The Italian Connection (1971, Gardner F Fox)

 

As his 'Lady from L.U.S.T' series began to wind down, author Gardner F. Fox found himself a new muse in Cherise Dellissio, better known to those who get to experience her on an intimate basis, which is just about everyone, as Cherry Delight. Fox's new muse isn't too removed from his old muse. Like Eve Drum, of the Lady from L.U.S.T novels, Cherry is a sexpot spy and tough girl who works for a government agency with an unfortunately smutty sounding name. Cherry being the lady from N.Y.M.P.H.O, which stands for New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization. The main difference between Eve Drum and Cherry Delight is that while Eve was a natural blonde, Cherry is a proud redhead. A fact that is quite literally thrust in the reader's face throughout these books. If you like 'em Strawberry all over, then Cherry is the fox you've been waiting for.

The first Cherry Delight outing 'The Italian Connection' shows that Gardner F. Fox sure knew how to grab the reader's attention right from the get go. Cherry is naked, playing dead and being molested in a coffin by a male co-worker. What initially seems like a shocking, necrophilia themed opening turns out to be training for N.Y.M.P.H.O's latest scheme to bring down the mob. In order to hide a shameful sexual secret from his fellow gangsters, Mafia kingpin Joe Turessi is having hookers being brought to him in coffins for sexual liaisons at a mafia owned funeral parlor. Thus Cherry is posing as a hooker and being shipped out to him in his unorthodox manner. If you are familiar with Fox's Lady from L.U.S.T books, you'll be unsurprised to learn that Turessi's sexual secret is a fetish for female underwear "every capo in the outfit would laugh at me if it got out". Such a reoccurring theme in Fox's adult fiction that there can be little doubt this fetish was shared by the author. It's a 24/7 obsession in his books. After she emerges naked from the coffin, Turessi has Cherry dress up in a variety of suspenders, panties and garter belts, much to his voyeuristic delight "the clothes, put them on, you gotta".

The Italian Connection delves a little deeper than most of Fox's work into the roots of underwear fetishism, and if Fox was writing from the heart, it is a rather dark, unsavory rabbit hole we go down here. Turessi admits that he likes seeing women in sexy underwear because it provides him with a nostalgic buzz for when Youngman Turessi used to spy on his mother and sisters "alla time i was growing up. I used to lie there inna dark and peek into the next room an' watch my sisters getting undressed for bed or dressed to go out". Fortunately for Turessi, Cherry don't kink shame, even when he is balling her in a coffin and fantasizing that she is his mother.

Cherry tries to get information out of Turessi, which isn't easy when he is burying his face in her ass. Cherry's aim is to manipulate Joe Turessi into taking her with him to France, where she can further infiltrate the European arm of the Mafia. However Cherry proves to be a little too good at her job, and ends up throwing so much energetic sex in Turessi's direction that the old codger dies from a heart attack. Arrivederci, Joe. Her 'Plan B' involves going to France herself and posing as his mistress, where Cherry finds herself in a middle of a power struggle between warring sections of the Mafia. Naturally Cherry uses her feminine charms to endear herself to a succession of Mafia goons with one track minds. Fox's Mafiosi characters do tend to be one note and interchangeable, yet all share the amusing characteristic of yelling "Marrone!!" in times of crisis.

Just as softcore American movies were at the time giving way to the likes of Deep Throat, so too the Cherry Delight books leaves the Lady from L.U.S.T ones in the dust when it comes to explicitness. Fox's writing was pretty much hardcore porn at this point, and the plots little more than a connecting link between sexual encounters. Life just seems to be one long orgy for Miss Delight, and Fox's extensive sexual vocabulary never fails to entertain. The Italian Connection being awash with references to 'blue veined breastflesh', 'pudendal pincers' and 'backdoor bumfiddling'.

