Harold R. Daniels’ The Girl in 304

Harold R. Daniels’ The Girl in 304 was published by Dell in 1956. It was one of around half a dozen crime novels from this author. There’s nothing noirish or particularly hardboiled about this tale. It’s an old-fashioned murder mystery with some police procedural elements.

The setting is Clay County. Ed Masters is the sheriff and he has a murder on his hands. A young woman’s body has been found just off a highway. She was stabbed multiple times. There is no indication of any sexual assault. Her dress and purse and nowhere to be found. She is clad only in her underwear and shoes.

Ed knows there’s something wrong with this picture, something that doesn’t fit. He knows what it is, but he doesn’t know what it means. It worries him. Ed is like that. He might not be the world’s greatest criminal investigator but he’s thorough and he’s a professional. He likes all the pieces of a puzzle to fit together.

Ed is going to need help. He gets that help from Dunn, a lieutenant on the State Investigation Bureau. They have worked together before and they trust each other. It’s still Ed’s case. It’s the more esoteric forensics stuff that Ed needs help with and Dunn is just the guy for that. He’s never happier than when he has a test tube in his hands. And there will be some moderately complicated forensic evidence in this case.

There’s a minor problem with jurisdiction. The crime was committed in Clay County so it’s a case for Sheriff Ed Masters but the case is linked to events in nearby Clay City. There’s been bad blood for years between The city police and the Sheriff’s Department and this will cause Ed a lot of trouble.

The woman’s name was Lucy Carter. She was a part-time prostitute. She arrived in Clay County a few months earlier. Nowhere is sure where she came from before that. She worked as a carhop at Benny’s Drive-In for a while. Benny’s has an unsavoury reputation. It’s not technically a brothel, no laws are actually broken, but in practice it is a brothel.

Quite a few people in Clay County were linked to Lucy Carter. Some were respectable men, others not so respectable. Eventually Ed finds out a few things about Lucy’s past, things that could be very significant indeed. Ed also finds out a few things from Evelyn, another part-time prostitute.

There are half a dozen possible suspects. They all had motives for killing Lucy. They all had alibis but the sorts of alibis that Ed knows would never stand up to a thorough investigation. Alibis are like that.

Ed Masters is a really decent guy. He’s honest and dedicated, and fairly competent. He does make some big mistakes. They’re understandable mistakes. He concentrates on the promising leads and if those leads point to a particular suspect he focuses on that suspect. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes Ed loses sight of the fact that his prime suspect is not the only plausible suspect. Occasionally he is swayed by personal feelings.

In other words he’s a good solid ordinary cop but he’s fallible. His biggest asset as an investigator is that tendency to worry mentioned earlier. If he can’t make a puzzle fit together neatly, if he can’t tie all the evidence together, he’ll keep worrying about the problem. He’s not the kind of cop who would ever want to charge someone unless he really was satisfied about the evidence.

Ed’s attitude towards prostitution is interesting. He doesn’t give a damn if Lucy was a hooker. It’s not just that as far as he is concerned murder is murder even if the victim was an immoral woman. He genuinely does not see her as having been an immoral woman. He doesn’t seem to have any negative feelings about Lucy, or Evelyn, because of their means of earning a living. On the other hand he has an intense dislike of men who prey on prostitutes, men such as crooked cops. And there is such a crooked cop involved in this case. What makes things awkward is that the corrupt officer is a city cop. This novel certainly does not gloss over police corruption and incompetence - the entire Clay City P.D. is rotten.

The climax comes in swamp country and involves some neat plot twists.

The Girl in 304 is a top-notch mystery. Highly recommended.

Black Gat Books have issued this book in paperback at a very reasonable price.

The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux Camélias)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Owen Dudley’s Run If You Can

Owen Dudley’s Run If You Can was published in 1960. The tagline will certainly get your attention - So Lovely, So Nude, So Evil.

Dudley Dean McGaughey (1909-1986) wrote a huge number of pulp novels in various genres including both westerns and crime fiction under many different pseudonyms including Owen Dudley.

Ed Dunlap is in the construction business in partnership with his old army buddy Jake Armistead. Now Jake is dead. He was hit by a truck in the little town of Palm Oasis. That means Ed will have to return to Palm Oasis. It’s not a pleasant thought. He hasn’t been back there since he and his ex-wife Clissta were tried for the murder of his uncle. They were acquitted but as Ed soon finds out out he isn’t popular in Palm Oasis.

That’s partly his stepbrother Quince’s doing. Ed and Quince have always hated each other. Ed has hated Quince even more since he caught him in bed with Clissta.

Now Ed is going to have to deal with both Clissta and Quince again. Ed has a very strong suspicion that Jake was murdered. There’s also the matter of the forty-one thousand dollars that has disappeared.

It doesn’t take Ed long to figure out that Palm Oasis is a very bad place for him to be. Especially with crooked sheriff Bert Crackling out to get him. He doesn’t have much choice. If he can’t recover that money his construction business is finished.

Ed has an ally, of sorts. Her name is Pat. She’s seventeen. Ed assumes Jake was sleeping with her but Pat has a different story, a very different story.

From this point on the well-constructed plot comes up with some nice twists.

There’s certainly a strong noir flavour here. Ed is a decent guy and while he doesn’t have any typically noir character flaws he does have some serious noir vulnerabilities. He’s getting in deeper and deeper and he doesn’t know exactly what it is that he’s getting into.

The noir flavour is strengthened by the presence of three dangerous females and any or all of them could qualify for the femme fatale label.

There’s also a very squalid atmosphere of corruption. Palm Oasis is a rotten town where money can buy anything and there aren’t too many people in the town who haven’t sold out. Those that haven’t are too dumb or too apathetic or too scared to do anything about it.

Ed isn’t dumb. Maybe it’s not very sensible to pursue this matter but he’s fairly smart and he can work things out. The trouble is that when he does figure things out he finds he doesn’t have too many good options.

There’s a very hardboiled feel which the author handles well. There’s plenty of action and violence. There’s also some definite sleaze. One of the three dangerous dames is jailbait, one is a high-priced whore and one is a nymphomaniac.

All the noir fiction ingredients are here. Whether such a story is truly noir naturally depends on whether the hero can succeed in extricating himself from the appalling nightmare he’s landed himself in. If he cannot then it’s noir. If he can, then it’s merely noir-flavoured. And naturally I have no intention of giving you any hints as to how this one ends.

On the whole I found Run If You Can to be a pleasant surprise, coming from an author I’d never heard of. It’s well-crafted with plenty of suspense and with a nice cast of noirish characters. Highly recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Milton K. Ozaki’s The Scented Flesh in a two-novel crime fiction paperback edition.

Jay Dratler’s The Pitfall

Jay Dratler’s The Pitfall was published in 1947.

Forbes is a Hollywood screenwriter. He knows this guy called Mac. Mac is a cop. Mac has made Forbes a very strange proposition. Mac busted a punk named Bill Smiley for petty thieving. Smiley is now behind bars but not for long. It was a very minor offence and he’ll be out in six weeks. But Mac has become obsessed by Smiley’s wife Mona. He has only met her briefly but he thinks she’s the most gorgeous most desirable woman he’s ever set eyes on. But she would never consider going to bed with Mac because he’s a cop.

Mac’s proposition is that Forbes should meet Mona, romance her, date her and (presumably) sleep with her. He should then introduce her to Mac and naturally she will then dump Forbes and jump into bed with Mac.

Forbes has three objections to this proposal. Firstly, he’s a happily married man. Secondly, it sounds like a recipe for trouble. Smiley is likely to come after him with murder on his mind. Thirdly, the whole idea makes no sense. It is incoherent, illogical, bizarre and crazy. Forbes is not interested.

On the other hand Forbes’ wife is pregnant at the moment and he’s not getting any bedroom fun. The more he thinks about it the more he decides he wants some bedroom action. And if Mona is as hot as Mac claims then he could definitely get interested. And what could go wrong?

