Devil yarn Jackboot Girls, which I really enjoyed, so admitedly I am judging the guy based off of two of his (apparently) three-hundred published novels(!). 

I say this British authorship is surprising because, if you’ve spent any time here, you know I’m not the biggest fan of British pulp. I find it fussy, stuffy, and stodgy. (I just copyrighted that as the title for a new animated series for kids, fyi.) And yet if I had not known a British author wrote The Thing!, I would’ve guessed it had been written by any of the American authors in Belmont Tower’s or Leisure Books’s stable. There is absolutely nothing “British” about the novel, absolutely nothing to give this away, and indeed there is a familiarity with New York City (another commonality with many Belmont and Leisure publications) that gives the impression “J.J. Madison” is a native New Yorker. 

I know zero about James Moffat, but I do see he was born in Canada, so perhaps this explains why his pulp comes off, at least in the two books of his that I’ve read, as more American than British. Then again, a pair of British pulpsters also turned in the decidely “American” Cut around the same time, so who’s to say – these pulp writers were so prolific they could probably mimic a tone when they wanted to, and maybe Moffat’s direction from his editors at Midwood Books was to “sound American.” 

Anyway, I digress, as usual. The Thing! is awesome, truly so, coming in at the usual brief Belmont Tower length (186 pages of big print) and offering all one could want in a sleazy vampire yarn. But those looking for straight horror might come away dissatisfied. To be sure, James Moffat follows a “sleaze first, horror second” approach throughout The Thing!, and folks that’s just fine with me. In fact the sexual material was so frequent and explicitly described, with copious detail on anatomical functions, that I almost started taking notes for future reference. 

But then, there’s just as much time spent on photography, and camera lenses, and how to properly pose models for perfect photos, something the Vault of Evil forum-goers also noted. Moffat adheres to the time-honored method of pulp writers everywhere in how he meets his word count by writing about stuff he’s interested in, even if it has no bearing on the plot. Thus one must be prepared for a lot of detail about photography and proper light and shadow and developing prints and all this other stuff you might not want to read in a novel about a sex-starved vampire babe. 

This, apparently, is the titular “Thing” of the Belmont reprint: Myra Manning, a stacked blonde movie goddess of yore who has gotten a second life in a mega-successful daytime soap opera titled “Deadly Love” which is clearly modelled after Dark Shadows. In the soap Myra plays a vampire, and we readers already know from the back cover that Myra herself is a vampire. Now as as I’ve said before, hot vampire babes are at the very top of the “hot evil women” heap, even higher up than Nazi She-Devils, but friends everyone knows that a hot vampire babe should have black hair, not blonde hair!! 

However, given the zeal with with James Moffat indulges in utter sleaze, filth, and depravity throughout the novel, I was willing to let this one slide. And yes of course, there are exceptions to this rule – I mean good grief, just consider Ingrid Pitt in the 1970 Hammer Films production The Vampire Lovers – but still. It’s a time-worn pulp conceit that good girls have blonde hair and bad girls have black hair, and it’s interesting that Moffat decided to overlook that. 

The book moves fast and Moffat does a great job of making it horror, yet at the same time never explicitly states that there is anything supernatural about it; again, this could be disappointing for someone looking for a standard type of horror novel, but there is absolutely nothing standard about The Thing!. It’s a dirty, smutty, yet undeniably fun little book, mostly because I got the strong mental impression of Moffat drunkenly chortling to himself as he pounded at his typewriter. 

We know what we are getting from the start, as Moffat opens the novel on the set of “Deadly Love,” as an episode of the soap is filming, with Myra as a vampire biting a man – and, when the cameras are turned off, the man complains that Myra has really bitten him. Moffat also shows a Hollywood that is long gone, with hardbitten, foul-mouthed veterans of the studio age who bitch at each other with no concerns over the “inclusion” of today; Myra’s poor co-star is raked over the coals for being gay, and Myra likes to strip in front of the director, displaying her “heavy breasts,” and taunting the gawking director: “You’re about to come in your pants.” 

Next we are introduced to the hero of the tale: Ken Painter, a ‘Nam vet who has no qualms with hitting dogs and roughing up women – another reminder of how “unsafe” 1970s pulp is in our modern era. Our intro to Ken is a harbinger of the type of book The Thing! will be: a several-page sex scene that leaves no sleazy stone unturned as Ken explicity boinks a woman he’s shacked up with in the Midwest…a woman who runs a gas station her dead husband left her, and who came across a stash of cocaine that spilled on the highway after a pharmaceutical truck crashed(!?), and who now spends her days in a dark room with the TV running, in a cocaine daze…and Ken has blissfully joined her for a few days of rampant coke-fueled sex. 

