Malko 2: Operation New York

Malko 2: Operation New York is one of the few Malko spy thrillers by Gerard de Villiers that have been given an English translation. It was originally published in French in 1968 as Magie Noire à New York. The English translation dates from 1970.

The hero of this espionage series is His Serene Highness Prince Malko Ligne, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Black Eagle, Knight of the Order of Landgrave Seraphim of Kletgaus, Knight of the Order of Malta. He works on a semi-official basis for the C.I.A. - semi-official because the C.I.A. does love plausible deniability and the jobs they give Malko are usually even more illegal, unconstitutional and immoral than their regular activities.

Malko regards the C.I.A. with a certain amount of sophisticated European aristocratic contempt. But they pay well, and Malko owns a castle and castles are very expensive to maintain. Malko is trustworthy but totally non-ideological. He is not interested in causes. He is interested in money and women. And the women who attract Malko’s eye also tend to be very expensive to maintain.

As his book opens Malko has no active case on which to work and he’s enjoying himself in New York City. He’s also enjoying Sabrina. Sabrina is rich and gorgeous and breathtakingly uninhibited in bed. She’s Malko’s kind of girl. Unfortunately Malko has walked into a honey trap. Sabrina really was too good to be true. She is a Soviet spy, working for the GRU.

It’s an interesting variation on the basic honey trap theme. Malko will be blackmailed into working for the Soviets but in such a way that he cannot call on the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. for help, not even unofficially. He has been set up so that he appears to be a war criminal on the run. A war criminal named Rudi Guern. He has been set up so cleverly that proving that he is not Rudi Giern would be very difficult indeed.

His only way out is to find and expose the real Rudi Guern. Guern was supposed to have been killed in 1945 but it’s now obvious to Malko that Guern is still alive.

Obviously the Soviets will do everything possible to stop Malko from finding Guern. Malko will have to make contact with ODESSA, the underground organisation of former war criminals. If they find out what Malko is up to they will kill him, very unpleasantly. And Malko has an Israeli hit squad on his trail as well. 

Malko will have some narrow escapes from death and will have to endure various beatings and torture.

Despite the book’s title the action takes place mostly in Germany, and at sea on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean.

Of course Malko encounters quite a few beautiful, dangerous and possibly treacherous women. He goes to bed with all three. Malko often has to sleep with gorgeous women in the line of duty. It’s a duty he accepts without complaint. The most interesting of the three is Phoebe. She’s the craziest. She likes to be whipped. Malko is not into that sort of thing but he’ll do anything to please a lady.

The three women are all different and all interesting and colourful. Malko’s feelings for these women are complex. He tries to avoid emotional entanglements but sometimes, much to his alarm, he discovers that he actually cares about them.

Malko is basically a decent guy doing a dirty job. He doesn’t enjoy torturing people. He leaves that sort of thing to his faithful manservant, a retired Turkish professional assassin. Malko hates to see innocent bystanders get hurt. He doesn’t mind if bad guys get hurt. They’re professionals and they know the risks of the job. Sometimes innocent bystanders do get hurt. When that happens it’s a tough break.

Malko is not a conscienceless killer but he has no illusions about his job. His job sometimes involves doing bad things but the pay is good. Sometimes the jobs do trouble his conscience.

The Malko novels get very dark and very cynical at times. People get hurt very badly and sometimes they’re people who don’t deserve it. The world of espionage is cruel and vicious. It’s not a civilised game for gentlemen.

These novels manage to be enjoyably pulpy and at the same time fairly intelligent spy thrillers. There’s a lot more moral complexity than you will find in most American pulp spy series of that era. Malko 2: Operation New York is an above-average spy novel that can be highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several other Malko novels - West of Jerusalem, The Man from Kabul and Angel of Vengeance.

H. Bedford-Jones's Buccaneer Blood

Buccaneer Blood from Altus Press collects five rollicking pirate adventure tales by H. Bedford-Jones, all published in the pulp magazine Argosy in the early 1930s.

Canadian-born H. Bedford-Jones (1887-1949) was an incredibly prolific pulp writer, mostly of adventure stories (often in historical settings) although he also wrote science fiction and westerns.

These five loosely linked short stories recount the adventures of Irish soldier of fortune and pirate Denis Burke.

Escape! appeared in Argosy in November 1931. In 1703 Burke is in the French service, until he is rash enough to make a very unflattering remark about Louis XIV. Now he will need to leave France in a hurry, keeping one step ahead of the king’s wrath.

Burke can be hot-headed but he is clever and determined and his boldness counts in his favour. He is a master of the art of bluff. If he can find a ship he has a chance. He will have to steal the ship but that prospect does not daunt him.

Luck of the Sea Burkes was published in Argosy in January 1932. Having assumed the name Captain Mayo Denis Burke has his first success as a pirate, capturing a fine Spanish frigate. He learns of great riches that are his for the taking, if he and his crew are prepared to fight hard enough. His crew will certainly fight for money.

There is a woman involved as well. There usually is where Denis Burke is concerned.

Spanish Gold appeared in Argosy in March 1932. A Spaniard tells Burke of a sunken galleon, lying in shallow water with a fortune aboard. This sets off a series of double-crosses and deceptions. Everyone wants that fortune but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds.

Burke encounters a woman from his past. Maybe she’ll be an ally.

There’s also plenty of action and suspense.

Buccaneer Blood is from a September 1932 issue of Argosy. Denis Burke is never really at his best when he isn’t at sea but he has a plan for the future which cannot be executed at sea.

He is trying to pass himself off as a French nobleman. He has good reasons for not wanting to be recognised as either Denis Burke or Captain Mayo.

His problem is that a French officer has indeed recognised him as the notorious wanted outlaw Denis Burke.

He may also have found love. He is not sure, but maybe he’s ready for marriage, something he had never considered before.

Spanish Blood is Proud Blood appeared in Argosy in March 1933.

Burke has fresh plans. Or rather a variation on earlier plans. If he succeeds he will no longer be a hunted man. His new plan is of course crazy and daring.

The trouble with being a pirate is that you find yourself associating with the wrong sort of people. Treachery is an ever-present danger. You have to be careful whom you trust.

Bedford-Jones did this sort of thing extremely well. He knew how to strike the right balance between action and romance and he knew how to keep a story powering along. He throws in lots of plot twists as well.

If you love pulp fiction and pirate adventures, and I assume that includes everybody, then Buccaneer Blood is highly recommended.

Carter Brown’s The Dame

Carter Brown’s The Dame, published in 1959, is one of his many Lieutenant Al Wheeler hardboiled mysteries. In fact it was the fourteenth of the 52 Al Wheeler novels (Carter Brown wrote 215 novels and 75 novellas which sold a total of around 120 million copies).

Lieutenant Al Wheeler from the sheriff’s office has to investigate the murder of glamorous movie star Judy Manners, only he gets to her luxury beach house to find her very much alive. There is a corpse, a naked woman, but it’s not the movie star.

The dead blonde was Judy’s secretary Barbara.

Judy thinks that she was the killer’s real target and that Barbara was killed by mistake. Al thinks it’s an interesting theory but he’s not convinced one way or the other.

