Showing posts with label James D. Lawrence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James D. Lawrence. Show all posts

Thursday, April 23, 2020

The Man From Planet X #3: The Devil To Pay


The Man From Planet X #3: The Devil To Pay, by Hunter Adams
August, 1977  Pinnacle Books

A little over two years after the second volume this third installment of The Man From Planet X finally came out, and I can’t imagine too many people across this great land of ours rushed out to buy a copy. There’s no internal evidence that two years have passed, and neither the front nor the back cover mention it, so my assumption is this book was ready to go in 1975, to be published shortly after the first two volumes, but was held back due to the oil crisis. Per Michael Newton in How To Write Action-Adventure Fiction, the men’s adventure market came to an abrupt halt in the mid-‘70s because publishers, facing an energy crisis, whittled their lines back to just the most essential titles. I figure The Man From Planet X wasn’t anywhere near a top seller for Pinnacle, so it was put on hiatus a few years.

So I’ll proceed with my theory that James D. Lawrence (aka “Hunter Adams”) wrote this one around the same time as the previous two, as the book just feels more mid ‘70s than late ‘70s. All the topical references are to mid-‘70s stuff, and there’s no mention by hero Peter Lance (aka alien Pritan Lansol) of any passage of time since Tiger By The Tail. But then at this point Lawrence is writing a straight-up comedy series, so there’s no focus on any sort of recurring storyline; Pinnacle proclaims this a “New Erotic Adventure Series” on the covers, but really “Adventure” should be replaced by “Comedy.” Peter Lance is so superhuman that there’s absolutely no drama or suspense to any predicament he finds himself in, thus everything plays out for laughs; even a part where he has to escape some scuba divers fails to engender any tension, given that, “like all Tharbians,” Peter has gills implanted in his lungs, so can breathe underwater.

Random musing: With this volume it occurred to me that “Tharb,” the planet Pritan Lansol is from, sounds similar to “therb,” the whip-weapon employed in the Balzan series – which was also “produced” by Lyle Kenyon Engel, and which also ran for only three volumes. The similarity of the two words makes me assume Engel himself came up with the terms when he farmed out each series; my assumption is Engel devised the concept, characters, and any recurring gadgets or gimmicks, and then his various ghostwriters delivered to spec. Anyway I’m only noting this because, sadly, the Tharb/therb thing proved to be more interesting than practically the entirety of The Devil To Pay. Because honestly this is a novel that starts with the mixed metaphor “the antlike humans were like fleas,” and that’s just the first paragraph. So you already know from the get-go that you’re in for a book where the author doesn’t give a shit.

Another thing clear with this volume is that Lawrence is bored with writing standard sex material. This already started with the previous volume, where the greater focus was on foreplay and gross-out situations. The initial boink is the most graphic in The Devil To Pay; Peter is walking along Manhattan one night and senses danger – he looks up at the skyscraper he’s walking by and sees a nude hotstuff brunette screaming for help. Peter scales twenty floors and enters the opened window to find the brunette about to be raped by a multiracial trio of thugs, leading to the unforgettable line, “…the Negro prepared to impale her with his huge, clublike ebony phallus.”

Without any effort Peter dispenses of the three, knocking them out and tossing them aside…he unties the brunette, a model named Solange, and when she complains that her arms are numb from being tied up, Peter does what any guy would do – he whips out his whang, which folks is sixteen inches long. You see, Peter’s dick pulses “ultrasonically,” thus he explains to the gal that all she need do is hold onto it and the pulsing will take care of that pesky numbness. Of course one thing leads to another, and soon enough Solange hops up on Peter so his whang is “wetly sheathed,” which causes the gal to scream out what is yet another unforgettable line: “My whole twat’s ultrasonic!” As mentioned this is not only the most explicit sex scene in the book, but it also features the first of many gross-out moments, with detail on Peter’s “spewing geyser” which is so, uh, climactic that it actually suspends Solange in mid-air!

Humorously this “geyser” is witnessed by Solange’s muscular and simperingly gay photographer, Brute Smoot, who doesn’t puke when he sees it, but instead starts checking out Peter, who of course quickly puts on his pants – the Man From Planet X might be an alien, but he’s no switch-hitter. Smoot just freed himself from a closet (unironically, I’m sure); he reveals that the thugs put him there before going after Solange, and Peter discovers that the entire building is crawling with other thugs who are looting the place. This promises a Die Hard situation, but instead Peter calls his boss, crotchety billionaire BG Wyngard, who sends in a private ‘copter to pick up Peter. BG is more concerned with one of his many companies, one that happens to have an office in this building; this place was working on a new energy project called Project Q, and when Peter checks the office on BG’s orders, sure enough the plans for it have been stolen from the vault.

Daphne Wyngard, who served as the main female character in the first volume, is again reduced to a cameo role, same as last time; when Peter goes back to BG’s rolling mansion, Daphne comes to his room to tell him she and her friends had “a little orgy,” one that led to a game of “find the olive.” Well, you know how these things go, and now a pimento is stuck up there and Daphne wonders if Peter could help remove it. “Perhaps if I use my tongue…” muses Peter, an idea which Daphne is eager to try out. This leads to off-page sex, same as Peter’s boff immediately thereafter with Wanda, BG’s insatiable, much-younger wife. Indeed, all the many sex scenes will be off-page from here on out, so while the book is smutty and sleazy it’s never outright hardcore. I mean The Baroness, another Engel production, is much more hardcore, and it wasn’t even billed as an “erotic series.”

The title and back cover copy promise a storyline involving Satanism – yet another element that places the book more in the early-mid 1970s than in the late 1970s – but truth be told Lawrence doesn’t do much to exploit it. BG reveals that one of Project Q’s main scientists, Ghent, went missing during a trip to Italy, but has finally returned and is acting weird. Peter shadows the guy – including a random bit where Ghent receives a package at the post office, Peter intercepts it, and it apparently has shit inside it – and this ultimately leads Peter to a Satanic orgy in a warehouse in SoHo. Here a guy dressed as the devil exhorts his followers to have group sex; more interesting is that Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” provides the soundtrack! This is actually the second time Lawrence has referenced Black Sabbath in a men’s adventure novel; he also did in Dark Angel #4. And also this particular Black Sabbath track, from their 1973 album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, might be another indication that The Devil To Pay was written in ’75, not ’77 – but then, what self-respecting Satanist would play Technical Ecstasy at an orgy?

Even here though the focus is more on sleazy comedy than action, let alone Satanic horror. (I mean if you want sleazy Satanic sex mixed with men’s adventure thrills, you seek out The Mind Masters #2.) Peter doffs his clothes to “fit in” with the others, but of course none of them have coppery red skin (“like a storybook Indian,” per one of Lawrence’s more memorable descriptions)….let alone a friggin’ sixteen-inch cock, so he’s an instant hit when the Satanists get a gander of him. And like the ol’ “dick stuck in the sink” bit from the previous book, this time Peter allows his whang to be strapped into some old piece of machinery, to be fawned over and petted by the orgiasts – Lawrence doesn’t elaborate, but it’s clear that the male orgiasts are stroking and sucking away at it, too, which makes Peter’s earlier abhorrence of Bruce Smoot kind of hypocritical – and then a fire breaks out, and Peter’s stuck. This is actually the most tense part in the book, as Peter has to choose between being burned alive or literally emasculating himself so he can get to freedom…but then our inhuman protagonist merely lifts the one-ton contraption and staggers out to the fire escape. And only after this does his “excitement” sufficiently dwindle so that he can, uh, slip out of the device.

In fact the whole Satanism angle barely fits into the scheme of things, making me suspect it was yet another Lyle Kenyon Engel mandate which Lawrence only half-assedly fulfilled. Instead, Peter figures the Satanism thing was more of just a fun hobby sort of thing for Ghent, and shortly afterward is tracking down another clue left by the scientist – a sex-focused travel agency based out of Manhattan, which has a whorehouse on the property. Peter’s getting busy with a busty Italian hooker when CIA agents raid the place – leading to yet another unforgettable line, as recurring CIA goon McDade orders his men to search the inner recesses of all the hookers: “That’s the spirit, cunthunters!” McDade comes in on Peter and the girl just as they’ve finished, and proceeds to inspect her; this bit probably has the most gross-out moment of all in the book, so gross-out that I just had to quote it in full:

[McDade] plucked from his pocket a slender-barreled optical instrument which appeared to be a battery-powered vaginascope; and after screwing one end to his eye, he inserted the other end into [the hooker’s] vulva – his face taking on an expression of deep interest. 

