John Flagg’s Woman of Cairo

John Flagg’s Woman of Cairo is a 1953 spy thriller.

American John Gearon wrote eight espionage/crime novels between 1950 and 1961 using the pseudonym John Flagg. All were published as Fawcett Gold Medal editions.

This is pre-James Bond spy fiction but don’t jump to the conclusion that that means it’s dull. It isn’t. While it’s more a suspense thriller than an action thriller there is a perfectly adequate supply of action. The sex and violence are more muted than in the Bond novels, but both those elements are definitely present.

As in most spy fiction from the late 40s and early 50s the Second World War casts its shadow over this tale. Spy fiction had not yet become dominated by the Cold War. There are communist agitators in this story but they do not take centre stage. The Soviets play no part whatsoever in this story.

The setting is of course Egypt. The situation is very unsettled, and could become chaotic at any time. The regime of King Farouk is by no means stable. There are many factions jockeying for power behind the scenes. The British are nervous.They are horrified by the prospect of losing control of the Suez Canal (a fear which would lead to the Suez débâcle in 1956 which proved to be the end of Britain as a Great Power) and losing a reliable client state.

Hart Muldoon is an American intelligence agent, now retired. He no longer wants any part of the spy business but since he’s just had some very bad luck at the gambling tables the British are able to persuade him to take on a job for them. They’ve lost one of their bombers. With a full load of bombs aboard. They’d like it back.

A shady character named Jeremiah Grant may be involved, as well as a German named von Bruckner. The idea is for Muldoon to seduce von Bruckner’s mistress Gina. His first contact however is a pretty blonde named Sigried McCarthy.

Muldoon falls for Gina, which was not part of the plan. He also sleeps with pretty young French chanteuse Marianne Courbet.

Finding a lead on that missing British bomber turns out to be frustratingly difficult. A man with possible information is murdered in front of Muldoon’s eyes. He knows the bomber is near an oasis, but he has no idea where the oasis is.

Muldoon finds himself embroiled with three women, all of whom could fall into the dangerous dames category. Gina’s brother Guido seems pretty shifty, and there’s a handsome charming young Frenchman named Armand Trouvier who hangs around the women a bit too much. King Farouk’s security chief is taking an uncomfortably close interest in his activities.

While Muldoon is juggling his women Egypt moves closer to an explosion. It could end in revolution, an Islamic takeover or a military coup. Or Farouk might regain control. One of the many factions stirring up trouble is the Sons of Mecca. They’re religious fanatics but they appear to have surprising links to either Jeremiah Grant or von Bruckner, or both. Muldoon is puzzled by this. Most of all he’s puzzled why anyone should think that the possession of a single British bomber is important. It’s not carrying nuclear weapons.

Ian Fleming’s Bond novels upped the ante as far as sex and violence were concerned and added hints of sadism. Perhaps surprisingly Woman of Cairo has some moderately shocking violence, it has lots of sex (although not described graphically) and it has hints of just about everything that in 1953 would have been considered sexual deviation. And to be honest not just hints. It’s pretty blatant about it. This is a pretty sleazy book.

Hart Muldoon is also a surprising pre-Bond spy hero. He tries to seduce every woman he encounters (and succeeds with most of them). He gives one of the women a fairly savage beating without even knowing if she’s on the side of the good guys or the bad guys. And he commits two murders. In 1940s/early 50s spy thrillers it was acceptable for the hero to kill people but it had to be in self-defence, to save the life of someone else or it had to be absolutely essential to the mission and to national security. But Muldoon’s kills are cold-blooded murder, they’re not the least bit essential to the mission and they’re motivated by personal feelings of revenge and sexual jealousy. Hart Muldoon is very close to being an authentic anti-hero.

The women all have some depth to them. There are lots of characters (including several European expatriates gone bad) who have become morally compromised but there are understandable reasons for their moral corruption.

The plot is rather clever.

The historical background is fascinating and the exotic setting is used extremely well. There’s an atmosphere of corruption and paranoia. In fact this novel has just about everything you could want in a spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed three other John Flagg spy thrillers - The Lady and the Cheetah, Death and the Naked Lady and The Persian Cat. They’re very good and I highly recommend all three. And they're all in print!

Stark House have paired this one in a two-novel paperback with another Hank Muldoon thriller, Dear, Deadly Beloved.

Edgar Wallace's The Door with Seven Locks

The Door with Seven Locks is a 1926 Edgar Wallace thriller.

