Содержание
Приемы торговли
Голое и смертельное введение
«Королева кораблей-клиперов»
«Величайшая корабельная катастрофа в американской истории»
«Она тебя не хочет!»
«Круиз для 137 трупов»
Они называли его «Королем боли»»
«Убийцы вокруг меня»
«Обнаженные и смертоносные»
“Просто шопинг в витринах”
«Мальчишник»
«Девочки-близнецы по вызову»
«Великий Стамбульский золотой захват»
«Привлекайте девчонок»
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Tricks of the Trade
A Naked and Deadly Introduction
“Queen of the Clipper Ships”
“The Greatest Ship Disaster in American History”
“She Doesn’t Want You!”
“Pleasure Cruise for 137 Corpses”
They Called Him ‘King of Pain’”
“Killers All Around Me”
“The Naked and the Deadly”
“Just Window Shopping”
“Stag Party Girl”
“Twin Call Girls”
“Great Istanbul Gold Grab”
“Bring On the Girls”
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A New Texture book
Copyright No 2023 Subtropic Productions LLC
Stories and Introduction No 1958, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1967, 1968, 1974, 2023 Lawrence Block. All rights reserved.
Archival materials supplied by The Robert Deis Archive
All Rights Reserved.
Cover: Detail from “Bring on the Girls” by Bruce Minney
Designed by Wyatt Doyle
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MensAdventureLibrary.com MensPulpMags.com
Booksellers: The Naked and the Deadly and other
New Texture books are available through Ingram Book Co.
ISBN 978-1-943444-65-6
First ebook edition: May 2023
This book is also available as a deluxe, expanded hardcover with additional material
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Men’s Adventure Magazines [MAMs]
A bona fide publishing phenomenon that emerged in the 1950s and thrived through the 1970s, the tropes and aesthetic estblished by men’s adventure magazines (MAMs) have proven so durable and have been absorbed so totally into the American consciousness that even decades after their demise, MAMs remain an incontestable—if invisible—hand behind key events and directions in entertainment and popular culture.
Incorporating the colorful, eye-catching cover paintings and pulse-pounding action/adventure fiction of pre-World War II pulp fiction magazines, MAMs added non-fiction adventures to the mix, and blurred the line between the two by frequently claiming the outrageous, high-octane fiction was also true, even when such claims were implausible, preposterous, or demonstrably false. This blend quickly became standard for the genre, and pulp “fact” ran side by side with pulp fiction.
The MAM formula cannily incorporated aspects of other popular magazines that appealed to the working-class readership they targeted, including racy “bachelor” and pin-up mags, outdoor and travel periodicals, true crime and detective magazines, and celebrity scandal rags.
The format was adopted by multiple publishers, who produced magazines of varying quality. All told, more than 160 different periodicals fit the classification. Some lasted decades, others, only a few issues—or just one. While the more lurid varieties (sometimes called “sweats” or “sweat mags”) often draw the most attention (and criticism), the range and quality of MAM content is more varied than is generally understood.
Though dismissed in their time as downmarket, lowbrow entertainment, the magazines were an enduring success, enjoyed by millions of readers over three decades. MAMs published popular writers of the day, and artwork by many of the era’s top illustration artists. The terse, hard-boiled intensity of the writing and the dynamic, explosive, and racy illustration art—on their covers and in their pages—are essential to their appeal, then and now. The potency of these words and images remains undiminished; their excesses still spark gobsmacked wonder, and their artistry inspires fascination on its own terms.
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Contents
Tricks of the Trade
by Wyatt Doyle and Robert Deis
A Naked and Deadly Introduction
by Lawrence Block
“Queen of the Clipper Ships”
attributed to Sheldon Lord
From REAL MEN April 1958
“The Greatest Ship Disaster in American History”
written as Sheldon Lord
From REAL MEN April 1958
“She Doesn’t Want You!”
written as Sheldon Lord
From REAL MEN June 1958
“Pleasure Cruise for 137 Corpses”
written as Sheldon Lord
From REAL MEN November 1958
They Called Him ‘King of Pain’”
written as Sheldon Lord
From ALL MAN May 1961
“Killers All Around Me”
written as CC Jones
From ALL MAN September 1961
“The Naked and the Deadly”
From MAN’S MAGAZINE October 1962
“Just Window Shopping”
written as Sheldon Lord
From MAN’S MAGAZINE December 1962
“Stag Party Girl”
From MAN’S MAGAZINE February 1963
“Twin Call Girls”
From MAN’S MAGAZINE August 1963
“Great Istanbul Gold Grab”
From FOR MEN ONLY March 1967
“Bring On the Girls”
From STAG July 1968
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“Tricks of the Trade”
by Wyatt Doyle and Robert Deis
Hellish disasters at sea. Human monsters in swastika and jackboots. The unvarnished realities of prostitution. Life in an asylum’s violent ward. International intrigue and white-knuckle adventure. Party girls who turn up dead. Randy stewardesses and sex at 12,000 feet.
The focus and subject matter of mid-century men’s adventure magazines (MAMs) were wide-ranging, and versatile storytellers able to confidently navigate varied genres, approaches, and authorial voices found regular, lucrative work in their pages. Among those talented writers was a notable newcomer named Lawrence Block—though his initial pieces would see print under pseudonyms.
Not the Lawrence Block you know, who is among the most widely read, respected, and celebrated writers of crime and mystery fiction in the world. Internationally read and internationally honored, upon whom the Mystery Writers of America bestowed the title of Grand Master. A storyteller with over 65 years of professional experience in damn near every mode of written expression, whose essays, magazine columns, and non-fiction books focused on the art, craft, and business of writing have endured to inform generations. Not that Lawrence Block.
Not yet.
