Had any Lately? (Troy Conway, 1969)

My first Coxeman left me speechless, so I think I should write something more substantial about this one. But to put any of this craziness into context, first we need to understand the story. So here it goes.

The entire male population of Sarmania has somehow lost its sex drive. Men are simply not horny and are refusing to fuck their women. Because of this biological oddity, the country's survival is at stake since they haven't been reproducing for full five years now. Rod is sent there to check out what's going on, although he's not really concerned about this unfortunate country's future. The thing is that Sarmania is behind the iron curtain, so Reds must be involved.

Upon his arrival, he is raped by fifteen sex-starved women and later runs (or should I say rams) into several more. One of them is beautiful sexology scientist J.R., who lives in a secluded Frankenstein-like castle doing fertility tests on gorilla Peter. J.R. is frigid and therefore off-limits (for the time being), so Rod - as a part of a scientific experiment - fucks the three women working for her. On his way out, he's frustrated and concludes that she is a "confirmed man-hater, possible Lesbian, potential suicidal type" and that J.R. probably stands for "Just Rusting".

Here we come to the second most hilarious point of the novel. When he returns to the hotel, there is a riot on the street. Women demand him to you-know-what them. This horny mob is led by Angelica, who proclaims:

"I, Angelica, say this. He will rest all day and night. Tomorrow morning, we will issue ration cards. For each and every woman here. Each in turn will be able to enjoy ten minutes with this remarkable man."

Fucking ration cards!!!?! Don't you just love it?

Rod manages to escape and eventually returns to the castle. Not surprisingly, he does score with J.R. this time around, and she goes crazy over his bouncing balls. Oh yeah - and there's an army of apes living in that castle protecting our beautiful rusting sex scholar. And another thing - Rod and J.R. discover a cause of the Sarmania's misfortunes. But things are not what they seem! Rod goes back to town, makes some calls, gets himself informed, and heads back to the castle for the final showdown after a few more lays. Upon his arrival, he then witnesses the most hilarious scene of the novel!

J.R. is lying naked on the floor, holding a pistol in each hand and is surrounded by six naked men lined up in a semicircle. They all have hard-ons (equipped with rigid weapons), and (in that cool scientific voice) she commands them to "Jump. Up and down. In position. Jog. I say, Jog!". So they start jumping and waving their balls at her, but she's still not satisfied! Seems like she craves Rod's "family jewels" specifically.

I mean - WTF!!?!

Later on, there's some silly crap about uranium mines and J.R.'s Sarmania take over, but in essence, that's it. In an abridged and very condensed version. And can I really put any context or meaning into any of this without the post running for ten pages or more? I can't. Will try with the next one since I was lucky enough to score a pack of ten Coxeman paperbacks on eBay for mere 50 bucks.

I'll just finish by saying that as over the top and silly and juvenile as it is, it never gets obscene. There are no four-letter words in this one. Instead, we are continuously treated with a never-ending streak of hilariously crazy metaphors. Rod's dick is everything from (a bit too frequently used) an old fashioned "family jewels" to a pretty self-explanatory "eight wonder of the world" or rather bizarre "red candle" and so on. I think the most memorable one is referring to coming in a girl's mouth as her "drinking of the red wine of life". Crazy stuff indeed. I needed to pause reading a few times to think over and decipher some of this nonsense.

It could have been a bit more hard boiled-ish, but it's still unforgettable.

4/5

Facts:

Hero:
I, Rod Damon, am still the greatest Coxman of them all. Ask anybody.

Me. Damon. The greatest Coxman of them all. The pride of L.S.D. The noblest roamin' sexologist in the universe.

"Whoremaster!" the man nearest me suddenly shouted.
"Lecher!" cried another.
"Adulterer" another man blurted, spitting at me.
"Despoiler of our women!" another man screamed in my face.
"Beast of the field!"
"Fornicator!"
"Lustful dog!"
"Sodomist!"

Hm - Beast of the field??

