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.