“Judas Priest, boy!” he muttered. “Talk about giving somebody the Deep Six! You got her pumped so full of pecker juice, I may need scuba gear and sonar to find out what kinda subversive-secret weaponry she’s got stowed up her snatch!”

After this the novel becomes mired in a tiresome espionage-comedy thing; Peter heads over to Rome to further research what happened to Ghent, only to find himself attending another Satanic orgy. While again trying to fit in, Peter is quickly outed, leading to a bit where Lawrence both indulges in the goofy sleaze vibe of the series and his penchant for obscure terms:

The third [Satanist girl] fastened her lips around [Peter’s] genital. But instead of sucking, she seemed to be blowing something up through his meatus! 

Too late, Peter Lance realized what was happening. They were injecting him with some sort of vaporous drug!”

I mean nothing says “New Erotic Adventure Series” like “meatus.” And also “genital” is a recurring term, to the extent that it makes the book seem like it was written by a robot with a limited understanding of human sexual intercourse. But then this appears to have been the idea, as Peter himself has no understanding of human sexual mores; when later he catches Solange, who has followed him here to Italy, having sex with a French triple agent, the girl cries because she can’t understand why Peter’s not upset that she was screwing another guy. To which Peter responds, “Good heavens, it’s your genital. Why should I object to what you allow inside it?”

Ultimately the Satanist angle drops and more focus is placed on Kontides, a Greek shipping magnate clearly based on Onassis who goes by the colorful nickname “Superkunt.” He’s very much in the Bond villain mold, with gold teeth and an army of henchmen. Peter runs afoul of him, is briefly captured and interrogated – he easily escapes, of course – and also Peter manages to pick up a parrot, per Bruce Minney’s cover. As we’ll recall, Peter can telepathically communicate with animals, leading to some humorous exchanges with the bird. And also this whole bit reminded me of a novel Len Levinson told me about back in 2014; he said in the ‘70s he wrote an unpublished novel titled The Parrot “about the world from the viewpoint of a highly intelligent parrot who has various adventures with people,” but it never got past the first draft. He’d recently rediscovered the manuscript and I practically begged him to send me a copy, but he said it needed too much work.

Anyway, that too is more interesting than anything in The Devil To Pay. There’s more espionage stuff, all of it revolving around goofy sex, like when Peter gets a bj from a hooker in an Italian whorehouse and afterwards his whole nether region is numb – metal fillament implanted by the woman’s mouth, connected to electrodes which she controls from a button on the bed. One touch of the button and Peter’s sixteen inches will be fried. There’s also the outrageously-named Tex Happyfeller, a redneck agent for OPEC, but he vanishes from the narrative almost as soon as he’s introduced.

The plot gradually centers around cacatroleum, the (literally) shitty substance Peter discovered in that package he intercepted from Ghent at the start of the book. This material is on the property of lusty Rosa Volterra, and all the action and intrigue have been a result of various factions trying to gain control of it. And also Brute Smoot keeps showing up everywhere, on one pretense or another, and clearly Peter Lance isn’t too smart because it takes him until the end of the book to realize that Brute’s involved in everything. And it’s ironic if the oil crisis really did postpone publication of this book, given that cacatroleum is a newly-discovered natural fuel that has the potential of replacing oil. 

The novel (and series) ends with Peter heading off for more time with Rosa – honestly he sleeps with so many women in the book that the reader needs a scorecard to keep track – and it was with much relief that I closed the book for the final time. Even the funky ‘70s details weren’t enough to save this one, and in fact they’ve dwindled as well…we read about, say, “purple hip-huggers” on Solange, or a denim suit for Peter, but really Lawrence saves all his “sleazy ‘70s fashion” ammo for Dark Angel. So the sex is pretty much nonexistent, the “thrills” are lame and tame because the hero’s superhumanly strong and fast, and the writer clearly isn’t taking anything seriously…which altogether means that there’s not much return on investment in either collecting or reading The Man From Planet X.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Dark Angel #4: The Godmother Caper


Dark Angel #4: The Godmother Caper, by James D. Lawrence
July, 1975  Pyramid Books

Friends, it’s a damn shame this was the last volume of Dark Angel. While James D. Lawrence floundered with the previous volume, this time he turns in a wild, wild novel that comes off like 192 pages of madcap sleaze. His operating principle appears to have been: When in doubt, have someone try to take advantage of heroine Angie “The Dark Angel” Harpe. And boy do they try to take advantage of her throughout The Godmother Caper, sometimes in the most outrageous ways imaginable.

Just like last time, it’s clear that Lawrence is plowing ahead with no clear direction for the narrative. But last time this resulted in a ponderous, repetitive book with few thrills. This time he practically throws everything in just to keep things moving. More importantly, everything is ramped up in this final volume. While the series was always pretty kinky, this time it’s downright hardcore – not up to the pages-filling boffs of The Baroness, but much more detailed in Angie’s frequent sexual shenanigans, whereas previous books would just give some juicy details and then fade to black. Here Angie gets it on in graphic splendor throughout, and Lawrence even treats us to a girl-on-girl scene as Angie seduces a “closet lesbian.”

Also the violence has been greatly expanded; I think the previous volume was the first time Angie even killed anyone, and that was only relayed briefly, almost as an aside, in the final pages. This time she’s “drilling” would-be rapists and muggers left and right, blowing them away with her Baby Browning or backup .25 with nary a thought. Previously she’d just bust some heads with her martial arts skills or her lead bar-lined purse and then run away. Now the Dark Angel plays for keeps, resulting in a novel that has more graphic sex and violence than the previous three installments combined. Lawrence also doles out an eleventh-hour subplot in which it’s revealed that Angie, in the past, has done contract spy work for various super-secret intelligence agencies, some of them “kill” missions, implying that future volumes might’ve seen the series progress in more of a Baroness direction.

Regardless, Angie is in full private eye mode here, as usual offered a job that turns out to be vastly more complicated and dangerous than she initially suspects. Only problem is, the back cover copy sort of blows the mystery. Angie’s approached by a platinum blonde in “goofy” glasses with “voluptuous tits;” as ever, the cover art faithfully captures characters and scenes from the novel, even down to the “Negroid Faye Dunaway(!)” ensemble Angie sports for this meeting. The blonde gives her name as “Marilyn Johnson” even though her cigarette case is stamped “GM.” Angie will spend the upcoming 180-some pages of dense, small print pondering over who this woman really is, until late in the game she realizes it’s the infamous “Godmother” of New York’s most exclusive cathouse, thus the “GM” on the woman’s case. Meanwhile, the back cover text – not to mention the title of the novel – already clues us in.

Marilyn Johnson offers Angie five thousand bucks to look into the rape of her 20 year old niece, who says she was just raped on the streets of Manhattan by a Mafia torpedo named Carlo Fosca. Angie, suspecting there’s a lot more to this than she’s being told, takes the job, and when she goes to Fosca’s place she finds a pair of balls nailed to the wall. Perhaps Lawrence wanted to be sure we were aware that this would be a “balls to the wall” sort of novel. And it is, as Angie’s jumped right on the scene by a pair of hoods who try to rape her. Lawrence is one of the few men’s adventure writers to offer topical details of his era, and it’s these touches I love so much; he also often mentions rock acts of the day, and this folks has got to be the one and only mention of Black friggin’ Sabbath in a ‘70s action novel, as Angie’s forced to strip and dance a go-go to “a hot and heavy number” by Ozzy and the boys.

This sequence in a nutshell gives us another indication of the prime concern of the novel: Angie getting raped. Indeed one almost gets the intention that it was Lawrence’s express purpose to piss off any feminist who might, for whatever reason, happen to read The Godmother Caper. Angie throughout is getting stripped down, fondled, assaulted, and nearly raped, and that’s not even mentioning the number of times she’s propositioned. In one particular sequence she actually throws a guy a mercy fuck just to get the intel he’s promised her. The rape stuff was there in previous volumes, but like the sex and violence it’s been ramped up tremendously this time; here the two hoods in Fosca’s place force Angie to strip and then one prepares to rape her while she’s forced to give the other a blowjob. Or as Lawrence refers to her as she performs the act: a “n – fellactrice!” For once again, Angie’s only referred to as black (in the most derogatory manner possible, of course) when she’s being mocked; otherwise she’s consistently referred to as “bronze-skinned.”