Location: 
Starts and ends in Japan but mostly takes place in Sarmania. Which is a little eastern European country known for its excellent rice. Yes, rice in Europe...

Body count: 
Only 2. But this is Coxeman novel so let's instead list all the fucking:

1. Mariko (You don't make love like a man. Like God)
2. Raped by 15 women (with pretty non-eastern European names): Wilma, Helga, Dorla, Irma, Dirma, Lowella, Helene, Paula, Pita, Irena, Alice, Sally, Francesca, Rhoda and Minnie 
3. Lowella Sparma - she comes so hard that she faints
4. Mrili
5. Mrili and her two virgin sisters, Tillie and Millie
6. J.R.'s staff: the cook Miss Poldin (Marry me), the personal secretary Lottie Linkel (I'll give you anything. I'll darn your socks, wash your cloths) and the gardener Freda Farkus (she cannot speak English so "Freda Farkus was glassy-eyed. She stared back at me through a foggy maze of disbelief.")
7. Allie (Merry me) - now Rod (finally!) starts to mention some of his famous techniques: The Rope Ladder, The Japanese Rope Trick, The forty-fifth position of Dealey's exposition, Damon Drop
8. J.R. staff getting raped by the six sex-recovered locals. Wouldn't mention this, but Rod himself almost gets gang-banged too!
9. J.R. (I'm dead). Because she's frigid, he uses The Hesitation Method since "This is a guaranteed cure-all for broads who were coming out of the deep freeze". Later, I guess when she is unfrozen, he utilises something called "see-saw elevator ride" and finishes her off with Oriental Love Dance. Next time, he promises to show her "The Australian Method" and "South Pacific Syndrome".
10. Allie (x3)
11. J.R. and Peter. Wouldn't mention this either but remember - Peter is a fucking gorilla!
12. One for the farewell with the mob ringleader Angelica 
13. Back in Japan with Mariko (San...I shall cry...) - using "what the Orient calls The Intertwining Leaves position"

So the total count reaches 31
 

Dames: 
Bewitching nymph Mariko -  She had graduated from Japanese burlesque to Number One Queen of Tokyo Films Ltd, but there was nothing limited about her. At the ripe old age of twenty-two, she was older than Time itself in the Sex Department.

Allie de Marpana - the bellboy (or the bell-girl): "Her eyes were as blue as the Navy and her lips as red as Heinz ketchup."

Lowella Sparma, prime minister's mistress.

J.R. Thule: "What Lowella Sparma had, she had more of it... What Allie had, she had improved on."

Blackouts: 
After being raped by 15 women:

I, the future author of one of the rarest works in THE FETISH ENCYCLOPEDIA, ten volumes inclusive, was raped by fifteen women on the morning of my arrival in the sleeping dominion of Sarmania in the year of Our Sex, 1969. Me, Rod Damon, head of L.S.D.
Dingalinga.

Have no idea what "dingalinga" is supposed to be, but this is how he "dropped off":

But there is a limit. There has to be. The blood in my head began to dance a merry jig. The room tilted. Above me, the panting mouths, the dangling mammaries, the gyrating pelvises all converged into one roaring central region of burning blackness...
...
I did the only sensible thing under the circumstances.
I dropped out.
I fainted.

Even though Rod is unconscious, he still somehow manages to hear women admiring his firmness. Because - and do I really even need to clarify this? - he keeps his hard-on, and they keep fucking him and arguing about whose turn is next!
 

Title: 
Pretty rhetorical question for Rod...

But I'm not sure if this is the 12th or 13th of the series. When I was looking for a cover image, I came across the one that states this is 12th, but mine says it's 13th.

Edition: 
Paperback Library

Cover: 
Provocative and cool, but it should really be that scene with J.R. naked, holding guns and surrounded by bouncing balls.


First time on this blog: 
Full frontal nudity cover

Cool lines: 
She didn't stop until Grand Central Station was firmly positioned where I could enter and drop my baggage.

She had a gloriously slick and comfortable resting place for the family jewels.

