Charles Williams' River Girl

River Girl, published in 1951, was the third novel by Charles Williams. Earlier that year he had had a major bestseller with Hill Girl.

Jack Marshall is a crooked deputy sheriff in a small town. He’s crooked in a small way. The sheriff, Buford, is crooked in a big way. They’re both under pressure from a crusading preacher.

Marshall is unhappily married and in debt and he’s disillusioned. Maybe a fishing trip will help.

That’s where he meets Doris. Doris and her husband Roger Spevlin live in a small shack at the far end of the lake. There’s something odd about them. They don’t talk the right way, the way people living in a remote shack eking out a living from trapping catfish should talk.

Doris is young and very beautiful but she’s very much on edge. And obviously very lonely. Marshall knows he should stay away from her. He also knows that he won’t.

Buford and Marshall are facing a major problem - a grand jury that could potentially blow the lid off the town’s corruption. That preacher, Soames, is planning to lead a moral crusade.

And there’s another problem. That girl in Abbie Bell’s whorehouse. That’s a scandal that will have to be hushed up.

All of these things - the grand jury, the young whore, Marshall’s obsession with Doris Spevlin - will intersect in interesting unpredictable ways.

The last thing Jack Marshall should do at this point in time is sleep with Doris Spevlin. But of course he does. They fall in love. Doris needs rescuing and Marshall starts to plan crazy ways of rescuing her. It all blows up in his face.

This is very much much noir fiction. Jack Marshall is a classic noir protagonist. He’s neither a good man nor a bad man. He’s a corrupt cop and he’s cynical but on the other hand he’s not violent. He has no desire to hurt anyone. He just wants to take his bribes (mostly to keep his status-obsessed wife happy) and be left alone and to spend as much time as possible fishing. He really does fall deeply for Doris. He really is trying to be a knight in shining armour although of course in payment for his trouble he expects to get the girl.

Jack’s biggest weakness is that he’s smart but not quite smart enough to get away with his complicated schemes.

Doris belongs to what I think of as the “innocent femme fatale” sub-type. She’s not a bad girl but she’s trouble and Jack should run away from her as fast as he can. Although she’s the one who leads Jack to disaster she’s perhaps the closest thing this book has to a reasonably admirable character.

Dinah is more of a classic femme fatale. She’s Buford’s mistress. She’s beautiful, glamorous, sexy and clever. She takes one look at Jack Marshall and decides he’s a big, dumb, hulking thug. That’s OK. Big, dumb, hulking thugs excite her quite a bit. Then she realises that he’s clever and devious. Now she’s really excited. With Dinah what you see is what you get. She looks like a very high-priced whore which is in practice what she is. But then she doesn’t pretend to be a Sunday school teacher.

Buford is not quite a straight-out villain. He’s as crooked as they come but his corruption is relatively harmless. As far as he’s concerned if a man wants to have a drink after hours or place a few bets or have a bit of fun with the girls at Miss Abbie’s cat house there’s no harm in any of that. By taking bribes to let those things happen he’s just allowing people to enjoy themselves. He would never take a bribe from a murder or an armed robber.

There aren’t any out-and-out villains in this story. All the characters are morally ambiguous without being evil.

Since this is noir fiction there is of course a sense of impending doom. Jack and Doris are like fish who’ve taken the bait.They can struggle but there’s no escape. It’s hard to see any way out for them. The odds are just stacked against them. All they have is their love but that may not be enough.

River Girl is top-notch noir fiction. Highly recommended.

Stark House have paired this one with another Williams classic, Nothing in Her Way.

The Trigan Empire

The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire was a 1960s British comic-strip written by Mike Butterworth and drawn by Don Lawrence. I’ve just finished reading the first volume of the recent reprint which includes the first thirteen stories in the series.

Don Lawrence (1928-2003) was an English comic book artist and author.

The Trigan Empire was originally published in the weekly papers Ranger and Look and Learn from 1965 to 1982. Lawrence did the artwork from 1965 to 1976. Lawrence later went on to the Storm series about a time-travelling astronaut. He also did the naughty lighthearted Carrie strip for the men’s magazine Mayfair. Carrie is a nice girl but she just can’t keep her clothes on.