Unfortunately as with the Lady from L.U.S.T books, when there is padding here it really stands out as such. Long descriptions of uneventful plane journeys, detailed accounts of where Cherry dined out at and what she had off the menu. Yawn. Then there are the shopping sprees, and Cherry's name dropping of the fashion brands she happens to be wearing...Givenchy, Estée Lauder, Christian Dior. Admittedly it wouldn't be out of character for a young, hip female character to be obsessed by fashion, but it's baffling why Fox thought a red blooded male audience would share this interest. Their likely reaction to these passages being "Marrone!! just a getta on with the naughty bits, Capiche". I guess having a fetish for female underwear gave Fox a greater insight into female fashion than the average fella.

Fortunately there is plenty of material in The Italian Connection that a red blooded audience would be interested in, it's a remarkably horny read, and Cherry Delight proves to be an even more hyper-sexual creation than Eve Drum. Such is Cherry's dedication to turning on the readership that during a life or death rooftop escape from a villa, Cherry takes time out from dodging the bullets to ogle the woman she is escaping with. "For a second Donna poised with her legs apart, I could see right up between them. She wore no panties just a garter belt, and her hairy nooky nest was something to make a guy or gal drool". Cherry Delight books aren't afraid to play rough either; gang rape and being placed in bondage devices are the frequent downsides to Cherry's line of work. While The Italian Connection favors sex over violence, the sequel novels show Fox wasn't adverse to gore. In the next book 'Tong in Cheek', Cherry gets to blow the top of a man's head off, while another mafioso is agonizingly cut into little pieces by oriental heavies.

I'm in little doubt that this book would have wound up the wrong way readers thinking they were signing up to a crime thriller along the lines of The French Connection, and weren't expecting a sleaze overload. A recent Amazon review of the book dismisses it as 'Trash poorly written for the perverted mind'. There can be little doubt though that Fox was a dedicated, hard worker when it came to satisfying perverted minds, knocking out numerous Cherry Delight novels in a short amount of time and pouring his own obsessions into them. The quick, sometimes careless nature of the work, being evidenced by the fact that in The Italian Connection the agency Cherry works for undergoes a name change from N.Y.M.P.H.O to S.P.E.R.M midway through the book without explanation. My guess is that Fox was originally going to call it S.P.E.R.M, before thinking that N.Y.M.P.H.O was funnier, either that or he couldn't come up with an appropriate acronym for S.P.E.R.M in time, and a proof reader forgot to correct it. In fairness, coming up with a story specific acronym for S.P.E.R.M sure isn't easy...the best I can come up with myself is Spies Protecting Everyone from Randy Mafiosi.

 

The Italian Connection and the entire Cherry Delight series is available to read at the Gardner F Fox website.

https://www.gardnerfrancisfoxlibrary.com/cherry-delight-novels-read-entire-stories-library

 

 

Blow My Mind (1970, Gardner F Fox)

Another so-so Eve Drum novel, in which the spy spends an equal amount of time describing her sexy underwear as she does going about her patriotic duty. In this one the Russians have found a man, Aleksandr Tkachevich, who can astrally project himself outside of his body, and has been using this skill to spy on top secret US documents. A situation which requires Eve Drum to also master astral projection and do battle with him on the astral plane. A task she is helped with by Martin and Marion Rorwick, a husband and wife team of ESP expects who also happen to be a swingers.

Personally, I've found the best Drum novels are the ones that divert from the series' Bond spoof origins. Unfortunately, Blow My Mind isn't one of them, which means we're also stuck with David Anderjanian, Eve's mentor/boyfriend. An absolute non-entity who usually sucks the energy out of Eve Drum novels, and whose only purpose in them seems to be to give Eve a very active sex life. Blow My Mind is also hindered by author Gardner F. Fox's love affair with New York high society, at times feeling as if Fox was tasked with ghost writing a society column for a female socialite. Thus lengthy passages of Blow My Mind are just Eve Drum describing the trendy places she dines out at, and what she had off the menu. "The Perch is the latest thing in New York private clubs. It is swank, posh and with it. Glass doors tinted blue, a uniformed doorman, thick carpeting..." Yadda, Yadda. Yadda.

