Honey West - Girl on the Prowl

Girl on the Prowl, published in 1959, was the fifth of G.G. Fickling’s Honey West private eye thrillers. G.G. Fickling was in fact a husband-and-wife writing team.

Honey West inherited a private detective agency from her murdered father. Honey handles all the cases herself. She’s cute and sexy but she’s a hard-nosed professional PI.

You know this is a real Honey West book because by the end of the second paragraph Honey is naked. It’s not her fault. She just has really bad luck with her clothes. They just keep falling off. In this case she is, or was, wearing a bikini but with her 38-inch bust Honey was just too much woman for her bathing suit. Poor Honey will lose her clothes on several further occasions. It’s just one of those things that a lady PI has to deal with.

Luckily a hunky guy, Kirk Tempest, comes to her rescue but when he takes her back to his house to find some clothes for her he starts to get fresh. They have a bit of an altercation, they both end up falling into the swimming pool and Kirk is now very dead. But that wasn’t Honey’s doing. He’s dead because he’s impaled on a spear from a spear-fishing gun. It’s a bizarre accident. It was an accident because there was no-one around. Except that maybe it wasn’t an accident.

There were two Tempest brothers and a sister. The sister Jewel, is a famous strip-tease artiste. Her gimmick is that she always a gold mask over her face. There may be a reason for this. She may have been disfigured in a fire. But everything about the Tempest siblings is mysterious. The relationship between them is very mysterious. Love, hate, jealousy and other assorted passions were involved.

Jewel’s other trademark is her gold G-string. And a gold G-string is now a vital piece of evidence;. This particular G-string may have been concealing something other than the thing that G-strings are designed to conceal. It might conceal valuable information.

There will be lots of women wearing gold masks in this story. How many women? Who can tell? They are after all wearing masks.

There’s more than one gold G-string as well. And somebody wants to get their hands on one or more of those G-strings.

Jewel Tempest is to be interviewed on a TV talk show. At this point the authors begin their campaign of deception. Whenever Jewel makes an appearance we can never be sure it is really her, and none of the other characters can ever be sure either. There’s doubt about the identities of all three siblings. And there’s a woman who may be masquerading as Jewel, and possibly there’s a woman masquerading as a woman masquerading as Jewel.

The Tempests are mixed up with various showbiz people. All of them are sleazy, dishonest, greedy and ambitious and they’re all entwined in a web of mostly perverse sexual betrayals and jealousies.

The Honey West novels are all fast-moving and fairly hardboiled and they’re all sleazy but mostly they’re sleazy in a fun good-natured way. Girl on the Prowl amps up the perversity factor quite a bit.

Honey is not quite a stereotypical modern kickass action heroine. The Honey West novels are not non-stop fistfights and gunplay and martial arts action. Honey can handle herself but mostly she relies on her wits. She’s a private eye, not a super-heroine. She’s very good at nosing around in things that are none of her business, and persuading people (through charm, sexual allure and cunning) to tell her things they’d rather not tell her. She just keeps plugging away a a case until she gets results and she doesn’t mind exposing herself to danger.

Girl on the Prowl boasts an outrageous plot but it’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West novels - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis.

Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain

During the 1960s Michael Crichton had written several thrillers under pseudonyms. The Andromeda Strain, which appeared in 1969, was his first novel published under his own name and was his first foray into science fiction. It is perhaps better considered as a techno-thriller since the technology in the story is cutting-edge present-day tech rather than futuristic tech.

The Andromeda Strain was made into an excellent 1971 movie.

It all begins when the Scoop VII satellite returns to Earth. There is something important about that Scoop satellite which is revealed early in the novel but is kept under wraps until very late in the movie. It doesn’t come down where it was supposed to. It comes down near Piedmont which is a tiny town, more a hamlet really, in Arizona. A couple of Air Force guys are sent to retrieve it. They don’t come back, but they do transmit a disturbing message. Everybody in the town is dead. A flyover by a reconnaissance jet confirms that disaster has struck Piedmont. There are bodies everywhere. Including the bodies of the two Air Force guys.

This means a Wildfire Alert has to be activated.

Project Wildfire was set up to deal with the possibility that a spacecraft might one day return to Earth carrying an extraterrestrial organism. This is most likely to be a micro-organism. The possibility that such an organism could be dangerous has been considered. Wildfire can deal with this. They have an incredibly well-equipped underground laboratory in Nevada with layer upon layer of security. There is no chance at all of a micro-organism getting loose once it’s been isolated at the Wildfire lab. When a Wildfire Alert is called a team of five crack scientists will be assembled at the Wildfire lab. If these guys can’t figure out what makes an extraterrestrial organism tick and how to deal with the possible dangers then no-one can.

And there’s one final absolutely foolproof safeguard. If something goes wrong the lab will self-destruct. There’s a nuclear warhead there to take care of this. And of course if a spaceship returns to Earth carrying alien organisms the landing site will be nuked.

If there’s a theme to this book it’s that no matter how much thought you put into preparing for possible disaster, no matter how many levels of security you have, some minor unpredictable thing will always go wrong. And even the most brilliant scientists can make very simple mistakes.

There’s obviously a deadly micro-organism. It is given the name the Andromeda Strain. But it seems to work in bizarre ways. It kills with breathtaking speed. Except when it doesn’t. Then it kills slowly. And there were two survivors. They seem totally unaffected. But they have nothing in common.

And then there’s the crash of the Phantom jet. Something very very strange caused that crash. Something that cannot be connected to the extraterrestrial organism. And yet it must be connected. The Phantom crashed immediately after flying over Piedmont.

Crichton goes to great lengths to give the impression that this is some kind of semi-official account. He gives us printouts of scientific test results. We’e not expected to read them. They’re there to make it seem like the author had access to official documents. The style is very brisk and matter-of-fact. It all works. We feel like this could all have really happened.

Crichton doesn’t get distracted by character stuff. That would ruin the illusion that this is an historical account of real events. And science fiction doesn’t need characterisation. It gets in the way. Crichton keeps his story moving along very briskly. We don’t want the book slowed down by the internal emotional agonising of the characters. We just want the facts.

There’s an intriguing scientific mystery to be solved and there’s plenty of suspense. The reader knows things that the Wildfire scientists don’t know, and we know that this really is a race against time.

The Andromeda Strain is top-notch stuff. Highly recommended.

Modesty Blaise: The Iron God and The Wicked Gnomes

Two more Modesty Blaise comic-strip adventures by Peter O’Donnell from 1973 and 1974, The Wicked Gnomes and The Iron God, reprinted by Titan Books in 1989.

By this time Enrique Badía Romero was well established as the Modesty Blaise artist (the original artist Jim Holdaway having passed away in 1970). Apparently O’Donnell would write the comic strips accompanied by crude stick-figure illustrations to give an idea of the action. They would then be sent to Spain where Romero would do the art work. The arrangement worked because right from the start Romero “got” Modesty Blaise. He knew exactly what O’Donnell wanted.

