Robert Silverberg's Killer

Killer is a 1965 sleaze/noir novel by Robert Silverberg which has been reissued by Stark House in their Black Gat Books imprint. In the 50s and 60s there were a lot of novels, most of them paperback originals, that straddled the worlds of sleaze fiction and noir fiction. Some were noir with a side order of sleaze. Some were sleaze with a side order of noir. Killer definitely falls into the latter category.

The fact that the novel was originally called Passion Killer and written under the pseudonym Don Elliott (which Silverberg used for his prolific output of sleaze fiction) and that it was published by Corinth Books tends to support this assumption. It was clearly aimed at the sleaze fiction market.

A rich middle-aged man, Howard Gorman, wants his wife killed. He will then marry his much younger and very hot mistress Marie. He hires hitman Lee Floyd to do the job. It should be a straightforward hit but things get complicated. For one thing Marie is having an affair with her friend Dolores. Lee Floyd picks up a girl. There’s a private eye mixed up somewhere in here as well.

You might think there’d be potential here for double-crosses and you’d be right. You might also think there’d be potential here for various emotional and sexual betrayals and again you’d be correct.

Marie certainly doesn’t love Howard but he’s rich and the idea of marrying money appeals to her. Marie likes money. Of course she enjoys her bedroom romps with her gal pal Dolores too much to have any intention of remaining faithful to Howard.

Most of the novel consists of endless sexual encounters. You have to admire Marie’s stamina. Her sexual appetites are prodigious. Lee Floyd has plenty of energy in the bedroom as well. And Dolores is no slouch either. The sex scenes are lengthy but not at all graphic (in fact they’re a bit tame by 1965 standards).

This doesn’t leave much space for the noir plot. There is definitely a noir plot here. It’s not wildly original and it’s not overly complex but it is there.

The major weakness is Lee Floyd. Silverberg does a fine job letting us know what kind of man he is and what makes him tick. Then suddenly halfway though the novel Floyd starts doing things that are totally and wildly out of character, for no good reason. It doesn’t ring true. Given that Lee Floyd is more or less the noir protagonist here that’s a real problem.

You do have to keep in mind that Silverberg churned these sleaze novels out astonishingly quickly. If you wanted to make money from this sort of writing you needed to be prolific. Silverberg was extremely prolific and he made a very comfortable living from his sleaze novels. Given that this novel would have been written very very quickly it’s no surprise that it feels a bit like a first draft. Essentially it is a first draft. You sit down at your typewriter and write and once you’re finished you put the manuscript in an envelope and post it off. You then wait for your cheque to arrive. You don’t bother revising. You won’t get paid any extra if you spend time polishing and revising.

There is for example the subplot involving the private detective. It just doesn’t go anywhere or serve any purpose but I guess Silverberg figured that there should be a private detective in the story.

There are so many sex scenes that the crime plot never has the chance to develop much momentum or sense of urgency.

On the plus side the novel has a fairly decent femme fatale. It also has a scuzzy cynical vibe. All of the characters are worthless human beings. They’re right at home in the noir universe. There’s the right atmosphere of desperation and sordidness. There is just enough here to indicate that, had he really put his mind to it, Silverberg could have written a fine noir novel.

Sadly Killer just isn’t all that good. As noir it doesn’t quite make it although it has a few good moments. As sleaze fiction it’s OK but Silverberg wrote much better sleaze novels, such as his excellent 1959 Gang Girl. Killer is maybe worth a look but don’t set your expectations too high.

Malko: West of Jerusalem

SAS à l'ouest de Jérusalem was the ninth of the Malko secret agent thrillers written by French former newspaper reporter Gérard de Villiers (1929-2013). It was published in 1967 and was translated into English as Malko: West of Jerusalem in 1969.

The Malko series ran to 200 novels and was hugely popular.

The hero is Malko Linge, an Austrian prince. He does jobs for the CIA but he isn’t actually employed by them. His motivation is money. The family castle needs to be restored and he needs a lot of money. Despite this he has a reputation for honesty and reliability.

The book opens with the Director of the CIA, Foster Hillman, jumping out of a window to his death. This causes a major crisis. He had no health or money problems and no entanglements with women. Is it possible he killed himself because he had turned traitor and was about to be exposed? This seems impossible. Hillman was an all-American patriot and all-round great guy. But it would be a plausible explanation for his suicide. There’s also the possibility he was being blackmailed.

