Qu.  How do I know a girl is serious or just leading things on?

Even the tiny streets leading off Knez Mihailova were bustling. The sun hung overhead slowing the pace of the day as shoppers sloped from door to door and tourists sauntered slowly, doing nothing in particular, taking in the atmosphere of the beautiful old city. In a corner cafe under the shade of a striped red and white awning Krauser sipped at a lukewarm coffee, waffling on about something of seemingly great importance, as I nodded occasionally, imitating a listening person and remembering suddenly why I visit him so seldom. The street that day accommodated several daygamers, I had noticed. I was thinking back trying to remember the first time I’d ever been to Belgrade, with Nick actually. Was it really 7 years ago? There were no daygamers back then, just me and Nick. It seemed a lot busier in general these days than it used to be.

‘Does that sound realistic?’, he suddenly asked, snapping me back to reality.

‘What? Oh yeah! Yeah’. I paused looking for a safe response. ‘You’re definitely good at that’, I chose confidently. It was one of my safest go to phrases whenever he almost caught me not listening. He smiled smugly across a desperate, craggy face, ‘I thought so’, he beamed as he emphatically planted down his coffee, spilling waves over the sides of his cup, and smiling as he eased back in his seat. ‘Yes. My calibration is much sharper than the average person’s. Much sharper. Good calibration is better than a million dollars in the bank. I know people who work in banks. And they have a million dollars. And they would love to have calibration like mine. I can tell in seconds if she’s just kicking the tyres’.

I nodded slowly to give the impression of being in deep agreement, ‘a million’ I agreed, not remembering what the figure referred to. I then gazed away as his voice carried on, like a unstoppable relentless grater, gnawing away at the peaceful fabric of the afternoon. ‘Kicking the tyres’, I mused, as I drifted off again. ‘To kick the tyres’ is a sales reference, often used in game. Game is sales after all to some degree. No doubt we’ve all reflected a few times on various examples of how game is similar to a sales job. I recalled how that scene from Glengarry Glen Ross always used to get mentioned on pickup forums back in the day. Does it still? I remember once how an old wing of mine, a great guy we called ‘Blue’, how he re-wrote that scene into a short sketch from a pickup point of view. He did a really expert job, changing all the characters to under-performing pickup artists and the dialogue to pick-up situations with the leader of the crew bemoaning their collective laziness and low standards. We talked about getting a camera and having a go at filming the scene. It probably wouldn’t have been that hard to do and if we had it would have been a great memento to look back on.

But game is close to sales and skirt do kick the tyres, like an indifferent customer passing the time on a forecourt. Pleasing themselves by just seeing what is out there, despite at times having little to no genuine interest in actually buying. We all ‘kick the tyres’, I reflected. Have you ever had the feeling your boss is not paying you what you’re worth? So what you do is you go on some job sites and look at some postings, you may even talk to a few recruiters. You talk to the recruiter and find out that your boss is paying you within a few grand of the market rate, so now, secure in the knowledge that you’re not getting ripped off, you go back to work with a happy feeling in your stomach and no nagging doubts. You can put your feet up and coast for another 6 months. Or maybe you don’t have a boss right now, maybe you’re taking time out and wondering what the market is like in case you want to get back to work any time soon. Maybe a recruiter calls you out of the blue and you talk to them. It doesn’t mean you’re going to go along with it. You just want to ‘kick the tyres’ of the market and if you were the recruiter in this situation, you wouldn’t get too excited, though the door is most certainly to some degree open.

Let’s say a girl has a ‘boyfriend’, whatever that might mean. She’s fairly happy but she is not sold this is the guy for her in the long term or even short term. She thinks she has the goods to shoot a little higher, so she has to manage her hypergamous curiosity. She’s maybe not likely to actually make a move, she just wants to satisfy herself that she’s not missing out. You stopping her in the street while no one is around to report back on her behaviour is like a recruiter calling you on your lunch break. And she wants to know what her market rate is, she wants to know what’s on offer. She may even keep you around for a while to pump for information and validation. Or maybe even while she genuinely makes her purchase decision. We just don’t know.

Yet.

‘Oy… OY’, he snapped impatiently, turning to me with a knowing look, ‘you can see the lower average IQ in these countries can’t you Jimmy’, he said to me, ‘EXCUSE ME’, he bellowed. The waiter whirled round to see Krauser impatiently waving his menu in the air. He looked at me victoriously. ‘I’m gonna have the steak and potatoes’, he declared, as if I were taking the order. ‘I have it every day at the same time’. I knew this already, since we’d been at this cafe every day for the last week, at the same time and he’d always ordered steak and potatoes.

The waiter wheeled over smiling nervously, ‘steak and potatoes?’, he said looking at Nick expectantly.

‘Steak and potatoes’, I said, as I leant back in my chair. Pumping you for validation she is. She is playing a balancing game of keeping you baited enough to hang around but not give so much that she has to hand in her notice and take the risk. It’s very likely that the value you have shown so far is not clearly higher enough than what she already has, for her to make any kind of move or purchase decision. Or she just loves the validation and attention. Either way she wants to sit in the grey area of deniable ‘light flirting’ and she is in no hurry to get out of it. You’re basically getting a ‘no’, ‘this is unlikely’ or a ‘maybe’. You just have to understand this so you can deal with it.

I had a few tricks up my sleeve in my time, to get her down off that fence and into the ‘Rodeo del Jimbo’. I smiled at the images flickering across the ‘memories movie screen’ in my mind. It turned out to be opportune moment to smile as Nick had seemingly just slipped some kind of a clever joke into whatever he was saying and it really looked like I was listening. It was a freebie. Those moments are gold, ‘it’s bought me another few minutes before I have to think up another response signal to give to this idiot’, I thought.

I shifted in my seat and leant back as if to say ‘go ahead, tell me all about it’.

‘How do you filter intentions?’, I thought, secretly.

I bet by now some guys have figured out some amazing techniques. Far beyond the rudely drawn gambits of the early guys like me. I asked myself ‘what, if asked, would I contribute to the conversation’?

Increase my value/build comfort

This is the obvious one. Jimmy, while she’s still kicking tyres, you simply haven’t made your case enough, so you still have some work to do. Now’s not the time to be too worried about if she fancies me or not, now is the time to build value and comfort. How to do this is obviously a big topic for another day. I can’t really talk about it under this heading. But your job as a pick up artist, as someone with ‘game’, is to take a girl from a negative or an indifferent position, to a positive one. And you do that with attraction and comfort. Tyre kickers are fine to some extent, as they’re giving you at least a chance, time and space on the ball, to work your magic. That’s a positive. I think that’s the correct starting attitude from which to attack this subject.

And a reminder here, the Mystery Method tells us: Game is played in ‘Comfort’. Comfort is a stage of the seduction process (it often takes place on dates). Just get the fuckers onto dates and then see to what extent you really have any game. Getting a number on the street or an iDate is a great skill, but it’s only a small part of game, it’s just the initial cold call. The real salesmen are the field sales guys who can consistently build value and comfort in the field. It’s not the appointment bookers. Appointment bookers work hard to prove themselves so that they can then become field sales guys. In game you have ‘approach coaches’ vying to become coaches.

It’s worth at this point differentiating between ‘date’ and ‘text game’ situations. In terms of text game situations, I see the real problem being elsewhere. Trying to save poor in field work with good text game is like smoking 100 a day and then trying to beat the cancer with a really great alkalising diet. Since as long as I can remember I’ve had people tell me that their game is ‘really good’ but ‘Jimmy, my text game needs work’. I always know what’s coming next. I watch them in set and then see their texts and hey ho, it’s not their texts, it’s their sets. They’re not as ‘really good’ as they think they are. They build minimal attraction and get a number based on momentum. The girl seems happy (and she is, in the moment), but really she’s just had a surprising fun conversation with a stranger and she gives her number based on the energy of the moment and the promise of a source of validation, there’s nothing really supporting it much beyond that. That’s OK though, not many of us, myself included, are as good as we think we are.

‘Apart from me’, Krauser yelled at me. I sat bolt upright, startled. Almost dropping my coffee, caught between my daydream and reality and for an uncomfortable moment, my blood ran cold, he’s managed to master an actual mind reading routine, I gasped to myself.

I can’t let this lunatic loose with this kind of power.

I looked at him through narrowed eyes, I’m going to have to kill him, I resolved.

‘I was the only one NOT qualifying Jimmy, the other chodes were standing around giving her as much validation as she wanted. A proper chode crystal. I was disgusted’.

I breathed out in relief. ‘It’s a mad world!, I sympathized. Write that line down lads. Anytime some fool complains about something that exasperates them, ‘it’s a mad world’ is a beauty. Placates them immediately. Try it.