Here we also get our first taste of how Lawrence is just going to keep throwing plot developments at us, some as arbitrary as can be – the most egregious being the aforementioned bit where Angie, apropos of nothing, is contacted by a “glutinous”-voiced Peter Lorre type who works for a top secret agency called ALICE and tries to draft Angie’s services, complete with a necklace he insists she wear which serves as a two-way radio and homing beacon. It can also tighten on her throat Running Man style, to the point of decapitation, so as to keep her in line; the “slave collar,” the cretinous agent calls in – and then goes on to inform Angie he must know all of his female agents “carnally.” You guessed it, another attempted rape ensues, with Angie saved at the last moment by her main squeeze in the novel, a young stud named Jeff North. After which the two run away – and the incident is just brushed under the narrative carpet. And that’s just one example of the arbitrary subplotting that goes on throughout.

The main plot has to do with an ancient bust of the goddess Selene which was stolen from Turkey and smuggled into the US, eventually landing in the hands of Nimrod North, elderly art dealer who was a friend of Angie’s. But Nimrod’s dead of a heart attack and his hunky nephew Jeff is certain someone caused the cardiac arrest. He runs into Angie when she is, naturally, fully nude, escaping from that attempted rape-blowjob scene described above. She jumps in his car and they take off and Angie knows Jeff can barely contain himself, what with all the “naked tits and pussy” on the car seat beside him. But Jeff’s engaged to a knockout named Beryl who insists on putting off sex, so he doesn’t respond immediately to Angie’s propositions that night in her swanky pad. Of course he eventually gives in, and becomes Angie’s main bedmate.

That isn’t enough for Angie, though, as later on she meets Beryl, who worked as Nimrod’s assistant, and succeeds in seducing her, as well. The second volume had a brief lesbian sequence, but here Lawrence goes full-bore with it. Angie even suggests a three-way, but surprisingly that doesn’t happen. The stuff with Marilyn Johnson and her raped niece and the literally emasculated Carlo Fosca gradually plays into all of this, as does seemingly-unrelated stuff like an anti-rapist and mugger vigilante group and a possibly-related enforcement wing of the group called “LF.” Lawrence gets way out with this; when we finally see the LF in action, sticking up a dingy bar that Angie of course happens to be in, they’re wearing “UFO getups:” green coveralls with masks that have speaker grills that distort their voices. “Buck Rogers stuff,” as another character refers to them, perhaps indicating Lawrence’s past writing the juvenile sci-fi series Tom Swift.

But this is just the framework for lots of sleaze and attempted rapes. The novel occurs over two or three days, and these are hectic days for Angie to say the least. She’ll go from bed with Jeff to almost getting raped on the street to dining at the Y with Jeff’s fiance to a gunfight with some Mafia hoods, all within a few hours, like a Blaxploitation 24 or something. Much of this too is as arbitrary as can be, like when Angie decides to scout around New York to see who is spraypainting all the vigilante slogans, finds one guy in the act, and sneaks up on him, only to discover too late that he’s spraypainting an anti vigilante message! You guessed it, this guy tries to rape her, too – indeed, he strips off her panties and prepares to do her “Greek” style. Or rather, “Angie could feel his penis start to anally penetrate her.” But Angie manages to save herself with a ring that contains a small but razor sharp stiletto.

It goes on like this throughout, with action and sex sprinkled here and there. The Godmother stuff doesn’t even play out until the final pages; Angie spends more time chasing various leads and red herrings trying to track down the missing bust of Selene. The finale brings it all together, though, with Angie retaining the services of a ‘Nam pilot vet (a smooth black guy who likely would’ve turned up again in ensuing volumes) who drops her and Jeff off on the Godmother’s Manhattan building. Dressed in black jumpsuits with hoods and toting Sten submachine guns (a recurring theme from the finales of previous volumes), the two storm the cathouse. Lawrence busily wraps everything up here, and even manages to throw in a guy with an acid-disfigured face who wears a metal mask and mummy-like wrappings.

And I haven’t even mentioned all the other random wildness, like the part where Angie, offered a job by a creepy old Mafia don, instead pulls her gun on him and forces his men to strip and strike homosexual poses for photographs that will be used for blackmail purposes, should the don attempt any reprisals on her! Or when Angie visits the Godmother’s cathouse and deems the place a “veritable cuntropolis,” given the number of customers and sex acts being performed behind unlocked doors. Or the guy who gets Angie in a chair with cuffs that rotates around and turns into, you guessed it, a handy platform for raping her. Lawrence has so much fun with this particular sequence that he doesn’t even bother telling us how Angie breaks free of the cuffs, though I figure she used that stiletto ring.

Really, The Godmother Caper suffers from a lot of problems – messy plotting, random subplots, bald exposition serving as plot developments. But as trash it’s pure gold. It was by far my favorite volume in the series, and really I enjoyed them all except for the third one, which was tepid. But this one makes me wish there had been a fifth volume. My assumption is the readers of the day just didn’t take to a “bronze-skinned” heroine in the male-dominated world of men’s adventure, and more’s the pity.

Thursday, August 9, 2018

The Man From Planet X #2: Tiger By The Tail


The Man From Planet X #2: Tiger By The Tail, by Hunter Adams
June, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Whereas the first volume of The Man From Planet X at least made the pretense of being a men’s adventure sort of spy-and-sex thing, this second volume drops all such pretenses and goes straight for a comedy approach. James D. Lawrence, once again serving as “Hunter Adams,” appears to already be bored with the concept “producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel has handed him – a red-skinned alien with a monstrous-sized member who has come down here to Earth to “study Earthlings,” which is shorthand for banging tons of babes. All in the name of science, of course.

Branded a “New Erotic Adventure Series” by Pinnacle, Tiger By The Tail is more akin to the goofy sleaze novels that were so common of the era, a light-hearted sexual romp that encompases both purple prose and straight-up explicit material. But even though there’s the occasional fight or chase, none of it is treated seriously and hero Peter Lance, aka Pritan Lansol of the planet Tharb, is so superheroic there’s never any question of him getting killed or even injured. I mean the dude’s super strong, hyper fast, can do all sorts of bizarre mindblowing stuff in the sack, plus he can even talk telepathically to animals. Not only that, but he’s as patient as a zen master and as polite as Mr. Rogers.

Well anyway it’s a few weeks after that previous book and ol’ Peter is heading out of New York in his station wagon(!) for another excursion into human relations, when his ESP senses detect nearby danger, right across the border in New Jersey. Turns out to be a sexy young housewife who is being threatened by a tiger on her own front yard. Peter first literally (and lamely) catches the “tiger by the tail” and tosses it, then telepathically communicates with it. The tiger is a female named Tanya, and Peter calls her off, but then some dudes with machine guns show up, gunning for the animal. Peter easily defeats them, disarming them and beating them up in the blink of an eye. Then he and the housewife repair upstairs for some casual ‘70s sex – Peter’s sexual magnetism is such that these Earthling babes immediately think of getting him bed as soon as they meet him. (I happen to have the exact opposite affect on Earthling babes.)

But Lawrence seems to have gotten sick of all the intermittent banging in the previous volume, so this time his focus is on weird gross-out stuff. We get our first indication of this when, after their quick screw, the housewife notes that Peter’s extra-long and thin member has an injury on it, Peter having been knicked there during the fight or somesuch, and insists that he clean off the wound. Anyway to cut to the chase, Peter’s dick gets stuck in the sink. It’s just one of those books, folks…then the lady’s husband shows up, and he is, naturally, a plumber, but Peter with his superhuman strength is able to pull the entire sink out of the wall as he beats a hasty retreat.

Tanya escaped from a zoo run by Velma Thorp, brunette babe with beehive hairdo who is running the place in the mysterious absence of her great white hunter father, Hugh, a former movie star. But upon his arrival at the zoo Peter is again attacked by men with machine guns, and after quickly knocking out these ones it occurs to him that perhaps they are tracking something hidden within the animal. Ultimately he will of course be proven correct; Velma reveals that her dad brought Tanya back from Russia a few months ago, and mentioned something special about her – it will develop that something has been surgically inserted in Tanya’s hide, a device which could trigger WWIII or somesuch.