The CIA decides to keep his death a secret and Malko is given the job of impersonating Hillman on the telephone, using a high-tech gizmo that can copy anybody’s speech patterns exactly.

After receiving a mysterious phone call from a woman Malko sets up a meeting with her but it all goes horribly wrong. He does however now have a lead, a lead that points to the Middle East. Soon there’s another lead - a woman’s amputated finger. There’s been a kidnapping and it is connected in some way with Foster Hillman.

Malko ends up in Sardinia, infiltrating the vast estate owned by a lecherous Middle Eastern emir. Malko knows he’s on to something when somebody tries to kill him.

It was 1964 when de Villiers started writing the Malko novels so there’s an obvious Bond influence. There are exotic settings and rich powerful men with evil plans, there are glamorous women.There’s that slight hint of sadism that is often associated with Bond. There’s also plenty of sex.

It takes a while for the action to kick in but when it does it’s pretty good. There are speedboat chases and helicopters, the occasional explosion and an abundance of gunplay.

There’s a cool scene with crocodiles.

There are also some rather dark and even grim moments.

The decadence of the Jet Set plays a major part in the story and there’s even an orgy.

Malko is a standard Bond-style secret agent hero - he’s debonair, always exquisitely dressed, he’s sophisticated and he’s tough. He definitely has an eye for the ladies and they find him very attractive.

Mercifully de Villiers doesn’t get heavily into politics. The Middle Eastern background adds an air of mystery and intrigue and an excuse for a solid espionage plot. That plot isn’t overly complex but it works.

There are clear-cut bad guys and they’re suitably sinister and vicious. And colourful.

Reading a book in translation obviously makes it impossible to say anything about the prose. It is however obvious that de Villiers knew how to handle action and suspense.

This is a very competent spy thriller and definitely belongs to the high adventure school of spy fiction rather than the dark and gritty and cynical school. Highly recommended.

Berkeley Livingston’s Queen of the Panther World

Berkeley Livingston’s science fiction novel Queen of the Panther World was published in Fantastic Adventures in July 1948.


It starts with a guy named Berkeley Livingston (yes the author has made himself a character in the book) visiting the zoo with his buddy Hank. They’re looking at the panthers. One of the panthers is much bigger than the others and seems different somehow. Hank has the crazy idea that the panther is communicating with him.

There’s a woman named Luria and Hank thinks she can communicate with him by some sort of telepathy. Luria decides to take Hank on a journey and Berk agrees to tag along. She’s going to take them to her world. Berk naturally thinks it’s all crazy talk, until suddenly the three of them are not in Chicago any more. They’re on a strange planet and there are giant lizard-like creatures with human riders.

The idea of transporting a story’s hero to another planet by simply hand-waving it away as “mind over matter” had already been used many times. It’s not a satisfying solution if you’re trying to write hard science fiction but if you’re writing what is essentially a fantasy novel it’s an acceptable technique and at least you don’t have to bother with a lot of unconvincing techno-babble. It’s basically magic but it does the job.

This strange planet is very strange indeed. The sun never sets. There are other odd things about it. Everybody falls asleep at exactly the same moment.

Luria’s society is a society run by women. The men do the housework and obey orders. The problem is that there’s a villain named Loko planning to establish his rule over the whole planet by force. While Luria’s amazons are brave enough she’s not convinced that they can stand up to Loko’s army. The men of Luria’s tribe are passive and helpless but they will have to be persuaded to fight against Loko. Things will have to change. The men will have to regain their self-respect. In reality you’d expect such a social revolution to be difficult to achieve but in this book it just happens overnight because the plot demands it.

Berk and Hank have various narrow escapes from danger. They get captured by Loko’s minions, as does Luria. There are various battles between the opposing forces. It’s all basic fantasy adventure stuff.

There’s also a bird. A parrot. But he’s no ordinary parrot.

Naturally Hank and Luria fall in love, and Berk falls in love with one of Luri’s amazon warriors.

Although we’re told that the inhabitants of this planet once had advanced technology this novel does not really qualify as a sword-and-planet story. It just doesn’t have quite the right feel, even though there are obvious Edgar Rice Burroughs influences. It doesn’t quite have a sword-and-sorcery feel either.