I saw his lips moving and he continued to tell his story. The sounds of the street once again muffled as, nodding and making eye contact, I sank back into my thoughts.

So I’ve got a tyre kicker on a date and I’m appropriately managing the attraction process. So what next?

Stay outside of that grey area

If she’s happy sitting in the safety of the ‘this could be a date/not quite a date‘ grey area, then you’re most decidedly not. And you want her out of it as soon as it’s appropriate. If you’ve had a crack at building attraction and getting a little rapport going, then you need to draw her into that ‘this ‘aint just friends’ vibe. The good news is, such forthrightness is an attraction builder. Staying in the grey area is an attraction destroyer. If you have done what you think is necessary, made your case to a reasonable degree, sometimes you just have to make a do or die call.

Going back to the sales comparison, I remembered being scared of a ‘no’ when I was a kid. I was 21 and wasting a lot of time as I worked several forms of sales jobs on my way up through to account management then project management. Again in sales, there’s a similar kind of scenario where the young salesperson is fearful of hearing the word ‘no’. Not being flush with choice, when the young salesman gets what looks like a good lead, he wants to keep it there. The hope and promise of a sale in the midst of his unimpressive pipeline means he’s happy to keep calling the client and putting off the point of sale, accepting the ever continuing excuses and delays of the client. ‘We’re VERY interested, this dovetails perfectly into our plans, call back after our board meeting next month’, they’ll say. The novice then enthusiastically taps the information into his CRM record and lives off the promise for the next month. That way, he believes, he gets to keep the promise and maybe something will happen and he’ll get the sale one day. He doesn’t want to push too hard and lose the little that he does have.

Then one day you just realise that getting a ‘no’ is actually very valuable and completely painless. It’s not only a big ‘so what’, it’s what the big boys actually do on purpose. You want to get your ‘no’ as soon as possible so that you’re not chasing around wasting time on people who have no genuine intention of buying. You want 10 leads and you want to filter out the obvious fake ones as soon as possible.

But here’s a bit of a difference between sales and game. In a similar way game really begins in comfort, sales really starts when you hear your first ‘no’. You try to find out what the objection is and deal with it and only if it’s insurmountable or the cost reward isn’t worth is, you move on. It’s a bit different in game as you have to react with indifference to these ‘no’ moments, but still handle them. You can’t come across like you’re selling, as that’s chasey and low value. You have to come across easy come easy go, like a mutually interested peer, and make her chase.

A refusal doesn’t necessarily mean forever either, it can just mean ‘not yet’. You’ve just got to understand you’re getting a ‘no’, so you know ‘I’m currently in turndown territory’ rather than ‘this is going great’.

In game we want to remind her this is romantic and put her in situations where she can’t box us in the friend zone. With tyre kickers, you’ve got to be willing to make your intentions clear and get the matter out in the open.

Escalating towards an obvious sexual frame is an example of how to keep things on the right track. This doesn’t have to be outrageous dirty talk, just man woman/frame references. You can turn it up or tone it down according to how turned off the target is. A pretty safe one I’d say on dates I’d say things like, ‘see if we had kids (eye contact when you say this), with my brain and your body… and also my body… (then I’d look away wistfully) and my tenacity, and my ability to learn new skills quickly… our kids would be incredible’. It’s clearly a daft joke, but it gently draws you in the romantic circle. NB: I’m not saying you tell girls you’re actually up for having kids with them. It’s a silly, unlikely future projection story that they don’t take seriously.

There are various possible reactions:

If she is laughing along at things like this, you can assume you’re making headway. It’s great escalation.

If she expresses mild discomfort or is unenthusiastic about the subject, you can tell there’s some kind of blocker, but she’s not willing to burn the set.

If she gets uppity or angry, great. You just got a pretty firm ‘no’ and an insight into the fact she might not be all that much fun to be around. You can now get to work dealing with it, or decide it’s just not worth it. But at least you’re in control and you’re not allowing her to put you in the friend zone.

You see this is the thing. If the set goes down in flames, the novice thinks he’s a failure at game. Like the salesman wanting to keep a ‘non lead’ alive for the illusion of success. It’s the seasoned swordsman who is willing to crash and burn. He gets that it’s sometimes the necessary play. Don’t do it needlessly, obviously, but don’t be the guy who’s just endlessly happy to keep the flame alive.

I suddenly became aware of an awful sucking and smacking sound, I looked in alarm up expecting to see some strange bulbous jelly like space creature engaged in some form of cleansing ritual, but I calmed down when I saw it was just Krauser eating noisily. ‘It’s all there on his blog’, he assured me, ‘the whole affair was really sordid, typical of the Democrats’, he declared.

‘Pft’, I breathed out through my teeth, ‘has this kind of thing happened before then…’

‘Well back in the Reagan era’, he began… I leant back further in my chair again.

‘What else was there’, I thought. We’ve accepted that indifference is just an expected art of game. We’ve agreed that we can handle it by managing a romantic frame.

Apart from progressive escalation, how else do we check it’s working?

Filter for investment

This is a big one and it serves two purposes in that firstly, it gauges genuine interest and secondly, it actually builds attraction. The idea behind investment as an attraction builder works in a few ways. Firstly it assumes the expectation that someone must be willing to invest in order to spend time with you, which is high value behaviour and high value behaviour build attraction. It builds a kind of faux bond, a thin kind of loyalty in the early stages in the same way a non refundable deposit does on theatre tickets. It’s makes you much more likely to show up.

Again back to sales. In the early days of running bootcamps, we did them totally free. We were so drunk on fun, we actually paid for the costs out of our pocket and never asked a penny. It went on for about 6 months. We’d average around 7 students booked for a weekend, but 2 or 3 would drop out and we’d end up with 5. That would leave us heavy handed on the trainers side but at first we didn’t care as we were in it for the fun, though after a while, we realised it was a bit disrespectful and expensive for us. Especially when at times 7 trainers might turn up ad end up supporting 3 students.

We resolved it by charging either a non refundable, or refundable, deposit, I don’t recall. But the idea was, you lose the money if you no show. The amount was minor and it didn’t even cover our travel costs, let alone our room rental. I guess it was about £20. It was indeed minor but the result was incredible. Sign ups decreased very slightly, but dropouts decreased to zero. I honestly don’t have the figures but I guess we ended up with a dependable 4 to 5 students a weekend.

This is all from memory, but I’ve seen evidence of this being the case across several industries. It’s pretty basic. It’s likely three things had occurred when we did this.

1 – We were demonstrating we were more than a bunch of jokers by having the confidence to ask money. We were still the basement boys but our time wasn’t a joke. When the resource is of value, you’re more likely to go.

2 – Once you’re £20 in you find it hard to walk away and write the money off. Even if it’s raining or your big toe hurts. When you have skin in the game, you’re more likely to go.

3 – Sign ups decreased slightly. We’d likely simply filtered out a lot of time wasters just at this step. The ones who were never going to be serious dropped out the minute there was an investment asked of them. I never had to spend time logging their names or tapping their numbers into my phone and calling them on the night to ask how far away they were. The truth is, they were never a yes. I saved myself a massive ball ache, just by demanding investment.

The insecure guy and the insecure salesman thinks ‘if I ask investment I’ll scare people away’. The underlying belief is ‘because I am not worth it’. Poison. Kick that little voice in your head right in the balls.

For most skirt it not necessary, but take a hard look if you think you’re having your waffles frozen. How invested is she? Does she turn up? On time? If she is happy to be flakey and let you down then you’re probably not that important to her. If a girl really likes a guy, everything else takes a back seat. General persistent flakiness, last minute cancellations or worse, requests to change plans, there are all signs of low investment and low seriousness. That’s not to say if she asks to change the time or the location you bawl her out. I’ve had girls who were always late, BUT, were always fully engaged in the conversation, the texts and keen to keep meeting. They were just poor at time-keeping.

No, it’s a general thing. When does she take time to meet you and is she willing to put herself out slightly for you?

It’s up to you to filter the signs of tyre kicking early and deal with them, either by demanding investment or slowly slipping it in there with minor compliance tests. But if it’s not there after a while, don’t paddle about after her like a puppy.

Tyre kickers are difficult because if you get 10 of them, 7 are going nowhere, which means you’ve got to lose 7 leads that you really, really want and it’s a hard promise to surrender. But remember, it’s good for the frame to be the chooser. Be the man who is the chooser. In order to be this guy, you’re going to have to burn a few sets in your time.

Let me ask you a question, have you ever told a hot girl ‘thanks, you’re a nice girl, but you’re not for me’ and walked away. I have many times. I have regretted it pretty much every single time, but man it’s good for the frame. You lose a lay on Monday to be a much tougher customer a year from now.