Judy is married to fellow movie star Rudi Ravell. Rudi is as dumb as a rock but he’s handsome (and he knows it) and he has an eye for the ladies. He also has a very jealous wife.

Judy and Rudi were about to star in a new movie. The business deals behind the movie, involving a producer named Harkness and a financier named Luther, are perhaps not entirely honest and above-board. But then very little in Hollywood is honest and above-board.

There’s another dame involved, Camille Clovis. She lives expensively and has no job. She is almost certainly a kept woman, but kept by whom?

Any of the men could be sleeping with any of the women. That’s the way it goes with movie people.

Which means shady business dealings or sexual jealousy could be equally plausible motives. And everyone mixed up in the case has a motive for murdering someone.

Al is keen to get to grips with some hard evidence. He’s also keen to get to grips with the lovely Camille. He wouldn’t mind getting to grips with Judy Manners as well - that legendary 40-inch bust of hers certainly got his attention. The truth is that Al Wheeler has a very keen interest in the female of the species, and when when he’s on a case he finds plenty of opportunities to pursue that interest.

Maybe the crazy old guy who maintains the cemetery in the dusty little one-horse town of Oakridge can provide a clue. The old guy has some bitter memories and they involve some of the people mixed up in this murder case.

There could be a question of mistaken identity, or possibly several questions of mistaken identity. Al seems to be dealing with people who shoot first and ask questions later.

Carter Brown wrote pulp fiction with the emphasis on pulp. But he wrote very enjoyable pulp fiction. And he wrote well. There’s plenty of hardboiled dialogue and atmosphere, and plenty of sleazy atmosphere as well.

Al Wheeler is a likeable wise-cracking rogue. He might seem to be focused mainly on skirt but he has good cop instincts. He has a reputation for getting results and treading on toes in the process. As long as he keeps getting results he can get away with treading on toes and chasing dames.

The Dame is trashy fast-paced light entertainment and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a number of the Al Wheeler books - No Harp for My Angel, Eve it's Extortion and Booty for a Babe as well as his Danny Boyd PI novel The Savage Salome and his Hollywood trouble-shooter Rick Holman thriller Where Did Charity Go? and they’re all fun.

Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds

Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds was published in Amazing Stories in December 1952. Except that there was no such person as Gerald Vance. It was a Ziff-Davis Publishing house name used by lots of writers. Nobody is sure of the identity of the author of this book although Berkeley Livingston has been suggested. It does have a very similar feel to Livingston’s Queen of the Panther World, and it has the same flaws which we’ll get to later.

It begins with married couple Roger and Lydia Sherman inviting their friend Wayne to joining them on an adventure. It will be quite an adventure - a journey to another dimension or a parallel universe. Roger and Lydia are not quite sure which it is. They’ve invented a machine that can take them to strange new worlds but they themselves don’t understand the science behind the invention. Wayne thinks it sounds silly but he goes along anyway.

A nice touch is that the inter-dimensional travel machine is just the Shermans’ living room. They have made some high-tech alterations to it but it still just looks like a living room.

The three end up on a planet of giants and endless wars. It’s an Earth-like planet but it’s definitely not Earth and the inhabitants are fairly human-like but definitely not quite human.

There are several tribes and they fight these wars because that’s what they’ve always done. Naturally our travellers from Earth are caught in the middle. One tribe is particularly aggressive and is led by a man who is clearly mad and evil. There’s also a High Priest, who is more ambigous.

Roger and Lydia are of course captured and threatened with dire fates. Lydia has her clothes torn off so she has a fair idea of the fate in store for her.

Our Earth travellers do form an alliance with that seems to be the most friendly tribe. And they encounter a beautiful queen. Not a beautiful evil queen. She’s a beautiful noble virtuous queen. Wayne takes quite a shine to her, and the queen thinks Wayne is quite a man.

It all leads up to an epic climactic battle.

Another problem facing our earthly trio is that there is a time factor involved if they hope to return to Earth.

Armchair Fiction have made a huge number of pulp science fiction novels available to modern readers and a very high proportion of them really are either neglected gems or at the least very very good stories. Others however are merely routine.

Too Many Worlds falls into the routine class. The characters are just standard stock types. The setup has been used by other writers and used with much more style and flair. The world-building is unimaginative. This other dimension is simply Earth with taller people with bluish-tinted skin, plus six-legged horses. This world does not feel truly alien and its inhabitants do not feel truly alien. A major weakness is that the queen seems totally human and of normal stature for a human woman but the reason for this is never explained (except that she is intended as the love interest for the hero).

It’s not a terrible book. There’s some reasonable action. It has a certain amount of energy. It just doesn’t have anything that is likely to grab the reader’s attention. It’s competent by-the-numbers stuff. It’s interesting mostly as an example of lesser pulp science fiction which serves to illustrate the difference between inspired pulp writing and routine pulp writing. It’s hard to recommend this one.

Armchair Fiction have paired this short novel with Charles Eric Maine’s novel Wall of Fire (which I have not yet read) in a two-novel paperback edition.

Some Armchair Fiction science fiction pulp reprints that I do highly recommend include Paul W. Fairman’s The Girl Who Loved Death, Henry Kuttner’s Crypt-City of the Deathless One, Into the Fourth Dimension by Ray Cummings, Lester Del Rey’s Pursuit, J.F. Bone's Second Chance and Emmett McDowell's Citadel of the Green Death.

M.G. Braun's Operation Atlantis

M.G. Braun (1912-1984) was a Frenchman who wrote the very prolific Al Glenne spy novel series. Operation Atlantis is one of the handful of the Al Glenne books that has been translated into English. It was originally published in French as Action de Force in 1964.

The Al Glenne spy novels were among the 171 novels written by Braun.

Al Glenne is a French spy. At the moment he’s in Berlin. An elderly German archaeologist named Uhrich has been murdered. An archaeologist with a special interest in the lost city of Atlantis.

The man who killed him has met an unfortunate fate as well. Uhrich’s killer was Heinrich but Heinrich was working for a man named Müller.

The Soviets may be mixed up in this. Other Russians may also be involved - the N.T.S., a shadowy anti-Soviet movement. The French are involved - one of their agents had been shadowing Müller. That French agent has been blown to bits by a car bomb. The Americans are involved - by rather nefarious means they have obtained a taped telephone conversation. Al Glenne will once again be working with his old C.I.A., pal Jeff Cavassa.

It all concerns Atlantis. Maybe not the lost city itself. Maybe it’s a code name for something. Maybe it has some connection to Atlantis. Whatever it is the Soviets, the N.T.S., the French and the Americans are all extremely interested in it.

This does not mean that the French and the Americans are actually working together. They have their own agendas. The N.T.S. have their own agenda. Al Glenne likes Jeff Cavassa a lot but he doesn’t trust him. Cavassa is C.I.A. and the French and the Americans are as much rivals as allies. That’s what makes 1960s French spy fiction such as M.G. Braun’s books and also Gerard de Villiers’ Malko spy thrillers so interesting. The Americans are not necessarily the good guys.