For the most part this main plot – which just barely categorizes the novel as men’s adventure – is cast aside and more time is spent on the “jungle porn film” Peter is roped into filming by drunkard director Burk Fontana, who declares upon seeing Peter’s dick: “That fucking whang of his is a potential goldmine!” Burk you see has been hired by Velma in a desperate bid to track down her missing father, who has been gone for three months but who is known for random, unexplained disappearances…Velma’s muddled hope is that this film, to be shot on the zoo Hugh Thorp opened, will somehow capture the attention of her father, wherever he might be, and he’ll come back home. Upon seeing that awesome whang, though, Burk demands that the flick needs to be a porn.

Burk, who steals the novel, calls in a former sword-swallower turned porn starlet to feature in some test footage based around fairy tales in which Peter screws a bevy of gals, capping off with this sword-swallower managing to contain his entire girth in her mouth. But she turns out to be a commie spy who has something hidden up in a certain part of her anatomy, something which latches onto Peter’s dick while he’s enthusastically boffing her, to the extent that Peter’s dick swells up to crazy levels. Enter the CIA agent from the previous volume, who has been tracking this sword-swallowing spy, Fifi, and informs everyone that she’s known for this trick – cue more gross-out stuff as Fifi again has to blow Peter, but this time it’s to suck that poison out.

Along comes wealthy socialite Crystal Warrick, a blonde vixen who demands, “Take out your cock!” promptly upon meeting our hero. She’s seen the test footage, you see, and through some chicanery she’s managed to buy out the Thorp zoo so she can have a controlling interest in the jungle porn. She is now running the film, and declares that they’ll be filming in Africa, not on the zoo itself, and that further she will star in the film and Velma can co-star if she’d like – there is a simmering jealousy between the two, not that this stops them from shooting girl-on-girl scenes for the movie! But Crystal, despite coming on strong to Peter, always refrains from full-on sex with him; it later develops, in another of the novel’s many arbitrary subplots, that Crystal’s a virgin – and of course Peter takes care of that for her.

Lawrence hits all the bases, so to speak: promptly upon arrival in Nairobi Peter is being propositioned by a sexy native: “Peter’s first real contact with a black Earthling.” And boy is it a memorable first contact. Later on, Peter, realizing that Crystal is hiding things from him, decides that “A simple little rape might do the trick,” and proceeds to anal-rape her, after which a satisified Crystal declares, “Okay, I’ve taken you up the ass, I guess I may as well take you into my confidence.” There’s also a part where Burk and the film crew are lured into the jungle by a bunch of horny native gals and screw away with aplomb, not realizing it’s a trap orchestrated by the Black Death, a big guy in black robes with a leprousy-ravaged face.

Despite the amount of sex there’s nothing steamy about any of it…particularly given how Peter’s always thinking of the women as “Earthling females.” You almost sort of get the idea that Peter would be just as game to experiment with Earthling males. But the explicit material is less pronounced than last time – I mean it’s graphic and all, but many times Lawrence spends more time on the foreplay or naughty dialog, then leaves the actual “coupling” vague. This one’s also missing those cool ‘70s touches that were frequent last time, I mean who could forget Peter Lance dancing to Led Zeppelin on a quadraphonic hi-fi?

But it does go on and on, and it’s more of a lame comedy than anything; even when Peter is briefly captured by Chicoms it’s more goofy than thrilling. But Lawrence plods away, almost desperately padding the 200+ pages; there’s even an arbitrary bit where Peter gets amnesia – a subplot that lasts all of a few pages and has no bearing on anything. For those diehards who want to know “But what’s it all about?,” long story short: Hugh Thorp turns out to be an agent of top-secret CRACK, as is Crystal Warrick, and he was on a mission to capture some doomsday tech from the Reds, and hid the schematics or whatnot in that cannister which he implanted in Tanya.

All told, Tiger By The Tail was really stupid, displaying none of the cool funky sleaze Lawrence delivered for Engel in the far superior Dark Angel series. My assumption is The Man From Planet X failed to resonate with readers even in its own day, as the third and final volume didn’t appear until two years later.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Dark Angel #3: The Gilded Snatch Caper


Dark Angel #3: The Gilded Snatch Caper, by James D. Lawrence
May, 1975  Pyramid Books

The third volume of Dark Angel is pretty patience-testing; sad when you consider how fun the previous two volumes were. But it would appear that James D. Lawrence has lost his mojo. While heroine Angie “The Dark Angel” Harpe is as vivacious as ever, with a smart-ass, Foxy Brown-esque line for every occasion, the plot itself is a muddled, listless affair, and it is accurately summed up by the proprietor of Blaxploitation Paperbacks (from whom I lifted this cover scan – thanks!): “…this one comes across as if the author just cranked it out because he was under pressure from the publisher.”

Even though this one is shorter than the first two, it seems a lot longer, mostly because hardly anything happens. Hell, even the sleazy sex has been whittled down. Angie spends the majority of the novel driving around New York City and its rural surroundings, chasing one red herring lead after another; action is just as scant as the sex. It doesn’t help matters that Angie’s case is outside her normal purview: this time she’s hired to find a kidnapped heiress, and as Angie constantly informs everyone, she doesn’t normally do missing person cases. But Lawrence must’ve been reading a lot about the Patty Hearst fiasco at the time and figured it was as good material as any to use for his third Dark Angel novel.

Lawrence at least retains his gift for memorable openings: Angie’s on a crowded elevator when a dude with a potted plant covering his face sticks a gun in her back. As nonchalant as can be, Angie reaches back, unzips his fly, and grabs hold of his dick! If he doesn’t hand over the gun he’ll be one sorry sonofabitch, so the guy hands it over. But here the longwinded nature of the tale first manifests itself; the guy’s over-complicated story has it that he was hired by a one night stand hippie chick who gave him the plant, which contains an address on it, as well as an envelope with the same address, and told to kidnap the Dark Angel.

The address turns out to be an abandoned flophouse with a store mannequin in it, one that’s got a machete through the head. There’s also an expensive necklace on it; through this and her various contacts Angie figures out that the owner is young Byrony Cargill (not to be confused with Patty Hearst, of course), college-age daughter of newspaper baron Royce Cargill. But when Angie goes to deliver them the necklace, she’s harrassed at the front gate and made to strip to panties and boots. As unfazed as ever by her own nudity, Angie beats up the men who have surrounded her, tosses one of them on the hood of her Jaguar, and drives up to the front gate.

She carries out her meeting with the Cargills while still nude – Lawrence still maintains an outrageously sleazy vibe throughout, though nothing to the caliber of his previous outings. Anyway here Angie learns that Byrony Cargill has been kidnapped. It would appear a recurring motif of the Dark Angel series is that Angie is hired by an older white male who treats her with disdain; Royce Cargill serves this function this time. Another motif is that, during the course of her investigation, Angie will be paired with a young white man, who indeed will soon become her partner in bed as well – as ever, Angie only has sex with white men.

The young man in question is Derek Morgan, wealthy ‘Nam vet who is in his mid 20s and is studying art at Rockford University with Byrony, his fiance. Cargill, who doesn’t believe Angie’s weird story and suspects she has something to do with Byrony’s kidnapping, orders her to find his daughter and insists that Derek accompany and monitor her throughout. He’ll even put them up at a company penthouse suite in Manhattan. It takes a good long while for Angie to get him in the sack, though she gives him all kinds of saucy lines in the meantime; indeed, Lawrence waits till page 102 to even get to his first sex scene, which admittedly is more explicit and longer than any others yet in the series, complete even with the TMI tidbit that Angie’s already “oozing” before they do the deed, Derek has her so worked up.

Angie and Derek spend a goodly portion of The Gilded Snatch Caper either sitting around the penthouse or driving to or from it. They chase after one lead after another, usually coming up with nothing – Angie is alternately stupid and brilliant this time out, missing obvious clues several times, then flashing on what she missed much later and having a brainiac flash that explains everything. As for the curious title of the book, it comes from the gold-colored, short curly hair which is included with the ransom note for Byrony; Derek reveals that, a few days ago, Byrony dyed her pubic hair gold as a lark. Angie chortles that she’ll file this case under the name “The Gilded Snatch.”

But it’s all pretty tedious. The sleazy ‘70s vibe at least is still in effect, with Angie’s slutty wardrobe often described, complete with the mandatory mentions of the salivating men she leaves in her wake. And Lawrence as ever busts out the racial slurs, with Angie good-naturedly joking on race with her contacts, most of whom are of various ethinicities. Particular pre-PC fun is provided by one in Chinatown by the name of Wun Good Fook. While Angie’s friends (and enemies) will often mention her race, I noticed this time around what appeared to be a careful attempt on Lawrence’s part of downplaying Angie’s ethnicity. Multiple times she is just described as “golden skinned,” as if Lawrence were trying to make us forget the character is black. (I immediately put down the book and phoned the ACLU.)

