Sax Rohmer's She Who Sleeps

There was much much more to Sax Rohmer than the Fu Manchu stories.

Stark House have issued two Sax Rohmer novels written at almost exactly the same time (the late 1920s) in a two-novel paperback. They give an idea of his ability to jump from genre to genre. Moon of Madness (published in 1927) is a straightforward spy thriller and I have to say that conventional spy tales were not his forte. She Who Sleeps (dating from 1928) is much more interesting and much more successful. He’s in more congenial territory here - this is both weird fiction and an occult thriller.

A rich young man named Barry Cumberland, lost in a storm, crashes his car after catching a glimpse of an Egyptian princess on a balcony. Of course she can’t be a real Egyptian princess, not in 1920s New York. He tries to find her but can’t. He can’t even find the place where his car accident occurred.

His fabulously wealthy father John Cumberland is a keen Egyptologist who has come into possession of a papyrus that concerns an Egyptian princess, Zalithea. It contains a formula and a ritual. Zalithea is She Who Sleeps. In fact she is She Who Sleeps and Will Awaken. She lies in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings but with the formula and the ritual she can be revived, after sleeping for 3,200 years.

John Cumberland is convinced that the papyrus is genuine. He was has consulted various experts. They agree that it really is 3,200 years old. Is it possible that Zalithea still lives?

John Cumberland naturally organises an expedition, with assistance from several Egyptologists including the slightly mysterious Danbazzar. The real purpose of the expedition will have to be kept secret. If all goes as planned they will have in their possession a living, breathing 3,200-year-old Egyptian princess which could cause all manner of complications with the authorities in Egypt.

Barry Cumberland has another obsession - that girl he saw on the balcony. He suspects that she is Zalithea’s double, or a vision of Zalithea, or Zalithea’s ghost. His ideas on this subject are muddled but he is sure there is a connection.

And of course when the sarcophagus is finally opened Barry does find himself gazing into the face of the same girl.

The tomb had escaped the notice of tomb robbers and had lain untouched and undiscovered for more than three millennia. Zalithea cannot possibly be awakened. Or can she?

Compared to Moon of Madness this is not only subject matter much more ideally suited for Rohmer it’s also the sort of strange mysterious uncanny story that seemed to make Rohmer’s writing suddenly become a lot more lively. And the sense of breathless excitement that Rohmer tried to aim for works more successfully.

This is an occult thriller but it’s also a love story, a love story with its roots in the distant past.

These are things that appeal to me and I love anything to do with ancient Egypt so this novel really is right up my alley. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed many of Sax Rohmer’s books. The Bride of Fu Manchu and The Mask of Fu Manchu are fine Fu Manchu books. The Dream Detective is a splendid collection of occult detective stories. The Leopard Couch and Brood of the Witch-Queen are typical of his excellent gothic horror fiction/weird fiction. The Sins of Sumuru introduces his final creation, the glamorous sexy female diabolical criminal mastermind Sumuru. Sumuru wants to eliminate violence from the world. She accepts that to do so will involve killing a lot of people.

Marty Holland’s Fallen Angel

Marty Holland’s Fallen Angel is a 1945 hardboiled murder mystery. It has definite noir overtones but as is always the case whether or not a novel is true noir depends a great deal on the ending.

Marty Holland was a pseudonym used by Mary Hauenstein (1919-1971). This was her first novel. She enjoyed some modest success and had two of her stories filmed but her career soon seemed to run out of steam.

The protagonist of Fallen Angel, Eric Stanton, had been an insurance investigator but not an honest one, which was why he had to leave L.A. in a hurry. He’s headed for Frisco but his money has run out. He’s sitting in a diner in a nondescript small town named Walton. There’s where he notices the waitress, Stella. She’s really something. She gives him the brush-off but he’s persistent. She goes out with him. Things are going well between them but they need money.

Stella drags him along to a spook show where a very incompetent phoney medium is fleecing the punters. That’s when Eric gets his bright idea. A woman in the audience, by the name of Emmie, wants advice from her dead father on investing the very large inheritance he left her. Eric has figured a fool-proof angle which will allow him to get his hands on Emmie’s money. Then he and Stella will be set. They can get married.

