Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way!

Murder on the Way! is a 1935 novel by Theodore Roscoe. It was originally published in the pulp magazine Argosy under the title A Grave Must Be Deep. I can’t tell you which genre it belongs to because I have no idea. And I don’t care. All I know is that it’s insane amounts of fun.

Theodore Roscoe (1906-1992) was one of the grandmasters of pulp fiction and writer some of the finest stories ever written about adventure in exotic settings. He spent some time in Haiti in the early 1930s which gives this novel an air of authenticity.

Patricia Dale (known to her friends as Pete) is more or less engaged to a more or less penniless artist in New York. An artist by the name of Cartershall. Pete always refers to him as Cart. Then a strange little Haitian lawyer shows up. He announces that he is Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, Comte de Limonade. Pete is in line for an inheritance from her Uncle Eli. He has left a huge fortune and a vast estate in Haiti. All Pete has to do is go to Haiti. So she and Cart fly to Haiti.

It’s all a bit of a culture shock but the reading of the will is a bigger shock. The will is eccentric to say the least (and the method of burial prescribed for Uncle Eli is very bizarre). The seven heirs have been assembled and they’re the most disreputable bunch of cut-throats one could imagine. Several of them are murderers. The entire estate goes to one of them but he must remain at the estate for 24 hours after the reading of the will. If he fails to do that the inheritance passes to the next in line, with the same condition attached. Pete is the last in line. Given that the other six are villainous scoundrels there’s obviously the potential here for murder. Multiple murder.

It’s the kind of setup you might find in an English country house murder mystery and such books were hugely popular in 1935. The seven heirs plus Uncle Eli’s doctor and Tousellines are completely cut off at the estate. The weather has made the roads impassable. Someone has cut the telephone wires. This is the kind of setup you’d find in an Old Dark House movie, and these popular at the time as well.

For most of the book it seems like it’s going to be a story along such lines, albeit in a very exotic setting. And written in a flamboyant outrageous pulpy style and with rollercoaster pacing.

The locals follow the Voodoo religion. Roscoe isn’t making any of this stuff up. Voodoo was arguably the dominant religion in Haiti at the time.

There are a couple of extra complications. Uncle Eli may have been murdered. His doctor thinks he may have been murdered by a zombie. And there is a bandit uprising which could spread to the whole country and the rebels claim to be led by the King of the Zombies. The King of the Zombies being - Uncle Eli!

The expected mayhem occurs. There are lots of murders. All the murders take place in bizarre circumstances.

The local police chief, Lieutenant Narcisse, is perplexed. He suspects everybody. Which is not entirely unreasonable.

Cart and Pete will meet the King of the Zombies. This is one of those tales in which you cannot be quite sure if there’s something supernatural going on or not. Whether that really is the case is obviously something I’m not going to tell you.

This is a murder mystery and a suspense thriller and a horror story and an occult thriller. There’s lots of craziness. There are secret passageways and all the fun things you get in Old Dark House stories.

Murder on the Way! is just wildly entertaining. Highly recommended. And it's in print!

Roscoe revisited some of these themes a couple of years later in the equally superb Z Is For Zombie, also set in Haiti. And if you enjoy jungle adventure tales check out Blood Ritual.

Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City

Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City was published in 1938. The 1950 film adaptation, regarded as a classic of film noir, is now much better remembered than the novel. The movie has little in common with the novel. The 1992 film adaptation has an even more tenuous connection with the novel.

Gerald Kersh was British-born but later became an American citizen. He enjoyed some success during his lifetime but is now entirely forgotten. Interestingly enough, given that the novel deals with professional wrestling, Kersh was at one time a professional wrestler.

The novel can at a stretch be considered noir fiction but it is not a crime thriller in the conventional sense. It is a novel of the criminal underworld in London but this is not the underworld of gangsters and bank robbers. This is the world of sleazy businessmen who have never been involved in a single really honest business deal in their lives. They run clip joints. They’re involved in crooked sports promotion. They’re mixed up in anything that can turn a profit.

