Jack Williamson’s Hocus-Pocus Universe

Jack Williamson’s science fiction novella Hocus-Pocus Universe was published in the pulp magazine Science Stories in October 1953.

Charley Guilborn is a high school science teacher. He’s fallen in love with Carol, one of his students. Carl however is in love with Eon Hunter, another student. Eon is Charley’s most disturbing pupil. He’s the worst student in the class even though he’s clearly very bright.

One day Charley sets up a simple experiment to demonstrate one of the basic laws of physics. It fails. Which is impossible. It fails over and over again. There’s nothing wrong with the equipment. But it keeps failing.

Eon is a misfit. He knows he doesn’t fit into the world and he talks about crazy stuff like changing the world so he will fit in. He also paints. One day Charley gets to see one of Eon’s paintings. It’s a painting of a nude girl in a fantastic landscape and she’s feeding flowers to a dinosaur. It’s strange but oddly fascinating and disturbing. There’s something else disturbing about it - Carol was clearly the model for the nude girl. That painting will later become very important.

The romantic triangle involving Carol, Eon and Charley doesn’t work out for any of them. Eon leaves school. Charley gives up his teaching post and a few years later he’s working in a top-secret government research project.

It’s a very important project. The Fate of the Free World is at stake. The aim is to build a hydro-lithium nuclear fusion rocket engine. The idea is scientifically impossible but Charley Guilborn thinks he’s found a way to make it work.

He hasn’t seen Carol or Eon for several years but suddenly they show up. Eon delivers a strange warning to Charley. If the hydro-lithium drive works it will trigger an uncontrolled chain reaction that will mean the end of the world. But it doesn’t matter, because the drive won’t work. This disturbs Charley because he knows the drive will work and he doesn’t believe there’s any scientific possibility that will have disastrous consequences. And yet there’s something about Eon that makes him wonder.

There are some very very cool ideas in this novella. I’m not going to risk spoilers by revealing exactly what those ideas entail.

Equally interesting is the psychological-social dimension. It’s all about belief. Belief is a critical factor in this story, in more than one way.

The 50s was a fascinating decade. Under the surface optimism and naïve faith in science there were strange undercurrents. There was the Cold War hysteria, and the juvenile delinquency hysteria. The counter-culture came into being in the 50s. The first faint stirrings of cultism had begun. There was the UFO craze. What’s really interesting is that Jack Williamson was tapping into these undercurrents as early as 1953.

This is a science fiction novella but it certainly pushes the boundaries of the genre. It pushes them quite a long way.

This is a big ideas story but the big ideas are not in any way conventional scientific ideas. Or rather there’s a mixture of scientific and pre-scientific big ideas. A considerable suspension of disbelief is required from the reader but if you don’t mind that it’s a wild ride and there’s a lot to enjoy. Highly recommended and if you like off-the-wall science fiction I’d bump that up to very highly recommended.

This novella has been paired with Berkeley Livingston’s 1948 novel Queen of the Panther World in an Armchair Fiction two-novel paperback edition.

I’ve reviewed other works by Jack Williamson - The Alien Intelligence and The Legion of Space. They’re very early works but they’re worth checking out.

M.G. Braun’s Apostles of Violence

Apostles of Violence is one of M.G. Braun’s Al Glenne spy thrillers. It was published in French in 1962 as Apôtres De La Violence. The English translation dates from 1966.

M.G. Braun was the pseudonym used by Maurice Gabriel Édouard Brault (1912-1984), a very successful and prolific French writer of detective and spy fiction. Between 1954 and 1978 he wrote an immense number of Al Glenne spy novels. Sadly only four were translated into English.

The cover blurb naturally tells us that Al Glenne is the French James Bond. Personally I thought this novel was much closer in feel to an Alistair MacLean thriller. It uses the same technique of putting a first person narrator hero into an incredibly hostile environment, an environment that becomes as much of a threat as the bad guys. The hero is also more like an Alistair MacLean hero than a James Bond. It resembles MacLean’s thrillers in another way but I can’t say more since that might give away a spoiler.