The raison d'etre of the Eve Drum novels though, was always there underlining fetish and pornographic leanings, which by the time of Blow My Mind weren't so underlining. Fox seems particularly fixated on troilism here, even if he feels obliged to explain what that meant to less sophisticated readers "a feature of sexual lore that has been known even before his two daughters got together with Lot, as told about in the bible....the term comes from the french, deriving from the word trois, meaning three". A threesome between Drum and the Rorwicks being an erotic highlight of the book. According to the rules of Blow My Mind, your astral version can also be an idealised version of yourself. Meaning that the Astral version of Marion Rorwick loses some weight around the hips and has firmer breasts, while Astral Martin Rorwick gains flesh where it matters to women "his manhood was something not quite to be believed in it's rampant state" Eve enthusiastically remarks. Be in no doubt, Blow My Mind is the product of a NYC that was gearing itself for arrival of filmed hardcore. Until then, reading about it was the second best thing to seeing it acted out in the flesh. Fox doesn't forget the Kinkos, or heaven forbid, the sexy underwear fetishists either. Just as Ed Wood was hung up on angora, Fox's thing was undeniably Nylon. An obsession that kicks into overdrive on page 59, when Eve falls prey to Igor, a homosexual Russian agent whose transvestite tendencies dictate that he strips Eve of her clothes "I don't have any nice girly things like you're wearing. These are real nylon stockings, aren't they". This is followed by a blunt, graphic S&M session where Eve has her buttocks whipped, gets water thrown over her and her breasts poked with electric goads, before being forced into an oversized bird cage. As someone recently pointed out, merely describing these books as silly spy spoofs in no way prepares the average reader for the level of kinkiness or played straight violence in them. Eve giveth as much as she taketh in Blow My Mind, no Russian groin is safe from Eve's karate kicks, with the spy also displaying a penchant for eye gouging.

I have a feeling that a movie version of Eve Drum would have been directed by AC Stephens, starred Rene Bond in a blonde wig as Eve, which would have dictated that Anderjanian have been played by Ric Lutze, and maybe the budget would have stretched to an Aldo Ray cameo. The series cried out for a low end of 1970s Hollywood treatment ...cries that unfortunately went unanswered.

For fans of manly, two fisted material, Blow My Mind makes good on the Bondian elements, including a fair amount of location hopping from New York to Madrid to the Carpathians and several action set pieces, including a memorable one set onboard a train. Still I suspect people claimed to read these books for the spy angle, in the same sense that people claimed to read Playboy for the articles. Chances are if you found an original copy of Blow My Mind, it would incriminatingly open at page 59.

Interestingly, the Eve Drum novels were initially distributed in the UK by Ben's Books. A company that -according to Oliver Carter's book 'Under the Counter'- was integral in supplying Soho with pornographic material from the 1950s onwards. Headed by patriarch Ben Holloway, the Holloway family would later find themselves the subject of much negative police attention when they went into business with NYC pornographer Reuben Sturman, effectively becoming the British arm of Sturman's operation. Before being put out of business in 1982, following the imprisonment of his sons Chris and Dennis, Ben Holloway had also been behind the 'Rippledale' mail-order hardcore video label, the first video company to have released 'Deep Throat' on tape in the UK.

Joe the 7th

 Another journey into the D'Amatoverse

Easy Ride (1970, Gardner F. Fox)

Originating as a Bond/Man from Uncle spoof series, Gardner F. Fox's Lady from L.U.S.T books initially ran from 1967 to 1972 outlasting Uncle and the first wave of Bond parodies. Fox's creation Eve Drum is a secret agent for L.U.S.T (League of Underground Spies and Terrorists) and her hyper-horny reputation earns her the nickname Oh-Oh-Sex. Like Bond, the series ran for so long that it wore out the spy theme and began to absorb elements from other genres that happened to be en vogue at the time. Towards the end of the run it looks as if Fox was just given a free hand to throw whatever he wanted into the mix, getting Oh-Oh-Out There with 1970's The Copulation Explosion - in which Drum has to contend with a scientifically created ape-man and alien invaders. Another 1970 title, Easy Ride, cashes in on the biker genre and in doing so takes the series in the direction of straight exploitation. Something which, combined with the series' inclination towards BDSM means that at this point Eve Drum is much more spiritually closer to Don Schain's Ginger films than it's Bond origins.