Romero’s style was subtly different from Holdaway’s but Romero maintained the essential feel.

The Wicked Gnomes was published in the Evening Standard from May to September 1973. Maude Tiller is a cute British spy who worked on a previous case with Modesty and Willie. Now she and Willie are having a romantic weekend together, until Maude is kidnapped by Salamander Four. Salamander Four is a freelance International espionage group, very efficient, very ruthless and totally without ethics. Modesty has crossed swords with them before. In this case the Salamander Four operatives are two very creepy killers.

Their plan is to exchange Maude for Pauline Brown, a communist spy currently serving a prison sentence in Britain. Tarrant, the British secret service chief for whom Modesty and Willie often work on a freelance basis, knows that there’s no way to stop Modesty and Willie from being involved. He assumes they’ll do the logical thing and start trying to find Maude to rescue here but Modesty has a much more unconventional plan in mind. Tarrant would not approve, so she doesn’t tell him.

Modesty ends up in a magic grotto dressed as a fairy queen. She’s done crazier things.

A good story with some nice touches and some decent action and Maude Tiller is a fun character. You don’t want to make Maude angry. She’s a sweet girl but she is after all a trained killer.

The Iron God appeared in the Evening Standard between October 1973 and February 1974. Both Modesty and Willie are in Papua where their light plane has to make a forced landing. They encounter a Papuan nurse who is in a lot of trouble. The local tribe isn’t very friendly. They’re head hunters, and they’re being led by a mad bad Irishman, O’Mara.

O’Mara is there because of the Iron God. I won’t spoil things by telling you what the Iron God is but you can see why O’Mara is so interested in it. And he has need of certain skills that Modesty and Willie possess.

Modesty and Willie have to do some quick thinking.

There’s quite a clever little plot here. If Modesty and Willie do what O’Mara wants he will then kill them so they have to play for time and that’s quite a challenge.

A very good story.

In fact they’re both fine stories. The Modesty Blaise formula was well and truly established by this time - exotic locales, colourful villains, outlandish criminal schemes, plenty of action, a hint of romance and a touch of sexiness. And plots that invariably hinge on the extraordinary communication and understanding between Modesty and Willie. Modesty Blaise fans will enjoy these tales. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up, Warlords of Phoenix and The Black Pearl, as well as the first three novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth and I, Lucifer.

Fantômas: A Royal Prisoner

Published in 1911, A Royal Prisoner (Un Roi Prisonnier) was the fifth of the Fantômas novels.

The brilliant arch-criminal Fantômas is one of the most iconic figures in the history of French pop culture. Marcel Allain (1885–1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874–1914) wrote thirty-two Fantômas novels between 1911 and 1913. Allain wrote further Fantômas novels about his collaborator’s death. Fantômas later featured in TV shows, silent movie serials, movies and comics.

A Royal Prisoner begins with King Frederick-Christian of Hesse-Weimar (a tiny mythical kingdom) visiting Paris. It’s not an official visit. He’s in Paris to see his mistress, the glamorous courtesan Susy d’Orsel.

Reporter Jerome Fandor (one of the three recurring central characters in the novels) meets the king and they get drunk together. Then there’s an unfortunate incident, with a woman apparently committing suicide by throwing herself out of a window. The French authorities want it to be a suicide. Anything else would cause diplomatic nightmares. The problem is that a witness saw enough to make it certain that this was murder. And the only person with the woman at the time was the king. The king is now very much the prime suspect for murder.

Detective Juve (another of the recurring central characters) is instructed to investigate and to come to the politically acceptable conclusion that this was suicide. But Juve doesn’t operate that way. He intends to find and arrest the murderer, even if it is the king.

There is a great deal of confusion about the murder. A third person may have been present.

Meanwhile Jerome Fandor has been mistaken for the king. And he’s meet a pretty lacemaker who has fallen in love, thinking that she has fallen in love with the king.

Mistaken identities, false identities and disguises will play key roles in this story, as in many of the Fantômas stories. Both the police and the criminals are often operating on false assumptions.

There is also a threatened revolution in Hesse-Weimar. And a stolen diamond. One of the most valuable diamonds in the world.

These are all classic ingredients in Edwardian thrillers and mysteries. The Fantômas novels have a very pulpy feel. There are kidnappings and narrow escapes and secret passageways. In this case there’s a mysterious singing fountain, and the reason it sings will become important. There’s a wildly convoluted plot. There’s breathless excitement. There’s romance. There’s everything needed for a fun crime/espionage/adventure romp. Plus there’s the sinister figure of the ruthless criminal mastermind Fantômas. The ingredients are there and the authors know how to combine them to perfection.

One interesting element is the air of sexual sophistication. Susy d’Orsel is a courtesan. She is technically a prostitute. But she’s a nice girl and not one of the characters expresses the slightest disapproval of her. The king is having an open affair with such a woman but no-one expresses any disapproval. This truly was La Belle Époque. Paris was the city of love, which meant it was the city of sex.

Fantômas’s mistress, the wicked sexy Lady Beltham, naturally puts in an appearance.

Fantômas himself is a figure of mystery. We see the story from the points of view of Juve and Jerome Fandor. They suspect Fantômas’s involvement early on but they can’t prove it. Fantômas is ever elusive. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he fails, but bringing him to justice seems impossible. He is sinister and ruthless. One of the great fictional super-villains.

A Royal Prisoner is fast-paced crazy pulp fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Fantômas novels - Fantômas, A Nest of Spies (L'Agent Secret) and The Daughter of Fantômas - as well as the insanely entertaining 60s movie Fantomas (1964).

Bill S. Ballinger's The Longest Second

The Longest Second is a 1957 crime novel by Bill S. Ballinger. Assigning it to a particular crime sub-genre is a bit tricky. It’s certainly a mystery novel. It has some hardboiled flavouring. It has some affinities to noir fiction. But there’s other stuff going on as well.

Bill S. Ballinger (1912-1980) was an American crime writer who enjoyed great success in his lifetime as a novelist and a writer for film and television. He had a definite taste for narrative experimentation. Perhaps that’s why he isn’t as well remembered as he should be - his experiments could be rather bold. This novel uses a technique (the split narrative) that he employed quite often, in novels such as Portrait in Smoke, but in The Longest Second he’s throwing in some other experiments as well.

There is a serious crime, but there’s nothing simple about it. There’s a mystery to be solved and there are three separate investigations being conducted, not all of them by the police.

A man getting his throat cut certainly qualifies as a serious crime. The man involved is not very happy about it at all.

I don’t want to give any details at all about the plot for fearing of spoilers. The plot does involve silversmithing, stained glass, an Arabic inscription and two women. One of the women might perhaps be a femme fatale.

The story is also very much about memory and identity. It concerns a man who has neither.

It’s also a story about the past. Everything hinges on the mysterious past of a particular man.