I remember one night, long, long before game, I was out with some of the football lads in a crappy night club in Wimbledon. Now this is a 100% true story, as they all are, and if I lie even slightly, let my favourite football club be plagued by a decade long losing streak. There were two hot, blonde Kiwi girls on the dancefloor in this club, mercilessly tooling every man who came near them. They stood out a mile because they were hot, blonde, confident and there were two of them. At the time I’d have said 9s. I have no idea now, but we can safely assume 8s. We were all pretty drunk and we stood around them in a circle, while one by one these girls went round the circle and danced with each guy in turn for about 10 seconds before coldly flicking them off with a laugh and turning to the next. It was a conveyor belt. Every single guy fell for it every single time. I was disgusted. I wised up after it happened twice. I watched it all unfold and kept expecting the guys to wise up long before it got to be my turn. Not a single one did, the fucking mop heads. I was amazed they could be so fucking feckless.

So when one of them came to grab me, I firmly grabbed her arms and and gently and dominantly, pushed them off me and said in her ear, ‘thanks, you’re a lovely girl, but I’m married’. I pulled back, looked in her eyes and smiled. ‘Go and dance with that guy’, I said.

I loved it. My frame changed forever.

I actually dated the girl for a while. That story ended up with her chasing me. But that’s by the by. However, comically with that girl, I had a big problem in that I had to keep pretending to be married! I couldn’t, pre game, see a way to get out of the impossible lie I’d created for myself. Now I realise I could have just said to her on the first date, ‘I don’t have a wife you dingbat, I said that because you were being a prick tease and I don’t fall for it. Now stop being wet, we’re going for a drink’.

I was so stupid I had to manage this wife. I had a fake wife! It made the whole thing impossible. I had to keep inventing things about this fake wife, Emma. I gave the wife a name (of an ex). I had to. I had a wife, she had to have a name. She had to have a name, she was my wife. The relationship ended in a really weird way as well, but that’s another story for another time.

There was another girl at uni, a Welsh girl, Sianne or something. She was fucking blinding hot. I once walked past her door in her dorm and no shit the post it notes from guys were about 40 deep. She had absolutely no interest in me whatsoever. It was never going to happen and I was savvy enough to know it. The other guys harboured wild hopes. One night when she tried to tool me like a puppy dog, I was ready for it. I threw her hands off me and said ‘Hey, don’t go putting your paws on me love. Look you’re a ice grl, but you’re not my type OK?’

I knew I was throwing nothing away. And maybe she did. But what could she say in front of everyone. I just became the only guy in town to ever blow Sianne out. And I did it publicly. People talked about that. It helped me get other girls.

There’s a lot to be said for saying, ‘you know what, on balance, I don’t know, but I just get the feeling this one is prick tease, I’m just going to squish it out in style and move on. ‘Listen, I think you’re a really… nice.. girl and I think you’ll be great for someone else’.

‘And that’s why my workout routine is far superior to his’, he gloated. He was obviously onto his fitness regime now. It was apparent I hadn’t said much of anything for at least half an hour too and he was now looking at me expectantly. ‘Does he know?’ I thought. I had a red alert situation going on here. If I was to get back to my thoughts on sales and game and girls kicking tyres, I had to think fast. Fortunately years of dealing with him has honed my skills and I launched a dynamite gambit I call the ‘half agree’. It goes like this, if I just keep nodding, he’ll realise I am not listening. If I disagree too much, he’ll press me for a full explanation, which takes a lot of focus and pulls me away from my thoughts. So I came up, years ago, with the ‘half agree’, it goes like this:

‘His routine isn’t bad though is it, it’s pretty impressive’.

Top level Krauser management. He takes the bait every time. I look like I’m listening and I give him a real bone to chew on. ‘He’ll be positioning himself above this poor sod, whoever he is talking about, for half an hour now’, I cackled to myself, ‘I’ve just bought myself half a bloody hour, I’ve enough time to do my ‘Burnley winning the Champions League’ daydream’.

As his lips continued to move, the floodlights of the San Siro filled my mind and the players lined up. The football world had been stunned by the story of how this plucky little town team in england had defied the odds and somehow got this final.

I smiled broadly and leant back… even further… in my chair. People say I’m so laid back I’m practically horizontal.

Jimmy has his own blog here which somebody somewhere might possibly have an interest in. If you feel like easy the burden of your wealth, consider my products here.

I just realised, tonight while having a drink with an active daygamer, that there is a general impression afoot in the London Daygame Community that Nick Krauser is no longer writing about daygame.

This is not true, though I can absolutely see why you’d all think that. This blog is one long procession of book reviews with only the occasional daygame post, is it not? So, I can hardly blame inquisitive minds for wondering, is Nick done with daygame?

The answer is no, I’m not done. I’m no longer a player, I don’t particularly enjoy blogging about daygame right now [1] and I certainly don’t want to see any bloody YouTube infields. But I’m not done. Not done, I TELL YA!!!!!! Let me tell you what I have written about daygame in 2018, while all those book reviews were flooding my blog:

25,000 new words of technical daygame advice for the second edition of Daygame Mastery, already published this year [2]
140,000 new words of Younger Hotter Tighter, volume 3 of the memoir, already published this year.
140,000 new words of Little Brown Sex Machines, volume 6 of the memoir, to be published later this year [3]
200,000 new words of Balls Deep second edition, volume 1 of the memoir, to be published later this year [4]

That’s FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND WORDS of new content all about DAYGAME that I’ve written this year. Do you know how much that is? It’s HALF A MILLION WORDS. Is anyone else writing that much daygame advice and field reports? No, they bloody well are not. It should now be clear why there hasn’t been much writing capacity left over for the blog.

But of course, you lads didn’t know that. How could you? I hadn’t explained it. Sorry about that. I understand this is a sub-optimal state of affairs for those of you who like a daily fix of short ephemeral daygame talk, as I’m packing everything up into big books released only a couple of times a year. It’s also sub-optimal for those of you who refuse to pay for anything and want it all for free. I’m not judging you, as I freeload plenty on YouTube myself on other subjects, but naturally you are not the market I care about [5]

So, keen daygamers and enthusiastic voyeurs alike. Keep your eyes peeled because plenty of new content will be dropping towards the arse end of this year. That stuff combined will absolutely blow away – in both quantity and quality – the kind of hastily scrawled blogposts I used to throw up for free a few years ago.

Sit tight. I always deliver on my promises.

If the act of sitting tight has caused you to notice your wallet is uncomfortably fat, perhaps consider lightening it by purchasing one of my fantastic products. Check out this product summary page.

[1] That will change in the next couple of months, I think.
[2] And the new layout was bloody hard work too! There’s a reason everyone else’s game books look like shit. No-one else is dumb enough to work as hard on them as I am. For fuck’s sake, the EXTRA CONTENT added to the main book is more than most people’s Game books have in their entirety.
[3] Probably.
[4] Almost certainly, it’s the next in the queue.
[5] That doesn’t offend you, right? You can see why I’m more interested in satisfying customers who pay me than freeloaders who don’t. If not, try writing a 5,000 word book chapter and you’ll see just how much work goes into it.

Sometimes you need to think hard and search out AMOG opportunities for your friends. Other times, AMOGs present themselves to you. When reading this 1933 book from John Creasey, the first of 28 in the Department Z series, I was elated to discover the main character is a foppish ne’erdowell called Jimmy. The story opens with him visiting his Aunt Gloria at her country home. She’s fond of him but wishes he wouldn’t waste his life.

Once again Lady Gloria laughed. This utter absurdity of Jimmy’s was infectious; a man who could make a butt for humour of his own habits and discuss his faults with such complete aplomb was surely less of a fool than he looked. Only – Lady Gloria sighed mentally – why did he make himself look such a fool?

You can bet a screencap of that paragraph got sent over WhatsApp. There was something in there to ask Jimmy.

The set up is such that I at first believed this book to be a James Bond imitation and it wasn’t until I noticed some quaint old language that I suspected it pre-dated Ian Fleming. Department Z is a secret government office run by the secretive Mr Gordon Craigie who is exactly like Mac in the Matt Helm books of thirty years later. Jimmy works as agent Number 7 attempting to root out plots against Her Majesty’s Government. His frequent trips take him overseas. To maintain secrecy, Jimmy has a cover identity as a dissolute skirt-chasing toff and it’s that which concerns his elder relatives (who aren’t read into Department Z’s existence).

Telegrams of similar nature had often come to him during the four preceding years, and directly after them he had taken a holiday from England, and spent a week, a month, or even longer in what Colonel Cann [his uncle] described as ‘women, wine and perdition’.

