53: Our Man From Sadisto - Brush Pass Review

Hi everybody it's Jeff Gelb I'm trying my hand at the brush pass to introduce you guys and gals to the wonderful world of Clyde Allison and his amazing character 0008  or Trevor Anderson who is Our Man From Sadisto.

Believe it or not these books came out in the 1960s when I was a teenager and they were not sold at regular newsstands they were sold at adult bookstores! They were from a company San Diego based called Amber Library who also went through several other names. Clyde Allison was a house name as well. However it was really all the work of one brilliant writer named William Knowles who toiled in soft core porn obscurity. Throughout the 1960s and almost made it big time with some Lancer books in the late 60s but never quite broke through to a mainstream audience sadly even more sadly. He committed suicide in the late 1960s. It's quite a sad story. However his work in this series of books and there were 20 of them within four years. Think about that was brilliant and hilarious. The Our Man Sadisto series were spy fi sci fi sexy satires all incorporating science fiction elements and a heavy dollop of sexual innuendo.

Now when I say that obviously you have to remember the times in the mid 1960s were not the early 2000's. You really could not get away with saying very much at all. So all of it was done by innuendo and all of it was hilariously done. Allison was actually a very brilliant writer who unfortunately just was never discovered by the mainstream press and I don't know why. But he obviously knew where he spoke in terms of spy novels he was well versed in what was going on around him at the time and he used characters and situations from other people's spy novels as satirical jumping off points. As I said there were 20 books in this series starting with our man from Sadisto in 1965 and ending with the Desert Damsels in 1968, nineteen out of twenty of these books have absolutely brilliant cover art paintings by an artist named Robert Bonfils who just died fairly recently.

He painted dozens if not hundreds of paperback covers for these sleaze publishers in the 1960s and he was really quite brilliant himself. If you don't believe me please look up Our Man From Sadisto by Clyde Allison on the Internet and you will find all of his amazing covers. One of the things that was just great about these books for me as a teenager and still great re-reading them today is that they all included references to then current spy movies or book characters.

There were frequent mentions of Our Man from Uncle, the James Bond character himself. Modesty Blaise and even more obscure characters like The Man From Orgy which by the way was a series that was nowhere near as funny or clever as the Man from Sadisto books were. The most famous real world so to speak character that Clyde Allison used in several of his books was a reference to the Our Man Flint movie because for some reason the Our Man Flint movie had flint reading a spy novel featuring 0008. It was of course a complete coincidence.

I am quite certain that the writer of the Our Man Flynt movie had no idea there was a character called 0008. Because again these were never sold on the mainstream newsstands. However in the movie. Our Man Flint meets the triple 0 8 character and they have a scuffle in a French restaurant. If you want to go back and check the movie out you will see that scene.  It's very very funny. The books were hilarious.

They were full of science fiction elements like machines that made people want to have sex nonstop stuff like that.

There were maniacal super-villains who wanted to take over the world. There were constant references to all of the other spy characters of the time and they were brilliantly written.

Now in 160 pages which is all that Clyde Allison had to work with for each book I would say a good hundred pages out of 160 were usually sexually oriented material. However again we're talking about sex as defined in the mid 60s. And so what he had to do was to continually reinvent the wheel in terms of how he described his characters having sex and that in itself is hilarious.

I loved these books as a teenager and have recollected them. As a person in my mid 60s and I still find them hilarious and well worth reading and collecting. They're very rare. They're very hard to find. If you can find any on the Internet. Grab one and have the experience of a lifetime. Be prepared to laugh out loud. And don't be drinking anything while you're reading the book because you might spit it out when you start laughing.

Seriously.

Clyde Allison was an amazing talent. These are all very funny books. They are of course very much of their time. But that was a really crazy time. These are really crazy books and they're really worth trying to find. I don't believe any of these are currently available. I believe they're tied up the rights for these are tied up somewhere so that they cannot be legally reprinted although I noticed that a couple of them have been reprinted anyway and you can pick them up on various Internet websites for under fifteen dollars. Again these may or may not be legitimate reprints but if you want to if I have whet your appetite whetted your appetite at all to listen to. Sorry to read the adventures or the misadventures of the greatest spy lover of all time Trevor Anderson of Sadisto better known as triple 0 8 then please do yourself a very big favor and pick one of those up.

And I am almost positive you'll agree with me that these are some of the funniest books you will ever read.