Dick Martin is a young Scotland Yard sub-inspector about to retire because he’s come into money, although now he’s wondering what on earth he’s going to do with himself. Being a cop was his life.

He’s just handled on odd case. He was to arrest a professional burglar named Pheeney but the man has an unusual alibi. At the time he was picking locks, in a totally lawful manner. He had been hired to break into a tomb.

Perhaps as a joke his superintendent assigns Dick to one last case - involving a stolen library book. That case will have surprising consequences. One of the consequence is that he meets an adorable girl named Sybil. The other consequences are more sinister - he meets a doctor named Stalletti. Stalletti occupies his time with some rather startling experiments.

Although Dick doesn’t want to become a private detective his superintendent also suggests he might like to take on a case, on a one-off basis, for a lawyer named Havelock. It involves keeping tabs on the young, unstable, eccentric, world-wandering Lord Selford. Dick is at a loose end and dreads boredom so he accepts.

These three plot strands will soon begin to intersect.

Dick is a bit surprised when someone tries to kill him, and even more surprised that his assailant doesn’t seem to be quite human.

There are also some keys which seem to be important. Sybil has one of these keys. Someone else is very keen to get hold of it.

In fact there are seven keys, and all seven are needed to unlock a door with seven locks. Nobody knows what is behind that door. The door is in the Selford Tombs, a burial complex built into a hillside by one of the current Lord Selford’s distant ancestors. That ancestor was notoriously wicked. The father of the present Lord Selford also had a reputation for wickedness.

There are quite a few shady characters mixed up in this case. Some turn out to be more sinister than initial appearances suggest while others might be fairly harmless common-and-garden crooks.

There are clearly all kinds of secrets associated with the Selford family. Sybil is distantly related to Lord Selford and indeed appears to be his only living relative.

There is a rumour that Selford Manor contains hidden rooms. There are kidnappings. Innocent people are drugged. Telephone lines get cut. There are what appear to be monstrous creatures. There are murders. There are gunfights. There are ancient sins.

Dick Martin naturally falls in love with Sybil, giving him a personal stake in the case. He’s a good detective but he’s dealing with fantastic crimes that are totally outside all his past experience.

Wallace as usual provides plenty of breathless excitement and a delightfully outrageous plot that positively races along. Wallace had a knack for making such plots finally come together in a surprisingly satisfying manner.

And as so often in Wallace’s books there are hints of gothic creepiness. Hugely entertaining and highly recommended

The Door with the Seven Locks was adapted for film in 1962 as an entry in the prolific cycle of German Edgar Wallace krimis (the German name for crime films) made by Rialto. I’ve reviewed that movie as well.

Asa Bordages's Murders in Silk

Asa Bordages (1906-1986) wrote four crime novels in the 1930s. Using the pseudonym Mike Teagle he wrote Murders in Silk in 1938. It was reissued by Lion Books in 1951. This was a slightly revised edition, with dates being changed to make it appear to have been written in 1951.

Tiberius Bixby (known to his family and friends as Tie Bixby) is on a train, on the way to visit his dad. He notices a pretty girl wearing a cute little red hat. She’s pretending not to know the man sitting opposite her but before boarding the train Tie had seen her having an animated conversation with this man. This unexplained man never reaches his destination. He is found, very dead, in the ladies’ room on the train. The girl in the cute red hat finds the body.

When the train arrives at Scraffton, Tie’s home town, his old school friend Rafe Conner, now a police detective, takes charge of the case. For reasons he finds impossible to explain even to himself Tie tells Conner a lie on red hat girl’s behalf. Tie doesn’t realise it but he’s now involved himself in a whole series of perplexing events which will include more than one murder.

What really worries Tie about the murder on the train is the murder weapon, an unusual knife. That knife could only have come from one place, Tie knows where that place is, and he isn’t happy about it.

Shortly afterwards there is a fire, at the house of a neighbour of the Bixbys. The circumstances are suspicious. It has something to do with silk. Curiously enough Tie sees red hat girl (whose name is actually Gretchen Jones) at the scene of the fire.

Tie finds himself mixed up with two other women. One is Ruth. She was a childhood friend. The other is a pretty blonde who hates her own father.

There have been two murders and while Tie had nothing to do with the murders that lie he told after the first murder means that he is involved whether he likes it or not.

