Wyatt Doyle's Blog

"Quite simply, spectacular."

In a season of weird doings, Steve Carroll Writes braves an exploration of The Men's Adventure Library anthology, Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants:

The book itself is simply gorgeous... Lavishly illustrated with many covers reproduced in full color, this is essentially a coffee table book dedicated to “when men’s adventure magazines got weird,” as the cover’s subtitle aptly describes. All in all, this book is an effort of pure love for the genre.

Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle have put together yet another archive of great worth, both for collectors and fans. I cannot recommend this collection highly enough and would go on record that it is essential to the preservation of the historic MAM as a uniquely American literary institution. 

Steve's review takes readers through the collection with story by story commentary. Read his thoughts in full at Steve Carroll Writes, HERE.

Edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants  is part of the Men's Adventure Library series, and is available now in softcover and as an expanded hardcover with bonus material. Buy it HERE.

BookTubers—readers and critics who share their reading and opinions on YouTube—have quickly become some of the best (and most entertaining) resources online for those who embrace the wild, the obscure, and the strange in fiction.

In short, our kind of people.

Tim from Secret Fire Books and Jeff from Jeff's Cave of Cool Books both recently posted their thoughts on The Men's Adventure Library's I Watched Them Eat Me Alive collection, and while it's safe to say they both enjoyed the book equally, their videos discussing it make for an appealing contrast.

Jeff aptly describes Deis' and Doyle's pair of introductions to the book (subtitled Two Takes on Killer Creatures in Men's Adventure Mags) as "two takes, but they are not in opposition, just complimenting each other." The same might be said of these two BookTubers' approach to the same book.

Tim at Secret Fire Books was the first to post his thoughts. Tim's got a big personality, a knowledgeable and enthusiastic bookshopping pal who wants to make sure you don't miss the good stuff as you navigate the stacks. He takes the viewer through some of the books' highlights, offering fun commentary on stories (and especially the artwork) that fills the book. 

"It's gorgeous, I love it so much. So freakin' cool... Robert and Wyatt have been doing a great job with The Men's Adventure Library. This was fantastic!"

Tim reviews the hardcover edition, which includes additional content the softcover does not. Watch Secret Fire Books' video HERE. 

Tim from Secret Fire Books
Jeff from Jeff's Cave of Cool Books reviews the softcover edition. He has a low-key style and takes a different approach, providing an in-depth page-through that explores the book from cover to cover, commenting in detail not only on the book's stories and artwork, but on The Men's Adventure Library more broadly, alerting viewers to our other books that Eat Me references in its text.

Jeff from Jeff's Book Cave

Jeff really gets what we're trying to do, both in Eat Me specifically, as well as our broader goals for The Men's Adventure Library. We try to bake in little clues and cues in our books to reward regular readers of the series, and I think Jeff caught all of them. Watch Jeff's Cave of Cool Books' video HERE.

It's a rewarding thing to have your work reviewed and analyzed by readers who bring such sincere enthusiasm and appreciation for our efforts. These guys read a lot of books in this area, and it's meaningful to know they are digging what we do. 

Our thanks to Tim and Jeff, and to all the BookTubers who embrace what we do and help spread the word about it.

I Watched Them Eat Me Alive is available from Amazon as a 120-page softcover and 128-page expanded hardcover HERE.

First, there were the Surf Pack Assassins, in the August 1967 issue of Male magazine. Story by Walter Kaylin, writing under his frequent nom de plume Roland Empey. Male was published by Magazine Management Company.

"Mag Mang" was also the birthplace of Marvel Comics. So perhaps it's not too surprising that a little over a year later, Marvel swiped the idea of surfing savages for their war title, Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders in October, 1968.

Both illos were predated in print by another group of savage surfers, this gang with significantly less firepower, but no shortage of outrageousness. Of course I'm talking about Mort Künstler's equally jaw-dropping illustration for "The Hell Surfers," published in For Men Only in July 1967.

And, good news for fans of surf gang pulp: Mort Künstler's website offers prints of Mort's classic illo in two different sizes. You can order from the Mort store HERE.

 "Surf Pack Assassins" and its unforgettable Norem illustrations are included in the Men's Adventure Library's Walter Kaylin collection, He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos, available now.

Get Nymphos as a deluxe color hardcover from Amazon HERE.
Get Nymphos as a color softcover from Amazon HERE.
Get Nymphos as a deluxe color hardcover from co-editor Bob Deis HERE.
Get Nymphos as a color softcover from co-editor Bob Deis HERE.

He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos collects highlights of Walter Kaylin's work for MAMs. It is now back in print from The Men's Adventure Library in bold new color editions, expanded from the out-of-print monochrome first edition. We are proud to present the book for the first time in color and celebrate the book's deluxe hardcover debut. 

