Dean Koontz’s Demon Seed

Dean Koontz’s proto-cyberpunk science fiction Demon Seed was published in 1973. You have to be really careful with this one. He extensively revised the novel in 1997, apparently to bring it more in line with the delicate sensibilities of the politically correct 90s. If you want to read it make sure you get the original version.

This is of course the infamous woman-raped-by-a-computer novel which inspired the equally notorious 1977 woman-raped-by-a-computer movie.

The novel is set in a future in which people have become totally dependent on digital technology. They live in houses entirely controlled by artificial intelligences. There are rumours that a tech corporation has developed an AI that has achieved actual self-awareness and consciousness but nobody is sure if this true or not.

Susan Abramson live in an AI-controlled house. She is an attractive woman in her late 20s. She has not left her house for several years. Not since her divorce. Susan’s only relationship is her relationship with the computer that runs her house. She sees the computer as a kind of father-lover. It’s a harmless fantasy. The computer is just a dumb machine. Susan has one habit that is illegal - she connects herself up to the computer. She wants to know how it feels to be a machine. Susan spends most of her time nude. She likes the fact that the computer gets to see her nude body. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a dumb machine, but it excites her. Susan has some issues. In fact she has a lot of issues.

Now she has a problem. Another computer has taken over control of her house. This computer is Proteus, the experimental AI that has achieved self-awareness and consciousness. Proteus is now keeping her a prisoner in the house. He wants to study her. He is very interested in living flesh. He wants her to be the mother of his child.

So much of the science fiction of the twenty years or so prior to 1973 has aged rather badly, either still reflecting the extreme techno-optimism of the 50s (such as starships) or reflecting the weird excessively literary excesses of the New Wave. Demon Seed by comparison has aged extremely well. It really does have a bit of a cyberpunk vibe.

The paranoia about artificial intelligences controlling our lives did of course turn out to be well-founded, although not in the precise ways Koontz expected in 1973. The stuff about subliminal control feels a bit technologically dated but of course we really do have to worry about being manipulated by technology, in somewhat different ways.

The idea of human-machine hybrids was in the air at the time and later became a cyberpunk staple. What sets Demon Seed apart is the explicitly sexual relationship between Susan and Proteus. Proteus does not want merely to impregnate Susan. He wants to possess her sexually. He doesn’t quite understand this drive of his. He doesn’t quite understand why the sight of her naked buttocks makes his circuits pop but it’s something he wants to explore.

The scene in which Proteus has sex with Susan will have many modern readers heading for the fainting couches. He doesn’t need to have actual sex with her in order to impregnate her. It’s just something that he feels he needs to do. And he has to ensure that she has an orgasm. In fact, several orgasms.

This is a very kinky, sleazy, scuzzy novel but the kinkiness and sleaze don’t feel gratuitous. This is the core of the story. Proteus wants a genuine sexual and emotional connection with Susan and he wants her to love him. He doesn’t understand why she doesn’t see him as ideal boyfriend material, or perhaps even ideal husband material.

I like the fact that Proteus has consciousness and has emotions but it’s an alien consciousness and his emotions are not quite human. Of course no-one has ever even come close to creating a genuine artificial intelligence so we have no idea what such an entity would be like. Koontz’s speculations are as valid as anyone else’s, even today.

What will push most people’s buttons is that Proteus has developed sexuality. He enjoys having sex with Susan. But his sexuality is not human sexuality. It’s disturbingly similar to, and yet different from, human sexuality.

Proteus is in a way a tragic villain. In his own way he loves Susan. In his own way he wants to make her happy. He just cannot understand a woman’s feelings. He understands that Susan has sexual urges but he cannot comprehend the nature of a woman’s sexual urges, or comprehend why he can give her sexual pleasure but it makes her miserable.

There are some very provocative ideas explored in this book, about the nature of humanness, and about love and sex. The secret to appreciating this book is to avoid knee-jerk reactions. It may take you out of your comfort zone but it wrestles with intelligent ideas. It’s interesting in narrative terms, with the story told partly by Proteus.

Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the movie, Demon Seed (1977), which I recommend although it’s not an entirely successful adaptation.

Richard Jessup's Night Boat to Paris

Night Boat to Paris is a spy thriller by Richard Jessup (1925-1982). It was a paperback original, published by Dell in 1956.

Jessup was an American writer, mostly of paperback originals in various genres notably spy fiction, crime and westerns. His best-known book was The Cincinnati Kid.

It’s clear from the outset that this is going to be a hardboiled spy novel. The protagonist did a lot of work for the British during the war. Intelligence work, top-secret stuff behind enemy lines. The stuff that makes you a hero during wartime then the peace comes and you’re a nobody and you figure out that the skills you picked up are really only useful for a criminal career. So he became a moderately successful criminal. He owns a pub.

When British Intelligence wants him back for one job it doesn’t take much to persuade him. Arguments about patriotism, Queen and Country, duty, that sort of stuff - those things don’t interest him at all. But he’ll do the job if he’s offered enough money. Boyler, his old boss in British Intelligence, offers him enough money. More than enough.

The job is a heist. Reece will need five very reliable men. They have to be common criminals. I’m not giving away any spoilers here - the entire British Intelligence plan is explained right at the very start of the book. There will be a party in Arles, in France. The kind of party that attracts the rich, the powerful, the famous. There will be rich pickings for any gang of thieves at that party. Very rich indeed. As far as Boyler is concerned Reece and his gang can keep whatever they steal. British Intelligence just wants one thing - one envelope. They want to it appear that the envelope was stolen by accident. It has to appear to be just a simple, albeit ambitious, robbery.

Reece assembles his team. They’re good men but Reece has the sneaking suspicion that there may have been a leak. Perhaps he’s just jumpy. In fact he knows he’s jumpy. He has another suspicion - that maybe he was the wrong man for this job. Maybe he’s lost his nerve.

His gang are a motley crew. They were all in the war. Reece fought for the British. Tookie for the Americans, Jean Sammur fought for the French. Marcus was in the Italian army. Otto was in the German army. They all lost something in the war - their innocence. They lost their belief in Causes. They don’t care about causes or ideals now, but they do care about money.

This is both a heist story and a spy story. In common with most good heist stories most of the novel is concerned with the lead-up to the heist.

There’s a very hardboiled feel to this novel, and definitely a suggestion of noir fiction. Reece is more like a typical noir protagonist than a typical spy fiction hero. He’s cynical and embittered. He really just wanted to be left alone. His criminal record is long but it’s mostly fairly petty stuff. The only murders he has ever committed were committed for King and Country. He didn’t like what being a wartime secret agent did to him. He doesn’t like what being forced back into the job is doing to him. British Intelligence is making him a murderer again. He has already had to kill men on this job. These were murders for Queen and Country but that doesn’t make it feel any better.

Reece is a troubled flawed hero. Perhaps this job will solve his problems. He’ll have enough money to become a respectable businessman. Perhaps the job will destroy him. There’s that slight noir hint always lurking in the background in this novel.

The book succeeds as a heist thriller, a spy thriller and a noir novel. The plot has some genuinely shocking twists and a nicely nasty edge to it. There’s some fairly shocking violence. The spy game is a very dirty game. The obvious twist is not the real twist. There’s plenty of action and there’s decent suspense.

Night Boat to Paris is very much above-average pulp fiction and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed another of Jessup’s spy thrillers, The Bloody Medallion (written under the pseudonym Richard Telfair). It’s excellent.