The murder throws a spanner into the works. At first Eric is not a serious suspect. There are two other much more obvious suspects, but when it becomes clear that those other two guys could not have committed the murder the cops start to figure Eric as the prime suspect.

Eric’s instinct all through his life has been to cut and run whenever the going gets tough and that’s what he does now. He has now acquired a wife and she insists on running with him.

Eric knows the cops have a net spread for him and he’s getting increasingly panicky.

The worst thing is that he knows he is innocent but he can’t prove it. Of course if he could prove the guilt of the actual killer he’d be off the hook but he genuinely does not have the slightest idea of the killer’s identity, or why the murder took place.

Eric is a bit of a louse but he’s not really evil. He would never kill anyone. He’s just a chronic loser without the discipline to succeed in an honest line of business. He’s not short of self-pity. He lies because his instinct is always to lie. But he’s not beyond hope. Whether he can learn to accept responsibility and make a proper life for himself remains to be seen. And while he’s committed various criminal acts in the past he really is innocent of this murder. It’s just that he can’t see a way out.

For all his faults he’s a reasonably sympathetic protagonist.

This is a pretty decent murder mystery which looks like it might turn out to be full-blown noir, or it might not. It’s still quite entertaining and it’s recommended.

Stark House have issued Marty Holland’s second novel The Glass Heart and her novella The Sleeping City in a double-header paperback edition. The Glass Heart is flawed but interesting. The Sleeping City on the other hand is absolutely superb erotic noir.

Otto Preminger’s film adaptation Fallen Angel (1945) is top-notch film noir.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most important works of Soviet science fiction.

It’s a first contact story, but a very unconventional one.

The Visit only lasted a very short time. Aliens visited six sites on Earth and then departed as mysteriously as they had appeared. Those sites are known as the Zones. There was no communication whatsoever between humans and the aliens. There were casualties among the human populations but it was never clear that the aliens actually had hostile intentions.

The Zones are littered with alien artefacts. Visiting the Zones is very very dangerous. No-one understands the nature of the dangers but they are very real. Governments have successfully suppressed all knowledge of what went on in the Zones and of what the Zones contain. The truth is that scientists do not have the remotest idea of what the Visit meant or why it took place.

Uses have been found for some of the alien artefacts (such as batteries providing limitless energy) but nobody knows the real purposes for which these devices were intended.

Entering the Zones might be incredibly hazardous but where there’s a profit to be made there will be people wiling to take the risks. Such people are known as Stalkers. The scientists do not care to take such risks but they are willing to buy artefacts from Stalkers. And there is a thriving black market.

Redrick Schuhart is a Stalker. Redrick is an ambiguous hero with complex motivations. Money is one of his motivations, but not the most important.

One of his Redrick’s forays into the Zone almost ended in disaster. He managed to save his companion, Burbridge. Burbridge claims to know the location of the Holy Grail of artefacts, the Golden Sphere. Maybe he will tell Redrick how to find it. The rumour is that the Golden Sphere can grant wishes. That might be mere rumour, but some of these artefacts really can do impossible things.

Close contact with the Zones can have unexpected consequences. Children who are not quite normal. Even more frightening and puzzling, when people who were in the vicinity of the Visit movie away to other cities very strange things happen. Strange inexplicable impossible things.

There are some wild, bizarre and very imaginative ideas in this novel. It’s a novel that exists on the fringes of conventional science fiction.

There is also a certain amount of excitement and suspense. Death can come quickly and unexpectedly in the Zone. And maybe worse things.

You find yourself hoping that the authors will be able to come up with an ending worthy of all the cool ideas that they’ve thrown into the story. Sadly they do not do so. I found the ending to be bitterly disappointing.

The authors ran into considerable censorship proems in the Soviet Union even though they had gone to great lengths to avoid taking any ideological positions. There is a rather cynical tone to the novel, which might explain the censors’ hostility. The Visit is after all the subject of government cover-ups throughout the world.

Roadside Picnic was filmed in 1979 by Andrei Tarkovsky, as Stalker.

Roadside Picnic is extremely interesting and imaginative but the feeble ending robs it of true greatness. Still worth a read. Recommended.

Henry James' Daisy Miller

American-born Henry James (1843-1916) was one of the true literary giants.