We figure out right away that with Forbes we’re dealing with a classic noir protagonist. He knows the whole situation just has so much potential for disaster, and for several kinds of disaster all rolled up into into one package. He isn’t dumb enough to think it can work out any way but badly. But he goes ahead anyway. He decides not to think about all those disastrous outcomes that are not just possibilities but practically certainties.

He meets Mona, and from that moment on he is lost. She is as gorgeous as Mac claimed. There’s something else about her that drives him crazy. He thinks of her as his tigress. Her body drives him wild. When they go to bed together it’s magic. He is hooked completely. Where Mona is concerned he’s an addict.

Of course he has given no thought to the fact that Bill Smiley’s sentence was a very short one. He has given no thought to what will happen when Bill is released. He hasn’t thought about the fact that Mac is a very dangerous man and he’s a cop as well. Mac expects Forbes to fade out of the picture so that he can have Mona. Cops like Mac do not like being double-crossed. Forbes has also put out of his mind the fact that he has a wife and kid and that he’s not going to be able to walk out on them. All Forbes can think about is Mona, and her perfect body.

Mona to some extent fulfils the femme fatale role in the plot but she’s not a classic femme fatale. OK, she’s a married woman having an affair but she isn’t intending to wreck Forbes’s life. To begin with she doesn’t know Forbes is married. She doesn’t know she’s stealing another woman’s husband.

The one minor problem you might have with this book is accepting the idea that a man like Mac, a tough no-nonsense cop, would come up with that crazy scheme in the first place. It’s a somewhat contrived plot device. If you can accept it that initial premise then everything else in the plot flows smoothly and logically from there. There are lots of ways that life can come crashing down around Forbes’s ears but there’s no way to know which of the many possible disasters might bring that about. And there’s no way of knowing whether Forbes will somehow figure a way out, or whether he’ll get some lucky break.

Forbes is the narrator of the story and The Pitfall is a fine example of the effective use of first-person narration. All we know is what Forbes knows, or thinks he knows. Neither Forbes nor the reader really knows what is going on in Mona’s head, or which way she is likely to jump if things come to a crisis. Forbes is crazy about her and he may be seeing her through the rose-coloured glasses of love. Neither Forbes nor the reader has any idea what is driving Mac. Maybe Mac is totally sane and this is just a cruel game he likes to play with other people’s lives. Maybe he’s totally sane but in the grip of a sexual obsession. Or maybe when it comes to Mona he is just as insane as Forbes.

There’s no way for either Forbes or the reader to predict the actions of Mona or of Mac.

In fact the plot is resolved very neatly. This is top-tier noir fiction. Highly recommended.

The Pitfall has been re-issued in paperback by Stark House.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent movie adaptation - Pitfall (1948).

Operation T, The Man from A.P.E. 7

Operation T, published in 1967, is the seventh of the Man from A.P.E. spy thrillers by Norman Daniels. It’s somewhat in the style of other pulp spy series such as the Nick Carter Killmaster books.

A.P.E. is the American Policy Executive. They’re an American intelligence agency with even fewer scruples that the CIA. There’s a definite mood of Cold War hysteria to this novel.

John Keith works for a big public relations film but the firm is just a front for APE.

The story begins with killer dolphins eating people on the Great Barrier Reef. The Americans also have reports of Chinese cargo ships heading towards Australia fully laden, then returning unladen, but no-one knows where their cargoes have been discharged. APE suspects a dastardly Red Chinese plot to invade Australia.

Their top agent, John Keith, is sent to Australia to investigate. He almost gets eaten by a dolphin. He’s also concerned about a report from an anthropologist about disappearing corpses in the Outback.

Keith’s cover story is that he’s promoting a new pop star, Oralie Lee. They dislike each other at first. They gradually become more friendly. When he finds a stark naked Oralie trying to climb into bed with him he figures she’s starting to like him.

Most of the action centres on a search for a secret Red Chinese base in the Outback.

The ace A.P.E. agent will be up against an old enemy, Chinese spymaster Chang Chou. They have personal reasons for wanting to kill each other.

Keith has two dangerous women to deal with. There’s Oralie and there’s also Jade Collette, a beautiful half-Chinese spy who seems to be willing to change sides at will. John Keith and Jade have a history, both professional and personal. They can hardly keep their hands off each other. This does not please Oralie.

There’s plenty of mayhem in the action finale, with lots of explosions.

There’s a bit of sex (Keith beds both Jade and Oralie) but it’s very tame.

Norman Daniels was in his 60s by the time he wrote this book. He was clearly bewildered by 60s youth culture and pop music but he wanted to include a pop singer in the story for commercial reasons. His knowledge of Australia geography also seems rather hazy. He obviously has no idea of the distances involved and thinks Arnhem Land is close by the Great Barrier Reef. He does know that Australians say dinkum a lot and never go anywhere without their tucker bags. He also knows enough about dolphins to know that they don’t usually eat people but not enough to know that they aren’t fish. All the stuff that he gets wrong actually adds to the book’s entertainment value.

If you’re over-sensitive to the different social attitudes of the past you’ll want to stay right away from this book. You’ll have apoplexy.

This is a very pulpy novel but it’s fun. This is by no means a good book but it does feature man-eating dolphins, disappearing corpses, a dragon, murder by boomerang, full-scale gun battles, a nefarious conspiracy and sexy dangerous ladies. They’re all fine ingredients for a pulp spy novel.

The plot makes no sense at all. Of course in the mood of Cold War hysteria of the time it’s possible that readers simply didn’t notice its absurd implausibility.

Operation T ends up being schlocky fun. It makes the Nick Carter Killmaster books look like serious literature. Recommended.

Doug Duperrault’s Trailer Camp Woman

Doug Duperrault’s Trailer Camp Woman (also published as Trailer-Camp Girl) is a 1959 sleaze novel belonging to the small but intriguing sub-genre of trailer park sleaze.

Doug Duperrault (1929-2005) worked in a huge variety of jobs and wrote at least twenty-four sleaze novels.

While the 50s is often thought of as a decade of unparalleled prosperity there were in fact severe housing shortages and there were plenty of people who were doing it tough. Trailer parks boomed in response. Since these were somewhat artificial slightly impermanent communities they gained a bit of a reputation for encouraging what was by 1950 standards a relatively free-wheeling attitude towards sex. The reputation may have been partly deserved - they possibly were more sexually liberated than ultra-respectable traditional small town America.

And given the 1950s obsession with sin it’s hardly surprising that publishers and writers recognised an opportunity for tales of trailer camp sexual licentiousness.

Arlene Ford lives in a trailer park with her husband Buddy. It is not a happy marriage. Buddy is quite a bit older than his very attractive young wife and he’s insecure about that and about a whole lot of other things - his inability to provide his wife with a proper house, his failure to get her pregnant after five years of marriage, his steadily increasing waistline and steadily receding hairline and his dodgy heart. Buddy is angry, jealous, possessive, bad-tempered, insensitive and intermittently violent towards Arlene. To top it all off he can’t satisfy Arlene sexually, and Arlene is a passionate woman. Despite all this Arlene has tried to make the marriage work and has never been unfaithful.

Then Arlene meets a handsome young sailor named Corey. He’s very young but he’s kind and gentle. Although he’s desperate to get into Arlene’s pants he won’t pressure her. He’s such a sweet boy that she ends up sleeping with him anyway.

Arlene also meets Agnes and Francie. They Iive in the trailer park and are reputed to be lesbians. Arlene has no idea what lesbians actually do in bed but she figures it might be fun to find out. She sleeps with both Agnes and Francie.

So suddenly the previously faithful Arlene is having three separate affairs all at once. She’s a busy girl.

She has one really big problem to worry about. Her psycho ex-fiancé John has started stalking her. She broke off the engagement with him when he tried to rape her. Now he tells her he intends to get from her what he didn’t get five years earlier. He hasn’t quite decided if he’s just going to rape her or if he’s going to kill her afterwards.

