VALENTINE FLYNN

Valentine Flynn is an industrial security consultant.

That is what he tells most of the people he talks with, explaining how he earns his living. To many who seek to employ his services, he lets them know that he is a licensed Doctor of Psychology. Finally, to others, especially if they are beautiful women, he confides that he is an expert in the rare field of Nymphology (the study of nymphomaniacs).

If someone is robbing from your company, he is the man you might call. His understanding of people is top notch and he can spot liars and cheats and sneaks and naughty-doers with the best of them. Aided by his friend and associate, Dusky, a walking Who's Who in an era long before the Internet, he is often brought in when skullduggery is going on and the possibility of inside work exists. He does not come cheap. In the mid-60's he charges an up-front $1000 with $100 an hour plus expenses, a fee that some having to pay it blanche at but he comes through so he proves worthy of it.

Money, though, is not his main reason for staying in a business that has so many people trying to pound, stab, shoot or blow up his only body. In truth, it is the ladies. Every where he goes and every case he takes, he invariably meets the world's most gorgeous, seductive, amorous, and often out-and-out horny women any nymphologist could hope to meet. His dedication to his schooling, not to mention his stamina, are put to the test on more than one occasion but just as in his security consultancy, he comes through time after time. When he is asked why he gave up his previous job as a shrink to work industrial espionage, he commented that he stopped being a practicing psychologist to be a performing one because it was more fun.

His success rate is impressive by itself but even more so when considering that one of craftiest and diabolical minds of the 20th Century, the luscious Baroness Ogden-Stutt, is often behind the extraordinary cases he faces. Her ways of trying to eliminate him are not only dastardly, they are also incredibly ... well, unusual. And they normally involve large breasted woman doing all sorts of things to him. Like the first recorded adventure, what a way to go!

This series falls into the same category as the Coxeman, Man from O.R.G.Y., Lady from L.U.S.T., and a few more. They are "espionage" adventures in that they deal with spies and international intrique and the like but their real purpose was S-E-X. Have a baddie shoot at you is to be like every other adventure writer. Have the assailant female and naked, wow, now you have something.

Now that I've been blasé and tritely dismissive, living in the age where Fifty Shades of Grey is a best-seller and not being banned somewhere, I need to admit that when I first read some of these books as a young man, well, my attitude was a tad different. Titallating and naughty and fun. Still, even as someone just leaving his teen years behind, they were not to be taken seriously.

The author knew that. He wrote prurient spy novels because someone paid him money to do so and that someone paid him because sex always sells. Most of the series of this type did not worry about a plot of any sort. This author did. It was thin but it was there. It was clear when reading these books both back then and now that a good writer was writing slop.

The covers were fun, though.