In fact there aren’t any good guys in the world of espionage. Every major power has its own objectives which may be in conflict with the objectives of supposed allies. Al Glenne certainly regards the C.I.A. as rivals. Every major power and every intelligence agency pursues its objectives with no regard for morality. It’s all about power and influence.

Al has obtained some interesting information from Olga, an N.T.S. operative who was ordered to seduce him. Her brother Nicholas is a big wheel in the N.T.S. but there’s plenty of tension between Olga, her brother and her lover Gregor. There’s plenty of potential for betrayal here. There will be lots of betrayals in this story.

Al gets some more information from another potentially dangerous female, the Baroness Schuetter. Al gets a lot of his information in the bedroom. That’s a method favoured by Jeff Cavassa as well. Sex is a useful weapon in the world of spies.

The problem is that nobody knows what Atlantis is, they just know it’s a code name for something big. Al and Jeff could be wastig time chasing up fanciful leads.

There’s a solid spy thriller plot with a lot of action along the way and the action scenes are good.

The ambiguity and complexity of the characters lifts this book above the pack. Al is a pretty good guy but he’s an intelligence agent so his ethical standards are flexible. He’s quite happy to mislead Jeff, and Jeff is quite happy to mislead him. The other characters are often a mix of strength and weakness. For that reason their actions cannot be predicted.

Most of the characters have personal motivations which may be in conflict with the missions they’re supposed to be carrying out. The two women are more than just dolly birds. They’re complicated women trying to reconcile their emotions with their duty.

This is an above-average thoroughly enjoyable spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed another of Braun’s Al Glenne spy novels, Apostles of Violence (which is also very good).

Rufus King’s Secret Beyond the Door (Museum Piece No 13)

Rufus King’s crime novel Museum Piece No 13 was published in 1945 and was later retitled Secret Beyond the Door to tie in with Fritz Lang’s movie adaptation.

Rufus King (1893-1966) was an American crime writer whose work belongs to the fair-play puzzle-plot genre that blossomed during the golden age of detective fiction. He is best-known for his excellent Lieutenant Valcour mysteries.

This book begins with Lily arriving at her new husband’s mansion, Blaze Creek, to take up residence. Lily is a 30-year-old widow whose instinct has always been to go with the flow. She isn’t stupid but she is timid. She’s also very rich. Her new husband, Earl Rumney, is quite a bit older. His first wife died a year earlier. He owns a newspaper.

The atmosphere is uncomfortable from the start. Earl’s fifteen-year-old son Aderic is introspective, intellectually precocious and decidedly odd. She does not like Lily.

The women of the household make Lily uneasy. Earl’s rather controlling sister Diana seems to resent her. Leona Drumm certainly resents her. Leona is a columnist and a political zealot and she’s angling for a share in Earl’s newspaper. She had also had hopes of marrying Earl. Miss McQuillan is Earl’s live-in secretary. She has long been in love with Earl.

The most disturbing thing is Earl’s hobby. He collects rooms. Rooms in which something startling or horrific has happened. He buys the houses in which the rooms are located and then recreates them at Blaze Creek. It’s an obsession rather than a hobby. These are mostly rooms in which brutal murders were committed. Earl likes to sit in these rooms and soak up the atmosphere. He likes to show these rooms off to people, except for Room 13 which is kept locked.

Lily becomes more and more concerned. Is her husband crazy? Is this morbid obsession of his dangerous? Dangerous to him, and possibly not just to him? Lily was timid to start with. Now she’s becoming a nervous wreck. She would like to do something to help Earl but she doesn’t know how.

She confides in a psychiatrist. He is quite alarmed.

The presence of a psychiatrist in a story written in the 1940s is always promising. I do love mysteries and thrillers with psychiatric themes.

There’s a definite mystery plot here but this is mostly a suspense novel. It might be more accurate to describe it as a gothic psychological suspense romantic melodrama. It covers all bases. And it uses elements from multiple genres in a very skilful way.

Rufus King was most assuredly not a pulp writer. His style is polished and literary, and often quite witty.

Lily might be mousey but she’s likeable and she’s not a fool. Earl is complicated and enigmatic. His bizarre obsession could have several causes. It might be weird but harmless. It could indicate deep-seated problems. It could have terrifying implications.

This novel is a riff on a famous fairy tale. To avoid spoilers I won’t tell you which one although you’ll almost certainly figure it out pretty quickly.

The plot has a few very neat twists.

The focus is very much on Lily. What matters is not necessarily what is happening but what she thinks is happening, or suspects is happening. Mostly all she has are suspicions but they’re eating her up.

An excellent novel by a writer who doesn’t get enough attention. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed four of Rufus King’s Lieutenant Valcour mysteries, including Murder Masks Miami and his three maritime mysteries (among the very best books in that sub-genre), Murder by Latitude, The Lesser Antilles Case and Murder on the Yacht. I recommend all his books very highly.

I’ve also reviewed Fritz Lang’s excellent and very underrated film adaptation, Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).

Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black

Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black was published in 1948. Woolrich’s particular genius is that his stories were so perfectly adapted to film adaptation. Very few writers have had more stories adapted for film and TV and that made him a crucial figure in the history of pop culture. And it turned out to be almost impossible to make a bad movie from a Cornell Woolrich story.

He wasn’t a great prose stylist, not even close to being in the same league as a Raymond Chandler, but Woolrich had a knack for coming up with really nasty gut-punch plots.

This book starts with a guy named Johnny Marr, a very ordinary guy, waiting to meet his girl at a drugstore. They’ve been planning to get married for a long time and pretty soon it’s going to be possible. The guy has come into some money, more than enough for them to get married. But he is destined never to marry Dorothy. She is killed in an accident.

That sets in train a series of bizarre and inexplicable murders. Very complicated murders.

The detective investigating the first murder has a problem. He is the only one who believes it is murder. There is however not the slightest chance of proving it.

Two more strange murders occur, apparently totally unconnected except for one tiny detail. That tiny detail detail convinces the cop he’s on to something but he has no idea what it is that he’s on to. He just fears that there will be more murders.

This is a kind of suspense story in five parts, with the detective’s investigation hovering in the background.

It’s a suspense novel but there’s a mystery as well. The solution to the mystery is so clearly signposted that one must assume that Woolrich intends the reader to figure it out without any difficulty. The detective however simply does not have the vital pieces of the puzzle that would allow him to solve the case.

There’s some very fine suspense. Woolrich is generally regarded as a noir writer and to a considerable extent he is, but he’s not quite a typical noir writer. And Rendezvous in Black is not quite typical noir fiction. You expect a noir protagonist to be at least partially responsible for the mess he gets himself into. He’s usually a slightly ambiguous figure, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. In this case there’s no character flaw. It’s just pure dumb bad luck - the remorseless working of impersonal and indifferent fate.

You also expect a femme fatale to play a major part in the protagonist’s downfall. There’s no femme fatale here.

