Tim O’Shane is an ace agent for T.O.M.C.A.T., a super-secret American spy agency. He also works for the Soviets. He is a double agent but his loyalty is to America. Interestingly in the three novels in this series that I’ve read the Russians are not particularly the bad guys. The bad guys are usually international fiendish supervillains and diabolical criminal masterminds, somewhat along the lines of SPECTRE.
Tim is on leave in Miami. He is sharing a house with two friendly airline stewardesses, Justine and Juliette. You don’t quite expect a de Sade reference in a book like this but there it is. His idea of a holiday is chasing skirt and he’s chasing a lot of it, and catching plenty. Tim likes girls a lot. But now he has a new assignment. It’s about all those missing virgins. Thousands of them. It’s not that they’ve ceased to be virgins. They have simply vanished.
It probably has something to do with a new religious cult called Systemology. When Tim is seduced by a female cult member he discovers something odd. She introduces him to sensual and erotic delights he had never even imagined but by the next morning she is still a virgin. That’s not Tim’s fault. He tried his best.
Of course Tim has to infiltrate the cult. The cult is popular because it promises its adherents wealth, pleasure and immortality.
There’s also a missing Russian ballerina. This allows Tim to make use of his Soviet contacts.
Tim starts to get an inkling of why the cult is so interested in virgins. It’s part of a totally crazy master plan, but behind that is another equally crazy master plan.
Tim’s own plans hit a few snags and he finds himself a prisoner on a ship.
He gets to know two of the Systemologist girls, Gisela and Raven. Gisela is quite a piece of work. She’s a bit of a surgeon but her operations are unlikely to win the approval of any reputable medical association. She performs the operations not on the virgins, but on men. Tim is very anxious to ensure that she doesn’t get anywhere near him with a scalpel.
These two girls are very very dangerous (and Gisela is clearly insane) but Tim may be able to make use of Raven thanks to one of the gadgets T.O.M.C.A.T. provides to its agents. It allows him to take hypnotic control of a subject (in 1967 hypnosis and brainwashing were hot topics). The monkeys might come in handy as well. There are five hundred of them aboard the ship. You’d be surprised how useful five hundred monkeys can be in the hands of a well-trained secret agent.
Knight had a knack for wildly improbable but rather nifty spy plots and while it’s very tongue-in-cheek there is a fairly exciting spy thriller plot here and there’s plenty of action.
There’s a decent villain and a superbly wicked sadistic villainess.
There’s plenty of sex as well but it’s not the slightest bit graphic.
It all has a very 60s vibe - crazy, outlandish, surreal, amusing, sexy in a good-natured way. Very Pop Art. Very Swinging 60s. And of course whacked-out religious cults were already a popular subject in crime/spy TV, movies and novels. The cults invariably involve lots of sex-crazed young ladies.
Affordable copies of the Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. books are not too difficult to find.
I thought The Million Missing Maidens was quite a bit of fun. Highly recommended.
I’ve reviewed two more books in this series, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy and The Malignant Metaphysical Menace.
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