Friends, this is how you introduce your protagonist. 

Ken (as Moffat refers to him throughout the novel) was a combat photographer in Vietnam, and now he wants to make his living as a professional photographer, but he’s a penniless vagabond. He leaves the coke-sex girl and heads for New York, where we have another protracted sequence where Ken jury-rigs some pay phones in the Port Authority, and then runs afoul of the mobsters who run the payphones. Again, none of this has anything to do with the horror genre, but it does bring to life the grungy, crime-ridden New York of the early ‘70s. 

But after running into Myra Manning in Central Park – where Ken mauls the woman’s guard dog and nearly drowns the poor animal, all because it ruined his shot and got water on his camera – Ken is given a new opportunity: to be the personal assistant for famous actress Myra, who promises she’ll get a publisher who will do a book of photos of Myra, photos taken by Ken. 

First, though, the two enjoy an exuberant sex scene that is only a precursor of the wild sleaze we will encounter as the novel progresses: 

Moffat foreshadows that there is more to Myra Manning than there seems: she’s a beauty with a perfect body, but Ken was a “kid” when she was a Hollywood queen and also there’s that pale-faced former assistant of hers with a bandage on his throat who slinks out of Myra’s penthouse apartment on Ken’s first day, trying to throw Ken a meaningful look… 

But really, at this point it’s a Hollywood novel, with a lot of stuff about the filming of Myra’s soap opera and the squabbling that goes on behind the scenes. That is, with a lot of material about photography…and a lot more explicit sex, as Myra begins to “initiate” Ken into something unstated, first by secretly dosing him with strychnine and then engaging him in yet more super-explicit shenanigans: 

But it’s not all drug-fueled super sex with the beautiful Myra who has almost superhuman control of her womanhood (cue those anatomincal notes I mentioned): in between the memories of sexual bliss Ken is haunted by scenes from “a nightmare,” with Myra wearing a “half-mask” with “canines,” and the feeling of blood flowing down Ken’s side as she feeds from his neck, but Ken is sure none of this could be real. Still, there’s this band-aid on his throat, and Myra’s insistence that he not remove it so that it can heal properly…claiming that Ken was so drunk he cut himself shaving… 

Then there’s Noire, Myra’s professor friend who is a mountain of muscle with a shaved head…the impression is he’s an Anton LeVay type after a few visits to the gym. He’s a specialist in all things vampire, and has been teaching Myra about it, and there’s a lot of stuff about historical vampires, and Noire’s insistence that such creatures existed…but, again, there’s nothing here that they are supernatural creatures, ie the living dead as you’d encounter in traditional vampire fiction. Instead, the impression Moffat gives is that these “vampires” are humans who drink blood to stay young. Moffat leaves it vague enough that the reader could take it either way, but the fact that Myra is a famous TV actress who often admires herself in the mirror should tell you right away that the traditional vampire lore is not being followed here. 

The “nightmare” stuff becomes more extreme as Myra continues dosing Ken with strychnine – which leaves him fuzzy-minded but super-aroused, capable of all-night action – and also throwing orgies where Ken witnesses such craziness as a young girl being ravaged by Noire’s massive “phallus.” As I said, the depravity is just off the charts. 

Only gradually does Ken realize what’s really going on: Myra is a vampire and she’s using him as a meal on legs. Ken finds salvation in another group who works on the soap opera, and with their help he escapes Myra’s clutches…and also he also helps a guy with some pointers on photography; even in the climax Moffat still indulges in page-filling, but it’s so well-written and quick-moving that I didn’t mind. 

More importantly, here Ken finds true love, courtesy brunette hottie Carol, an up-and-coming starlet on the soap who initially gave Ken the cold shoulder. Moffatt again displays his penchant for sizzling shenanigans when Carol gets Ken to do a nude photo session of her – for a play she’s interested in, naturally – and then she essentially throws herself on him, leading to a sex scene just as explicit as those with cougar Myra: 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this and the next four paragraphs if you don’t want to know the finale, but given the obscurity and scarcity of The Thing!, I thought I’d note what happens for posterity. Basically Myra and Noire go the expected route and take Carol prisoner, so like a true Belmont Tower hero Ken goes out for revenge. Yes, I know Midwood originally published the book, but Midwood was a Belmont Tower imprint, so it still works. 