In the book he’s working for the Secret Service but I did need to ask Jimmy if his euro-jaunting wasn’t some kind of cover for espionage. Art imitates life and life imitates art so when Aunt Gloria questions him on his aimlessness, I couldn’t help but think these would be words I’d utter myself:

‘I think,’ she said slowly, ‘that he would be satisfied if you didn’t look quite so…. useless… sometimes.’ She eyed her companion squarely, refusing to respond to his laughter. ‘You do slide through life, don’t you, Jimmy?’

It’s lucky Death Miser contained such nuggets because it’s an otherwise crappy book. That surprised me because I’ve read a dozen John Creasys before this and they were all good. The answer lies in the date, 1933. It’s his third novel and the first two were standalones, making this his first attempt to begin a franchise. He’d written – and I’m not shitting you – a stunning 43 books before the first of his Inspector West series, which are my favourite.

Creasey got considerably better at his craft over time, as you may expect.

There’s a short interview with his son on the official John Creasey site where he explains his dad used to give himself five days to write a novel. That’s almost incomprehensibly fast for something that gets legitimately published in the paperback era [1]. Back in those days printing technology severely constrained publishing so paperback authors would literally write to certain page count, based on a multiple of the individual sheaves of papers glued inside the cover. That’s why they are all the same size.

Creasey became so confident of his ability that he wouldn’t even plot his detective stories. He’d begin with a simple idea, throw in a clue, and then have his fictional detectives solve the mystery for him as he wrote. As the protagonist moved forwards, Creasey would think up – on the spot – the next clue or next twist. He was winging it. I sensed this make-it-up-as-you-go-along plotting when first reading the Inspector West yarns and it gives an air that anything might happen. It feels real because there’s the unusual sensation of a genre novel (i.e. plot-driven) that is actually somewhat character driven.

But that was all to come. In 1933’s Death Miser, it’s just shite. Creasey was only 25 years old when it was published and it shows. It’s impressive for a young lad who banged out three novels that first year, but by the standards of regular genre fiction its very immature. Half the time I wasn’t even sure what was supposed to be happening.

The story is thus. Jimmy is out in the countryside visiting his Aunt Gloria when he gets a telegram from Department Z telling him to put a watch on his next door neighbour Thomas Loder, a suspicious character. It turns out a dozen bad apples are having secret meetings there and the boss wants to know what. He meets a stunning girl who he goes doolally over but the least credible turn is that her dad (and Jimmy’s neighbour) is the head of an international criminal network that is about to pull the trigger on a World Revolution.

Yeah, they just happened to set-up their HQ next door to Department Z’s top operative. That’s roughly equivalent to Spectre setting up shop next door to James Bond’s apartment in Sloane Square. You’d have to be 25 years old to write that.

Jimmy blunders his way through a couple of gun-fights, cabaret shows, car chases and showdowns with The Miser (the dad) and it’s dreadfully dull. I dare say that Fallen Angel was more skilfully written. So, this book is a load of shit. I don’t recommend it at all. I do, however, absolutely recommend John Creasey’s later work. He’s an accomplished pro by the time Inspector West appears.

Speaking of accomplished pros, you might want to check out my books available in the USA here, the rest of the world from Amazon here, and if you want to know more about each book and what it’ll teach you, look at my product summary here.

[1] As opposed to Kindle Direct Publishing where there’s no such quality control and books are often less than half the size.

I don’t know what possessed me to read this book [1] seeing as it’s the second in a series where the first one was a bit shit, and the series evidently didn’t catch on first time around because it ended after the third book. But….. how can I put this? Reading Fallen Angel was the literary equivalent of eating a McDonald’s cheeseburger or gutter-gaming a gook: a squalid guilty pleasure precisely because it was a bit grotty.

I dunno, doesn’t Karl Jung talk something about the ‘shadow self’? Isn’t there a strain in psychology discussing the death wish [2] and our atavistic tendency towards occasional self-debasement? If I remember correctly, life in the Garden Of Eden was just lovely until Adam decided to eat the forbidden fruit and begin the fall of mankind. Anyway, my point being that my reading trashy books is an expression of a long lineage of self-destructive human behaviour.

That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

So imagine my surprise when this book turned to be good fun. Yes, The Werewolf Walks Tonight was a solid afternoon’s read. Not literature, and certainly not award-winning, but fun to read. Authors say you can ‘find the book in the writing of it’ and I think that’s what happened with Michael Avallone in his series. Book one started very clunkily indeed and didn’t find its way until halfway through. Book two also starts feebly but picks up much earlier. That got me speculating about the conditions under which Avallone wrote.

I have a writer friend nicknamed Juggernaut due to his resemblance to the Marvel villain [3] who had the good grace to edit volume three of my memoir Younger Hotter Tighter. “It starts unsteady but really hits its stride during the Brazil chapters” he told me. “And your introductions are shit.” Should I rewrite it, I asked. “Nah man. Editing is gay. Go on to the next book. Learn by writing.”

I absolutely believe writers find their books by writing. Even the fantastically talented Erle Stanley Gardner began his Perry Mason series with a couple of clunking chapters. You need time with your characters and precis until you work out how it’s meant to hang together. Some writers are perfectionists so they’ll write the book and then, having found it, go back to the beginning and rewrite it in the new style. A prolific hack like Michael Avallone ain’t got no time for that. He wrote over 220 books and you don’t do that by looking backwards, do you Sonny Jim? By the time his editor was checking out chapter one of Fallen Angel, he was likely halfway through The Werewolf Walks Tonight.

It was really apparent from book one that Avallone doesn’t rewrite his books. I suspect his editors had a big polishing job ahead of them. Reading The Werewolf Walks Tonight was like watching a boxing rematch – round one is really round thirteen. The guys already know each other, and have already adapted.

The story here concerns a tiny town in the Deep South called Fletcherville. The body of their priest is found in the forest with his throat ripped out, and soon after three more bodies are found. The injuries look inhuman, like the savaging of a wild beast, and word spreads there’s a werewolf on the loose. The Satan Sleuth, Philip St George, perks up his ears and goes to investigate. What follows is more like a murder mystery than an actioneer and it felt a little like a low-rent Matt Helm story. It’s short and doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. The combined Deep South atmosphere, multiple perspective characters, and supernatural overtones hang together long enough to produce a satisfying conclusion. The pace never drops.

I’m going to give Avallone another chance because I’m starting to think we got off on the wrong foot together with Fallen Angel. The guy writes full-blooded and without faggotry, getting straight to the point. Kindle Unlimited showed me he has a thirty-volume hard-boiled detective series so I’m curious to see how he handles different genres. If he’s the American John Creasey, I’ll be all over it.

It appears my books are all on Amazon now, for worldwide sale. They must run an automated script to pick up Ingram distributed books. Anyway, it’s good news because you can now get full colour latest editions of my books, hardcover or softcover, and save a packet on postage too. Let me know how the ordering process goes. Customers in the USA are still better off going direct to my Ingram sales page, as you’ll get exactly the same thing but faster and at no extra cost. Click here to know what products I’m selling.

[1] Excuse the pun.
[2] No, not the cool movie series.
[3] Friend is perhaps stretching it. More like an acquaintance. Or hanger-on.

This page explains the products I have for sale relating to daygame and seduction. Hopefully it’ll help you decide which is appropriate for your position and needs. First, at the high level, there are THREE categories:

 

Pick-up Textbooks – These explain how to do daygame, with many many examples of what you say and do at each stage of the seduction.
Pick-up Videos – These too explain daygame in detail and you are buying a login to my teaching platform.
Pick-up Memoirs – This series of books tells my story, taking you on the journey of how I learnt game. They are full of field reports, lay reports, and analysis of a player’s life. They are highly instructional.

 

PICK UP TEXTBOOKS

Daygame Mastery – The core textbook of how to pick-up girls from the street, cafes, and any other daytime situation you can conceive. It’s a massive 524 pages in full colour and walks you through the daygame model from beginning to end. So it begins with the inner game, to get your mind straight and to battle approach anxiety. Then I explain choosing targets and how to stop girls. It’s extremely detailed on the body language, behaviour, and what to say. Then there is extensive text game advice and the full date model. This book is my bestseller and since its release four years ago it has transformed the daygame community. Start here.

I recommend the new second edition. It’s full colour, containes 20% addition content over the first edition, and looks nicer. See the video above for a hands-on look. The second edition is available in the big A4 hardback suitable for pride of place on your bookshelf, and also as a small (6″x4″) full colour Pocket paperback suitable for travel, with a subtle cover so no-one knows what you’re reading. The content is identical.