The Trigan Empire is a science fiction epic set on a distant Earth-like planet, Elekton. There are quite a few different cultures, some much more technologically advanced than others. Trigo and his brothers rule a very technologically backward warrior society. Trigo can see the writing on the wall. They will inevitably be conquered by their more advanced neighbours.

Trigo is determined to transform his primitive kingdom into a modern major power. The first step is to build a city. A great city. It will be the nucleus of a great empire.

Trigo pursues his objectives through numerous wars. He makes allies. He suffers betrayals. He has narrows escapes from disaster. But his belief in the future never wavers.

All of this provides an excuse for non-stop action.

This was clearly aimed at a younger readership. There’s no hint of sex or nudity. You can be confident that the bad guys will be vanquished. But it still manages to deal with some grown-up themes (ambition, divided loyalties, betrayal). It’s more than just a kids’ comic strip. I suppose that today it would be seen as being aimed at a Young Adult market.

Trigo is an interesting hero. He’s brave of course and he’s a fine charismatic energetic leader, but his judgment in personal matters is often very poor.

One of Trigo’s brothers is smart but treacherous while the other is loyal and brave but not outstandingly bright.

Although it concerns a galactic empire it takes a long long time before the action movies to outer space. In fact it takes a long time before the Trigan Empire even gets as far as the Moon.

I think the slow build-up works. Mighty empires start small. Trigo’s petty kingdom is initially totally insignificant. It’s not going to become a global power, or on an interstellar power, overnight. In this case it happens because Trigo (despite occasional errors of judgment) has vision, determination and charisma.

He also has a very realistic understanding of power. He would have been quite happy for his little principality to be left alone but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. You either dominate or you get dominated. You either conquer your neighbours or they will conquer you.

This first volume ends with the Trigan Empire on the verge of making the major move beyond its home planet.

Don Lawrence’s artwork is lively and pretty cool.

This is entertaining stuff and I’m certainly tempted to get hold of the later volumes in the series. Recommended for space opera aficionados.

Michael Crichton's Scratch One

Michael Crichton is best remembered for his novels in the science fiction/techno-thriller genres but early in his career he wrote quite a few straightforward thrillers using the pseudonym John Lange. Scratch One, published in 1967, was his second novel.

The basic concept, a poor innocent schmuck who gets drawn into a web of espionage and has no idea what is going on, has been used often but here it’s done with real style and energy. In this case it begins with a case of mistaken identity.

Roger Carr is an American lawyer who is in Nice to buy a villa for a client. He really is just a lawyer. And he really is in France to be a villa. Unfortunately he looks just enough like Morgan to be mistaken for him by someone making an identification solely from a photograph. And he’s arrived on the plane on which Morgan was expected to be travelling. Who is Morgan? Morgan is an assassin employed by the US Government. By the CIA in fact.

Morgan had been assigned by the CIA to kill every member of an Arab organisation known as the Associates. The five members of the Associates have found out about an arms deal involving Israel. It’s an arms deal that the Americans wanted kept secret. There were various options for dealing with the Associates but in order to avoid embarrassing publicity the CIA felt the best method was simply to kill them all.

The Associates know about Morgan. They want him dealt with and they have mistaken Roger Carr for the assassin. The local CIA people are also under the impression that Roger Carr is Morgan.

Roger Carr isn’t a great lawyer but he’s rather a success with the ladies. And then Anne comes along. Anne is an Australian model. He really likes her and he starts to fall for her, hard.

Anne gets captured. Poor old Roger gets captured and tortured by the Associates. He gets arrested by the French cops as well. And interrogated by the CIA. Nobody believes anything he says. This is the world of espionage. There are endless layers of deception. He could be a simple lawyer pretending to be an assassin pretending o be a regular lawyer. Everyone assumes that everyone else is lying. The most confusing thing you can do is tell the truth. If you genuinely seem to be telling the truth then you must be lying.

Roger is a bumbling amateur. But the truth is that the Associates are bumbling amateurs as well. They make a mess of even the simplest assassinations. And the CIA guys are bunglers as well. The guys who take all this espionage stuff most seriously and think of themselves as professionals are the worst bunglers of all. Roger really is a compete amateur but he’s not as foolish and incompetent as the professionals.

