Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #13: Fatal Femmes

The latest issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is out, and as usual, it’s a breathtakingly exciting collection of stories and artwork from the men’s adventure magazines, expertly assembled by editors Bob Deis and Bill Cunningham, ably assisted this time by guest editor Eric Compton and guest contributor Terrance Layhew. The theme this time around: Fatal Femmes!

They lead off with “The Gun Moll Who Hated G-Men” from the July 1957 issue of SEE. The author is David Mazroff, whose work I’ve been familiar with for a long time due to his true crime articles and occasional fiction in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. I didn’t know until I read about it in a previous issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, however, that Mazroff was a career criminal himself and was deeply involved with organized crime. That certainly gives his work an air of authenticity. His story in this issue is a non-fiction piece about the notorious Ma Barker and her sons, and he does a great job of capturing their bloody lives and deaths.

Don Honig, a prolific contributor to the men’s adventure magazine whose work has been reprinted several times in this series, also wrote for the mystery digests. His clever crime story “Mrs. Herman and Mrs. Kenmore” is from the May 1958 issue of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. While AHMM isn’t exactly a men’s adventure magazine, I suspect there was a significant crossover with the readership of those magazines. A guy like me, for example.

W.J. Saber was really Warren Shanahan, and under his real name he wrote one of the novels featuring the comic strip hero The Phantom that were published originally by Avon back in the Seventies. I was an avid reader of those novels and read and enjoyed Shanahan’s entry back then. Under the Saber pseudonym, he wrote extensively for the men’s adventure magazines, including “Rich Lovers Wanted—Apply Mme. Crielle, Champs Elysées” from the January 1960 issue of STAG. It’s a great, lurid yarn set in Paris in the 1920s about young men being murdered and their blood being drained from them, with a dogged police detective determined to get to the bottom of the crimes.

“Kiss Me and Die” by Hiram J. Herbert (TRUE ADVENTURES, December 1960) is another true-crime yarn about the killing spree of a couple of prostitutes and their henchman/fall guy, an AWOL GI. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of true crime stories, but this one works very well and I enjoyed it.

Buz Rowan, like the author of the previous story, is an unknown quantity, likely a pseudonym. His noir crime yarn “Blood for a Nympho’s Flesh”, from the November 1962 issue of ALL MAN, is about crop-dusting, not a subject that comes up very often in such stories, I suspect. But Rowan, whoever he really was, uses it to craft a gut-punch of a story that could have been a Gold Medal novel in miniature.

I’ve read several stories and a novel by Dean W. Ballenger, and his work never fails to entertain. “The Incredible Norwegian Ice Nymphs” (NEW MAN, September 1963) is a World War II yarn about Norwegian women who fight back against the Nazis and prove to be just as deadly as their men. It’s a punchy, very entertaining tale, as you’d expect from Ballenger.

None other than the great pulp author Paul Chadwick, creator of Secret Agent X and Wade Hammond, shows up with “The Ever-Lovin’ Nude Who Watched Her Boyfriends Die” from the May 1969 issue of REAL MEN. This is the only story Chadwick wrote for the men’s adventure magazines, but it appeared three times under three different titles, in three different magazines, to boot! It’s a good story about a serial murderess who uses poison to dispose of her victims, set in France like one of the earlier stories in this volume. You can always count on Chadwick to spin a good yarn, and this one is no exception.

“Vendetta on the Street of Lonely Frauleins” wraps up the fiction in this issue. It appeared originally in the March 1966 issue of MEN and is by Mario Cleri, a prolific contributor to the men’s adventure magazines who just happens to be better known by his real name: Mario Puzo, author of THE GODFATHER and many other bestselling novels. Taking its cue from the contemporary boom in espionage and secret agent fiction, this story features freelance American operative Scarlet Tracy and her partner Charlie Hunt. Scarlet and Charlie are in Berlin to hunt down a British defector with a briefcase full of top secret documents to sell to the Russians. There seems to me to be a definite Modesty Blaise influence in this one, along with echoes of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., The Lady From L.U.S.T., and the other books, movies, and TV shows from that era that featured beautiful female protagonists. I am definitely the target audience for stories like this, and I loved it. If Puzo had turned this into a paperback series, I would have been right there at the spinner rack to pick up each new book as it came out. As far as I know, this is Scarlet Tracy’s only appearance, but it’s a good one.

