My college roommate had some very interesting books.
Sue and I had met at an early meeting of what became SSFFS and found that we had similar tastes in science fiction and fantasy. We also both liked to write, and ended up co-editing a small fanzine, Dreamlight, which we managed to con the college into financing as an Intersession project. Several of our contributors and former members went on to careers in writing and editing, most notably Walter Hunt, Sue's high school friend, and Atlanta-based playwright and cultural critic Anya Martin, while Sue herself worked as an editor in New York for about a decade before going freelance. We were young, very intense about certain things, and played a lot more D&D than we should have.
We also read each other’s books. I had several Star Trek fanzines, a couple of books on bad movies, lots of books on the Middle Ages, plus a complete set of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books (including Sword of Aldones, which was so bad Bradley eventually did a complete rewrite), some Roger Zelazny, and my English and history textbooks. Sue’s library was similar, sans the bad movies and fanzines.
She also owned a near-complete set of The Destroyer books.
I’d seen the thin little paperbacks about Remo Williams, the Destroyer, on the newsstands in my local pharmacy, DiStefano’s, for most of my teen years. I’d never read them, partly because the covers were pure pulp, and partly due to pure, primal fear. You see, the only time I ever visited DiStefano’s was on the way home from piano lessons on Friday night, and my uncle Lou would have asked too many questions if his demure little niece came back to the car with violent, male-oriented books about government assassins who basically slaughtered everything in sight with their toenail clippings.
How my mother would have reacted didn’t bear thinking about; she didn’t censor my reading, but the true crime paperbacks and the cache of extraordinarily bad fanfiction she pretended not to see were as far as I was willing to stretch her patience.
That Sue owned such literature was interesting enough, but that she owned it openly was wondrous indeed. Even better, Sue loved to read aloud, and before I knew it she’d read me enough about Remo, his adventures, and his mentor Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, to know that the Destroyer books were as much satire as adventure. I mean, what else could one call books starring a ninja master who not only is obsessed with American soap operas but has it written into his contract that he must travel with a VCR so he can tape each and every episode of his “beautiful dramas”? Or whose hero can karate chop armor plating so fast that he sets up a vibration on the molecular level that allows him to break through the steel with his bare hands?
It was all quite ridiculous, and ridiculously entertaining, and soon I found myself reading similar books, most of them centering on a single violent, heroic character and his outrageous adventures mowing down his enemies in pursuit of truth, justice, and quick profits for Gold Medal Books. They were mindless, extraordinarily silly for all the bloodshed, and of course, most of them were Books So Bad They’re Good.
The small, blood-soaked genre known as “men’s adventure fiction” had its roots in post-war pulp magazines like Argosy,Adventure, Real, True, Saga, Stag, Swank and For Men Only. These magazines, all marketed exclusively to men, were known in the trade as "the sweats" for their lurid contents and titillating cover photos, but they published stories by the likes of Mario Puzo and, believe it or not, “Ellis Hart” (Harlan Ellison). Many of the articles were allegedly true stories with titles like "Lt. Morrow's Mademoiselle-Commando Raid on Hell Bomb Cavern." Cover art or photos of busty women screaming as their clothes were torn off were routine, as were travelogues about manly men who traveled to exotic lands, met exotic natives, hunted exotic game, and shot it with exotic large-bore guns.
As magazines gradually gave way to television, the wild adventure stories migrated to stand-alone paperbacks in genres ranging from action-adventure to Westerns to science fiction to private eye stories that made Mickey Spillane look like a Quaker. These books usually came out once a month or so, averaged 50,000 words, and were written by the sort of fast, facile, careless authors who had written for the lower grade pulps a generation earlier. By the time Sue introduced me to the Destroyer, there were many, many such series, usually written by authors like Michael Avallone who were prized more for their ability to churn out thousands and thousands of words than for any particular gift for plot, characterization or language.
Tonight I’ve unearthed three prime examples of this popular but all too frequently putrid genre. Two are no longer published, but the third, perhaps the greatest of all, is still gracing newsstands, bookracks, and even bookstores to this very day:
The Baroness, by Paul Kenyon (Donald Moffitt). The 1960s and early 1970s were an exciting time to be female. Skirts were shorter, sex was guilt-free, and barriers to education, finance, and the professions were falling, one by one. “You’ve come a long way, baby,” was the famous tag-line of Virginia Slims cigarettes, and if having your own cigarette meant you stood a good chance of getting lung cancer, heart disease, and emphysema in twenty years, wasn’t being a sexy, liberated woman worth it?