So Ken goes after Myra and, having seen how she “ages ten years” in just a few minutes without her amphetimines (again, the connotation is that Myra is not a traditional vampire, but just a human who has vastly elongated her life by drinking blood and taking uppers), Ken strips Myra and ties her to a chair in the empty studio and then he essentially broils her with high-watt studio lights placed directly on her nude body. Curiously Moffat does not have Myra break, even as her body shrivels in the intense heat, and Ken at length even begins to respect her strength. 

From there to a brief confrontation with Noire, who is about to rape Carol with that massive phallus of his; a fight which sees Ken nearly get ripped apart, and features a finale that seems like a rip-off until you think about it and realize Moffat has pulled off a neat trick with proper setup. Essentially, Noire is about to escape with Carol in his car and he puts Ken’s face up against the exhaust, trying to smother him. Then Noire gets in his car, thinking Ken is dead – but Ken opens the door and pulls Carol out. We recall then the opening setup, in which we were informed that Ken was drummed out of ‘Nam because he’d developed a tendency to hyperventilate when nervous. Thus, when Noire was “smothering” Ken with the exhaust fumes, the carbon monixide was actually helping Ken control his hyperventilation! I’m not sure if the science is legit, but Moffat certainly writes it with confidence. 

That said, Noire’s sendoff is laughable – in his haste he barrells out of the parking lot and runs into a truck, killed by the steering wheel slamming into his chest! And at novel’s end we learn that the withered hag that was Myra Manning has “disappeared” from the world, and, safely knowing that her legend will live forever, she plans to dose herself with strychnine, rip out her teeth and cut off her fingertips, and then douse herself with gasoline and immolate herself “before the tremors” make muscle movement impossible! 

And meanwhile Ken and Carol head off for a happily ever after… 

End spoilers. Yes, the finale is rushed, but hell, what Belmont Tower doesn’t have a rushed finale? I was satisfied that James Moffatt even told us what happened to all of the characters. All told, I loved the hell out of The Thing!, but I will be the first to acknowledge that your own mileage will vary. 

Here is the cover of the original Midwood edition, from 1971, which does a better job than any of the reprints of depicting the actual contents of the book...though note the artist at least also agreed that hot and evil vampire babes should have black hair: 

And here is a link to Too Much Horror Fiction, where you can see a few other covers Belmont Tower graced this book with over the years; according to a comment Andy Decker made at the Vault Of Evil forum, the copy I read, the cover for which is shown at the top of the review, might actually have been from 1978. If so, the copyright page itself only states 1971. My assumption is Belmont Tower just took the actual Midwood Books printing from 1971 and affixed different covers to it over the years.

Succubus

Succubus, by Irving A. Greenfield

September, 1970  Dell Books

Leave it to Irving Greenfield to write a paperback original that comes off like a sleazy, X-rated, “in the tradition of” take on William Blatty’s The Exorcist, with the added bonus that Greenfield’s novel was published the year before Blatty’s novel! Now that’s an impressive feat. 

I picked this one up many years ago, along with a concurrent PBO Greenfield published with Dell, The Sexplorer, and it seems to me now that the two novels are connected in a way. Not in the repeating characters or situations – like with Greenfield’s later Making U-Hoo and Julius Caesar Is Alive And Well – but in how they are essentially sleaze paperbacks that were published by a mainstream outlet. 

Speaking of “in the tradition of,” one thing I’ve always meant to mention on here is that Harold Robbins was the only bestselling author who actually got more explicit than his “in the tradition of” imitators…save for Irving Greenfield. For make no mistake, Greenfield’s novels are incredibly raunchy, leaving no juicy stone unturned – and it seems now that the same raunchy material repeated throughout his oeuvre, like for example his focus on “dining at the Y,” something much dwelt upon here in Succubus, just as it was nearly two decades later in Depth Force. 

Seriously, while Succubus is marketed as “horror,” explicitly so in the 1979 Manor Books reprint (where Greenfield was strangely credited as “Campo Verde”), it is in reality a piece of steamy fiction, filled with characters having sex, thinking about sex, dreaming about sex, fantasizing about sex, or talking about sex. The “possession” stuff is just an add on, with the additional note that techinically it isn’t even a “succubus” that posseses the main character! 

No, it’s a priestess from ancient Sumeria, her spirit taking possession of a lovely young brunette named Rina, she of the “tantalizing upturned breasts.” The priestess, we’re told, has blonde hair, and presumably that’s supposed to be her on the photo cover. Rina is married to Thomas, a 30 year-old professor of Etruscan history in New York City. They have only been married for a short while, and Greenfield builds up some mystery over how and why they met. Eventually we’ll learn that Rina was guided to this meeting, but unfortunately the entire plot unravels if you think about it too much. 