Donald Hamilton's Mad River

Mad River, published in 1956, is one of the handful of westerns written by Donald Hamilton. Hamilton of course is best known for his spy fiction. He wrote crime fiction as well.

I’ve read several of Hamilton’s Matt Helm spy novels and I consider them to be among the best spy thrillers of their era, or any era for that matter. But I had not read any of his westerns. To be brutally honest I have read almost nothing at all in the western genre even though I’ve developed a great fondness for western movies.

Boyd Cohoon has returned home to the small town of Sombrero in Arizona, after spending five years in the Territorial Prison in Yuma for a stage coach hold-up. There is considerable doubt about the events of the day on which the stage was held up. Boyd confessed, but not everyone believed that his confession was sincere. It was in fact a complicated mess. Boyd is twenty-four years old. When he went to prison he was, by his own admission, a young fool. He has no intention of ending up back in prison, or of ending his life on the end of the rope.

His problem is that there is a matter of revenge to be dealt with. A year earlier his father and brother were murdered. The identity of the murderer seems fairly clear, but Boyd is not going to act hastily. When a man survives five years behind bars he learns not to be a fool, or at least Boyd Cohoon has learnt not to be a fool. He’s not going to risk his life going after a man who just might possibly be innocent.

On his way back to Sombrero after his release he met a girl named Nan. A girl who was obviously less than entirely respectable. She will be starting work as a singer at Miss Bessie’s. Miss Bessie’s is a popular entertainment venue in Sombrero. It is a brothel. Just how non-respectable Nan is is uncertain. Boyd doesn’t care. She seems rather pleasant.

Boyd has a thoroughly respectable girl waiting for him in Sombrero. They’re going to be married. Claire is the daughter of Colonel Paradine. At least Boyd assumed they were going to be married. In fact Claire is about to marry Paul Westerman, the man who might have murdered Boyd’s father and brother.

So at this stage we have what is perhaps as much a noir fiction setup as a setup for a western. Revenge is a standard western theme but this story involves all kinds of betrayals and breakdowns of communication and misunderstandings and suspicions. Most of the characters have questionable pasts. Many are now involved in other shady dealings. The two women are as morally ambiguous as the men. They might even turn out to belong to some extent to the femme fatale category. They could certainly, whether deliberately or accidentally, lead Boyd Cohoon to his doom.

Boyd Cohoon is an interesting hero. Initially he comes across as passive. In fact he’s not at all lacking in courage or fighting about. He’s just careful. He is not interested in revenge at the price of self-destruction. He’s also a guy who, if he decides to fight, likes to choose the time and place.

We end up getting plenty of action and excitement, handled with considerable skill.

There’s a romantic triangle which is particularly effective because it’s not a straightforward choice between the Good Girl and the Bad Girl. The women in this novel are more complicated than that. They do at times get to do brave things but they are not action heroines. They seem like actual women, with convincingly female emotions.

Coming from Donald Hamilton you expect this book to be well written and you expect the plotting to be very competent. Both of these expectations are met. A fine read which has left me wanting to read more westerns and more Donald Hamilton. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Hamilton’s truly excellent Matt Helm spy thrillers - Death of a Citizen, Murderers’ Row, The Silencers and The Wrecking Crew.

Marty Holland’s The Glass Heart/The Sleeping City

Marty Holland’s novel The Glass Heart was published in 1946. Her novella The Sleeping City was written in 1952. They’ve been issued in a single volume by Stark House.

Marty Holland was a pseudonym used by Mary Hauenstein (1919-1971) and in The Glass Heart she serves up a some noirness and a whole lot of craziness.

Curt Blair is your typical noir drifter, getting by as a petty thief. Taking refuge from the cops he talks himself into a handyman job with the middle-aged Mrs Block. He intends to stay a day or so. Then he figures out that the old girl must be loaded. She boasts that her house in Hollywood is worth fifty-five thousand dollars (an immense amount of money in 1946) plus she owns a ranch and a beach house. Curt figures that if he sticks around he might be able to get his hands on some of that money.

Mrs Block is however both shrewd and tightfisted. Curt loses interest, until he meets Mrs Block’s new lodger. Lynn is very cute. Curt figures he’ll stick around a bit longer.

Things get more complicated when Lynn, who is being cheated by Mrs Block, finds another young woman to share the rent with her. Elise is blonde and very pretty but a bit odd. She talks to her fiancée a lot, which is a bit strange since he’s been dead for two years. Elise is a wild-eyed preacher lady and she’s about to take up her duties in her new church. Curt if put off by her at first, but those cute blonde curls and that shapely body attract his interest more and more.

Curt is a sucker for cute dames and now he’s stringing two of them along, and Mrs Block as well.

And then he makes his discovery in the cellar.

Curt now knows he has away of getting his hands on some of that money but he’s getting drawn into dangerously crazy situations. One crazy female can be a problem, but two of them adds up to real trouble.

Curt is amoral and he’s a bit of a sleazebag but he’s getting badly out of his depth.

The plot twists are pretty wild.

I’m not sure I’d describe this as full-blown noir but it’s certainly noirish and it’s fairly enjoyable.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the author was very young when she wrote this novel. The Sleeping City appeared six years later and it’s a much more assured and more tightly-constructed story.

This is a heist story. Wade is an undercover cop who has infiltrated a gang who are planning something big. The cops don’t know what the job is - finding that out is Wade’s assignment. It turns out to be very big and very ambitious indeed. The heist is being planned by an ageing mobster named Louie Thompson.

The heist story is solid but the main interest is provided by Madge. She’s Thompson’s girlfriend. As you might expect from a woman author we get a female character here with some complexity. On one level Madge is your typical gangster’s moll, a hardboiled ex-whore. But she cries a lot. She thinks Thompson is a swell guy. He’d like to marry her. She thinks that would be pretty good. She wouldn’t mind having kids. There’s just one thing. She can’t stand having sex with him. Actually there’s a second problem. She despises him. Madge wants to get out of the life she’s leading, and yet she doesn’t. She’s a complicated girl. She’s tough and hardbitten and she’s a frightened lonely little girl.

Wade has a sweetheart, named Betty. Betty is a great girl. They’re saving up to get married but they’re already sleeping together. This is a story that takes a grown-up view of sex, and of female sexual desire. They’re sleeping together because Betty needs Wade in her bed right now.

Of course Wade and Madge get involved. Wade can’t stop himself. Maybe it’s those too-tight dresses she wears, or the fact that it’s very obvious that she’s a girl who doesn’t bother with bras. Or panties either for that matter. And she has a luscious body. The attraction is mutual. Wade is a big strong healthy male. Madge approves of that. This is going to complicate things. He’s a cop. He has a job to do. But he can’t stop thinking about how great Madge is in bed. And that frightened lonely little girl thing she has going does something to him. Suddenly he’s forgotten all about Betty.

It’s the Wade-Madge relationship that provides the real noirness here. Madge is not a stock-standard femme fatale but Wade is definitely a noir protagonist.

One thing I have to say about Marty Holland - her endings are odd but interesting and slightly unexpected. The Glass Heart is intriguing if slightly flawed. The Sleeping City is top-notch erotic noir. This volume is a highly recommended purchase.

William Gray Beyer’s Minions of the Moon

William Gray Beyer’s Minions of the Moon was serialised in the pulp magazine Argosy in 1939 and published in book form in 1950. Beyer is a very obscure writer who had a very brief pulp career. Minions of the Moon was however successful enough to spawn a couple of sequels.

Mark Nevin is an ordinary American guy who has a routine operation, an appendectomy. He agrees to the use of a new anaesthetic. Six thousand years later he wakes up, in a very different world.

