Phil, Miles, and Graham (by late Marconi T1154 Transmission) join me in Derry & Toms for an uncomfortable encounter with Guy N. Smith’s Bamboo Guerillas, a book whose notoriety among paperback collectors we’ve been egging each other on to explore for a few years.
Commissioned to push wartime sex and violence to extremes, it leaves us wondering what all that unpleasantness actually achieved, and what its existence tells us about the market that produced it.
Along the way, we get into Tenko, Darkie’s Mob, and the brilliantly cynical jungle war films Too Late the Hero (featuring our old friend Percy Herbert) and The Long and the Short and the Tall (featuring no Percy Herbert at all… sad face emoji).
Content warning for discussions around sexual violence and torture, of which there is a lot in this book. Also boners. So many boners.
I mention Jeff Popple’s excellent blog post about sleazy pulp war novels and Horwitz Press (which I repeatedly referred to as Horowtiz Press). You can read that here.