I pressed with my thumbs until both of her half-moons widened into a glorious entrance-way to the stars, to the Valhalla of womanhood.

My formula for instant sleep was very simple. I closed my eyes and counted naked Sarmanian peasant girls jumping over the window sill of my bedroom, breasts bouncing, fannies bobbing.

The Marksman #11: Counter-attack (Frank Scarpetta, 1974)

I'm far from being an expert in men's adventure novels (come to think of it - I'm not an expert on any kind of novels), but I'm 100% positive that something is definitely wrong with this one. Doesn't feel like a finished product at all. It's more like a bare manuscript that the author would pitch to a publisher and then complete quickly after approval. While having a drink or two, probably.

Starts somewhat ambitiously with a complicated plot that involves five crates of heroin smuggled from Egypt (poppy fields in a fucking desert?) into America. So what's ambitious about such trivial plotting, you might ask? The thing is that these crates were intercepted by the US customs (and/or some secret UK agency) and then stolen back by Mafia before finally, our man Magellan got to them. Their content changed from heroin to marijuana to a pile of bricks and even sand during this period. All this enfolds really fast, and I admit that I lost track a bit. But to my defence, it seems like Mr Scarpetta too got a little lost, so he, fortunately, stopped fooling with this nonsense and made it clear that they indeed do contain heroin (worth $650 million) and that they indeed are in Marksman's possession.

From here on, it settles a bit, but it again goes totally wild in an abrupt ending. Only a few pages before the conclusion, another girl is introduced (and immediately forgotten), and then the final shootout happens on the very last page in no more than four (4 !!!) paragraphs.

You can, and you should read a proper and super cool review on the one and only Glorious Trash blog. I'll just abruptly finish mine with a quick summary:

• slightly pathetic hero 
• incredibly pathetic pair of villains. One is such a sissy that suffers a mild stroke upon receiving some bad news
• no sex
• let me repeat: there's no sex in this men adventure novel! The closes it gets is this: Magellan made her nakedness complete, then stood back and coolly regarded her in the dim light. The sight of her beautiful, young body kindled a pang of memory, but only briefly.
• pathetic body count. For some reason, Marksman uses a gas grenade in the last "shoot-out" and thus spares the lives of two main villains and seven gangsters who "represented some kind of an execution squad"
• no globe-trotting. The whole thing takes place in New Orleans
• no "world domination" or "communist take over" grand plot

At least it's short. But it's so weird it's hardly funny.

2/5

Facts:

Hero: 
Philip Magellan, The Marksman - "A cruelly efficient killing machine, crazed for revenge"

Location:
New Orleans

Body count: 
7 (one single kill and a couple of triplets)

Object of desire: 
He had one thought! To personally wipe out the narcotic traffic here and, in process, blast open the immaculately kept secret of who masterminded the formidable crime organization whose headquarters was in New Orleans. 

Dames:
Chantal, Choisi's daughter. Her role is very mysterious and never quite explained...

Blackouts: /

Title: 
I wasn't sure about this. I thought initially that Marksman was left with some score to settle with Mafia from one of the ten preceding volumes or that he was still revenging the death of his wife and daughter. But no, the back cover informs us that "Summoning the enormous power at his command, Borghese launched a blistering counterattack to recover the smack and wipe-out The Marksman."

Edition: 
Belmont Tower Books, April 1974 

Cover: 
One of the mentioned triplets killing. It's cool but inaccurate because I'm sure that the Marksman did both of them disguised into a hippie outfit.

Cool lines: 

/

Murder with Honor (Philip Wilding, 1960)

Kicks off as a blackmail case that our hero solves swiftly in just a couple of chapters by kicking the shit out of the bad guys. In the build-up to this scene, we learn about some Nazi conspiracy and pretty soon after, there's a jewels theft (you know - "a new angle") followed by an inevitable corpse.