The tone is something of a problem. At times it seems to be veering towards a tongue-in-cheek approach but it lacks the lightness of touch needed to pull it off, and at other times it seems to be playing things rather straight.

It all seems like a rehashing of ideas culled from better stories by better writers. The world-building is not overly impressive. The interestingly strange things about this world are never explored in depth or explained in any way.

The social and psychological implications of a society having to undergo a total social revolution are not explored at all.

There’s also a lack of any emotional depth. We feel that the romances between the two heroes and their amazon girlfriends are necessary for the plot so they just happen without any real emotional tension ever being developed.

This is the kind of story that I usually enjoy but in this case it’s not handled well and the book is rather shoddily written. It all falls rather flat. I really cannot recommend this novel.

This novella has been paired with Jack Williamson’s truly excellent novella Hocus-Pocus Universe in an Armchair Fiction two-novel paperback edition. Hocus-Pocus Universe is so good that the paperback is worth buying for that reason alone.

The Phantom Detective: The Dancing Doll Murders

The Phantom Detective was a pulp magazine published from 1933 to 1953, with each issue containing a Phantom Detective novel. It was obviously inspired by the success of The Shadow which began its run in 1931.

The Dancing Doll Murders was the 52nd of the 170 Phantom Detective novels. It was credited to Robert Wallace, a pseudonym used by several writers. It appeared in the June 1937 issue.

The Phantom is a typical pulp masked crime-fighter. His true identity is known only to crusading newspaper publisher Frank Havens. The Phantom is in reality Richard Curtis Van Loan, a very rich and apparently very idle young man.

The Phantom naturally has a secret hideout with a well-equipped scientific laboratory. His main weapon however is his genius for disguise. This genius stretches credibility to a breathtaking degree - in a few minutes The Phantom can take on the appearance of any man.

The Dancing Doll Murders boasts a very cool opening. A rich old man is dying and his heirs are gathered to make sure of getting their shares of the spoils. One of the heirs, Don Winstead, has just received an odd package. It’s a German musical box with a dancing doll. The doll looks just like Don Winstead, except for the knife protruding from its chest. A few minutes later three masked men break in and now Don Winstead really does have a knife protruding from his chest!

The family lawyer, Squires, believes he possesses a vital clue but he will only reveal to the famous Phantom. Unfortunately before can do this he receives a dancing doll and soon he is dead as well.

The Phantom is determined to crack this case. He has an idea of the identity of the next intended victim. Perhaps his talent for disguise will prove useful. It does prove useful, up to a point.

An enormous amount of mayhem ensues. There are gun battles, knifings, trucks used as battering rams, car chases and speedboat chases. Time and again The Phantom finds himself in situations from escape seems impossible.

The pacing is breathless. It’s an adrenalin rush rollercoaster of action.

Believability was clearly not a priority. The bad guys can open fire at The Phantom with multiple submachine guns and somehow every slug misses its mark. But this is a masked crimefighter pulp hero story so you don’t expect anything even vaguely resembling realism. What matters is that the story keeps powering along. Which it does.

The Phantom is certainly quick-thinking, which is more than can be said for the goons sent to eliminate him. They’re all drug addicts anyway so you don’t expect them to be overly efficient.

There is of course a diabolical criminal mastermind and he has a very ingenious hideout.

The style is ultra-pulpy. I'm fine with that.

The plot is actually not too bad, with some fairly neat twists.

The Dancing Doll Murders is pure pulp entertainment and while it features lots of familiar ideas it’s all done with energy and flair. Highly recommended.

Wildside Press have reprinted this book in paperback.

Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr Goodbar

Judith Rossner’s novel Looking for Mr Goodbar was published in 1975 and was a huge bestseller. The 1977 film adaptation was a major hit. Both the novel and the film have since disappeared into obscurity. They deal with grown-up subject matter that is now more or less off-limits. Today you’d have to add lots of trigger warnings and even then the novel probably would not get published today and for several reasons the movie certainly could not be made today.

The novel was inspired by a real-life case of a young female schoolteacher who lived a double life, cruising the singles bars at night looking for pick-ups.

The novel reveals the ending right at the very beginning. The movie doesn’t quite do this but the novel was so notorious that viewers at the time probably knew how the movie was going to end. Nonetheless I don’t want to reveal what might be considered spoilers for the movie so I’m going to be very vague about certain plot details.