MAMS could be a good fit for a young writer. Block’s initial pieces appeared in magazines published by Stanley Morse, whose company Stanley Publications, Inc. gained notoriety for putting out some of the extreme horror comic books that sparked the anti-comics hysteria that led to Congressional hearings and the 1954 Comics Code, which prohibited bloody violence and sex in comic books.
Morse responded by toning down his comics and amping up the blood-and-guts quotient of his magazines for adult men. He transformed the Stanley comic Battle Cry into a MAM of the same name and launched a number of other pioneering titles, including All Man, Champion for Men, Man’s Adventure, Man’s Best, Man’s Look, Man’s Prime, Men in Combat, Men in Conflict, Real Men, Real War, Rugged, Rugged Men, Spur, True Battles of World War II, True Men Stories, and War Criminals.
Morse would become the second-largest publisher of MAMs after Martin Goodman, who started out publishing pulp magazines and comics (including Marvel). Beginning in the early 1950s, Goodman’s Magazine Management Company published a long list of popular MAMs, such as Action for Men, Battlefield, Complete Man, For Men Only, Hunting Adventures, Ken for Men, Male, Man’s World, Men, Men in Action, Stag, and True Action.
MAMs published by Morse and Goodman weathered a changing marketplace across three decades, holding on until the MAM format faded away in the late 1970s.
AT THE core of all MAMs was a dedication to covering any subject thought to be of interest to American men at the time—a strategy to appeal to the largest possible readership by including a little of everything. They cast wide nets for content, offering fiction and non-fiction that played to popular and established interests and curiosities, along with pin-up photos, gag cartoons, and more. The magazines’ content is best remembered today for tough, pulpy fiction, war stories, survival sagas, and “Weasels Ripped My Flesh”-style animal attack yarns, but MAM non-fiction was an essential and popular aspect of the magazines, and came in as many varieties as MAM fiction: celebrity gossip, biographical profiles, travel pieces, advances in technology and medicine, cryptozoological sightings and UFO-related developments…even mad-as-hell consumer advocacy had a place. As long as an idea could be reasonably tied into the broad category of male interest, there was room for it.
Men like sex, so MAMs included plenty of it, packing as much into the magazines as could safely pass muster with the laws, social mores, and postal regulations of the era. In a time when frank exploration of the subject could be difficult to come by, part of MAMs’ appeal was as a venue where relatively adult discussions of sex and sexuality could be found—often presented salaciously, but safely within the accepted standards of the era. Publishers knew where lawmakers (and postal censors) drew the line, and even seedier MAMs with lower standards knew to toe that line or face serious legal consequences.
MAMs focused heavily on escapist entertainment and male-oriented fantasy. They offered a portal to other lives and imaginary places where excitement was everywhere and casual sex with desirable partners was easy and frequent. Directly and indirectly, they catered to male erotic fantasies from conventional to kink, making up for what they couldn’t baldly say or show by emphasizing sex in every kind of content in their pages, sexualizing most situations involving women. Even an otherwise straightforward adventure like “Queen of the Clipper Ships” has a prominent component of sexual threat that is the source of much of the story’s tension.
THE LINE between MAM fiction and non-fiction pieces could accurately be described as fluid. MAM fiction was frequently presented as factual accounts, and MAM non-fiction was prone to heavy exaggeration, even outright invention.
Though MAMs were not cynical, editorial voices were presented as informed and experienced, at times judgmental. A barracks-room familiarity was typical, with readers encouraged to trust the magazines for the straight dope on everything from sex to insurance scams to international tensions, with consumer reports and fraud warnings regularly found among the hard-boiled fiction, illustration art, and pin-up photos. Exposés and accounts of historical tragedies and disasters were popular, and when the guilty party was a specific person or company (as opposed to enemy forces or fate), a bit of good old fashioned finger pointing lent a fresh edge to dusty historical accounts.
Whether the blame could be laid at the feet of moneyed fat cats looking to save a buck or workers simply failing to do their jobs, righteous indignation proved as consistently alluring to MAM readers as accounts of wartime action or animal attack fiction. [See “The Greatest Ship Disaster in American History” and “Pleasure Cruise for 137 Corpses”.]
Like most of these early pieces, Block’s “She Doesn’t Want You!” was written as Sheldon Lord. It is part of another notable MAM lineage: Exposés and firsthand tell-alls about taboo and forbidden subjects; in this instance, prostitution.
Since many mid-century American males were World War II veterans, Nazis were a staple of both the magazines’ fictional and fact-based features. Non-fiction profiles of notable figures both heroic and notorious appeared regularly in MAMs, and Block’s brief but potent look at the life and crimes of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s “Blond Beast”, appears to be his only foray into biographical sketches for the magazines.
Considering MAMs’ emphasis on all things tough and manly, extreme and dangerous jobs cropped up frequently in the pages of MAMs, both as dramatic settings in short fiction and in fact-based articles. Block dipped a toe in with 1961’s “Killers All Around Me”, written from the perspective of a mental institution employee and chronicling physical threats encountered on the job. Published as “CC Jones,” Block submitted the story with the byline “CO Jones,” but an editor with at least a passing familiarity with Spanish seemed to catch the author’s risque wordplay en español (“CO Jones” = cojones) and sanitized the pseudonym for print.
“Just Window Shopping” is a brief and unsettling account told from the perspective of a peeping tom, a most unreliable narrator. Despite its first-person trappings, the story is unexpectedly presented as a work of fiction and credited to Sheldon Lord, a name that until then Block had only applied to non-fiction.
IN CLASSIC pulp magazines, novels were sometimes serialized over the course of several issues before they were published in book form. By the 1950s, pulps had waned and the men’s adventure magazine genre was taking shape. MAMs continued some pulp traditions, most notably, eyeball-grabbing painted covers and lots of action/adventure fiction stories. But MAMs didn’t serialize novels.