Arlene’s life has become much too complicated and there are several more twists to come.

Buddy, John and Arlene’s sleazy neighbour Hank are straightforward villains - they’re pigs or sleazebags or psychos. Agnes and Francie are quite sympathetic characters. They’ll chase anything in a skirt but they’re really nice about it.

Arlene is the most interesting character. She’s a mixture of indecisiveness and recklessness. She should have left Buddy two or three years earlier but she didn’t. We can certainly understand her motivations - a hunger for both love and sex. But having now decided to become a sexual adventuress she’s not as discreet about it as she should be.

There’s plenty of sex but not too much in the way of detailed descriptions of the acts. It’s all titillation but it’s done well enough. The essence of sleaze fiction of that era is that it’s mostly a tease - you think you’re going to get more than the book actually delivers in terms of sexual content but Duperrault builds up a nicely overheated atmosphere of sexual frustration and jealousies.

There is some suspense as the drama with psycho John heats up. There’s romance. Arlene really thinks she’s found the man she’s been looking for in Corey.

It’s well-written and well-paced and it’s pretty enjoyable if you like the sleaze genre. In fact I’ll highly recommend it.

Lester Del Rey’s When the World Tottered

Lester Del Rey’s 1950 novel When the World Tottered, published in Fantastic Adventures in December 1950, is one of many attempts to combine ancient mythology with science fiction.

Lester Del Rey (1915-1993) was a fairly prolific American science fiction writer.

The novel begins at un unspecified time but probably a few years into the future. Leif Svensen is a farmer living in the United States. He is of Scandinavian descent, which is important. The world is undergoing some sort of crisis. Particularly harsh winters, crop failures, food shortages. Things are growing rather tense. And people have reported seeing women riding through the air on horseback, which Leif attributes to hysteria.

Leif is involved in a dispute with his neighbours over his dog Lobo which has been accused of killing livestock. Things come to a head, there is an attempt to Lynch Leif and his twin brother Lee, an attempt which ends in a violent fight. Leif remembers being struck a savage blow.

Leif wakes up to discover that he is no longer on Earth. He is in Asgard, the home of the Norse gods. He was brought there by a Valkyrie. The task of the Valkyries of course is to carry heroes killed in combat to Asgard. It seems that Leif is such a fallen hero.

That’s disturbing enough, but it’s worse than that. The time for Ragnarok is approaching. All will be destroyed, including the gods themselves. It is their inescapable destiny.

Leif has his doubts about that. He comes to the conclusion that these gods among whom he now finds himself really were the origins of Norse mythology, but he suspects that they are simply beings from another dimension, one of several such alternate dimensions. They really are gods, the giants with whom the gods will do battle really do exist, but Leif is not convinced that their destiny is written in stone. Maybe he can change it. It might help if the gods had better weaponry. Spears and swords and battle-axes and Thor’s hammer all very well, but grenades might give the gods more of an edge.

Of course the odds would be even better if he had some Uranium-235 but there’s no chance of that. Until one of the dwarf smiths who serves the gods informs him that he can create an almost limitless supply of that element.

Loki, the notorious trickster god, also has doubts about the inevitability of fate. He also has plans to change the destiny of the gods. Maybe he and Leif can come up with a plan. Naturally a lot depends on whether Leif can trust Loki.

There’s another complication for Leif. He has fallen in love with a pretty Valkyrie, Fulla.

This novel seems on the surface to be fantasy but really it’s science fiction. Asgard is simply another dimension in which the rules are different. It just happens to be a dimension in which certain things are possible which would be considered magic on Earth. These gods are immortal beings but whether they are gods or not is an open question.

There’s no shortage of action. Leif is trapped in the world of the frost giants and must battle his way to freedom. Ragnarok is to involve a mighty battle, and that’s what happens. It’s a bloody battle indeed. The gods believe they will lose, because Fate has decreed that they will lose. Leif intends to win the battle.

There’s plenty here to please fans of action and mayhem, and plenty to please science fiction fans who want imaginative speculation about other worlds.

It’s all very entertaining. Highly recomended.

Armchair Fiction have reissued this one in one of their two-novel paperback editions, paired with Ice City of the Gorgon by Richard S. Shaver and Chester S. Geier (a book that deals with a somewhat similar theme).

I’ve also reviewed Lester Del Rey’s Pursuit, a very different kind of science fiction novel but a very good one.

Don Holliday's Circle of Sinners

Circle of Sinners is a 1961 sleaze novel written by Lawrence Block and Hal Dresner under the pseudonym Don Holliday.

Hal Dresner (born 1937) has worked mostly as a film and television writer although he has written a couple of novels.

Lawrence Block (born 1938) of course became a well-known and successful crime writer. Early in his career he wrote a lot of sleaze fiction, most of it pretty good.

Circle of Sinners is really just a series of episodes strung together very tenuously.

There’s no point in saying anything about the plot because there isn’t one. It’s just a string of sexual encounters involving different people. All the encounters end in violence of some kind. Some of the situations will shock modern readers. It is a pretty nasty mean-spirited book.

There’s no shortage of sleaze. The book covers just about everything that in 1961 would have been considered to be sexual deviance.

Being plotless and lacking a strong viewpoint character Circle of Sinners doesn’t really have much to keep the reader’s attention engaged. It relies mostly on shock value. I enjoy late 50s/early 60s sleaze fiction but shock value is not what I personally am looking for in this type of book.

I’ve read quite a bit of 1950s and early 1960s sleaze fiction and Circle of Sinners is very much an outlier. Most sleaze novels of that era are surprisingly strong on plot, and on characterisation. Many are essentially noir novels or romance novels with added sex. Most of them stand up surprisingly well as novels.

Even the other sleaze novels I’ve read by Lawrence Block and Hal Dresner are not like this one. Kept, which Block wrote under the name Sheldon Lord, is a sensitive grown-up romance novel and if that’s what you’re after it’s pretty good. Sin Hellcat, which he co-wrote with Donald E. Westlake, is also quite good.

Hal Dresner’s Sin School is a very fine sleaze novel.

So both of these guys could write and they both understood the genre. Which makes Circle of Sinners rather disappointing. I can’t really recommend this one.

Don Holliday's Sin School

Sin School is a 1959 sleaze novel by Don Holliday. Don Holliday was actually a house name used by various writers for Midwood Books. This book was apparently by Hal Dresner.

Dale Lorring has just arrived in the city of Sutton to take up a position as a teacher at Sutton High School. It’s the most expensive school in the country and the job pays extremely well. For the 24-year-old Lorring it seemed like a great opportunity. It soon turns into a nightmare.

Sutton is a very rich city. And that’s the problem. Lots of very rich people. They live in fancy houses, drive big cars and wear expensive clothes. And they have the morals of pigs. Their children are even worse - not just spoilt arrogant brats but vicious. Sutton High School is a very exclusive school but it’s the school from Hell.

The teachers are downtrodden and cynical. They stay on as long as they can stand it because the money is good.

Worst of all are the Esquires. They’re an unofficial fraternity. They’re rich young hoodlums.

Lorring realises this is no ordinary high school when he happens to glance into a storeroom where two of the students are having sex.

The one bright spot for Lorring is Karen. She’s the school librarian. She’s young and sweet and pretty. She loves Dale Lorring and he loves her. But it’s not all smooth sailing. They can’t have sex because she’s frigid. She dislikes sex so much that she won’t even let Dale touch her.

Dale is not the only teacher with troubles. Bickell is the middle-aged shop teacher. He has a cute French wife but she’s a lesbian. Bickell isn’t coping very well with that.

Lorring isn’t happy at the school. He wants something down about the Esquires but he’s not going to get any help from Nash, the principal. Nash is too scared of upsetting those rich parents. The fact that Dale is not getting any sex from Karen doesn’t help his outlook on life.