I often find that when I watch a movie and read the source novel shortly afterwards I find myself dissatisfied with the movie. This however is an interesting case - both the novel and the movie are seriously flawed but extremely interesting and they’re flawed and interesting in quite different ways.

In this review I’ll be devoting quite a bit of attention to the difference between the novel and the film because those differences are so intriguing.

It’s significant that the movie was made in 1977 and the key events of the story clearly take place in the mid-70s. It’s a very 70s movie. The key events of the novel all take place in the mid to late 60s. It’s very much a 60s novel.

Theresa Dunn is a college student having an affair with her professor. The affair lasts four years but it’s far from smooth sailing and then Theresa finds herself dumped. She graduates and becomes a teacher. She likes teaching small children. Her attitudes towards children are as contradictory as her attitudes towards most things.

Her childhood was difficult. She suffered serious illness which left her with a slight limp and a large scar on her back. Her Catholic upbringing caused her problems as well. The movie deals with her childhood very economically but very effectively. We learn everything we need to know in a few brief scenes. The book explores her childhood in painstaking and obsessively unnecessary detail.

Theresa’s relationships with men are turbulent and mostly disastrous, complicated by her sexual problems. She picks up men in bars. She becomes involved with men who are clearly trouble. She pushes away any man who falls in love with her. She becomes involved in the drug scene. She gets mixed up in the swinger lifestyle. She becomes, briefly, a hooker (mostly for the thrill of rebellion rather than the money). She becomes trapped in a potentially dangerous spiral of risk-taking behaviour.

In the movie she’s a woman looking for love in all the wrong places. In the novel she’s a woman looking for sex in all the wrong places. In the novel it is quite clear that Theresa likes rough dangerous sex. The rougher and more dangerous the better. The movie does offer hints of her sexual obsessions but they’re downplayed. Even in 1977 and even with an X rating there was no way a major studio was going to allow sadomasochism to be dealt with openly and honestly. Theresa’s sexual kinks are the core of her story and since the movie sidesteps that side of her sexuality Theresa’s motivations in the film end up being unclear and most of the story’s impact is lost. In that respect the movie compares very unfavourably with the novel.

The movie gives us Theresa’s story, with just a couple of unnecessary and undeveloped sub-plots. In the novel those sub-plots are still unnecessary and poorly developed but they’re a much more annoying distraction. In the novel my impression is that Rossner wanted to combine Theresa’s story with a sociological-political-cultural history of the 60s. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that but it makes the novel much more unfocussed and rambling than the movie. So in that respect the movie is superior. Incidentally Rossner hated the movie.

The novel has major problems but at least it tries to grapple with confronting and uncomfortable subjects. I think both novel and film are worth checking out but neither is totally satisfactory. I’m still recommending the novel.

I’ve also reviewed the movie.

Jack Williamson’s Hocus-Pocus Universe

Jack Williamson’s science fiction novella Hocus-Pocus Universe was published in the pulp magazine Science Stories in October 1953.

Charley Guilborn is a high school science teacher. He’s fallen in love with Carol, one of his students. Carl however is in love with Eon Hunter, another student. Eon is Charley’s most disturbing pupil. He’s the worst student in the class even though he’s clearly very bright.

One day Charley sets up a simple experiment to demonstrate one of the basic laws of physics. It fails. Which is impossible. It fails over and over again. There’s nothing wrong with the equipment. But it keeps failing.

Eon is a misfit. He knows he doesn’t fit into the world and he talks about crazy stuff like changing the world so he will fit in. He also paints. One day Charley gets to see one of Eon’s paintings. It’s a painting of a nude girl in a fantastic landscape and she’s feeding flowers to a dinosaur. It’s strange but oddly fascinating and disturbing. There’s something else disturbing about it - Carol was clearly the model for the nude girl. That painting will later become very important.

The romantic triangle involving Carol, Eon and Charley doesn’t work out for any of them. Eon leaves school. Charley gives up his teaching post and a few years later he’s working in a top-secret government research project.

It’s a very important project. The Fate of the Free World is at stake. The aim is to build a hydro-lithium nuclear fusion rocket engine. The idea is scientifically impossible but Charley Guilborn thinks he’s found a way to make it work.