So lots is happening, and I liked some of it. The plotting is decent, the characters are colourful enough, it has that lovely old fashioned feel about it (Heathrow airport is still called Heath Row), and it's pretty fucking hard-boiled considering it was written in 1960.

But it just doesn't work, or at least it didn't work for me. Nothing major is wrong with it, but the sum of minor flaws exceeds the summary of cool things. All that Nazi crap is totally redundant. Hero is a bit of an asshole - he's one of those "know all" types (for some reason, he keeps tampering with evidence). He also seems to have a sixth sense of determining someone's guilt based on the first impression of them that he gets.

Also written poorly. Some of the dialogues work, and every now and then, there's an occasional hard-boiled-ish flash (see 'cool lines' below), but mostly text is dry and dull (for some reason author needs to go into great detail about how people are dressed). There's a scene in which captured Crane is rescued by his sidekick Red, and the whole rescue operation takes 10+ painfully boring action-less pages describing every little detail but without a single line of dialogue. Wouldn't it be better and more efficient to just fast forward this crap and then maybe later have Red or Crane do a quick recap?

There are some cute moments (the main villain is referred to as "Herr Leader"), but there are also many nasty ones. Italians are called wops, women are sometimes bitches and so on.

I don't know, nothing is horrible, but everything is far from good. It was a bit of a struggle to finish those 150 pages of small print. Herr Leader does manage to escape at the end, so I can speculate that Wilding resurrected him again. But I don't think I'll bother finding any more of his stuff...

2/5

Facts:

Hero: 
She read the card and stared up at him wide-eyed. "Nicholas Crane, Private Investigations? Then you - you're detective?"
He nodded. "Keep it under your hat, Gladys," he said, thinking this would be most unlikely.

Vittori went pale, "The Police?" he gasped.
Winthrop knew better. "He's no copper," he sneered. "He sounds more like a G.I. who's lost his way home."
Crane said: "Shut up, Pansy!"

Location: 
London and some estate called Manor House in Denton, Sussex

Body count: 
7 - including real Robert, who had been bumped by Nazis during WW2 but excluding two "seriously injured" wanna-be Nazis.

Discovery of Lucy's body is pretty funny: "He bent down and touched her face and noticed the patch of blood on the breast of the suit. The dame was stone cold. Lucy d'Avigne had been killed!"

Dames: 
Bunch of them. We have a french maid who is a "tasty dish", Terry Logan who "was a hot number whichever way you looked at her" and - definitely my favourite! - Crane's secretary Betty, who speaks in super cool street-tough slang. But they are all over-shadowed by Honor d'Avigne! Every single fucking time she appears, the entire following paragraph is padded with detailed descriptions of her dress, radiant beauty, intelligence, devotion to France...

Blackouts: 
He almost faints during the first fight:
Crane began to see a red misty curtain before his eyes... Nick Crane's brain tried to convey a message to his body, but it would not respond... [after taking a couple of shots of Scotch] the room went round once, and then came back right side up.

And later there comes the proper blackout:

He was half-way into the big room when it came. He had not heard a sound. It was very quiet. Too quiet. A crashing blow behind his ear send a thousand star-spangled pains through to his eyes. A great red wave that changed rapidly to black engulfed him, completely obliterating any interest in the outside world.
Crane had been sapped as easily as a third-rate amateur.

Nothing special, but I liked that "third-rate amateur" conclusion.
 

Title: 
A bit silly words play. You do get it, don't you? Honor d'Avigne, honor...

Edition:  
Banner Books, looks like the first edition

Cover: 
Honor d'Avigne in front and her murdered sister Lucy in the back

Cool lines:  

"Listen, rat!" he said. "I'm going to take you apart and find out what makes you tick. Afterwards I'm going to clean this joint up and take back the jack, or what's left of it, to Honor d'Avigne. The dough you've been high-jacking her for over the last year."

But if some observant character should glance that way it would look like a parked car belonging to a necking couple who had gone off into the woods to find out whether they had anything in common.

He stood in the darkness and mediated. Not on infinity, but on an immediate line of action.