‘Men’s Adventure Quarterly,’ No. 13: Fatal Femmes

I recently received the 13th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, the excellent magazine series focused on men’s adventure magazines, now starting its fourth year of publication.

That’s a pretty good accomplishment. They have been very successful at getting out four issues a year for the past three years, and in putting out a well-designed publication as well.

This time, we get “fatal femmes” such as gun molls, black widows, pretty poisoners, kiss-me killers, and more, as we see on the cover. I see on the back cover that we get postage-stamp-size reproductions of the MAM covers for the issues that are featured in this issue. I think this is a first.

As with previous issues, MAQ is available in three formats: the full-color printed version, a black-and-white “noir edition,” and a full-color “digital replica edition.”

Full disclosure, I was sent a copy of the full-color edition. And I would encourage people to get this one over the black-and-white edition due to all the great color artwork.

Again, publisher Bob Deis (Men’s Adventure Library) and graphic designer Bill Cunningham (Pulp 2.0 Press) have another great issue. And their excellent intros to each piece are a big reason why this magazine series is so great. These intros get into the author, artist, and sometimes publisher behind that particular work. For me, I sometimes enjoy these more than the articles.

This time, they are joined by guest contributors Terrance Layhew and Eric Compton. Terrance Layhew is a podcaster and author who has recently done a new series starring Mitch Mayhew, and my review is coming up soon. I reviewed his earlier standalone work. Eric Compton runs the Paperback Warrior website and podcast.

Let’s first look at the fiction we get here. We get eight fiction pieces and an article by Compton on 10 novels that feature fatal femmes. The only works I was familiar with were Stephen King’s Misery and Mickey Spillane’s I, The Jury.

On fiction, with some of the wildest titles I recall so far, we get works like: “The Gun Moll Who Hated G-Men” by David Mazroff. We learn from the sidebar that Mazroff was a former con turned writer. He was involved in several holdups and even accused of murder. This story is based on “Ma” Barker, a real life crime matriarch from the 1930s and the subject of several movies.

We get a weird crime-noir tale in “Rich Lovers Wanted – Apply Madame Crielle, Champs Elysees” by W.J. Saber (Warren Shanahan). Shanahan is a former social worker who broke into the MAM field in the ’50s. Interestingly, he wrote one of The Phantom paperbacks (yes, the Lee Falk comic-strip character) and scripts for the Canadian animated series Rocket Robin Hood, among others.

“Kiss Me and Die” by Hiram J. Herbert is one of many stories based on a true one that appeared in MAMs. This time it’s the case of Violet Merryman, who teamed up with another prostitute and an AWOL airman for a string of deaths in eastern Virginia. But the sidebar article lets us know there was more to Merryman than most know. It’s like they say, truth is stranger than fiction.

I think the most bizarre title has to be “Blood for a Nympho’s Flesh.” The author is probably a pseudonym. This is your basic story of the hot wife wanting to get rid of her husband for another man. Will she get away with it?

And I think the runner-up for bizarre titles is “The Incredible Norwegian Ice Nymphs,” set in World War II. The author, Dean W. Ballenger, started his writing career with Western pulps before moving to MAMs. He also did a short-lived men’s adventure paperback series called Gannon.

I was a bit puzzled by the inclusion of the story by Don Honig, as it appeared not in a MAM but a digest fiction magazine — in this case, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. But reading the sidebar helps make sense. Honig was a wannabe baseball player who instead became a writer, mainly in the MAMs, but also in magazines like Alfred Hitchcock’s, and then became a noted baseball historian. Speaking with the author, he suggested this tale that would fit the theme. I think it does, but in a different way.

Several pulp authors made the transition to MAMs, and one example is Paul Chadwick. He’s probably best known for writing several pulp-hero series such as Wade Hammond, Secret Agent X, and Captain Hazzard. But for the MAMs, he only wrote three works, one being “The Ever-Lovin’ Nude Who Watched Her Boyfriends Die.” The sidebar focused on Chadwick’s pulp career and the series he did there.

And from Mario Puzo, best known for The Godfather, we get one of the works he did before there under the pseudonym Mario Cleri for Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management Co. Yeah, the guy who established Timely, Atlas, and Marvel Comics also did MAMs (and pulps). The sidebar article looks at another work he did, “Six Graves to Munich,” which was turned into the 1982 movie, A Time to Die. But what we get this time is “Vendetta on the Street of Lonely Frauleins,” which stars Scarlet Tracy, a sort of female James Bond type. The sidebar wonders why this wasn’t made into a movie, and I would agree with that.

For this issue’s gallery, Terrance Layhew looks at Bond girls that went deadly. I think I’ve rarely seen Bond girl lists that include characters like Rosa Klebb from From Russia With Love.  Yeah, she’s a girl in a Bond movie, but… And I’m not sure about the inclusion of Kara Milovy from The Living Daylights, as she was less a fatal femme than a patsy. It’s another good gallery.

So another winner from this team.

I see that the next issue will focus on Bigfoot. I especially look forward to this one, as I recall a lot of stuff about Bigfoot and his “cousins,” like the Swamp Ape/Skunk Ape in Florida and other areas, like the Fouke Monster in Arkansas (aka The Legend of Boggy Creek) when I was a kid in the ’70s. So this one should be great, like their UFO issue.