The storytelling techniques used here are definitely risky. Ending such a story in a satisfying plausible way is a challenge. There’s the danger that the whole thing will turn out to be too clever for its own good. Ballinger pulls it off reasonably well although it is, unavoidably, a little contrived.

Ballinger is doing more than experiment with narrative structure. He’s being equally daring with the entire concept of characterisation. And with character motivation. This was seriously avant-garde stuff in the 50s but Ballinger manages to make the book an exciting and engrossing mystery story as well. There are plenty of indications early on of the direction the story might be taking but the ending is still not quite what you might be anticipating.

This is one of those books in which the reader knows a lot more about what is really going on than any of the characters do but there’s still crucial stuff we don’t know.

And the characters are not automatons doing things because the plot requires them to do so. The key character does have choices. He has free will.

The Longest Second is wildly unconventional but it’s entertaining if you set aside your genre expectations and just go with it. Highly recommended.

Ballinger was for decades a totally forgotten writer but Stark House have now brought a lot of his novels back into print (The Longest Second had been out of print for half a century).

I’ve reviewed Ballinger's 1950 novel Portrait in Smoke (paired with The Longest Second in a Stark House two-novel edition) which I recommend very highly.

Murray Leinster's The Time Tunnel

Murray Leinster's The Time Tunnel is a 1966 TV tie-in novel based on the Irwin Allen television series of the same name that went to air from 1966 to 1967.

I have a soft spot for that television series. It's one of the more interesting time travel series. The novel is quite entertaining as well.

And Murray Leinster is a rather underrated science fiction writer. He certainly wrote some excellent short stories.

You can find my full review here.

The Million Missing Maidens (The Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. 2)

The Million Missing Maidens is the second in Mallory T. Knight’s The Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. series of sexy spy thrillers. It was published as a paperback original in 1967.

Tim O’Shane is an ace agent for T.O.M.C.A.T., a super-secret American spy agency. He also works for the Soviets. He is a double agent but his loyalty is to America. Interestingly in the three novels in this series that I’ve read the Russians are not particularly the bad guys. The bad guys are usually international fiendish supervillains and diabolical criminal masterminds, somewhat along the lines of SPECTRE.

Tim is on leave in Miami. He is sharing a house with two friendly airline stewardesses, Justine and Juliette. You don’t quite expect a de Sade reference in a book like this but there it is. His idea of a holiday is chasing skirt and he’s chasing a lot of it, and catching plenty. Tim likes girls a lot. But now he has a new assignment. It’s about all those missing virgins. Thousands of them. It’s not that they’ve ceased to be virgins. They have simply vanished.

It probably has something to do with a new religious cult called Systemology. When Tim is seduced by a female cult member he discovers something odd. She introduces him to sensual and erotic delights he had never even imagined but by the next morning she is still a virgin. That’s not Tim’s fault. He tried his best.

Of course Tim has to infiltrate the cult. The cult is popular because it promises its adherents wealth, pleasure and immortality.

There’s also a missing Russian ballerina. This allows Tim to make use of his Soviet contacts.

Tim starts to get an inkling of why the cult is so interested in virgins. It’s part of a totally crazy master plan, but behind that is another equally crazy master plan.

Tim’s own plans hit a few snags and he finds himself a prisoner on a ship.

He gets to know two of the Systemologist girls, Gisela and Raven. Gisela is quite a piece of work. She’s a bit of a surgeon but her operations are unlikely to win the approval of any reputable medical association. She performs the operations not on the virgins, but on men. Tim is very anxious to ensure that she doesn’t get anywhere near him with a scalpel.

These two girls are very very dangerous (and Gisela is clearly insane) but Tim may be able to make use of Raven thanks to one of the gadgets T.O.M.C.A.T. provides to its agents. It allows him to take hypnotic control of a subject (in 1967 hypnosis and brainwashing were hot topics). The monkeys might come in handy as well. There are five hundred of them aboard the ship. You’d be surprised how useful five hundred monkeys can be in the hands of a well-trained secret agent.

Knight had a knack for wildly improbable but rather nifty spy plots and while it’s very tongue-in-cheek there is a fairly exciting spy thriller plot here and there’s plenty of action.

There’s a decent villain and a superbly wicked sadistic villainess.

There’s plenty of sex as well but it’s not the slightest bit graphic.

It all has a very 60s vibe - crazy, outlandish, surreal, amusing, sexy in a good-natured way. Very Pop Art. Very Swinging 60s. And of course whacked-out religious cults were already a popular subject in crime/spy TV, movies and novels. The cults invariably involve lots of sex-crazed young ladies.

Affordable copies of the Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. books are not too difficult to find.

I thought The Million Missing Maidens was quite a bit of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two more books in this series, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy and The Malignant Metaphysical Menace.

Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way!

Murder on the Way! is a 1935 novel by Theodore Roscoe. It was originally published in the pulp magazine Argosy under the title A Grave Must Be Deep. I can’t tell you which genre it belongs to because I have no idea. And I don’t care. All I know is that it’s insane amounts of fun.

Theodore Roscoe (1906-1992) was one of the grandmasters of pulp fiction and writer some of the finest stories ever written about adventure in exotic settings. He spent some time in Haiti in the early 1930s which gives this novel an air of authenticity.

Patricia Dale (known to her friends as Pete) is more or less engaged to a more or less penniless artist in New York. An artist by the name of Cartershall. Pete always refers to him as Cart. Then a strange little Haitian lawyer shows up. He announces that he is Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, Comte de Limonade. Pete is in line for an inheritance from her Uncle Eli. He has left a huge fortune and a vast estate in Haiti. All Pete has to do is go to Haiti. So she and Cart fly to Haiti.

It’s all a bit of a culture shock but the reading of the will is a bigger shock. The will is eccentric to say the least (and the method of burial prescribed for Uncle Eli is very bizarre). The seven heirs have been assembled and they’re the most disreputable bunch of cut-throats one could imagine. Several of them are murderers. The entire estate goes to one of them but he must remain at the estate for 24 hours after the reading of the will. If he fails to do that the inheritance passes to the next in line, with the same condition attached. Pete is the last in line. Given that the other six are villainous scoundrels there’s obviously the potential here for murder. Multiple murder.

It’s the kind of setup you might find in an English country house murder mystery and such books were hugely popular in 1935. The seven heirs plus Uncle Eli’s doctor and Tousellines are completely cut off at the estate. The weather has made the roads impassable. Someone has cut the telephone wires. This is the kind of setup you’d find in an Old Dark House movie, and these popular at the time as well.

For most of the book it seems like it’s going to be a story along such lines, albeit in a very exotic setting. And written in a flamboyant outrageous pulpy style and with rollercoaster pacing.

The locals follow the Voodoo religion. Roscoe isn’t making any of this stuff up. Voodoo was arguably the dominant religion in Haiti at the time.

