J.R. Salamanca's Lilith

Lilith is a 1962 novel by J.R. Salamanca which was made into an excellent 1964 movie. Vince is an aimless young man just out of the army who joins the staff of a mental hospital where he meets a disturbing young woman named Lilith.

Reading the novel cleared up for me something that was rather confusing in the movie. In the movie the story appears to takes place in the early 1960s but the time period doesn’t quite make sense. In the novel it is absolutely clear that Vince begins his employment at the hospital in 1946 or 1947. And a great deal of the character motivations (which are the same in both the novel and the movie) are much more comprehensible in a late 40s setting.

The first quarter of the novel gives us a detailed backstory for Vince. It’s a bit dull but necessary. The movie gives us the essentials of his background through a few subtle hints which work well in a movie but would not have worked in a novel. In both cases we find out that there are events in his past with which he has never come to terms and that while he definitely does not dislike women he is all at sea when it comes to emotional relationships.

Vince has no formal qualifications but is employed as an occupational therapist and will be trained on the job at the Poplar Lodge Hospital in his hometown in Maryland.

Lilith is one of the patients. She is twenty-two, beautiful and enigmatic. She is sweet but very disturbing. Everyone is disturbed by her but Vince is particularly vulnerable in this regard.

It is important to note that Poplar Lodge is not a state hospital but a very expensive private hospital. The patients are from very rich families. They are well-educated and highly intelligent. They are also schizophrenic. Vince is warned that crazy and intelligent is a dangerous combination. These patients are quite capable of outsmarting even experienced staff members. Lilith is very very intelligent and very very crazy.

At Poplar Lodge the patients are treated entirely by psychoanalysis. Drugs and shock therapy are not used. This means their sexual urges are intact. This will become important.

Vince is also told that whereas the delusions of schizophrenics are almost always unstable, irrational and illogical Lilith is different. She has created a complex fantasy world that is stable, coherent, logical and internally consistent. It just happens to be a complete delusion.

Lilith comes across more like a refugee from the realm of faerie than an everyday mental patient. It’s not that her delusions come and go. She lives permanently in her fantasy world. She is entirely disconnected from the real world.

A complicating factor is Warren, another patient. He is twenty-two, painfully shy, socially inept. He is hopelessly in love with Lilith.

The best part of both novel and movie is the jousting tournament. This is apparently a real thing in Maryland. The riders carry lances but don’t tilt at each other. The object is to spear metal rings suspended from an archway while riding at full speed. It requires great skill. Vince enters the tournament. He will be wearing Lilith’s colours - her blue scarf. Lilith is delighted. Now she imagines Vince as a knight in shining armour competing to win the favour of a fair lady, Lilith being the fair lady. Vince is almost seduced by the fantasy as well. He is realising that he is in love with Lilith.

There’s obvious potential for all this to end very badly. While the movie follows the plot of the novel very very closely the ending is different. The movie’s ending is superior but what matters is that in both novel and movie the ending is not quite what we expect.

While the treatment of mental illness may have changed the story is still relevant. It still raises important questions about the fantasies we all construct for ourselves, and about the seductive nature of fantasy worlds. Lilith wants to remain in her fantasy world. She is mad but happy. It also suggests how very easy it is to be drawn into another’s fantasies.

There’s so much that is fascinating and provocative and disturbing in this novel that it’s sad that it’s now so completely forgotten. Highly recommended.

It’s long out of print but affordable used copies are not too difficult to find.

I’ve also reviewed the movie, Lilith (1964).

The Red Skull (Doc Savage)

The Red Skull is a Doc Savage novel published in the Street & Smith Publications pulp magazine Doc Savage Magazine in August 1933.

It was written by Lester Dent, writing as Kenneth Robeson. Kenneth Robeson was a house name at this publisher. Lester Dent wrote most of the Doc Savage Magazine stories.

The Red Skull begins with an entertaining shootout on a golf course involving an aeroplane. A cowboy kind of guy from out West is trying to get a message to Doc Savage. His buddies need some help.

Doc and his assistants - Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny and Long Tom - are always ready to help anyone in need.

In this case it’s something to do with a radium mine in Canada, but Doc has a feeling that the whole story is phoney. Doc believes that somebody really does need his help but that the message may have been tampered with.

So Doc has to try to figure what’s really going on, but he doesn’t where it’s going on or who it is needing help, or what it’s about or who the bad guys might be.

