Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time

Fritz Leiber’s novel The Big Time was published in 1958. It’s the beginning of his Change War series which comprises this novel and and seven short stories.

This is a wild complex unconventional time travel story. Two warring factions, the Spiders and the Snakes, are trying to change the past in order to further their agendas. Those agendas are unknown.

Changing the past is possible, but extremely difficult. The Spiders might prevent the First World War by preventing the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand only to find that the war breaks out anyway six months later over some totally different issue. So then you have to change something else. And that might lead to other changes that you didn’t want. So you have to keep endlessly tinkering, and the other side (the Snakes) are tinkering as well to produce outcomes that you don’t want.

Soldiers are recruited from both the past and the future to make these changes happen. Mostly (but not always) they are recruited at the moment of their deaths and they undergo a kind of resurrection.

The novel takes place entirely in the Place. This is a kind of rest and recuperation centre that is outside of the cosmos (space-time). The Entertainers, including the narrator Greta, help the Soldiers to recover from their physical and emotional wounds. The Soldiers are provided with the things that Soldiers like when they’re on leave - basically booze and women.

Soldiers and Entertainers are Doublegangers (they can operate in the cosmos and outside of it) and Demons (they are more or less alive in both the cosmos and outside it). At least it’s better than being a Zombie (those whose timelines are entirely in the past) or an Unborn (those whose timelines are entirely in the future).

The staff of the Place comprises three men and three women, plus a vast supply of Ghostgirls. Three Soldiers arrive. Pairing off takes place and then things start to get weird and exciting. Finding an atomic bomb on the premises can do that. And they lose the machine that allows them to pass back and forth from the cosmos to the Place. That means they’re trapped. Everyone blames everybody else.

Leiber had a theatrical background and The Big Time is like a play that takes place entirely on a single set. Momentous things are happening, but they’re all happening offstage. Leiber focuses on the effects those events have on this small group of people.

Leiber is interested in what happens to the personality when somebody is totally unmoored from his own time. In this case of these people comes from a billion years in the past, from a long-lost lunar civilisation. Knowing that you entire civilisation disappeared into oblivion a billion years ago is not exactly easy to deal with. Another is from a billion years in the future - his civilisation his not yet even evolved to the point of qualifying as intelligent life.

And these characters are constantly shuttling back and forth between countless different historical eras, and when they revisit an historical era with which they are familiar it has changed anyway. Some of them have died several times.

All of this gives Leiber the chance to play around with some philosophical themes, something he was fond of doing.

This is not quite like any other science fiction novel. It’s not just the subject matter (which other authors have tackled) but the unique and unsettling tone. But then Fritz Leiber was not quite like any other science fiction writer. He had a very distinctive authorial voice.

The Big Time will play with your head, but in a good way. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Fritz Leiber’s novel You're All Alone which is also pretty wild stuff.

James Leasor’s Passport to Oblivion

Passport to Oblivion, published in 1964, is the first of James Leasor’s Dr Jason Love spy thrillers.

James Leasor (1923-2007) was a reasonably prolific British writer of thrillers whose output included ten Dr Jason Love novels.

It begins with a British agent (code-named K) in Tehran being hunted down and killed.

K’s superior at MI6, MacGillivray, has no idea what has happened to K. He just knows that he has suddenly disappeared and that he was trying to get a message back to London. But he doesn’t know what the message was.

Someone will have to be sent to find out what happened but that’s a problem. This is 1964. Most of MI6’s agents are in fact KGB agents. The only way to be sure that an agent can be trusted is to employ someone who is more or less an amateur. An obscure country doctor, Dr Jason Love, seems like a possibility. MacGillivray used him once before on a very small job, many year earlier. Love proved to be fairly sensible and capable of exercising some initiative. Love has no spy training but he’s an ex-soldier and a judo instructor. The fact that he’s a doctor might be useful as a cover.


And there’s something else. Love is obsessed with Cord motor cars (the Cord being a highly advanced American luxury car of the 1930s). And it just happens that a very very rare Cord indeed, a Le Baron limousine, is rumoured to have recently turned up in Tehran of all places. That would give Love an excuse to be poking about the back streets of the city.

Something odd has also happened in Canada and there is a possibly very tenuous link to K’s disappearance.

Love’s first stop is Rome where he meets British agent Simone. She is very annoyed when he refuses to sleep with her.

In Tehran Love does eventually find out what happened to K. He also finds out something else. It’s not a certainty, but it seems likely that his cover has been blown. Which would mean there’s a leak somewhere.

He also finds out what K had uncovered. It’s a major conspiracy that could have serious consequences for Britain.

The reluctant spy was a popular trope in British spy fiction in the 30s and 40s. It was out of fashion by the 60s but Leasor has come up with a convincing reason for reviving it. And Dr Love isn’t so much a reluctant spy as a somewhat bewildered moderately keen amateur. He’s bewildered but he’s not unintelligent. And he is resourceful. And given that he’s a former soldier and teaches judo he’s also quite capable of handling himself in unarmed combat.

This was 1964 and Bond Fever was approaching its height. The trick if you were a spy writer at this time was to capture some of the Bond glamour without making your spy a mere Bond clone. Passport to Oblivion does have some glamour and exotic settings and some action. Jason Love doesn’t have the fancy gadgets that feature in the Bond movies but he has a few simple nifty little devices. There’s some sex, but oddly not for Dr Love. The novel does however acknowledge the importance of sex as a motivation for spies.

Jason Love is a likeable hero and he gradually learns that spies have to be ruthless at times. He’s not fond of violence but having been through the war it doesn’t scare him and if it’s kill or be killed he’d prefer to be the one doing the killing. He treats it as an extension of his wartime military service. Sometimes soldiers have to kill, and sometimes spies have to kill. One thing in his favour is that he’s not excessively trusting.

The plot is solid enough, the conspiracy has some pleasingly wild elements and there’s some fine suspense towards the end. Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

Passport to Oblivion was filmed as Where the Spies Are in 1966. The movie has a slightly more lighthearted approach which doesn’t quite come off.