There are a couple of extra complications. Uncle Eli may have been murdered. His doctor thinks he may have been murdered by a zombie. And there is a bandit uprising which could spread to the whole country and the rebels claim to be led by the King of the Zombies. The King of the Zombies being - Uncle Eli!

The expected mayhem occurs. There are lots of murders. All the murders take place in bizarre circumstances.

The local police chief, Lieutenant Narcisse, is perplexed. He suspects everybody. Which is not entirely unreasonable.

Cart and Pete will meet the King of the Zombies. This is one of those tales in which you cannot be quite sure if there’s something supernatural going on or not. Whether that really is the case is obviously something I’m not going to tell you.

This is a murder mystery and a suspense thriller and a horror story and an occult thriller. There’s lots of craziness. There are secret passageways and all the fun things you get in Old Dark House stories.

Murder on the Way! is just wildly entertaining. Highly recommended. And it's in print!

Roscoe revisited some of these themes a couple of years later in the equally superb Z Is For Zombie, also set in Haiti. And if you enjoy jungle adventure tales check out Blood Ritual.

Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City

Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City was published in 1938. The 1950 film adaptation, regarded as a classic of film noir, is now much better remembered than the novel. The movie has little in common with the novel. The 1992 film adaptation has an even more tenuous connection with the novel.

Gerald Kersh was British-born but later became an American citizen. He enjoyed some success during his lifetime but is now entirely forgotten. Interestingly enough, given that the novel deals with professional wrestling, Kersh was at one time a professional wrestler.

The novel can at a stretch be considered noir fiction but it is not a crime thriller in the conventional sense. It is a novel of the criminal underworld in London but this is not the underworld of gangsters and bank robbers. This is the world of sleazy businessmen who have never been involved in a single really honest business deal in their lives. They run clip joints. They’re involved in crooked sports promotion. They’re mixed up in anything that can turn a profit.

The protagonist is Harry Fabian. He’s a Cockney who pretends to be an American. He is a small-time pimp (or ponce as they were called then in Britain) but likes to give the impression that he is a professional song-writer who has hobnobbed with Hollywood movie stars. In fact he’s never set foot outside of England. He has never knowingly told the truth in his life. He lives on the earnings of his prostitute girlfriend Zoë.

Now he’s planning something big. He’s going to be a big-time wrestling promoter. Harry is a fake but he does understand one thing - wrestling is showbiz. His idea is to make it even more phoney than it already is but to make it entertaining. He has found a partner. Figler is no more honest than Harry. The idea is one that might work, but Harry has neither the brains nor the drive nor the self-discipline to make it work. He blows the capital for the venture on making a big splash at the Silver Fox night club.

At this point his story intersects with the stories of two girls, Vi and Helen. They’re hostesses at the Silver Fox. Vi is a part-time whore but won’t admit it. She makes most of her money by taking drunken customers home, sleeping with them and then robbing them. Helen has more ambition but also a streak of ruthlessness.

And then there’s Adam. He works at the Silver Fox but he also hangs out at Harry Fabian’s training gym. Adam wants to be a sculptor. It’s mostly a fantasy, just like Harry’s fantasies, Adam is madly in love with Helen. Helen sleeps with Adam and lets him think she loves him but her ambitions to make money matter more to her than love.

If you want to take a deep dive into squalor, degradation and misery this is the novel for you. Every single character is either crooked or deluded or vicious. They are all losers. Kersh doesn’t just want us to see the squalor, he wants us to smell it. It’s clear that he regards humanity with contempt. He seems to be particularly repelled by women. Life is worthless, meaningless, cheap and sordid. Everybody lies. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. In Kersh’s world everybody betrays somebody. He clearly sees women as being especially treacherous.

These people are losers for various reasons but mostly they all live in a world of fantasies and illusions. When they have something worthwhile they throw it away.

The only character possessing even a shred of decency is Zoë. She’s a prostitute, but an honest one. She offers Harry her love, but he thinks he can do better.

I very much doubt that Kersh thought of himself as a crime writer, or a genre writer. He had obvious literary aspirations. I suspect that he saw Night and the City as a serious novel about the seamy underside of English society.

Night and the City is actually rather similar in feel to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, coincidentally also published in 1938. If you count Brighton Rock as noir fiction then I think you could count Night and the City as noir fiction as well.

Night and the City is unrelentingly bleak and pessimistic but it does have a certain power. Harry Fabian is one fiction’s most memorable losers. Recommended.

John Norman's Assassin of Gor

Assassin of Gor, published in 1970, is the fifth of John Norman’s Gor novels. The Gor series needs to be read in publication order so I’m going to be very careful not to hint at any spoilers for the earlier books.

Tarl Cabot is from Earth. He ends up on Gor, a hitherto unknown planet in out solar system. Gorean society is quite primitive. The technological level seems to be roughly equivalent to that of the classical world. There are no cars or aircraft or firearms or radio. But it’s actually more complicated than that. There is high technology on Gor. Very advanced technology indeed. But the Goreans do not have access to it

There are competing and often warring city-states. The Goreans are human but the animals are not those of the Earth. The animals include tarns - gigantic carnivorous birds that can be tamed (up to a point) and ridden. They constitute a kind of flying mediaeval heavy cavalry.

Tarl Cabot is in the city of Ar. He has gone there to kill a man, but he has another more important mission. He is accompanied by Elizabeth Caldwell, an Earth girl who appeared in an earlier Gor novel. Tarl and Elizabeth have to infiltrate themselves into the retinue of the current ruler of the city.

The situation in Ar is in reality not quite as it appears to Tarl and Elizabeth. They’re in more danger than they think. And they haven’t been quite as clever as they thought.

There will be lots of betrayals and lots of mayhem including an epic blood-drenched tarn race which is a bit like the chariot races in Ancient Rome but with gigantic flying birds.

John Norman (born John Frederick Lange Jr in 1931) is a philosophy professor. With the Gor novels he created a thrilling world of sword-and-planet adventure owing quite a bit to Edgar Rice Burroughs but he was also sneaking in various philosophical and cultural influences. Norman cited Homer, Freud, and Nietzsche as his major influences.

There’s more to these novels than there appears to be on the surface.

It is also very important not to be tempted into knee-jerk reactions by the controversial elements. It’s also important not to take these books at face value and jump to the conclusion that Norman was advocating the cultural practices he described. If you avoid those knee-jerk reactions it’s obvious that Tarl Cabot is very ambivalent indeed about Gorean culture.

One of the things Norman was trying to do was to create fictional societies that are genuinely alien. In this series there are two - the Goreans (who are human) and the Priest-Kings (who are very very non-human). Both societies are culturally very different from societies on Earth. He was intent on examining Gorean society in a great deal of detail. We get a huge amount of information about the taming of the tarns and their use in both sport and war. And having created culturally different fictional societies he was prepared to explore the ramifications of those cultural differences.