But there are definitely bad guys.

The trail leads Doc and his crew to Arizona. There’s a dam under construction. Somebody seems to be sabotaging the construction, for no obvious reason.

Of course there is a reason. But in the meantime there’s more than sabotage going on. There are attempted murders. Doc’s assistants are among the intended victims, and the beautiful secretary of one of his lieutenants is kidnapped.

Doc is also puzzled by the plane crash involving one of the owners of the dam construction company. It doesn’t seem to add up.

There’ll be plenty of meyhem before this story is concluded and it builds to a satisfying action climax.

Doc Savage doesn’t like to kill bad guys (although in the early stories many of them do come to a sticky end). Doc prefers to capture them and send them to his private clinic where they get the Clockwork Orange treatment - they get brainwashed and turned into respectable law-abiding citizens. In the early 1960s brainwashing became a major pop culture obsession and figured in countless spy and science fiction stories, and was always seen as something sinister. It’s odd to see it treated in such a positive way in 1933.

He makes use of gadgets, most notably various methods of dispersing knockout gas, and occasionally gas of a more lethal nature.

Doc has an ultra-advanced high-speed aircraft of his own design, and a high-tech autogyro. I’m always delighted by any kind of 1930s high technology.

There was never any doubt that Lester Dent knew how to keep a pulp adventure story powering along.

The Red Skull is fine pulp adventure. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several earlier Doc savage novels - The Man of Bronze, Land of Terror and The Polar Treasure and I recommend all of them.

Michael Avallone’s The Alarming Clock

The Alarming Clock, published in 1956, is one of Michael Avallone’s many Ed Noon pulp private eye thrillers (he wrote at least thirty Ed Noon books).

Michael Avallone (1924-1999) was an amazingly prolific American author in various pulp genres.

The Ed Noon books are long out of print and used copies can be pricey. They may for all I know be available as ebooks - I have zero knowledge of and interest in ebooks.

The Alarming Clock starts promisingly. PI Ed Noon has a package delivered to him, with a very cryptic note attached. The package contains an alarm clock. What’s weird and disturbing about the clock is that there’s nothing weird and disturbing about it. It’s just a very ordinary cheap alarm clock. There has to be some secret attached to it but Ed can’t even guess what it could be.

In the early stages I thought the story had a slight Maltese Falcon vibe. The key to The Maltese Falcon is the falcon but nobody is sure if it really exists, if it does exist it might be a fake, it’s reputed to conceal immense riches but it might turn out to be worthless and if it’s a fake there may be more than one falcon. Despite all this uncertainty a motley collection of shady characters are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths and double-cross each other to get hold of it.

Which is also the case with this clock. It might contain hidden diamonds, or the key to finding some hidden treasure, it might conceal vital military secrets, or a stolen top-secret device, or it might contain evidence of a crime (or it might be the evidence). Or it might be just a very ordinary cheap alarm clock.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, Avallone reveals too many clues as to its true nature too early on so we know what kind of story it’s going to be.

On the other hand, like The Maltese Falcon, the story still has a motley collection of very suspicious characters prepared to take drastic steps to get hold of it. They could be rival criminal gangs or rival spies or even undercover Feds.

Ed Noon did not come down in the last shower. As soon as he got the clock he played the old switcheroo. And someone else then plays the same trick. So now nobody knows how many clocks there are or which is the real one.

Any good PI thriller requires at least one dangerous dame. This one has two. One blonde and one brunette, both glamorous and they hate each other (in the way that only women can hate other women) which adds to the fun. Ed loves Alma but that doesn’t necessarily mean he can trust her. He is sure that he can’t trust Myra but he might of course be wrong about that. Nobody in this tale is what he seems to be. The good guys might really be bad guys and the bad guys might really be good guys.

The book is not short on action. The violence is not graphic. There’s no sex.

Avallone keeps the true nature of the clock concealed quite skilfully. We can make guesses. The important thing is that the characters in the story are even more in the dark.

Ed Noon is a typical likeable wisecracking private eye, basically honest but he has occasional misunderstandings with the cops. He’s a PI of the down-at-heel type. He has pokey office and cannot afford a glamorous secretary, or even an unglamorous one.

Perhaps it needed a more colourful master villain but then it’s the nature of this story that we don’t know the identity of the master villain.