Greenfield keeps the reader from thinking about the plot holes by focusing on sex for nearly the entire 205 pages. Mind you, this isn’t a complaint. No one writes an explicit sex scene like Irving Greenfield. I mean, this dude himself was a teacher. I’ve always imagined what one of his classes might have been like: “Professor Greenfield, should it be written as ‘come’ or as ‘cum’?” (That’s a joke I’ve been meaning to write on here for like 13 years!) 

Proving my point, Succubus opens with Thomas and Rina lounging in their home, Thomas dozing as he reads and Rina relaxing on the couch…and soon enough Thomas is thinking and dreaming about sex, as is Rina, and shortly after that they are going at it full-bore. Here Greenfield will quickly prove his fondness for cunnilingus, with lots of detail of Thomas working on Rina’s “lips” and whatnot. It’s pretty crazy and certainly has that hardcore ‘70s vibe in full effect…again, pretty impressive given that the novel was published just as the ‘70s were beginning. 

As if that weren’t enough, we have another long sex scene as Thomas sexually fantasizes about a woman walking ahead of him on the street as he makes his way to his school; this is the material that made me think of The Sexplorer, which I started to read back in 2010, back when I started the blog, but for some reason never finished. From there Thomas goes into his office…where later he is propositioned by a sexy young student (“We’ve been talking about sex so damn much that my crotch is already wet!”), who strips for him and then, after more of the Y-dining, the two go at it on Thomas’s desk. No juicy stone is left unturned. 

Meanwhile Rina “sees” all of this, and thus is certain Thomas has cheated on her. Greenfield pulls an interesting conceit here that Rina is possessed, but does not know it…even after mental conversations with the priestess who has possessed her, and who can take over Rina’s body at whim, Rina will come out of the mental conversations with no recollection of them. Greenfield, who also plays an interesting conceit in that he doesn’t concern himself with explaining any of it, provides a few genuinely creepy moments as Rina will go “into a room” in her mind and talk to this priestess, and see things via remote vision. 

But still, Succubus isn’t much of a horror rollercoaster. It’s more of a character study; Greenfield’s narrative style is somewhat different this time around, as he is very much concerned with probing the thoughts and feelings of his characters. Very much of the novel is stuck in the headspace of Thomas and Rina, going on about their feelings and how they react to each other – and, given the otherwise formal tone of Greenfield’s narrative style, this gives the book an almost stuffy feel. 

Rina, post that beginning-of-the-novel sex, has suddenly announced her desire to go see Thomas’s estranged uncle, William. Eventually Thomas agrees, and meanwhile Greenfield has fun with Rina being bitchy and catty to Thomas, as she “knows” he had sex with that girl in his office, and thus wants to be spiteful…even though Thomas does not know that Rina knows. And meanwhile Rina will frequently go into long, pages-filling dreams about ancient Sumeria, where we learn the horrific backstory of the priestess, who betrayed her people with a foreigner and who was then raped by a few hundred slaves until she died, her corpse fed to the ravens…oh, and meanwhile her soul was cursed! 

Greenfield does not do much to bring the priestess to life, so to speak. Her goal is simple: the retrieval of a “scroll” Thomas’s uncle, a globetrotting rake, has gotten hold of…a highly-valued scroll from Sumeria that no one can read. We are to understand that the ancient Sumerians have a cult, or something, that still operates in the present day, and they want this scroll back – it is the very thing the priestess betrayed her people with, centuries ago, and thus she has now possessed Rina’s body to acquire it. 

Here’s where the plot falls apart: why didn’t Rina just go after Uncle William? A handsome older man who is unmarried and who lives alone on a castle in Antigua, William would be prime for the plucking by a sexy brunette babe with tantalizing upturned breasts. I mean, wouldn’t we all be? One wonders why the priestess even bothered ensnaring Thomas, if her ultimate goal was William. But then who can understand the mind of an undead ancient Sumerian priestess? 

It’s very heavy on the psychological tip as Rina and Thomas go to Antigua, bickering and bantering all the way, and then William comes along and there’s more bickering and bantering, and Rina decides to screw him to get that scroll, which was her plan all along. Meanwhile Thomas is hoodwinked into screwing a phantom female of his mind, created by the priestess – who seems to have whatever power Greenfield needs her to have, for the convenience of the plot. 