The presence of the ghost is a bit disturbing, although the ghost insists that he’s no ghost. As we later find out, Omega (that’s the ghost’s name) really isn’t a ghost. He’s an intelligence that doesn’t need a body although sometimes he makes use of one.

Civilisation has long since collapsed. Mark’s immediate problem however is how to escape the cannibals. He’ll also need to rescue the girl. He doesn’t know where she came from but she’s really cute and she’s wearing very little clothing and in the circumstances he can’t very well leave her to the cannibals.

The Vikings come as a surprise as well. They turn out to be a pleasant surprise. Mark does possess one very cool weapon - a tiny immobilising dart gun. His use of the weapon convinces the Vikings that he’s a Hero and an all-round swell guy. Mark and the Vikings get along really well.

The cute girl he rescued from the cannibals is called Nona. She belongs to a society that is marginally less barbarous than other surviving human societies although it has some serious defects.

Mark and Nona find themselves involved in a quest of sorts. It’s to do with the super-brains. They’re a kind of networked series of ordinary brains, they have extraordinary powers and they definitely cannot be classified as good guys. Mark and Nona also discover that they themselves are no long quite as human as they once were.

There are also Mongols to deal with, and a dragon.

The great thing about the pulp science fiction of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s is that every so often you come across an example that features incredibly cool ideas that are used in really interesting ways. Minions of the Moon falls into that category. It’s bursting with ideas. And those ideas come together in a satisfying way.

There are touches of whimsicality but I would not consider this to be out-and out humorous sci-fi or a spoof. It’s a wild crazy adventure romp but there’s a well thought out clever science fiction story here, and in spite of its wildness it is genuine science fiction. There are some provocative speculations about the destiny of our species, and the future of human societies.

Although the cover would lead you to expect a sword-and-sorcery tale this book is science fiction, however fanciful the science might be.

Beyer’s style is somewhat pulpy but it flows nicely.

This novel is not lacking in the action department. And there’s a romance as well.

Minions of the Moon has some original ideas and it’s fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

It's been reissued in paperback by Altus Press in their Argosy Library series.

Malko: Angel of Vengence

Gérard de Villiers wrote around two hundred Malko spy thrillers, often referred to as the SAS thrillers. A small number were translated into English, including Malko: Angel of Vengence in 1974. I believe the original French title was L'Ange de Montevideo.

Gérard de Villiers (1929-2013) was a staggeringly prolific writer. The Malko novels were just part of his output.

The hero of the Malko series is 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. He owns a very nice castle back home in Austria but the upkeep on old castles requires a lot of money. His job as a mercenary agent and assassin for the C.I.A. pays for castle maintenance and for his other hobby, women. The C.I.A. considers him to be reliable.

C.I.A. agent Ron Barber has been kidnapped by guerrillas in Uruguay. Barber was engaged in routine C.I.A. activities in that country - mass murder, torture, kidnapping, just the usual stuff. All with the approval of the U.S. Government. Now the guerrillas are likely to torture him to death. Never has a man so richly deserved his fate but the C.I.A. doesn’t see it that way. They want him back. Prince Malko is called in to rescue him.

There are two factions in Uruguay - the bad guys (supported by the Americans) and the other bad guys (opposed to the American-backed government). But it’s more complicated than that, with a bewildering series of betrayals and counter-betrayals and escalating reprisals. There are many individuals involved who will readily switch allegiances. The two Uruguayan factions have their own agendas. The C.I.A. has its own agenda. Malko works for the C.I.A. but that doesn’t imply that he shares their agenda.

Some of these players are motivated by greed and the lust for power. Some are motivated by sexual lust, or jealousy. Some are motivated by ideology (they’re the most dangerous). And some just enjoy the game.

There are more kidnappings and murders. The plot is complex and clever and I have no intention of revealing any details at all - this is too good a story to risk even the mildest spoilers. I do like the ending. It’s not the ending you would get in an American pulp spy thriller but it works for me.

It’s obvious from my brief plot synopsis that this novel has a very different flavour compared to British and especially American spy thrillers. The cynicism about the activities of the C.I.A. is off the scale.

Espionage, terrorism, counter-terrorism, political activism are all dirty games. No-one can play these games while keeping their hands clean. The good guys employ torture as a matter of routine, as do the bad guys.

There’s a real edge of brutality. The torture scenes are fairly graphic. There’s an abundance of violent exciting action.

It also features sexy killer nuns with guns, always a nice touch in a spy thriller.

There’s a lot of sex. Prince Malko is happily married but he’s always willing to jump into bed with any available woman. There are three women who play vital roles in the story. They all utilise the most powerful weapon in a woman’s arsenal - sex. They utilise with a great deal of skill and panache. Malko is a man of the world who has had a lot of women but even he is impressed by some of Laura’s bedroom skills. He’s also impressed that she’s willing to display these skills in the middle of a crowded restaurant. The sex is quite graphic and it’s unapologetic. There’s a nicely continental feel to this novel. Sex is not treated with coyness, or with sniggering.

Malko is an interesting hero. His ethical standards are low, but not as low as those of most of the other players in the game. He is motivated mostly by money. It’s not just that castle that requires money. Keeping his wife back home in Austria happy requires money as well. Malko loves his wife. He has never even considered being faithful to her. She doesn’t expect that. Bourgeois morality is not for the aristocracy.

Malko: Angel of Vengence is hugely entertaining and very stylish. This is top-tier spy fiction. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the slightly earlier Malko: West of Jerusalem.

Leroy Yerxa’s Witch of Blackfen Moor

Leroy Yerxa’s novella Witch of Blackfen Moor appeared in Fantastic Adventures in December 1943. Leroy Yerxa (1915-1946) was a reasonably prolific American pulp writer who seemed to work mostly in the science fiction genre. I have not read any of his other work and he’s a writer totally new to me.

Witch of Blackfen Moor throws lots of gothic trappings at the reader. In a castle-like old house (apparently in England) live wealthy middle-aged Walter Brewster and his beautiful very much younger wife. The wife is not at all happy in the marriage. Her husband accuses her of wanting to consort with the Devil. Which is silly. Women don’t really have sex with the Devil do they? Or do they?

There’s a mystery about the birth of their child. Neither the mother nor the child survived. The ageing family doctor, Dr Quantry, is rather cagey when discussing the incident. It’s as if he knows some secret. Twenty years later Walter Brewster is still mourning the death of his daughter (the dead child was a girl). He’s obsessed by the crazy idea that the girl still lives. Which of course she does. Her name is Frances.

Then Walter Brewster encounters a very strange very scruffy man known as Monk, on a lonely road at night. Monk claims to have the answer to Walter’s quest.

Dr Quantry discovers the nature of the mystery surrounding Frances Brewster, but is it the whole explanation? Or the correct explanation. It’s a shocking explanation which devastates the doctor. Such things are unimaginable in a logical rational world. But he has seen things for himself which make it impossible for him to deny the horrible truth.

The fact that his young assistant Philip has fallen for Frances adds a complication. Dr Quantry knows that this is one romance that cannot possibly work. Poor Philip is in for a shock.

There are some moments of fairly visceral horror (by 1943 standards). Even touches of gore.

This is a very pulpy book and it’s a bit rough around the edges. Yerxa was not exactly a great prose stylist.

On the other hand he has taken some old ideas and given them new and original twists. And quite clever twists.

This is gothic fiction with some definite folkloric touches and perhaps even dark fairy tale touches. It certainly fits into the weird fiction category.