Eve Drum is investigating water pollution in Monterey "the angrier I got thinking about it, the sexier I became". Upon setting eyes on the beautiful lake Soledad, Eve being Eve decides to go skinny dipping in it, only to be deterred by the sight of dead fish by the waterside. She is then oglied by a biker gang who attempt to rape her. In a spectacular example of turning the tables though, Eve defeats the four bikers with her superior karate skills, ties them all up and decides that she'll be the one to do all the raping.

The sex scenes in an Eve Drum novel are truly something else. Maybe it was out of embarrassment, maybe it was out of fear of an obscenity bust, but Fox uses them as his cue to prove he was in fact a sophisticated and cultured writer, bombarding the reader with Latin, French and Punjabi phrases as well as historial references. "I lowered myself slowly, my back to him in the approved method of venus reversa, which Livia Drusilla adopted with the Emperor Augustus....my constrictor cunnae muscles were working overtime". It's likely you'd need a degree in several languages and one in history to get turned on by the earlier books in the series, and there is evidence in Easy Ride that Fox's New York publishers may have had words with him about this. Thus here Eve Drum has a habit of explaining her extensive vocabulary to the layman "I sauntered away from the mirror with swaying hips, practising my sexiest walk, the kind the french call faire des effets de sul, in other words, my hips swing and my buttocks jounce very nicely".

It doesn't take much sleuthing to deduct that Fox's big thing was female underwear...garters, lace, baby doll nighties, panties. Fox could write all day about that subject, and safety hiding out under the pen name 'Rod Gray' for these books was free to let his fetish flag fly high. Take a drink every time he mentions nylon in an Eve Drum book and you'll end up shaken and possibly also stirred. "I was wearing nylons and a garter belt and a bra made of black nylon that bulged at its cups where they tried to hold in my luscious 38's". Fox's nylon obsession is the Eve Drum books' most endearing eccentricity. Never missing a trick, Fox even has the villains wear nylon stockings over their faces.

In short, if you like your lit heroines in sexy underwear, to be on the playfully aggressive side and have the morals of an alleycat, then Eve Drum is your gal. When a young boy is injured by the bikers, Eve uses paying him a hospital visit as an excuse to seduce his father "I talked brightly to Billy, chattering away even while I recrossed my legs, taking my time and letting his father see that I had no panties on".

The non-sexual action of Easy Ride evolves around Eve playing bodyguard to bio-chemist Hugo Edwards, whose predecessors have gotten beaten up by thugs while testing the water in the lake for pollution. Fox is best remembered as a comic book guy and the non-pornographic, non-BDSM parts of the Eve Drum books are fast paced and feel as if they should be served up in illustrated panels and speech bubbles. Despite writing under a pseudonym, Fox slyly eludes to his more respectable career in Easy Ride when Eve brings Billy some hospital bedside reading material "Batman, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Superman, Flash and Adam Strange. A good selection, I thought Billy would like them". Eve Drum is definitely not for kids though. What with the biker threat neutralised early on in the book, the focus of Easy Ride rests heavily on Drum's sexual side. The spy making good on her task to not only bed Billy's father, but improve his carnal knowledge as well. Leading the blue collar, single parent on a head spinning display of kama sutra like positions. The Eve Drum books seem to have made it there personal mission to expand the American male's bedroom activities beyond the standard, missionary position antics "then he slid into position and we were off on a round of oolud-poolud".