This is a spy action thriller but it is also a kind of murder mystery. The book puts a group of people into an isolated situation and one of them is a killer.

French secret service agent Al Glenne is sent to Venezuela to retrieve a satellite. He will be working under a more senior French agent, a man named Théo. The satellite came down in the middle of the jungle. The French secret service people are excited because they think they have a lead that will get them to the satellite before their rivals (which includes the Russians, the Americans and the British). The French and the British don’t know if the satellite is American or Russian. What they do know is that there is a super-advanced laser on board and they want that laser. At the moment the French are lagging behind the Russians and the Americans in this technology but if they can get hold of this laser they will catch up overnight.

Al Glenne and Théo parachute into the jungle. Everything goes smoothly at first. They now have the laser. Then everything goes wrong. They find themselves with three enemies to deal with - a very hostile local tribe plus an American and a British secret service team.

There is now a party comprising about a dozen assorted spies from rival powers all thrown together and nobody trusts anybody. With good reason. It’s not long before one of the British spies is murdered, by an unknown killer. The killer must be a member of this ill-assorted party.

An added complication is their local guide, Innocencia. Innocencia is young, very female, very pretty and absurdly over-sexed. As you might imagine this adds considerably to the uneasy atmosphere.

And other members of the party turn up dead. Murdered.

The only way out of this nightmare is a long long trek through the jungle to reach a seaplane that (they hope) is waiting for them. They have no radio. And the rains are about to arrive.

As much as anything else this is a saga of survival, with plenty of paranoia thrown in.

The plot is quite solid with plenty of twists. There are some clues scattered through the novel that make the final twist at the end plausible.

Although there’s a high body count this is more of a mystery/suspense thriller than an action thriller. And both the mystery and the suspense are handled effectively. Innocencia’s presence adds plenty of sexual tension - all the men want her.

All in all this is an enjoyable spy thriller and having a French spy as the hero adds interest. Highly recommended.

The Naked and the Deadly: Lawrence Block in Men's Adventure Magazines

The Naked and the Deadly: Lawrence Block in Men's Adventure Magazines, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle, collects assorted fiction and non-fiction written by Lawrence Block (sometimes using pseudonyms) for men’s adventure magazines between 1958 and 1974.

During his time writing for such magazines in the very early stages of his career Lawrence Block wrote a number of stories featuring private eye Ed London. This collection includes three Ed London stories.

The Ed London stories are moderately hardboiled with a dash of sleaze. The violence is fairly restrained and there’s no graphic sex. Just the implication of unmarried people having sex was titillating at the time.

Ed London is an honest and fairly ethical private eye although he’s not too fussy about the cases he takes. He’ll do things like divorce work. A job is a job, money is money, and Ed likes money as much as the next guy. Ed does however have a habit of sleeping with his female clients which is definitely not very ethical. Ed can handle himself reasonably well but he’s not a conventional two-fisted tough guy.

The Naked and the Deadly was first published in Man’s Magazine in October 1962. Ed London thought this was a simple case. All he had to do was, on behalf of his client, to hand over five grand to a blackmailer. Not an unusual job for a PI, but this time it ended in a hail of machine-gun fire.

In the light of this Ed starts to wonder if his client was being strictly honest with him. Rhona Blake is very young and very pretty but she seems strangely evasive when Ed suggests that they need to meet and talk. She’s even evasive about giving him her telephone number.

Since Ed doesn’t believe her first story she comes up with another one. Ed likes this story a whole lot better. He believes her. She’s young and pretty and, as he’s already discovered, very good in bed. He really wants to believe her. Even when three punks try to kill him he still believes her story.

What we find out about Ed London in this story is that he isn’t pedantic about following the letter of the law but he’s basically honest and he plays square with his clients. We also discover that he’s a bit of a sucker for beautiful women.

Stag Party Girl appeared in Man’s Magazine in February 1963. Mark Donahue is about to marry society girl Lynn Farwell but he has a problem. His former mistress Karen Price has been making threats. Mark hires Ed London as a bodyguard until the wedding is safely over.