Indeed, Greenfield has spent so much time focused on introspection and sex-fantasizing that he must rush through the conclusion. Basically William and Thomas realize Rina is possessed like in the final eight pages, and they get a voodoo priestess, and there’s chanting and whatnot…but while the main problem is resolved, Greenfield is stingy with the details. 

For example, William mentions a “cult” that has tried to take the scroll from him. Who are these people and what happens to them? In fact, the priestess tells Rina that the leader is the literal god Enki, so what are we to make of this? The old gods still walk the earth? We also are not given a satisfactory reason why Rina was even possessed, nor why the gods had Thomas and not his uncle in their sights…and Greenfield brushes this all aside, having all three characters not remember a single thing about Rina’s possession at the end of the book. 

So while it was a frustrating read as a horror paperback, it must be stated that Succubus was certainly a success as a piece of paperback sleaze; I could imagine a horny 14 year-old kid taking notes from this damn book in the pre-internet world. “Girls must really like it when you rub on something called a ‘clit!’ I’ve gotta remember that!”

Men’s Mag Roundup: Satanic Sleaze

 

Boy, it’s been several years since I’ve done one of these men’s adventure magazine roundup reviews. Ever since Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham started up Men’s Adventure Quarterly, I’ve rarely dipped into my collection of men’s adventure mags. But recently I hit Bob and Bill up with an idea for a “Satanic sleaze” sort of MAQ Halloween special, focusing on the lurid “killer cult” tales of the latter men’s mags (ie, from the early to mid 1970s), and then I decided that I’d just read some of these stories from my own collection. 

Yes, as documented in Barbarians On Bikes (which Bob put together with his other co-editor, Wyatt Doyle), as the ‘60s progressed the editors of the men’s mags started looking for more than just the typical “Nazi villain” of the earlier pulps. So there was an increasing amount of stories with biker villains, or cults, or Satanists, or hippie killer freaks. 

First up is this Man’s Story from April 1975. This mag was one of the “sweats,” meaning it traded in more lurid and sensationalistic content than the “upmarket” men’s mags (which were pretty lurid themselves, but still). And the cover is the proof in the pudding, illustrating some Nazi terror. I really love the covers on the later men’s mags, and this one’s great. Though I have to admit, the Telly Savalas-lookalike Nazi in the far corner almost looks like a TV game show host, the way he’s grinning and pointing at that poor blonde. “And you just won – a flaming poker enema!” 

This issue serves up the exact sort of story I had in mind for my “Satanic sleaze” Halloween MAQ special: “Blood Rites Of Satan’s Darlings,” by Chuck Graham. It features a great splashpage, which again demonstrates how cool this latter-era men’s mag artwork was: 

Yeah man, this one is short but it serves up the whole thing. Curiously, it’s written in present-tense, which is unusual for a men’s mag. It would appear that the editors were open to experimentation in the later days. But then again, the drugs were just better back then. The story concerns an unfortunate young American girl named Jan who is on vacation in Mexico (apparently a hotbed for Satanic cult, at least so far as the men’s mags were concerned). 

The story opens with Jan enjoying dinner with the female friend who brought her here and the three people who live in this house: two beautiful native women and an older native man. But something seems off and Jan’s thoughts are fuzzy…yes, folks, Jan’s been drugged, but the drug leaves only her body unresponsive but her mind is cogent, because the Satanists want Jan to know every horrid thing that happens to her. 

We go immediately to the “sweats” stuff, with Jan taken into a cult chamber where the man and four women strip her down to her “nylon panties” and start pawing her up…but some of the “depredations” done to poor Jan are too much for even our author to recount. About the most we know is that she is tortured; the author intimates that the four use her sexually, but does not go into detail. At any rate, Jan’s heart is ripped out, and that’s it for her. 

I first read this story probably around 2011, when I bought the magazine, and the finale made me laugh then and it still makes me laugh now: after recounting all this lurid horror, author Chuck Graham finishes off the story in a faux stentorian style in which he soundly condemns the atrocities of Satanists in the western world…as if he hadn’t just exploited such atrocities in his lurid story! But then, it is quite evident that most of these men’s mag authors had their tongues firmly in cheek. 

Overall this one certainly serves up the sleazy Satanism, but otherwise “Blood Rites Of Satan’s Darlings” is really just a torture story, with no actual plot or anything else. But then, that’s what we want from the sweats. 