Daygame Infinite – This companion textbook to Daygame Mastery pushes into advanced territory. Like Mastery it is full colour and a massive 575 pages full of illustrations, demonstration photos, and detailed reproductions of real-life text chats with girls. Daygame Infinite focuses on improving your vibe and calibration. It is packed with advice to clear your mind and present yourself as a cool, well-balanced man. There is a massive dating section using transcripts of real-life dates with hot girls, explaining why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Currently in its first edition, it too is available in A4 hardback and the smaller Pocket Edition here. It’s best to consider Mastery and Infinite as volumes 1 and 2 of the same comprehensive work.

Daygame Nitro – This old classic was the first textbook on the London Daygame Model. It is recommended for readers new to daygame, perhaps having only done a hundred sets, or for those used to ‘indirect game’ wishing to transition to the more ballsy and effective ‘direct’ style. Nitro is much simpler and easier to practice that Mastery and Infinite, though it’s the same model. Consider this the introductory book.

Now in it’s second edition, Nitro is an A4 hardback with B/W interior available here.

 

 

PICK UP VIDEOS

Daygame Overkill – This is the core video instructional. It comes in two parts. First is a theoretical seminar explaining the difference between traditional pick-up and the faster, more dynamic ‘bad boy’ pickup. The second part is the demonstration. There are ten infield videos of me picking up girls. The real sauce is in the analysis. Unlike other ‘highlight reel’ infield products, Daygame Overkill goes into extreme detail explaining exactly what is happening, both in my technique and the girl’s response to it. All videos are subtitled so you don’t miss a word. After watching Daygame Overkill, you’ll know exactly how to ‘read’ a set so you always know how it’s going. READ MORE, AND BUY IT HERE.

Black Book – This is a seminar in which I explain intermediate daygame and dating to a crowd of beginners. It has workshop tasks such as how to create unique openers, how to sit on a date, how to smoothly escalate. There is no infield. It’s pure theory and workshop demonstration. READ MORE, AND BUY IT HERE.

Womanizers Bible – This seminar covers high level mindset, outlining how a successful seducer thinks of the world and his place within it. It peels back the curtain to what is really going on, on a deep level. I don’t cover infield techniques. Womanizers Bible is all about the inner game. READ MORE, AND BUY IT HERE.

 

 

PICK UP MEMOIR

#1 Balls Deep – This is a story – my story – of why I turned to Game and how I began the seemingly impossible task of transforming from a chubby timid office worker into a charismatic seducer of beautiful women. It begins in 2009 with my divorce, aged 34 years old, and chronicles the next two years by which point I’m a decent player. Currently in it’s first edition, available in A5 paperback (full colour interior) here .

#2 A Deplorable Cad – The story continues as I’m living in a ‘pick-up’ mansion in London with a team of seducers. We travel the world, chase skirt, and get into all kinds of trouble. This volume covers the next two years of my journey. The full colour second edition is available in A5 hardbacks and paperback. There is also a B/W first edition available here, but I strongly recommend the second edition. The text is the same, but the second edition is full colour and has a tidier layout.

#3 Younger Hotter Tighter – It’s now 2013 and I’m a full-time skirt-chaser. Follow my adventures as I visit Brazil, Belarus and everywhere in between. This is available only as A5 hardback and paperback, in full colour.

 

#4 Adventure Sex – The memoir series closes with an account of my most successful year as a player – 2014. We have lay-upon-lay, all described in detail so you can reproduce my technique, and much rumination on how it feels to live a player’s life. The second edition is a full-colour A5 hardback or softcover with an updated layout. The first edition is still available here, in B/W, with the same text but the second edition is much nicer.

My first editions in B/W are all available on the Lulu bookshop. It’s simple to order, but just bear in mind you are not getting the latest versions and I don’t offer discounts or ‘trade in’ on later editions.

I hope this clarifies things.

Nick

 

On first picking up this book and taking a look at the title, I assumed it to be the memoir of a Russian prostitute. Imagine my disappointment, then, when upon reading I found it to be just some crusty old medieval fantasy tale written in cack-handed Ye Olde English.

Wait, no. That’s not quite right. Let’s start again.

It would appear that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been a naughty boy. Many of you will know him as the author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. He also wrote the Sir Nigel knight-errant tales, and the Professor Challenger stories beginning with The Lost World. So, that’s a rather impressive oeuvre. Or is it?

I’d read all 56 Holmes short stories, 4 novels, and watched countless Basil Rathbone Nazi-hunting wartime movie adaptations before I finally stumbled upon Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue. I’d heard whispers Poe had invented the entire genre of Locked Room Puzzle with this short story but…. fucking hell….. it was like reading a Sherlock Holmes story. Conan Doyle had shamelessly ripped it off. I then read Poe’s The Purloined Letter and…. fucking hell… that’s the blueprint for all the Sherlock Holmes stories featuring espionage.

I’ll grant that Conan Doyle’s stories are better than Poe’s, but they are shameless imitations. And yet I can’t be the only fool in these fair lands who gives Conan Doyle the creative credit that rightly belongs to Poe [1].

You’ll find my review of Sir Nigel here and I was greatly impressed by Conan Doyle’s tale of a valiant young knight doing battle with the French during the hundred years war [2]. Now that I’ve read Ivanhoe I see where his inspiration came from. It’s rather obvious. Again, I think Conan Doyle brings greater literary mastery to his tale than Sir Walter Scott does to Ivanhoe but it’s clear which of the two was the more original writer. Is there anything else Conan Doyle imitated and stole the thunder of? God forbid there are any movies out there featuring an isolated ‘park’ of dinosaurs from a Lost World of the Jurassic era. I think that would finish me off.

On the plus side, it seems Sir Walter Scott was a tremendous influence on most adventure writers. Now that I’ve finally read him I see parallels in Tolkien and the crusader stories of Robert E Howard. It’s hard to believe Ivanhoe was written two hundred years ago as it reads fresh today. It took me only three days to plow through the 400-page tome. So, what’s it about?

The backdrop is strife and division in England a hundred years after The Battle Of Hastings. Normans still rule as robber barons and the Saxons grumble under their heel. King John has usurped Richard The Lionheart while the later was on the crusades and then held prisoner in Germany. A lone knight turns up incognito to a grand tournament and wins both the joust and melee, under the watchful eye of another incognito warrior, The Black Knight. From there begins a tale of battle and chivalry as Wilfred of Ivanhoe seeks to win the hand of his fair Rowena, Richard seeks to be restored to his throne, while Robin of Lockwood and Cedric Thane skirt the edges of the succession struggle.

It reads a lot like a Dumas story if he were an Englishman. Like Dumas, Scott is adept at weaving together plot-lines from multiple characters with overlapping but never-matching interests, in showing the political climes of the day, and springing plot twists that don’t feel cheap but totally upend the book’s assumed trajectory. It can get overly wordy at times, like Dumas, with paragraphs the size of the page, but it’s always hurtling onward. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to pick up a sword and buckler and smite some Saracen on the noggin.

From the very first page I had the sense that Sir Walter Scott is an extremely intelligent and well-read man. Genuinely so, unlike a showy bullshitting pseudo-intellectual like Jordan Peterson. It really reminded me of my old maxim that “the Victorians were right about everything” [3] and that previous generations didn’t only have double our modern levels of testosterone but they were smarter too. You can’t imagine a millennial capable of reading this even though it was a mass market success in its day. The introduction to this Wordsworth Classics edition goes into a detailed critique that I didn’t much care for. Apparently Scott was a bit liberal with the historical chronology to speed up Richard’s return to England, he has some anachronisms in the weapons and coinage, and his tendency to overly describe scenes comes from his unfamiliarity with the time period.

Laughably, the introduction finds Scott’s treatment of gender roles and race to be troubling. It’s basically an Alt-Right book [4]. Men are valorized for bravery and battle, with a chivalric code of honour. Women are domesticated. Importantly, a key theme expressed via Cedric is how the Saxons cannot abide their lands to be overrun by foreign invaders because the two races are fundamentally different. There’ll be no race-mixing in this book, thank you very much. One plot-line is that no-one will tolerate their gallants from fraternising with a beautiful Jewish women [5] and much comedic relief comes from Isaac Of York, and avaricious cowardly Jew who is forever in peril.

I wasn’t the least bit troubled.

If you find such gallantry boring and think it would be better to read a memoir including Russians and whores, consider my own KrauserHo! series available here to US residents and here to everybody else.

[1] Never fear, karma has settled that debt to me by all the hustlers who imitate my work without giving credit.
[2] Or Thirty Years War. I forget. Check the review.
[3] The Queen was born one year before this book’s publication so it’s technically-speaking Victorian but my maxim isn’t meant to be that strict.
[4] As was everything back then.
[5] SPOILER – they’d rather burn her at the stake as a sorceress. Good on them!