Fox doesn't seem remotely engaged with the biker theme, only displaying enthusiasm for it when it skids off the dirt road and into fetishistic territory. A subplot about Drum integrating herself with the biker gang and competing in a drag race builds up to an almighty cat fight between her and Nance, a biker's girlfriend who has developed a mean outer shell after being gang raped. The Eve Drum novels posit their heroine as having a sexually therapeutic effect on both the men and women she encounters. After Eve punches Nance in the face, strips her and trashes her buttocks, the experience causes Nance to become a better person and regret the sadistic way she has treated her fellow women in the past. "I never knew what it was like to be made to walk bare-assed in front of the boys". On the back of the cat fight, Eve and Nance even become good friends "come on, I think we ought to celebrate with a picnic of some sort, don't you".

Easy Ride isn't as wild as The Copulation Explosion, then again that one really set the bar high for wildness, but all of the Eve Drum books are sexy, fun, quick reads. Collectively they evoke images of Irving Klaw era New York fetishism, of long gone dirty bookshops, of timid guys whose wives probably cut them off years ago, and for whom the latest Eve Drum book arriving on the shelves meant another dream date with their favourite sex kitten, gift wrapped to them in...but of course...lots and lots of nylon.

Book of Shadows (1980, Marc Olden)

 If you've ever wished that Jackie Collins had been commissioned to write a sequel to The Wicker Man, then you need The Book of Shadows in your life. A druid husband and wife team - Rupert and Rowena Comfort - show up in New York on a mission to terrorise the beautiful people. Those in the druid sights include Marisa...a famous soap opera actress, Robert...her insufferable unsuccessful novelist lover, Marisa's friend Nathan Shields...an aging bi-sexual antiques dealer, his wife Ellie, and his Jewish toy boy Larry, who is 'living on Valium and Preparation H'. All were marked for death following an ill-fated English canal journey from Oxford to Manchester, during which the five New Yorkers discovered a hidden druid village and cheated the locals out of a priceless book of shadows. Fearing the book can give away the location of the village -a closely guarded secret since the days of Matthew Hopkins- the druids send the Comforts to the Big Apple in order to retrieve the book and dispatch the transgressors. One of whom is destined to go up Sergeant Howie style. Before that however the druid twosome cross paths with a Puerto Rican street gang who are prowling central park looking to beat up homosexuals, only to end up taking their frustrations out on an Oak tree. This angers the Druids, who in order to average the Oak tree decapitate one of the Puerto Ricans, before -to misquote Tony Orlando- tying the Puerto Rican's intestines round the old Oak tree.

After that ultra violent opening, The Book of Shadows becomes a fawn-o-thon over New York's rich, famous and fabulous...darling! It's a VIP invite to a world of Madison Avenue shopping sprees, drinking cognac out of three hundred year old teacups and an apartment so luxurious 'Marisa had always described as an experience second only to sex'. The Book of Shadows isn't afraid to wallow in street level sleaze either. Venturing into Cruising territory with a subplot about a transvestite police informant, anonymous gay sex in central park and the revelation that not even NYC's gay scene is immune from penetration by the druids. For an author who gives the outward impression of not being enamored by the gay community, Marc Olden sure could write like a right old bitch at times..."a little nip and tuck in Brazil and she could pass for Marie Osmond , or a polished apple"... "If sex was the only thing he and Marisa had going, maybe Marisa would be better off with a vibrator"... "He had more ass than Hollywood had teeth, and anyone who bit him had better bite hard". Belying the fact that Olden was himself an African-American, The Book of Shadows is also chock full of derogatory put downs of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, instead opting to champion Armenians. The hero, Joseph Bess, being a hard working detective sargent who is brimming with Armenian pride "there's four million of us scattered throughout the world and nobody knows we once had our own country, Jesus don't get me started".

the cover illusion's depiction of Rupert Comfort and its non-too subtle resemblance to George Peppard  

Bess' ethnicity and tough guy personality gives you a mental image of him resembling Armenian-American actor Mike 'Mannix' Connors. While David Jarvis' artwork of the 1980 edition of the book makes Rupert Comfort look so much like George Peppard that Peppard could easily have sued. Though personally I tend to imagine the dedicated, grey haired, machete weilding Comfort as a blue blooded, British version of Blood Feast's Mal Arnold.