Not that there’s any need to go without sex in Sutton. There’s Roxanne, one of the teachers. She’s a nymphomaniac and she’s already picked Dale as a future bed partner. And then there are the mothers of the students. Like Barbara Ann’s mother. She’s rich and powerful and makes it clear to Dale if he doesn’t sleep with her she’ll make sure he loses his job. So Dale sleeps with her.

Lorring’s dislike for the Esquires grows stronger and stronger (and he particularly detests their leader, Burke) but he knows that it would be futile to take them on openly. His idea is to win their confidence in the hope of being on the spot when they do something really bad, something do illegal that even their rich daddies won’t be able to cover up for them. Unfortunately Lorring’s plan is pretty vague. It doesn’t amount to much more than hoping the Esquires will make a mistake.

There’s a lot of sex in this book but when it comes to describing the sex it’s very very tame. On the other hand the book does succeed in creating a palpable atmosphere of corruption, sleaze and sin. There’s also a fair amount of violence. The Esquires play rough. There’s a convincing atmosphere of menace as well, and we have a sense that this situation is not going to end well.

A lot of sleaze novels included strong noir fiction elements and although it might be a bit of a stretch you could just about describe this book as noir, or at least slightly noirish.

While it’s typical of sleaze fiction in relying on the shock value of sex what really makes this book dirty and grimy and oppressive is not the sex but the violence and sadism of the Esquires, and the corruption of the city.

Sin School is in the Peyton Place tradition of exposés of the hypocrisy and phoney respectability of small town life. It works pretty well and it’s entertaining. Highly recommended.

Frederick C. Davis's High Heel Homicide

High Heel Homicide is a 1961 hardboiled crime novella by Frederick C. Davis (1902–1977) who had been a prolific pulp writer back in the 30s.

Johnny Trexler, the narrator, has a fairly senior position at a TV studio. Driving past his boss Victor Gaylord’s house in the early hours of the morning he sees a woman run out in front of his car. The woman then jumps into a parked car and speeds off. Trexler, a little uneasy, decides to check that everything is OK in the house, and in the guest house he finds Gaylord’s dead body. He has been murdered, with a Boy Scout hatchet.

There are bloody footprints, and they are the footprints of a woman. Trexler puts two and two together and figures that the woman who ran in front of his car must have been the murderess. But there are signs that Gaylord had been entertaining not one but two women. And, as it later turns out that his wife was in Chicago that night, neither women could have been his wife. Trexler also finds a note that is an obvious clue and for some reason he feels compelled to pocket that note rather than leaving it for the police to find. He has an uneasy feeling that he should have recognised the woman in the street and that he should have recognised the handwriting on the note.

Trexler isn’t particularly sorry that Victor Gaylord is dead. While Gaylord was alive Trexler’s job at the TV studio was under a cloud so from a purely selfish point of view Gaylord’s death is not such a bad thing for Johnny Trexler. And he heartily disliked Gaylord (most people heartily disliked Gaylord).

Trexler’s main concern is to avoid getting involved in any investigation. He doesn’t need the aggravation and when the police start snooping the fact that he doesn’t have a rock-solid alibi might become a problem. Because he doesn’t know what else to do he rings his friend Bryce, also a senior guy at the studio, and they decide it’s best to keep quiet and just wait for the police to discover the body.

Trexler has another problem. He has a bullet wound in his arm, acquired while he was poking around Victor Gaylord’s guest house. He has no idea who shot him. He also doesn’t know why. He was lying ion the ground and he was shot at close range. He should be a corpse. But all he has is a slight wound in the left arm.

He’s pretty sure the killer is a woman associated with the TV studio. Gaylord played around with the ladies and didn’t treat them any too well so lots of the women at the studio might have had a motive.

His girlfriend Val, one of the top actresses at the studio, might even have done it but she has an alibi. He and Bryce can more or less alibi each other but the murderer was definitely a woman. Bryce’s wife Mona, a rather unstable actress, might have been involved in the murder. She’s acting rather strangely. There’s evidence for and against that theory. Allene, a staff writer, is also behaving oddly. Maybe she could be a suspect. Trexler is pretty confused about the whole thing. Val doesn’t seem quite so confused. She has a theory.

The second murder seems to confuse things more.

The method by which the killer distracts the attention of the police onto others is quite clever. The whole murder plan turns out to be quite clever. There’s some good misdirection. The TV studio setting is interesting. There are plenty of plausible motives. There are plenty of plausible suspects but the most likely suspects from the point of view of motive seems to be the least likely suspects when it comes to opportunity.

Trexler’s idea of keeping clear if the investigation turns out to be a bad idea since he finds himself caught in the middle anyway. But even if he’d called the cops straight away it probably wouldn’t have helped.

It’s a pretty decently plotted story. It’s really only mildly hardboiled. Trexler is maybe not the smartest guy in the world but eventually he starts to figure out at least some of what’s going on. His judgment is sometimes suspect and he jumps to conclusions at times but he’s not such a bad guy. He’s quite sympathetic in is own way.

Davis’s style is a bit pulpy but that’s mostly a plus. There’s a solid mystery and it’s at least moderately fairly clued. There’s an important clue early on which hinges on what is not seen rather than on what is seen.

Overall this is an enjoyable little tale of murder and mayhem. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with E. Howard Hunt’s The Violent Ones in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions.

Lester Del Rey’s Pursuit

Lester Del Rey’s novella Pursuit appeared in the magazine Space Science Fiction in May 1952.

Del Rey (1915-1993) was a prolific American science fiction writer, particularly of juvenile titles.

Pursuit is all about fear. Wilbur Hawkes is a mathematician. Wilbur wakes up one morning and automatically reaches for a cigarette. Which is strange, since he doesn’t smoke. Or at least he didn’t smoke. Maybe he does now. Because Wilbur cannot remember anything of the past seven months of his life.

The one thing he is aware of is the fear. They are determined to get him. They have been pursuing him relentlessly. And now he’s sure that they’ve found him again. He flees from his apartment, and just in time. He has no sooner reached the street when his apartment explodes in a ball of fire. He runs for the subway, and the subway entrance is demolished in another fire ball.

Wilbur thinks they have a heat ray. He’s not sure why he thinks that, but that’s what he thinks. He’s actually not at all sure that such a thing as a heat ray is possible.

He has no idea of the identity of the people pursuing him. He’s fairly confident it’s not the police. The young man in the old grey saloon car that he keeps seeing is probably one of them. He’s not sure about the fat man. Or about Ellen. Ellen turned up at a sleazy cold-water apartment Wilbur had apparently rented although he has no memory of having rented it. Ellen claims to be the same Ellen he knew as a kid. Maybe she is. Or maybe she’s one of them. He has to trust somebody and he thinks he can trust Ellen, but then again maybe he can’t.

He has considered the possibility that this is an alien invasion. It makes sense. He’s dealing with monsters that can levitate cars and have other terrifying powers.

The fear helps. It always seem to warn him when he’s in danger. But eventually they will get him. He can’t run forever. But he has to keep running.

The paranoia is very nicely done in this little tale. Wilbur isn’t just facing terrifying enemies - he’s facing enemies he doesn’t understand. If he could just remember a few things, but he can’t remember anything.

Del Rey makes us wait until very near the end of the story before giving us the big reveal, and the reveal is pretty satisfying. And even when we know what is going on, even when Wilbur Hawkes knows what’s going on, it doesn’t solve the problem. Wilbur still doesn’t know what to do. But maybe he can find an answer in time. Maybe.

This is a rather nifty little tale, very tightly constructed and very fast-moving and with some genuine overtones of existential terror. Pursuit is highly recommended.

Pursuit is paired with Paul Ernst’s Rulers of the Future in a two-novel paperback from Armchair Fiction.

Lionel Davidson’s The Night of Wenceslaus

The Night of Wenceslaus was the first of Lionel Davidson’s spy thrillers. It was published, to considerable acclaim, in 1960.