But who is Walter Kaylin? Simple. Walter Kaylin is the MAM writer other MAM writers wanted to be.

Kaylin had an innate understanding of the highly specific needs of MAM fiction, and his work in the field across decades would help define the unique genre. But that once-in-a-career symbiosis came at a price: For decades, those musty, obscure magazines—most now well over half a century old, with copies hard to come by—have provided the sole portal to the majority of Kaylin’s prodigious output. 

Our priorities for the He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos collection were to present a selection of some of Kaylin’s most memorable stories, while also covering as many MAM obsessions and sub-genres as could reasonably fit between covers. You’ll read Kaylin takes on hard-boiled crime, Westerns, dark historical fiction, tropical adventure, revolutionary battle, alarmist non-fiction, a WWII “death trek” saga, reality-based survival, varied approaches to international espionage and intrigue, bogus biography, gangsters, humorous tall tales with a wartime theme and a sexy bent, and, in the new expanded hardcover edition, a highly unconventional animal attack story.

Our initial edition of this collection suffered from spotty distribution, making it less accessible to readers of what would become our acclaimed, multi-volume Men’s Adventure Library series. We also didn’t previously issue a hardcover, as has since become standard for the Library. We’re glad to put those issues right with these new, color editions, which include supplementary illustrations and commentary that further illuminate the range and quantity of Kaylin’s work in MAMs.

Includes a reminiscence by Kaylin's editor at Magazine Management Company, Bruce Jay Friedman.

Excerpted from "The Right Man for the Job" by Wyatt Doyle, He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos

Get Nymphos as a deluxe color hardcover from Amazon HERE.
Get Nymphos as a color softcover from Amazon HERE.
Get Nymphos as a deluxe color hardcover from co-editor Bob Deis HERE.
Get Nymphos as a color softcover from co-editor Bob Deis HERE.
...Just get Nymphos!

Terence Stamp's first day shooting "Toby Dammit" with Fellini. (From Stamp's Double Feature.)

 
Thanks to the kindness of fellow multi-hyphenate Sean CW Korsgaard, we're very pleased to share Wyatt Doyle's talk from PulpFest 2025: "Masters of MAMs." It's a brief overview of some of men's adventure magazines' (MAMs) leading lights from across their three decades of publication, with some explanation of why we believe they are important.
You can watch the whole 45-minute presentation via the embedded video above, or go directly to each subject by clicking their name below.
George GrossMort KünstlerRobert SilverbergLawrence BlockSamson PollenEva LyndWalter KaylinRobert F. DorrGil Cohen
Big thanks also to Bill Lampkin, Mike Chomko, and Jack Cullers for their heroic work keeping PulpFest alive and thriving every year. 
To purchase our releases focused on these luminaries, scroll the column on the right side of the site.

"One must read Weasels Ripped My Flesh! for GarbAugust. One simply must." 

Thanks to our friends at Paperback Warrior, popular book vlogger Michael K. Vaughan is now the very happy owner of two of two deluxe hardcover editions from The Men's Adventure Library: Walter Kaylin's He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos, and Weasels Ripped My Flesh!

As you'll see in his July Book Mail video post below (titled "Weasels Ate My Postman"!), Vaughan couldn't be happier to receive the books, and immediately adds them to his GarbAugust reading list.

(What is GarbAugust? I refer you to the event's founder, CriminOlly.)

Michael, we can't wait to hear what you think of the books once you've tackled them...presuming you make it out in one piece.

Big thanks to Michael and to Paperback Warrior! 

Weasels Ripped My Flesh! is available in full-color softcover and deluxe hardcover editions. Buy from The Men's Adventure Library's co-editor Bob Deis HERE (free domestic shipping). Or buy from Amazon HERE.
He-Men, Bag Men, & Nymphos by Walter Kaylin is available in full-color softcover and deluxe expanded hardcover editions. Buy from The Men's Adventure Library's co-editor Bob Deis HERE (free domestic shipping). Or buy from Amazon HERE.

Join New Texture's JD Doyle at Houston's LGBTQ+ Indie Author Fair, Saturday August 2! He'll be signing and selling copies of his acclaimed memoir, 1981—My Gay American Road Trip.
Local independent LGBTQ+ authors from the Houston Metro Area will be selling and signing their books. This is a great way to discover new writers and new books while support local LGBTQ+ authors. 
The event will be held at The Montrose Center, 401 Branard St in Houston, TX, from 11 am til 5 pm. 
More details on the Fair's Facebook page, HERE . JD Doyle's 1981—My Gay American Road Trip is available now from QMH Press/New Texture. To purchased the softcover or deluxe hardcover edition, click HERE.

Men's Adventure Library editors Bob Deis and Wyatt Doyle join Nick Anderson of The Book Graveyard to discuss The MAL's many releases and talk all things MAM!