He hasn’t seen Carol or Eon for several years but suddenly they show up. Eon delivers a strange warning to Charley. If the hydro-lithium drive works it will trigger an uncontrolled chain reaction that will mean the end of the world. But it doesn’t matter, because the drive won’t work. This disturbs Charley because he knows the drive will work and he doesn’t believe there’s any scientific possibility that will have disastrous consequences. And yet there’s something about Eon that makes him wonder.

There are some very very cool ideas in this novella. I’m not going to risk spoilers by revealing exactly what those ideas entail.

Equally interesting is the psychological-social dimension. It’s all about belief. Belief is a critical factor in this story, in more than one way.

The 50s was a fascinating decade. Under the surface optimism and naïve faith in science there were strange undercurrents. There was the Cold War hysteria, and the juvenile delinquency hysteria. The counter-culture came into being in the 50s. The first faint stirrings of cultism had begun. There was the UFO craze. What’s really interesting is that Jack Williamson was tapping into these undercurrents as early as 1953.

This is a science fiction novella but it certainly pushes the boundaries of the genre. It pushes them quite a long way.

This is a big ideas story but the big ideas are not in any way conventional scientific ideas. Or rather there’s a mixture of scientific and pre-scientific big ideas. A considerable suspension of disbelief is required from the reader but if you don’t mind that it’s a wild ride and there’s a lot to enjoy. Highly recommended and if you like off-the-wall science fiction I’d bump that up to very highly recommended.

This novella has been paired with Berkeley Livingston’s 1948 novel Queen of the Panther World in an Armchair Fiction two-novel paperback edition.

I’ve reviewed other works by Jack Williamson - The Alien Intelligence and The Legion of Space. They’re very early works but they’re worth checking out.

M.G. Braun’s Apostles of Violence

Apostles of Violence is one of M.G. Braun’s Al Glenne spy thrillers. It was published in French in 1962 as Apôtres De La Violence. The English translation dates from 1966.

M.G. Braun was the pseudonym used by Maurice Gabriel Édouard Brault (1912-1984), a very successful and prolific French writer of detective and spy fiction. Between 1954 and 1978 he wrote an immense number of Al Glenne spy novels. Sadly only four were translated into English.

The cover blurb naturally tells us that Al Glenne is the French James Bond. Personally I thought this novel was much closer in feel to an Alistair MacLean thriller. It uses the same technique of putting a first person narrator hero into an incredibly hostile environment, an environment that becomes as much of a threat as the bad guys. The hero is also more like an Alistair MacLean hero than a James Bond. It resembles MacLean’s thrillers in another way but I can’t say more since that might give away a spoiler.

This is a spy action thriller but it is also a kind of murder mystery. The book puts a group of people into an isolated situation and one of them is a killer.

French secret service agent Al Glenne is sent to Venezuela to retrieve a satellite. He will be working under a more senior French agent, a man named Théo. The satellite came down in the middle of the jungle. The French secret service people are excited because they think they have a lead that will get them to the satellite before their rivals (which includes the Russians, the Americans and the British). The French and the British don’t know if the satellite is American or Russian. What they do know is that there is a super-advanced laser on board and they want that laser. At the moment the French are lagging behind the Russians and the Americans in this technology but if they can get hold of this laser they will catch up overnight.

Al Glenne and Théo parachute into the jungle. Everything goes smoothly at first. They now have the laser. Then everything goes wrong. They find themselves with three enemies to deal with - a very hostile local tribe plus an American and a British secret service team.

There is now a party comprising about a dozen assorted spies from rival powers all thrown together and nobody trusts anybody. With good reason. It’s not long before one of the British spies is murdered, by an unknown killer. The killer must be a member of this ill-assorted party.

An added complication is their local guide, Innocencia. Innocencia is young, very female, very pretty and absurdly over-sexed. As you might imagine this adds considerably to the uneasy atmosphere.

And other members of the party turn up dead. Murdered.

The only way out of this nightmare is a long long trek through the jungle to reach a seaplane that (they hope) is waiting for them. They have no radio. And the rains are about to arrive.

As much as anything else this is a saga of survival, with plenty of paranoia thrown in.

The plot is quite solid with plenty of twists. There are some clues scattered through the novel that make the final twist at the end plausible.

Although there’s a high body count this is more of a mystery/suspense thriller than an action thriller. And both the mystery and the suspense are handled effectively. Innocencia’s presence adds plenty of sexual tension - all the men want her.

All in all this is an enjoyable spy thriller and having a French spy as the hero adds interest. Highly recommended.