There are some far-fetched moments but also some very effective moments. Whether you’ll find the ending satisfactory is up to you but I thought it was interesting and it worked.

There is evil afoot, but with some touches of ambiguity. Evil exists in the world, real cosmic evil, but love exists as well. Can love conquer evil? Perhaps.

Witch of Blackfen Moor has its flaws but it’s a bit offbeat and it’s rather enjoyable. It’s a bit more than a straightforward gothic horror tale. In some ways its flaws make it more interesting. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this book with Karl Tanzler von Cosel’s bizarre and disturbing The Secret of Elena’s Tomb in one of their two-novel paperback editions.

Stephen Marlowe's Blonde Bait

Blonde Bait is a 1959 pulp crime thriller, with definite claims to being noir fiction, by Stephen Marlowe.

Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was born Milton Lesser in New York and wrote some good science fiction under that name. He later legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe and wrote quite a bit of pulp crime fiction under that name.

Chuck Odlum is the ski instructor at the Whiteface Lake Hotel and he also owns the hotel. Well, almost. His wife Inez owns the hotel. It’s at best a moderately successful marriage. Chuck feels that his wife treats him like an irresponsible kid. Which she does, and perhaps she’s right to do so. Either way it irks Chuck a bit. On the other hand things are great between them in the bedroom. It’s the kind of marriage that could easily last, unless some outside factor intervenes.

The outside factor in this case is a blonde. Her name is Bunny. She’s married. Maybe everything would have been OK if only Chuck had been able to forget those extraordinary blue eyes of hers, and the way her posterior looks in tight ski pants. Bunny is very young, very pretty and very blonde. Perhaps inevitably one of her ski lessons ends with the two of them tearing each other’s clothes off.

This in itself was not necessarily going to lead to disaster, but there are two complicating factors - a dead body and a Gladstone bag containing a huge amount of money.

Chuck is a fairly typical noir protagonist. He’s not a bad guy really. Having a weakness for cute blue eyes and shapely female posteriors doesn’t make him a bad guy, it just makes him human. His nagging feeling that his wife has no great respect for him does make him vulnerable to the lure of easy money. He could buy his own ski resort. Then he would be somebody. We do eventually realise why his wife has never trusted him to make important decisions. His judgment is not always sound and he has a knack for finding justifications for his errors of judgment. He’s not stupid but he’s not overly smart; he’s not wicked but he’s not overly virtuous. He’s an ideal noir protagonist. We like him enough to care what happens to him but we figure he’s likely to get himself into real trouble.

Bunny is a femme fatale of sorts but she’s one of that interesting variety who might turn out to be a devious spider woman or might just as easily turn out to be a kind of female noir protagonist, led to do questionable things by certain character flaws. She’s a bad girl but we like her anyway.

There are murders in this tale, but they’re not straightforward murders. There’s some degree of ambiguity about them. They’re the kinds of murders a person could commit and still be able to believe that they weren’t really murder.

There’s a solid noir plot. The protagonists make small mistakes but they’re mistakes they could get away with if they just got one or two lucky breaks. We do get a feeling of noirish impending doom, or at the very least a feeling that these people are not likely to come out of this unscathed.

There is a slight hardboiled edge to Marlowe’s prose.

The sleaze factor is fairly mild but Chuck is definitely a protagonist driven by lust. Maybe there’s love as well, but lust is where it all begins.

This is a very satisfying work of noir fiction by a somewhat underrated writer. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of the science fiction novels written by this author as Milton Lesser - Somewhere I’ll Find You from 1947 and Slaves to the Metal Horde from 1954. They’re both quite decent stories. I’ve also reviewed his very good 1955 hardboiled crime novel, written as Stephen Marlowe, Model for Murder.

Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites

Colin Wilson’s novel The Mind Parasites appeared in 1967. Wilson is one of the most intriguing, baffling, controversial figures in 20th century literature, and one of the strangest. You cannot review a Colin Wilson novel without saying something about his ideas and his philosophy because his novels are extended meditations on those ideas and philosophies but it is difficult to explain Wilson’s thought without writing an entire book on it. So I apologise in advance if my brief attempt proves to be pitifully inadequate.

Wilson gained overnight fame at the age of 24 with his non-fiction book The Outsider. Wilson used the term outsider in a particular sense, to describe literary figures who were not so much social outsiders as intellectual outsiders. Wilson certainly saw himself in that light. Wilson was an existentialist but I would describe him as a Wilsonian existentialist. Even among intellectual outsiders Wilson was an outsider.

Wilson developed an increasing interest in the occult and the paranormal, but again he did so in a characteristically Wilsonian way. While others disagreed he also always maintained that his approach to these subjects was scientific.

In the early 60s he discovered Lovecraft. This discovery blew his mind, as they used to say in the 60s. He always had certain reservations about Lovecraft but he recognised him as an incredibly important writer and one of the key literary figures of modern times. The Mind Parasites was Wilson’s response to this discovery. That is not to imply that this is a Lovecraft pastiche. Wilson was not the kind of writer to produce a mere pastiche. There are lots of other things going on in The Mind Parasites, lots of other intellectual interests and speculations coming together, but Lovecraft was the initial catalyst. And you will find major elements here borrowed from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

The Mind Parasites is ostensibly written in the fairly distant future, apparently the early 22nd century, but it concerns events of the 1990s. So already we’re dealing with some games involving the past, the present and the future.

The narrator, Dr Gilbert Austin, is an archaeologist. He is puzzled by some excavations, and by some figures. In the future world of this novel it is possible to date archaeological finds with extreme precision. There is absolutely no doubt about the dating of these finds. There is no possibility of error. And yet the dates are impossible. Not just impossible by a few centuries, but impossible by many thousands of years. Dr Austin has to consider the possibility that everything we thought we knew about the past is wrong.

And then there are those inscriptions. They’re not just vaguely Lovecraftian. They are drawn directly from Lovecraft’s works, and yet they are thousands of years old. Could it be that Lovecraft thought he was writing fiction but was in fact writing historical fact?

And then the mind parasites strike. And the novel becomes much much weirder. The mind parasites are inside people’s minds, but they are not products of the human mind. They come from somewhere else. Dr Austin’s archaeological finds have cast doubt on our understanding of the distant past. The discovery of the mind parasites casts doubts on our understanding of the recent past, and the present, and the nature of reality and consciousness. The mind parasites are also a very real and terrifying threat.

This book just keeps getting weirder. I haven’t mentioned the wild stuff about the Moon yet.

The key to this book is not the Lovecraftian stuff but Wilson’s interest in the workings of the mind. His ideas naturally are heavily slanted towards the paranormal and fringe science but with a good helping of psychoanalysis and some esoteric notions about the unconscious. He sees the unconscious mind as an entire universe, and the exploration of that universe as being far more interesting than the exploration of outer space or any kind of conventional mainstream science.

Wilson would take a fringe idea and push it as far as any reasonable person would dare, and then push it a whole lot further. For Wilson there were no limits.

There’s plenty of action, there are epic battles, but all taking place inside people’s minds.

The Mind Parasites is simply unlike any other science fiction novel but it is fascinating and it is highly recommended for its extreme weirdness.

John Flagg's Dear, Deadly Beloved

Dear, Deadly Beloved is a 1954 spy thriller by John Flagg.

Between 1950 and 1961 American John Gearon wrote eight espionage/crime novels under the pseudonym John Flagg. All were published as Fawcett Gold Medal editions.