There is the classic noir feature of impending and inescapable doom. Mostly this is a suspense novel but there’s more to it than that. This is perhaps an existentialist crime novel, or an absurdist crime novel. That sets it apart from noir where you have the feeling that no matter how tragic the story it does have a kind of logical inevitability. In Rendezvous in Black there’s nothing logical about life - it’s as if the universe has played a horrible trick on Johnny Marr for no reason whatsoever except that that’s how the universe works. And most of the characters in this novel are in the same position - it is impossible to see any reason why such things should happen to them. So overall I think absurdism is closer to the mark here than noir.

The plot is also more satisfying if considered from that perspective. Sometimes we’re the victims of bizarre crazy coincidences that can never be understood in rational terms. The plot here is outlandish because that’s the way Woolrich wanted it to feel.

It doesn’t matter whether the characters in this book are good people or bad people. Some of them are very good people. Some are very bad. Some are neither particularly good or bad. It doesn’t matter. The universe will stomp you anyway. Noir is pessimist but this is a different kind of pessimism.

Rendezvous in Black is very Woolrichian and it’s powerful stuff. Highly recommended.

Like so many of Woolrich’s books this one has been filmed - Rendezvous in Black was the source material for Umberto Lenzi’s excellent 1972 krimi-giallo hybrid Seven Blood-Stained Orchids

I’ve also reviewed Woolrich’s 1942 Black Alibi.

Ghost In The Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor

Ghost In The Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor was the third of Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell mangas to be published (in 2003) but should be read before Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface (published in 2001).

Human-Error Processor is not so much a graphic novel as a group of short stories, but with some connecting tissue.

Fat Cat dates from 1991. Dead people are being used as cyber-zombies, manipulated by remote control. A young woman fears this fate may have befallen her father although she cannot (or will not) believe he is really dead.

Drive Slave dates from 1992. Azuma and Togusa have to keep a witness alive. The witness’s brain may have been infiltrated by micro-machines. This could be linked to a push to allow prefectural governments access to the very top secret data stored in Pandora. Not everyone is happy with this plan which has the potential to be a major security risk.

The Major has another priority - rescuing the kidnapped girlfriend of a top scientist.

Mines of Mind starts with a series of brutal murders. Several of the victims have tattoos, which seem to be military tattoos. There’s some link to a military prison, and to arms dealing.

Section 9 will have to work with military intelligence on this case. One thing that crops up again and again in the Ghost in the Shell universe is that when you have multiple intelligence agencies they are more likely to work against each other than with each other. There is no trust or goodwill between these agencies.

There’s an added factor - the military has assigned a guy named Kim to the case. Kim and Batou know each other and they do not like each other one little bit.

Lost Past is a hunt for a sniper. It would help if Section 9 knew the identity of the target, but they don’t.

These stories were written in between the publication of the two major Ghost in the Shell mangas and they are much less ambitious. These are routine Section 9 cases, although of course nothing that Section 9 does can really be described as routine.

Public Security Section 9 is a mythical counter-intelligence counter-terrorism unit. It tends to be a bit of a law unto itself. Mr Aramaki, who runs Section 9, doesn’t really take orders from anyone other than the prime minister.

In the original manga the focus was very much on Major Motoko Kusanagi, the female cyborg in charge of Section 9’s field operations. The Major makes appearances in Human-Error Processor but she’s a bit more in the background. Perhaps the intention was to flesh out the other members of the team a bit more, to show that guys like Togusa and Azuma are quite capable of handling routine assignments without need the Major to hold their hands.

There’s also a bit more of a police procedural feel, with an interesting mix of cyberpunk tech and old-fashioned police work (footprint evidence, interviewing witnesses).

They’re good solid stories and they have plenty of the paranoia that is so much a feature of the Ghost in the Shell universe.

I always love Masamune Shirow’s footnotes - they’re full of esoteric technical stuff but they’re also chatty and whimsical.

Don’t expect Ghost In The Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor to be quite on the level of the first manga. It’s just a lot less ambitious and low-key, but this is still top-grade cyberpunk. Highly recommended.

Kodansha have published this manga in an English translation (in the original right-to-left format).

Malko 3: Man from Kabul

Malko 3: Man from Kabul is one of the handful of Malko spy thrillers by Gerard de Villiers that have been translated into English. It was the 25th of his 200 Malko novels and was originally published in French as L'Homme de Kabul in 1972.

The hero of the Malko series is His Serene Highness Prince Malko Ligne, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Black Eagle, Knight of the Order of Landgrave Seraphim of Kletgaus, Knight of the Order of Malta. He needs money to maintain his castle, and his women. He is not on the C.I.A. payroll but he does jobs for them, jobs too awkward for the C.I.A. to handle directly. Malko is a loyal employee although he regards the C.I.A. with a certain amount of distaste. He is an aristocrat and a gentleman. His ethical standards are flexible but unlike the C.I.A. he does have some morals.

The first thing to bear in mind is that when the novel was written in 1971 Afghanistan was still a kingdom, trying to maintain friendly relations with both sides in the Cold War.

An Australian freelance spy has some important information he wants to sell to the C.I.A. but he is killed trying to cross the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. His information does reach the C.I.A. and causes great excitement. An aircraft en route from China crash-landed in a very remote spot. There was something (or someone) aboard that aircraft that the Americans, the Chinese and the Russians all want very much. The Afghans want it too. They could exchange it with any of those powers in return for important diplomatic advantages.

The Americans want that person but they cannot act officially. They employ Malko to get it for them.

His plan is fairly simple although it will involve a great deal of mayhem.

Malko’s assignments always bring him into contact with beautiful, morally ambiguous, fascinating and dangerous women. This case is no exception. There’s a gorgeous Afghan girl. She’s dangerous because her uncle runs the Afghan security service, and her cousin will kill any man who tries to persuade her into bed. That’s awkward because Malko would very much like to bed her.

There’s also the bald German girl, Birgitta. She’s bald but stunningly beautiful and very sexy. She’s the mistress of a colonel in the Afghan intelligence agency. He’s German as well. He’s also very jealous and very very dangerous. Withy a definite cruel streak.

Of course there are attempted double-crosses. With four players in the game (the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese and the Afghans) there’s plenty of potential for really complicated double-crosses. Especially when it’s not clear that all four players are have totally different objectives.

What makes the Malko books so interesting is that they are written by a Frenchman who views the Cold War from a neutral outsiders’ perspective. You cannot assume that the author thinks of the Americans as the good guys or the Russians and Chinese as the bad guys. Espionage is a grubby vicious game whoever plays it and all sides play dirty. There’s no morality at all in the world of espionage.

Malko himself views the Cold War from an outsider’s perspective. He works for the C.I.A. because they pay well and he needs the money. He has no ideological agenda. He regards all sides with aristocratic disdain. He is often sickened by the things he finds himself doing. Malko is mercenary and he’s loyal to his employer but he dislikes his work. He has a taste for danger and adventure but he would have been more at home in an earlier era when a gentleman could indulge such tastes without compromising his sense of honour.

In this book Malko is appalled by the C.I.A.’s casual use of torture.

The cynicism of de Villiers goes beyond anything you will find in British or American spy writers such as Len Deighton. Malko cannot console himself with the thought that our side might do bad things but the other side is worse. He cannot console himself with the thought that he is doing bad things for a good cause. He knows that he is doing bad things for money. He is a kind of anti-hero. He is determined not to abandon his sense of honour completely but in his heart he knows he has morally compromised himself. He feels dirty.