Girls don’t half read shite. You’ve probably heard of the Bronte sisters, a trio of Victorian lasses who each wrote classic romances in the early 1800s. I wasn’t really sure which of the three to start with [1] so I asked myself the obvious question: which one has the best Kate Bush song?

That would be Wuthering Heights, and thus Emily Bronte [2]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW3gKKiTvjs

My first thoughts on this book were along the lines of oh my god this is so bleak! That’s deliberate. Bronte has done a sterling job in aligning all aspects of her writing to reinforce the feeling of a desolate, bleak, wind-swept moor peopled by a small clutch of disagreeable, bleak characters. Every single character in this story is thoroughly unlikable, even Nelly, the main narrator and Bronte’s ‘voice of reason’ within the total insanity created by the rest of the cast. The story goes thus.

There are two manors next to each other on the windswept Yorkshire moors, Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. The family of the latter are odd balls, being a young man Hindley and his younger sister Catherine. One day, while on a business trip to Liverpool, their dad picks up a street urchin gypsy that he names Heathcliff [3] who is Catherine’s age. For reasons unknown, the dad makes Heathcliff his favourite and that leads to resentment from his siblings, who bully him, as does the manservant Joseph. Thrushcross Grange is inhabited by the Lintons, of whom there are also a son and daughter, Earl and Isabelle, the same age as the other kids. They also hate Heathcliff.

Hindley goes off for a few years and comes back with a wife who then dies in childbirth to a young lad Hareton. Catherine and Heathcliff start playing together and form a budding romance but she ends up marrying Earl because of his vastly superior station in life and Heathcliff runs off for several years. He returns with mysterious wealth, blackmails the now drunkard Hindley by mortgaging Wuthering Heights for gambling debts, and uses his newfound power over the families to elope with and marry Isabelle. She has his child, named Linton, but escapes him. Catherine gives birth to a daughter, also called Catherine, and dies soon after. By this point it’s clear she and Heathcliff were desperately in love.

Skip forward about 15 years and the next generation has grown up and Heathcliff has used the intervening years to mope around in Wuthering Heights as a recluse, trying his damndest to ruin everyone’s life. His motivation appears to be to take revenge on Hindley by corrupting his son Hareton, and on Earl by ruining his daughter Catherine. For unknown reasons he’s also ruining his own estranged son Linton’s life too, bringing him back to Wuthering Heights. Around this time, a stranger called Lockwood arrives to rent the now untenanted Thrushcross Grange, and he’s the narrator of the first and last few chapters.

Look, it’s all a bit complex. Narratively, the book begins with Lockwood’s testimony in the present day, and he gets his housekeeper Nelly to give her testimony into events passed, and she sometimes provides a further layer by recalling testimony of Catherine and Isabelle. I’ll just summarise the key point:

Everyone is an utter cunt.

Heathcliff is the main villain and justifiably so, being a gypsy. What I can’t figure out is (i) why he’s doing this all, even though it ruins his own life, and (ii) why he lives on in culture as some kind of romantic bad boy. He’s a total chode. Okay, he’s dark, ruthless, good-looking and whatnot but his behaviours all smack of oneitis, jealously, zero emotional control, and failing to accomplish anything. He’s as good a candidate for ‘sexy bad boy’ and Walter White is for ‘alpha male’. To think that, you’d have to be brainless [4]. He spends his whole young adulthood failing to shag Catherine, then his middle-age pining over her memory. It’s a lifelong oneitis.

Catherine herself is also an utter cunt. Though the terms didn’t exist back then, Emily Bronte describes her as a character with clear bi-polar disorder and malignant narcissism. The traits are so consistently described that I can only presume Bronte was intimately acquainted with a BPD slut in her own real life. Catherine is constantly toying with others, abusing their politeness, and telling shameless lies, only to fly into rages and then self-pity when busted. It’s not clear if she dies for this reason, working herself into a fit, or if it’s death due to complications in childbirth. I found the book unclear because it spends several chapters presenting her as bedridden due to hysteria but then in a paragraph slips in that she gave birth without having ever mentioned she was pregnant. Weird.

Even the main narrator Nelly, the closest thing this book has to a normal person, is a bit of a cunt. Several times she could’ve prevented catastrophe but her own cupidity and cowardice lets others walk into disaster.

Also notable in this book is the depravity and insanity. It’s essentially two small households in the middle of nowhere. At no point do scenes take place in the nearby village, much less a city. There’s a cloying atmosphere of isolation as these lunatics roam around messing with each other’s minds. No-one ever does the sensible thing. For example, Heathcliff is determined to have his sickly young son [5] married to young Catherine so as to secure her inheritance for himself. Earl is adamantly opposed to this and….. does nothing. He tumbles to the plan before Catherine has developed any affection for Linton but just continues to live on the next manor over, doing nothing about it. He doesn’t send her off to boarding school, or into the village, or move house. They just wait like sitting ducks until events turn Heathcliff’s way.

I spent most of this book muttering under my breath, “just tell him to fuck off.” Mind you, the book would be only two chapters long in that case so I guess the canon of English literature is fortunate Bronte never considered that as an appropriate response.

Given how isolated the farmhouses are, and how depraved the inhabitants, I’m amazed there are no rape scenes. Several times that would be the obvious way for Heathcliff to achieve his ends. I suspect this is more due to Bronte writing the book in the early 1800s and thus not able to pass censorship. It’s not like gypsies ever shy away from rape, kidnapping, and using white girls as sex slaves [6]

If it was Emily Bronte’s intention to write a dark romance then I think she failed miserably and her legion of fans through the ages are morons. However, if she instead wished to paint a nightmarish picture of isolated countryside life and the dangers of living as a recluse, she admirably succeeded. I enjoyed this book and finished it in 24 hours.

If you’d like a story about an English bad boy who manipulates pretty young women into bed against their better judgement then consider my memoir series. Readers in the USA should go to my user-friendly site here. Readers in all other countries should go here.

[1] When forced to choose between three girls, I always go for the one with the biggest tits. However, there are no photos of this trio.
[2] I’ve yet to see anyone but Ms Bush hit the right notes on this song.
[3] A literal gypsy, in all it’s connotations of dirty skin, evil soul, and constant thievery.
[4] But remember, it’s written for women.
[5] A clear case of the Jungian ‘high-chair tyrant’
[6] I have a Romanian ex-girlfriend whose best friend in junior high school was kidnapped by gypsies while walking home, then sold into sex slavery in Italy, and only rescued by her father two years later.

How many of you dickheads have played Company Of Heroes?

I have a strange fascination with the RTS genre in that I always think I want to play them [1] to the point of resolving “when I get home I’m gonna give it a crack” but then the moment I start I realise I’m all at sea. What actual tactics should I be using? It all degrades into a select-all-then-rush scrum. It would seem I’m just not very good at them.

In contrast, I’m fucking ace at Advance Wars. Make the thing turn-based and I’m completely in my element. Since the first Advance Wars game was released on the Game Boy Advance I’ve been a hardcore fan of the series and invested about two hundred hours into each of the four games. It perfectly suited all the long bus, train, and airplane rides I was doing at that point in my life. I could board a plane in Narita Airport, flick on the GBA, and then like magic I’d find myself at Heathrow twelve hours later having been so absorbed as to lose track of time completely.

I really am getting ahead of myself here. Sorry.

The only RTS game I ever completed was Command And Conquer Generals and ever since I’ve dipped into C&C but then dipped back out as I can’t fathom any actual tactics [2]. It’s unsatisfactory to my precise orderly mind to just cluster my units together in a random attack and then watch me overwhelm the enemy AI with brute force. I heard Company Of Heroes was the most tactical of RTSs so I looked into that and got very excited indeed. It looked like a Sven Hassel novel simulator.

Jesus, it looked great! Explosions, tanks, infantry, MG nests, and all done on the Normandy and Eastern fronts. Then….. I got confused and gave up. Right then, that finally gets me to today’s book, D-Day Through German Eyes (volume 1). This is my second stab at a free Kindle Unlimited book and I’m already seeing why people get so excited about the system.

Vox recently discussed a reader’s theory on why e-books are a dying business despite the roaring success of Kindle Unlimited. Read the post here. To summarise, there are increasingly two types of internet-savvy reader. Firstly, the “super readers” who burn through a book or two per day on their e-reading device. These folks are reclusive hermits or spend a lot of time commuting (or skiving) and thus reading is their primary time-filler, where others in a similar situation but of different mind may prefer Netflix or Sudoku. Kindle Unlimited is perfectly pitched at such readers because there’s an effectively unlimited amount of reading available for a pittance, all on-demand on their device. I’m only two books into using the service and I’m already a convert. It’s really astonishing how much good stuff is on there, not to mention the weird niche trash too.