There’s a stag party on the night before the wedding. The highlight is to be a naked girl popping out of a wedding cake. The evening ends in murder, but Mark is not the victim. Mark is however a potential suspect.

There are plenty of other possible suspects. Ed figures that for his client’s sake it would be a good idea to find the actual murderer. Motive is what worries Ed. He’s sure that concentrating on motive is the best way to solve this case.

He also has several women to deal with and they seem more than willing to go to bed with which could complicate matters.

It’s a solid PI story and it’s pretty enjoyable.

Twin Call Girls was first published in Man’s Magazine in August 1963. Ed’s latest client is very pretty, very blonde and very dead. Then she turns up on his doorstep. There were two of them, sisters. Not twins but almost identical in appearance. Now someone wants them both dead.

Jackie is the one who was killed. Jill is the survivor. There’s no obvious motive but since both are (or were) call girls Ed figures their profession might supply a motive. Maybe Jackie was trying her hand at blackmail?

Ed decides to search the girls’ apartment and gets clobbered by some guy. Now he’s at least had a brief look at the killer. He figures the killer was looking for something and he also figures that he didn’t find it. Ed has a pretty good idea where that something really is.

There are some decent plot twists here. A pretty good story.

All three Ed London stories are clever, fast-paced and enjoyable.

The Great Istanbul Gold Grab appeared in For Men Only in March 1967. An America named Evan Tanner has been arrested in Turkey. Tanner is a member of countless subversive organisations but has no actual interest in politics. The Turks suspect he’s CIA. He isn’t. What he’s interested in is gold.

He had a plan but getting arrested threw a spanner in the works. He wanted to go to Turkey but ends up being pursued across Europe by various police forces. It has something to do with a bundle of documents. All Tanner knows about the documents is that they’re important and a lot of people want them.

This story is a wild tongue-in-cheek romp. It’s a spoof of both spy fiction and caper stories. Tanner seems to speak almost every European and most Middle Eastern languages and knows a great deal about obscure revolutionary groups. He also seems to be remarkably formidable when it comes to unarmed combat. He has the kind of impossibly diverse skillset that one associates with fictional spies.

He leaves a trail of chaos behind him and he beds lots of beautiful girls. It’s a crazy story but it’s huge amounts of fun.

Bring on the Girls was published in Stag in July 1968. This is another Evan Tanner story. He starts when he meets Tuppence, a Kenyan singer. Later he gets a letter from her, from Thailand. She’s there with an American jazz quartet. She mentions jewels. There’s been a huge jewellery robbery in Thailand. Tanner think he should investigate.

He ends up a prisoner in a bamboo cage. He finds an ally of sorts. Dhang is willing to help if Tanner can find a woman for him. Dhang had never had a woman but he’d really really like to.

There are assorted groups of guerrillas, none of them friendly. And plenty of mayhem in the jungle. He finds the jazz quartet, in a way. This story is an enjoyable romp.

This volume contains some non-fiction pieces as well but the three Ed London stories and the two Evan Tanner stories are the reason to buy it. And you should buy it. Highly recommended.

Gil Brewer’s Memory of Passion

Gil Brewer’s Memory of Passion was published in 1963. It is noir fiction, but not quite conventional noir fiction. It’s drenched in lust and desperation and craziness.

It certainly starts in an interesting way.

Bill is a 39-year-old commercial artist. He’s married to Louise and they have a kid. It’s a reasonably successful marriage but lately things haven’t been quite the same, for reasons that Bill just can’t understand.

Then he gets a phone call. It’s a girl. She sounds about fifteen. She claims to know Bill and she wants him to meet her at the usual place. She says her name is Karen. Bill has no idea what the usual place is and he doesn’t know any women named Karen. It’s crazy and must be a practical joke. Probably some stupid kids. But there’s something that bothers him, an elusive memory of something but he can’t place it at all.

And then he remembers. Karen. It’s impossible. That was twenty-two years ago. It was something special. It has never been that way with any other woman. But it can’t be her. He remembers the usual place now, and he meets her anyway.

