The Italian Connection (1971, Gardner F. Fox)

With his Lady from LUST series coming to an end, author Gardner F. Fox found a new muse in Cherise Dellissio, better known to those who know her intimately, which is pretty much everyone, as Cherry Delight. Fox’s new muse isn’t all that different from his old muse. Like Eve Drum, from the Lady from LUST novels, Cherry is a sex-crazed spy and tough girl who works for a government agency with an unfortunately nasty-sounding name. Cherry is the lady from NYMPHO, which stands for New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization. The main difference between Eve Drum and Cherry Delight is that while Eve is a natural blonde, Cherry is a proud redhead. A fact that is literally shoved in the reader’s face in these books. If you think she’s all Strawberry, then Cherry is the fox you’ve been waiting for.

The first Cherry Delight issue, ‘The Italian Connection’, shows that Gardner F. Fox had the reader’s attention from the start. Cherry is naked, pretending to be dead and being harassed in a coffin by a male colleague. What initially seems like a shocking, necrophiliac opening turns out to be a training ground for NYMPHO’s latest plan to bring down the Mafia. In order to hide a shameful sexual secret from his fellow gangsters, mob boss Joe Turessi has hookers brought to him in coffins for sexual relations at a mafia-run funeral parlor. So Cherry poses as a hooker and is sent to him in his unorthodox way. If you’re familiar with Fox’s Lady from the LUST books, you won’t be surprised to learn that Turessi’s sexual secret is a fetish for female underwear “any capo in the outfit would laugh at me if it came out”. Such a recurring theme in Fox’s adult fiction that there can be little doubt that this fetish was shared by the author. It’s a 24/7 obsession in his books. After emerging naked from the coffin, Turessi has Cherry dress up in a variety of suspenders, panties and garters, much to his voyeuristic pleasure: “the clothes, put them on, you must.”

The Italian Connection delves a little deeper than most of Fox’s work into the roots of underwear fetishism, and if Fox was writing from the heart, it’s a rather dark, uncomfortable rabbit hole we’re going down here. Turessi admits that he enjoys seeing women in sexy underwear because it gives him a nostalgic buzz from when Youngman Turessi would spy on his mother and sisters “all the time I was growing up. I’d lie there in the dark and peer into the next room and see my sisters getting undressed for bed or getting dressed to go out.” Luckily for Turessi, Cherry isn’t ashamed of kinks, even when he puts her in a coffin and fantasizes that she’s his mother.

Cherry tries to coax information out of Turessi, which isn’t easy when he’s got his face in her ass. Cherry’s goal is to manipulate Joe Turessi into taking her to France, where she can further infiltrate the European branch of the Mafia. Cherry proves to be a little too good at her job, however, and ends up throwing so much energetic sex Turessi’s way that the old fart dies of a heart attack. Arrivederci, Joe. Her “Plan B” involves going to France herself and posing as his mistress, where Cherry finds herself in the middle of a power struggle between warring sections of the Mafia. Cherry, of course, uses her feminine charms to endear herself to a succession of one-track-minded Mafia henchmen. Fox’s Mafiosi characters are generally monotonous and interchangeable, but they all share the amusing habit of shouting “Marrone!!” in times of crisis.

Just as softcore American films were giving way to films like Deep Throat at this point, the Cherry Delight books are leaving the Lady of LUST books far behind in terms of explicitness. Fox’s writing style was practically hardcore porn at this point, and the plots are little more than a connecting link between sexual encounters. Life seems like one long orgy for Miss Delight, and Fox’s extensive sexual vocabulary never disappoints. The Italian Connection is littered with references to “blue-veined breast meat,” “labia pliers,” and “backdoor bumfiddling.”

Unfortunately, as with the Lady from the LUST books, the padding really stands out here. Long descriptions of boring plane rides, detailed accounts of where Cherry went to eat and what she had on the menu. Yawn. And then there are the shopping sprees and Cherry’s name-dropping of the fashion labels she happens to wear… Givenchy, Estée Lauder, Christian Dior. Granted, it wouldn’t be unusual for a young, hip female character to be obsessed with fashion, but it’s baffling why Fox thought a bloodthirsty male audience would share this interest. Their likely reaction to these passages was “Marrone!! just agree with the naughty bits, Capiche”. I think Fox’s fetish for female underwear gave him a better understanding of female fashion than your average bloke.

Fortunately, there is plenty of material in The Italian Connection that would interest a bloodthirsty audience; it is a remarkably horny read, and Cherry Delight proves to be an even more hypersexual creation than Eve Drum. Such is Cherry’s dedication to titillation that during a life-or-death escape from a mansion roof, Cherry pauses to dodge bullets and glances at the woman she is escaping with. “For a second I could see Donna, spread-eagled, right between her legs. She wore no panties, only a garter belt, and her hairy fuck-nest was the stuff of which any man or woman would drool.” Cherry Delight books are also not afraid to play rough; gang rape and being placed in bondage devices are frequent drawbacks to Cherry’s work. While The Italian Connection favors sex over violence, the sequels show that Fox was no stranger to gory violence. In the next book ‘Tongue in Cheek’ Cherry gets the chance to blow a man’s head off, while another mafioso is gruesomely cut into small pieces by oriental thugs.

I have no doubt that this book would have gone badly wrong, as readers thought they were signing up for a crime thriller in the vein of The French Connection, and didn’t expect an excess of sleaze. A recent review of the book on Amazon dismisses it as “Poorly written trash for the perverted mind.” There can be little doubt, however, that Fox was a dedicated, hard-working man when it came to satisfying perverts, churning out numerous Cherry Delight novels in a short space of time, while also infusing them with his own obsessions. The fast-paced, sometimes sloppy nature of the work, evidenced by the fact that in The Italian Connection the agency Cherry works for undergoes a name change from NYMPHO to SPERM halfway through the book without explanation. I suspect that Fox was originally going to call it SPERM, before thinking NYMPHO was funnier, or that he couldn’t think of a suitable acronym for SPERM in time, and a proofreader forgot to correct it. To be honest, it’s not easy to come up with a story-specific acronym for SPERM… the best I could come up with is Spies Protecting Everyone from Randy Mafiosi.

The Italian Connection and the complete Cherry Delight series can be read on the Gardner F Fox website.

https://www.gardnerfrancisfoxlibrary.com/cherry-delight-novels-read-entire-stories-library