Lionel Davidson (1922-2009) was an English writer who wrote nine spy thrillers and a few children’s books. Before turning to writing he had been a journalist and had served in the Royal Navy.

The hero and narrator is Nicolas Whistler. Whistler is (as he freely admits) lazy, aimless and indecisive. And by nature he’s a coward. He is also, as we soon discover, a rather amiable and essentially good-natured young man. He is also broke. His late father left him a share in a glass-manufacturing business but due to the carelessness with which his father’s will was drawn up Nicolas finds himself little more than a very lowly clerk, subsisting on a very meagre income. Nicolas has a girlfriend, Maura, with whom he might be in love. He owns a little MG sports car which he cannot afford but it’s his pride and joy. There is probably no young man in the whole of England less suited to being a spy but that is the destiny in store for him.

Nicolas’s mother is Czech and Nicolas spent his early childhood in Prague. As a result he speaks Czech fluently, and that’s how he becomes a spy.

It all starts when a lawyer named Cunliffe informs him that his Uncle Bela has died and left him a fortune. Nicolas quits his job and goes on a spending spree. And then he learns the truth. He has been cleverly manoeuvred into accepting what he is assured is a very simple and entirely risk-free task in Prague. It’s really at most a rather innocuous piece of industrial espionage so there’s no risk of any real trouble with the Czech authorities and the task is so simple that nothing can go wrong.

So Nicolas finds himself behind the Iron Curtain, in Prague. He has to endure some extraordinarily boring tours of glass factories but there is one compensation.That compensation is Vlasta Simenova. She’s the driver assigned to him, an impossibly tall and statuesque slavic beauty. And she’s very friendly. Very friendly indeed.

To his astonishment it all goes remarkably smoothly. No problems at all. This industrial espionage lark turns out to be ridiculously simple. Nicolas is feeling very pleased with himself. In fact he’s bursting with confidence. And then he has the first nasty surprise sprung on him. Even that isn’t too bad. By now he’s thinking of himself as a seasoned professional. But the nasty surprises just keep coming and he slowly realises just what it is that’s been manoeuvred into. Panic sets in. Nicolas is now a hunted animal.

The last third of the book is taken up by the pursuit of Nicolas by the Secret Police. This pursuit is handled by the author with imagination, verve and wit. Nicolas has no idea what he’s doing or how he’s going to get out of this mess but desperation unlocks qualities of resourcefulness that he had no idea he possessed. He makes one seemingly impossible escape after another but surely he must eventually be caught.

This is a lighthearted romp of a spy thriller. It’s whimsical and consistently amusing. Nicolas is a bungling amateur but somehow his bungling usually turns out successfully, possibly because he does things that are so foolish that the professionals who are chasing him get caught by surprise. There are no shoot-outs, in fact the level of violence is extraordinarily low, but there is plenty of excitement and suspense combined with the fun.

Nicolas Whistler is breathtakingly naïve but he’s a likeable hero and we can’t help admiring his ability to keep going in the face of seemingly impossible odds and his ability to bounce back from his own blunders.

The Night of Wenceslaus was filmed in 1964 as Hot Enough for June. There are a few changes to the plot in the movie but the whimsical tone is very much the same and the movie is well worth seeing.

The Night of Wenceslaus is a thoroughly enjoyable semi-comic spy romp and it’s highly recommended.

Jessie Dumont's I Prefer Girls

I Prefer Girls is a 1963 sleaze fiction novel which belongs to the sub-category of lesbian sleaze fiction. This was an extremely popular sub-genre which can’t really be ignored. You probably won’t be surprised to be told that lesbian sleaze fiction was popular with both male readers and actual lesbians.

Sleaze fiction in general was often written by male writers using female pseudonyms or by women writers using male pseudonyms. Quite a few of these women writers were lesbians. In the case I Prefer Girls I honestly have no idea if the author, Jessie Dumont, was male or female. Some modern lesbians insist that no lesbian could have written this book but they may be overlooking the fact that the lesbian subculture of the 1950s and early 1960s was very very different from even the lesbian sub-culture of the ’70s and bore no resemblance to that of today.

I Prefer Girls is the story of Penny Stewart, who narrates the tale. Penny was a bit of a tomboy and did not get on with her parents. When they were killed in a car accident she moved post-haste to Greenwich Village and got a job in Marcella’s dress shop. She still had no idea that she was a lesbian. Marcella however easily convinced her, with the aid of some practical demonstrations in the bedroom, that she was in fact a lesbian. It was those practical demonstrations that really convinced Penny. 

However it hasn’t been exactly smooth sailing. Penny not only likes having sex with women. She likes having sex with lots of women. Marcella is older and she’s possessive and she’s not happy about this. Also Marcella is madly in love with Penny. Penny is not in love with Marcella. She’s happy for Marcella to keep her in comfort and she likes the sex but she wants her freedom, and that means the freedom to have as many other women as she chooses. So as the story proper opens the situation is a bit unstable and a bit uneasy.

Then Bernice comes along. Bernice is a waitress. She’s young and blonde and as a cute as a button. She’s also straight, and a virgin, and she has a boyfriend. To Penny these are merely minor details. She wants Bernice. She wants her real bad. The difficulties just make the pursuit more exciting and more challenging.

Penny likes challenges and when it comes to scheming and manipulating she has few equals.

When judging a book such as this you need to remember that that the authors of sleaze fiction had to consider the demands of the commercial marketplace and the demands of the publishers (in this case Monarch Books). With lesbian sleaze there was also the need to satisfy both male readers and lesbian readers. The lesbian readership on its own would not have been sufficient to make such books financially viable in 1963. The men readers obviously wanted lots of steamy lesbian couplings while the lesbian readers would have wanted romance and emotional melodrama as well. In 1963 there was also the problem that the book would have to be somewhat sympathetic, but not too sympathetic.

And there had to an atmosphere of actual sleaze because that’s the whole point of this genre of fiction - forbidden lusts, out-of-control passions, sin and sensation. Sex as something exciting, dangerous and naughty.

Penny herself is a bit of a monster. She’s not just completely self-centred. She also likes to dominate people. She likes to dominate them emotionally and she’s good at it. She realises quickly with Marcella that if she allows Marcella to dominate her in the bedroom that will give her the leverage to dominate Marcella in every other way. Penny’s understanding of power in sexual and emotional relationships is sophisticated and subtle. She doesn’t even mind submitting to a beating in order to increase her long-term power.

Penny is of course in many ways the stereotypical predatory lesbian (while Marcella is the archetypal older butch and Bernice is the archetypal femme) but the author is skilful enough to give the characters at least some semblance of nuance. Penny also has a dark secret (aside from her sapphic longings).

There’s an interesting symmetry to this story but I won’t spoil things by hinting at the nature of that symmetry.

The trick with sleaze fiction was to make the sex overheated without being explicit and Dumont does that pretty well. There are lots of lingering descriptions of the delights of the female body. 

I Prefer Girls works as early ’60s sleaze fiction and there are even some hints of noir fiction as Penny’s lusts and manipulations threaten to lead to disaster. Penny is a memorable femme fatale. I have no intention of telling you whether she really is led to disaster or not - one of the joys of the sleaze fiction of this era is that you can never be sure if the Bad Girl will be punished or redeemed.

I Prefer Girls is the sort of book that has to be enjoyed as a guilty pleasure but if you like indulging in guilty pleasures it’s fun.

And the cover of the Blackbird Books reprint features the same great Robert Maguire painting as the original.

Len Deighton’s Spy Story

Spy Story is a 1974 spy thriller by Len Deighton. The first-person narrator is Patrick Armstrong, a man who works at the Studies Centre in London. Patrick and Ferdy Foxwell have just returned from one of their cruises, on a British nuclear submarine collecting intelligence on the activities of the Soviet Navy. The Studies Centre then uses this data to play war-games. The sort of ultra-sophisticated war-games using computer assistance that both the western and Eastern bloc militaries would play to figure out how to destroy each other in the event of all-out war. The Studies Centre is a kind of quasi-official offshoot of the intelligence community. Which makes Patrick Armstrong not quite an intelligence officer but kind of vaguely in that sort of field.