The French cops actually do know what they’re doing but they’re hamstrung by their reluctance to get embroiled in a major CIA fiasco.

The Associates are the bad guys but the whole CIA operation is sleazy and immoral. There aren’t really any straightforward bad guys. The arms deal is essentially a MacGuffin. Crichton isn’t interested in the politics. He’s interested in the amount of mayhem that can be caused by spy agencies and spy rings who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, and he’s interested in the duplicity of the entire word of espionage. He handles this subject with style and wit.

And he gives some fine action and suspense and thrills as well.

This may seem odd but this book reminds me a bit of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War, a great novel (probably le Carré’s finest) about a hopelessly bungled British intelligence operation. Both le Carré’s novel and Scratch One have more than a touch of absurdism. The le Carré book is darker but both have touches of black comedy.

I enjoyed Scratch One so much that I’m now anxious to read all of Crichton’s early thrillers. Highly recommended.

Ki-Gor, The Complete Series Volume 1

The Ki-Gor stories by John Peter Drummond were published in the pulp magazine Jungle Stories, beginning in 1938. The Complete Series Volume 1 edition contains six early stories.

These are jungle adventure tales very very obviously influenced by the Tarzan stories. In fact the basic premise is pretty much lifted directly from the original 1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs novel Tarzan of the Apes.

A formula soon emerges in these stories. These are not tales of a jungle man battling poachers or diamond smugglers or anything along that line. Ki-Gor is pitted against more outrageous dangers - crazed would-be emperors, armies of man-like apes and lost civilisations.

He acquires several allies including his faithful elephant Marmo. But the most important is American society girl and heiress, and daring aviatrix, Helene Vaughn. Ki-Gor has never seen a cute redhead before and he’s impressed. To Helene Ki-Gor seems to be a tall muscular wild half-savage untamed wild man. That’s how she likes her men.

Pretty soon they are obviously shacked up together in various jungle lairs. He always refers to her as his woman. In the sixth story, completely out of the blue, it is suggested that they actually married during their brief time together in England. Perhaps the author decided it might be wise to throw that in to counter possible accusations of immorality since it’s very plain in the first five stories that Ki-Gor and Helene are sharing a bed.

The first story, Ki-Gor: King of the Jungle, begins with bold but foolhardy young American aviatrix Helene Vaughn crashing her red monoplane in the African jungle. She is rescued from several imminent dangers by a blond-haired blue-eyed jungle man. He speaks English, after a fashion. She soon figures out that he is English, the son of a missionary who perished in this jungle twenty years earlier. His name is actually Robert Kilgour. He calls himself Ki-Gor. He has lived alone in the jungle from the age of six.

Ki-Gor is pretty much a Tarzan clone, although perhaps a bit more bloodthirsty. He is of course totally uneducated but he’s intelligent and quick-witted. Helene makes an ideal mate for him - she’s resourceful and she loves adventure and she soon discovers that she prefers the jungle to civilisation.

Helene wants him to take her to the nearest village but Ki-Gor warns her that the local tribe is extremely hostile. She soon discovers that he’s not kidding about that.

Ki-Gor is very friendly. He ties her up and takes her back to his cave. Then he unties her, they have a meal and survive a ferocious attack by those hostile tribesmen. The shared danger creates a bond between them, but naturally he ties her up again before he goes to sleep. She might run away. You know what girls are like. She does run away but he recaptures her and they have more escapes from danger. This is a pretty entertaining start to the series.

As these stories progress other regular characters star to make their appearance. Like George, chief of a tribe of brave warriors. George is black but he’s an American. He becomes Ki-Gor’s ally when Helene is in danger. George is not going to let an American girl come to harm.

The second story is Ki-Gor and the Stolen Empire. Helene is naturally anxious to make contact with civilisation. Ki-Gor arranges for her to meet a fellow European. He does so in his inimitable fashion. He kidnaps the guy. The guy is Julio and he’s an insane megalomaniac. He will become a recurring villain, constantly cooking up fiendish new plots.