Murray Leinster’s The Mutant Weapon

The Mutant Weapon is a science fiction novella (or maybe at a stretch a short novel) by Murray Leinster (1896-1975). Leinster was a prolific American science fiction writer who deserves a lot more attention. He wrote mostly short fiction.

The Mutant Weapon was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1957. It’s part of his extensive Med Service series.

The story takes place in a future in which humans have colonised hundreds of planets. But Leinster understands something that so many other science fiction writers have failed to understand. Any kind of interstellar empire or federation would be impossible. When travel between the colony worlds takes years there can be nothing even approaching a central government. All the colony worlds are in practice entirely autonomous. They recognise no central authority.

The one partial exception is the Med Service. Med Service spaceships are constantly visiting other worlds. A Med Service man has in theory vast authority but has no means of imposing that authority. Because the Med Service is universally recognised as useful in practice any planetary government will almost certainly quite voluntarily recognise a Med Service man’s authority. The Med Service is the only way the colony worlds can have access to the latest medical technologies.

Calhoun is a Med Service man about to conduct a routine health examination on a brand new colony. His ship has a crew of two, the second crew member being Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd is a tormal. Tormals are cute monkey-like animals but they have a couple of very significant biological peculiarities that make them incredibly useful. Calhoun is very fond of Murgatroyd.

No-one has ever interfered with the Med Service. Why would they? It would make no sense. So Calhoun is more than a little puzzled when someone tries to destroy his spaceship.

When Calhoun does land there are more puzzles. A vast city apparently empty. A man lying dead in a field. He has starved to death but he is surrounded by food. This is impossible.

What is happening on this planet is bizarre, inexplicable, sinister and terrifying. With horrifying implications. It’s a plague but it breaks all the rules of known medical science.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot other than that it contains some very cool ideas and twists.

I like Calhoun. He’s not at all a straightforward action. He’s a doctor and he detests the idea of harming people. On the other hand he has an extraordinary steely determination and a very strong sense of justice. He can be a very formidable adversary and when he has to resort to action he does so in extremely devious and imaginative ways.

And while the focus is on Calhoun’s search for answers there is some action and suspense and a very real sense of menace. And evil. And it’s a nasty kind of calculated evil.

Calhoun is a man who thinks in terms of probabilities. Actions have consequences which can to some extent be predicted. And ingenious plans fail because the people who devise ingenious master plans never take chance consequences into account.

The Mutant Weapon is clever superior-grade science fiction and it’s highly recommended.

Murray Leinster should be regarded as one of the science fiction greats. I’ve reviewed his 1953 alien invasion tale The Invaders and absolutely superb short story collection The Best of Murray Leinster.

Armchair Fiction have paired The Mutant Weapon with J.J. Allerton’s Moon of Battle in a two-novel paperback edition.

Fritz Leiber’s Swords and Deviltry

Swords and Deviltry, published in 1970, is a collection of three of Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Leiber wrote a vast number of these stories beginning in 1939, with the final story being written in 1988. In 1970 the stories were collected in seven paperback volumes arranged in internal chronological order (which was wildly different from the publication order). Swords and Deviltry was the first of the seven volumes.

In these three tales we see two young men discovering their destinies, but this is sword-and-sorcery not high fantasy so while their destinies will involve deeds of heroism they’ll also involve a good deal of thieving. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are not exactly law-abiding citizens. In fact they’re rogues and criminals, but rogues not entirely lacking in honour.

Leiber was determined that if he was going to write sword-and-sorcery he was not going to write mere Conan pastiches. He created his own distinctive style of sword-and-sorcery.

Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were perhaps the single most important influence on the development of Dungeons and Dragons. The world of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is the world of D&D, created by Leiber thirty years before anyone had thought of role-playing games.

The first story in this collection, the novella The Snow Women, was written in 1970 and it introduces us to Fafhrd. He is eighteen years old, a young giant, still dominated by his mother but chafing at this domination. Home for the Snow Clan is the frozen northern wastes. The Snow Women are witches.

Each year a travelling show arrives, much to the delight of the men and the horror of the women who strongly disapprove of fun of any sort.

Fafhrd has rescued a female dancer, Vlana, from the jealous wrath of the Snow Women and that is likely to cause a breach with his mother. Fafhrd is captivated by the free-spirited slightly wicked Vlana but he has been courting a local girl, Mara. He is caught between these two very different women.

This is a tale that give us a very detailed backstory on Fafhrd. I’m not necessarily a fan of detailed backstories but this one does set up some of the important themes of this story cycle. The clash between barbarian and civilised societies is a perennial theme of sword-and-sorcery with, usually, a contrast being drawn between the freedom, bravery and nobility of barbarians and the corruption and wickedness of civilisation. In this story Leiber turns that on its head. The Snow Clan is a society run entirely by women. It is a repressive stifling rules-obsessed pleasure-hating society. The Snow Women ruthlessly crush anyone who defies the rules.

Vlana comes from the world of civilisation, a world of freedom and pleasure and opportunity, a world to which Fafhrd longs to escape. Fafhrd wants to breathe free city air. This is the story of Fafhrd’s first steps on the road to adventure.

The short story The Unholy Grail had originally been published in 1962. This gives us the Gray Mouser’s backstory. He was a young man known as Mouse, an apprentice wizard. An apprentice to a very humble country wizard named Glavas Rho. He is teaching Mouse white magic although he suspects that the young man may well be tempted to dabble in darker forms of magic.

The cruel and ruthless local lord abhors wizards, for reasons connected to his now deceased wife - a woman he feared greatly. The duke both fears and hates his daughter Ivrian. And the daughter has formed a secret tentative romantic attachment to Mouse. This is a situation that is likely to end badly, and it does. 

This is a story of jealousy, betrayal, suspicion and revenge and the meek young man known as Mouse becomes a more morally ambiguous but much more formidable figure, the Gray Mouser.

In the third story, the novella Ill Met in Lankhmar, we find out how these two slightly disreputable adventurers meet. They are, independently, doing some freelance thieving in Lankhmar. A dangerous thing to do - the Thieves’ Guild deals ruthlessly with outsiders. Fafhrd is living with Vlana while the Mouser is shacked up with Ivrian.