Spanning showbiz bitchfest, occult horror, cop thriller and English canal journey travelogue, against all odds Olden manages to pull off this multi-genred mating. Olden is best remembered for his kung-fu/blaxploitation 'Black Samurai' books, which I've struggled to get into, but The Book of Shadows has proven to be an absolute blast.

Street Wars (1984, Joe Nazel)

Joe Nazel brings the black action novel into the era of jogging suits, ghetto blasters, cocaine and Cabbage Patch dolls. 1984's Street Wars finds private investigator Terrence Malcolm Slaughter and his ex-wrestler pal Fred 'Dead-On-Arrival' Hollis having to protect schoolteacher Pamela Middleton from the clutches of murderous pastor Reverend Truman Blood. After Blood mistakenly believes she knows the whereabouts of his stolen drugs and money. In Street Wars the action comes thick and fast, Nazel sure knew how to pen some memorably unusual set pieces. Opening with the violent hi-jacking of an ice cream truck and later a shootout on a bus which results in watermelon destruction on a scale that would make Mr. Majestic weep.

I've loved every Nazel book I've read so far, and am only baffled as to why he doesn't appear to be held in the same regard as fellow Holloway House writers Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. To dismiss him as a hack, is to do the man a great injustice. Nazel was equally adept at writing escapist pulpy fare like the Iceman series- whose hero is like a mixture of Willie Dynamite, James Bond and Howard Hughes- as he was grittier novels like Death for Hire and Killer Cop, which aren't afraid to look the black community's problems straight in the eye. Street Wars exists someplace between these two worlds. It's landscape is an all too real one of poverty, neglect and substance abuse, yet Slaughter and D.O.A are ultra-alpha, larger than life characters designed to give Nazel's audience heroes to believe in.

The more serious aspects of the book sees Nazel turn a disdainful eye towards the media savvy pastors that were emerging in the 1980s and the cronyism between them and the black press. Considering that Nazel himself was frequently involved in the black press in a journalistic capacity, there is an air of whistleblowing about Street Wars. Which critically depicts the black press as obsequiously following around corrupt and disingenuous figures. At which point villainery in the book alternates between Rev Blood and George Hill, a prominent businessman and apparent community champion. While decrying drug dealing and street gangs for the cameras, Hill is privately getting rich from running a crack empire from a fleet of ice cream trucks. Nazel also places heavy emphasis on Slaughter and D.O.A's base of operations, the Regal Arms hotel. A place frequented by affluent blacks during the thirties, forties and fifties, only to be abandoned by them once integration came along. "When the barriers lowered those that could integrate did. That's what it was all about" writes an angered Nazel "there was no sense of shame, no remorse, no sense of loss". Not only do Slaughter and D.O.A work out of the building, but they also serve as guardians to those left behind and of a place that once symbolised hope and prosperity. Like many of Nazel's heroes, Slaughter is reserved, underappreciated but dedicated to improving the lot of his community, even if the odds are against him, and his hard work isn't always reciprocated.

I don't know if the influence of 1980s buddy comedies was rubbing off on Nazel, but there is also a sense of humour in Street Wars that wasn't visible in his 1970s books. One of Blood's goons is called RamBro, which is reason alone to love this book. While a crazy streaker causes bare-assed chaos at a religious gathering being held by the Reverend Righteous B. Goodfellow...Nazel sure was at the top of his game here when it came to catchy character names. A bit of indecent exposure that in the book's funniest line causes a female parishioner to remark "wish my ol'man was hung that like! wouldn't have to come to church to get turned on".