Ki-Gor and Helene are getting along well by now. He doesn’t tie her up any more. Ki-Gor is looking for a place for them to live. He assumes they will set up housekeeping together. He likes her. She is ignorant of the ways of the jungle but he knows a pretty girl when he sees one. Helene was not planning on spending her life in a jungle treehouse. She wants to go back to England (or at least she thinks she does). But she wants Ki-Gor to go with her. She’s grown fond of him and she can certainly appreciate his manly physique.

This is a kind of lost civilisation tale, with a mysterious city hidden in the jungle guarded by an army of chimpanzees. And there are rumours of treasure.

Ki-Gor and the Giant Gorilla-Men pits Ki-Gor against a Hindu with a hidden kingdom of his own. And an army of specially bred super-gorillas. It ends with a full-scale battle.

In Ki-Gor and the Secret Legions of Simba the shadow of war falls over Africa. Not just the Second World War but the prospect of a holy war in Africa. The story begins however with Ki-Gor and Helene in London. Ki-Gor quickly decides that he does not want to live in England among his own people. His home is the African jungle. Returning to Africa means parting from Helene but he knows they will not be parted forever. She is his woman.

Ki-Gor and the Forbidden Mountain involves another lost tribe. Their mountain home is protected by a ring of death - anyone who crosses the surrounding wasteland dies instantly and inexplicably. The tribe is ruled by a mysterious pale-skinned queen and they make their living from slavery. Ki-Gor will have to penetrate that ring of death - the tribe has kidnapped Helene.

This is another story in which the war plays a role in the background. The agent of a foreign power wants something from this hidden kingdom but hat exactly is it that he’s after?

Ki-Gor and the Cannibal Kingdom sees Ki-Gor’s friend George in trouble. Ki-Gor has to deal with cannibals and talking bulls.

These are fine pulp stories and if you love outrageous jungle adventures you won’t be disappointed. Highly recommended.

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.

Curt Siodmak's Donovan’s Brain

Donovan’s Brain is a 1942 science fiction novel by Curt Siodmak.

German-born Curt Siodmak (1902-2000) enjoyed success as an author, screenwriter and film director.

The fact that it’s about a disembodied brain kept alive in a laboratory might tempt some readers to dismiss this book as mere pulp science fiction but Siodmak was a writer with more substance than that.

He addressed a similar theme again much later in his excellent 1968 novel Hauser's Memory.

Donovan’s Brain is the story of a bizarre medical experiment carried out by Dr Patrick Cory. He is obsessed by the idea of keeping a brain alive outside the body. He has had limited success with monkeys. Then a golden opportunity is dropped into his lap. A light plane has crashed in the mountains. Dr Cory is first on the scene. A man in his sixties is horribly injured and his chances of survival are nil, but his brain is undamaged. Dr Cory is able to remove the brain. The brain is placed in a large glass jar filled with serum and surprisingly remains alive.

Keeping Donovan’s brain alive is all well and good but Dr Cory wants to find a way to communicate with it. There’s no doubt that Donovan’s personality still exists.

He finds a way to communicate but Donovan’s messages are rather cryptic.

There’s also a mystery story of sorts. Donovan’s behaviour just before the plane crash was puzzling. And Donovan has some odd obsessions. It’s possible that those obsessions now dominate his personality. Dr Cory needs to find out more about Donovan in order to make sense of whatever it is that Donovan is trying to tell him. Donovan’s surviving children may have their own reasons for not wanting Cory to learn certain things. It’s also apparent that they think Donovan told Dr Cory something important before dying (they of course do not know that Donovan is still alive after a fashion).

Donovan’s personality has to some extent taken lodgement in Dr Cory’s brain. And Donovan is a very strong personality. And, perhaps, not quite sane. Perhaps he was never quite sane.

The idea of two personalities, with conflicting agendas, occupying the same brain has been used countless times but it’s worth remembering that Siodmak was utilising this idea way back in 1942.

And he was doing it skilfully. Neither the reader nor Dr Cory have any reason to think that there is anything sinister about Donovan, at first. Donovan was a remarkable man. Dr Cory was particularly excited to have the opportunity to preserve his brain - it would be an opportunity to learn about the workings of the mind of a man who had achieved great success. And for quite a while Cory isn’t concerned. Donovan’s obsessions seem to be simply a desire to correct mistakes that he made. Nothing worrying about that. It’s only very gradually that Cory begins to suspect that perhaps Donovan was somewhat sinister. But what I like about this story is that Dr Cory is not having his mind invaded by the mind of a psycho killer. Donovan is more complicated than that.