Instead, MAMs published Book Bonus versions of novels and some non-fiction books of interest to their male readers. Typically, these were drawn from books that had already been published. Sometimes they were promoted as versions of soon-to-be-published novels, or books soon to be made into movies. Other times, they were condensed versions of existing movie tie-in novels for films that were recent hits.
Most Book Bonus stories were published by MAMs with circulations in the hundreds of thousands and budgets that allowed them to pay for reprint rights to novels and other books. Those included the top-tier MAMs like Argosy, Bluebook, Cavalier, and True, and mid-tier MAMs such as Pyramid’s flagship MAM Man’s Magazine, and Martin Goodman’s popular Magazine Management MAMs. Most of the bottom tier of MAMs, with circulations of 50,000 to 100,000 or so, had budgets too slim to pay for Book Bonus reprints.
MAMs that did feature Book Bonus stories usually trumpeted them in their cover headlines, especially when they were by writers who were famous or at least well known to fans of crime and action/adventure novels. Even a short list of some of the best-selling authors who had Book Bonus stories in MAMs would include Nelson Algren, Louis L’Amour, Michael Avallone, Lawrence Block, Carter Brown, Erskine Caldwell, Brett Halliday (David Dresser), Ian Fleming, Joseph Heller, Frank Kane, Day Keene, Philip Ketchum, Alistair Maclean, Norman Mailer, Richard Matheson, Richard S. Prather, Ellery Queen, Quentin Reynolds, Robert Ruark, Mickey Spillane, and Donald Westlake.
Goodman MAMs would add a new wrinkle to the concept: Book Bonuses for imaginary books. Touted as novels soon to be published (or soon to be adapted for upcoming movies), it’s doubtful that readers ever noticed these novels never were published—much as most didn’t notice (or didn’t care) that many MAM stories presented as true (and accompanied by editor’s notes and photos to support that illusion) were entirely fictional. What mattered to readers was whether the story delivered.
For the authors of books that actually existed, Book Bonuses offered the dual advantage of an extra fee and some additional publicity. Typically, the publication of these shortened versions was arranged by the author’s agent. Sometimes the agent provided the shortened version, sometimes the edited version of the text was created by the editors of the magazines.
One special aspect of MAM Book Bonus stories is that they were frequently accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by top MAM illustration artists, rather than the actual books’ cover art. MAM editors usually made up their own title for the Book Bonus version to fit the high-octane, often sexually tantalizing style of the genre. Thus, the Book Bonus version of Lawrence Block’s first Evan Tanner novel, published in 1966 as The Spy Who Couldn’t Sleep, became “Great Istanbul Gold Grab” in the March 1967 For Men Only. The Book Bonus version of “The Scoreless Thai” from the 1968 Tanner novel Two for Tanner was titled “Bring on the Girls” in Stag, July 1968.
UNLIKE the pulps that preceded them, MAMs usually did not have recurring characters in stories unless they were Book Bonus versions of novels constructed around characters like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott, Donald Westlake’s Parker, and Block’s Evan Tanner. The Ed London stories by Block are an exception. They are unusual because they were first published in MAMs, but didn’t appear in book form until many years later.
Lawrence Block has another unusual credit in the realm of stories that connect MAMs and books. Early in their careers, Block and fellow scribe Robert Silverberg (later a Science Fiction Grand Master) both jumped on the ever-popular “sexology studies” bandwagon sparked by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), generally called The Kinsey Reports.
Block would write a series of fascinating faux—but seemingly well-researched and very cogent—books of sexual studies under the pseudonym Dr. Benjamin Morse. They included The Lesbian (1961), The Homosexual (1962), The Sexually Promiscuous Female (1963), The Sexually Promiscuous Male (1963), Sexual Behavior of the American College Girl (1963), and Adolescent Sexual Behavior (1964).
Silverberg also wrote sexology and sex advice books under the name L.T. Woodward, whose books include 1001 Answers to Vital Sex Questions (1962), Sex and the Armed Forces (1963), Sex and the Divorced Woman (Non-fiction, 1964), and I Am a Nymphomaniac (1965).
Excerpts from the sexology books penned by Block and Silverberg showed up as articles in MAMs, sometimes identified as Book Bonus stories, sometimes not.
Capitalizing on the sexual revolution then underway, between 1968 and 1973 Block wrote another series of sex-related books, this time under the name John Warren Wells. Wells’ books include Eros and Capricorn (1968), The New Sexual Underground (1968), Sex and the Stewardess (1969), Comparative Sex Techniques (1971), and Come Fly with Us (1972), the sequel to Sex and the Stewardess. Portions of the Wells books were also published as articles in MAMs, sometimes with the book source identified, sometimes not. Many of those books include introductions or quotes by—who else?—the esteemed sex studies expert, Dr. Benjamin Morse.
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“A Naked and Deadly Introduction”
by Lawrence Block
For five bucks a week, I chose Scott Meredith over Henry Luce.
Well, in a manner of speaking. It was the summer of 1957. After spending the month of July on Cape Cod, where I wrote a batch of short stories before hunger prompted me to take a horrible job in a restaurant, I quit and headed back to my parents’ house in Buffalo. I’d bought my first car, a 1953 Buick, in order to drive to the Cape, and I cracked it up en route to Buffalo, where I sold it and got on a train to New York. I found a furnished room on East 19th Street and set about looking for a job.
I had turned 19 in June, and had completed two years at Antioch College. Antioch had (and still has) a work-study program; students spend about half their time on campus and the other half getting real-life experience in jobs in their field. My first co-op job had been a year earlier, at Pines Publications, publishers of the Popular Library paperback line and a great array of magazines. I’d spent three months in the mail room, which gave me practical experience as a clerk and gofer, neither of which much appealed to me as a career choice. But Pines was a publishing company, and I knew I wanted to be a writer, and that wasn’t the worst place to start.