From the dyed pubic hair (there’s a sentence I don’t get to write every day) Angie has already figured out that Byrony played a part in her own abduction. It develops that she’s in with a group of hippie terrorists called The Rainmakers (not to be confused with the Weathermen, of course), and she plotted the kidnapping as a ruse to get money from her old man “to raise public consciousness.” Angie gets here after contacting a variety of leads, including a fashion mag photographer who has Angie pose mostly-nude for him like old times (even sucking on her “tits” so her nipples will be erect for the shot!). But eventually Angie and Derek learn that there is more to the kidnapping story, and that Byrony might be in real danger.

There’s precious little action. When visiting the Rockford campus Angie and Derek are attacked by a “biker freak” and a big black dude (whom Lawrence memorably describes as a “jig” – like I said, the sleazy vibe is still here), but Angie again bests her opponents with her weighted purse and judo skills. A later, even briefer fight has her taking out some Mafia thugs she meets in one of the book’s more arbitrary scenes. Lawrence mixes the sex and violence later on when Angie’s kidnapped by three Nazi-types who announce their intent to rape her. Angie tells them she wants to enjoy it, strips down, arranges which guy gets which part of her, and when two of them “slide into her” she “rakes her teeth” along the “shaft” of one and beats them all senseless.

But what makes it worse is that Lawrence keeps teasing us with the promise of action. Like when Royce Cargill gets notice of where to drop off the payment, and sends off his lawyer to do the job. Angie and Derek wait in the shadows, armed with Uzis…and all the action happens off-page, as it were, with people shooting at each other while Angie and Derek sit there. Then they just get in Angie’s Jaguar and drive back to New York!! So it’s back to the penthouse for more sex, after which they learn one of Angie’s contacts, that photographer, has been murdered. This leads to more diversions, Lawrence clearly just spinning his wheels to fill up the book.

To cut to the chase – it turns out that a sleazy hippie chick named Flower Power, who is a Rainmaker, has also been sleeping around with the “ghetto militants” of the Che Berets, a Harlem-based black terrorist army. She is the one who slept with the dude with the potted plant at the beginning of the novel; a convoluted story the goal of which was to get Angie involved with the caper in the first place. But the Che Berets, led by a big black dude with a strange speaking style, ended up stealing Byrony from the Rainmakers – and then, in the final pages, a third group has come along, stealling Byrony away from these guys, killing them all in the process.

It gets more convoluted. If you recall the dude Angie tossed on the hood of her car like a deer carcass – it was a man named Warner Upshur, editor of the National Indicator, a tabloid owned by Royce Cargill. Toward the end of the book Upshur keeps calling Angie. When she finally goes to his place, which is decorated in “Boris Karloff Byzantine,” Angie discovers that Upshur is into the bondage scene. He has a dungeon in his place with whips and chains, and Angie, despite the fact that she just pulled the exact same stunt a few pages ago, fools the guy into thinking she’s all game for it – and then ends up locking him up and escaping.

But now in the final pages…it turns out Upshur is the main villain, after all! Yep, Angie and Derek, again with those Uzis, head back to Upshur’s place and Angie exposits for a few pages about how Upshur is really a German and was a Nazi to boot. In fact those three would-be rapists are his soldiers. Angie you see has figured all this out without informing us readers. The fact that Angie was just in Upshur’s place a few hours ago, with him at her mercy, is unmentioned – nor is the fact that Upshur could’ve killed Angie at the time. As I say, the entire novel just reeks of something Lawrence quickly banged out without much thought.

Even in the finale Angie doesn’t do much – those three Nazis gun down Upshur, then Angie and Derek blast them away. This is literally on the last page, like four paragraphs before the end of the book – Lawrence has so padded the pages that he merely leaves it at “Angie shot one of them down,” or something to that effect. Sprinting for the finale now, he finally introduces Byrony, who is captive here in Upshur’s place; she doesn’t even have any dialog. In fact Lawrence is so out of sorts that he goofs and mentions Angie’s “bare breasts,” when in fact it was in her earlier visit to Upshur’s that she was topless, not here in the finale.

So yeah, this one was subpar. One can see why there was only one more volume to go; here’s hoping The Godmother Caper is much better than this dud.

Monday, November 14, 2016

The Man From Planet X #1: The She-Beast


The Man From Planet X #1: The She-Beast, by Hunter Adams
February, 1975  Pinnacle Books

Proving there was no limit to what book “producer” Lyle Kenyon Engel was willing to try, The Man From Planet X is a mid-‘70s take on ‘60s sleazy spy series like The Man from O.R.G.Y. and such, only with a sci-fi angle and much raunchier sex. However it does maintain the goofy vibe of those earlier spy paperbacks, to the extent that The She-Beast is for the most part a sex-laden comedy with only occasional patches of violence.

According to Hawk’s Authors Pseudonyms, “Hunter Adams” was James D. Lawrence, who around this time was also writing the vastly superior Dark Angel series for Engel. Initially I never would’ve believed this, as The She-Beast comes off as very juvenile and lunkheaded in its opening pages, despite the plethora of hardcore sex scenes. But gradually I could detect Lawrence’s tone, especially given his occasional use of ten-dollar words and literary turns of phrase. (Also the juvenile bit could probably be explained by the fact that Lawrence was also one of the authors of Tom Swift.) I now suspect that Lawrence was the mystery author of another Engel-produced sleaze masterpiece, Memoirs Of An Ex-Porno Queen.

But the reader must be prepared to accept that The Man From Planet X is not to be taken seriously, and really is an XXX-rated spoof of James Bond or somesuch…again, like those earlier spy paperbacks, but a lot more explicit. And weird! For our hero, “Peter Lance,” is in reality a friggin’ alien from the planet Tharb, his real name Pritan Lansol. Under the guidance of Dr. Kaarg, Pritan has descended to the Earth in his UFO, which hides back in the Catskill mountains as Pritan attempts to gather first-hand knowledge of the Earthlings in New York.

In his real appearance, Pritan has red skin and a hairy face. But Dr. Kraag has “biochemically” changed Pritan into “Peter,” and now he’s a good-looking stud with glossy black hair, piercing blue eyes, and tanned skin. But the biochemical stuff hasn’t extended to Peter’s nether parts, and this being a sleaze series, we get right to it; when a hitchhiking Peter is picked up by a sexy blonde named Daphne, he takes out her pursuers in somewhat gory fashion and then proceeds to give in to her demands for immediate sex, right there in the front seat of her sportscar.

Well, friends, Peter Lance has some unusual equipment. Not only is it wide at the base and pointy at the top, but in its fullest extent it goes all the way down to his knee…plus he can control it as easily as a normal man controls his finger. Oh, and it vibrates. “Man, I’ve gotta have that in me, but quick!” Daphne thinks to herself as soon as she’s gotten a gander at it. Their first boink is sleazy alien sex for the ages:

Their initial coupling had proved even more exciting than Daphne could possibly have anticipated. His pointy whatchamacallit had slid in as smoothly as a greased speculum, but its increasing girth toward the root had swiftly opened her as wide (it felt) as the Lincoln Tunnel. 

And the length of him – oh, my gosh! Every thrust felt as if he were ramming it clear up to her tonsils. 

But it wasn’t only the size and the stroke – there was something else, still more sensational, that Daphne could scarcely even put into words. She and her girlfriends had often titillated themselves or each other experimentally with electric massagers. But talk about vibrations – holy cow! His thing positively seemed to thrum at supersonic speed. She could feel shuddery, burning waves of chills and thrills radiating all the way up and down to her fingernails and toenails until her whole being seemed about to burst into fire.

Within a few pages Peter’s scoring again, in just as detailed fashion, with Wanda, hot young wife #4 of Daphne’s mega-millionaire father, BG Wyngard, who lives in a secluded mansion. Mind you, Peter’s just going with the flow throughout this; unlike your average men’s adventure protagonist, he’s on no special assignment other than gathering data on humans, in particular their sexual behavior, naturally. But Wanda (“this Earthling’s titties were something else”) comes on strong to Peter, and when Daphne almost catches them in the act, Peter reveals yet another of his superhuman qualities: he hefts Wanda on his shoulders and runs at over sixty miles an hour across the courtyard, deposting on her bed and racing back to his room in a blur of motion.