His 1878 novella Daisy Miller brought him his first taste of commercial success and critical acclaim.

James spent a large part of his life in Europe and in Britain. He was fascinated by the experience of Americans in Europe.

This is the theme of the novella. Daisy Miller is the daughter of a nouveau riche American. Her father has sent her, along with her mother and her kid brother, to Switzerland to absorb some culture and some polish. Daisy is beautiful and charming. Her problem is not that she’s American but that she does not not know any of the rules that govern respectable fashionable society. Even worse, she does not know that she does not know these rules. She has no idea why she is continually snubbed.

She makes the acquaintance of Winterbourne. He is a young American but he has spent most of his life in Europe. He does know the rules. Unfortunately he does not comprehend that he is dealing with a girl who is entirely unaware of her social mistakes. She is entirely unaware that her forwardness will be misinterpreted as an indication of loose morals.

Winterbourne is charmed by her but also shocked.

That’s what will cause the heartache. He is delighted when he first encounters her and is able to engage her in conversation, but shocked that he allows it. It is most improper for a young lady to speak to a young man to whom she has not been formally introduced. He is delighted that she agrees to accompany him to a picturesque nearby chateau but shocked that she does so. Again, it is not proper behaviour for a young lady.

Winterbourne just cannot reconcile his attraction to Daisy’s beauty, vivacity and charm with his growing fear that perhaps she really is not respectable. He is worried about her familiarity with Eugenio the courier. The seeds of mistrust and suspicion have been sown. And Daisy does nothing to allay his concerns because she has no inkling that she has done anything wrong.

Later, in Rome, Daisy’s behaviour becomes increasingly socially reckless but she remains oblivious. She spends a lot of time with an Italian who may be a fortune-hunter. That’s Winterbourne’s assumption. But is Daisy just flirting?

Winterbourne and Daisy just cannot understand each other. It’s not a cultural difference. They’re both Americans. It’s not even quite a class difference. It’s a social difference. The inhabit different mental universes. Daisy does not realise her danger. Winterbourne cannot get through to her.

The communication difficulty has other consequences. Winterbourne genuinely doesn’t know what feelings, if any, Daisy has for him. And increasingly he is unsure about his own feelings.

Daisy is trapped by her inability to comprehend the social rules. Winterbourne is trapped because he understands them too well.

Winterbourne and Daisy are both rather nice young people. We care about them although we share Winterbourne’s exasperation with Daisy and to an extent we share her exasperation with him.

Wonderful book. Read it.

I very much enjoyed Peter Bogdanovich’s film adaptation, Daisy Miller (1974). I recommend it. It follows the novella very closely and I think it captures its spirit.

Sax Rohmer's Moon of Madness

Moon of Madness is a 1927 Sax Rohmer thriller.

Sax Rohmer (1883-1959) is best known as the creator of Dr Fu Manchu but he wrote a lot of other books in a number of genres. He wrote some great gothic horror and some fine occult thrillers. He also wrote straightforward spy thrillers such as Moon of Madness.

I like the spy fiction of the 1920s and 1930s because it has a refreshingly different tone compared to the endless Cold War spy thrillers of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

In Moon of Madness the enemy is the communists, the Bolsheviks, but it still has that interwar period flavour. And like so many of the spy novels of that period it features an amateur spy. In fact there are three spies on the side of the good guys. One is a professional, war hero Major O’Shea. The second is the narrator, George Decies. The third is a cute frivolous high-spirited eighteen-year-old girl, Nanette. But they all, even the professional, have that delightful British “muddling through” spirit.

The setting is Madeira, a suitably exotic and neutral locale for a spy thriller. A smooth Portuguese ladies’ man named de Cunha has been romancing Nanette. She should exercise more caution in these matters but she’s young and she wants to have fun. She’s not in love with de Cunha. She has set her sights on Major O’Shea. O’Shea is attracted to Nanette but he’s a man who agonises over moral dilemmas and points of honour and he’s convinced himself that it would be dishonourable to declare his love for the girl. One also suspects that’s just a little given to indulging in noble self-sacrifice.

What’s at stake is a bundle of letters written by a certain royal personage. If they fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks governments could fall, it might even mean a war.