Two months in, the fellow in charge of promotion and publicity told me his assistant was leaving at the end of the month, and wondered if I’d like to take his place. When I admitted I was scheduled to return to college, he assured me I should stick with my plans—and I did, but not without some reluctance. I liked school well enough, but from the jump I was impatient to Get Out There and Do Something.
What I did in August was look for something to do—and, back in Buffalo, my folks tried to lend a helping hand. Ralph Tolleris, a fraternity brother of my dad’s at Cornell, was married to a woman who did something significant at Time-Life, and eventually she and I spoke over the phone. I’d spent a week responding to classified ads, and figured I’d be able to get an office job that would pay me $65 a week. Beebe Tolleris was able to offer me a job as a copy boy at Time Magazine. I’d work 9 to 5, Wednesdays through Sundays, with Monday and Tuesday off, and I’d make $60 a week.
I said I thought I’d keep looking.
Now it wasn’t the five pre-tax dollars a week, not really. It was a deep disinclination to take a job through family connections, because what if I screwed up? What if I got fired? And so on. And yes, a path to success often started as a copy boy at Time, much as careers in the film business began in the mailroom at William Morris, but on the first of November I’d be back on campus in Yellow Springs, Ohio, so what was a menial job at Time going to do for me?
Next thing I knew I’d taken a test and landed a position as an editorial associate at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. There’s an interesting story that goes with it, but I tell it at length in A Writer Prepares, where you can find it at leisure. I got the job—and yes, the base pay was $65 a week, and if you exceeded your quota you could bring in ten or twenty dollars over that figure.
But that was the least of it. I had fallen into what I have never ceased to believe was the best possible job for anyone with career aspirations in any area of writing or publishing. By the time August had given way to September, as it so often does, I knew I wasn’t going back to Antioch, not in November and very likely not ever. It was a good school and they had a lot to teach me, but I was already in the right place to learn what I really wanted to know.
I was at my desk at 580 Fifth Avenue five days a week, reading the stories of wannabe writers who paid Scott to read their work. They didn’t get Scott, they got me or one of my colleagues, and it was our job to read their stories and tell them why they were unsalable, but that we’d welcome more submissions—each, of course, accompanied by the requisite fee. I’d do that until five o’clock, and then I’d go home and write stories of my own. I’d bring these to the office and give them to Henry Morrison, and he’d read them and send them to one editor or another, and most of the time they’d sell for a cent a word, sometimes a cent and a half, bringing me something like thirty or forty or fifty or sixty dollars—but the money wasn’t the point. I was writing fiction! I was selling it, and it was getting published!
In addition to the stories I wrote of my own initiative, sometimes an editor would call the office with an assignment. He needed 2500 words to fill a hole in an issue that was about to go to press, say, or he had a terrific idea and needed someone to write it up. A shipwreck, or a disaster, or a Very Bad Man—generally something it would never occur to me to write, but more often than not an occasion to which I was prepared to rise.
A fellow named Ted Hecht, at a company called Stanley Publications, was the source of most of these assignments. The Scott Meredith offices were at Fifth Avenue and 47th Street, and the New York Public Library was five short blocks to the south, and I would walk there and consult the card catalog and fill out a slip to request a couple of books, and read enough to go home and write an article. That’s how most of these articles came about.
But not quite all of them. The first one you’ll find is “Queen of the Clipper Ships,” and the byline is Sheldon Lord, the name I used on most of these pieces. But the article itself, I assure you, is one I read for the first time in a pre-publication PDF of this very book. I’d never seen it before, and I certainly never wrote it.
Now I’m unquestionably getting on in years. If I was 19 in 1957, well, you can do the math. And my memory has aged along with the rest of me, and it’s among the component parts thereof that no longer function as well as they once did. There are things I don’t remember all that clearly, and others I recall imperfectly. But in this instance I can say with absolute certainty that “Queen of the Clipper Ships” is not my work. It’s listed in Terry Zobeck’s bibliography of my work, A Trawl Among the Shelves, because anyone encountering it with Sheldon Lord’s byline on it would certainly assume it was mine. I thought as much myself, until I finally took an actual look at it.
But it’s not.
So who wrote it, only to have Ted Hecht hang someone else’s pen name on it? I’ve no idea, and I suspect anyone who ever might have known has long since spiraled on to another incarnation. You’ll note that it appears in the same issue with another shipwreck story, the General Slocum disaster, and slapping the same byline on both pieces is the sort of thing that can happen when an editor’s in enough of a hurry to get copy to the printer. But never mind. I got $75 for “The Greatest Ship Disaster in American History,” and I can but presume that the actual author of “Queen of the Clipper Ships” got as much for what he wrote, and that it didn’t pain him too much to see the credit go to somebody else.
And now I’m comfortable enough seeing it here in this volume, helping to add a little heft to the book, perhaps making it that much more rewarding an experience for You the Reader. Did I write it? Well, no, but here it is, in my book, still wearing my longstanding pen name. So I think we can safely say it’s mine. And, should anyone reading this be seized by the urge to reprint this stirring tale, my response would be the same as if you expressed similar interest in any of the book’s other contents. I am, after all, a reasonable man. I’ll listen to offers.
Ah yes. I learned a great deal from Scott Meredith…
Besides the articles—which, I have to say, would be much easier to write now, in the era of Google and Wikipedia—you’ll find some of my early fiction in this volume. There are in fact three novelettes that feature a New York-based private detective named Ed London.
His origins are complex, and perhaps interesting. I left my job at Scott Meredith after a little less than a year, arranged to return to Antioch in the fall of 1958, and in the interim went home to Buffalo and wrote my first novel. (It’s in print now as Shadows, by Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson; it was initially published in 1959 with a different title and pen name.) By the time I was back in Yellow Springs, I’d begun writing erotic novels for Midwood Books as—yes—Sheldon Lord, and one way or another I wrote and drank and smoked my way out of Ohio by the end of that none-too-academic year. I wound up, first in Buffalo and then in New York, making a living by writing novels.
