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.