Fafhrd had made an unwise vow to Vlana, to aid her in revenging herself on the Thieves’ Guild. And now Fafhrd and his new friend the Gray Mouser, having had rather too much to drink, have foolishly decided on a head-on clash with the Guild.

Leiber handles the sorcery elements extremely well. The Snow Women’s snow magic consists entirely of a mastery of the power of coldness. And you can be in the grip of sorcerous power without being aware of it.

Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery can switch very quickly between lighthearted adventure and real darkness. 

These three stories tell you all you need to know about what makes these two slightly disreputable slightly cynical heroes tick and will leave you thirsting for more of their adventures. Highly recommended.

Frank Belknap Long’s Space Station #1

Frank Belknap Long’s science fiction novel Space Station #1 was published in 1957.

American science fiction/weird fiction writer Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994) was a close friend of H.P. Lovecraft.

Space Station #1 is by far the biggest space station ever constructed. This is the 2020s by which time Mars has been colonised. But all is not well on Mars. A fabulously wealthy man named Ramsey now runs the planet and the original colonists are impoverished and disaffected. They believe (correctly) that he has cheated them.

The protagonist of the novel is Lieutenant Corristan, a young officer on a space liner on its way to the station. He meets a charming young lady. She is accompanied by her bodyguard. Corristan finds out that she is Ramsey’s daughter Helen. Which makes it a very big deal when she vanishes. And then her bodyguard is murdered. The killer flees. Corristan gives chase, unsuccessfully.

Corristan expects to be regarded not perhaps as a hero but at least given credit for effort. He is mystified and dismayed when no-one believes a word of his account of the event. Helen Ramsey was not aboard the spaceship. The dead man was not her bodyguard.

When they reach the station Corristan finds himself diagnosed as another tragic case of space shock. He must have been hallucinating. Perhaps in time he will recover.

Corristan isn’t giving up. He escapes from custody and then he makes some truly puzzling and bizarre discoveries. These discoveries seem impossible, but Corristan is convinced that he is not mad.

It seems that things aboard the spaceship are not what they seem to be.

Corristan hasn’t just stumbled into a fight between two factions. There are three factions involved. There are multiple conspiracies.

And lots of paranoia.

What Corristan cares about is the girl. He’s only exchanged a dozen words with Helen Ramsey but he knows that he’s in love with her. He doesn’t even know if she’s still alive. He has no idea where she is.

And he’s soon in the middle of a space battle. A space battle that is not as wildly unrealistic as most science fiction space battles.

And the author doesn’t forget the thin atmosphere on Mars, and the implications of that. And he remembers to at least mention the low gravity. The space station spins to provide artificial gravity through centrifugal fore. This is not quite hard science fiction but at least the author makes an effort to keep things science fictional rather than just being an adventure in space.

There’s more drama when Corristan arrives on Mars. And a major battle seems likely, with no clear indication as to which groups belong to which factions and what their objectives are.

Corristan is a fine hero. His love for Helen Ramsey provides him with plenty of motivation. He’s gutsy and determined.

The plot has some very nice twists and there are enough hints of weird stuff to keep things interesting. There are conflicted characters and betrayals and suspicions.

This is a decent fairly grown-up and entertaining science fiction tale and I’m going to highly recommend it.

I’ve also reviewed Frank Belknap Long's Mission to a Distant Star, which is a good story ruined by a catastrophically bad ending.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with William P. McGivern’s The Galaxy Raiders in a two-novel edition.

Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying

A Kiss Before Dying was Ira Levin’s first novel. It appeared in 1954. It was a very impressive debut for a 23-year-old writer. It was a bestseller, as were all of Levin’s subsequent books.

New York-born Ira Levin (1929-2007) was not a prolific novelist but he was an extraordinarily interesting one.

At first you think this is going to be an inverted detective story with a psychological tinge, somewhat in the mould of Frances Iles’ Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact. With perhaps some noir fiction flavour.

Then at a certain point it switches gears and switches focus, and then throws in a huge plot twist right out of left field, and we realise this is going to be a different kind of book altogether. It could be assigned to a couple of different genres but to say more might risk spoilers.

Given the ambitious and slightly unusual structure I’m going to be even more vague than usual in discussing the plot.

The story does involve a murderer. We do know his identity right from the start. We have some inkling of his motivations. The full scope of his motivations slowly becomes more obvious.

He’s a fine character creation, a young man who comes across as smooth and charming and confident but he is in fact a total loser. It’s all bluff. He’s never held down a job for more than a few weeks. He’s now a college student, which for him is clearly a retreat from a real world which is too much for him to deal with. In a vague sort of way he recognises his own inadequacy, which is what leads him to murder.

Initially murder is a way to avoid inconvenience but it occurs to the young man that it could be profitable as well. He will need to be very clever but he really does believe that he’s very clever.

So there’s a fine character study here but it’s the intricate and daring structure that raises this novel to the status of greatness.

And there are some extraordinarily subtle and clever clues.

This is an ambitious book but Levin doesn’t put a foot wrong.

There are some great set-pieces with a very cinematic feel. With some very tense and imaginative murder scenes. Almost all of Levin’s novels were filmed and, remarkably, all the film adaptations are excellent. He just had a knack for writing books that would translate extremely well to film.

One word of warning - some reviews and online plot synopses reveal a very very big spoiler.

A Kiss Before Dying has its own distinctive flavour and it’s very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the first of the two movie adaptations of this novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1956). And I’ve reviewed Ira Levin’s much later thriller, the excellent and rather under-appreciated Sliver.

Ira Levin's Sliver

Sliver is a 1991 suspense thriller by Ira Levin. I think you could argue that it also qualifies as a techno-thriller. There was a 1993 film adaptation staring Sharon Stone.

Ira Levin (1929-2007) was an immensely successful American writer who tended to jump around from genre to genre. He gained initial success with the noirish crime thriller A Kiss Before Dying. He wrote horror (Rosemary’s Baby) and science fiction (The Stepford Wives) as well as thrillers such as The Boys from Brazil.

Sliver takes place in a high-rise apartment building in Manhattan. It’s a fairly high-tech building but the residents don’t know just how high-tech it is.