Henry at Scott Meredith was still my agent, and the occasional source of an assignment. One was a TV tie-in novel, a book to be published as a paperback original and capitalizing on a television show, in this case one called Markham and starring Ray Milland. (This was not a novelization, which would consist of turning an existing dramatic script into a prose novel; I was to take the character Ray Milland played and come up with my own story for him.)
By the time I’d finished the book, I wondered if it might be too good to sell to the low-rent house that had commissioned it. I showed it to my friend Don Westlake, who encouraged me to show it to Henry, who sent it to Knox Burger at Gold Medal, who’d already bought my first crime novel. (Mona, later retitled Grifter’s Game.) Knox asked for some fixes, including changing the hero’s name from Roy Markham. I picked Ed London, and made the other changes he wanted, and Gold Medal brought it out as Death Pulls a Doublecross. (And later it became Coward’s Kiss. Plus c’est la même chose, dontcha know.)
But then I owed a book to Belmont, a book starring Roy Markham. So I had to write it, and, well, never mind. I did what I had to do, and by then Ray Milland’s show was canceled anyway, but Belmont published it as Markham and I’ve since republished it as You Could Call It Murder.
So there I was, with a guy named Ed London who could go on to star in a series of Private Eye novels, if only I could write them. And I tried, but it never worked. I don’t know why. What I did manage to write was a novelette, and it sold to Man’s Magazine. That was a decent sale to a decent market, and in the ensuing months I managed two more Ed London novelettes, and they went to the same place. And that was as much as I ever had to say about Ed London—except for all the times I’ve recounted this story, which may well add up to more words (if to no more purpose) than all three novelettes and the novel itself.
And what else have we here?
“Just Window Shopping” is an early crime story, and probably one that failed to sell to one of my regular penny-a-word markets; someone evidently dug it out and sent to Man’s, and it landed there. “Great Istanbul Gold Grab” and “Bring On the Girls” are extracts from The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep and The Scoreless Thai, both novels in my Evan Tanner series.
And there you have it. Naked? Yeah, pretty much. Deadly? You betcha.
And by Lawrence Block?
Well, mostly…
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“Queen of the Clipper Ships”
The crew of the Neptune’s Car had a right to be proud of their ship. She was an extreme clipper, the largest in her class, measuring 216 feet from stem to stern. The finest Georgia pine had been used in her careful construction. Her spars were long and sturdy, stretching broad sails skyward—she had been designed to achieve the swiftest speed possible.
Proud as they were of their ship, they had even more reason to be proud of their captain. Joshua Patten was world-famed as the “Boy Wonder of the Sea.” In an age when Clipper Ships were the lions of the sea and the captain was king of his ship, the eyes of the nation were on the men at the helms of the graceful Yankee Clippers. Joshua Patten was such a man.
Born in 1827, he was a ship’s officer before his twentieth birthday. At twenty-five, he had the distinction of becoming the youngest of the Clipper Ship captains—a breed of men with salt water in their veins and cast iron in their bones.
Four years later, in 1856, Patten was pitted against Captain Gardner of the Intrepid, in a race that was to make history. Today, that race makes the famous annual race at Indianapolis Speedway look like a “Snowshoe Walkathon.” The owners of the two ships had their fortunes invested in the outcome of the race, and the first ship to make the trip from New York to San Francisco would haul in the whole pot. It was a rich prize, and Patten had his heart set on it.
Even though Josh Patten was only twenty-nine, the years of hard work and responsibility had put lines in his face and wrinkles in his forehead. He was tall and lank, with sandy hair and a strong, prominent chin. His shoulders were slumped, but his eyes were as bright and shining as a boy’s. The race was the biggest challenge in his career, but he was confident. He was confident of his ship, his crew, and his own proven ability.
He was, in fact, so sure of himself that he brought his 17-year-old bride along. His wife, Mary, was a blue-eyed blonde with a figure that was as trim as the Neptune’s Car, in a different way, of course. She and Patten had been married just four months at the time of the voyage, and perhaps it’s no great wonder that he wanted her along.
To Patten, the trip promised to be a routine one. Despite the high stakes, the fact remained that the Intrepid was no match for the Neptune’s Car. But a sailor by the name of Paul Haggerty was to change everything.
Several days before the two ships weighed anchor, Patten’s regular first mate had failed to show up. Haggerty was soon on hand to take his place. The shuffling, hard-drinking Irishman had been hired by Gardner of the Intrepid to make sure that the Neptune’s Car reached Frisco with her topsail dragging. An ideal choice for such a role, he was a man who would do anything for a price. Sabotage was a little out of his line, but Haggerty had no qualms about trying his hand at it.
ON JUNE 30, the order was given to weigh anchor. The Neptune’s Car and the Intrepid eased slowly down the East River. The sky was overcast and there was a light wind behind them. They drew abreast off Sandy Hook, and crew members of the two ships exchanged challenges, catcalls, and insults. Then Patten ordered the sails unfurled, and the Neptune’s Car drew away swiftly. By eleven in the morning, the Intrepid’s foretopsail was barely visible. By noon she was lost from sight.
Patten jubilantly turned over the helm to his newly-acquired first mate, and Haggerty repaid the trust with avid interest. He neatly steered the ship several degrees off course. It was several hours before the error was discovered, and progress was considerably cut.
Patten was furious. He righted the ship and severely reprimanded Haggerty. The saboteur skillfully apologized. “Just a mistake,” he explained. “If I never made mistakes, I’d be a famous captain like yourself,” he smiled. Patten was unused to flattery, and he passed over the incident.