He also realises that he’s fallen in love, and she might be the kind of girl with whom it’s unwise to fall in love. There’s another girl in love with him, and that seems likely to cause complications. He has hoodlums trying to kill him. He finds himself having to rescue damsels in distress. He’s told a lie, and lots of lies have been told to him. He has no idea what’s going on, much to the disappointment of his father Zebediah. Zeb Bixby is rarely sober but he’s a kind of alcoholic marvel - no matter how much he drinks his mind is still as sharp as a tack. Zeb thinks he knows what’s going on but being an irascible (although likeable) old coot he’s determined to make Tie figure it out for himself.

Tie isn’t dumb but he’s out of his depth. He turns out rather surprisingly to be a lot tougher, and a lot more handy with his fists, than he looks. He might be better off breaking his habit of coming to the rescue of ladies in distress but it’s an ingrained habit.

Given that this novel has been reissued in the Black Gat Books imprint I was expecting noir fiction, or at least hardboiled crime. It is slightly hardboiled but mostly it’s a fairly traditional puzzle-plot mystery novel. It’s reasonable to say that it qualifies as a fair-play mystery. In fact some of the clues might be a little too obvious. On the whole the plot is very serviceable with some nasty twists. There are lots of betrayals and conflicted loyalties.

Tie is a likeable enough hero. We assume that he’s going to be the amateur detective who solves the case but then there’s an interesting narrative shift.

The novel does perhaps have a slight claim to being noir (or at least noirish) fiction. There are three women all of whom might at different times be seen as playing the femme fatale rôle.

One item of interest is that the actual amateur detective is very manipulative. The mystery is resolved quite satisfactorily but we don’t get the kind of neat and tidy emotional resolution we might be expecting.

Murders in Silk has just enough slightly unexpected features to make it more than just a routine story. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Highly recommended.

Jack Sharkey’s The Secret Martians

Jack Sharkey’s science fiction novel The Secret Martians was written in 1960.

Jack Sharkey (1931-1992) was a prolific American playwright. He also wrote a lot of science fiction short stories, mostly between 1959 and 1965. He published a few novels with The Secret Martians being one of his few novels in the science fiction genre.

The setting would appear to be the mid to late 21st century. Jery Devlin works in advertising. His current assignment is to persuade American women that Plasti-Flex bras will make them irresistible to men. Jery has a particular talent that has made him a success in advertising. Advertising is of course based entirely on lies and misleading claims. Jery has an uncanny ability to spot lies and misleading or false information. He can spot things that just don’t add up or don’t ring true. If Jery can spot the lie in a piece of advertising copy in less than five seconds the copy is rejected, but if it can fool Jery for five seconds it will fool the general public indefinitely.

This skill is about to become important in a completely different context. Jery has been chosen by Interplanetary Security (IS) for a secret mission. Or rather he has been chosen by the Brain, the super-advanced computer on which IS relies. Jery has no experience in secret agent work but the Brain has decided that that skill of his makes him the only man for the job. Jery is given a little disc known as an Amnesty. This disc gives him unlimited authority. It’s not just a licence to kill, it’s a licence to do anything at all that he considers necessary.

Jery is sent to Mars on a rescue mission. On his journey to the red planet Jery acquires a travelling companion, Snow White. No, not that Snow White. This Snow White is just a regular human, albeit a very blonde and very pretty young female human. His meeting with Snow White was no accident.

The mission involves a missing party of Space Scouts. They’re like space age Boy Scouts. They were on a trip to Mars which was a kind of PR stunt on behalf of Earth’s government. They simply vanished from the spaceship Phobos II. Vanished in totally impossible circumstances. Jery solves that mystery very quickly but it leads to a whole series of other mysteries and conspiracies and counter-conspiracies.

Jery discovers that all sorts of things that people have taken for granted about Mars are not necessarily true. In fact all sorts of things that people have taken for granted about various subjects Mars might not be strictly true. Everyone knew about the Sugarfeet. They’re a Martian life form resembling smallish crystalline dragons. They’re dumb and harmless. There had been another much more advanced Martian race but they’re long since extinct, leaving behind only a few ruins. Everyone knew about parabolite, a common Martian rock that is potentially immensely valuable that is impossible to exploit.

There are at least four different factions which might intend to kill Jery. Or they might see him as a potential ally. There are shifting alliances and betrayals. Each faction has an agenda, but their agendas seem to be changeable. Jery can’t trust anyone other than Snow White. He is sure he can trust her. Of course Jery admits that he is absolutely hopeless about women.