Kay Norris has just moved in. She’s a 39-year-old book editor, still very attractive but starting to become aware that she’s not as young as she was. When she catches herself having rather lustful thoughts about one of the other tenants she is a bit shocked by herself. The guy is cute but he couldn’t be more than 27 or so.

There are some interesting connections between some of the tenants, connections that go back many years, connections which will become important later.

What the reader knows but Kay doesn’t is that she is being watched. All the tenants are being watched. They have no idea that the building boasts an incredibly sophisticated surveillance system. They are being monitored by hundreds of cameras. Only one person knows about this - the person who installed the surveillance system. It was installed in absolute secrecy. This person lives in the building. He owns the building.

Kay eventually finds all this out, at which point the story takes some really interesting twists. Not just plot twists but psychological twists.

This is not a conventional study of an abnormal personality. It is that, but it becomes a study of abnormal relationships as well.

This is clearly a story about voyeurism but it’s not primarily about voyeurism as a sexual kink. The sexual kink element is a fairly minor aspect of the novel. The movie adaptation puts a bit more emphasis on the sexual aspect and it can be described as an erotic thriller. I would not however call the novel an erotic thriller. There is a scene in the book in which the voyeur watches Kay masturbating and masturbates while watching her but perhaps surprisingly that is the only such incident in the novel. It is not what really drives this particular voyeur.

It’s interesting to compare it to Hitchcock’s classic voyeurism movie Rear Window. There are intriguing similarities and intriguing differences.

In Rear Window the voyeur/protagonist Jeff (James Stewart) does enjoy watching the pretty dancer he refers to as Miss Torso getting undressed but that’s merely added spice. What really fascinates Jeff is seeing into other people’s lives and discovering their secrets. And that’s the drawcard for Sliver’s voyeur. He is excited by the idea of discovering other people’s secrets, and excited by the fact that they don’t know he is watching them.

The chief difference compared to Hitchcock’s film is that in Rear Window the voyeur/protagonist Jeff (James Stewart) only has partial information - he only knows what he can see through the curtains that happen to be open. Rear Window has a strong mystery element so this works in the movie’s favour. Jeff has to solve the mystery based on partial information. In Sliver the Voyeur can see and hear everything. There is no mystery in Sliver. We know the identity of the killer from the start.

And interestingly the voyeur in Sliver does not seem to be interested in the power that knowing those secrets could offer him. To make use of those secrets in such a way would be to risk exposure. His motivation is simply the joy of knowing these secrets and knowing that his targets have no idea that their secrets are no longer secrets.

What makes Sliver interesting is the suggestion that a woman can enjoy this kind of voyeurism. And it’s believable. Women are fascinated by secrets. The voyeur’s addiction could be shared by a woman. It could become a shared obsession.

An interesting moment comes when the voyeur reveals that he is using the same equipment that the FBI uses to spy on us. That’s really what the novel is all about. We’re living in a society in which we are being constantly watched, whether we like it or no. Even in 1991 Levin could see that privacy was becoming a thing of the past. We are becoming a society in which we are all subject to high-tech voyeurism.

While Sliver plays around with a few observations on the direction in which society is heading it doesn’t have a particular ideological axe to grind. It does deal with voyeurism in a reasonably complex way but mostly it’s a fine intelligent suspense thriller/techno-thriller and it’s highly recommended.

I reviewed the movie Sliver (1993) not too long ago. A lot of people hate this movie but I like it rather a lot.

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.

Norman Lindsay's The Cousin from Fiji

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fritz Leiber’s You're All Alone

Fritz Leiber’s You're All Alone has a fascinating history. It was written between 1943 and 1947 as a 75,000 word novel which was never published and the manuscript was lost. He then rewrote it from scratch as a 40,000 word novella in which form it appeared in Fantastic Adventures in July 1950. In 1953 it was published as The Sinful Ones, with quite a few changes that were made without the author’s consent. The story was sexed-up quite a bit. In 1962 Galaxy published a short story by Leiber, The Big Engine, which is in fact a chapter from another version of the novel. In 1980 Leiber partially rewrote the unauthorised 1953 novel which was then published in an authorised version, again with the title The Sinful Ones.

Oddly enough most of these many versions of the story are fairly easily obtainable.

Armchair Fiction have published the 1950 novella version of You're All Alone in one of their terrific two-novel paperback editions (paired with Bernard C. Gilford’s novella The Liquid Man). This is the version I’m reviewing here.

Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) is one of the greatest of American science fiction and fantasy writers and arguably has never really gained the attention he deserves.

You're All Alone is disorienting brain-twisting stuff right from the start. Carr Mackay is a perfectly ordinary guy working in an employment agency. One day a very frightened young woman comes into the office. He has no idea why she’s frightened although it seems to have something to do with a tall blonde.

Then one of his workmates, Tom, introduces him to a girl, only there isn’t any girl. The guy is talking to the empty air. Carr tries to explain things to his boss but his boss doesn’t seem to notice that Carr is there. People talking to other people who don’t exist is bad enough, but Carr starts to wonder if he himself exists.

Things get stranger. His girlfriend Marcia rings to thank him for a lovely evening, but he never kept that particular date. Tom talks about the great time that Carr had with the girl on the double date the previous night, but Carr wasn’t there.

Pianos play, but no-one is playing them.

And there was that store mannequin. Can a shop-window mannequin look terrified?

He meets the frightened girl. She explains a few things to him, and now he’s more mystified than ever.

Has he gone crazy? Is the whole world crazy? Is the world real? Is he real?

And there are plenty of twists still to come.

It’s easy to see why Leiber was unwilling to abandon this story even when early on it seemed destined to remain unpublished. It’s a great story idea and it was worth reworking it. This is the only one of the several versions of the story that I’ve read and it works very neatly indeed. I am somewhat tempted to track down one of the two versions of The Sinful Ones.

Apart from the brain-twisting science fictional elements there’s a kind of very offbeat love story here as well, and the question of what constitutes reality plays a part in that as well.

It’s not necessary to worry overmuch about plausible science in this tale. This is more a philosophical (perhaps even slightly existentialist) story than a straight science fiction story. It’s the sort of thing Leiber did extremely well.