Which brings us to the slavery issue. In Gor female slavery is taken for granted. Of course in most human societies for most of human history slavery was taken for granted but on Gor the female slaves are unequivocally sex slaves. It’s the suggestion that some (not most, but some) are not entirely unhappy about the arrangement that shocks many people. Norman explains the workings of slavery on Gor in enormous detail. In this book Elizabeth has to play the role of Tarl’s slave. And he really does, to an extent, train her as a slave. They both enjoy it, and she certainly enjoys being tied up. But of course they are in fact playing a game.

Norman is exploring some of the sides of both masculinity and femininity that make people today so uncomfortable.

The Gor books are certainly provocative but sometimes we need provocative fiction. Assassin of Gor is highly recommended but you must read the earlier books first.

I’ve reviewed all the earlier books in this series - Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor, Priest-Kings of Gor and Nomads of Gor.

Norman Lindsay's The Cousin from Fiji

The Cousin from Fiji is a 1945 humorous novel by Norman Lindsay.

Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) was the one genuinely great painter that Australia produced, and he was arguably the finest painter of erotic art of the 20th century. He was also a successful novelist. For my money there were three truly great 20th century humorous novelists - P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Norman Lindsay.

In 1892 Cecilia Belairs and her 18-year-old daughter Ella arrive in Ballarat, a fairly substantial provincial city northwest of Melbourne. They have just retuned to Australia from Fiji where Cecilia owns a sugar plantation. They move in with Cecilia’s brother George, her sister Sarah, Sarah’s daughter Florence and Grandma. It’s a decidedly odd household.

Cecilia is scatterbrained and has always been very fond of men. Sarah disapproves of what she regards as Ella’s lax upbringing. She is certain that Ella is a wicked girl.

At this point I should explain that Norman Lindsay spent his life battling the wowsers, this being an Australia slang term for moral busybodies and self-appointed guardians of public morality. Many of Lindsay’s novels were banned in Australia. His paintings were controversial. In 1940 sixteen crates of his paintings were burned by U.S. authorities.

In all of his novels he has fun at the expense of the wowsers. The Cousin from Fiji could be described as a cheerfully bawdy novel. There’s no graphic content but all of the characters’ motivations have a great deal to do with sex.

Ballarat is a very respectable little city. The inhabitants attend church regularly. They lead morally upright lives - publicly at least. In private Ballarat is a seething hotbed of frustrated erotic desire. Nobody talks about sex because it isn’t nice, but they think about it constantly.

Ella is desperately keen to experience The Great Mystery - sex. Her biggest worry is that her breasts are too small. She fears this may affect her chances of attracting a man. She makes various attempts to experience The Great Mystery.

The next-door neighbour, solicitor Hilary, is middle-aged but has also yet to experience The Great Mystery. He has high hopes that he can persuade Cecilia to help him to remedy this.

The characters are eccentric, outlandish and absurd but Lindsay isn’t really gratuitously cruel. The unsympathetic characters are not evil. They have failed to embrace life and the sensual joys it offers and as a result they have become sex-starved, love-starved, lonely and bitter. The sympathetic characters are the ones who are trying their best to avoid this fate.

Bicycles play a major part in the story. The 1890s was the high point of the bicycle craze and it’s easy to forget the huge social impact of the bicycle. It offered young men and young women unprecedented freedom and adventure, and a means of escaping family supervision. Bicycles were also remarkably useful for arranging assignations of an amorous nature.

And it’s amusing that Melbourne was the place to go for those seeking sin and debauchery. If Lindsay is to be believed the city was knee-deep in whores.

This is an outrageous and extremely funny novel and while the humour can be quite pointed it’s generally very good-natured. Lindsay never allowed his battles with the wowsers to affect his fundamentally cheerful and optimistic nature.

The Cousin from Fiji is an absolute joy. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two more of Norman Lindsay’s comic novels - A Curate in Bohemia (published in 1913) and Age of Consent (published in 1938). They’re both terrific.

The Malignant Metaphysical Menace - The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. 6

Published in 1968, The Malignant Metaphysical Menace was the sixth of Mallory T. Knight’s The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. sexy spy thrillers. I believe there were nine books in the series.

Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1926-1987) wrote a number of spy thrillers in the late 60s and early 70s using the pseudonym Mallory T. Knight.

I had previously read the first book in the series, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy. That one came out in 1967. By 1968 the Flower Children were big news and the hippie thing was gathering steam, and The Malignant Metaphysical Menace reflects this. This is a far-out psychedelic freak-out of a spy thriller, if you can dig it.

Tim O’Shane is an ace agent for T.O.M.C.A.T., a super-secret U.S. spy agency. He is also an agent for a super-secret Soviet spy agency, but his real loyalty is to T.O.M.C.A.T.

He and his pal and fellow agent Ellis are now in the television production business although that is of course only their cover. They are investigating rumours that a charitable foundation set up by a child TV star named Corky Lovemore is involved in some secret research. She’s the star of a TV series, The Kids from K.I.S.S., and she has the reputation of being so wholesome and loveable that it’s nauseating. Her charitable foundation is the Corky Lovemore Institute To Originate Reforms In Science. I’ll let you figure out the acronym there. Mallory T. Knight just loves naughty acronyms!

The people making the TV series have a sideline - making blue movies.

What bothers Tim is that he has stumbled into some seriously freaky spook stuff - mediums, Chinese psychics, astral travelling and lots of psychedelic chemicals. There seems to be a connection to Corky Lovemore’s foundation. Tim’s psychic contacts (Tim himself is somewhat into this kind of scene) lead him to believe that what is really happening in so bizarre as to defy belief. But it involves aliens. Tim starts to feel that reality is a rug that has just been pulled out from under him.

The zombies are rather worrying as well.

More disturbing of all is that Corky Lovemore turns out to be not at all the cute adorable poppet she seems to be.

As you might have gathered this is very tongue-in-cheek stuff but the author pulls it off surprisingly well. There’s some genuinely inspired craziness, there’s some action, there’s murder and the plot moves along like an express train.

It gets crazier and crazier. While there are mind-altering substances involved it’s clear that seriously weird stuff involving the occult really is happening. This novel abandons the world of reality very early on. It’s a wild tongue-in-cheek romp. It is amusing and it really is fun in a very 1968 way.

There’s also a lot of sex. This is a sleazy spy thriller rather than merely a sexy spy thriller. With some science fiction and horror elements. It’s a book that gleefully rides roughshod over genre boundaries.

If you just let yourself be carried along by the zaniness there’s a lot good-natured enjoyment to be had in The Malignant Metaphysical Menace. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. book, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy.

Robert Bloch’s Psycho

Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho dates from 1959. A year later it would be the basis for one of Hitchcock’s most famous movies. I like Bloch as a writer so I can’t offer any adequate explanation for the fact that I had never read the novel until now.