And in Malko’s world nice people get hurt very very badly. In this novel a very nice people suffers an appalling fate.

This is intelligent provocative spy fiction. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the slightly earlier Malko: West of Jerusalem and also Malko 5: Angel of Vengence.

Clifton Adams' Whom Gods Destroy

Clifton Adams (1919-71) was a successful and prolific writer of westerns but he also wrote several noir novels, the first being Whom Gods Destroy in 1953.

Roy Foley is working in a cheap diner when he hears of his father’s death. He’ll have to go back to his home town, Big Prairie. That means he’ll see Lola again. He knows that seeing her again is the worst thing he could do, but he knows that he will.

Roy had been born on the wrong side of the tracks. The rich kids looked down on him. Especially Lola. Lola was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Roy had tried to make something of himself. He became a football star. He figured that now Lola would go out with him. But she laughed in his face.

Fourteen years later Roy can still hear her laughter. His hate just seems to keep getting stronger.

In fact Roy really is a loser. But in Big Prairie he has an idea. Bootlegging is a thing of the past, except in Oklahoma. They still have Prohibition in Oklahoma. The bootleggers spend a lot of money buying politicians to make sure Prohibition stays in place. Prohibition is good for business. They also make sure that prostitution remains illegal. That makes it a profitable sideline.

Roy decides he wants to be a bootlegger. He had dreams of being a doctor or a lawyer, but he wasn’t smart enough. At some level Roy understands that he’s not very smart enough. But you don’t have to be smart to be a successful bootlegger. You just need to be hungry. His old pal Sid is a bootlegger and will teach him the ropes.

Roy soon has bigger plans. Roy comes up with reasonably good plans but he never thinks them through properly. When they blow up in his face he’s always surprised. But he keeps trying. You have to give him credit for that - every time a plan fails he immediately comes up with a new one, just as ingenious and just as flawed. He’s not very bright but he is cunning.

He’s a fairly typical noir fiction protagonist, although not a very sympathetic one. Lola was right to laugh at him. He really is a dumb thug. He’s too vicious and too stupid to make the reader care very much about him. On the other hand we feel some sympathy since we figure that really really bad things are bound to happen to him.

There are two women. One is Lola. The other is Sid’s wife Vida. One or both could turn out to be a femme fatale.

Roy hates Lola but maybe he has never stopped loving her. It’s not clear whether he loves Vida. He doesn’t know himself if he loves her. He certainly desires her.

There’s no ideological grandstanding although the book certainly paints moral reformers in very unfavourable colours. The moral reformers are organised crime’s biggest asset. There’s plenty of cynicism here. There’s not a single politician or public official who isn’t corrupt.

To be honest there’s not a single character who isn’t corrupt in some way. Corrupted by greed, ambition, revenge, the thirst for power, lust or just seething hatred.

Whom Gods Destroy has a nasty edge to it and a stifling atmosphere of hopelessness. Which is what noir fiction is all about. This is a fine entry in the genre and it’s highly recommended.

The Stark House Noir paperback edition also includes another excellent Adams noir novel, Death’s Sweet Song, which I reviewed here a while back. Adams doesn’t have a huge profile as a writer of noir fiction but perhaps he should.

The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux Camélias)

La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias) is an 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. Dumas himself adapted it as a stage play shortly thereafter. In 1853 it became the basis for Verdi's opera La traviata. Both the novel and play were highly successful.

Dumas was the son of the immensely popular and famous Alexandre Dumas. The younger Dumas went on to become a major figure in the French literary world.

He was just twenty-three when he wrote The Lady of the Camellias. It is a semi-autobiographical account of his affair with Marie Duplessis, one of the most famous (and expensive) of all 19th century courtesans. Marie Duplessis died of tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of twenty-three. The heroine of the novel is renamed Marguerite Gautier.

Given that Dumas’ liaison with Marie Duplessis was well known in Parisian society and that readers of the novel were well aware of Marie’s death in 1847 the author’s decision to begin the novel with her death was probably an unavoidable one, and of course it serves to highlight the tragedy. We know the heroine is doomed, and that the love between these two people is doomed.

A young man named Armand Duval becomes infatuated with the celebrated courtesan Marguerite Gautier.

The problem is that he cannot possibly afford her. Armand is by no means poor but he is far from being a rich man. And only a very rich man indeed could afford a woman like Marguerite.

The complication is that they fall genuinely in love. Marguerite does not mind that Armand has very little money, as long as he is prepared to accept that she is being kept by a wealthy duke and that she is accepting money from other men for her sexual favours. Armand struggles to come to terms with all this. He struggles to understand Marguerite.

Both Armand and Marguerite try to find a solution that will be mutually satisfactory.

Dumas had an assortment of mistresses and kept women. The world of decadent excess, of high-class prostitutes, the world of the demi-monde, was his world. His attitude towards prostitutes was extremely sympathetic. That is not to say that he entirely approved of prostitution. His attitudes to this question were complicated and perhaps contradictory. On the other hand he did not believe that such women should be condemned. Marguerite Gautier is a very sympathetic heroine. Dumas does not sentimentalise her. Marguerite is quite mercenary. She has found that the wages of sin are very generous and she is addicted to a life of luxury and excess. She loves Armand but she doesn’t see any reason to be faithful to him.

Marguerite has her flaws, but her love for Armand is genuine.

The novel can be described as a fictionalised account of the life of Marie Duplessis. Just how fictionalised Dumas’ account is remains uncertain.

Dumas was a big name in France but his plays were considered much too shocking to be performed in England. Reading the novel it is certainly evident that there was a reason that French novels were considered scandalous by respectable opinion in England. The novel makes not the slightest attempt to disguise the fact that its heroine is a prostitute and that the relationship between the two main characters is a sexual one. Nor does it disguise the fact that while living as a kept woman Marguerite turns tricks on the side. Dumas avoids moral judgments. Armand has a mistress before he meets Marguerite and during the course of the story he sleeps with other women. He is not the most admirable of men - he fails to trust Marguerite at a time when she needed him to do so. He lets her down.

The Lady of the Camellias offers an extraordinary glimpse into the world of the demi-monde, written by an insider. It can be considered to be a priceless artifact of social history. It is also a great love story. Highly recommended.

It has been filmed countless times,  the most notable adaptations being the 1921 Camille starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino, the 1936 Camille starring Greta Garbo and the 1969 Camille 2000.

The Blazing Affair - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Michael Avallone's The Blazing Affair was the second original novel based on the 1966-67 The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV series.

It's a competent spy thriller that is most likely to appeal to fans of the series.

It's yet another 60s spy story about yet another attempt to revive the Third Reich. It's set in South Africa so diamonds are of course also involved.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Vampirella Archives, volume 4

Vampirella Archives volume 4 collects issues 22 to 28 of the Vampirella magazine. These issues were published in 1973. As usual each issue contains a Vampirella story and usually four other stories.