Eric Compton contributes a fine article about fatal femmes in novels, and Terrance Layhew has assembled a wonderful photo gallery of some of the beautiful women from the James Bond films. Both are very worthy additions to one of the best issues of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY so far. But let’s face it, all the issues have been great. If you’re a fan of great art and hard-hitting stories, this volume and all the previous ones get my highest recommendation. You can find the Fatal Femmes issue on Amazon.

Men's Adventure Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 1: The Most Wanted Wild West Issue

Nobody knows more about the Men’s Adventure Magazines, those lurid mixtures of fact and fiction that were common on newsstands and magazine racks in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, than Bob Deis. He’s teamed up with Bill Cunningham (and an assist by Paul Bishop) to produce a terrific new anthology series called MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, each issue of which will focus on a different genre from the Men’s Adventure Magazines. The first one is out now and is loaded with Western stories and artwork from a variety of sources.

There are non-fiction articles about madams of the Old West and the TV series GUNSMOKE, but most of the contents are fictional, although some stories are based on historical characters such as Clay Allison and Buckskin Frank Leslie. Not surprisingly, my favorites are the tales by old pros Lou Cameron, Dean W. Ballenger, and Donald Honig. All the stories are well-written and entertaining, though.

Visually, MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is a real treat. The production values are excellent, and it features dozens of magazine covers and interior illustrations by some of the top artists of the mid-Twentieth Century era. It’s a wonderful recreation of that time.

By the time I was trying to break into writing in the mid-Seventies, the Men’s Adventure Magazines were still around but mostly a pale shadow of what they had once been. I sent them dozens of stories anyway but never sold any. I’m sorry I didn’t crack that market, but I really enjoy revisiting it now. MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY gets a high recommendation from me. You can buy it on Amazon or directly from the publisher.

Gannon #1: Blood for Breakfast -- Dean Ballenger

I nearly always enjoy a book written in a distinctive voice, and BLOOD FOR BREAKFAST certainly qualifies. Published in 1973 apparently in order to cash in on the then-current popularity of the Executioner and similar men’s adventure series, it’s the story of Mike Gannon, a security expert who returns to his hometown of Cleveland to avenge the rape and beating of his teenage sister by a couple of vicious college kids who are the sons of rich and powerful fathers. Those fathers will go to any lengths, legal or otherwise, to protect their sons, but Gannon intends to cut through all that and get his own brand of justice.

Although organized crime plays a part in this, because the rich guys hire hoodlums to scare off Gannon, BLOOD FOR BREAKFAST is really a class warfare book, with anybody who has money being unspeakably evil. Of course, poor people who can be bought off come across as being pretty bad, too. It’s almost like Gannon is battling money the same way that Mack Bolan battled the Mafia. This book is even more violent than the Executioner books, too, with Gannon cutting a bloody swath through Cleveland’s underworld on the way to his vengeance.

When I first started reading this book, I wondered if it was written by James Dockery, the original author of the Butcher series. The writing is that bizarre and over-the-top. But Dean Ballenger has his own style that doesn’t include any of Dockery’s catch-phrases, so my feeling is that there’s no connection between the two authors. Everybody in this novel, no matter who they are, speaks in exactly the same way, a slangy, side-of-the-mouth tough guy patter mixed with graphic profanity. The plot frequently makes no sense, and even when it does, it’s so far beyond belief that the reader is left just shaking his head. At least I was.

Despite that, I sort of enjoyed the book, probably because Ballenger brings such fervent sincerity to it. I don’t know anything about him other than that this was apparently his first novel. I can imagine him banging it out in a white heat, then having the manuscript make the rounds until it landed with Manor Books, a low-rent publisher if ever there was one. (And being a Manor Books author, I speak from experience.) Ballenger went on to write a handful of other novels: two more Gannon books for Manor, a Western for Major Books, assorted other men’s adventure novels. I wouldn’t say that BLOOD FOR BREAKFAST is a good book, but I found it interesting enough that I’d read at least one more book by Ballenger if I came across it.