Minutes later, Haggerty had his first encounter with Mary Patten. She entered her husband’s cabin just as Haggerty was leaving it, and the two collided with an impact that sent them both sprawling to the deck. While Mary apologized, the First Mate let his eyes wander insolently over her body. “My pleasure,” he said, jauntily. “Hope I bump into you again!”
As the Neptune’s Car raced steadily southward, with a good wind at her back, a rash of “accidents” cropped up to plague the captain. On the second day out, Haggerty went to work on the spanker boom, and the sail burst loose in the middle of the night. The crew worked feverishly on the sail, with the loss of a good deal of precious time.
THAT same night, a fire broke out in the paint locker. A deckhand spotted the blaze before any great damage could be done, but time was lost in extinguishing it.
Every night was the occasion for another “mishap.” First a shroud line would loosen—then a stay would become unpinned. It seemed as though nautical gremlins were plaguing the vessel, as if the Fates were determined to win the race for the Intrepid. Accidents are frequent aboard ship, however, and Haggerty wasn’t suspected. Although Patten sensed that something was definitely wrong, he had no grounds to believe that any crewman was at fault. He merely redoubled his efforts, and the Neptune’s Car sailed on. The Intrepid was still nowhere in sight.
At last another incident occurred—one which made it painfully obvious that there was a saboteur aboard. A reading of the sextant revealed that the ship was far off course, and Patten discovered that someone had magnetized the compass with the blade of a penknife. He ordered a search of the crew, but the knife was nowhere to be found. It was Haggerty’s knife, of course, but it rested safely on the bottom of the ocean.
Each mishap served only to spur Patten on, renewing his vigor and determination. He worked as though possessed by demons, driving himself and his men to the limit of their endurance.
Favorable winds took the clipper’s sails, and the ship made its way across the Equator and down the coast of South America. The treacherous waters of Cape Horn lay ahead, followed by the final sprint to Frisco.
Haggerty became desperate. He drank more heavily than ever—his eyes were like those of an animal, vicious and bloodshot. He had to stop Patten, yet it seemed impossible. There was only one answer. Small doses of foul play would never do the trick—Patten was too excellent a sailor to bow to them. The captain would have to go.
Haggerty had another reason to get rid of Patten. With the captain out of the way, his wife might provide Haggerty excellent companionship for the cold nights at sea. He needed women, just as he needed liquor. Every glimpse of the lush, young beauty increased his desire for her. All the rum in the world couldn’t decrease it.
While Patten attempted to inflame the crew with the drive to beat out the Intrepid, Haggerty worked against him to undermine their morale. As Patten raced the ship faster and faster, fighting desperately against the rash of mishaps, the first mate spread the rumor that Patten was an egotistical tyrant, solely concerned with the race at hand. He intimated that the captain was slowly but surely driving his men to death.
Finally, Haggerty pressed for a liberty stop on the coast of Argentina. This was out of the question, and Patten told him so. The first mate grew sullen and morose, and denounced Patten so roundly that the captain had no alternative but to order him below.
PATTEN was a mild man with his crew, but he did not and would not tolerate insubordination. Besides, he was beginning to associate Haggerty with the “accidents.” Despite lack of proof, he finally saw the first mate for what he really was.
As Haggerty shuffled back to his cabin, he passed Mary Patten on her way to the deck. The weeks without a woman were telling on him, and he came so close to the captain’s wife that he could smell her. The slim roundness of her figure and the jut of her breasts inflamed him—it was all he could do to keep from grabbing her then and there. He contained himself, however. But that night, he graduated from sabotage to a “higher level” of evil. He poured a small envelope of poison, graciously supplied by the owner of the Intrepid for just such an occasion, over Patten’s food.
That night the ship entered the waters of Cape Horn, at the southernmost tip of South America. Those were rough, unpredictable waters, and they spelled doom for more than one clipper. On that same night the color faded from Joshua Patten’s weather-beaten cheeks. He wobbled on his long legs, the poison penetrating his system, robbing him of his vitality and sapping his strength.
This weakening did not pass unnoticed by the crew, and no doubt Haggerty would have brought it to their attention if it had. Most of them attributed it to the rigors of the voyage, but one crewman laid the blame to “too much bed and not enough sleep.” All were agreed on one point—Captain Joshua Patten was a weak man.
Patten recognized this. He knew that he was physically incapable of taking charge of the ship all by himself, but there seemed to be no other choice. The second mate was too green to take over, and all the crew was completely untrained for the job. Only Haggerty could be entrusted with the responsibility, and Patten could not see his way clear to trust the first mate with anything.
He didn’t confide his suspicions to Mary, for he couldn’t back them up. She saw only his stubborn attitude, and feared that he was killing himself. She argued with him continually as the sickness got progressively worse. Finally, she was able to convince him to place Haggerty in command.
Mary hurried to Haggerty’s cabin to order him to the helm, and found him in his characteristic attire. He was stripped to the waist, with his hand gripping a half-emptied jug of rum. Seeing Mary in his cabin doorway, he put two and two together, and came up with five.
“Hi,” he said. “Have a seat.” He gestured drunkenly to the bed, but Mary remained standing.
“I knew you’d come around,” he went on. “You’re too much of a woman for the captain to handle. He’s all tuckered out.” He laughed and took a step in her direction, reaching out for her.
Mary started to back away, but the Irishman was too fast for her. He slammed the door and pulled her into the room. His arms closed around her waist and pressed her to him. He forced a long kiss upon her lips. She struggled, but he only gripped her tighter.
“Don’t fight,” he commanded. He pinned her arms behind her back and forced her down to the bunk. He kissed her again, and his rum-soaked breath filled her with nausea. Pinning her to the bed, he clasped one hand over her mouth and fumbled with the buttons on her dress with the other. She could neither move nor call for help.