Esteban Maroto’s Tomb of the Gods: Orpheus is a retelling of Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld in search of Eurydice. In The Sentence we find that even the cleverest burglars do not escape justice. Cry of the Dhampir is a reasonably good tale of vampires and those who hunt them. Minra is silly hippie-dippie nonsense about the nature of evil.

Cobra Queen is an OK jungle adventure tale which needed to be developed a bit more. Call It Companionship is about a woman whose boyfriend problems are solved by her cat. You can’t trust men but you can trust your cat. The Accursed concerns a man who seeks revenge on an already dead sorcerer. In Witch’s Promise the daughter of a woman hanged for witchcraft is seduced by a handsome rake, an army officer who uses women for his pleasure. She vows to have her revenge. In Won’t Eddie Ever Learn? a drifter thinks that robbing an old farmer and his blind daughter will be easy.

Middle Am is silly moralising nonsense. Homo Superior is science fiction. A member of a top-secret research assistant has discovered something disturbing - a member of the team is not human at all but could perhaps intend to replace humans. A reasonably good story. The Choice offers an encounter between a werewolf and a vampire, with some twists. Not a bad story. Changes follows an ordinary morning in the life of an ordinary man. The only interesting thing that happens on this morning is that his wife is murdered. It’s at most mildly disturbing, a minor disruption. We soon discover that this is a world in which people are murdered regularly and it’s no big deal. It’s not as if he is actually losing his wife. An odd, unsettling and very good story.

The Haunted Child is the tale of a husband-and-wife team of psychic researchers and a house haunted by the ghost of a child. An OK story. Cold Calculations takes lace in the frozen wastes of Alaska. Could there really be a yeti in Alaska? Another OK story. Nimrod is about poachers in Africa who stumble upon a strange creature who rescues freaks. A disappointing story ruined even further by a clumsy moral message. Dead Howl at Midnight borrows elements from both The Body Snatchers and Frankenstein. A passable story.

Moonspawn is an intriguing attempt at a science fiction explanation for werewolves. Not a bad story. In Fringe Benefits a murderer thinks that a lucky accident has allowed him to escape justice. An OK story. Demon Child tells of an ageing occult investigator who has dark suspicions about his granddaughter. Another moderately entertaining story. Blood Brothers is the tale of two revolutionaries, a secret hoard of gold and a strange cult. This one is pretty good.

Clash of the Leviathans is a tale of dinosaurs, of one dinosaur in particular whose battle with a strange enemy will have momentous consequences. A clever story. Blind Man’s Guide tells of a boy who was once a guide for an old man. Now the boy is blind and has a dog to guide him. For the boy history will repeat itself. Not too bad a story. The Power and the Glory is the story of a wicked Englishman in colonial times. His rich father protects him from the consequences of his crimes. Nothing can touch the young man. A fairly decent story.

Eye Don’t Want To Die tells of an old tailor with a glass eye. He is reputed to be a rich old miser. There are those who covet his supposed riches. A pretty good story. The Other Side of Heaven is about a fisherman who meets God. Well, maybe not the God but certainly a god. A rather Cthulhu-like god. An interesting story. Old Texas Road shows what can happen when you run out of petrol on a deserted road. A nasty but effective little chiller.

The Vampirella stories

Hell From on High takes Vampirella and the Van Helsings to the Rocky Mountains where they encounter a kindly priest. They also discover that they now face a formidable new threat, the Darkling Disciples.

The Blood Queen of Bayou Parish takes Vampirella and her friends into swamp country, a setting I always love. And the men discover that finding the woman of your dreams is not necessarily a good thing.

In Into the Inferno and What Price Love Vampirella’s friend Pendragon, a broken-down stage magician, has to confront his past and there are gangsters to deal with as well. Vampirella learns to kill, under the influence of drugs. This is a horrifying experience for her. No matter how strong her craving for blood she has always in the past avoided killing.

In Demons in the Fog Vampirella needs blood. Not for herself. For another reason entirely. Pendragon’s efforts to help backfire, as they so often do, and Vampirella has to battle old enemies, but very deadly enemies.

In Return Trip Vampirella faces a new menace - a man who can control her dreams. He can give dreams of happiness, and force her to do evil.

The Curse of the MacDaemons begins with Vampirella and Pengragon holidaying in Scotland. Vampirella meets a handsome young Scottish laird but Vampirella is not going to get to enjoy the joys of love. There’s an interesting twist to a popular legend and a decidedly perverse atmosphere to this excellent story.

Final Thoughts

These Vampirella Archive reprints really are a must for comic-book enthusiasts. Vampirella is one of the great comic-book heroines and while the non-Vampirella stories are a mixed bag some are very interesting indeed. Highly recommended.

Robert Sheckley's The 10th Victim

The 10th Victim is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Robert Sheckley (1928-2005). Bear with me because the story behind the novel is a bit complicated.

In 1953 Sheckley wrote a short story, Seventh Victim, for Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. It was adapted for radio in 1957. The excellent 1965 Italian science fiction movie The 10th Victim was based on Sheckley’s short story. The movie was scripted by Tonino Guerra, Giorgio Salvioni, Ennio Flaiano and Elio Petri and directed by Elio Petri. Sheckley wrote a novelisation of the movie, with the title The 10th Victim, which was published in 1965. Sheckley later wrote two sequels, Victim Prime and Hunter/Victim.

All of these works deal with the theme of murder as sport and entertainment. This became a very popular them in science fiction movies in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Obvious and notable examples are Rollerball and The Running Man.

In this review I will be dealing with both Sheckley’s 1953 short story and his 1965 novelisation.

Sheckley’s short story Seventh Victim is set at some unspecified time in the future. Murder is now entirely legal, but tightly regulated by the government.

This is not quite a post-apocalyptic or a dystopian future although it has some affinities with such futures. War had become so destructive that it was outlawed completely. The government however realised that not only would it be impossible to eliminate the desire for violence, it would also be harmful. To eliminate violence would be to risk eliminating all kinds of socially necessary qualities such as courage and resourcefulness. It would produce a bland conformist society lacking in creativity. And life in such a society would be unsatisfying.

It is important to note that in this story murder is a purely voluntary activity. It is essentially an extreme sport. Both the murderer (the “Hunter”) and the Victim are volunteers. Participants, if they live long enough, alternate between playing the Hunter and Victim roles. A Hunt always ends with a kill but sometimes it is the Victim who is killed and sometimes it’s the Hunter.

Frelaine, the protagonist, has participated in six successful Hunts as both Hunter and Victim. Apart from his enthusiasm for this lethal sport he is a perfectly ordinary well-adjusted citizen. His seventh Hunt as Hunter does not turn out as he expected. To say anything more about the plot would give away spoilers. This is an excellent story with a nice twist and very good very economical world-building - we are told just enough about this future world to get us interested.