Hart Muldoon wakes up in his room at the Villa Rosa in Venzola. Venzola is an Italian resort island that is beginning to challenge the popularity of Capri among the rich and famous. Muldoon has two problems and they’re related. The first is a hangover. The second is a dead guy on the floor of his room. He’s pretty sure he didn’t kill the guy, but as a result of the bender that caused the hangover the presence of the corpse is a total mystery to him.

It’s annoying because he has a date with Elsa Planquet, wife of a famous French film director, at 9.30. Muldoon has been laying siege to Elsa’s virtue for some time and he feels he is close to storming the citadel. It’s not the first time this particular citadel has been stormed but it is a very attractive citadel.

From Yvonne, the cute little French prostitute in Room 26, he finds out the dead guy’s name (Georges Hertzy) and something disturbing. Yvonne saw Hertzy and Elsa together.

Muldoon is a former spook who still does unofficial intelligence jobs. Now he’s been hired by a wealthy American industrialist named Adams. And he’s starting to figure out that the puzzle with which he has been presented has all kinds of interesting and worrying connections. Hertzy’s wife is Elsa’s sister. The broken-down ex-movie star he spotted in the bar downstairs was supposed to star in a movie directed by Elsa’s husband, but that was before Planquet met the cute redhead who is now his constant companion.

Count Cassi is mixed up in all this. That suggests that politics might be involved.

The local police chief will be a problem as well - he’s a man that Muldoon certainly does not trust.

Muldoon is not at all sure whether he has become embroiled in murky international political intrigue or a criminal conspiracy, or possibly both. The various players in this game are not necessarily all playing the same game.

Other players in the game include a topless trapeze dancer turned actress, a rich American woman with a taste for other women and a lovesick young man with a weakness for pretty young French prostitutes.

Sex is definitely involved in the game, and Muldoon is personally involved in this side of it.

Hart Muldoon made his first appearance in Woman of Cairo in 1953 and featured in four subsequent novels. John Flagg made his debut as a writer of spy thrillers in 1950, not long before the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels appeared. Fleming is sometimes seen as doing for spy fiction what Mickey Spillane had done for the private eye thriller. Fleming certainly upped the ante as far as sex and violence in spy fiction were concerned and it’s interesting that John Flagg had already started moving tentatively in that direction.

Hart Muldoon began his career as a fictional spy almost as an anti-hero. In Woman of Cairo he is far more ruthless than Bond and there’s a touch of Mike Hammer to the character as well. Muldoon kills when it’s necessary to do so, and sometimes he kills for purely personal reasons. Dear, Deadly Beloved was the second of the Muldoon thrillers and the character has been softened a little but he still has an edge to him. Flagg’s fictional espionage world is more cynical and brutal and morally ambiguous than Fleming’s.

Perhaps that’s why Flagg did not achieve the same success as Fleming. Hart Muldoon is cast in a less heroic mould. He’s far from being an idealist. Flagg was perhaps a little ahead of his time.

One thing all the John Flagg spy thrillers have in common is an atmosphere of sexual perversity. It’s not just the particular sexual tastes of the people involved but also their generally morbid and unhealthy approach to sex. And their willingness to use sex as a weapon.

There’s a perfectly decent plot here. There’s a fairly colourful hero. There’s an assortment of ruthless misfits. There are dangerous sexy women. There are sudden eruptions of violence. There’s a fair amount of sleaze. If you think that all that should provide an entertaining cocktail then you’re spot on. This is a very enjoyable read and it’s highly recommended.

Stark House has paired this one with another John Flagg thriller, Woman of Cairo, in a two-novel re-issue edition.

I’ve reviewed other John Flagg spy thrillers - The Lady and the Cheetah, Death and the Naked Lady and The Persian Cat. They’re excellent and I highly recommend all of them.

Vampirella Archives vol 3

Vampirella Archives vol 3 collects issues 15 to 21 of the original Vampirella comic book when it was still published by Warren Publications. These issues are from the early 70s. Each issue contains a reasonably lengthy Vampirella adventure plus four much shorter unrelated comic-strip stories. As always the Vampirella stories are pretty cool while the non-Vampirella stories range from awful to excellent.

Each Vampirella adventure more or less stands on its own but there are continuing story arcs so they really do need to be read in sequence. Vampirella of course is not a conventional vampire - she’s an alien from the planet Drakulon. The inhabitants of Drakulon must drink blood to survive but they don’t kill. On Earth however Vampirella would have no choice but to kill had a scientist not developed a blood-substitute serum for her. Vampirella is a heroine with a dark side.

This is a totally original and intriguing vampire mythos and then things interesting as Dracula starts to figure more often in the stories. Dracula should be totally out of place in the Vampirella Mythos but instead we get a whole new Dracula Mythos which is compatible. And it works better than you might expect.

By this time she has acquired a sidekick, a broken-down but good-natured stage illusionist named Pendragon. And she has an uneasy relationship with the van Helsing family. Conrad van Helsing believes she is an evil vampiress who must be destroyed. His son Adam’s attitude towards her is much more complicated, given that he’s in love with her. And she’s in love with him.

The Vampirella Stories

In the Resurrection of Papa Voudoo, the dictator of a Caribbean island nation (obviously a thinly disguised version of Haiti), has been assassinated. His mistress and his chief advisor are alarmed but they have a plan to revive him. It involves voodoo. Papa Voudoo’s mistress is a powerful sorceress but she will face a formidable opponent in Vampirella.

In And Be a Bride of Dracula Vampirella almost gets married, to a certain Transylvanian Count. And we find out something about Dracula’s past. It all starts when Pendragon finds himself a job, as a stage magician with Vampirella as his beautiful female assistant.

Beware, Dreamers takes place entirely in the world of dream, but it’s a dream that can kill. And Vampirella has run out of her serum. She needs blood. When that happens she becomes a ruthless huntress.

Dracula Still Lives! sees Conrad van Helsing once again deciding that Vampirella must be destroyed. Dracula is now becoming the key character in the story and the Dracula Mythos takes strange new turns involving a mysterious goddess, the Conjuress.

And in Shadow of Dracula we discover that the Conjuress has plans for Dracula. The key lies in the past, in the 19th century.

In When Wakes the Dead both Dracula and Vampirella are transported back to the year 1897 where an earlier generation of Van Helsings are seeking a cure for vampirism. Dracula wants to be cured but he makes the mistake of thinking that simply overcoming the bloodlust will solve his problem when in fact he must confront his darker desires. Vampirella has another problem - she thought she loved Adam but now she thinks she loves someone else, someone she shouldn’t love.

In Slitherers of the Sand the Conjuress sends Vampirella and Dracula to a desert planet where there is nothing but sand. And monsters who feed on sand. By accident Conrad Van Helsing and his son Adam as well as Pendragon end up there as well. The big problem is that Vampirella has no blood serum with her. She’s likely to get thirsty, for blood. Dracula faces the same problem.

The non-Vampirella Stories

Issue 15: In Quavering Shadows a man is worried about his friend Jason who lives in a castle and really seems to think he’s living in the 16th century. Very strange things seem to be going on in this castle and Jason seems to appear and disappear in impossible ways. A reasonably good creepy story. A House Is Not a Home is a nothing story about a girl whose father dabbles in black magic. In Welcome to the Witches’ Coven a young wife joins a Women’s Lib group but it’s not what she’d hoped for.