There is one problem here. If you’ve seen the movie (and I’ve seen it several times) then you know something very important about Mother right from the start. I think it’s obvious that Bloch expects the reader to have very strong suspicions by the halfway point but it’s also obvious that he doesn’t intend for the reader to be absolutely certain. When you know for a certainty right from the beginning it does inevitably lessen the enjoyment of the novel quite a bit.

The movie followed the novel very closely, but with a couple of subtle but important differences of focus.

I never assume that everyone has seen a movie even when it’s as well-known as Psycho so I’m going to try to avoid spoilers.

Mary Crane (she becomes Marion Crane in the movie) has stolen a great deal of money from her boss. It’s Friday. Nobody will know the money is gone until the banks open on Monday (banks being closed on weekends was always a useful plot device in crime thrillers of the past). Mary has covered her tracks well. She has switched cars several times. Now she’s lost so she’s very grateful when she sees the motel Vacancy sign. She needs to eat, and to sleep.

The motel manager is a slightly odd guy named Norman Bates. He lives in the house behind the motel with his mother.

The first thing Mary needs to do is to change her clothes. Of course she doesn’t know that Norman is watching her undress through a hole in the wall.

After having dinner (which Norman was kind enough to prepare for her) she really needs to take a shower.

Other people will become involved. People like insurance investigator Arbogast. He wants to recover the stolen money. He’s prepared to offer Mary a deal. If she returns the money no charges will be laid. Mary’s boyfriend Sam Loomis and her kid sister Lila will also become involved. They all want to find Mary.

Hitchcock made a very daring narrative choice in the film. Something happens a third of the way through that you don’t expect to happen at that stage. This also happens in the novel but in the novel it’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing you find in plenty of crime novels. It’s a very big deal in the movie because Hitchcock very cleverly misleads us into thinking that a particular character is the central character but the central character is actually someone else. It’s just a slight change of emphasis but it’s enough to demonstrate Hitchcock’s genius.

The movie made a few interesting changes. In the novel Norman Bates is 40, very overweight and balding. Apart from his other issues he is clearly very physically unappealing to women and that’s a major part of his problem. You get the feeling that all it would have taken would have been for one woman to go on a date with him and then he might have had a chance of avoiding all the subsequent disasters. By casting Tony Perkins, a fairly good-looking actor with a great deal of charm, Hitchcock emphasises Norman’s tragedy. He is not a hopeless loser because women find him repulsive. He really didn’t have to end up as a hopeless loser.

This makes him a tragic oddly sympathetic monster which was presumably Hitchcock’s intention. And Hitchcock’s instincts were correct. The movie packs more of an emotional punch. All Norman needs is to find the confidence to actually approach a woman. If he did, she might well go out with him. But he never does find that confidence and tragedy ensues.

It’s intriguing that Brian De Palma made a similar change when he adapted Stephen King’s Carrie. In King’s novel Carrie is very overweight which emphasises her inability to attract interest from boys. In De Palma’s movie Carrie is no super-babe but she’s kinda cute in her own quirky way. When Tommy takes her to the prom he really isn’t embarrassed to be seen with her, or to be seen dancing with her and kissing her. Carrie goes so close to making it.

Psycho is very much one of those stories that requires the reader (or the viewer in the case of the movie) to take the wild and wacky theories of psychiatry seriously. Back in 1960 people actually did take this stuff seriously. It’s also a story that really doesn’t work once you know the solution, and that’s an even bigger problem with the novel. At least the movie has Hitchcock’s stunning visual set-pieces. Psycho is far from being my favourite Hitchcock movie and the novel really doesn’t do much for me at all. Both the novel and the movie are greatly weakened by having things over-explained in a very unconvincing fashion. Worth reading perhaps if you’re a very keen fan of the movie.

James Hadley Chase's The Doll’s Bad News

The Doll’s Bad News (AKA Twelve Chinks and a Woman AKA Twelve Chinamen and a Woman) is a 1941 James Hadley Chase crime thriller. It was his third published novel.

James Hadley Chase (1906-1985) is an interesting figure in pulp fiction history. There was a time when paperback editions of his books were absolutely everywhere. Anywhere that paperbacks were sold his books would be there. He wrote ninety-odd novels which sold by the truckload. He is now almost entirely forgotten.

Chase was English but at the end of the 1930s he figured out that the formula for success was to write American-style hardboiled gangster stories with American settings. He had never been to America but he gave himself a crash course in American slang and the geography of American cities. He got some details wrong but his books were fast-moving, exciting and entertaining. They were also violent and had an appealingly lurid style.

The Doll’s Bad News starts with New York private eye Fenner getting a new client. She wants him to find her sister. Then some unknown guy phones and tries to convince Fenner that the girl is an escaped lunatic. Fenner isn’t buying that. He tells his secretary to stash the frail away in a hotel somewhere but the girl does a vanishing act.

Then things turn nasty and the case becomes personal for Fenner.

Fenner has a lead that takes him to Florida, to Key West. He poses as a gangster. There are two major gang bosses, Carlos and Noolen. Either one might perhaps lead him to that missing sister and to the solution to a murder. Carlos is mixed up in an illegal immigration racket. There are lots of unsavoury characters. There’s a rich guy named Thayler who owns a yacht. The nature of Thayler’s involvement isn’t clear. There are a couple of dangerous dames. Glorie is Thayler’s woman although it’s probably more complicated than that. There’s also Nightingale, who runs the funeral parlour. He has connection with both gangs.

Fenner’s idea is to play the chief gangsters off against each other. It’s a dangerous game but at least it will make things happen.

Things do indeed happen. A full-scale gang war erupts. It doesn’t erupt spontaneously - Fenner makes it erupt. There are epic gun battles on land and sea and lots of explosions. Chase figures his readers want plenty of mayhem and that’s what he’s going to give them.

Although there is some lurid subject matter there is curiously a total lack of actual sleaze content. Glorie makes it clear she’s up for some bedroom hijinks but Fenner isn’t buying. The reason for this may be Paula. Paula is Fenner’s secretary and there are hints that they’re in love with each other.

Fenner is also smart enough to know that when a case involves dangerous females a private eye who starts hopping into bed with said females can find himself in a whole world of hurt. He already has quite enough on his plate.

Fenner is a fairly typical private eye hero although perhaps more inclined to co-operate with the cops than most. He doesn’t want to bring the cops into this case because he has personal grudges to settle but he is careful not to alienate the cops. There is a definite streak of ruthlessness to Fenner. He’s one of the good guys but he’s not averse to exacting some private justice.

Chase keeps things moving along at a very brisk pace. There’s plenty of hardboiled dialogue and atmosphere. There’s a complicated but effective plot. It’s all nicely pulpy.

There’s plenty to enjoy in The Doll’s Bad News. I’ll definitely be checking out more of James Hadley Case’s work. Highly recommended.

Robert Sheckley's Untouched by Human Hands

Untouched by Human Hands is an early collection of short stories by American science fiction writer Robert Sheckley (1928-2005).