THEN two things happened almost simultaneously. It was as though Providence was determined to protect the virtue of Mary Patten. First, the ship took a tremendous roll which heaved Haggerty limp upon the floor. Then, seconds later Joshua Patten himself strode into the room, his eyes blazing.
Not even Haggerty could explain his way out of the situation. He tried to put the blame on the roll of the ship, but not even a tidal wave could have had such an effect on Mary’s clothing. Patten sent Mary back to her cabin, and bluntly informed Haggerty that a repeat performance would result in his death. The first mate only grinned.
Despite the incident, Patten had no choice but to turn the ship over to Haggerty. The roll which saved Mary was the initial blow of a violent hurricane, a common feature of the Horn. The poison had thoroughly permeated Patten’s system, to the point of temporarily blinding him. Guiding the ship was too much for even him, and he was forced to finally admit it. Reluctantly, he turned the helm over to Haggerty’s eager hands and collapsed in his cabin.
The hurricane made things easy for Haggerty. He wouldn’t have to limit himself to sabotage any more. The storm afforded, a perfect excuse to put to port on the Argentinian coast. Such a delay would knock the Neptune’s Car out of the race, and the Intrepid would win without difficulty.
Seconds after Patten had regained consciousness, Haggerty burst into his cabin with the announcement that he had given orders to turn the ship around and put to port in Rio Grande. There was, he explained, no sense whatsoever in fighting the storm. It was a shame that the race would be lost, but that was the only course.
Joshua Patten was enraged. Not only would such a move lose the race and the prize that went with it, but it would place the ship in an even more perilous position. With the hurricane at her back, the Neptune’s Car would have the cards stacked against her. Shipwreck and loss of life would be almost a certainty.
Patten had his back to the wall. If he countermanded Haggerty’s order, who could pilot the ship? He tried to get up from his bunk and take over control himself, but he was too weak to stand. He pulled the covers over his body and gave the order to continue on course to San Francisco.
Haggerty returned to the deck and screamed that Patten was incompetent. He ranted to the crew that the fever had damaged the captain’s brain until he was no longer responsible for his words or actions. Mutiny was the only answer. Accordingly, he and several representatives of the crew presented Patten with the ultimatum: tum back willingly or submit to mutiny.
At that moment, Joshua Patten seemed an old man. His hair was touched with gray—the strength had ebbed from his body—all of his vigor was gone. But he would not be beaten.
He sat up in bed. He turned from one man to the other, fixing his eyes rigidly upon them. He did not say a word. Haggerty was unmoved by his action, but the members of the crew squirmed under his glance. The veins stood out on his forehead, the sweat poured from him, and his eyes burned from one man to another.
Then he spoke. First, he ripped Haggerty’s arguments to shreds in cold, clear logic, demonstrating that return was tantamount to suicide. When his point had been scored, he lashed into Haggerty.
HE DENOUNCED the Irishman as a saboteur, blaming him for all the mishaps that had occurred during the voyage. Despite Patten’s physical condition, the force of his personality alone won back the loyalty of the crew and set them against the first mate. They were all for lynching him from the yardarm, but Patten ordered him placed in chains in the brig for the remainder of the trip.
Then Patten played his trump card. “Mary,” he announced to the astonished crew, “is to take over command.” They were to follow her orders all the way to San Francisco. He stifled their protests one after the other. The fate of the Neptune’s Car rested on the shoulders of Mary Patten!
She walked proudly to the bridge. Behind her, shuffling weakly, came her husband. Together they were to make a command team that would rank as one of the most famous and competent in all the history of our merchant navy.
The storm was getting worse. The wind was shrieking so loudly that it would have drowned out a full-throated scream. The spray, breaking over the bows of the Neptune’s Car was so thick that the violent waves were almost totally obscured.
Mary and Josh took their posts without a murmur of complaint. Mary, straining her eyes into the swirling. mist, trumpeted a running description of the scene and the situation to her half-collapsed husband. And he in tum, despite his infirmity, translated the data as fast as any modern calculating machine, back into specific orders. These Mary relayed to the crew.
Mary rocked on her feet as a gust of wind tore at her, wrenching her rainproof hat from her head. She fought for balance, her long, honey-blonde hair streaming out behind her in the spray. The deck canted sickeningly as the small clipper ship ground into a hell-deep trough between two giant waves. Mary clutched frantically for the rail; and then as the weakened bow plunged headlong into the oncoming mountain of water, she was thrown backward again, collapsing with a dull, sliding thud, her body twisting down on the hard, slippery deck.
Her scream, as she rocketed across the small deck toward the rail, was like the mournful cry of a lost soul. It seemed impossible that she could survive. Josh, aware of what was happening, even with his blindness, began praying, audibly, for the peaceful flight of his wife’s soul.
But at the last possible second, the ship came through the wave and across in the opposite direction. Mary’s body stopped its death-slide at the peak of a long, mountain slope. And then it started back, gathering speed as it came, until her feet tangled through the legs of the captain’s chair.
Half-drowned, bruised and breathless, Mary refused to quit. She struggled to her feet with a mighty effort and resumed her post, picking up her description of the high, running seas as if there had been no pause at all.
“The mast!" Joshua shouted hoarsely. “Lash yourself to the mast! For God’s sake Mary, protect yourself.”
Mary didn't waste breath replying. Motioning to a group of sailors feverishly working the ropes nearby, she told them to follow her husband’s instructions. Moments later, tied securely to the mizzenmast, she again took up her duties.
The barometer continued to fall. Down, down, down, past the 28-inch level, the column of mercury marked the movement of one of the worst storms ever to hit any ship, anywhere. And with each drop, the wind grew fiercer. Sixty-foot-high waves smashed into the frame of the ship. How strong the winds were, no one knows, for there was no instrument aboard capable of recording it. But they must have been well over 125 miles per hour.