You're All Alone is excellent stuff. Highly recommended.

The Cornish Pixie Affair - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Peter Leslie’s The Cornish Pixie Affair, published in 1967, was the fifth of the original novels based on the TV spy series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

It's a competent enough spy thriller which should satisfy fans of the television series. It has a somewhat more serious tone than the series. 

The travelling circus setting adds some interest. I always love circus settings.

You can find my full review here at Cult TV Lounge.

Milton Lesser’s Slaves to the Metal Horde

Milton Lesser’s short novel Slaves to the Metal Horde was published in the science fiction magazine Imagination in June 1954.

Stephen Marlowe (1928-2008) was an American pulp writer who wrote crime fiction under his own name and science fiction under the name Milton Lesser.

Slaves to the Metal Horde is a post-apocalyptic science fiction tale. The Third World War has ended disastrously. An army of robot warriors had been constructed to serve as the ultimate weapon but before they could be used bacteriological weapons were unleashed. The result was a plague that raged out of control. Civilisation collapsed everywhere.

Johnny Hope is twenty-three years old and lives in a small agricultural village, Hamilton Village. It’s a harsh primitive life but the villagers survive. Johnny however has been forced to leave. He is suspected of being infected with the Plague.

He has some vague plan to reach a large now deserted city once known as New York but after a day or so he realises he really does have the Plague. All he can do is lie down and wait to die.

That’s when Diane finds him. Diane, a beautiful blonde girl, belongs to a vey different kind of community,  community of nomadic hunters. She is one of the Shining Ones. These are the tiny minority of people who survive the Plague. They survive, but they will always be carriers of the disease. They are shunned by the rest of society.

Johnny survives. He is now one of the Shining Ones. Diane and Johnny are attracted to each other but there’s another bond between them. They both suspect that the Robots are spreading the Plague. The Robots are now masters of the Earth and are almost worshipped as gods but there are many who fear them. With good reason. The Robots do not see themselves as friends of humanity.

Johnny has some problems fitting in with the Shining Ones. His main problem is Harry Starbuck, a sneaky character with big plans. Johnny has even bigger problems when Diane falls into the clutches of the Robots. Along with an ageing scholar he sets off on a rescue mission which is likely to end in a showdown with the Robots.

This is a fairly typical post-apocalyptic tale but with one rather interesting feature - the nature of the Robots. The big fear has always been that robots/computers will develop consciousness. That would give them free will. That in turn could mean that they would no longer be under human control - they could become our masters.

In this story it’s not clear if that has actually happened. These Robots might just be slavishly trying to follow their original programming without understanding that that programming is no longer relevant or appropriate. Or they might have achieved actual consciousness and free will. Lesser keeps this nicely ambiguous for as long as possible, which means we’re kept guessing about what the Robots’ long-term objectives are. They might not even have any coherent long-term objectives. Or they might have a fiendish master plan.

There are also some interesting questions of loyalty on the part of the humans. Some see the Robots as saviours, some see them as a menace, and some ambitious humans see coöperation with the Robots as a path to power. The humans are divided between the uninfected ones and the Shining Ones and the two groups fear and mistrust each other. Even among those who fear the Robots there is no agreement on what, if anything, can be done to oppose them. This is made more difficult because no-one is quite sure exactly what powers the Robots possess.

It’s an engaging story with fairly good ideas, a few intriguing nuances, some action and some romance. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Joseph E. Kelleam’s Hunters Out of Time in a two-novel paperback edition.

I’ve also reviewed a very early Milton Lesser sci-fi novel, Somewhere I’ll Find You, and it’s highly entertaining. And I’ve reviewed the hardboiled crime novel Model for Murder which he wrote as Stephen Marlowe and it’s sexy, sleazy, trashy, pulp and generally terrific.

The Woman and the Puppet by Pierre Louÿs

If the essence of the decadent world view is that love is a disease then Pierre Louÿs’ 1898 masterpiece The Woman and the Puppet (La femme et le pantin) is the quintessential decadent novel.

It is Carnival in Seville, and a man is captivated by the briefest glimpse of an extraordinary young woman, whose beauty is matched only by her air of mystery. He is determined to have her, and asks advice of a friend. Don Mateo is a man of the world, a legendary connoisseur of female beauty, but Don Mateo is horrified when he realises the identity of the woman. It is none other than Concha Pérez, and she is (as he informs his young friend) the worst woman in the world. His experiences with Concha have convinced him to avoid any further entanglements with women. He proceeds to recount the story of his own infatuation with her.

He had met her on a train, briefly, and then the acquaintanceship was renewed quite by accident. Concha, then very young, had been working in a cigar factory. She had seemed eager to accept the attentions of Don Mateo, and he is soon convinced that she is as much in love with him as he with her. He is only too happy to help Concha and her mother in their financial difficulties.

His happiness seems assured, but every time it seems that their relationship is finally about to be physically consummated Concha finds some obstacle to place in his way. When he becomes insistent, she and her mother leave hurriedly and secretly, taking a considerable amount of Don Mateo’s money with them.

But their paths are destined to cross again. She is now a flamenco dancer, and she is graciously prepared to forgive him for the wrong she’s done him. Soon he is as obsessed as ever, and Concha tells him she is willing to give herself to him. He buys her an expensive house, and finds himself locked out. He finds her dancing naked for foreign tourists, and in a rage he beats her. She is now convinced he loves her, and is therefore willing to sleep with him.

A cycle of jealousies and beatings and passionate sex escalates, as she taunts him with real and imagined infidelities. She flies into jealous rages as well. Don Mateo tires of her, only to have his passions inflamed again and again.

This is more than simply a tale of obsessive love. It’s reminiscent of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic Venus in Furs, with the relationship between Don Mateo and Concha having very strong elements of sado-masochistic sex, of shifting patterns of dominance and submission, of humiliation and cruelty. 

This is a seductive and memorable novel of twisted sexuality, with an impressive degree of psychological insight. 

And it’s beautifully written. One of the great 19th century novels. Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) was a Belgian novelist and poet, possibly the greatest writer produced by the fin de siècle Literary Decadence. Very highly recommended.

