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| There's just something about those 1960s spy stories. |
Ian Fleming could scarcely have known what he was unleashing on the world when he wrote Casino Royale (1953), the first of his twelve novels about suave British superspy James Bond. Though hardly fiction's first secret agent, it was 007 who established the template that so many after him would follow. The first big-screen Bond adaptation, Dr. No starring Sean Connery, appeared in 1962. The phenomenal success of that film and its many sequels, especially Goldfinger (1964), cemented Bond's fame and inspired countless imitations, knockoffs, and wannabes.
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| "A secret service thriller." |
All of popular culture came down with a serious case of Bondmania in the 1960s. And why not? Cold War tensions were running high. (Is it a coincidence that the first Bond film came out the same year as the Cuban Missile Crisis?) Spies were simply everywhere—movie theaters, TV screens, toyboxes, bookshelves, our dreams, etc. There was no escape from car chases, gimmicky weapons, top-secret missions, boastful villains, hulking henchmen, and sexy female double agents. Even on pop radio, you could hear Johnny Rivers crooning about that poor "secret agent man" who traded in his name for a number. The great thing about Bond-inspired spy stories is that they could range from silly to serious and could be tailored to any age group.
Did you think the adult publishing industry would ignore this trend? Ha! In 1968, Bernie Bloom's Pendulum Publishing released a photo-illustrated novella called The Erotic Spy. This was another of the company's Pendulum Pictorials, which falsely claimed to be "novelizations" of feature films. Instead, they contained staged, mostly black-and-white photos accompanied by text. There were six of these Pictorials altogether, all released in 1968. The Erotic Spy was the third of them. It retailed for $1.75, which is over fifteen bucks in today's money.
Since the first two Pendulum Pictorials were credited to our very own Edward Davis Wood, Jr., it's reasonable to assume that Eddie may have written the other four under fake names. Notice that I said assume and may; we're not talking about certainties here, just probabilities.
Officially, The Erotic Spy is credited to Abbott Smith, an author with zero other credits. I doubt he's George Abbott-Smith, who wrote A Manual Greek Lexicon of the Old Testament in 1923. For one thing, George died in 1947. According to reader Shawn D. Langrick, at the time of this book's publication, a man named Abbott Smith happened to be the Acting Chairman of the Office of National Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency. Shawn speculates that the credited author's name may have been an "inside joke."
But does The Erotic Spy seem like Ed Wood's work? Let's investigate.
What we have here are the adventures of Dick Wilson—and, yeah, our hero is blatantly named after the appendage he uses the most—who works for a government agency called GSS in Washington D.C. Dick's boss (the equivalent of M in the Bond films) is a guy named Kip Arlington, and his partner is a sexy brunette rookie named Ann Barnes. Naturally, in addition to their professional relationship, Dick and Ann have an intense sexual affair that Kip neither condones nor condemns. And they all work out of a three-story brick building that also contains a ladies' dress shop, a shoe repair shop, and a dry cleaning place, all of which operate as legitimate businesses.
A story like this obviously needs a major crisis, and, boy, does The Erotic Spy have one! Briefly, a mysterious but widely-feared foreign agent known only as Gold Girl has purloined a valuable and potentially dangerous item known as the Golden Rooster. And what is that? Well, on his deathbed, an eccentric nuclear physicist named Dr. Harvey Malcolm created a "deceptively simple" formula for "producing a controlled thermo-nuclear reaction" and wrote it on a sheet of vellum, which he then placed inside a lead cylinder. Surprisingly active for a dying man, Dr. Malcolm hid the cylinder inside a gilded plaster figurine of a rooster ("an ordinary chicken-type rooster," the book specifies). And now, the so-called Golden Rooster has been stolen from the Bureau of Standards, and it's up to Dick Wilson to retrieve it.
The Golden Rooster is such an absurdly contrived plot device that it almost serves as a self-aware parody of the MacGuffin, i.e. the object that drives the story but is otherwise worthless. We care about this item only because the characters care about it. It's the thing everyone wants for some reason. One of the most famous MacGuffins in movie history is the titular object in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941). Like the Golden Rooster, it's a statue of a bird. I'm confident that The Erotic Spy is directly referencing the Huston film in a knowingly silly way.