The first question that is going to occur to any Len Deighton fan reading this book is - is Patrick Armstrong actually the unnamed spy of Deighton’s first five spy novels (the unnamed spy who became Harry Palmer in the film adaptations)? Deighton has stated that he isn’t but he has done so in terms that actually suggest very strongly that he might very well be the same man. In fact the internal evidence of the novel pretty strongly suggests that he is the unnamed spy, a few years older and now retired from the Secret Service. One thing we know for certain about him is that his name is definitely not Patrick Armstrong, and that he definitely was a spy, working for the very same branch of the Secret Service that the unnamed spy worked for. And his former boss was Dawlish, the unnamed spy’s boss. We also know that he has no intention of going back to being a spy, and given that the unnamed spy was not exactly enthusiastic about being a spy that also seems consistent with his being the same man.

Patrick Armstrong has stumbled upon something rather interesting. His old flat is full of the same photos that were always there, photos of himself with various other people. The photos are exactly the same, but his face has been replaced by someone else’s.

Other disquieting things happen. Like having his home raided by Russian security personnel (not what you expect to happen in London) led by none other than his old adversary Colonel Stok. There’s also an accident that might or might not be an attempt on the life of a British MP. And a witness to the accident whose story doesn’t add up at all.

The very last thing that Patrick Armstrong wants is to be drawn back into the murky world of espionage and counter-espionage but he has the uncomfortable feeling that that is exactly what might happen to him if he’s not careful.

What’s happening is that someone has come up with a very clever plan. And there’s nothing Pat Armstrong likes less than people who come up with very clever plans. It always ends in tears before bedtime.

And there’s no way of knowing whose very clever plan this is. It might have been Dawlish who came up with it. Or Colonel Schlegel, the ex-US Marine flyer now in charge of Studies Centre. Or some fool at the Foreign Office. Or some fool at the CIA. It might have been Colonel Stok. It might have been some other hare-brained genius. There’s also no way for Pat to know what this clever plan actually consists of. He just knows that he doesn’t like it. And when he starts to get an inkling of what might be involved he likes it even less.

It ends up with Pat and Ferdy and Colonel Schlegel on a US nuclear submarine making its way under the Arctic ice, a dangerous undertaking at the best of times but much more dangerous this time because the submarine is just a counter in someone’s strategic war game and it’s an expendable counter. It’s on an insanely dangerous course which would not in normal circumstances even be contemplated. The sea is too shallow, the ice above is too thick, the margin for error is non-existent. And to make things even more delightfully suicidal, there are those East German submarines. Plus the entire Russian Northern Fleet. All of which is guaranteed to produce some suitably nail-biting excitement.

This is typical Deighton in its extreme cynicism. It’s not just that both sides are equally cold-blooded and ruthless. There are multiple players in this game and some of them are crazy. Maybe all of them are crazy. There’s also Deighton’s trademark sardonic wit.

Spy Story is perhaps not quite top-tier Deighton but it’s still fairly entertaining. Recommended.

Nictzin Dyalhis’s The Sapphire Goddess

The Sapphire Goddess collects all of Nictzin Dyalhis’s stories that appeared in Weird Tales from 1925 to 1940.

Nictzin Dyalhis 1873-1942 was an American pulp writer who was extremely successful in obscuring the details of his own life. His birth date and place of birth are both uncertain and while Nictzin Dyalhis seems to have been his legal name it may or may not have been his birth name.

Dyalhis was a remarkably unproductive writer, producing just thirteen short stories in a period of eighteen years. Eight of the stories were published in Weird Tales. He should therefore be little more than a footnote in the history of pulp fiction except for one thing - he was exceptionally popular with the readers of Weird Tales.

When the Green Star Waned marked the author’s first appearance in Weird Tales (in April 1925). At first you could be forgiven for thinking it’s going to be a space opera. In fact it does have some science fictional elements but it’s more a fantasy with a dash of horror. It’s probably best to think of it simply as weird fiction. There’s also a preoccupation with good and evil and even perhaps a hint of some religious themes.

The planet Venhez constantly monitors everything that happens on its neighbouring worlds and recently there appears to be nothing at all happening on the planet Aerth. It’s as if the entire population of that world has vanished. An expedition is despatched to Aerth, each of the seven members being the acknowledged leader in his field (fields such as war, diplomacy, science and medicine). What they find is unimaginably horrifying.

Of course once you find out that one of Venhez’s other neighbouring planets is named Marhz you’re going to really that the story takes place in our own solar system, but in the very distant future.

Aerth has been taken over but the nature of the invaders is bizarre indeed. It seems impossible to defeat them , or even to fight them at all, but such evil cannot be allowed to continue to exist.

I’m not sure that this could be described as a good story but it’s interesting in its own way and you do have to remember that it was written in 1925 at which time some of ideas in it were quite original.

The Eternal Conflict, also published in Weird Tales in 1925, is much stranger. It’s a cosmic battle between good and evil. On one side there’s with a kind of goddess of love but she’s really an archangel and on the other side there’s the power of hate represented by Lucifer. They hurl lightning bolts and similar things at each other. And the battles take place in outer space, or at least in the Aether. It’s a mishmash of Christianity and mystic occultism. The hero is a middle-aged businessman who is a student of the occult and serves the power of love.

It has affinities to When the Green Star Waned but without the science fictional elements. It’s fantasy, but with spiritual overtones. I’m afraid it’s not my cup of tea at all.

He Refused to Stay Dead was published in Ghost Stories in 1927. I suppose it could be called a ghost story, but an unconventional one. A soldier, prematurely aged by a great shock, recounts the events that left him a wreck of man. After serving in the First World War he had married a strange girl named Edwina, a girl with a fascination for folklore and the occult.

The soldier happens to own a castle. A very old castle, dating from the ninth century. His new wife discovers that there’s more to the ghost that supposedly haunts the castle than had been supposed. It’s all connected to terrible events that happened more than a thousand years in the past, events set in motion by a Viking raid.

This is a much much better story, involving a past that won’t stay dead and an old old quarrel that must be resolved. If the soldier cannot resolve it he will lose the love of his life. A very good story.

The Dark Lore appeared in Weird Tales in 1927. It’s the story of Lyra Veyle, recounted by herself. She had been a beautiful dark-haired young woman but filled with pride. She had a sister, blonde and virtuous. The sister loved a fine man and that drove Lura to commit a terrible sin. She made use of evil incantations and summoned a demon, a handsome demon who became her lover. But loving a demon is not a very good idea and Lura is cast into a nightmare of sin and debauchery, and then cast aside. She is already in Hell but she discovers that there are even worse Hells. And even greater debaucheries.

Dyalhis’s vision of Hell is outlandishly over-the-top. Lura encounters unimaginable horrors and the worst thing is that even death will provide no escape. In these Hells you can just keep on dying.

Again Dyalhis offers us a struggle between good and evil but the main focus is on Lura’s own inner torment - she knows that she deserves her suffering. Apart from the mystical quasi-science fictional cosmic visions that we’re starting to expect from this author there’s an obsession with sin and also sexual depravity. It’s actually quite a strong story.

The Oath of Hul Jok (published in Weird Tales in 1928) is a sequel to When the Green Star Waned. The seven leading Vehnezians are all having troubles with their women. The evil creature they captured in the earlier story seems to be behind this. If there’s one thing that Venhezians will not tolerate it is anyone messing with their Love-Girls. The war leader Hul Jok’s Love-Girl has been so troublesome than even a spanking failed to bring her into line.

