We got lazy about scanning again, but today we’re back to Australia’s Adam magazine with an issue published this month in 1970. The cover illustrates Mark Bannerman’s sea adventure “Day of the Knife,” in which a habitual troublemaker is released from an island prison by a connected police official on the condition that he recover a cache of Spanish gold. The gold happens to be aboard a ship that sank a hundred years ago in shark infested waters. This isn’t actually the major problem. The more serious issue is that he strikes up an affair with the wife of the rich man sponsoring the expedition, and quickly learns the wife wants her husband dead. Since they’ll be at sea together, what better time to do it than during the diving operation? But when he eventually feeds the husband to hungry sharks the femme fatale reverses course, accuses him of murdering her husband out of jealousy, and gets him tossed back in jail. It’s only when he’s sentenced to death at his trial that he realizes it isn’t just the wife who set him up, but the police official too—the pair had been lovers all along. It’s pretty straightforward stuff as adventure fiction goes, and not well written, but enjoyable just the same. Other tales in the magazine are better. We have dozens of issues of Adam in the website, so if you want to see more from this publication just click the keywords at bottom.