There have been no less than five film versions including Josef von Sternberg’s exquisite The Devil is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich giving one of her greatest performances as Concha.

David Lewis’s The Omega Assignment

The Omega Assignment, published in 1976, was the second of David Lewis’s two Steve Savage spy thrillers. I believe that was the extent of Lewis’s literary endeavours. His real name was Patton D. Lewis. That’s all I know about him. Given that his spy hero is British it’s reasonable to assume that Lewis was British.

Steve Savage is a photo-journalist who does occasional jobs for the British intelligence services. He’s strictly a free-lancer. He does intelligence jobs for the cash.

This adventure starts with the sinking of an incredibly expensive and luxurious private yacht, the Cytherea, not far from Cyprus. The Cytherea was owned by a wealthy German businessman, Herr Braeder. The sinking was no accident. There appear to be no survivors.

The Cytherea was a floating pleasure place. The pleasures it catered for were the pleasures of the flesh. Whatever your sexual tastes, no matter how outré, the girls on the Cytherea would ensure that those tastes would be accommodated.

Half a dozen of the passengers on the Cytherea’s final voyage were senior NATO officers. They did not meet easy deaths when the ship went down, not did any of the passengers or crew. Although nobody knows it in fact one man and three of the girls survived. Their survival was not due to luck.

Shortly afterwards Steve Savage is offered a photographic assignment. A German magazine wants photos of the wreck. This surprises Steve, since as far as he was aware the wreck had not been located. He will be working with a journalist named Destiny Blaine. Destiny is a pretty blonde American, very feminine, although feminine girls usually don’t carry Colt .45s in their handbags.

Steve and Giorgio (an expert Cypriot diver with whom Steve has worked before) find the wreck easily enough but in that sunken ship there are a lot of things that are puzzling and disturbing. There are signs that some terrible things went on before the ship went down. Steve isn’t entirely surprised when it turns out that someone does not want them to investigate that wreck, and will take drastic steps to dissuade them.

Things get more dangerous and more violent. Steve also figures out that that there are a lot of things he wasn’t told. He is half inclined to have no more to do with any of it. That changes when events transpire that give him a personal stake in the case. In fact two personal stakes.

There is non-stop action. The plot isn’t anything special, it’s pretty standard spy stuff, but the book powers along at such a pace that you don’t have time to worry about plot weaknesses. The action scenes are violent and exciting and very well handled.

There’s some underwater action, always a bonus as far as I’m concerned.

There’s definitely a brutal edge to this book. There are scenes of horrific violence and torture, and they’re described very graphically. There are also touches of perversity.

There’s some sex but it’s pretty tame by mid-70s standards.

Steve Savage is a fairly stock-standard secret agent hero. He’s more cynical than Bond. He doesn’t care about ideology. He just wants to live to get paid. Destiny is a likeable enough heroine. There’s no real depth to any of the characters.

The novel does have a memorable villain. He’s a diabolical criminal mastermind but more insane than most of that breed and more sexually perverse. And he has a proper diabolical criminal mastermind secret headquarters.

I have no idea why this author wrote just two spy thrillers. On the basis of this one I’d have expected him to have a decent career writing pulpy action-adventure thrillers.

The Omega Assignment is fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

I discovered this book through a rather favourable review at Paperback Warrior.

Gaston Leroux’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black

Gaston Leroux’s impossible crime novel The Perfume of the Lady in Black (the original French title is Le parfum de la dame en noir) was published in 1908.

Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) is best known in the English-speaking world as the author of The Phantom of the Opera. Keen detective fiction fans are also aware of his 1907 locked-room mystery The Mystery of the Yellow Room but Leroux is not regarded as a big deal in the Anglophone world. Leroux was however a prolific and extremely successful author and in France he is definitely a big deal, being considered one of the greats of genre fiction.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black is a kind of sequel to The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Once again the hero is Joseph Rouletabille, newspaper reporter and amateur detective. Joseph Rouletabille was a mere teenager when the events recounted in The Mystery of the Yellow Room took place. Since this book constantly refers to the events of The Mystery of the Yellow Room you probably should read that one first. To avoid spoilers I’ll be very vague about plot details.

There’s a man who should be dead but may not be. He was (or is) a nefarious villain, cunning and ruthless.

Rouletabille has become obsessed with the perfume of the Lady in Black. It’s a childhood memory with immense significance for him.

Most of the story takes place in a castle on the border between France and Italy. The castle was built in the 12th century, extended in the 15th century and again in the 17th century. It’s a maze of intact and partially ruined towers on a peninsula which is almost an island. It’s a great setting for a story of mystery and terror and Leroux makes extensive and skilful use of it. The castle has withstood attack many times and now Rouletabille is hoping it can withstand a more modern type of attack - by a master criminal.

Leroux goes to extraordinary lengths to convince us that the impossible crime which occurs really is impossible. He provides us with floor plans. The big problem is that there is one body too many.

There are several murders and several disappearances. Rouletabille is sure that Larsan is not far away.

The plot hinges on a device that was immensely popular in the mystery and thriller fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s device which most modern readers will find much too far-fetched. The plot is ingenious but contains a number of elements of doubtful plausibility. Very few readers today will be satisfied with the solution to the impossible crime angle.

Modern readers will also have problems with the pacing.

There are two major plot strands. One concerns events in the here and now and one concerns events in the past, events which concern Rouletabille. The perfume of the Lady in Black continues to haunt him. He feels it is the key not just to his past but to his future happiness and sanity.

Rouletabille is a boy genius detective who enjoys keeping his secrets. He knows certain things which he has reasons not to reveal to anyone else. His plan to apprehend a dangerous criminal depends on secrecy.

I like the breathless sensational tone and the general atmosphere of overheated emotional hysteria.

The concept of fair play had not yet become an accepted part of the detective fiction genre but if you’re familiar with the conventions of the crime fiction of that era you will have your suspicions as to at least a part of what is going on.

There are also several interlocking romance subplots.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black is, to be honest, mainly of historical interest. It has some slight affinities to the 19th century English sensation novel. I enjoyed it well enough but you do have to be a fan of the crime fiction of that era. If you fall into the category you’ll find it worth a look.