To be honest I don’t think the straightforward spy thriller was Rohmer’s forte. The plot is rather thin. He was at his best when his plots were enlivened by bizarre backgrounds and outlandish setups, such as ongoing struggles with evil geniuses or weird possibly supernatural elements.

The hero-worship towards Major O’Shea displayed by the narrator can get a mite embarrassing. Especially given that O’Shea really doesn’t come across as such a brilliant splendid chap. O’Shea thinks he’s being terribly noble by not declaring his love for Nanette when in fact he’s causing her totally unnecessary emotional pain. And the only reason for his reticence appears to be an over-developed obsession with being virtuous and self-sacrificing. The reader feels like screaming at him to just take the girl in his arms, kiss her and tell her that he loves her. If he’d done that at the beginning a lot of suffering could have been avoided.

O’Shea also seems far from being a super-spy. He makes some elementary mistakes.

Of course the fact that O’Shea doesn’t live up to the narrator’s inflated estimate of him does add a slightly interesting touch.

This is a competent but fairly routine spy thriller. Worth a look, but he wrote so many much better books. Sax Rohmer was a great writer whose work is very much worth seeking out but Moon of Madness is not the best place to start.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Sax Rohmer’s stuff. The Bride of Fu Manchu and The Mask of Fu Manchu are good mid-period Fu Manchu books. The Dream Detective is an excellent collection of occult detective stories. The Leopard Couch and Brood of the Witch-Queen are typical of his excellent gothic horror fiction/weird fiction. The Sins of Sumuru introduces his final creation, the glamorous female diabolical criminal mastermind Sumuru. Sumuru wants to eliminate violence from the world and she doesn’t care how many people she has to kill to achieve her objective.

Whitley Strieber’s The Hunger

Whitley Strieber’s novel The Hunger was published in 1981. In 1983 there was a celebrated movie adaptation which is one of those love it or hate it movies (I love it).

John Blaylock and Miriam are hunting. John’s target is Faye, a teenaged girl. Miriam’s target is Faye’s boyfriend. If one of these teenagers suddenly disappeared questions might get asked. If they both disappear at the same time it will be assumed that they ran off together. It is important that no questions should get asked. Good clean kills with no traces left, that’s the objective.

John and Miriam are very much in love. They’re a typical couple except that Miriam is a bit older than John. Several thousand years older. John isn’t even 200 years old. John and Miriam are vampires.

John has noticed something recently, something slightly disturbing. He doesn’t know what it means. Miriam knows exactly what it means. She has been dreading this. She loves John. She has loved all of them, and has lost all of them. Like the others John is not a true vampire. Miriam is sure there must be a way to make her lovers immortal like herself. She can’t go on losing those she loves after only a few centuries.

She suspects that Dr Sarah Roberts might have accidentally stumbled upon the key. Sarah is a sleep researcher and has discovered something extraordinary about the links between sleep and ageing. Persuading Sarah to help her will be tricky, but it could be done.

The clever thing here is that even when Sarah becomes totally enmeshed in Miriam’s scheme she has no idea that she is dealing with a vampire. Miriam does something very unexpected. Something that you do not expect a vampire to do. She deliberately puts herself in the hands of scientists (Sarah and her team). She allows them to study her, knowing that they are very quickly going to realise that there are things about her that are wildly outside the normal human parameters. Her blood composition is bizarre. Her sleep patterns are bizarre.

But what’s really clever about Miriam’s scheme is that the scientists are not going to realise that she’s a vampire. That possibility will never occur to them, it could never occur to them, because vampires do not exist. And she has been very careful to ensure that they do not have possession of a single item of knowledge about her that might suggest the possibility that she is non-human. She appears to be a 30-year-old woman so that’s what they assume she is. They do not suspect that she is thousands of years old. They know nothing of her blood-drinking. They have no way of knowing that she has killed thousands of times. And they do not for a second suspect that she might be dangerous.

It’s all part of Miriam’s plan to draw Sarah in.

There are three separate species in this book. There are the humans of course. There’s Miriam. She is a true vampire. She is not human. She belongs to a closely related but distinct species. And there are the transformed vampires, such as John Blaylock. They are hybrids. The transformation has made them vampires of a sort. They have many of the characteristics of vampires. But they are not true vampires. They are both vampire and human.