The Alarming Clock is perfectly decent moderately hardboiled entertainment and it’s recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the two Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV tie-in novels written by Michael Avallone, The Blazing Affair and The Birds of a Feather Affair. They’re both worth reading.

Michael Crichton’s Sphere

Michael Crichton’s novel Sphere was published in 1987. The novel was successful and was well received by critics. The 1988 film adaptation made some significant changes and was very poorly received and was a box-office flop. The fact that Crichton himself was not involved with the film in any way may account for its failure.

The novel begins with a team of four scientists assembled by the U.S. Navy to investigate what the Navy describes as an anomaly a thousand feet below the surface of the South Pacific Ocean. The Navy’s cover story is that it is an air crash scene.

The team comprises astrophysicist Ted Fielding, mathematician Harry Adams, zoologist Beth Halpern and psychologist Norman Johnson. Their investigation will entail spending a week in a deep-sea habitat. Norman is not happy about this but it’s his own fault. He’s the one who, eight years earlier, wrote the protocol for dealing with such a situation and who recommended the inclusion of a psychologist on the grounds that the situation would put the members of such a team under extreme stress.

This is not an air crash. It is a spacecraft crash, and there is clear evidence that the crashed spaceship has been on the ocean floor for at least three hundred years. Which obviously means that it’s an alien spacecraft.

The scientific team will be dealing with the first contact with an alien civilisation.

Norman Johnson’s specialities are the effects of stress and more specifically the effects of stress on human group dynamics. In this case there will be plenty of stress and the group dynamics will be complex and potentially explosive. There are tensions right from the start. This novel is, among many other things, a psychological thriller. And Crichton integrates the psychological thriller and science fiction elements seamlessly.

Right from the start the attitude of Harry Adams is puzzling. This is because he has figured something out. It is not only clear to him that the Navy has withheld important information he has also figured out exactly what it is that they haven’t been told. He is both worried and amused.

The fact that the team members are unaware that the situation is not what it seems to be is important and it’s also important that the reader is unaware of this. For this reason I’m going to be even more careful than usual about hinting at anything that might be a spoiler. Crichton has gone to a lot of trouble to reveal a whole series of secrets to us in a gradual way. Just as we think we know what’s going on he springs another surprise on us.

There’s not just the spacecraft. Aboard the spacecraft is the sphere. What is the sphere and how is it connected with the spacecraft?

Crichton started his literary career as a writer of thrillers and he never forgot the basic techniques of that genre. His skills at building suspense and establishing an atmosphere of menace and paranoia and very evident in Sphere.

This is a classic “put a bunch of people is an isolated confined space and watch them become more and more paranoid” story.

This is also Big Ideas science fiction and in this book he combines a number of big ideas in extremely interesting ways.

This is a novel that came out just before the wave of undersea science fiction adventure films such as The Abyss and it may well have helped to kick off that boom. Sphere is certainly a vastly better story than The Abyss.

Sphere is ambitious and it’s an impressive achievement. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed many of Crichton’s books including Scratch One, The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, Binary and Congo. And I’ve reviewed his movies Coma (1978), Looker (1981) and Westworld (1973).

Irwin R. Blacker’s The Kilroy Gambit

There’s nothing more exciting when you’re a vintage pop fiction fan than discovering a totally unknown book by a writer you’ve never heard of and then discovering it’s terrific. That was the case for me with Irwin R. Blacker’s 1960 spy novel The Kilroy Gambit. And the icing on the cake is that it was the first of a series of four books about American spymaster Richard LeGrande.

Irwin R. Blacker (1919-1985) was an American who wrote around a dozen novels altogether (all within the space of a decade) and also had a successful career as a writer for film and television.

The Kilroy Gambit is certainly not a James Bond-style action spy thriller. It is a spy thriller, but of a very particular type. It’s very serious in tone, but it’s quite unlike other serious spy thrillers of that era such as Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels such as Death of a Citizen. In some ways it’s an anticipation of John le Carre’s approach in which the focus is much more on the spymaster sitting in his office pulling the strings rather than on the field agents doing the actual spying stuff.

It’s also quite cynical, but it’s not the cynicism of a Len Deighton in which the whole business of espionage has a touch of the absurd to it. The Kilroy Gambit is a kind of political thriller, but focused on the sleazy politics of espionage.

The central character is middle-aged General Richard LeGrande who heads a shadowy U.S. agency knows as General Operations (GENOPS). Unusually LeGrande does not have a background as a field agent. During the war he was involved in covert operations but he was the man making the plans and giving the orders, not the agent in the field.