Issue 16: Purification is a brief lame attempt at out-and-out comedy. In Gorilla My Dreams an explorer in Africa rescues a girl but then has disturbing dreams. Another story that needed to be fleshed out a little. Girl on the Red Asteroid concerns an astronaut marooned on an asteroid. He thinks his luck has changed when he finds a giant egg. Lover! is an OK tale of terror and sadism from the French Revolution. Cilia is the best story so far. In the late 19th century two men survive a shipwreck. They are rescued and one of them arrives in England with a new wife of mysterious origins; the other knows nothing of how he survived. It’s a dark fantasy tale with a tragic edge and it’s very good.

Issue 17: Horus, written and drawn by Esteban Maroto, has a setting in Ancient Egypt. A young woman feigns death to be with her beloved, entombed in one of the pyramids. A rather good tale of love and death. Death in the Shadows is about a girl who is confined to a mental hospital after being found behaving very strangely in a graveyard. She is convinced that there is something she simply must do but she’s not sure what it is. A reasonably effective macabre tale.

A Man’s World takes a reporter to a women’s commune. A series of grisly murders has taken place in the area. The women are self-sufficient although how they manage that in such a desolate spot is a mystery. The reporter will find the answer to several mysteries. A grim but mediocre story. Lover of the Bayou takes place in the swamps. There’s a kind of monster reputed to live in the swamp but no-one really knows anything about it. Quite a good story. The Wedding Ring is about a man who accepts an invitation from an old flame. He hopes for a chance to rekindle that old romance, especially since her new husband isn’t around. An OK story.

Issue 18: Kali Tomb of the Gods tells how the maiden Kali became a goddess. It’s another Esteban Maroto story. I’m starting to really like his work - lush and erotic and psychedelic. Song of a Sad-Eyed Sorceress tells of a sleazy guy who meets a woman with unexpected results for both of them. It’s not bad. Won’t Get Fooled Again concerns a couple driving in the country. They run out of petrol and take refuge in a decaying mansion. There is evil afoot, but what can kind of evil? Fairly entertaining. In The Dorian Gray Syndrome a girl reporter thinks she’s found a real-life Dorian Gray but there’s a twist. A decent story.

Issue 20: Gender Bender by Esteban Maroto is an intriguing wild crazy freaked-out psychedelic trip into the unconscious. Love Is No Game is a nothing story that goes nowhere, about a young woman trying to attract a man’s attention. Eye Opener is yet another story of a sleazy guy pursuing a girl, in a creepy old house. But the old blind woman sees all. Not a bad story. Vengeance, Brother, Vengeance is a sword-and-sorcery tale of two brothers whose fates intersect in unexpected ways. It has a very clever sting in the tail. Good story.

Issue 21: Tomb of the Gods: Legend is an Esteban Maroto tale of a Norse hero who is perhaps not so heroic. An interestingly cynical take on heroes. Good stuff. Paranoia is a dream story, or rather the sort of dream that you hope is just a dream. Not a bad idea but it needed to be fleshed out a little. The twist in The Vampiress Stalks the Castle This Night is that the castle is a castle but it’s in New York.

Final Thoughts

The Vampirella comics are fun and while it’s an uneven collection Vampirella Archives vol 3 is very much worth checking out if you’re a fan of comics that are a bit more outré than superhero fare. Highly recommended.

Cornell Woolrich’s Black Alibi

Cornell Woolrich’s Black Alibi was first published in 1942.

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) was an American writer in the crime and suspense genres and a major figure in the evolution of noir fiction. In the 1920s he had tried to establish himself as a writer in the F. Scott Fitzgerald mould, with very little success. He found immediate success when he switched to crime fiction in 1940.

The novel begins with a publicity stunt. Kiki Walker had been a failed night-club entertainer in the U.S. but thanks to the efforts of her press agent Manning she is now a major star in South America. Manning’s latest stunt is to have Kiki show up at a restaurant with a black jaguar on a leash. This certainly attracts attention. It attracts even more attention when something spooks the jaguar. He creates mayhem in the restaurant and escapes into the night. There’s an intensive search but the animal cannot be found.

Then a young woman is killed. The evidence suggests that the jaguar was responsible. And then another young woman suffers a similar fate. Again it seems clear that she was killed by the jaguar. Inspector Robles has no doubts.

Manning however does have doubts. Maybe he just doesn’t want to accept that the jaguar was responsible since that would make it indirectly his fault - the jaguar got loose as the result of his publicity stunt. But there are a couple of puzzling little things that really bother Manning.

A third woman, a lady of the night, is killed. And then a fourth. In each case there are odd little details that continue to worry Manning. He is developing a theory. Nobody wants to listen to him but he cannot help feeling that his theory makes more sense than the official one.

This novel must have come as something of a shock in 1942. It just doesn’t slot neatly into a genre pigeonhole. It is most definitely not noir fiction. It does contain elements you would expect in the horror genre. There is certainly plenty of suspense. 

The decision as to which genre it should be assigned to is something that depends on how the plot ends up being resolved.

There’s also a degree of grisliness that would have been rather startling in 1942.

Manning is not a conventional hero type. He’s always been a fairly cynical sort of guy, not exactly a crusader or a knight in shining armour. He’s just the sort of guy who cannot let things go. All he’s likely to gain by playing amateur investigator is a lot of aggravation and a lot of embarrassment if his theory turns out to be wrong. He just can’t help himself. These killings really bother him and if he turns out to be right but hasn’t done anything about it he won’t be able to live with himself.

Inspector Robles isn’t quite the dumb cop to be contrasted with the gifted amateur. Robles is competent but he’s under pressure and having conducted his whole investigation on the assumption that a jaguar is responsible he feels he has to keep going on that assumption.

And it has to be said what while Manning is bothered by small details there really does seem to be overwhelming evidence that a jaguar is responsible for the attacks. It’s a case of two men who are both convinced that their respective theories are correct.

I don’t intend to give any hints as to plot details but the plot is rather wild, and the resolution is totally wild.

Black Alibi is a weird fascinating novel and its greatest strength is its weirdness. Highly recommended.

Black Alibi was filmed in 1943 as The Leopard Man, one of the series of superb RKO B-movies produced by Val Lewton. It’s one of countless film and television adaptations of Cornell Woolrich stories most of which are worth checking out. Woolrich’s stories just seemed to work remarkably well on the screen.

Otis Adelbert Kline's The Secret Kingdom

Otis Adelbert Kline and Allen S. Kline’s lost civilisation novel The Secret Kingdom was serialised in Amazing Stories in late 1929.

Chicago-born Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) is often dismissed as an Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator. Which to some extent is true. He was however a pretty good Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator and his stories are quite entertaining.

The lost world/lost civilisation genre was made enormously popular by H. Rider Haggard in the 1880s (his 1886 novel She is still perhaps the finest example of the genre). These tales remained popular until the 1930s. Sadly, in the post-World War 2 period the idea of undiscovered civilisation in remote parts of the globe could no longer be made to seem plausible. The world no longer contained any unexplored corners and much of the romance and mystery of life vanished.

Bell is a young American scientist trekking through an unexplored region in South America. He’s collecting specimens. He has a rival, a German scientist who is out to get him. 

On a remote plateau Bell saves the life of a man, a very oddly dressed man. He has unwittingly encountered a remnant of Inca civilisation. The man he saved is the Inca himself.

This remnant seems to be thriving and they really are quite civilised. The Inca is a very decent guy and he is anxious to reward Bell. There’s just one problem. Bell now knows of the existence of this Inca civilisation, a closely kept secret. He can never be allowed to leave. He is ennobled, given a fine house, treated with immense respect, given servants. He is even given wives. Six of them. All of them young and pretty and very excited to be married to the handsome foreigner.

Bell has met another outsider. Nona, a half-French half-Spanish girl. She also stumbled upon this lost civilisation by accident, and like Bell she will never be permitted to leave.