Peter Lance has other superhuman qualities as well – he’s telepathic, able to read minds and communicate with animals, in particular dogs. He has the strength of ten men. And he’s got “miniature lungs” surgically inserted in his ears or something, which is the norm for all Tharbians, having eons ago made the land, the sea, and the air their natural habitat. Oh, and he has this “third eye” gizmo he can hook up to his forehead to boost his telepathy, so he can speak with Dr. Kraag back on the spaceship, and with minor “brain waves” from other Tharbian gizmos he can become immediately fluent in any Earthling language.

Lawrence lays the groundwork for the novel’s main plot, with wily BG Wyngard untrusting of this new young stud, and yet hiding the fact that someone’s out to get him and his family – something Peter’s picked up via ESP, not to mention the two thugs who tried to kill Daphne when Peter met her. Meanwhile Daphne’s called over two of her equally-sexy friends to check out Peter’s inhuman endowmnet. After dancing to Led Zeppelin on quadraphonic stereo, Peter sneaks over for more explicit naughtiness, with the gals arguing who gets Peter’s vibrating cock and who gets Peter’s vibrating tongue. Meanwhile Daphne makes a “sex movie” with her film camera and then takes her second helping of Peter when her two pals pass out mid-climax.

Despite the goofy tone, the sex scenes here are much more explicit than those in Lawrence’s Dark Angel, which for the most part went more for a sleazy vibe than anything outrageously hardcore. Not so here, with the seeming intent of the series itself just being hardcore shenanigans with a slight spy-fy overlay. Unsurprisingly then, the main plot also has to do with sex; after our hero has staved off yet another attack on BG Wyngard and family, BG informs Peter that someone desperately wants control of a no-name company called Novitol which BG recently acquired in a business deal.

Hired as BG’s “corporate troubleshooter,” Peter is flown over to Switzerland, where he is to find out what exactly Novitol is. As mentioned, it’s of a sexual nature, having been run by a recently-deceased chemist who was looking to manufacture various sex-scents as perfumes. The book’s uber-goofy tone is displayed yet again when Peter telephathically informs a dog that it’s humping nothing more than a dummy, the dog having been fooled by the artificial scent sprayed on the dummy’s “receptacle.” The dog grumbles in shock – dogs speak to Peter in English throughout, by the way – and then pisses on the dummy.

It’s been a few pages, so Peter scores again, this time with Brigitte, 6’2” “raven-haired Amazon” caretaker of Novitol’s main company; she has “bushy black armpit hair,” “impressive mammary development,” and likes to ride men like horses. Here Peter learns that spys are afoot, tracking his moves. While speaking to BG through a Wyngard-designed “videoceiver,” which sends coded images over the phone, Peter learns that BG’s enemy is a mysterious woman of unknown age named Serafina Buonaparte, aka “The She-Beast,” as she’s known in business circles. As wealthy as BG, Serafima got her start as a hooker in Marseilles decades ago; the last photos of her appear to be from the ‘20s, and no one knows what she looks like now, though rumor has it she’s had untold facelifts. BG is certain the She-Beast is the enemy who has been trying to take Novitol from him. 

On to more sleaze! Surprised by a “Cat Woman” while snooping around a laboratory (ie a well-endowed woman in a black catsuit with mask and claws), Peter of course has sex with her…only to discover it’s Daphne in disguise. Separately and together the two run afoul of various enemies, from agents of the She-Beast to the CIA to the KGB. This latter is represented by a sexy, busty gal (naturally) who has silicone-injected boobs that secrete – brace yourself – poison “titty-milk.” (She isn’t alone, either – check out “the lady with the killer-tits” in The Enforcer #4!) More sex is to be had throughout, both with ever-eager Daphne and a host of “nymphomaniac” women who were patients of the doctor who created Novitol.

For it turns out Novitol is both a company and a chemical, a serum composed of “sex excretions” of people in the act, combined with injections of their blood, or something. But the scientist who created it, kindly Brit Dr. Chumley, has been kidnapped by the Red Chinese, while meanwhile Daphne’s been kidnapped by the She-Beast’s men. Lawrence, as in the Dark Angel books, really brings on the lurid vibe, with Peter at one point visiting a private club where white women are raped by “Third World” denizens in vengeance for all the ills white people have perpetrated upon them; it’s run by depraved Colonel Dong, yet another villain seeking Novitol.

Indeed, the titular villainess only gets a few pages of text, thanks to all the other characters. Using a contraption of his own device, Peter Lance flies to the She-Devil’s castle in the mountains of Corsica, where he’s promptly captured by the woman’s green-leotarded minions. The She-Devil herself is a ravishing brunette who walks around her castle completely nude save for a piece of golden filament that forms a figure eight around her impressive boobs; we’ll learn she can actually control those impressive boobs, to the point that all she has to do is twitch ‘em and the filament, which is really a weapon, will fire a bullet!

Of course, the two promptly go at it on the shag-carpeted floor of the She-Beast’s quarters, but having allotted so many pages to previous sex scenes Lawrence only devotes a paragraph or two here. And talk about anticlimax (so to speak); post-orgasm the She-Beast withers away to the “old hag” she truly is, the Novitol – which turns out to be a youth serum for the very old, hence why the She-Beast looks so young and sexy – having stopped working for some unspecified reason. From here it’s all too-quick wrapup, with “the hag” turned over to the CIA (who promptly get ready to gang-bang her!) and Peter having quick sex with the rescued Daphne, after which we see Peter back on his UFO, debriefing Dr. Kraag and ready for his next adventure here on Earth.

Lawrence’s writing is good, all things considered, and despite the juvenile tone, the important thing to note is that it’s all still deadly serious to the characters themselves. In this way The She-Beast escapes the mire of those earlier sleaze-spy yarns, like The Man From TOMCAT, where nothing was serious. Lawrence also, as in the Dark Angel books, really captures the groovy, shaggy ‘70s, often rattling off the names of various rock groups (even the New York Dolls get a mention!) and always discussing the funky ‘70s wardrobes of the various characters. In that way the book is almost a time capsule of the ‘70s, same as Lawrence’s other series, and I dig that.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Dark Angel #1: The Dream Girl Caper


Dark Angel #1: The Dream Girl Caper, by James D. Lawrence
January, 1975  Pyramid Books

The Dark Angel series starts off on strong footing with a fun trip back to the sleazy ‘70s, James D. Lawrence capturing the fun and goofy vibe of a Blaxploitation movie. This series could be loglined as “Pam Grier in Banacek,” and our capable heroine, Angela “Angie” Harpe, comes off as more memorable and likable than The Baroness and Cherry Delight combined.

And friends you know you’re in for a sleazy good time when, within a few pages of her introduction, Angie’s already doing a strip-tease to a Tina Turner song (on her state-of-the-art quadraphonic sound system, naturally), all for the benefit of some dude she just met. The dude claims to be a reporter for Manhattan Magazine, and after relaying her convoluted backstory (from ghetto poverty to highly-paid insurance investigator, with tenures as a cop, fashion model, hooker, and Radcliffe student along the way), Angie’s already shucking her clothes and allowing the dude to give her a little oral pleasure.

But this is just our heroine’s gambit to distract the man, whom she knows to be an imposter. Angie you see is “the Dark Angel,” as she’s known to the criminal underworld, a tireless pursuer of justice; her trademark sign is very reminiscent of the seal of the Spider: an image of a harp-playing angel which she stamps on the foreheads of her victims (whom she does not kill, as opposed to the Spider). Apparently Angie’s Dark Angel activities have only recently gotten off the ground; as The Dream Girl Caper opens, her legend in the underworld has only just begun to grow to the point where it’s reached the awareness of the mainstream press.

And like an old pulp hero, Angie’s double life is kept secret, so that though the crooks (and the cops) know the Dark Angel is supposedly a beautiful black chick, they don’t know who she is. All of this really does give the series a bit of a “pulp hero for the ‘70s” feel, only with more of a lurid and sleazy overlay. That being said, Angie is not as bloodthirsty as other female protagonists in the world of men’s adventure books; whereas the Baroness kills with nonchalance, Angie is more prone to use her karate and judo skills to just knock someone out and then tie them up.