Best of all, women in TV, films, and popular fiction could be more than just damsels in distress. Starting with the sophisticated, elegant, lethal reformed gangster Modesty Blaise in the early 1960s, a series of beautiful, smart, deadly women began to appear in books, TV, comic strips, and movies: Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) and the immortal Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) on the sophisticated British spy series The Avengers; Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) on Mission: Impossible; the Bond girls in the wildly popular spy movies and books; April Dancer, the Girl from UNCLE (Stefanie Powers)…even non-spy series like Star Trek and Ironside had their share of gorgeous women like Lt. Uhura and Eve Whitfield who went toe to toe with the men and frequently won. It was a refreshing change from the screaming ninnies who had featured in so much popular entertainment in the pulp days, albeit too often intended for male titillation rather than female empowerment.
And then there was the Baroness.
Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini, former model, international playgirl, and spy, debuted in 1974 in The Ecstasy Connection and blew her way through seven more books before fading into oblivion thanks to poor sales. Voluptuous, with green eyes and black hair, she was the widow of an Italian baron who died racing in Monte Carlo. After several years of dull, mindless existence, Penelope became a spy pretty much out of boredom but proved to be talented at such valuable espionage skills as thwarting international conspiracies, drinking Martinis, driving a Porsche, throwing parties for the glitterati, and dispatching enemies like Dr. Thing, Petronius Sim, and Sully Flick with a Bernadelli .25 and more feminine weapons like hairpins. The cover of her first adventure sets the tone for the whole series: Penelope, wearing a skin-tight black catsuit as she fires a machine gun, is surrounded by helicopters, assassins in purple suits and black turtlenecks, a Sydney Greenstreet clone in what is either a Victorian dining room chair or a throne, and two Borzois leaping about for no discernible reason. Many times good books are concealed by terrible art, especially genre fiction (see my diary last Monday), but it’s safe to say that this isn’t one of them.
What really tips The Baroness into BSBTG territory, though is the sex. As one might expect in the Swingin’ Seventies, Penelope, widowhood notwithstanding, almost matches James Bond himself when it comes to bedding friends, allies, enemies, and suspects. Unlike Bond, however, Penelope St. John-Orsini’s sexual exploits include lines like the following:
"She flicked it downward to the slippery underside and found it muscularly imprisoned." [Wha - ????]
"They lay side by side like exhausted wrestlers... a single sparkling droplet trying to ooze out of his blunt tip. [of what?]
His tool grew in her hand until it was a rigid club, hot and heavy to the touch. [sexay!]
And perhaps the most amazing of all:
Penelope felt an electric shock travel downward through the center of her body to where she was plastered wetly to the padded barstool.
Orgasm as an electric shock that plasters one to a barstool...the mind reels at the thought that anyone, even the randiest adolescent boy, would find this erotic, and it's little wonder that the series was canceled after eight books. That such singularly unerotic erotica did appear in French, however, is definitely a surprise. Perhaps "blunt tips" sounds dirtier in Languedoc?
The Executioner, Able Team, Stony Man, and Phoenix Force, by Don Pendleton and a cast of thousands. The Executioner is one of the great pulp characters in American literature. Originally a sniper in Vietnam who earned his nickname for his deadly precision with a rifle, Mack Bolan began as an ordinary if highly skilled veteran who embarked on a one-man war against the Mafia after most of his family was wiped out by the Mob in that legendary Mafia center, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. By means of luck, pluck, and treachery, he took down the Pittsfield mob and proceeded to battle his way across most of North America for 38 violent but entertaining books that grew more elaborate, and ridiculous, as Bolan came closer and closer to his goal of wiping out every gangster alive except the Gambinos, the Gottis, Whitey Bulger, Howie Winter, the Patriarcas, etc., etc., etc..
In particular, Bolan's mighty War Wagon, a converted RV with an armory, sleeping quarters, and sophisticated electronics beyond the reach of the average Third World petty dictator, was an innocuous but lethal weapon for justice, especially the kind that didn’t involve civil liberties, trial by jury, or similar trivialities. He financed his righteous endeavors by taking cash from the Mafiosi he mowed down defeated, and since he showed an unexpected talent for disguise, he infiltrated and wrecked a lot more Mafiosi than probably existed in America at the time.
Alas, all good things must come to an end, and series creator Don Pendleton bowed out after ending Bolan’s war against the Mafia in book #38, Satan’s Sabbath, although his name continued to appear on the books. That was when the real fun began.