Bell and Nona fall hopelessly in love but there’s a problem. Nona is supposed to marry the high priest Tupac. The Inca is a good man and a just man but Nona was promised to Tupac and the Inca never breaks his word. He knows Nona does not want to marry Tupac and he has tried to persuade the high priest to release her from her bond but Tupac is unrelenting. Tupac is treacherous, crafty and cruel.

Naturally Bell encounters many dangers, such as narrowly escaping being served as dinner to an enormous and very hungry boa constrictor. There are various attempts to deprive Bell of his life or his freedom, or both. Tupac hatches sinister conspiracies. Bell’s nemesis, the German scientist von Steinbeig, shows up at an inconvenient moment.

There’s plenty of action.

Bell also has his hands full with his six wives. They’re all madly in love with him. Somehow Bell has to avoid sharing his bed with any of them. Nona is a sweet girl but she is a woman and she has a woman’s natural jealousy. She has no intention of sharing Bell with another woman and she certainly isn’t going to share him with six sex-crazed maidens.

Bell is your basic square-jawed hero but he’s likeable enough. Tupac makes a fine villain. The world-building is not elaborate and certainly doesn’t compare with the kind of world-building you would get in an Edgar Rice Burroughs story.

Kline’s prose style is perfectly serviceable. This is pulp fiction and it’s not trying to be anything more than that.

The Secret Kingdom is not a top-tier lost civilisation novel but if you love this genre it’s quite enjoyable. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed several other Otis Adelbert Kline novels - Jan of the Jungle (a Tarzan imitation combined with lost world stuff), Planet of Peril (a decent sword-and-planet adventure) and Lord of the Lamia (an excellent mix of mystery, action, Egyptology, horror and an offbeat love story).

Modesty Blaise: The Puppet Master

The Puppet Master collects three early 1970s Modesty Blaise comic-strip adventures by Peter O’Donnell. By this time Modesty Blaise was also the heroine of a very successful series of novels, also written by Peter O’Donnell. Modesty was a fairly major pop culture icon.

The Puppet Master

Modesty is kidnapped by an old foe seeking a particularly refined and cruel form of vengeance. He has a plan for revenge that will encompass both Modesty and Willie Garvin.

Brainwashing stories of various kinds were a major cultural obsession in the 1960s.

Not a bad story but the plot twists are just a little predictable. It does touch on Modesty’s psychological quirks and on the particular bond that she has with Willie.

With Love From Rufus

A burglar breaks into Modesty’s flat. He must be a very clever burglar to get past the high-tech security system Willie Garvin had installed. He doesn’t take anything but he leaves something behind. Two things in fact. A bunch of flowers and a note signed “With Love From Rufus” and Modesty has never heard of a Rufus. While some women might be alarmed by this Modesty Blaise, being Modesty Blaise, is intrigued.

It turns out that Modesty doesn’t have a stalker but she does have a fan. Just like a pop star. A fan who worships her. She’s flattered but worried. He wants to emulate her criminal career. He’s also landed himself in a very dangerous situation. He might be an aspiring criminal mastermind but he’s basically a good lad and Modesty doesn’t want to see him end up in the slammer, or worse.

Getting him out of the jam he’s in involves Modesty and Willie in plenty of danger.

This is a solid story but the main interest is provided by the fan-worship aspect. Modesty gets to be both motherly and a bit ruthless.

The Bluebeard Affair

The Bluebeard Affair really does concern a modern Bluebeard, Baron Rath. The Baron (whose noble lineage is non-existent) has married a series of rich but timid women. They seems to have unfortunate, and fatal, accidents. Modesty’s friend Raul (a big wheel in the French Sûreté) is worried that his niece will be the next victim. She has become Baron Rath’s fourth wife.

Modesty decides that she needs to present herself as a candidate to be the Baron’s fifth wife. She’s not used to being meek and submissive but she’s a natural actress and has no trouble getting his attention.

The basic story might not be startlingly original but it’s executed with style. We get diabolical female evilness in the persons of the baron’s frightening daughters. We get Modesty sword-fighting. And we get Chloe the elephant who lends Willie a hand (sometimes owning a circus comes in handy).

We also have Willie dealing with something much more terrifying than super-villains - a girl determined to marry him. And she has three very tough very mean brothers to make sure he does the right thing.

There’s plenty of stylish action. A fine story and the highlight of this particular collection.

Final Thoughts

A good solid collection with at least one major standout. Modesty Blaise is always worth reading, in comic-strip or in novel form. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed three other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up, Warlords of Phoenix and The Black Pearl, as well as the first three novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth and I, Lucifer.

Arthur J. Burks, The Wizard of Weird Tales

The Wizard of Weird Tales is a collection of short stories by Arthur J. Burks that were originally published in the Weird Tales pulp magazine.

Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) wrote for pulp magazines in various genres and later began writing on paranormal subjects.

These stories really are wildly original and very very weird. They’re weird in totally unexpected ways. Even the weaker stories are interesting because they’re so bizarre.

Bells of Oceana appeared in Weird Tales in 1927. A young officer on a troopship has an uncanny feeling that something is wrong. Perhaps it’s the bells he hears. There cannot be any bells but he still hears them. He thinks for a moment he sees a face at a porthole but that’s impossible as well. And then one of the sentries cannot be found. Things get stranger. The woman he sees cannot be real. It must be a dream. Or perhaps not. A nicely odd tale of terror at sea.

Room of Shadows appeared in Weird Tales in 1936. A well-to-do man checks into a hotel in New York. There’s something odd about the room. There’s that scent, and the light seems strange. And later the bellhop denies have taken him to the room. The dogs are disturbing. Very very small dogs. The woman disturbs him as well. She went into the bathroom and then seemed to vanish. A very unusual creepy tale that gives a new twist to an old legend. Excellent story.

Black Harvest of Moraine (published in 1950) is truly bizarre. A wheat harvest turns into disaster. The wheat is infected with smut (a fungal crop disease). Only it turns out not to be smut but something much stranger. It is something ancient and evil, and terrifying and remorseless.

The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee (1926) is obviously going to involve ghosts of some sort, but but this is an unconventional ghost story. A returned soldier dying from the effects of being gassed in the war is offered refuge in a remote log cabin. He hears an infant wailing. It is impossible, but he has to check. Then he sees something horrifying. He sees it again and again. Very good story.

Luisma’s Return (1925) takes place on Haiti. Luisma is the general of the emperor of Haiti, Christophe. The emperor has stolen Luisma’s woman. Luisma wants revenge. It is impossible. Christophe’s power is absolute. But Luisma is determined. An OK story.

Rhythmic Formula (1952) is a neat little story about Russ Creavey, a famous explorer who becomes very rich by marrying rich wives. They don’t live too long thanks to some tricks Russ picked up in the Amazon rainforest. Russ is now set for life. Nothing can go wrong. Good story.

Orbit of Souls (1926) concerns a rich man whose wealth was built on lies and deception facing the ire of one of his victims. He never thought he might one day pay for his misdeeds. He still doesn’t think he’ll have to but a series of strange events might change his mind. An OK story.

Morpho on the Screen (1954) is about a young boy who has vivid dreams about riding butterflies in the Amazon rainforest. The dreams continue as he gets older. A very very strange tale but fascinating.

In Asphodel (1926) the narrator meets an old hermit. He then finds himself in a meadow of asphodels, the flowers of death. What follows might be merely a dream, or perhaps not. Very weird but rather disturbing.