It’s immediately apparent that Sheckley has a knack for creating truly bizarre alien races. Races that are physically incredibly alien, and socially and culturally incredibly alien. And alien in really interesting ways.

What really interests Sheckley is that if truly alien races encounter each other any meaningful communication will almost certainly be impossible. And actions will be misinterpreted in totally unpredictable ways.

He also has a taste for humorous or semi-humorous science fiction. Not an easy thing to pull off but he does it reasonably well. Some stories have a sting in the tail, some don’t.

And he has an extraordinary imagination.

The Monsters appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a first contact story. The trick is always to make aliens seem truly aliens. In this case Sheckley offers us two species (one of them obviously our own) that are almost unimaginably different physically. And even more unimaginably different culturally. Even when they learn each other’s languages they cannot communicate. Which predictably leads to serious problems. A clever story with some nice black humour.

Cost of Living was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1952. It’s a satire on consumerism and the cost of endless debt and it remains relevant today. This is a future in which people not only get themselves but also their children into perpetual debt.

The Altar appeared in Fantastic in 1953. A very ordinary inhabitant of the very ordinary town of North Ambrose, New Jersey, suspects that he has stumbled up the existence of strange cults in the town. He might be right.

Shape was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. The Glom are making another attempt to invade Earth. The Glom can take on any shape they choose, and yet at the same they have no freedom or individuality at all.

The Impacted Man appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1952. It concerns the galaxy in which we live as a vast artificial creation. A rip occurs in the fabric of this artificially manufactured space-time continuum and some poor schmuck gets caught in it.

Untouched by Human Hands was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. A couple of rather amateurish spacefarers are in trouble. Their food supplies are gone. They find a building. The construction of buildings implies a reasonably advanced civilisation so surely it should be possible to find food. Unfortunately these aliens are so different from ourselves that although our spacefarers find plenty of food they cannot eat any of it.

The King’s Wishes was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953. This is a wild story. A couple who run an appliance store have a problem with a burglar. But he’s not an ordinary burglar. He’s a ferra. A sort of djinn. He’s very friendly but he insists that he has to steal appliances to take back to his king. It turns out that this kingdom is very distant, in more ways than one. A very clever very playful story.

Warm was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. A young man, Anders, starts hearing a voice. The voice can’t tell him where it’s from but it will tell him when he’s getting warm. Anders starts to see things in a new and disturbing way. He starts to see reality as it really is.

The Demons was published in Fantasy magazine in 1953. A hideous red-scaled monster named Neelsebub has tried to conjure a demon but instead he’s ended up with a mild-mannered insurance salesman from New York, by the name of Arthur Gammett. Neelsebub wants Arthur to produce a vast hoard of gold for him. Arthur of course cannot do this but he decides to do some demon-conjuring of his own. This is a fun story that is like a farce, but with demons and pentagrams.

Specialist was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a variation on the living spaceship idea which would become popular many decades later but this spaceship is entirely made up of an assortment of living creatures, each serving a very specialised purpose. Of course if a member of the crew is killed then that component of the spaceship no longer exists, which can be a very serious problem.

Ritual appeared in Climax in 1953. The inhabitants of a planet have been waiting 5,000 years for the gods from the stars to return. Then finally two gods land in a spaceship. The gods are strange - they have two legs and two arms and, bizarrely, no tails. But the planet’s spiritual leader, Elder Singer, is prepared. The rituals must be followed. There must be four days and four nights of ritual dances before the gods can be offered food or water. The gods seem to be begging for food and water but Elder Singer knows that that is part of the ritual. Everything is ritual. Another excellent story of disastrous mutual incomprehension between alien races who have nothing but friendly intentions.

Beside Still Waters appeared in Amazing Stories in 1953. It’s a low-key tale of the friendship, of sorts, between an old man and a robot one a tiny asteroid.

Seventh Victim was later expanded into a novel The 10th Victim. Both the story and novel are reviewed here. And I've reviewed the superb movie adaptation, The 10th Victim (1965).

A collection of truly offbeat eccentric but delightfully clever tales. Highly recommended.

Jimmy Sangster's private i (Spy Killer)

Jimmy Sangster was much better known as a screenwriter but he wrote a lot of novels. In the late 60s he wrote four spy thrillers, two featuring glamorous lady spy Katy Touchfeather and two featuring a spy named John Smith. A man whose real name really is John Smith. The first of the John Smith spy novels, private i, was published in 1967. It was later reissued with the much less interesting title Spy Killer.

The novel opens with John Smith in a lunatic asylum. He isn’t mad, but there seems no escape. We then flash back to the events that led him to such an unpleasant place.

John Smith works as a private enquiry agent (the British name for a private detective). He’s broke so he’s pleased to have a new client, a Mrs Dunning. The case should be straightforward. It’s a routine divorce case. The one very slight complication is that Mrs Dunning is John Smith’s ex-wife Danielle. Perhaps he should have realised that with Danielle involved the case probably wasn’t going to be straightforward after all.

Finding himself suspected of a murder is rather disturbing.

Smith gets really worried when Max shows up. Max had been his boss when he was in the Secret Service. The last thing Smith wants is to get mixed up in the sleazy world of espionage again. But that’s what’s happened.

And if Max is involved then Smith really wants nothing to do with any of it. He doesn’t have a choice. There is that murder charge hanging over his head.

Max wants the notebook. Smith doesn’t know anything about a notebook. But now he figures that if he doesn’t find the notebook Max will throw him to the wolves.

This was a time when spy fiction, and especially British spy fiction, was becoming very dark and cynical. This novel dials the cynicism up to the max. Smith quit the Secret Service after being ordered to take part in a massacre of poor dumb deluded young people who had been manipulated by various intelligence agencies. Smith particularly disliked having to blow a young girl’s face off with a shotgun. That’s when Smith decided he wasn’t cut out to be a spy.

And he knows Max’s methods. If someone is even a minor threat, or even just a minor inconvenience, Max has that person killed. They don’t have to be enemy agents. The British Secret Service is like a more amoral version of Murder Inc.

Smith wants to get rid of that notebook but he knows that as soon as he does he can look forward to a bullet in the back of the head.

Max wants the notebook. A foreign power wants the notebook. Smith has to hand it over or they’ll kill him. But he can’t hand it over because it’s his insurance policy. If he no longer has the notebook they’ll definitely kill him. It’s a tricky problem.

You expect double-crosses in a spy thriller but in this one it’s not just the bad guys but the good guys and even the hero planning double-crosses. And double-crosses piled on top of double-crosses.

The notebook seems to be a kind of McGuffin but the contents gradually become more significant. The contents also present Smith with more of a moral problem. He doesn’t have much in the way of ethics (his days as a British agent knocked all the idealism out of his system) but he does have some morals. He may however have to choose between mortality and survival.

This is a novel that relies more on paranoia and atmosphere than on action but there are some good action moments.