Much longer and more enjoyable is “I Joined A Cross-Country Sex Circus,” by Don Peters “as told to Steve Lawton.” From Barbarians On Bikes I know that this story also appeared in the April 1972 Man’s Story. The men’s mag editors were not shy about reprinting stories. (And by the way, that is not my finger, or carpet, in the screengrabs above; these images are from an eBay listing for the magazine I came across many years ago!)  As mentioned above, bikers were also prime “villain candidates” for the mags, as demonstrated here. 

In this first-person tale, “Don Peters” (though our narrator never actually refers to himself in the story) is going across the Denver area in search of a particular biker. His girlfriend you see was raped and killed by a biker, an act which Don witnessed, but was too busy being knocked out at the time to stop it from happening. He only saw a brawny biker push his girlfriend up against a tree, rape her, and then gut her with a knife – Don got to her before she died, saw that she was holding the broken half of a Maltese Cross, and now Don is going around looking for a biker with a broken Maltese Cross. In other words, the biker who has the other half of this broken cross is the biker who raped and killed Don’s girlfriend. 

Well, it’s an okay setup, I guess. Doesn’t really live up to the title of the story, though. But then, that’s standard for the men’s mags. Don thinks he’s found his bikers when he latches onto a group near Denver and hitches a ride with one of them to a party in the woods. Oh, and by the way Don himself is not a biker, which sort of robs the appeal of the story. He’s really more of an aimless drifter; “dude” is how everyone refers to him, including the “mama” of the club’s boss, who promptly slips into Don’s sleeping bag that night for some barely-described hot action. 

Our hero’s kind of dumb, though. He sets his sights on one of the bikers, sure it’s the man who killed his woman, and then gets him to go off on a pretext. But our hero has been played for a fool and is knocked out. This leads to the climax, where Don somehow manages to free himself – memorably taking out one of the bikers by stomping him repeatedly in the balls. There’s a bizarre editorial error, though; our narrator is about to be killed, too weak to fight, and then the boss’s mama kills the man who is about to kill our hero – but the editor goofs and writes “I” instead of “she,” ie giving the impression that the narrator has saved himself, though it’s clear he did nothing. 

“Bride Of The Corpse – The Incredible Terror Ordeal of Lucia Alvarez,” by sweats veteran Jim McDonald, is another torture piece that lives only to illustrate its memorable splash page. Essentially our narrator, Lucia, an actress in an undisclosed South American country, is brought in by the despotic regime as a “traitor,” and after being groped and tortured she’s tossed into the fresh grave of one of her compatriots, being made to sleep with the corpse. This one’s pretty lame and at least has a happy ending, with Lucia being rescued. 

The last story I’ll focus on from this April 1975 Man’s Story is the cover story, “The Hideous Evil Of The Nazi Fire Beast,” by Hal Sommers. This one’s crazy because it starts off really good: the narrator, a German reporter, is in the morgue, looking at the corpse of a man in his 60s who was an arsonist. Indeed, the old man accidentally killed himself in a fire he was setting. But our narrator suspects a Nazi, and sure enough finds the SS code number (or whatever it is) tattooed beneath the corpse’s arm. He identifies him as a beast named Breslaur. 

From there our narrator goes to a war records place, where he reads about Breslaur’s background…and here the story becomes just another sweat. Without warning we are thrust into the first-person recollections of one of Breslaur’s many victims, our narrator listening to her tape-recorded statements. So now the story’s in 1944 and we read as this beautiful young woman outside Paris is sent to a prison where Breslaur rules with an iron fist. 

He’s not only a sadist but an arsonist, a man who is sexually aroused by fire, and there follows lots of sweat mag stuff where Breslaur tortures women with fire and flaming pokers – ghoulish stuff, somehow made even more ghoulish given that the author doesn’t go into full-bore exploitation, though letting us know without actually saying it that some of the women are raped by the poker. 

This poor girl who has become our new narrator is “only” raped by Breslaur in the traditional way, ie not with a flaming poker – but she knows her time is coming, and the author does a good job of mounting the suspense. But man, this one comes to a rushed end; the war’s over, and Breslaur escapes before he can kill this particular girl, and then we’re back to the narrator’s POV and he’s sickened by all this stuff he’s read – more laugh out loud stuff, because the “sickening” stuff is exactly why the author wrote the story in the first place, which is another indication of how these authors had their tongues in their cheeks – and then the narrator figures that Breslaur must’ve accidentally killed himself in this fire he set, a fitting end for the sixty year-old sadist. The end! 