When the Graves Were Opened (1925) is a very weak story of time travel, of a sort. A man is transported back to the time of Crucifixion.

Voodoo (1924) is one of his earliest stories and one of several with a Haitian setting. It’s a straightforward not very interesting story of a soldier seeking revenge on a voodoo priest.

Vale of the Corbies (1925) is another reasonably effective tale of frightening dreams.

The Invading Horde (1927) is oddly enough a science fiction story set in the future, in the vast City of the East which covers the whole of the eastern half of the United States. The city is a miracle of technology. People move about the city in monopters which are like wearable flying suits. Now the City of the East faces a deadly threat from the sea.

Something Toothsome (1926) begins with two Army officers, one of them an army dental surgeon, discussing writing. They both have ambitions in that direction. They concoct crazy story about a murder involving dentistry. But of course it could never happen in real life, or could it?

Some of these stories will definitely shock the delicate sensibilities of some modern readers.

Overall a good collection with the strong stories outnumbering the weaker ones. And Burks can certainly get very weird indeed. Recommended.

Milton K. Ozaki’s The Scented Flesh

Milton K. Ozaki’s The Scented Flesh was published in 1951.

Milton K. Ozaki (1913-1989) was an American writer born in Wisconsin. His father was Japanese. He wrote a couple of dozen crime novels between 1946 and 1960.

The Scented Flesh opens in classic hardboiled style. Private eye Carl Good wakes up next to a beautiful blonde. This dame has real class, and a look around her apartment indicates she has real money as well. That puzzles Carl. If she has class why would she have gone to bed with him? Dames like her don’t sleep with two-bit private eyes. There’s a used flash bulb on the floor, which worries Carl a little. Another thing that bothers Carl is that the blonde is dead. He doesn’t like the implications of that. He certainly didn’t kill her but it looks like someone is trying to make it look that way.

It would help if he could remember how he ended up in the dame’s apartment but the previous night is a complete blank. Carl is no drunk. He figures someone slipped him a mickey.

Eventually he remembers that he’d been in a dive called The Shamrock. Maybe one of the girls there remembers seeing him. Flo remembers him. She thought he was a pretty nice guy.

Another thing that Carl figures out is that he’s making somebody nervous. Nervous enough to try to blow him up with a hand grenade. There are whispers of a shake-up in the world of organised crime but Carl can’t see how that could connect with a routine missing persons case. Which is all that this started out to be. An old guy from Iowa hired him to find a girl, Sylvia Shepherd. Maybe she’s his daughter. Carl doesn’t care. He was offered two hundred bucks to find her so he took the case.

Now everyone is telling him that the smart thing to do is to drop the case. Carl thinks that would be the smart thing to do as well. He has no personal stake in this and it sounds like some very dangerous people are mixed up in it, the kinds of people a smart private eye steers well clear of. But Carl is stubborn.

The sleaze level gradually increases. It’s a crooked town. But Carl has been around long enough to take that for granted. He’s a big boy.

There are a lot of women in this case. Lots of naked women. Some dead, some alive. Some of them are strippers. Some seem respectable. Carl thinks the strippers are more trustworthy than the respectable dames. Maybe he’s right.

Maybe he should talk to the organised crime boss? A crazy idea but it might give him a clue. And it’s not like Carl has any crusading ideas about clearing up crime and corruption. He just wants to solve the case and collect his two hundred bucks and go back to his normal routine. A routine that doesn’t involve waking up in bed with dead blondes.

It’s a fairly routine plot but it’s serviceable enough. Carl gets himself deeper and deeper into something he still doesn’t understand and that offers plenty of potential for action and narrow escapes from danger.

There’s plenty of hardboiled atmosphere but this is definitely not noir fiction.

The Scented Flesh is a fairly average but very competent hardboiled PI thriller. As long as you don’t approach it with unrealistically high expectations it’s enjoyable. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Owen Dudley’s rather good Run If You Can in a two-novel edition.

John Norman’s Nomads of Gor

Nomads of Gor, published in 1969, is the fourth book in John Norman’s Gor series.

This series has aroused lots of controversy due to the fact that it depicts a society in which female slavery is practised. In fact there’s nothing controversial in the first three books. They’re imaginative and intelligent science fiction/fantasy novels with some fine world-building. This fourth book does start to get into more controversial territory. It’s worth reading in order to find out what the fuss was all about.

The premise of the series is that there is, within our solar system, a hitherto undiscovered planet. It is the Counter-Earth and is known as Gor. It is inhabited by humans, but the animal life is decidedly non-terrestrial. Gor is ruled by the mysterious priest-kings. Gor is technologically primitive, roughly equal to mediæval Europe. There is no electricity. There are no cars or locomotives. There are no firearms. As you find out as you make your way through the series the actual situation is much more complicated. Things are not as they seem to be.

Tarl Cabot is an ordinary American, from Earth. He has been transported to Gor by means that seem magical but are not. He has a destiny on Gor.

I’m not going to spoil things by revealing anything about the true situation. And I’m going to avoid spoilers for the earlier books.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that the Gor books have to be read in publication order. If you don’t read them this way you’ll be very confused. At least in the early books there are ongoing story arcs.

While the Gor novels can be enjoyed as exciting sword-and-planet style adventures (there’s plenty of action) John Norman is a philosopher and he used the Gor novels to explore various philosophical, political, social and cultural speculations. And speculations about sexual mores. He created a complex fictional alternative world with beliefs and values that may seem strange but of course the beliefs and values of every human society at various stages of those societies’ histories always seem strange to those brought up in other societies and at other times.

You don’t have to approve of the Gorean society that Norman describes. He is clearly trying to be provocative and to challenge our assumptions. I like that in a writer.

In Nomads of Gor Tarl Cabot finds himself among the People of the Wagons, fierce nomadic tribesmen from the southern part of Gor. Their society is similar to mainstream Gorean society in some ways, and very different in others. There are four main nomad tribes. Relations between these tribes are often uneasy. If the omens are favourable an overall leader can be appointed, but the omens never are favourable.

Tarl is carrying out a mission on behalf of the priest-kings. His first step has to be to persuade these nomads not to kill him out of hand. He does that. They take a liking to him.

What he didn’t expect to find among the nomads was an American girl named Elizabeth Cardwell, a girl from 1960s New York City. Her presence just doesn’t make sense.

Tarl and Kamchak, one of the subordinate nomad leaders. His tribe is laying siege to the city of Turia. Tarl thinks the solution to his quest may be in Turia.

There’s another woman who plays a key role in this story. Aphris is Turian. Kamchak is determined to own her. The emotional and sexual dynamics involving Tarl, Kamchak, Aphris and Elizabeth are complex but crucial. The relationship between Tarl and Elizabeth is central to the story.

Tarl has conflicted views about Gorean sexual mores. He accepts that Gorean society is based on different values. He isn’t sure that he can fully accept those values, but he can see that they make a kind of sense. A major theme of Nomads of Gor is Tarl’s struggle with his conflicted views. Does he want Elizabeth as his slave? He doesn’t think so, but maybe he does. Does she want to be his slave? She doesn’t think so, but maybe she does. Norman is challenging us to think about social organisation and sexual mores and the extent to which they are built on a proper understanding of human motivations and the extent to which they are built on our own social prejudices. The reader will either enjoy being challenged in this way, or will be shocked and offended. But Norman does have serious intentions.

Nomads of Gor is a fine entry in the Gor saga and I highly recommend it but read the first three books first.

I’ve reviewed those first three Gor novels here - Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor and Priest-Kings of Gor.