There have been several film adaptations of this novel, including Francesco Barilli’s giallo Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974).

Norman Lindsay's A Curate in Bohemia

Norman Lindsay is (in my opinion) the only truly great painter Australia has ever produced. Lindsay was also a very successful writer. A Curate in Bohemia, published in 1913, was his first novel.

The Rev. James Bowles is about to depart for Murumberee to take up his first curacy but before doing so he makes the fateful decision to look up his old school chum Cripps. The young curate finds himself in the world of pre-WW1 Melbourne arty Bohemia.

Cripps and his friends are art students. Their idea of the pursuit of art is centred around talking about painting rather than actually painting, but mostly it’s centred around beer, tobacco and girls. The curate does not drink nor does he smoke. He is however a young man who always takes the path of least resistance and he is easily persuaded that one drink would do no harm. One drink having produced no great ill-effects he decides to have another. And another.

He wakes up the next morning with his finances sadly depleted but with happy memories of conviviality and even happy memories of long conversations with Florrie, Florrie being an artist’s model who poses for Cripps.

The curate has more convivial evenings. His finances are even more sadly depleted. And somehow he has still not managed to get himself to the railway station to take that train to Murumberee.

Bowles soon discovers that he rather likes beer and he rather likes girls as well. And the reader discovers that the curate doesn’t exactly have a strong vocation as a clergyman. He just drifted into it as a result of his usual practice of taking the line of least resistance.

Matters will come to a head when Cripps decides that his old school chum simply must have a grand send-off party before entraining for Murumberee. Paying for the party will be the challenge. The art students are all broke. They are always broke. Cripps somehow manages to scrape up enough money for the alcohol for the party but he has to adopt desperate and unorthodox measures to provide the food. As a result of those desperate measures he has the law after him.

An ingenious expedient is adopted to keep Cripps out of gaol and that expedient will have consequences for the hapless would-be curate of Murumberee. And things become steadily more farcical and more delightfully absurd.

The book is to some extent autobiographical, with Lindsay admitting that one of the art students, Partridge, is a thinly veiled version of himself.

A Curate in Bohemia is totally outrageous and filled with the vitality and joie de vivre that also infused his paintings. It expresses Lindsay’s love of the sensual pleasures life has to offer. It’s an extremely funny novel. Lindsay might be poking fun at the clergy but he’s deriving just as much enjoyment poking fun at himself and at the world of artistic Bohemia. He also has some fun with the terribly serious debates among the art students about the latest artistic theories.

Lindsay spent his whole life battling those who would censor art and literature. He was always controversial and he relished controversy.

I’ve also reviewed Lindsay’s wonderful 1938 novel Age of Consent which, along with several of his other novels, was banned in Australia.

A Curate in Bohemia was one of five Lindsay novels adapted by ABC Television in the early 1970s but tragically not one of those TV adaptations survives.

A Curate in Bohemia is a delight from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Frank Belknap Long's Mission to a Distant Star

Mission to a Distant Star is a short science fiction novel by Frank Belknap Long which appeared in Satellite Science Fiction in February 1958 and was later published in book form.

Frank Belknap Long (1903-1994) was an American writer in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. He was part of Lovecraft’s circle of friends and correspondents and he contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos.

Mission to a Distant Star is a first contact story and an alien invasion story, although whether it’s a conventional alien invasion story is not at first clear.

The novel is set at some unspecified time in the not-too-distant future. At one point there’s a reference to a battered old 1987 model car. Seven years before the events described in the novel the Scorpions arrived on Earth. The Scorpions are alien but they are very very human-like, in appearance at least. They make a request that they be allowed to stay and to move around freely. They back up their request with a demonstration of their power, by vaporising an uninhabited island. Their request is, not surpisingly, granted.

The Scorpions prove to be friendly and harmless. People learn to take them for granted, and even to like them.

The US Government isn’t entirely convinced and Jim Lawrence is given the job of travelling to his home town, Quarry Hill, in Vermont. There’s a damaged Scorpion spaceship there, which the Scorpions are repairing. An old man wandered too close to the stricken spaceship. Now he’s suffering from a kind of amnesia but he’s also now very happy. He has never been so cheerful and content. The Bureau doesn’t like the sound of that, hence Lawrence’s mission.

The Scorpions have taken in a young human woman named Ruth. They didn’t abduct her. She has joined them entirely voluntarily. Ruth has always been a troubled young woman and the Scorpions tell her that they can help her. They are extremely interested in her. They do not understand why so many humans lack joy in their lives. They want to understand this mystery. As we will later discover they have their reasons for being concerned about this problem.

Whether the Scorpions are benign or malevolent remains in doubt until the end of the story. Eventually the action moves to their home planet and we discover just how strange and disturbing their culture is. We discover that the Scorpions are both very human and very non-human.

This book is more concerned with psychology than with action. In fact there’s virtually no action at all. Up until the ending this is a rather interesting tale. Then we get the ending and that’s where disaster strikes. This novel has possibly the worst ending I have ever encountered in a science fiction story. It’s cringe-inducingly bad. It’s the sort of ending that makes one want to hurl the book across the room.

The ending is so bad that even though there’s a lot to admire in this novel I cannot in all conscience recommend it.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with J.F. Bone’s rather good novella Second Chance in yet another of their excellent two-novel paperback editions. Armchair Fiction are to be congratulated for coming up with so many intriguing and often genuinely excellent obscurities for this series. I’ve bought a stack of these Armchair Fiction editions and Mission to a Distant Star is the first significant disappointment I’ve encountered.

The Avengers - Dead Duck

Dead Duck is an original novel published in 1966 and based on the television series The Avengers. 

It was credited to Patrick Macnee although it seems to have been written by Peter Leslie (who wrote some very decent TV tie-in novels).

It’s an engagingly offbeat story with a fine crazy finale. It captures the feel of the series reasonably well. Fans of the TV series should enjoy this novel.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Murray Leinster's The Invaders

The Invaders is a 1953 novella (at a stretch you could call it a short novel) by Murray Leinster (1896-1975). Leinster is a science fiction writer who deserves a lot more attention.