The US intelligence community, deciding that such a bad-ass would be an invaluable asset to the fight against international terrorism, Communism, and drug cartels, recruited Bolan and renamed him “Col. John Phoenix” even though he’d never been more than a sergeant during his actual military career. He was given money, a base of operations in West Virginia, and allowed to hand-pick a career of multi-national war buddies, intelligence operatives, and stone cold killers to form three separate but related units: Able Team (three of Bolan’s old war buddies who fight domestic terrorism); Phoenix Force (a group of international operatives who battle, no surprise, international terrorism); and Stony Man (both groups plus occasional ringers and allies who fight everything, everywhere). All these groups were featured in their own series, plus a mega-series called “Super Bolan” that threw in every conceivable enemy except those defeated by Doctor Who and Captain Kirk, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that someone has written fanfiction doing just that.
This is every bit as confusing as it sounds, especially since Mack Bolan and his friends must be pushing 70 by now and on 100% disability for war wounds, peace wounds, PTSD, Agent Orange exposure, and just plain age. Despite this, there were over 700 books about Mack Bolan, Col. John Phoenix, Able Team, Phoenix Force, et al> as of last year, with no end in sight. It’s a fair bet that any day now a super-secret government agency will offer these gallant heroes either an immortality serum, android bodies, or a series of brainless clones so that regardless of time, space, or plausibility, Mack Bolan will continue to defend America and entertain men with a taste for gunfire and loud explosions for generations to come.
Nick Carter, Kill-Master of AXE. The original Nick Carter was a Victorian-era master detective in the mold of Sherlock Holmes or Sexton Blake. This Nick Carter, who first appeared in 1886, was later updated to a pulp-era private eye and gadget expert, and continued on radio and in magazines until 1955. The character was resurrected yet again in 1964, this time as a dashing, globe-trotting spy in the mold of James Bond, and continued for thirty more years and over 250 novels.
This Nick Carter, though, would have given his Victorian creators heart failure. The latest incarnation of Nick Carter is an ultra-violent "Kill-Master of AXE," an elite assassin employed by a secret US government agency. In this capacity Carter, now an OSS veteran, out-Bonds James Bond in terms of body count, number of women bedded, viciousness of opponents, and wildness of plots. Character names verge on the ridiculous (the M-equivalent, Hawk, has a secretary named "Della Strokes"), and the sexual encounters in particular are explicit enough to be confused with the milder forms of 1960s porn.
If that weren't enough, the new Nick Carter also throws in the sort of vulgar sensationalism that would have made Ian Fleming swallow his triple gold-ringed cigarette, whole. The first of the reboots, written in mid-1963 but published early in 1964, involves Carter thwarting an attempt to assassinate the President of the United States...and if this breathtaking show of inappropriateness isn't enough, the book ends by having the villain refer to making another attempt since this one failed! That anyone, even a pulp publisher, would deliberately try to capitalize on the death of a beloved President to launch a series of spy novels is truly mind boggling. Why this wasn't edited out after the President of the United States actually was assassinated is a good question, although it's possible (just) that the book was already set in type and the production process too advanced to remove the offending line.
And then there are the Kill-Master's weapons.
Every great action hero has a preferred weapon, whether a Walter PPK, a Magnum .357, or a Colt .45. Nick Carter, Kill-Master of AXE, has several. And like a medieval knight-errant anthropomorphizing his sword, he's named them all:
- Wilhelmina, originally one but later a series of stripped down Luger semi-automatic pistols. The original Wilhelmina was a prize Carter took from the body of a German officer during World War II.
- Hugo, a pearl-handled stiletto with a retractable blade. Carter wears this in a wrist sheath and can deploy the blade with a simple wrist movement.
- Fang, a hollow finger with a poison-tipped needle.
But the best, the absolute best, is possibly the single most ridiculous weapon in action-adventure history:
Pierre, the poison gas crotch bomb.
That's right. Somehow, despite bedding beautiful women at a rate that would make 007 fall down dead from envy, the Killmaster manages to keep a small, egg-shaped canister of poisonous gas tucked neatly against (or possibly in) his scrotum. Activated by means of a single twist, Pierre will kill anyone or anything that breathes its fumes within a few seconds.
Yes, really.
Presumably Carter is supposed to twist and throw Pierre, rather like a grenade, since there's no reference to Petronella, the portable gas mask he would need if someone accidentally twisted Pierre in the wrong way during an intimate encounter something went wrong. How any of Carter's numerous lovers avoided noticing that he had what one might call "enhanced maleness" is equally mysterious, but, well, it's all in good fun so who cares? And why would anyone expect realism in a book about a Kill-Master who works for AXE?
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There have been plenty of other men's adventure series over the years, from the Penetrator to the Death Merchant, the Man from ORGY to Talon Force, Cap Kennedy to Longarm. Which one is your guilty pleasure? Will you admit it even here? Or have you left instructions for that dusty, crumbling shelf of Super Bolans to be consigned to the flames when you join the choir eternal? Put up your feet, pour yourself a martini, and share.....