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.