Anyway, the faux-reporter turns out to be a private eye himself, one from Chicago who was hired to get the scoop on Angie for some unspecified reasons. Angie sends him away (after pissing on his hand…?!) and later finds out that this dude, Tony Troy, recently pulled the same “reporter” stunt on Quentin Wise, millionaire owner of Colt’s Cigarettes. Wise’s company is running an incredibly convoluted treasure hunt/sweepstakes in which one lucky winner will win three million dollars. We get more detail on this from the many scenes featuring Garth Trent, the head adman working on Wise’s contest, and the only other person besides Wise who knows where the three million bucks will be hidden.

Garth’s wife Vale turns out to be the titular “dream girl.” A hotstuff blonde who keeps having nightmares which seem to predict things that happen in reality, Vale’s most recent dream concerns a car crashing on some desolate road. After a bit of nodescript banging (Lawrence’s sex scenes only go on for a few sentences, by the way, as compared to the paragraphs of purple prose in The Baroness), Garth ventures out into the night – only to see a car speed by and crash along the desolate road near their New Jersey home. But what comes off as even more puzzling is when Garth finds a newspaper clipping in Vale’s purse, a clipping which announces the sale of Mingo Island, off the Jersey coast.

This is puzzling because Mingo Island is where the three million dollar prize money is going to be stashed, but only Garth and Quentin Wise know this. So why does Vale have a newspaper clipping about it in her purse, and why has she never mentioned it to Garth? Suspecting something’s up, Garth hires Angie Darke, whom he’s read about in the paper. There’s instant chemistry between the two, but then Angie has instant chemistry with every guy in the novel – it’s hilarious in a way that The Dream Girl Caper is almost designed to infuriate Women’s Libbers, as Angie’s endowments are constantly being checked out and commented on by every single man she meets – and we’re informed how she gets off on it.

Vale has weekly sessions with a psychiatrist named Dr. Bruno Baxt, and Angie makes his office the first place to check out in her investigation. Here Lawrence excels in another sleazy setpiece as the gnomish Baxt hypnotizes an undercover Angie, has her strip – and then begins jerking himself off as he fingers her! And to continue with the whole exploitation vibe that our author captures so nicely, we learn that Angie in’t hypnotized at all, and has just been going along with the good doctor’s finger-based assault because she’s been enjoying it! Eventually Angie discovers that Baxt has a cathouse hidden within his office suite, with his good-looking female patients whoring themselves out to various bigwigs.

Vale Trent turns out to be one of the doctor’s top gals, though she only has two customers – Quentin Wise himself, and someone only listed as “X” in Baxt’s otherwise-comprehensive black book. At first I thought Lawrence was going to go for a mind control sort of thing, with these “whores” really being patients suffering from Baxt’s hypnosis, turned into virtual MK-Ultra style hookers. But unfortunately that doesn’t turn out to be the case; we eventually learn that Vale is a willing participant in the cathouse scheme, which renders the whole “let’s hypnotize Angie” scenario kind of puzzling. But that’s missing the point, I guess.

More digging will uncover the fact that “X” is a notorious Mafia hitman. Angie also has to break it to Garth that his wife is not only a prostitute but that he’s a double cuckhold. This of course gives Angie and Garth the opportunity to go at it themselves; Angie as usual comes on strong to the guy, calling his office and identifying herself to his secretary as “his black panthress.” Interesting to note, as in the second volume, that Angie only has sex with white men. No doubt this is to cater to what I assume was the overwhelming white readership of men’s adventure fiction, but it’s still interesting in a way – we’re told she’s had a colorful history, so to speak, but so far as the Dark Angel series itself is concerned, Angie Harpe only digs white meat.

Lawrence doesn’t dole out much action in The Dream Girl Caper, unlike the second volume, which was peppered with the occasional fight and torture sequence. There are also many moments where Angie and Garth will hide and watch as other characters do things. This plays out especially in a bit where we learn how cold Vale Trent really is: telling Garth she’s going to spend the weekend in the woods of Pennsylvannia with an old college girlfriend, who has a cabin out there, Vale later calls him in a panic saying she’s had another nightmare, that someone’s going to kill her here in the cabin. Would Garth please come over and scope out the place in the middle of the night?

Angie’s already on the scene, having bugged the cabin. When Garth shows, the two crouch in the woods and listen as Vale vigorously screws Quentin Wise in the cabin – the story about the old college friend being a bunch of crap, of course. Then someone shows up outside the cabin, and Vale demands that Quentin take this “starter pistol” out there and scare him away, insisting that he aim the gun at the dude and pull the trigger. Quentin does as ordered, only to discover too late that it’s a real gun and he just killed someone – and also that the whole thing was just photographed by “X” himself, Mafia hitman Vinny Reggio, who was hiding in the bushes. But here’s the thing: the guy Quentin just murdered, who turns out to be Tony Troy, was supposed to be Garth!

In other words, Garth’s own wife just set him up for his death. So Garth does what any other shocked husband would do…he goes back with Angie to her motel room and screws the hell out of her. Our heroine meanwhile has figured out what’s going on – Vale and Vinny are plotting to heist the three million, which they plan to do by making a blackmailed Quentin Wise replace the real loot with a bunch of counterfeit. Angie’s plan is to heist the heisters, and Garth gamely agrees. The final quarter of the novel is more of a sequence of turnarounds and reveals rather than a slam-bang action sort of thing.

Outfitted in black jump suits and masks with “plastic eyelets” (which of course reminded my geek senses of the similar “plastic suit” of another Lyle Kenyon Engel production, the John Eagle Expeditor series) and armed with Uzis, Angie and Garth get the jump on Vale and Vinny, just as they themselves have gotten the jump on Quentin Wise, who is in the middle of delivering the three million to a helicopter transport. But more people arrive on the scene, bullets start flying, and soon Angie and Garth are on the ‘copter, which is shortly thereafter shot out of the sky by a ship on a river below. This turns out to be helmed by yet more Mafioso, one of whom is a boss who wants the three million for himself.

The novel’s only real action sequence occurs on Mingo Island, with Angie and Garth caught in the middle of a sort of gang war, with more bullets flying. But only some random Mafia gunman gets killed in it; as with the second installment, the novel is for the most part bloodless. Reversals and reveals continue to assail our heroes (and us readers) with a finale seeing Angie back at Bruno Baxt’s office – turns out the psychiatrist had his own heist in mind. Here Angie gets in a knockdown, dragout fight with Baxt’s hulking “dyke” secretary. Both she and Baxt are recipients of Angie’s “dark angel” stamp on the forehead, but again they aren’t left for dead, just knocked out and tied up.

Angie and Garth end up making off with the three million, but given that they’re the heroes they decide to “anonymously” tip the authorities where it can be found, something for which Angie will receive $200,000 for from the insurance company that’s hired her to find the missing money. They split this evenly, and I think The Emerald Oil Caper made passing mention of this extra cash in Angie’s account, courtesy this particular caper. Otherwise the Dark Angel series appears to have been free of much continuity, similar to most every other Lyle Kenyon Engel/BCI publication.

The kinky bent of the series is already in effect in this first volume. Lawrence must’ve wanted to set a record for finger-rapes in a novel, with not only the aforementioned bit with Dr. Baxt but a later sequence where Angie is briefly captured by a mob boss who strips her down, ties her to a table, and proceeds to jam his fingers up her ass! This kinky bent is evident throughout the novel, like when Angie thumbs through Dr. Baxt’s catalog of whores and dwells on the shots of Vale Trent, noting her “perfectly neat and classically ringleted triangle of pubic hair”!  You can’t get more sleazy ‘70s than that, my friends. Just as ‘70s is Angie’s wardrobe, each item of which is amply described and of course so revealing that she leaves men panting as she waltzes by them.

Lawrence’s writing is good, with that same sort of professional polish as other BCI authors; I’m always impressed Engel was able to find writers with such similar styles. Lawrence could’ve easily served as Paul Edwards or Paul Kenyon or have turned in one of the Engel-produced volumes of the Killmaster, his style meshes so well with what I guess we could term the “BCI house style.” Compare this to say the Sharpshooter or Marksman books, which had drastically disparate styles each volume. But also Lawrence is good with dialog, setup, description, etc; there might be a little too much POV-hopping for my taste, but that’s par for the course in this genre.

Anyway, The Dream Girl Caper is another enjoyably sleazy Dark Angel adventure, with a fun-loving, likable protagonist and several memorable minor characters. It might not be as over-the-top crazy as The Emerald Oil Caper, but it’s still pretty great and it’s a damn shame this series is so scarce and overpriced on the used books market.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Dark Angel #2: The Emerald Oil Caper


Dark Angel #2: The Emerald Oil Caper, by James D. Lawrence
March, 1975  Pyramid Books

If you’ve ever been reading The Baroness and thought to yourself, “This is good and all, but what if, instead of a spy, the Baroness was a private investigator? And what if she was black??”, then you are in luck, because the four-volume Dark Angel series answers those very questions.