The protagonist is Harry Fabian. He’s a Cockney who pretends to be an American. He is a small-time pimp (or ponce as they were called then in Britain) but likes to give the impression that he is a professional song-writer who has hobnobbed with Hollywood movie stars. In fact he’s never set foot outside of England. He has never knowingly told the truth in his life. He lives on the earnings of his prostitute girlfriend Zoë.

Now he’s planning something big. He’s going to be a big-time wrestling promoter. Harry is a fake but he does understand one thing - wrestling is showbiz. His idea is to make it even more phoney than it already is but to make it entertaining. He has found a partner. Figler is no more honest than Harry. The idea is one that might work, but Harry has neither the brains nor the drive nor the self-discipline to make it work. He blows the capital for the venture on making a big splash at the Silver Fox night club.

At this point his story intersects with the stories of two girls, Vi and Helen. They’re hostesses at the Silver Fox. Vi is a part-time whore but won’t admit it. She makes most of her money by taking drunken customers home, sleeping with them and then robbing them. Helen has more ambition but also a streak of ruthlessness.

And then there’s Adam. He works at the Silver Fox but he also hangs out at Harry Fabian’s training gym. Adam wants to be a sculptor. It’s mostly a fantasy, just like Harry’s fantasies, Adam is madly in love with Helen. Helen sleeps with Adam and lets him think she loves him but her ambitions to make money matter more to her than love.

If you want to take a deep dive into squalor, degradation and misery this is the novel for you. Every single character is either crooked or deluded or vicious. They are all losers. Kersh doesn’t just want us to see the squalor, he wants us to smell it. It’s clear that he regards humanity with contempt. He seems to be particularly repelled by women. Life is worthless, meaningless, cheap and sordid. Everybody lies. They lie to others and they lie to themselves. In Kersh’s world everybody betrays somebody. He clearly sees women as being especially treacherous.

These people are losers for various reasons but mostly they all live in a world of fantasies and illusions. When they have something worthwhile they throw it away.

The only character possessing even a shred of decency is Zoë. She’s a prostitute, but an honest one. She offers Harry her love, but he thinks he can do better.

I very much doubt that Kersh thought of himself as a crime writer, or a genre writer. He had obvious literary aspirations. I suspect that he saw Night and the City as a serious novel about the seamy underside of English society.

Night and the City is actually rather similar in feel to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, coincidentally also published in 1938. If you count Brighton Rock as noir fiction then I think you could count Night and the City as noir fiction as well.

Night and the City is unrelentingly bleak and pessimistic but it does have a certain power. Harry Fabian is one fiction’s most memorable losers. Recommended.

John Norman's Assassin of Gor

Assassin of Gor, published in 1970, is the fifth of John Norman’s Gor novels. The Gor series needs to be read in publication order so I’m going to be very careful not to hint at any spoilers for the earlier books.

Tarl Cabot is from Earth. He ends up on Gor, a hitherto unknown planet in out solar system. Gorean society is quite primitive. The technological level seems to be roughly equivalent to that of the classical world. There are no cars or aircraft or firearms or radio. But it’s actually more complicated than that. There is high technology on Gor. Very advanced technology indeed. But the Goreans do not have access to it

There are competing and often warring city-states. The Goreans are human but the animals are not those of the Earth. The animals include tarns - gigantic carnivorous birds that can be tamed (up to a point) and ridden. They constitute a kind of flying mediaeval heavy cavalry.

Tarl Cabot is in the city of Ar. He has gone there to kill a man, but he has another more important mission. He is accompanied by Elizabeth Caldwell, an Earth girl who appeared in an earlier Gor novel. Tarl and Elizabeth have to infiltrate themselves into the retinue of the current ruler of the city.

The situation in Ar is in reality not quite as it appears to Tarl and Elizabeth. They’re in more danger than they think. And they haven’t been quite as clever as they thought.

