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.