Like The Baroness, Dark Angel is copyright book packager Lyle Kenyon Engel, who with his usual gift for capitalizing on trends must’ve seen a few Pam Grier movies (or at least saw how much money they were making) and decided yet another paperback series was in order. He even contracted James D. Lawrence, the man who had co-created black comic strip character Friday Foster (which itself was turned into a Grier movie in 1975), to write the series.

The only problem is, the Dark Angel series is woefully overpriced in the used books marketplace, much like another Engel production, Operation Hang Ten, though not to that absurd extent. Unlike that series, though (or at least the volume of it I’ve so far read), Dark Angel is worth tracking down, and it's even better than the sometimes-static and repetitive Baroness series.

Our hero is Angela “Angie” Harpe, who we are informed is known as “The Dark Angel” by the cops and the underworld. Like the Baroness, her beauty and body is frequently mentioned in the narrative, as is her expansive wardrobe, which as in the Baroness books lends the series a trash fiction vibe. And again like the Baroness, Angie is rich and lives the jet-set life, and her main home is a penthouse suite in Manhattan which is described as a very swank ‘70s-style pad, though we learn she plays classical music on her hi-fi instead of the more-expected Love Unlimited Orchestra or Barry White.

Angie has had a colorful history to say the least; she was raised in the ghetto, but through her intelligence she was able to get into Radcliffe, where she graduated with flying colors. Oh, but she also worked as a hooker…before briefly serving as an NYPD cop(!!). She also did some glamor modeling on the side to support herself while in college (while still hooking as an independent, high-class escort), but also to save up money so she could fund her true dream…being a private detective! Like Killinger, Angie now handles big, multimillion-dollar cases for insurance companies.

So, again like the Baroness, Angie Harpe is idealized, but unlike the Baroness she doesn’t come off as a self-centered glory hound. She gets off on danger, and treats her cases with snarky aplomb, which lends the series an intentional camp vibe, with Angie often poking fun at the situations she encounters and the weird characters she meets. And she meets a very weird character early in The Emerald Oil Caper, a lecherous old masked man who is chaffeured around in a big limo.

After being suspiciously called out of her penthouse in the middle of the night, Angie gets in the limo with this strange dude who contacted her; first he asks if, for a thousand dollars, he can “kiss and fondle” her breasts. When Angie says no, he then offers a thousand bucks for her underwear! This she agrees to, giggling at the strangeness of it all as she slips off her “nylon bikini panties” from beneath her miniskirt. My friends, when the old freak in his half-mask started sniffing the panties, holding them right over his face, I knew I was reading a trash masterpiece. And it was only page 16!!

While The Emerald Oil Caper does manage to reach several other such trashy heights, truth to tell it does come off as a little plodding at times. But then, it runs to 220 pages of small print, and thus is similar to other Engel-produced paperbacks in that it’s a little too long for its own good. However, also like other Engel-produced books, it’s pretty well written (even though Lawrence POV-hops like crazy), and it so captures its era that you can almost hear a jazz-funk soundtrack playing in your head.

Anyway, the panty-sniffer turns out to be Xerxes Zagrevi, an Iranian oil tycoon who wants Angie to find out if an oil “wildcatter” named Laidlaw Pike has found oil in Columbia. So Angie breaks into Pike’s suite and snoops around. The novel is filled with kinky details, and here we get another, as Angie discovers a redheaded “sex robot” in a big trunk by Pike’s bed. But when Pike himself enters the room, Angie distracts him the best way she knows how – pretending to be a hooker sent up by management, and proceeding to screw Pike senseless!

There’s a fair bit of sex in The Emerald Oil Caper, but unlike the Baroness books the sex scenes don’t go on and on. In fact, most of them are only a paragraph long, and barely described, Lawrence moreso going for the metaphorical approach. Have no fear, though, as Angie’s lush body is often described in detail, and as mentioned the novel has a very kinky, at times sadistic bent to it. In fact I found it more kinky than the Baroness books, with Lawrence serving up sex robots, a sadomasochistic anal rapist (not of the Tobias Funke variety), lesbian sex, an over-the-hill tramp who strips and likes to be lead around on a leash, and copious scenes of a nude Angie either being tortured, threatened by rape, or stripping so as to distract someone.

Well, the guy Angie thinks is Laidlaw Pike turns out to be a young strapping dude named Jack Bristol, who himself was snooping around in Pike’s apartment. Jack hires Angie himself; Jack’s father, another oil prospector, was recently murdered, and Jack’s certain it has something to do with an oil field supposedly discovered down in Columbia. The majority of The Emerald Oil Caper is really a murder mystery, with Angie and Jack hurtling from one location to another, interviewing suspects and getting in the occasional fight scene – not to mention engaging in the occasional sex scene with one another.

Angie has a knack for running afoul of people, most of whom just want to get her off of the investigation, and her ethnicity is very often brought up by these people, in particular the fact that she was a black prostitute (though these are not the two words used to describe her). Beyond the heavy kink factor, The Emerald Oil Caper is filled with racist invective and slander and etc, all of which only lends it more of a pulpy, Blaxploitation feel. I also found it interesting that, at least in this volume, Angie only has sex with Caucasians – both male and female.

Lawrence delivers a handful of action scenes, but most of the novel is dialog and investigation. Angie handles herself well in the various scuffles, using martial arts moves. She has her own cache of gadgets, from a big purse that has a steel bar built into the bottom which she uses to brain several people, to a cat burgular type device that lets her scale walls. She also carries a Baby Browning pistol in the purse, and is handy with a variety of sidearms. And she can also blank her mind by flashing on “The One” when she needs to calm herself!

As part of her investigation Angie once again becomes a hooker, going undercover with a group of high-class whores to a party for oil executives. To accomplish this Angie engages in the lesbian sex mentioned above; when she discovers that one of her former coworkers is going to the party, Angie goes over to the gal’s place to booze her up and have some friendly sex with her to really tucker her out (a scene which features the unforgettable line, “Please, darling! Would you sixty-nine me?”). When the girl passes out, boozed, screwed, and drugged, Angie takes her place in the stable of notorious Harlem pimp Longdong Strong, aka “The Abominal Cunt Man,” who got his nickname because he’s “cut more broads than Vidal Sassoon!”

This section in particular is very sleazy and sadistic, with Angie captured (just as she’s going down on the oil exec she’s trying to, uh, pump for info) by Longdong’s goons and taken back to a Harlem pad. Here the pimp himself tortures her with a pair of “pimp sticks,” ie two wire coathangers that are wrapped together, which Longdong uses to whip Angie right on her most private of areas! This is easily the most unsettling scene in the novel, and again quite similar to all of those times in the Baroness books were Penny was captured, stripped, and tortured, before escaping in some novel method.

With all of the sleaze and kinkiness, one can’t really fault Lawrence for sort of dropping the ball on the finale. Sure, Angie’s nude throughout (stripping to a “throbbing Rolling Stones song” so as to distract her would-be murderers), and Lawrence packs in a little bit of gore, with people getting shot, stabbed, and crushed, but our heroine and her boyfriend Jack are suddenly relegated to supporting status. When the villain behind it all is revealed, instead of Angie taking him on, suddenly it’s one of his colleagues who shows up to do the deed, and Jack and Angie run away to hide while those two are killing each other.

But still, I really had a lot of fun reading The Emerald Oil Caper. It’s a shame the Dark Angel books are so overpriced, but I’ll definitely track down the rest of them someday.

And what the heck, here’s the sequence with that redheaded sex robot, as Angie presses the activation switch that’s hidden at the nape of the robot’s neck:

Almost at once she could feel the plastic flesh begin to warm beneath her fingers. A subtle funky aroma of female perspiration and genital exudation rose to her nostrils. The dummy’s hips began to move in a suggestive rhythm. Its arms reached out, its eyes opened and closed, its lips moved. 

“Oh, please! … Fuck me, darling! … Fuck me hard!” 

As the recorded voice spoke from somewhere inside the robot’s head, its knees moved up and back, its hips revolved upward, and its thighs spread wide, revealing the moistly open lips of incredibly realistic genitals. 

“Sorry, sister,” giggled Angie. “I’ve got a headache tonight.”