Smith is a fascinating character - he’s overweight and balding but that doesn’t mean that he’s not dangerous. Max is one of the nastiest villains in spy fiction and he’s one of the good guys. Although whether the British Secret Service in this novel can be described as good guys is very very debatable.

There are two women involved and at least one could turn out to be a femme fatale figure. Sangster is however a very fine writer and his plotting is very solid so jumping to conclusions can be a mistake.

An excellent story. Very dark, very cynical, very paranoid. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Touchfeather, the first of Sangster’s Katy Touchfeather novels, and it’s excellent.

Masamune Shirow's Black Magic

Black Magic is a very early manga by Masamune Shirow. It dates from 1983 so he was in his early twenties at the time. He hadn’t yet developed his mature style but he was already playing around with lots of cool ideas.

This is cyberpunk but very early cyberpunk. The genre was only starting to emerge at this time. Black Magic predates William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, the novel that really established a firm framework for the genre. The Japanese could be described as early adopters of cyberpunk.

There are seven sections to the book, some described as chapters and some as prologues. This is a world of AIs, bioroids and combat robots. The dividing line between computers, humans, bioroids and robots can be very blurred.

The setting is Venus, the only planet in the solar system in which intelligent life is to be found. The Venusians have built an artificial sun on Earth’s Moon. There is life on Earth but it hasn’t amounted to much. The Venusians have started to establish colonies on some of the other planets.

While it lacks the depth and complexity of his later mangas such as Ghost in the Shell this is very much a Masamune Shirow manga. His trademark interests and obsessions are all here. And he gives us lots of fast-moving violent mayhem.

The first prologue, Black Magic, introduces us to a cute girl who has magical powers. Very heavy-duty magical powers. There’s a super-computer than has created other super-computer. Some of these computers are mere machines, some appear to have consciousness. They’re all named after figures in Greek mythology. The cute magical girl, Duna Typhon, was created by one of these artificial intelligences. To what extent is she human? Are her powers magical or super high tech? These entities are not exactly gods. They are not worshipped as gods. But they are god-like and they do behave like goods.

The first chapter Bowman deals with interplanetary colonisation by the Venusians. The story takes place on one their colonies. A young female investigator named Pandora takes control of a new nuclear submarine. But why would anyone have constructed a ballistic missile submarine on a colony planet?

There’s a second prologue and then we move on to the second chapter, Booby Trap. The MA-66 is an advanced combat robot. Four of them are out of control. They will need to be destroyed. The MA-77 is even more formidable. It has advanced decision-making capabilities. An MA-77 has gone rogue as well. There’s lots of high-octane action in this chapter.

City Light moves the action to Saturn’s moon Titan, or at least to a spaceship on its way there and finding itself in trouble. There are people aboard the spaceship who should not be there. Sabotage may be afoot.

The Epilogue is perhaps unexpected although there have been plenty of clues pointing in this direction.

I always love Masamune Shirow’s footnotes. We don’t get many of those where but we do get some cool endnotes explaining the tech stuff. I love the guy’s playful tongue-in-cheek approach to these. You can tell he has fun doing these mangas.

Masamune Shirow was later slightly embarrassed by the old-fashioned graphic style of this early work. It is a bit old-fashioned but it’s lively.

If there’s a fault here it might be that the author is throwing a few too many ideas into the mix. It’s never quite clear where the magic fits in. He would later move to a more pure cyberpunk style with Appleseed and with Ghost in the Shell he produced one of the towering cyberpunk classics. And he was still in his twenties.

Black Magic’s flaws are actually its strengths. It’s wild and offbeat and surprising. And it’s great fun. Highly recommended.

The Booby Trap chapter was the basis for the 1987 anime OVA Black Magic M-66.

A.S. Fleischman’s Venetian Blonde

A.S. Fleischman’s thriller Venetian Blonde was published in 1963. You couldn’t really come up with a cooler title for a thriller.

A.S. Fleischman (1920-2010) had been a professional magician. He wrote some excellent spy thrillers in the early 50s. Venetian Blonde came later and it’s a crime thriller rather than a spy thriller. Fleischman later had a hugely successful career as a writer of children’s books.

Venetian Blonde is moderately hardboiled with perhaps some hints of noir.

Skelly has just arrived in Venice California. He is a professional cardsharp. He is very good at it. Or at least he was. Now he’s lost his nerve. The skill is still there but to be successful as a cardsharp you need nerve as well. His big problem is that he owes 125 grand to a guy who can get quite unpleasant about such things. If Skelly is really lucky he’ll just have both his legs broken but it’s more likely he’ll be found floating face down in a canal. He can avoid all this unpleasantness by paying back the 125 grand. The trouble is that his personal fortune at this amount amounts to $31.45.

He meets two women. One is the psychic and mystic Evangeline Darrow. Her real name is Maggie. She’s married to a con artist buddy of Skelly’s. Maggie is working on a long con and the payoff could be huge. She needs Skelly. Skelly isn’t interested but then he thinks about the prospect of being found floating face down in that canal and figures maybe he will join Maggie in the con.

The other woman is Viola. She’s a cute blonde and she’s a crazy beatnik chick and she keeps following Skelly around like a puppy. This annoys Skelly, until he realises he’s fallen in love with her.

The con Maggie is working on involves a very very rich old lady, Mrs Marenbach. Maggie figures that if she can put the old dame in touch with her deceased nephew Jamie it could be good for a cool million. Mrs Marenbach is no fool and she’s very suspicious but Maggie has an angle that she’s confident will work.

Skelly gradually starts to suspect that something doesn’t add up. There’s something Maggie hasn’t told him. He isn’t even sure who else is on this deal. Maggie claims her husband is in Mexico, but maybe he’s much closer to hand. He’s also a bit concerned by Porter, the sleazy private eye.

The con itself is clever enough and Fleischman throws in some neat plot twists.

Fleischman’s background in stage magic and vaudeville and his obvious familiarity with the mindset of carnies gives the book an authentic flavour. Fleischman clearly understood the tricks used by phoney mediums.

And there’s nothing better than noir fiction that involves phoney spiritualists, illusionism and con artists.

Skelly isn’t a bad guy. He’s dishonest but there are limits to his dishonesty. He’s a crook with ethics, of a sort. He’s not as cynical as he thinks he is.

Maggie is every bit as cynical as she thinks she is. She’s beautiful and sexy and that makes her dangerous. Skelly’s problem is that he’s not sure just how cynical and dangerous she might be.

There’s some nice hardboiled dialogue liberally sprinkled with carnival and criminal argot.

There’s not much violence but the threat of murder hovers in the background.

And there’s a quirky love story as well.

Venetian Blonde is a very enjoyable read. Highly recommended. It’s been reissued by Stark House in a double-header edition paired with Fleischman’s Look Behind You, Lady.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Fleischman’s spy thrillers. They’re all set in exotic locations and they’re all excellent - Malay Woman, Danger in Paradise, Counterspy Express and Shanghai Flame.