THE CLIPPER scudded along like a roller coaster, her poles totally bare, her lines singing like violin strings as they whipped taut against the mast. The long, high column of wood, taking the full force of the tremendous pressure, bent like an Indian’s bow, threatening to snap in two, or even worse, to rip bodily from the deck, leaving a huge gaping hole.
Yet Mary stayed at the masthead, trying to keep from looking at the almost doubled-up wood, steeling her nerves against the shaking and shivering of the hard pole directly behind her.
“Land ho! Off the starboard bow!”
Mary stretched against the waterlogged ropes that held her, looking into the sea-drenched sky to her right. The cold cliffs of Isle Hermite loomed up before her like a vision of doom.
“Hard a’port! Hard a’port! Hands to the tiller! Hold her! For God’s sake hold her port!”
The rocks grew closer, despite their desperate efforts. The full force of the wind, and the pressure of a billion tons of water dragged them along. The boat heeled dangerously, leaning so far to one side that it almost capsized.
Another wave, this one almost cresting the mast, threatened to break over them. They plunged into it, hitting square for a moment, before plunging up again, through and over.
But the giant wave worked a miracle, even though it threatened to swamp the ship. For a brief instant, the wall of water acted as a shield against the terrible wind. The tiller bit and held. The ship turned, only slightly, but enough. When they emerged, they were moving again, clear of the threatening, barren coast of the lonely, empty island. It was a miracle!
“Mary, Mary! Are you still there!” The voice of Josh Patten broke over the howl of the storm from where he sat, still blind, lashed to his chair on the bridge.
“Aye! And still in command, sir!” The feminine voice shot back.
“God bless ye, Mary my girl! We’ll lick it yet.”
“God bless us all, Josh, for without His blessing we’re all drowned.”
Then, as if in reply to their courage and their faith in each other, the glass wavered and began to rise. The wind veered suddenly to the opposite quarter and slowly started to fall off. The worst was past. They had come through. The waters of the Pacific lay dead ahead.
The storm abated finally, after fourteen hours of the worst hell any vessel has ever known. They headed north on blue waters. Patten recovered and was feeling in top shape when the Neptune’s Car finally docked at San Francisco on November 13, 1856.
The Intrepid could not possibly close the gap. Neither Nature nor Haggerty could change things now, and it was two weeks before Captain Gardner’s clipper reached Frisco. By that time Patten’s men were too drunk to care, and the Neptune’s Car had been decked out in streamers. The race was over—a saga of treachery and of Nature’s violence—a saga of the heroism of a man and his woman.
Attributed to SHELDON LORD
That two stories credited to the pseudonym Sheldon Lord appear in the April 1958 Real Men is unusual. After all, pen names were usually deployed specifically to avoid a name appearing in the table of contents more than once in an issue. But minor editorial blunders like this are not unusual in MAMs, and though it was surely accidental, it’s amusing that Block’s Sheldon Lord pseudonym would end up “borrowed” out from under him only a few pages before he could use it himself: “Queen of the Clipper Ships” by Sheldon Lord (original author unknown) appears on page 26 of the magazine, ahead of “The Greatest Ship Disaster in American History” by Sheldon Lord (Lawrence Block) on page 36. —Eds.
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“The Greatest Ship Disaster in American History”
At ten o’clock on the morning of June 15, 1904, the excursion steamer General Slocum pulled out of her berth on New York City’s East River. She was carrying 1,358 women and children to the annual picnic and outing of St. Marks Lutheran Church.
Thirty minutes later, three quarters of them, one thousand and twenty persons, to be exact, were dead. They were victims of a disaster that stemmed directly from the most incompetent piece of seamanship that the world has ever known.
Considering the circumstances, it was a wonder that there were any survivors at all. Had the vessel been more than a few hundred yards from shore, and travelling in an area less congested with shipping, the loss of life would almost certainly have been complete.
Maybe the ship was fated. Built in 1891, the General Slocum was just thirteen years old on that sunny June day. Despite legends to the contrary, she was not carrying an excessive passenger list—her certificate allowed for 2,500. However, there had been a mob scene at the pier, just before departure time. Families by the hundreds ran, pushed, shouted and fought to get aboard. But this was merely a typical last-minute rush—everyone arriving at the latest possible moment and then all trying to get aboard at once, pushing and kicking.
There were plenty of freeloaders on hand, too; both among those on board and those left behind at the dock. St. Marks, located in the heart of the city’s teeming East Side, could never fill the ship entirely from its own congregation, and friends of the parishioners, as well as urchins from the surrounding slums, beat their way down to the river, hoping to find a way of participating in the pleasures of a country picnic and a boat ride.
The captain was a stickler for schedules—though from later events, it appears that that was all he was good for. At ten AM sharp, he cast off, ignoring the protests of those still on the dock, vainly trying to get aboard. So, luckily, several hundred picnickers were left behind. But that didn’t keep them from cursing the captain then. And he deserved every one of the curses.
Ten minutes after the ship had pulled away from the pier, a fire broke out in the storeroom. A 14-year-old boy, Frankie Perditski, saw it. He ran immediately to the captain with the news.
The captain could have done any one of a number of things. He could have put to port immediately. He could have had the fire taken care of at once. Instead, he turned to Frankie with a bored expression and snapped, “Shut up and mind your own business.”
Frankie shut up.
After the ship had gone another quarter of a mile, a passing dredge captain saw a puff of smoke break from the hold. He gave four blasts on his whistle to bring it to the attention of the Slocum’s crew. But no one answered and his warning went unheeded. It was almost as if the crew was deaf and blind.
As the steamer continued on its journey, at least a half-dozen other vessels signaled, frantically blowing their whistles. No signals were acknowledged and no action was taken.