It’s Karen all right, but it isn’t her. It’s not the same Karen, but it is the same Karen. And he wants her as much as ever. He has to have her.

You have to admit that’s a pretty good setup.

There’s another man connected to Karen in a totally different way. That creates a whole separate sub-plot, but the two plot strands do of course eventually converge.

Bill knows it would be foolish to get involved with Karen. You can’t relive the past. But the past was so magical. So naturally he does get involved.

Bill also knows that he’s headed for disaster but when disaster does strike it’s not the disaster he expected. It’s a different disaster. And he’s trapped.

As for Karen, we know there’s something strange about her and while we have our suspicions regarding her motivations we can’t be sure. Bill has no idea what her motivations are. He doesn’t understand his own motivations. Like any noir protagonist when a femme fatale comes along he isn’t thinking straight. He’s just thinking about Karen’s body, and how wonderful it was when they were young and they were together. He feels like his whole life has been wasted without her.

That’s assuming that she is a femme fatale. She is, but maybe not in a straightforward way.

The book is, as its title suggests, all about memory and the past. There are three key characters who are in differing ways trapped in the past. And they’re trapped in ways that involve sexual and emotional obsession. It’s also a story about people whose grip on reality starts to slip. We get the points of view of all three key characters. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a bad thing in the case of Hogan. I’m not a fan of novels that try to take the reader into the mind of a psycho. It’s a good thing in the case of Bill and Karen because they’re much more interesting, both tragic and pathetic, with intriguingly tangled motivations.

There’s plenty of sleaze here and the sex is moderately graphic by 1963 standards. Erotic obsession is what drives this story.

The major weakness is some half-baked Freudianism. The novel was clearly inspired by a certain very famous movie made a few years earlier but to say more might risk a spoiler. There’s also a lot of beat lingo, if you can dig it. It does give the novel a very early 60s vibe.

If you wanted to make a movie from this novel you could do it as a film noir, an erotic thriller, a slasher movie, a psychological thriller, a giallo or an art film. It contains all those potentialities.

Memory of Passion is slightly oddball noir fiction but it’s frenetic, crazed and fascinating. Highly recommended.

Stark House have paired this one with another Gil Brewer noir novel, Nude on Thin Ice, in a double-header paperback edition.

Poul Anderson’s Sargasso of Lost Starships

Poul Anderson’s novella Sargasso of Lost Starships appeared in Planet Stories in January 1952.

Anderson wrote a lot of fine sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-planet tales early in his career. The Sargasso of Lost Starships seems at first to be space opera, and in fact it is space opera, but as the story develops it becomes more and more of a sword-and-planet story.

This is a clash of cultures story but it involves three rather than just two very different cultures. It’s also a story of civilisation pitted against barbarism but with ambiguities as to which culture represents the good guys and which represents the bad guys. Maybe all cultures have both good and bad in them. And maybe heroes and villains are not clearcut either. This is an exciting pulp space adventure but with some added subtleties and some complexity. At no stage in his career could Anderson be dismissed as a mere hack.

The hero, Basil Donovan, is a hereditary ruler on the planet Ansa. The people of Ansa are human, descendants of colonists from Earth. For centuries, after Earth’s interstellar empire collapsed, they have been independent. Fiercely independent. Ansa is now a backwater, a kind of feudal agrarian society but with high technology as well. They are still spacefarers in a small way. Basil is a proud stubborn aristocrat but a just and humane leader.

Everything was fine until the Terrans created a new interstellar empire, the Solar Empire. Ansa wanted no part of the Solar Empire but was not given a choice. It is now merely a province of that empire. The Terrans are human and enlightened masters but they are still the masters and the Ansans bitterly resent this. Basil resents it very bitterly indeed. He had participated in the great space battles in which the Ansans fought, unsuccessfully, to maintain their independence.

Basil now lives on booze and dreams of past glories. Until he receives an Imperial summons. The Empire has need of his services. It involves the Black Nebula. Basil is unusual, indeed unique. He has been to the Black Nebula and come back alive and sane. Well, mostly sane.