GENOPS is involved in covert operations that are perilously close to being black ops. What they do is pretty much illegal and certainly unconstitutional and probably in breach of international law. Their operations have to be kept secret not just from the Soviets but from the U.S. Government and Congress and the media and the American people.

He now faces his most dangerous enemy - not the KGB but a U.S. Senate inquiry. There’s not a single aspect of the activities of GENOPS that he can reveal to a Senate committee but if he refuses to reveal the nature of those activities it could be the end of his career and of GENOPS. He soon finds out that in Washington nobody has any friends. Every agency and individual on which he relies to protect him is willing to sell him out to gain a political advantage or to advance their own careers.

His immediate problem is an operation in Afghanistan involving arms caches which seems to have gone disastrously wrong. The idea of clever operations that end up as trainwrecks due to bungling or treachery would later be explored brilliantly by John le Carre in novels such as The Looking Glass War. This operation (whimsically codenamed Operation Kilroy) may have been completely blown. The covers of GENOPS agents may have been blown. GENOPS may have been betrayed by one of his own agents. There is a security leak which may have originated with one of the five subordinates who make up the inner circle of GENOPS.

The book is also interesting for its treatment of defectors. Richard LeGrande has never liked defectors. If a man will betray his own country, Russia, then he is highly likely to betray the U.S. as well. Even assuming he’s a genuine defector and not a KGB plant. Defectors are so untrustworthy that in practice they’re a lot more trouble than they’re worth. And Richard LeGrande now has two defectors to worry about.

There’s also the problem that one member of this inner circle, Janet Garner, happens to be his mistress. This not very well kept secret may be about to be aired publicly. That could cause difficulties with his wife.

These nightmares would be enough to deal with but when they happen just as he is about to face a very hostile Senate committee then Richard LeGrande is a man under extreme pressure.

The narrative switches constantly between the Washington witch-hunt against him, his attempts to figure out how Operation Kilroy went so badly wrong and a dangerous mission by a GENOPS field agent, who happens to be his mistress Janet.

There’s almost no action at all, although there are some fine suspenseful moments involving real danger.

It’s the details of operational planning, the portrait of the murky world of Washington politics and the emphasis on a man slowly being crushed by intolerable personal and professional pressures that makes this a fascinating and extremely fine unconventional spy thriller. Very highly recommended.

Peter O’Donnell's Modesty Blaise: Mister Sun

This volume contains three Modesty Blaise comic-strip adventures written by Peter O’Donnell with artwork by Jim Holdaway.

Comic strips published three frames at a time in daily newspapers were once immensely popular. It’s a format that is now more or less extinct. These were almost always aimed at kids and younger readers. What made Modesty Blaise revolutionary when the strip debuted in 1963 was that it was aimed much more at grown-ups.

In fact, as is evident in this collection, Modesty Blaise was definitely for grown-ups. It wasn’t just the occasional nudity. The tone could be quite dark and even grim. In the worlds of crime and espionage people get hurt. Good people get killed. Straightforward happy endings are not guaranteed.

Mister Sun is a very early Modesty Blaise adventure, from 1964. A few years earlier Modesty had unofficially adopted a young Vietnamese boy named Weng and paid for his university education in Hong Kong. Now he has become involved with organised crime. It doesn’t make sense. He’s not that kind of kid. Apparently he was trying to get hold of a great deal of money very quickly, for some undisclosed purpose. But if he needed money Modesty would have given it to him gladly.

And Weng has no idea of the trouble he’s landed himself in getting involved with the sinister crime lord Mister Sun. And Mister Sun and Modesty Blaise have clashed before so Modesty suspects a particularly sinister purpose behind Mister Sun’s recruitment of Weng.

There are lots of unexpected ramifications and lots of plot twists to come. This is a rare Modesty Blaise story that involves current events (in this case the war in Vietnam), something that O’Donnell was later careful to avoid. Mister Sun is a suitably dangerous villain and he controls a vast criminal network. It’s a good story.

The Mind of Mrs Drake is unusual in having hints of the paranormal. There is a woman who earns her living as a psychic and she may or may not have some actual psychic abilities. She also happens to be a spy. Her psychic abilities make her very effective at recruiting agents - she knows their dirty little secrets and their weaknesses and their fears, all the things that can be used to manipulate them.