Otherwise this issue of Man’s Story is filled with the usual sex articles of the later men’s mags, not to mention a whole plethora of ads for sex toys and sex services and sex books. It’s interesting that none of the ads have nudity in them; the nipples are usually blacked out and the actual penetration is also blacked out, so no doubt the concern was Federal charges for sending out porno in the mail. 

I reviewed this December 1974 Man’s Story before, but at the time my focus was on the WWII pulp action story, “OSS Carter’s Death Doll Platoon,” which later made its way into MAQ #5. That’s a good story, but I’ve read it a few times, now – and reviewed it on here twice – so this time I’ll focus on the other stories in this issue. This time I’ll focus on the Satanic sleaze! 

“Helpless Virgins And The Night Of The Slithering Horror” is by Mark Powers “as told to Ted Harper,” and serves up the sleazy Satanic goods. Indeed, this one would be an even better candidate for my imaginary MAQ Hippie Horror Halloween Special. Our narrator is a writer who is visiting Mexico, where apparently he discovered the corpse of a young woman, who appeared to have been killed by snake bites. But the local cops disbelieve him and tell him he’s imagining things. The narrator is content to bang his native girl; cue some of the slightly-more-risque material of the later men’s mags. 

But as I mentioned above, Mexico was apparently a Satanic Disney World in the ‘70s, and you guessed it – there’s a friggin Satanic snake cult operating out of the area, and our narrator saw too much when he came upon the murdered girl. So now the cult abducts his girl, leading to the splashpage illustration where the robed and cowled cultists are about to kill her with a bunch of snakes. But we’re in the world of the men’s mags, thus our hero’s able to get out his gun and start blasting away – a fairly graphic bit where he blasts out the brains of one of the cult leaders. 

A notable element here is that the narrator goes off to a happily ever after with his native gal; as I noted before, the white heroes of the earlier men’s mags were all well and good with having sex with native gals, but rarely if ever stayed with them. But our narrator assures us that he’s staying with his native Nina. Well, that’s progress! That said, there’s an unintentionally hilarious editing snafu where Nina becomes “Linda” for a paragraph. 

“Rape Rampage Of The Sex Cult Savages” is by Rod Brady, and is the title piece of this issue. The most interesting thing about this short and rough story is how the author strives to cater to the splashpage (and cover) illustration; it seems clear that he either saw the artwork, or he was given thorough description of it. Otherwise this is another story that really hinges on sadism and nothing else – but again, that’s what we expect from the sweats. 

A curious thing about this story is that it goes into second-person later in the tale, an unusual stylistic gimmick that you don’t see very often. Outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books, at least. (And yes, I used this exact same joke in my previous review of this tale, but so what! At least I steal from the best!) This grungy little tale, which could almost be a cheap drive-in flick or something that played on 42nd Street, concerns Herbie, a loser who lives with a trio of other losers in Alphabet City, in New York (not referred to that way in the story, but that’s where they are – off Avenue C). Oh, and one of the group is named “Batman!” 

Well, the group has often “gang-banged” women and done other outrageous things, but so far as Herbie’s concerned, all the women have been in on it, or enjoyed it, or were whores and were probably so strung out they didn’t even care. But this time it’s different! The group has picked up a young woman who was waiting for the bus, and they’ve taken her off in van, and now they’re stripping off her clothes and one of them’s carving her initials on her leg…and basically all the other stuff that is shown on the memorable cover/splashpage art, so again it’s clear the author was trying to cater to that. 

But Herbie doesn’t like it, and after a few pages of describing the girl’s horror as she’s pawed and raped – including that aforementioned strange bit where the narrative goes over to “you thought this,” “you thought that,” and other second-person narration – Herbie decides to do something about it, and steps in to save the day. A short, nasty tale, but commendable for actually trying to live up to the artwork, which is something too few of these men’s mag stories ever do. Yet at the same time, it is another indication of how the plots of the actual stories seldom if ever lived up to the potential of the titles.

Otherwise in this issue we have “The Nazi War Who Made War On The Maidens Of The Maquis,” which I also reviewed previously, as well as the usual sex-based articles and ads. One of the ads really made me chuckle, though: 

Well, as the cover will attest, we’re now in a totally different men’s mag world. And yes, I did block out the ta-tas in the above screengrab; don’t want the blog to get hit with another random sensitive content warning. But boy, the pulpy thrills of the early days are for the most part gone; this December 1976 issue of Male is printed on slick paper, not the pulpy paper of earlier men’s mags, and it features full-color interior photography. And boy, folks, we’re talking straight-up Penthouse sort of stuff. The models who pose for us are fully nude and, uh, fully spread, so absolutely nothing is left to the imagination. 