Basil is to be guide and advisor to Captain Helena Jansky, commander of the Terran starship Ganymede. The Black Nebula has become a problem that needs to be confronted. Captain Jansky needs Basil’s knowledge of the Black Nebula. He is prepared to share that knowledge, but the suspicion remains that he is concealing a great deal of what he knows. Basil and Helena do not trust one another.

When the Ganymede reaches the Black Nebula it becomes obvious that there is a very great deal indeed that Basil has not revealed. He had not mentioned the voices. The voices that are reducing the Ganymede’s crew to madness. The voices seem to come from nowhere. Basil had also failed to mention Valduma. Valduma is a woman but she is definitely not human. Perhaps Basil loves her, perhaps he hates her.

To add to the complications Basil is no longer sure that he hates Helena. Perhaps he loves her. There’s a bizarre romantic triangle here. Basil must choose between these two women and his choice will have momentous consequences.

This is an exciting tale of high adventure and action and it’s a twisted love story. It’s also a story of rising civilisations and dying civilisations. It’s also a story about freedom and servitude both of which turn out to be complex and ambiguous. And it’s a story about a man torn by conflicting loyalties and conflicting loves.

There’s no magic and there are no wizards but there are technologies so advanced and so strange and so incomprehensible that they might as well be magic. They serve the same purpose that magic would serve in a sword-and-sorcery story.

Sargasso of Lost Starships is superior-grade pulp fiction that manages to deal with complex issues whilst still offering plenty of old-fashioned entertainment. Very highly recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Don Wilcox’s excellent The Ice Queen in one of their two-novel paperbacks. The combination of two very good titles makes this a very worthwhile purchase.

I’ve also reviewed DMR Press’s Swordsmen from the Stars which contains three excellent Poul Anderson sword-and-planet novellas. Anderson’s Virgin Planet also has some slight affinities to the sword-and-planet genre and it’s very much worth reading as well.

Secret Agent X: The Torture Trust

The Secret Agent X novels were published in the pulp magazines of the same name which ran for 41 issues between 1934 and 1939. The stories were published under the house name Brant House but there were in fact several authors. The Torture Trust, written by Paul Chadwick, was the first to be published.

Secret Agent X is a typical pulp hero of the time, an amateur crime-fighter who conceals his real identity. He is in reality a war hero who was grievously wounded in the First World War.

He is a master of disguise. Disguise was an obsession with crime writers in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. It was a somewhat over-used trope and almost always stretches credibility to the breaking point. The Secret Agent X stories push the use of this trope about as far as it could be pushed. To be fair the author tries to make the idea slightly more credible by explaining how the hero manages his extraordinary repertoire of disguises and suggests that he has some sort of theatrical background. The degree of suspension of disbelief required of the reader is still immense.

Agent X can assume his disguises in a matter of minutes, which stretches credibility even further.

As is fairly standard in pulp stories of this type Secret Agent X is regarded with suspicion by the police. They see him as either a master criminal or a vigilante and whichever he might be they don’t approve.

The author goes to great lengths to reassure the reader that despite his unconventional methods and the fact that these methods might at times veer dangerously close to being illegal or unethical he is very definitely one of the good guys. He has secret backing from the government, and of course the government would never be involved in anything illegal or unconstitutional.

As is also fairly standard in such pulp stories Secret Agent X tries very hard to avoid killing. After all if he went around killing people, even criminals, he’d be a kind of government sanctioned assassin or vigilante killer and that might get the publisher in trouble.

There is of course a vast criminal conspiracy afoot. A gang has been kidnapping prominent citizens and engaging in extortion and blackmail. They use terror as a weapon. If their victims refuse to play ball they are permanently disfigured with acid. This method is used against anyone who gets in their way. The acid treatment frequently has fatal results.

Agent X uses his mastery of disguise to infiltrate himself into situations in which he can discover the plans of this nefarious criminal organisation. He disguises himself as everything from a cab driver to a police commissioner.