British counter-intelligence have sent in Modesty’s young friend Jeannie Challon as bait. This is Jeannie’s first counter-espionage assignment.

Mrs Drake has an accomplice, an osteopath, and while he lacks her special skills he is much more ruthless and much more dangerous.

The danger for Jeannie Challon is that Mrs Drake’s psychic abilities may have put her one step ahead of her adversaries. Jeannie’s cover could be blown and she would have no way of knowing it.

Modesty dislikes having to kill people but when she decides that someone really does need killing she puts her scruples to one side. This is one of the stories in which that ruthless side of Modesty is in evidence. A very good story.

The Killing Ground is a very brief story that O’Donnell and Holdaway had to produce in a hurry to fill a publication gap. It’s yet another retelling of The Most Dangerous Game. It’s OK but it is obviously a filler story.

Mister Sun and The Mind of Mrs Drake are top-tier Modesty Blaise adventures making this a very desirable purchase.

I’ve reviewed three other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up, Warlords of Phoenix, The Black Pearl and Uncle Happy, as well as the first five novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth, A Taste for Death, The Impossible Virgin and I, Lucifer.

William Vance’s Bait

Bait is a sleaze novel with a hint of noir by William Vance (writing as George Cassidy) published in 1962.

Melody Frane is an itinerant farm worker in her late teens. Her mother is a drunk and a whore. Melody is constantly trying to avoid the attentions of men but with a body like hers it’s a losing battle. She’s working on a farm which is part of the vast business empire of Harry Ransome.

When company pilot Kenney Ward tries to make her in the cockpit of his plane her problem is that she wants him to stop, but her body definitely doesn’t want him to stop. She wants to be a good girl but she hungers for love and she hungers for men.

She gets herself fired and realises she doesn’t have too many good options. She has no education to speak of. She has no social polish. She has no skills. She has one possibly useful asset - her luscious body.

Then she attracts the attention of the company boss, Harry Ransome. After having sex with her he offers to employ her as his secretary. She is puzzled by this - she cannot type or take shorthand, in fact she has no office skills. Her assures that this won’t be a problem - he’ll send her to Las Vegas for training. Mrs Matthews will take care of her. She accepts the offer.

Melody is naïve but she knows what men want and she realises that being Harry’s mistress will be part of the deal. Had she known that Harry Ransome was married alarm bells might have started ringing. On the other hand she enjoyed the sex with him.

She becomes more puzzled when the training involves no shorthand or typing. Slowly it dawns on her that she is being trained as a courtesan. She is shocked. She thinks of herself as a good girl (despite her propensity for hopping into bed with men). And it does seem like she will be well paid. She likes that idea.

Kenney meanwhile has decided he wants to save her and marry her. She’s not sure about the marriage idea but he is awfully good in bed. Kenney means to win her but Harry Ransome is not likely to relinquish such a useful asset and such a satisfactory bed companion.

There was a considerable crossover between the sleaze, noir and hardboiled genres in the 50s and early 60s. There were noir novels with generous helpings of sleaze and there were sleaze novels with a very noirish flavour. Bait falls into the latter category.

The sleaze elements are very coy even for 1962. There’s not even a hint of even mildly graphic sex. The shock value comes from what would at the time have been considered moral depravity. Melody has a lot of sex. The real shock factor is that she enjoys it.

What makes this novel interesting is the moral ambiguity. There are are no real villains. Kenney’s attempted seduction of Melody in the plane goes way beyond seduction. He intends to take her by force. But he’s one of the good guys. Harry Ransome exploits Melody but she gives herself to him willingly and she’s also willing to be exploited, at least up to a point. He’s not quite an out-and-out villain and to some extent he’s driven by pressure to keep his head above water in a cutthroat business world, and by an unsatisfying marriage.

Melody is a nice girl who causes most of her own problems through her extraordinary mixture of innocence, greed for the good things in life and wantonness. She’s a good girl but if a man is nice to her she’ll drop her panties in a trice.

To the extent that this is borderline noir Melody is both the noir protagonist and the femme fatale. Her stunningly impressive bust measurement, her healthy sexual appetite and her tendency to defend her virtue in a very half-hearted manner make her a dangerous young lady.

The author is aiming for a bit of complexity rather than a god vs evil story.

Bait pulls its punches a bit but it’s a fairly enjoyable potboiler. Recommended. It’s available in paperback from Black Gat Books.