PaperBack: “The Ominous Orgy”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Ominous Orgy, by “Mallory T. Knight,” aka Bernhardt J. Hurwood (Award Books, 1969). Cover artist unidentified.

This was the seventh of nine “sexpionage” novels by Hurwood (1926-1987), who was also a prolific writer of occult, erotica, and speculative fiction during the 1960s and ’70s. The Ominous Orgy stars Tim O’Shane, an agent for T.O.M.C.A.T. As blogger Randall Masteller explains in Spy Guys and Gals,

[O’Shane] had been a Captain in the Marine Corps on special assignment to the Embassy in Paris in the fall of 1961 when an assignation with the beautiful wife of a French nobleman unearthed the theft of top secret NATO information. As a strange reward for his diligence, O’Shane was whisked away to an undisclosed location where he was told he had been commandeered to be an agent. He did not ask for it but he did not put up any struggle against it.

Tactical Operations Master Counterintelligence Assault Team—a multinational espionage and counterespionage organization, T.O.M.C.A.T—is comprised [sic] of agents from most of the Western nations, all under the control of Colonel MacSwiver, an eighty-one-year-old Scottish rake and lecher who was also one of Britain’s greatest living spies.

As an agent, O’Shane had training in numerous languages, all reasonable fighting methods, and every other type of spycraft the organization could think of. Within a year, O’Shane was as ready as anyone could be to enter the shadowing world of cloak and daggers.

The T.O.M.C.A.T. series, brought by the same people who were already giving the world Nick Carter [and]
Killmaster, is an odd mixture sure to confuse most readers. The name of the series and, more specifically, the names of the books would lead one to expect non-stop sex. Certainly the books do not fail to deliver.

They also, however, deliver spy stories that are actually about spying. Perhaps not a lot and certainly never at the risk of interfering with the prurient aspects, but they are still there. Frankly, I was amazed.

O’Shane debuted in 1967’s The Dozen Deadly Dragons of Joy, would somehow endure dangers and dalliances through The Malignant Metaphysical Menace (1968) and The Peking Pornographer (1969), and make his final showing in 1971’s The Bra-Burner's Brigade.

READ MORE: “Bernhardt J. Hurwood, an Unsung Hero of My Childhood,” by Doug Draa (Amazing Stories).