He has a kind of assistant, a young lady named Betty Dale. There doesn’t seem to be any real romantic attachment between them. Betty’s purpose is of course to get herself captured by the bad guys so Secret Agent X can rescue her.

The villains are not ordinary criminals. A couple of them are doctors, including an expert in psychology. He knows all about breaking people’s wills. Sinister psychologists or psychologists are always fun. Naturally he employs hypnotism as a weapon.

The author uses footnotes to give an air of authenticity and in an attempt to make it plausible that Agent X is an expert in so many fields. I like novels with footnotes.

Secret Agent X has no super-powers, he doesn’t have almost superhuman strength and he doesn’t rely on gadgets. His skill at disguise is however so great that it’s as good as a superpower.

This is pure pulp fun, more or less in the mould of The Shadow, Doc Savage and other 30s pulp heroes. Highly recommended.

Perley Poore Sheehan’s Woman of the Pyramid

Perley Poore Sheehan’s novel Woman of the Pyramid was published in The All-Story pulp magazine in 1914.

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 had first sparked western interest in ancient Egypt and by 1914 Egyptology had become quite a craze. This novel was therefore very topical.

In the days before the First World War a young American named George Carlton is a bit of a scientific dilettante. He’s trained in psychology and psychiatry but his real interest lies in the occult and in what would later come to be known as the paranormal. He’s very interested in ghosts.

As an aside, at that time such interests still had at least a degree of scientific respectability and plausibility.

Carlton is in love with a pretty English girl named Alice Wentworth. Wedding bells would seem to be in the offing. In the meantime Carlton, Alice and her aunt are off to Egypt. Carlton already has a very keen interest in ancient Egypt.

Carlton is a little disturbed by the mysterious woman he keeps seeing. No-one else seems to be able to see her. He suspects that she’s a ghost of some sort. He also suspects that she’s connected to ancient Egypt in some ways. He thinks of her as the Woman of the Pyramid.

He becomes a little obsessed. He enters the famous Red Pyramid (the third largest of the pyramids) and there he encounters the Woman of the Pyramid again. It’s a fateful meeting. Carlton finds himself back in the distant past. The Woman of the Pyramid is the queen, Netokris, recently widowed. And Carton is no longer Carlton. He is now Menni, an important man, governor of the royal palace in fact. It seems that the queen sees him as a potential husband.

Menni isn’t interested. He’s in love with slave girl Berenice, who is in fact Alice Wentworth. Netokris is a woman who doesn’t take no for an answer. She’s ruthless, cruel and inclined to act on whims. She decides that Berenice is a rival whose existence cannot be tolerated.

There are various palace conspiracies afoot and while Carlton/Menni doesn’t want to get mixed up in them it might be the only way to save Berenice/Alice, and his own skin.

A possible ally is the priest and sorcerer Baknik. Baknik has various occult powers including the power to foretell the future. The future he predicts for Carlton/Menni and Berenice/Alice is a case of good news and bad news. His predictions of the queen’s future are not entirely hopeful either. All of the characters feel themselves to be the playthings of Fate.

This might at first seem to be a time travel story but it’s more of a past lives story. The question is the extent to which events in one life will affect their next life.

It’s also very much a love story.

Most of the story takes place in ancient Egypt but the final quarter of the book brings Carlton back to the 20th century, where the same three people seem destined to replay the events of the past. The past lives thing is done quite well here with the past lives and present lives intersecting neatly.

I don’t think Sheehan was overly obsessed with historical accuracy but the background is at least vaguely historical. Netokris probably existed and may possibly have been responsible for building the Red Pyramid. Some plot points are lifted from the account of her reign by Herodotus.

If the past lives thing appeals to you and you have any kind of interest in ancient Egypt and you happen to enjoy pulp adventure/romance then this novel will tick all your boxes. I enjoyed it. Highly recommended.

Woman of the Pyramid has reprinted in a paperback omnibus edition (including three other stories by the same author) by Steeger Books in their excellent Argosy Library series.

I've also reviewed another of Sheehan's novels, The Red Road to Shamballah. It's pretty good also.