There will be lots of betrayals and lots of mayhem including an epic blood-drenched tarn race which is a bit like the chariot races in Ancient Rome but with gigantic flying birds.

John Norman (born John Frederick Lange Jr in 1931) is a philosophy professor. With the Gor novels he created a thrilling world of sword-and-planet adventure owing quite a bit to Edgar Rice Burroughs but he was also sneaking in various philosophical and cultural influences. Norman cited Homer, Freud, and Nietzsche as his major influences.

There’s more to these novels than there appears to be on the surface.

It is also very important not to be tempted into knee-jerk reactions by the controversial elements. It’s also important not to take these books at face value and jump to the conclusion that Norman was advocating the cultural practices he described. If you avoid those knee-jerk reactions it’s obvious that Tarl Cabot is very ambivalent indeed about Gorean culture.

One of the things Norman was trying to do was to create fictional societies that are genuinely alien. In this series there are two - the Goreans (who are human) and the Priest-Kings (who are very very non-human). Both societies are culturally very different from societies on Earth. He was intent on examining Gorean society in a great deal of detail. We get a huge amount of information about the taming of the tarns and their use in both sport and war. And having created culturally different fictional societies he was prepared to explore the ramifications of those cultural differences.

Which brings us to the slavery issue. In Gor female slavery is taken for granted. Of course in most human societies for most of human history slavery was taken for granted but on Gor the female slaves are unequivocally sex slaves. It’s the suggestion that some (not most, but some) are not entirely unhappy about the arrangement that shocks many people. Norman explains the workings of slavery on Gor in enormous detail. In this book Elizabeth has to play the role of Tarl’s slave. And he really does, to an extent, train her as a slave. They both enjoy it, and she certainly enjoys being tied up. But of course they are in fact playing a game.

Norman is exploring some of the sides of both masculinity and femininity that make people today so uncomfortable.

The Gor books are certainly provocative but sometimes we need provocative fiction. Assassin of Gor is highly recommended but you must read the earlier books first.

I’ve reviewed all the earlier books in this series - Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor, Priest-Kings of Gor and Nomads of Gor.

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.

The Malignant Metaphysical Menace - The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. 6

Published in 1968, The Malignant Metaphysical Menace was the sixth of Mallory T. Knight’s The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. sexy spy thrillers. I believe there were nine books in the series.

Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1926-1987) wrote a number of spy thrillers in the late 60s and early 70s using the pseudonym Mallory T. Knight.

I had previously read the first book in the series, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy. That one came out in 1967. By 1968 the Flower Children were big news and the hippie thing was gathering steam, and The Malignant Metaphysical Menace reflects this. This is a far-out psychedelic freak-out of a spy thriller, if you can dig it.

Tim O’Shane is an ace agent for T.O.M.C.A.T., a super-secret U.S. spy agency. He is also an agent for a super-secret Soviet spy agency, but his real loyalty is to T.O.M.C.A.T.

He and his pal and fellow agent Ellis are now in the television production business although that is of course only their cover. They are investigating rumours that a charitable foundation set up by a child TV star named Corky Lovemore is involved in some secret research. She’s the star of a TV series, The Kids from K.I.S.S., and she has the reputation of being so wholesome and loveable that it’s nauseating. Her charitable foundation is the Corky Lovemore Institute To Originate Reforms In Science. I’ll let you figure out the acronym there. Mallory T. Knight just loves naughty acronyms!

The people making the TV series have a sideline - making blue movies.

What bothers Tim is that he has stumbled into some seriously freaky spook stuff - mediums, Chinese psychics, astral travelling and lots of psychedelic chemicals. There seems to be a connection to Corky Lovemore’s foundation. Tim’s psychic contacts (Tim himself is somewhat into this kind of scene) lead him to believe that what is really happening in so bizarre as to defy belief. But it involves aliens. Tim starts to feel that reality is a rug that has just been pulled out from under him.

The zombies are rather worrying as well.

More disturbing of all is that Corky Lovemore turns out to be not at all the cute adorable poppet she seems to be.