The Love-Girls are kidnapped by the Lunarian who intends taking them back to Aerth and having all seven of them as his wives. Aerth meanwhile is now controlled by creatures that  are half-human and half-monster. One of whom, a female, wants to be the wife of all seven Venezhians.

This is more space opera than fantasy. It’s also rather disturbing. The Venezhians are supposedly the good guys, the most civilised culture in the solar system, but their vengeance is quite blood-curdling in its calculated cruelty and ferocity. One can only speculate as to the source of the author’s taste for refinements of bloodthirstiness. There’s also, as in some of his other tales, something of an obsession with sexual depravity. The Venezhians are rather terrifyingly possessive of their Love-Girls. One can also speculate on the source of this obsession and I can think of some plausible explanations which I have no intention of going into. There’s a lot of weirdness here but it’s morbidly fascinating.

The Red Witch (published in Weird Tales in 1932) bears some thematic similarities to He Refused to Stay Dead. Once again we have a hero and a heroine trapped in the grip of the distant past. Randall Crone and his beloved, Rhoda Day, were once a young warrior and his wife in the primitive world of the last Ice Age. She was Red Dawn, the Red Witch of one of the tribes. There was a mighty war-axe and an equally mighty warrior who sought to steal Red Dawn. There was love and betrayal and a thirst for vengeance and those things never die. And old quarrels are not forgotten even after thousands of years.

These were themes that clearly obsessed Dyalhis and he handles with skill and energy. A very good story.

The Sapphire Goddess (AKA The Sapphire Siren) appeared in Weird Tales in 1934. There are the usual Dyalhis obsessions with the past and with shifting identities. Reincarnation was a popular notion at that time but while Dyalhis flirts with the idea he avoids being too obvious or simplistic about it. Once again there’s a hero who finds himself in a sort of alternative reality and this time it’s a classic sword & sorcery world, and indeed this is to a large extent a sword & sorcery tale although it owes more to Catherine L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith than to Robert E. Howard.

There’s plenty of action, there’s magic, there are two evil sorcerers and there’s a giant sapphire shaped in the form of a beautiful nude woman but is it really just a jewel? There’s also a hero in search of both his past and his destiny. And it’s all great fun. A very good story indeed.

The Sea-Witch was published in Weird Tales in 1937. The narrator, obviously no longer a young man, lives in a cottage on a cliff-top on the New England coast. For some unaccountable reason he decides to take a walk along the shore-line in the middle of a raging tempest and he sees something extraordinary washed up on the beach. It is a young woman. She is extremely beautiful and extremely naked. More unsettling is the fact that she seems oblivious to both the cold and to her own nakedness. Naturally he takes her back to his cottage. He finds some clothes for her but she declares that, despite the bitter cold, it is much too warm to wear clothing. Even more disconcertingly she offers to be his slave.

It’s the sort of offer that a retired anthropologist, ethnologist and archaeologist (for that is what the narrator John Craig is) can hardly refuse. He is familiar with the Norse sagas and he knows he’s dealing with a witch, but not a witch in the Christian sense. She is a Norse witch, possessed of great powers, and she can be frightening but she is by no means evil. She is charming (if disturbing) and will be a fascinating object of study for a man well-versed in Norse lore.

She moves into his cottage, presenting herself to the world as his niece. Their relationship is platonic. Well, sort of platonic. She takes her clothes off a great deal and she’s rather an affectionate girl. John Craig is not entirely indifferent to her naked charms even if he is (mostly) able to convince himself that he loves her as a niece. But why did she come to him that day on the beach and was does she want? The answer is a terrible one and it lies in the distant past (which will come as no surprise to anyone who has read of a few of Dyalhis’s stories). There’s a lot of suppressed eroticism in this extremely fine tale.

Dyalhis’s final story, Heart of Atlantan, appeared in Weird Tales in 1940. Two men are obsessed with the idea of discovering the secrets of the lost civilisation of Atlantis. They are able to make contact with Tekala, priestess of Atlantan. A struggle for power between good and evil had taken place in that long-ago civilisation and Tekala believes she was responsible for its final fall. Can Tekala and the two men of the 20th century defy Destiny? Can anyone do such a thing? And what price would have to be paid? Another very fine story to round off this fascinating collection.

I think I can now see why Dyalhis wrote so few stories. He had certain obsessions to which he returned again and again. Had he been a prolific author such obsessions might have become repetitive. By limiting itself to a handful of tales he was able to take the same themes and play fascinating variations on them.

He Refused to Stay Dead, The Red Witch, The Sapphire Goddess and The Sea-Witch are all variations on one theme and they’re all interesting variations. They’re by far the strongest stories he wrote.

I can also see now why Dyalhis was so highly thought of by contemporary readers of Weird Tales. His best stories are stories of love and revenge, erotically charged and with just a dash of the decadence of Clark Ashton Smith. Dyalhis was also a writer who seemed to improve with each story that he wrote. The Sapphire Goddess is an uneven but intriguing collection. The better stories are very very good indeed. Highly recommended.

Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek

My interest in Daphne du Maurier’s books was initially aroused by the fact that they provide the source material for three of my favourite films - Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). I was reasonably impressed by du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, but not so impressed by the short stories that inspired the other two films.

Daphne du Maurier has been described as a writer of gothic romances (and Rebecca most certainly fits into that category) and after reading Xavier’s spirited defence of this genre at his At the Villa Rose blog I felt I should give du Maurier another try. The book I selected is one of her most famous, Frenchman’s Creek, published in 1941.

It turns out that Frenchman’s Creek is not really a gothic romance after all. It’s certainly a romance but it’s probably best described as a swashbuckling romance novel. The story of an English noblewoman’s passionate affair with a dashing French pirate is one that is clearly likely to tick all the romance novel boxes.

The heroine is Dona, Lady St Colomb, and she has grown weary of the high life in London. She retreats, alone, to her husband’s neglected estate in Cornwall. She soon discovers that there is a creek running through the property and that creek is being used as an anchorage by a notorious French pirate who has been raiding the properties of the rich landowners of the region. Dona is a woman who suffers a great deal from boredom and the presence of a pirate ship almost in her own back yard at least promises to make life slightly less tedious. Then she hears that there are rumours that the pirates have not only been committing robberies, they have been ravishing the local women as well. Now Dona is really interested. In fact she’s more than a little excited.

This French buccaneer is not your typical pirate. He is well-bred and well-educated, a man of culture, and even a bit of a philosopher. He is a gentleman, well apart from the ravishing women thing (and Dona is inclined to see that as a feature rather than a bug). In fact he’s the kind of pirate pretty much guaranteed to set feminine hearts aflutter. He certainly gets Dona’s blood racing. I’m not sure if it gets her bosoms heaving but it certainly seems possible.

Of course Dona persuades her handsome pirate to take her to sea with him on his next voyage. And she will get drawn into a world of adventure and forbidden love.

The plot may sound absurd and overheated. It is overheated, but perhaps not entirely absurd when you consider the background to the novel. This is the England of Charles II, an age in which sexual licentiousness was more or less taken for granted among the hangers-on at Court. It is established that Dona and her husband are very much a part of a very dissipated social set. It is also established right from the start that Dona already has a scandalous reputation and, not to put too fine a point on it, she is generally regarded as being little better than a whore. She doesn’t have to worry about endangering her reputation. Her reputation is well and truly in tatters already. Taking a notorious pirate to her bed is just the sort of escapade that might appeal to such a woman, and would certainly amuse her friends.

The focus of the story is very much on the romance angle. Of course criticising a romance novel for being romantic is a bit like criticising a thriller for being thrilling. There’s an extraordinary amount of sexual innuendo, much of it clever and amusing.

Daphne du Maurier was immensely popular in her day although not highly regarded by critics. Her critical reputation has grown since and is, perhaps, a little overblown. Frenchman’s Creek is a bodice-ripper. It’s well-written and with some literary pretensions but even if it’s a slightly literary bodice-ripper it’s still a bodice-ripper. I honestly don’t have a problem with that. Being a good writer of genre fiction well is just as challenging as being a good writer of so-called literary fiction, the main difference being that genre writes write books the people want to read while writers of literary fiction write books that people feel they should want to read.