The second type are the “premium paper” readers who may not read so much but have an emotional identification with books such that they like to own high quality editions of the books they do like. They may even re-read the same book several times. For a long time, this described me. It’s quite normal for me to drop $50 for a single volume of a book I really like just for the pleasure of owning it. For example, consider these beauties.

I suspect many Sigma Wolf customers are the same. It’s why I instinctively lavished extreme care upon the quality of the books. Important though the content is, there’s a unique pleasure in owning a high quality edition. So now that I travel a lot I find myself switching between both super-reader (while abroad) and premium-paper (while home). Vox’s theory is that normal e-books have fallen between the two stools: too expensive for super-readers and too transient for premium paper buyers. I agree.

Anyway, I’ve gotten well off track. Let’s return to D-Day Through German Eyes.

This book made me want to play Company Of Heroes again. It’s a series of five interviews conducted ten years after the end of WWII to give a cross-section of German soldiers posted at the static defences of the Atlantic Wall. Each of Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword beaches are represented as are different branches of the Army in a grenadier, an infantry corporal, an engineer, and an artillery second lieutenant. Each man talks through the events of the evening preceding Operation Overlord and D-Day itself.

Notable themes are how the German troops speak of ‘defending France’ and that Nazi propaganda of the time had convinced them that Europe was united by Hitler and defending it from the international bankers of America, the global imperialists of Britain, and the communist hordes of Russia. Frankly, I think they weren’t far wrong. Here’s an example in chapter three:

It is overlooked, perhaps forgotten, by almost everyone today that we were there to defend Europe against the multiple threats represented by the Allies. We saw the British as an outdated Imperial force, organised by freemasons, who sought to turn the clock back one hundred years to the days when their word was the law around the world [3]. Why should they be entitled to install their freemason puppet, De Gaulle, in France, to rule as a proxy? The Vichy government had three consistent points in its propaganda regarding the threats to the French people: these were De Gaulle, freemasonry and communism.
As for the American state, we perceived that as controlled by the forces of international finance and banking [4], who wished to abolish national governments and have the world run by banks and corporations. And there was the definite sense that both these countries, England and the USA, were being manipulated, controlled, by the Bolsheviks in Moscow. I stress that these were my views, and they were very common views, at the time.

Looking at the collusion between the Hillary campaign and Russia, of China’s ownership of much of the Democrat party and Hollywood, of the Jewish control of Wall Street and social media, and the blatant fascism of the Obama administration [5]…… well, not much has changed since 1944. I suppose Iran’s control of the Obama presidency is the only new element. I happen to think the Nazis were cunts – socialist cunts – but there were no good guys in World War II and the whole thing was a shit show. Think of how much could’ve been achieved if instead of slaughtering each other, Europe had banded together and slaughtered Africa or the Middle East instead. We could’ve won back Constantinople!

Other notable themes are that all the soldiers sensed an invasion was coming that summer but German intelligence couldn’t predict exactly when or how it would occur, that Operation Overlord succeeded due to the overwhelming force Allies had against stretched Axis defenders, and that all the Germans report the Allies having total naval and air superiority.

My one qualm with this book is that I suspect it’s not an accurate account of the soldiers interviewed. All five veterans present extremely lurid accounts of battle, with limbs flying up from shell-blasts, guts hanging off tree branches, and men stumbling around as flaming torches from flamethrower attacks. It’s too gruesome and sensationalist to be believable. These men are describing possibly the most harrowing day of their lives in which they were pounded into submission, failed in their primary task (to repel the invaders), and saw dozens of comrades violently killed. I seriously doubt they’d talk about it like a Sven Hassel action scene.

So is it all real? Did the editor spice it up with additional description? Were there no veterans at all and the ‘interviews’ are a creation of the writer’s own mind? I have no idea. I’d read this with the same mentality you’d watch a YouTube daygame infield: for entertainment. Assume the creator is lying his ass off.

If you’re in the USA and would like some premium-paper editions of my books with full-colour interiors then well, sonny Jim, it’s your lucky day. Go to my sales site here and it’s all very straight forward. Sadly that service doesn’t extend to countries outside the USA, but you can get the latest versions of my books by looking at my product page here.

[1] And to “git gud” at them.
[2] I’m not saying there aren’t any tactics, just that I can’t fathom them.
[3] I’d quite like that, now that I think of it.
[4] Jews.
[5] Actual fascism, in the Mussolini sense of organised collaboration between trades unions and business, with heavy government regulation of the economy, totalitarian state, and a negation of individual liberty, all propped up by outrageous money printing and debt creation.

I’ll admit that in my advancing age I’m starting to struggle with horror and gore. When I was a kid I really didn’t give a shit. Friday 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street…. fuck it, even vile slasher shit like Maniac… bring it on! In contrast, about ten years ago I was watching one of the SAW sequels [1] and I found it all so pointlessly bloodthirsty.

Who can enjoy this sadistic filth? I asked myself. Evidently large numbers did, as the eight movies made a combined worldwide gross of almost $1 billion, on a combined budget of just $77m, with not one of them grossing less than six times its budget. Consider the similarly-sadistic Hostel series was also a smash hit and that makes a lot of very sick individuals going to the cinema.

But then again, when I was fifteen years old I was watching Cannibal Holocaust and The Beast In Heat, and I turned out to be a very stable genius didn’t I?

Thinking about my decreased appetite for horror and carnage over the years [2] I figured out the key: empathy. What is it that creates empathy and why do I have more of it now than thirty years ago? My pet theory involves mirror neurons and warfare. For the latter, I’ve noticed that all teenagers, deep down, consider themselves to be immortal. It’s well known that young men make the most fearless soldiers and I think this is why. Young men are needed to defend the tribe and thus take extraordinary risks that are illogical should they be concerned only with the safe transmission of their own DNA to the next generation. Thus nature has imbued young men with a delusional sense of immortality (to take risks) and a lack of empathy (to mercilessly destroy enemies). It seems to wear off over age, perhaps as we are meant to transition to raising children or watching over grand-kids.

If you thought that was pseudo-science you won’t like my next leap of logic.

Empathy comes from mirror neurons and most social mammals have them. Simply put, when you notice a fellow mammal experiencing an emotion, your own matching mirror neurons fire to recreate their emotion in your own brain. That’s what empathy is [3]. Mirror neurons are extremely adaptive to higher primates because they support a Theory Of Mind and better allow you to anticipate the actions of others. It’s my conjecture that sociopaths are simply lacking these mirror neurons and that’s why they feel disassociated from others. If you can’t feel another’s pain, you find it easier to attack them.

Now, assuming I’m right about this [4], it presents an additional question of why has my empathy increased as I aged? [5] Is it a natural part of the ageing process, or might it even be a side-effect of the Game and my increased calibration? Could it be that doing thousands of sets and working very hard on calibration has been some kind of neural exercise to strengthen my mirror neurons?

I was watching Better Call Saul last week and in it was a hospital scene that suggests a common therapy for stroke patients is to train up undamaged neurons to take up the tasks formerly done by neurons the stroke has damaged. Could it be Game is a similar therapy? [6] I don’t know. I’m just telling you what was on my mind as I read this book, Fallen Angel, the first in the short The Satan Sleuth series. The book is shit, and I don’t recommend it, therefore spoilers ahead.

I downloaded this onto my kindle based entirely on how retarded the cover is, how interesting the narrative hook (a man hunting down Satanists in revenge), and that it was free on Kindle Unlimited. That’s a powerful trifecta on a Sunday afternoon when I’m sitting in Plato cafe in 25C sunshine with a couple of hours to kill.

This is the plot:

Phillip St George is a young heir to a billionaire’s fortune who used the opportunity to become a world-renowned explorer, the type of man who “wants to see what is behind the mountain”. He marries a Miss America hottie and she’s waiting at home in his upstate New York chateau while he’s down south investigating the Bermuda Triangle [7]. It’s the normal schlock fiction set-up where every man is devastatingly rich and handsome while every girl has shapely legs and big tits. Escapism.

Things pick up when four Satanists invade the chateau, catch Phillip’s wife, and then ritually sacrifice her. It’s extremely brutal stuff, on a par with SAW or Hostel. They rape her with a crucifix, slash her torso with a knife, saw her limbs off, then finally chop her head off with an axe and strew the body parts around different rooms. Then they run away and hide in a cave. They evade capture during the one-month manhunt. Phillip is none to happy about this so he decides to become The Satan Sleuth, dress as a monk, arm up, and seek revenge. The Count Of Monte Cristo this isn’t. The revenge takes a week to plot and the four Satanists have the good grace to return to the chateau (unwittingly) so Phillip doesn’t even need track them down. He kidnaps one at a time and sets out to break their minds before gruesomely murdering them.