Sheckley’s novel The 10th Victim is not just a very expanded version of the short story. It is very much based on the movie, so it’s Sheckley taking his own ideas from his short story and ideas from the writers of the screenplay of the movie. The movie retained all the core ideas of the short story but added a lot of extra touches and some extra characters. The movie changed the names of the two main characters and changed the setting from New York to Rome. The novelisation uses the character names from the movie (Frelaine becomes Marcello Polletti and his adversary in the Hunt becomes Catherine Meredith) and the extra characters from the movie. It is very much a novelisation of the movie, but since the movie was generally faithful to the core idea of the original story the novelisation can be seen as both Sheckley’s creation and the creation of the screenwriters.

In the novel Catherine has completed nine successful Hunts. If she completes her tenth Hunt successfully she becomes a Ten. No-one can compete in more than ten Hunts, but once you become a Ten you gain immense financial, political and social status. For her tenth Hunt she is the Hunter. Marcello is the Victim. This is only his fourth Hunt.

Catherine has a media job so her tenth Hunt is turned into a major media event. As in the short story both the Hunter and the Victim come to have slightly ambivalent feelings about the Hunt since they have both made the mistake of developing some kind of personal connection.

It’s a very witty novel (and that’s true of the film as well). There’s quite a bit of black humour. What’s really interesting is that the novel has no political axe to grind. There is no suggestion whatsoever that this is a totalitarian society. It is neither a purely socialist nor a purely capitalist society. There’s some mockery of big business and the media but there’s mockery of bureaucracy as well. The novel takes no overt stance on the morality of the Hunt. It is not presented as being overtly evil or overtly good. Participation in the Hunts is entirely voluntary. The Hunts do serve a social purpose. Whether that purpose is sufficient to provide a moral justification is left for the reader to decide.

The tone is more absurdist than anything else. The target is not any particular political system but the absurdities of human nature, and of human civilisation. Turning murder into a sport is not a capitalist conspiracy or a socialist conspiracy. It’s just the way people are. We enjoy violence. It satisfies a deep human need. You can create any kind of political utopia but you will never be able to escape from the deep primal needs that drive human behaviour. We want sex, we want love, we want violence, we want money, we want status. We want to dominate and we want to be dominated. We’re an absurd species but it’s our absurdities that make us human.

An excellent amusing eccentric clever novel. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the excellent movie adaptation The 10th Victim (1965) and several of the other movies that deal with the same theme, or variation on the theme, including Joe D’Amato’s Endgame (1983) and Lucio Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072 (1984).

Blood and Honey - Honey West

Blood and Honey was the eighth of the Honey West mystery novels. The husband and wife writing team of Gloria and Forest Fickling, writing as G.G. Fickling, wrote eleven Honey West novels between 1957 and 1971. They more or less invented the sexy girl private eye genre and Honey West also has claims to being fiction’s first kickass action heroine.

Honey West’s father was a private eye, until he got murdered on a case. Honey now runs the West Detective Agency. In fact she is the Honey West Detective Agency. She handles all the cases herself. Her father taught her the job. She has a PI’s licence. She has a gun and she knows how to use it (for emergencies she carries a .22 in a garter holster). She can handle herself in unarmed combat. Honey is tough, resourceful and very stubborn. She’s a good PI. Honey’s measurements are 38-22-36. In other words she has everything a woman should have, in all the right places. She is young, blonde, cute and very female.

Blood and Honey starts with Honey running down a dark alley in New York wearing a negligee and high heels. She’s running from a man with a gun. When she made her exit through her bedroom window she was only wearing the high heels. She grabbed the negligee on the way out. So we knows she sleeps nude. We also know immediately that this is a real Honey West novel. Poor Honey is a nice girl but she has an amazing knack for being caught without her clothes on.

Honey is in New York at the request of an old friend, Broadway producer Vic Kendall. His latest production has run into troubles. Several attempted murders certainly counts as trouble. Honey has just arrived in the Big Apple and already somebody has tried to kill her. It seems that somebody doesn’t like Vic’s new show. New York critics can be tough but they don’t usually try to literally kill you.

There are all sorts of emotional, romantic and sexual dramas associated with this show. There are other dramas as well, such as questionable business dealings. There are people with scores to settle.

I love showbiz mysteries and thrillers. There’s always a touch of decadence and sin. There’s plenty of both here. And sexual jealousies get even more overheated than usual in this world.

There are some dangerous women. Vic’s ex-showgirl wife Tina. Tina wants love. Lots of it. There’s the star of the show, Pepper Parker. She’s blonde and she’s built and she and Tina hate each other. There’s Pepper’s friend Evy. There are rumours that Evy and Pepper like to play games together, games that involve dressing in cowboy boots and paper doilies and nothing else. Yes, I know, paper doilies are a kink I’d never heard of either.

The movie world is involved as well. Movie producer Anthony Troy has bought an ocean liner. He intends to sink it. For his new movie. He’s mixed up with some of the people in Vic’s new show. There are gangsters as well. And Pepper has a story about being tied to a bed, a special bed with leather straps. She doesn’t like to think about what happened to her next.

Yes, there’s plenty of sleaze here. What I love about the Honey West books is that they’re sleazy but in a kind of playful way. Honey isn’t shocked by any of this. All her cases seem to involve such things. When a girl is a PI she sees all sorts of things. She’s used to it.

This is moderately hardboiled fiction, but again with a playful touch. The authors are aiming for slightly naughty entertainment rather than wallowing in misery. This is hardboiled but it’s not noir fiction.

There’s plenty of action as well.

Honey is a wonderful heroine, with or without her clothes. Once she’s on a case she doesn’t give up.

Blood and Honey is a typical Honey West novel which means it’s loads of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West books - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer. And I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis in the title role.

Bernard C. Gilford’s The Liquid Man

Bernard C. Gilford’s novel The Liquid Man appeared in Fantastic Adventures in September 1941.

Bernard C. Gilford (1920-2010) was an American writer, mostly in the suspense genre. The Liquid Man seems to have been his only novel (and it’s really not much more than a novella).

The Liquid Man begins with a murder. There’s a witness. It’s a dark night and it’s raining but somehow the killer doesn’t look quite human - more of a vague human-like shape with a disturbing liquid quality.

There’s another murder soon afterwards.

To the police it seems straightforward. A man named Ferdinand Silva thought his girl was two-timing him. He killed the faithless girl and the other man. A very ordinary murder, apart from the odd description of the suspect.

Juan worked in a laboratory, doing routine research on cleaning wax. It appears he was also working on some mysterious project of his own.

There are other murders, and all the witnesses insist that the killer seemed more like a man made out of liquid than an ordinary man. It’s ridiculous of course, but Lieutenant Quante starts to think that there really is something strange about these murders.

Of course tracking down and capturing a man in liquid form would present certain challenges. There’s also the possibility that such a man would be rather difficult to kill.

Even worse, such a man could find unexpected places to hide.

This liquid man seems intent on continuing his murderous rampage, so Lieutenant Quante is under plenty of pressure.

There’s also Priscilla. She is the only one of the liquid man’s victims who escaped, and Lieutenant Quante has fallen for her. There’s a possibility the monster may strike at her again.

The liquid man is a monster, but monsters have feelings too. They need love just like everybody else.

This is a straightforward monster terror tale with a science fictional gloss to it. The difficulties presented by such an unconventional manhunt are handled reasonably well by the author, with the police displaying considerable ingenuity and facing continual frustration.