In a way it’s a sad end to the men’s mags; the cool “I’m an honest vet who fought for my country and now I just wanna work at my blue-collar job and go home to read about virile yanks banging big-boobed broads during the war while I have a smoke and a drink” vibe of the early days is completely gone; this is porn, and sleazy porn at that. The market had clearly changed, and the men’s mag editors were desperate to cater to a readership that wanted Hustler instead of quality tales of military action. For, believe it or not, Male was one of the “upmarket” men’s mags I referred to above, offering stories and articles that were much better than the grungy stuff in the sweats. But reading this December, 1976 issue of the magazine, you’d never guess that. 

That said, they still managed to get some fairly good fiction into the pages, and “Ex-MP Who Became The Sex-And-Crime King Of Europe” by Jerry Trumbalt is a case in point. In fact I think this story is the reason I picked up this issue many years ago. It’s a heist yarn, about a moral-lacking MP who heists the Army payroll with a team he puts together, and then goes into the slave-trade business outside of Tangier. 

As with many of these stories, it’s framed as a nonfiction piece; Harry Malone is an MP with a mind for an angle and he gets responsibility for all the payrolls in a part of Germany. He puts together a team from the stockade and they pull the heist – but all that is sort of told in summary. The meat of the tale is Malone taking the money and starting up a lucrative sex-trade business, which he runs on a ship in the Tangier area. He also enjoys testing out all the girls he will sell: 

“Anal sex was something she held the patent on.” Now there’s a line that needs to be stolen for a book. More focus is placed on Malone and his run-ins with the abovementioned Arabic criminal, culminating in a firefight by some ancient Roman ruins in the desert. Overall a pretty good story, but not as long as such a story would have been in an earlier men’s mag. 

Earl Norem, my favorite of all the men’s mag artists, handles the nice splashpage for “The Rape Hunt Brothers,” by Anthony Farrar, another short piece that harkens back to the men’s mags of yore. This one’s a fairly short revenge piece about a group of five scumbags in Baja California who drive around in a “high-powered car” and enjoy raping female American tourists. And beating their men to a pulp. 

But the group, which manages to evade arrest, sows its own fate when one of the rape victims goes back home and tells her three brothers to get revenge for her. So now these good ol’ boys head down to Mexico to find the scumbags and make them pay…though, for vague reasons, their sister wants it all to be “legal.” Okay, whatever. This grim setup doesn’t prevent the author from “inserting” a random sex scene: 

As you can see, the sexual material has become more risque in the later years. The revenge angle is given short shrift, with the brothers catching the scumbags in action – as illustrated by Norem in his splashpage – and then shooting at them as they drive away. 

The sexual material is even more risque in “Porno Girls And The Casting Couch,” by Eugene Grant, which purports to be another nonfiction piece, the author interviewing a few porno actresses, but this is really just the framework for a bunch of explicit sex scenes: 

It’s like this throughout; the author will introduce a girl “in action,” then spend some time talking to her about how she got into the porno biz – and even here sex is factored in, as the girls all got into the biz after having sex with a guy (or, in the case of one of them, sex with a gal). This story too suffers from an abrupt finale, as if the author hit his word count without expecting it. 

Then there’s “Secrets Of A Whore House Detective,” by George Harris “as told to” Simon Koch. Note the title: It’s “Whore House Detective” here in the magazine, whereas it’s shown as “Cat House Detective” on the magazine cover. Again, methinks the concern was over what could and could not be shown on the cover, due to these magazines being sent out in the mail. This is another pseudo-nonfiction piece, about a detective who works for a “consortium” of health insurance companies – his job to root out “pockets of infection” in the prostitution world. 

The detective is currently in NYC, where a shipment of fifty whores have been sent in by “the Chicago Syndicate” to entertain the delegation that’s come in town for a Democrat convention(!!!). Word has it that a new strain of syphilis or whatever has broken out, and this detective’s job is to find the infected hooker(s); the consortium isn’t concerned with morality or legality, they’re just sick of paying out for men who contract STDs from infected hookers! So this detective’s job is to find an infected whore and report her to the cops, to keep her off the streets. 

Other than that, this issue of Male features the usual sex exposes, not to mention a lot of full-color photographs of fully-nude women (one of whom sports very unattractive hairy armpits!), in a manner more Hustler sleazy than anything you’d see in Playboy. It’s no surprise that the men’s mags would soon wither away.