Dr Cory is confident that he can remain in control. Donovan’s brain is just a mass of brain tissue sitting in a glass jar filled with nutrients.

This is a story focused not just on Donovan’s obsessions but on Dr Cory’s as well. They are perhaps similar in some ways - both are men driven by ambition. Dr Cory is driven by ambition in a good way. He wants to advance scientific knowledge. There’s no harm in that is there?

This is fine intelligent science fiction with some dashes of mystery and horror. Curt Siodmak certainly deserves to be appreciated more. Highly recommended.

And Siodmak’s Hauser’s Memory is very much worth reading as well.

Malko 4: Malko versus the CIA

Malko 4: Malko versus the CIA is one of the handful of Malko spy thrillers by Gerard de Villiers that have been translated into English. It was originally published in French in 1965 as S.A.S. contre C.I.A. and the English translation dates from 1974.

His Serene Highness Prince Malko Ligne, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Black Eagle, Knight of the Order of Landgrave Seraphim of Kletgaus, Knight of the Order of Malta works on a semi-official basis for the C.I.A. - semi-official so that the C.I.A. can plausibly deny everything afterwards. They trust Malko because he’s reliably anti-communist. Malko has no great interest in causes and he regards the C.I.A. with a certain amount of European aristocratic disdain but they pay well and he needs the money to repair his crumbling ancestral castle. He also likes women, the sorts of women who cost as much to maintain as a decaying castle.

French spy fiction of this period is interesting because the C.I.A. are not automatically the good guys and the Soviets are not automatically the bad guys. In this book the Russians are more or less good guys but mostly they just want to avoid getting mixed up in a mess that the Americans have created.

The mess is in Iran. This novel was written in 1965, years before the Islamic Revolution. Iran is under the control of the Shah, who was installed in power by the C.I.A. some years before. The Shah is little more than Washington’s puppet.

In this novel Malko is working for the C.I.A. to foil a plot by - the C.I.A. More specifically they have information that the C.I.A.’s Iranian bureau chief General Schalberg has hatched a plan to overthrow the government of Iran, on his own initiative. Given that Iran is a reliable U.S. puppet state this information is very upsetting. The worst thing is that the C.I.A. really don’t know exactly what is going on. General Schalberg might be the instigator of the crazy plot. The head of the Iranian secret police, General Khadjar, might be involved. The Russians might have fed the Americans phoney information about this plot. The Iranian communists are probably not involved since the Shah has had almost all of them killed.

The plot might involve the assassination of the Shah. And revolution. Revolutions are easy to set off but not so easy to control.

It doesn’t matter who originated the plot, it must be stopped. If Malko needs to do some killing that’s OK. That’s why the C.I.A. gives him these jobs - dirty jobs are his specialty. If he has to kill the rogue C.I.A. guy that’s OK as well.

Of course you know that Malko is going to get mixed up wth beautiful dangerous women. Beautiful Iranian women can be very dangerous - they tend to have husbands, fathers or brothers who don’t approve of decadent European aristocrats bedding their women. But you know Malko won’t be able to help himself.

There’s plenty of action including a wild aerial climax. There’s a full-scale gun battle. There is mayhem in the streets. Malko has narrow escapes. He is up against people for whom torture is not just a policy but an absorbing hobby.

In this adventure Malko doesn’t have to worry too much about the morality of any of the people or factions involved. They’re all equally amoral. It doesn’t matter if revolution against the Shah is justified or not - if the country explodes it will be a disaster for everybody. All Malko has to worry about is preventing that explosion.

I’m becoming a major fan of the Malko thrillers. They feature a hero who’s a bit morally ambiguous and somewhat ruthless but charming and deadly. Plenty of thrills. Some sexiness. Exotic settings. Interesting historical backgrounds. Morally complex stories. What’s not to love? Malko versus the CIA is an above-average spy thriller and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed three other Malko novels - West of Jerusalem, The Man from Kabul and Angel of Vengeance.