As you might have gathered this is very tongue-in-cheek stuff but the author pulls it off surprisingly well. There’s some genuinely inspired craziness, there’s some action, there’s murder and the plot moves along like an express train.

It gets crazier and crazier. While there are mind-altering substances involved it’s clear that seriously weird stuff involving the occult really is happening. This novel abandons the world of reality very early on. It’s a wild tongue-in-cheek romp. It is amusing and it really is fun in a very 1968 way.

There’s also a lot of sex. This is a sleazy spy thriller rather than merely a sexy spy thriller. With some science fiction and horror elements. It’s a book that gleefully rides roughshod over genre boundaries.

If you just let yourself be carried along by the zaniness there’s a lot good-natured enjoyment to be had in The Malignant Metaphysical Menace. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. book, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy.

Robert Bloch’s Psycho

Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho dates from 1959. A year later it would be the basis for one of Hitchcock’s most famous movies. I like Bloch as a writer so I can’t offer any adequate explanation for the fact that I had never read the novel until now.

There is one problem here. If you’ve seen the movie (and I’ve seen it several times) then you know something very important about Mother right from the start. I think it’s obvious that Bloch expects the reader to have very strong suspicions by the halfway point but it’s also obvious that he doesn’t intend for the reader to be absolutely certain. When you know for a certainty right from the beginning it does inevitably lessen the enjoyment of the novel quite a bit.

The movie followed the novel very closely, but with a couple of subtle but important differences of focus.

I never assume that everyone has seen a movie even when it’s as well-known as Psycho so I’m going to try to avoid spoilers.

Mary Crane (she becomes Marion Crane in the movie) has stolen a great deal of money from her boss. It’s Friday. Nobody will know the money is gone until the banks open on Monday (banks being closed on weekends was always a useful plot device in crime thrillers of the past). Mary has covered her tracks well. She has switched cars several times. Now she’s lost so she’s very grateful when she sees the motel Vacancy sign. She needs to eat, and to sleep.

The motel manager is a slightly odd guy named Norman Bates. He lives in the house behind the motel with his mother.

The first thing Mary needs to do is to change her clothes. Of course she doesn’t know that Norman is watching her undress through a hole in the wall.

After having dinner (which Norman was kind enough to prepare for her) she really needs to take a shower.

Other people will become involved. People like insurance investigator Arbogast. He wants to recover the stolen money. He’s prepared to offer Mary a deal. If she returns the money no charges will be laid. Mary’s boyfriend Sam Loomis and her kid sister Lila will also become involved. They all want to find Mary.

Hitchcock made a very daring narrative choice in the film. Something happens a third of the way through that you don’t expect to happen at that stage. This also happens in the novel but in the novel it’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing you find in plenty of crime novels. It’s a very big deal in the movie because Hitchcock very cleverly misleads us into thinking that a particular character is the central character but the central character is actually someone else. It’s just a slight change of emphasis but it’s enough to demonstrate Hitchcock’s genius.

The movie made a few interesting changes. In the novel Norman Bates is 40, very overweight and balding. Apart from his other issues he is clearly very physically unappealing to women and that’s a major part of his problem. You get the feeling that all it would have taken would have been for one woman to go on a date with him and then he might have had a chance of avoiding all the subsequent disasters. By casting Tony Perkins, a fairly good-looking actor with a great deal of charm, Hitchcock emphasises Norman’s tragedy. He is not a hopeless loser because women find him repulsive. He really didn’t have to end up as a hopeless loser.

This makes him a tragic oddly sympathetic monster which was presumably Hitchcock’s intention. And Hitchcock’s instincts were correct. The movie packs more of an emotional punch. All Norman needs is to find the confidence to actually approach a woman. If he did, she might well go out with him. But he never does find that confidence and tragedy ensues.