The Invaders is (obviously) an alien invasion story. This was 1953, with the UFO craze getting into top gear, and the saucer-shaped alien spacecraft are clearly an attempt to cash in on this. It’s also a story with obvious resemblances to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Heinlein’s novel was published in 1951 and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers appeared in 1954. The aliens in The Invaders look just like us. They’re totally non-human but they can make themselves look thoroughly human.

The Invaders, like Heinlein’s and Finney’s novels, has something of a Cold War atmosphere.

The Invaders begins in Greece. Coburn is an American. He witnesses a Bulgarian raid into Greek territory. It’s not a full-scale invasion but it’s a large-scale raid intended to provoke the Greeks. Coburn runs into a British reporter named Dillon and a pretty American girl named Janice. What Coburn witnesses is extremely puzzling. In fact it just doesn’t seem possible.

Coburn finds that he can draw only one conclusion. There are alien invaders on Earth. Aliens from outer space. But is it likely that anyone will believe him?

This is of course a setup that has been used countless times. The hero knows the truth but can’t get anyone to listen to him. This book does however throw in a twist. It’s not Coburn’s veracity that comes under question, but his motivations.

The question of course is the intention of the aliens. Coburn has no doubts about this. They want to take over the Earth.

The aliens have other advantages aside from their ability to look human. They have highly advanced technology. The latest American fighter jets are helpless against therm. The latest guided missiles are of no use.

Coburn has one factor on his side. He has figured out a way to recognise the aliens.

It all sounds like a thoroughly conventional alien invasion story but Leinster wasn’t interested in just churning out completely predictable pulp science fiction. He has some plot twists up his sleeve. The motivations of the aliens remain nicely mysterious. The outcome of the confrontation between Earth and an alien civilisation remains in doubt until the very end.

There’s some action, and it doesn’t always play out predictably.

The Cold War angle adds further complications.

This might not be one of the great alien invasion stories but it holds a fair bit of interest and it captures some of the mood of the time, when people first started seriously considering the possibility of extraterrestrial life and were starting to speculate about the forms such life might take, and the potentially momentous consequences of contact with alien cultures. Plenty of alien invasion stories had been written before this time but the early 50s was the time that aliens started to seem like maybe they might be more than science fiction.

Not quite a neglected classic, but worth a look.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Laurence Manning’s World of the Mist (which is quite good) in one of their two-novel paperback editions.

The Del Rey paperback collection The Best of Murray Leinster includes most of his notable short stories and is very much worth getting hold of.

Norman Lindsay’s Age of Consent (1938 novel)

Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) was the one truly great painter that Australia produced (and he was arguably the finest painter of erotic art of the 20th century). While his fame rests mainly on his painting he was also a very successful writer. His novel Age of Consent was published in 1938.

Age of Consent was filmed in 1969. It was an Anglo-Australian co-production directed by Michael Powell and it’s a movie that deserves a lot more recognition.

Both novel and movie deal with a meeting between a painter and a young woman. She becomes his model, and his muse. In the novel Bradly Mudgett is forty years old and he’s broke. He’s always broke. He ekes out a precarious existence as a painter. In the movie he becomes Bradley Morahan, a much older man and an internationally acclaimed artist who decides to turn his back on the New York art world and return to his home country, Australia.

In the book Bradly rents a shack at a place called Margoola Beach. It’s primitive but it’s cheap and it’s isolated. Bradly does not like the company of people. He has his dog, Edmund. Edmund is more than enough company. The shack is surrounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by a lagoon. It’s not quite an island, but almost.

Bradly is slowly coming to realise that he’s reached a crisis in his career. He has never achieved anything approaching real success. He is afraid to take risks. He knows how to produce paintings that will sell for a few pounds. He has found a safe formula which is at least enough to keep starvation at bay.

Then he sees the girl. At first he’s horrified that there are other people in the vicinity of his hideaway. Then something about the girl strikes him. In the past he’s done nothing but landscapes. He hasn’t done figure work since he was a student. But now he thinks he wants to paint the girl. She seems to be the missing ingredient that will bring his paintings to life. She agrees to pose for him.

The girl is Cora. She’s almost feral. She lives with her foul-tempered gin-sodden grandmother. Cora is not exactly socialised. Like Bradly she doesn’t know how to deal with people. She is however a perfect model.

And he makes an amazing discovery. He is now painting pictures that are better than anything he’s ever done before. Much better. He is finally finding himself as a painter. And he’s starting to consider taking a few risks. He’s done a painting of Cora and he decides he’ll ask twenty pounds for this one. He’s not just doing good work. He’s doing work that he suspects will be saleable, at decent prices.

Then the first disaster strikes. Young Hodson shows up. Bradly had met him, briefly, in Jillabong. Now Hodson expects to be greeted like an old friend and he expects Bradly to put him up. Which is a problem. Bradly has just enough money to last him for a few months, precious months to spend painting. Now he has to feed Hodson as well. He can’t turn Hodson out. The police are after him. Bradly doesn’t have many principles but he dislikes the police and would never turn a man over to them. Not even an annoying pest like Hodson.

A bigger problem is Cora’s grandmother. She’s convinced that Cora is whoring herself out to Bradly. Cora is under-age. That gives the grandmother a lever with which to blackmail Bradly. In fact Bradly hasn’t laid a finger on the girl. She just poses for him. But Bradly is terrified of the grandmother’s threats.

This is of course (like the movie) a coming-of-age story. Cora is just becoming aware of herself as a woman. It’s all very confusing for her.

It’s also, in a way, a coming-of-age story for Bradly Mudgett. At the age of forty he knows nothing of women. His experiences with women have been confined to a few encounters with prostitutes. But Cora is getting under his skin. He thinks it’s just because she’s such a good model but unwittingly he’s getting used to having her around and he’s growing fond of her.

It’s also a story of an artist belatedly coming of age as an artist, slowly learning that maybe he is a real artist after all.

This is a very lighthearted semi-comic novel. It’s charming and throughly enjoyable and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed Michel Powell's very good movie adaptation here - Age of Consent (1969).