The story does at least have the virtue of originality.

It’s a very pulpy tale, but that’s all it was ever intended to be. It’s a bit like a 1950s monster movie, but written more than a decade before such movies became popular.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Fritz Leiber’s short novel You're All Alone in of their terrific two-novel paperback editions.

This is not a neglected gem. It’s really not very good, but if you’re going to buy the book for the Fritz Leiber novel (and you should) then The Liquid Man might provide some mild entertainment if you’re in the right mood.

John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8

BUtterfield 8 was John O’Hara’s second novel, appearing in 1935. It was an immediate bestseller.

John O’Hara (1905-1970) is now almost entirely forgotten but he was quite a big deal on the American literary scene at one time. Even during his heyday he had his detractors as well as his admirers.

BUtterfield 8 was based on the notorious real-life case of a flapper named Starr Faithfull.

This is a Depression novel in the sense that the Great Depression is mentioned constantly but while the characters complain about how hard the Depression has hit them these are people for whom extreme poverty means having to cope with fewer servants. These are very rich people having to deal with the trauma of suddenly finding themselves only moderately rich.

The novel concerns an affair between a young woman named Gloria and a married man named Weston Liggett.

After spending the night having sex with Liggett in his apartment (in the marital bed) Gloria leaves, taking with her Liggett’s wife’s mink coat. That mink coat becomes an obsession with Liggett. Or rather, he becomes obsessed by the difficulty of explaining its absence to his wife.

Gloria is eighteen but she has had a lot of men. She feels plenty of guilt and existential despair. Liggett is torn between guilt, his cowardice about coming clean to his wife and his feelings for Gloria. Eventually the illicit relationship between Gloria and Liggett reaches a crisis.

There are also numerous sub-plots involving other couples but they go nowhere and serve no apparent purpose. Perhaps O’Hara saw this novel as a kind of social document on American middle-class life in the 1930s but the result is a novel that feels badly unfocussed. Or perhaps social documents are just not to my taste.

The book’s success at the time is understandable. It was based on a widely publicised real-life scandal and the plot revolves entirely around sex. In 1935 this novel would have been considered racy.

What’s curious is the total lack of any sense of erotic or emotional heat. When characters in this novel have sex they do so with as much enthusiasm, passion, desperation and madness as they would experience when deciding whether or not to have a second cup of coffee at breakfast. When one of the male characters tells one of the female characters that he has to have her, or when one of the female characters tells one of the male characters that she loves him, we just don’t buy it. We’re just not convinced that these people feel anything.

The characters are totally lifeless and uninteresting. It’s easy to get the various characters confused because they don’t have any real individuality.

The climax comes as more of an anti-climax.

Maybe O’Hara was trying to say something profound about the emptiness of modern life. Or maybe he just couldn’t write interesting prose or create living characters. Maybe he thought he was writing an honest hard-hitting realist novel but the fact that the characters are not believable is still a problem.

The novel gives us exhaustive backstories on even minor characters. It gives us a detailed explanation of how Gloria came to be such a wicked girl. This aspect of the story was handled much more economically, much more effectively and much more convincingly in the 1960 movie.

This is one of the cases of a movie adaptation being vastly superior to the source novel. The screenwriters of the 1960 movie, Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes, wisely dumped most of O’Hara’s story and replaced it with a much more interesting story. They also retooled the story as melodrama, but very superior and very entertaining melodrama. The movie also has the advantage that Elizabeth Taylor brings Gloria to life on the screen in a way that O’Hara totally failed to do on the printed page.

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that BUtterfield 8 is a bad book but it’s most definitely not to my taste and I can’t recommend it.

I can however very strongly recommend the movie which I reviewed here - BUtterfield 8 (1960).

Donald Hamilton's Night Walker

Night Walker is an early (1954) spy thriller by Donald Hamilton. At this time he was a moderately successful writer of paperback originals in the crime, spy thriller and western genres. Then in 1960 (with the excellent Death of a Citizen) he created Matt Helm, the toughest most ruthless of all fictional spies, and from that point on he concentrated on writing Matt Helm thrillers.

Night Walker has some of the grittiness of the Helm novels, and it has an intriguingly not-totally-heroic hero.

David Young is a youthful Navy lieutenant on his way to report back to active duty. We will soon find out that he has very mixed feelings about this.

He hitches a ride and gets knocked on the head with a wrench. He wakes up in a hospital bed with his head entirely covered in bandages and discovers that everybody thinks he is Larry Wilson. Larry Wilson was the guy who hit him with a wrench.

In hospital he is visited by his wife Elizabeth, or rather Larry Wilson’s wife Elizabeth. For some reason she is anxious to believe that he is her husband. Or to have him believe that she believes he is her husband.

He also meets Wilson’s cute young girlfriend Bunny. For some reason David feels he should go along with the deception although he’s not sure why he agrees to do this. He can’t explain to himself why he doesn’t just reveal his true identity to the doctors.

This is one of the interesting things about the novel. David has some personal demons to wrestle with and he doesn’t always understand his own motivations. Or rather, he isn’t always honest with himself about his own motivations.

He and Elizabeth settle into a bizarre and uneasy married life. They sleep together. David doesn’t think he’s in love with her.

Elizabeth knows that this is not her husband. She offers David a detailed explanation of what happened to both David and her husband and why these things happened, and of her own part in it. David doesn’t believe a word of it, but he continues to go along with the charade.

There are definitely some hints of noir fiction already becoming apparent. A flawed hero allowing himself to be manipulated by a woman even though he knows he shouldn’t trust her. An atmosphere of deception and paranoia. Elizabeth will certainly strike the reader as a potential femme fatale. And there are hints of slightly odd sexual obsessions.

And then there’s Bunny. Everybody treats Bunny as if she’s a young girl but she’s a young woman. Her relationship with Larry Wilson is a bit mysterious. They were obviously lovers, but there’s something not quite right about the picture.

Another complication is that Elizabeth has a lover, a middle-aged doctor.

There’s a spy fiction plot developing as well. That list of boats that David found is the sort of list a spy might make. It could be a list of rendezvous points. And before bludgeoning him with the wrench Larry Wilson had admitted to being under suspicion as a communist spy.

You can see some of the early plot twists coming but I think that’s intentional on Hamilton’s part. He wants us to think that we’re starting to figure things out. Then he hits us with a series of plot twists. And then some more plot twists.

Things are getting out of control for David. He’s a fairly sympathetic hero. He does some dumb things. His judgment isn’t great when it comes to women. He is haunted by the past. Overall he’s not such a bad guy and we’re inclined to give him some slack. He’s a very imperfect hero but he’s believable enough. His mistakes make sense in view of what we know about his past. He’s a protagonist who could go either way - he could spiral down to destruction into a noirish nightmare world or he could pull himself out of the hole he’s in. We can’t predict which way things will go.

This is a grown-up spy thriller, with people who do foolish or wrong things for entirely understandable reasons. They’re real people.

Night Walker is a fine spy thriller. Highly recommended.

Night Walker is available in paperback from Hard Case Crime.