This is the sort of book that critics would have been inclined to dismiss not just because it’s clearly genre fiction but because it’s aimed squarely at a female readership. Which is unjust. There are genres that men like and there are genres that women like. Critics tended to despise them all, but they especially despised the books women like. These days critics are more likely to take the opposite tack. It’s all equally unreasonable. Genre fiction requires its practitioners to understand their target audience and give them what they want. I don’t have a problem with that. Daphne du Maurier understood her audience and gave them what they wanted, with style and skill.

Assuming that the purpose of this book is to generate an atmosphere of romantic and sexual excitement in its female readers I’d say it succeeds admirably. The author builds up the sexual tension with considerable skill. We have to wait a long time for Dona and her pirate to have sex so that when they do (there are of course no graphic descriptions of sex but du Maurier makes it absolutely crystal clear that Dona isn’t naked with her pirate because it’s getting stuffy in her cabin) it has the desired impact.

The pirate is a totally unbelievable hero. He’s perfect in every way, the ideal combination of masculinity and sensitivity, the ultimate female wish fulfilment fantasy. But hey, it’s a romance novel. We have to believe that Dona is so hot for this guy that she’ll risk everything.

Dona on the other hand is an interesting heroine. She’s not quite as immoral as her reputation suggests but she’s still pretty damn immoral. She finds some rationalisations for her behaviour but clearly she’s quite happy to abandon every responsibility in order to gain romantic fulfilment and it’s also clear that for Dona romantic fulfilment means sexual fulfilment. Her pirate fills her with the kind of lust she could never feel for her husband.

So is this a book that male readers will enjoy? Probably not. There’s not quite enough action, although there is some. And while du Maurier isn’t at her best in the action scenes they’re OK and she is very very good at suspense. On the whole though, even with the adventure element, this is still basically a bodice ripper. As a heterosexual male I’m probably not the best person to judge it on those terms but even I’d have to admit that it is wildly romantic. And it is clever and witty. You’ll have to decide for yourself on this one.

Conan Doyle's Adventures of Gerard

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was during his own lifetime as celebrated for his historical fiction as for his detective stories. Among his most popular works in this genre are the two volumes of short stories concerning the life and the adventures of Etienne Gerard. The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard was published in 1896 while Adventures of Gerard followed in 1903 (these tales had started appearing in the Strand magazine in 1894 and the final Gerard story dates from 1911).

Etienne Gerard is a hussar officer in Napoleon’s army who has been described by no less a judge than the Emperor himself as having both the stoutest heart and the thickest head in La Grande Armée.

Conan Doyle took his historical fiction seriously. He considered his works in this genre to be his greatest achievements. On the other hand he was always a commercial writer and entertainment was the first priority. The best of his historical novels, the two Brigadier Gerard collections and the two novels about Sir Nigel Loring, The White Company and Sir Nigel, manage to be both serious historical fiction and amusing and outrageous yarns.

This ability to be amusing while taking his subject matter seriously is a rare accomplishment and one is tempted to make comparisons to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels (such as Flashman and the Mountain of Light). There are differences of course. Gerard is genuinely brave, even if he is at times a fool. Flashman is a coward. But there are definite affinities. Conan Doyle adopts a mock-heroic style, with Gerard (who narrates the tales) treating his own idiocies as acts of extraordinary martial skill and glory. They are both men whose fame as soldiers is not entirely deserved. Gerard is a brave and well-meaning but not very intelligent bungler who has occasionally managed to do heroic things mostly by luck, although he considers himself to be a brilliant officer. Flashman is a coward and a scoundrel who has occasionally managed to appear to have done heroic things mostly by luck. So in both cases the author is taking a rather sceptical view of military glory.

The Crime of Brigadier Gerard presents Colonel Gerard with a fine opportunity to win honour. His mission is to singlehandedly scout out the Lines of Torres Vedras, the formidable line of fortifications that Viscount Wellington had constructed to defend Lisbon. Marshal Masséna has personally selected Gerard for the mission. It does not work out quite as planned. Gerard finds himself in the midst of something far more important than mere military manoeuvres - he blunders into a fox hunt. The English of course cannot possibly do without their fox hunting even in Portugal so they have imported both foxes and hounds. Gerard however does not quite appreciate just what a solemn occasion this is.

It’s a typical Gerard story, with Gerard doing his best to be heroic whilst being blissfully (and amusingly) unaware of what is actually happening.

How Brigadier Gerard Lost His Ear takes place in Venice, which Napoleon’s army is energetically and efficiently looting. The Venetians are outraged and some are exacting private vengeance on the French invaders. Gerard almost finds himself a victim of such private vengeance, although in his case there is more involved. There is a lady involved. Gerard of course will do anything for a lady. In this instance what he has to do is rather surprising. Another fine story.

In How the Brigadier Saved the Army Gerard is given a very important mission. The French are on the retreat but are being harried by Spanish guerillas. A large detachment of French troops will be left behind, and will be doomed, unless Gerard can light a beacon fire to tell them to fall back on the main army. To light the beacon Gerard will have to travel miles through guerilla-infested countryside. In this story Gerard demonstrates the extraordinary and very genuine courage of which he is capable, and it demonstrate his unbelievable capacity for making a thorough mess of things but somehow muddling his way through. A very enjoyable tale.

Gerard is often heroic and often absurd and in Brigadier Gerard at Waterloo he manages to be both at the same time. It’s also a story in which Gerard’s delusions about his own importance reach ridiculous but rather touching extremes. He is entrusted by the Emperor with a vital mission which cold determine the outcome of the battle. Of course it doesn’t but it does give Gerard the opportunity to save the Emperor. The fact that this ends up being a futile lost cause adds a further touch of melancholy amusement (and if you think melancholy amusement isn’t possible you need to read this story).

The Brigadier in England covers the period Gerard spent in England after being captured. Much of this time was spent in congenial surroundings at the home of Lord Rufton. Gerard spends his time leaning to play cricket (a most bloodthirsty game, or at least it is the way Gerard plays it) and getting mixed up in a complicated romantic intrigue in which Gerard as always doesn’t quite understand what is going on although he thinks he does. An amusing little story.

How the Brigadier Joined the Hussars of Conflans tells us of Gerard’s first day with the regiment that was to be so important to him. Gerard immediately makes himself ridiculous with his outrageous boasting, and then proceeds to demonstrate that he really is as brave as he says he is, almost singlehandedly capturing the city of Saragossa. Some fine swashbuckling here.

How Etienne Gerard Said Good-Bye to his Master is a poignant and quixotic tale of an attempt to rescue Napoleon from St Helena. You have to admire Gerard for refusing to abandon his allegiance to the Emperor. All the Gerard stories are recounted by the elderly Gerard some time in the 1850s or thereabouts and he never wavers from his loyalty. How Etienne Gerard Said Good-Bye to his Master is a poignant and quixotic tale of an attempt to rescue Napoleon from St Helena. You have to admire Gerard for refusing to abandon his allegiance to the Emperor. All the Gerard stories are recounted by the elderly Gerard some time in the 1850s or thereabouts and he never wavers from his loyalty.

The Marriage of the Brigadier was the last of the Gerard tales to be written (in 1910, several years after the publication of The Adventures of Gerard) but chronologically it’s the first of the stories, taking place in 1802. In peacetime Gerard finds time for love, and he discovers true fear. He fears no man, but an enraged bull is another matter. And the bull acts as an unexpected match-maker. A slight but amusing story.

The Gerard stories are an absolute delight. Gerard is a buffoon but he is a brave buffoon. His belief in his heroic stature never wavers and is sublimely unaffected by reality. The Adventures of Gerard is highly recommended.