It’s intriguing that Brian De Palma made a similar change when he adapted Stephen King’s Carrie. In King’s novel Carrie is very overweight which emphasises her inability to attract interest from boys. In De Palma’s movie Carrie is no super-babe but she’s kinda cute in her own quirky way. When Tommy takes her to the prom he really isn’t embarrassed to be seen with her, or to be seen dancing with her and kissing her. Carrie goes so close to making it.

Psycho is very much one of those stories that requires the reader (or the viewer in the case of the movie) to take the wild and wacky theories of psychiatry seriously. Back in 1960 people actually did take this stuff seriously. It’s also a story that really doesn’t work once you know the solution, and that’s an even bigger problem with the novel. At least the movie has Hitchcock’s stunning visual set-pieces. Psycho is far from being my favourite Hitchcock movie and the novel really doesn’t do much for me at all. Both the novel and the movie are greatly weakened by having things over-explained in a very unconvincing fashion. Worth reading perhaps if you’re a very keen fan of the movie.

James Hadley Chase's The Doll’s Bad News

The Doll’s Bad News (AKA Twelve Chinks and a Woman AKA Twelve Chinamen and a Woman) is a 1941 James Hadley Chase crime thriller. It was his third published novel.

James Hadley Chase (1906-1985) is an interesting figure in pulp fiction history. There was a time when paperback editions of his books were absolutely everywhere. Anywhere that paperbacks were sold his books would be there. He wrote ninety-odd novels which sold by the truckload. He is now almost entirely forgotten.

Chase was English but at the end of the 1930s he figured out that the formula for success was to write American-style hardboiled gangster stories with American settings. He had never been to America but he gave himself a crash course in American slang and the geography of American cities. He got some details wrong but his books were fast-moving, exciting and entertaining. They were also violent and had an appealingly lurid style.

The Doll’s Bad News starts with New York private eye Fenner getting a new client. She wants him to find her sister. Then some unknown guy phones and tries to convince Fenner that the girl is an escaped lunatic. Fenner isn’t buying that. He tells his secretary to stash the frail away in a hotel somewhere but the girl does a vanishing act.

Then things turn nasty and the case becomes personal for Fenner.

Fenner has a lead that takes him to Florida, to Key West. He poses as a gangster. There are two major gang bosses, Carlos and Noolen. Either one might perhaps lead him to that missing sister and to the solution to a murder. Carlos is mixed up in an illegal immigration racket. There are lots of unsavoury characters. There’s a rich guy named Thayler who owns a yacht. The nature of Thayler’s involvement isn’t clear. There are a couple of dangerous dames. Glorie is Thayler’s woman although it’s probably more complicated than that. There’s also Nightingale, who runs the funeral parlour. He has connection with both gangs.

Fenner’s idea is to play the chief gangsters off against each other. It’s a dangerous game but at least it will make things happen.

Things do indeed happen. A full-scale gang war erupts. It doesn’t erupt spontaneously - Fenner makes it erupt. There are epic gun battles on land and sea and lots of explosions. Chase figures his readers want plenty of mayhem and that’s what he’s going to give them.

Although there is some lurid subject matter there is curiously a total lack of actual sleaze content. Glorie makes it clear she’s up for some bedroom hijinks but Fenner isn’t buying. The reason for this may be Paula. Paula is Fenner’s secretary and there are hints that they’re in love with each other.

Fenner is also smart enough to know that when a case involves dangerous females a private eye who starts hopping into bed with said females can find himself in a whole world of hurt. He already has quite enough on his plate.

Fenner is a fairly typical private eye hero although perhaps more inclined to co-operate with the cops than most. He doesn’t want to bring the cops into this case because he has personal grudges to settle but he is careful not to alienate the cops. There is a definite streak of ruthlessness to Fenner. He’s one of the good guys but he’s not averse to exacting some private justice.

Chase keeps things moving along at a very brisk pace. There’s plenty of hardboiled dialogue and atmosphere. There’s a complicated but effective plot. It’s all nicely pulpy.

There’s plenty to enjoy in The Doll’s Bad News. I’ll definitely be checking out more of James Hadley Case’s work. Highly recommended.