Think of it like Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left. It’s really rather similar: a quartet of low-life beatniks (three men and a woman) capture a woman, sadistically murder her, then inadvertently stumble into her family, who takes brutal revenge. My guess is the beatnik’s murder in Fallen Angel is inspired by the Charles Manson ‘family’ attack on Sharon Tate only a few years earlier. Everyone hated hippies back then [8]

The book isn’t well written. It gets the job done but the first third is particularly poor at drawing the reader in. I figured out why. The writer, Michael Avallone, uses the odd prose style of reporting everything long after the event and in mostly passive voice. Take this section as an example, the very first lines of Fallen Angel:

  The last letter from his wife, Dorothea, was one that Philip St. George was to carry with him for the rest of his life. It was only a fairly short summons, a romantic plea from a lonely wife eager to see her husband again.
As things turned out, the poignant love cry buried somewhere in the racing feminine script was to sound over and over again, like Ravel’s Bolero, in the soul of the man who was not with her when disaster and terror and horror struck.
There is little a man can do when something is taken away from him. When he does realise, finally, far too late, just how much that something means to him.

That’s not very engaging is it? It’s not even a scene. Surely it would’ve made more sense to locate the reader into a scene as Philip reads the letter? “Philip dropped the telephone receiver and sat heavily in his smoking chair. He fumbled at the whiskey decanter on the table. ‘It’s your wife, she’s been murdered’. The sergeant’s words echoed in his ears and he was only now aware the policeman was still speaking, through the dropped receiver.”

Or something.

Everything about this story is overblown titillation. Here’s the beginning of the murder scene, the chapter helpfully titled “Overture To Slaughter” just in case you weren’t sure of it’s principal theme.

  She had lost the precious ability to scream.
To run, to hide, to vocally escape from the nightmare madness of it all. If she hadn’t been so terrified, so paralysed with fright, she might have been able to fight back. To at least halt the horror, block out the ugly reality.
But it was too late, now.
The hideous scene had engulfed her.
For all time.
Forever.
They were holding her down, trapping her, doing obscene, awful things to her.
Tall, monstrous, distorted shadows surrounded her, blotting out the light, the hope, the clear path toward sanity and reason.
She was overwhelmed, pinned everlasting in a scene from Hell. A poor player impaled between fantasy and commonplace normality

That’s a bit over-egged I think. It’s also extremely vague as this is how the chapter opens. We don’t yet know who she is, where she is, what’s going on. Its all abstract and nonsensical. Fortunately the book does pick up eventually and the latter half is written in the present tense and involves people saying and doing things in real time. Sadly, there’s no drama or reversal. Philip decides to hunt them down and does exactly that. He’s never in any kind of scrape, needs no ingenuity, and frankly doesn’t even expose himself to risk. I know that beating up a few spaghetti-armed progressives isn’t very challenging (as we see every day on Twitter nowadays) but they should at least put up a bit of a fight to keep the reader entertained.

The one part where the book surprised me was the ending. Having kidnapped all four hippes and tied them up he decides not to kill them. His cold hatred has burned out, he fears what he’ll become, so he instead calls the police. That’s actually an interesting way to do it. In a book that promises gore, violence and murder the only actual violence committed in the entire novel is (i) the initial murder and (ii) the hippy leader beating up his girlfriend with his fists. It’s amazing how little carnage is here after that early chapter quoted above.

Anyway, it’s shite and I don’t recommend it. I suppose the fact Michael Avallone wrote 223 books (officially, he claimed a total of 1,000 including those written under pseudonyms) means you can’t expect him to spend much time on each.

What I do recommend is my own series of books available here to readers in the USA and available here to everyone else.

[1] No idea which, as they are so samey as to have blurred into one that I can’t see which saw I saw and which scene I seen from a saw I didn’t see.
[2] Except for killing globalist traitors. I’d still very much like to see them tortured to death.
[3] I know, it’s hard to believe that increased sensitivity to other people’s misfortunes may result from excessively active mirror neurons rather than simply “increased faggotry”.
[4] I always assume I’m right even when I’m not.
[5] I stress again that, “because you’re more of a faggot now” is an unscientific retort and you should know better than to think it.
[6] Unless you’re a spammer and thus not training calibration at all, or one of those “circling the drain” black sheep YouTube players who very specifically tries to prevent ever developing empathy.
[7] Basically, he’s me but in the 1970s.
[8] Nothing has changed.

Another bloody Matt Helm book. I think I could start writing them myself at this point, so familiar am I with the formula. Surprisingly, I’ve started to realise they are more like murder mysteries than spy thrillers. Jason Bourne this isn’t. Whereas the latter is all about double-crosses, triple-crosses, chase scenes and whatnot, these Helm books nearly always come down to a small cast of suspicious characters, one of whom is the Soviet agent doing all the mischief. Helm’s primary exertions are always based on smoking out the opposition so as to identify them. Once he does so, killing them is the easy part.

I guess that’s the advantage of operating on home ground. He hasn’t yet been asked to go behind the Iron Curtain.

Helm doesn’t get any rest, I’ll tell you that much. I just finished my thirtieth day of residential daygame coaching yesterday and I’m a bit tired by it. It’s intensive stuff because I spend all week with a guy [1] as we go through a high-pressure activity. The client is fully committed and ready to work hard, as am I, so we get a lot done. At the end of each in-field day our legs ache and our brains have melted.

I’ve done it six times this year and don’t for a moment think I’m complaining about being overworked or something. However, six bursts of frantic high pressure activity is rather draining, and that’s just chasing skirt. Imagine doing the same six jobs but the subject was Cold War espionage and you were up against highly-trained merciless assassins. That’s rather more stressful than having a silly tart give you an eye-roll blowout.

The Shadowers is the seventh Matt Helm book and he’s getting all this done in less than four years. I think he should have a word with his shop steward or the ACLU. He might have a case for compensation due to unsafe working environment and excessive hours.

This story begins with Helm on a well-deserved holiday in Florida and it’s obvious that if he’s paying his hotel room monthly then he’s wildly optimistic. His girlfriend has a high-speed night-time car accident, running her coupe off a corner and tumbling down a hill. It looks like an accident [2]. Distraught, Helm asks if there are any jobs going around that could take his mind off the grief. Yes, there is. His boss Mac sends him off on a counter-intel op. Word is out that a nasty old Jew [3] – famous for running effective spy networks for the Soviets – has set up a new ring in the USA. The plan is to shadow key employees of the US Government and armed forces so that they can all be murdered in one small window of opportunity, preventing them defending the USA from Soviet attack.

Think of it like this scene in Breaking Bad, but with world domination at stake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RCmb_aTSXk

So Helm is given a cover identity to marry a key female scientist and he must then spot her Soviet shadows, capture one alive, and get information leading to the current identity and location of this nasty old Jewish spymaster [4].

As you’d expect, the story proceeds with misdirection, dark manoeuvres, and Helm trying to ascertain just who among a short list of suspects is the Soviet agent. He displays his usual trade craft in second-guessing everyone, setting clever traps, and playing possum when threatened. I really like seeing it. Donald Hamilton has a way of making it all feel real and blindsiding you without cheating. You always get the feeling Helm wins because he’s more experienced than the opposition and can out-think them. It’s never like The Destroyer or The Executioner who simply rely upon being faster on the trigger.

It’s fair to say that if you’ve read one Matt Helm book you’ve read them all. I’ve done seven in a row now and they are each of about the same quality and same structure. Yet I’m still not tired of them. As soon as I closed this I wanted to move onto number eight in the series. I think I’ve found my favourite spy series.

If you live in the USA and would like a cheap, no-fuss way of buying my books in full colour you should have a look at my new sales site here. Sadly, the company cannot yet fulfil orders sent outside the USA. For that, consult my usual products page.

[1] Who has paid me an obscene amount of money that I have to justify by the quality of my coaching.
[2] What, you suspect foul play? Damn, you’re good at this espionage racket! Nothing gets past you, buster.
[3] Not Diane Feinstein, or Paul Krugman, or Bernie Sanders. That trio of traitors are much too high-level threats to the USA for a man of Matt Helm’s paygrade. Helm assassinates mid-level traitors such as a Ben Shapiro or a Jordan Peterson.
[4] I know, he’s better off just posting something on Twitter and then seeing who reports him to the Safety Council.