The Graveyard is home to a lively, informed audience, so click WATCH ON YOU TUBE. Once you're there, be sure to select SHOW CHAT REPLAY to follow the comments and questions posted by viewers during the livestream. 

Thanks very much to Grounds Keeper Nick and all who joined the conversation!

 

I wrote Attaché Case for several reasons. First, I felt that people outside the walled garden of foreign affairs didn’t really understand what diplomats did, or the culture of the State Department as an organization. I wanted to get that across. There are many good books by military veterans—what they did in the armed forces, what it felt like, how the institution worked—but that granularity of experience was missing from many of the books I read by former diplomats. Maybe it’s because the field draws people with a habit of discretion, which it is hard to give up. Second, I had a bunch of stories I thought were funny or poignant or revelatory about American power over the last 30 years, and its projection. I wanted to get those out. Finally, as a lifelong celebrity-watcher, I wanted to chase down this notion of the US as the celebrity nation, as the place no one can avoid having to think about, witness, have an opinion about. I wanted to trace the arc of this from the end of the Cold War into the first Trump Administration. 

When I was in college and figuring out what to do for a career, I thought the Foreign Service sounded interesting: I liked politics, I liked travel, I liked writing, I liked intrigue. I was a news junkie and I have an ear for languages. My whole life I’ve had dyscalculia, where I mix up numbers and cannot grasp fairly basic mathematical concepts, but I’ve got a steel-trap memory when it comes to country names, flags, and capitals. I can use the subjunctive. This was my modest and esoteric skill set. I was too into creature comforts for the Peace Corps, but also too gay and way too chatty for the CIA. This left the US Foreign Service. 

I had known about diplomats from childhood. In 1977, the US diplomat who lived a few doors down killed his family. Two of his sons had been on my swim team. A manhunt ensued, but he vanished forever. It was the first press stakeout I ever saw. A couple years later, the US embassy in Teheran was taken over by Iranian college students, who held fifty or so American diplomats hostage for 400+ days. This story on the news every night, with footage of the US Embassy, now covered in anti-US graffiti. 

Still, I was hazy about what diplomats actually did. By the time I was in college, I’d worked at a city newspaper, so I understood what reporters and editors did during the day. One summer I interned at IBM, so I got, in the vague way of someone with math anxiety, what engineers were doing at the office and in labs. But diplomats? I knew they were discreet in an ostentatious way. Unless they were Henry Kissinger, they made a virtue out of their unobtrusiveness. I knew they rarely said what they meant or meant what they said, and that insincerity was an idiom, a tool. Being a diplomat seemed like more of a mood, a role, a status, an expert glide across wars, cultures, time zones, languages. There was something enigmatic there, and as de Chirico said, “What do I love if not the enigma?” 

Wilfrid Hyde-White as Crabbin in The Third Man (1949)

When I was a junior in college I saw the movie The Third Man. It’s a terrific story, beautifully shot, but the real takeaway for me was this minor character, Mr. Crabbin, who’s a cultural attaché. Here it was, at last, the diplomat at work, talky and distracted and opinionated as I was. Unlike, say, Dean Acheson, this was someone who was relatable. And here he was at work, running a speaker program on the Western genre of novel in postwar Vienna. He was occupying the liminal zone between his country and another, navigating a furrow full of hazard and ambiguity and promise. He seemed to have a lot of leeway. It looked fun. 

Was this still a thing people did? I knew about the Alliance Française from my French studies and found out that, yes, the US too had a cultural and press service at our embassies and consulates. Every autumn, the State Department offered the Foreign Service exam, so, based on this character I saw in a movie and a tendency to imagine myself in faraway places (Port Moresby, Algiers, Vladivostok, anywhere but here, really), I took it. I passed the test and joined, again with only the vaguest notion of what I would be doing, other than acting discreet and organizing lectures. 

Over the next three decades, I figured it out. More people became aware of what diplomats do. There was Richard Holbrooke, wrangler of Balkan dictators, who was in the Kissinger mode of self-promoter, never more comfortable than when in a room of reverential journalists. There were the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. There were the celebrity ambassadors: Shirley Temple Black, Pamela Harriman, Caroline Kennedy. 

But when people with normal jobs, like baker or management consultant or oral surgeon or florist, would ask what it was I did, and I told them, they seemed surprised. It was odd because if they were Americans, they were, as taxpayers, paying my salary. There was a general bafflement about the culture. This even went for new Foreign Service Officers. When I spoke to them they often seemed a little taken aback, puzzled by the culture of the State Department. They were usually less, uh, florid than I was, but they had, in their way, been just as fanciful.

End of part one.

© 2025 Todd Pierce; all rights reserved

 

Attaché Case: Backstage at the Embassy is available in hardcover, softcover, and ebook editions. Click HERE to buy on Amazon.