The plots and counter-plots get more and more convoluted but they’re certainly ingenious.

As you might expect in a tale with a heroine named Snow White there’s a bit of a tongue-in-cheek vibe. It’s a wild crazy romp of a story.

There are cool very alien-like aliens. There’s some action. Jery is not your standard square-jawed action hero. He’s not much of an action hero at all. But he does have that ability to spot the true meanings behind things, to see beneath the surface of the obvious. And an ability to tease out the tangled motives of others. He’s likeable enough. Snow White is a fairly feisty heroine.

There’s some amusing technobabble. I have no idea how much of a grounding in science the author possessed but he had enough to make his technobabble sound vaguely plausible and it is undeniably clever. There’s some wild pseudo-science and fringe science and it’s worked into the book’s plot rather nicely.

The Secret Martians is fast-moving and entertaining with enough solid science fiction content to make it much more than just an adventure story set on Mars. Highly recommended.

This novel is paired with Secret of the Flaming Ring by Rog Phillips in an Armchair Fiction double-header paperback edition.

F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Sulu Sea Murders

The Sulu Sea Murders was the seventh of F. Van Wyck Mason’s thirty-one Hugh North spy thrillers. It was published in 1933. While these novels are usually considered to be spy fiction it should be pointed out that many of the early books in this series are as much murder mysteries as spy thrillers, and quite a few are in fact pure murder mysteries. Such is the case with The Sulu Sea Murders. It’s a murder mystery but the exotic setting adds interest.

Hugh North is an officer in the US Army’s intelligence division, G-2, but in the early books he works for the Department of Criminal Investigations. He is essentially a military policeman. He holds the rank of captain (by the time the series ended in 1968 he had been promoted to colonel).

The Sulu Sea Murders opens with the murder of a pearl diver in the Philippines. All that is known of the murderer is that he is a member of the American garrison on the nearby island of Sanga Sanga. Hugh North is sent to Sanga Sanga to investigate.

The American garrison is quartered in Fort Winfield, a very old castle built by the Spanish. It’s a rabbit warren. There are parts of the castle that the Americans have never even attempted to explore - it would to be too easy to become hopelessly lost.

There’s one thing North is pretty sure of - pearls are involved somewhere in this case. It soon becomes obvious that the atmosphere at Fort Winfield is not merely tense, it’s explosive. There are professional jealousies among the officers. The commanding officer, Major Flood, is hated by all.

There are three women each of whom seems to be at the centre of romantic and sexual intrigues. One is Flood’s French-born wife. Theirs is clearly not a happy marriage. Then there’s Captain O’Hare’s wife, universally referred to as Anytime Annie. There’s also Manuela, the beautiful young daughter of the local Spanish grandee. All three women are engaged in flirtations or affairs.

Those pearls also suggest that greed is going to play a part in this tale.

There are countless motives for murder, and there are several murders in quick succession. In two cases the identity of the killer seems obvious but Hugh North is not satisfied. He doesn’t like jumping to obvious conclusions.

Hugh North is very much a scientific detective. Forensic science provides some of the vital clues that will eventually lead to a solution of the case. North doesn’t rely too much on flashes of intuition. He is patient and methodical.

The old Spanish fortress plays a major role in the story. As does a shipwreck. There’s also the curious and colourful profession practised by one of the chief murder suspects before he enlisted in the army. There are conflicted loyalties and there are double-crosses.

The climate becomes almost a character in the story. The stifling heat raises tensions ever higher and there’s a hurricane on the way. The approaching hurricane plays a key role in the plot, adding a crucial time element.

This book is very much in the vein of the puzzle-plot mysteries of the golden age of detective fiction and I think it qualifies as a fair-play mystery. This one has a pleasingly intricate plot that comes together neatly at the end.

I am personally a huge fan of mysteries, thrillers, horror tales and melodramas in tropical settings. You get that feel of overheated passions and the loosening of moral restraints which always leads to entertaining emotional mayhem. It always works for me and it works in this book.

The Sulu Sea Murders is thoroughly enjoyable and is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of F. Van Wyck Mason’s other Hugh North novels - The Shanghai Bund Murders, The Fort Terror Murders, The Singapore Exile Murders, The Branded Spy Murders and The Budapest Parade Murders.

I’ve also reviewed his The Castle Island Case which doesn’t feature Hugh North but is a fascinating illustrated murder mystery with photographic clues.