Strieber uses this fact to explore the moral issues connected to vampirism in interesting ways. Miriam fees no remorse whatsoever about killing humans in order to feed. She likes humans. She is genuinely fond of them and in some ways she admires them. But she regards them the way a farmer regards his livestock. He may be quite fond of his cows but he accepts that the time will come when they have to be eaten. Miriam does not consider herself to be a murderess. To some extent she regards transformed humans such as John Blaylock as much-loved pets. We might love a dog very much but the dog is a pet, not a human lover.

John has never quite come to terms with the need to kill because he is aware that he is still partly human. It feels like cannibalism. It feels like murder. He has become accustomed to it, reconciled to it, he has even come to enjoy the hunt, but he is still not entirely comfortable with it.

The human scientists and doctors have no more respect for Miriam’s rights than she has for her victims. They think of her the way they think of their lab animals. As far as they’re concerned she has no more rights than one of the rhesus monkeys on which they experiment. And they treat her this way even though they have no knowledge of her true nature. They think she’s human. They just think that she is so unusual that they are justified in treating her like a lab rat. The humans in this story are morally no better than the vampires.

The book is very concerned with morality but treats the subject in a very complex and provocative way.

This is also a story about love and loss, but love of an unusual kind.

Strieber creates a very complicated and elaborate and original vampire mythology, but it’s not a mythology as such. This is a science fiction novel. He also gives Miriam and John very detailed backstories. None of these things would have worked in a movie so the 1983 movie very wisely focuses on the emotional implications of the story. The novel and the movie are therefore very very different but I love them both equally.

The Hunger is a fascinating science fiction vampire tale. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the movie, The Hunger (1983).

Charles Burgess's The Other Woman

The Other Woman is a 1960 crime novel by Charles Burgess. He’s a seriously obscure writer who seems to have written only one other novel. He also wrote some true crime stuff in the late 40s.


The Other Woman was originally published by Beacon so you might be expecting this to be crime with a healthy dash of sleaze. It isn’t really, but there is some moderately steamy sex. This is not a particularly hardboiled story but it does have some noir flavouring.

Early on the set-up seems to be suggesting that we’re in for yet another riff on Double Indemnity but that’s not how it plays out. In Double Indemnity we know the identity of the murderers right from the start. The Other Woman is more of an old-fashioned murder mystery. There is a murder but we don’t know the killer’s identity. The murder method is not as straightforward as it appears to be and alibis are important. There is a puzzle to be unravelled.

It begins in a small town in Florida. John Royal wants real estate agent Neil Cowen to arrange the purchase of a property which will be the site of a major housing development. Royal is an old man and very very rich. Royal’s wife Emmaline is thirty years his junior, blonde and gorgeous. And almost certainly dangerous. The kind of gal who is likely to turn out to be a femme fatale.

Neil has a successful business. He’s a respected member of the community. He’s happily married with a kid. He would be crazy even to think of getting mixed up with Emmaline Royal. But by the next day he and Emmaline are getting it on in the back seat of Neil’s car.

Neil can’t stop himself. He has never met a woman as hot and as gorgeous as Emmaline.

Then something happens that causes Neil to have second thoughts although by now it may be way too late.

Of course there is a murder. There is one odd detail at the murder scene that worries Lieutenant Gainey just a little. It seems somehow wrong but he can’t figure out how it could possibly be significant.

There’s one obvious suspect but Lieutenant Gainey is well aware that there is no real evidence.

A regular guy led astray by an uncontrollable lust for a woman is certainly classic noir stuff. Neil really is a totally decent guy and he never does figure out how he succumbed to temptation. The fact that Emmaline might be the kind of gal who knows exactly how to persuade the most reluctant man to fall for her charms, and that he might just be the latest in a string of men who have danced to her siren song, doesn’t occur to him. He thinks that a smokin’ hot classy rich dame is just waiting for the chance to jump into bed with a second-rate small town real estate agent.

Of course while we know that Emmaline is a temptress that doesn’t mean she’s a murderess. There are other suspects. There are quite a few suspicious characters lurking about. There’s a mystery woman.

As a noir novel it works reasonably well.

As a straightforward murder mystery it’s also reasonably successful.

The Other Woman is routine stuff but it’s enjoyable. A harmless time killer.