Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur

The Voyeur, published in 1955, was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s third novel.

Robbe-Grillet was a leading light in the Nouveau Roman ( 'new novel') movement which emerged in France in the 1950s. Whether this can be considered a modernist or a postmodernist movement depends on how you define postmodernism, and nobody has ever been able to define postmodernism satisfactorily.

The Nouveau Roman writers were uninterested in conventional narratives. The Voyeur has a narrative, but it’s almost accidental. It’s as if the protagonist, Matthias, collects bits and pieces of evidence drawn from his observations and memories and it is possible from these elements to construct a narrative but there is no way to be sure that is is the correct one. In fact there is no way to be sure that there is any story at all. The story told by these items of evidence might be illusory, merely a result of the innate human desire to see events as forming patterns. Sometimes the patterns are real. Sometimes they’re just random observations.

Matthias is a watch salesman. He arrives on a small island, hoping for a successful sales trip. He was born on this island and has various memories connected with it, although we have to consider the possibility that he has never been there before.

Memories are triggered but Matthias knows that memories can be misleading or false. He meets an old school friend but he has no actual recollection of having ever set eyes on this fellow before.

While Matthias is on the island a terrible event occurs. It may be a shocking crime. A young girl is found dead. It may have been murder but for various reasons the evidence pointing to murder has to be regarded by the reader as very ambiguous. It is entirely possible that the girl fell from the cliff accidentally.

Matthias tries to reconstruct the events, and his own actions, from his memories of that fateful day. These memories may be mixed up with memories from his past, of things that may have happened to him years earlier. It is possible that those things really happened to him, but it is also possible that they never happened. Some of his memories seem to be constructed from stories he has heard about other people. Matthias seems to have difficulty separating other people’s experiences from his own. We might well suspect that Matthias is the sort of guy who reads detective stories and true crime stories. The newspaper cutting he carries around with him might be about a crime he committed, or it might simply be a story of a crime committed by someone else.

You could argue that in this novel Matthias may be playing the role of the detective, or the role of the perpetrator of a crime. If there was a crime.

Matthias’s memories are disturbing but at the same time he regards them with detachment. There are perhaps some existentialist elements to this novel. Matthias is an observer (hence the title). Is he a participant as well, or just an observer?

Matthias obsesses about time (it’s probably no coincidence that he makes his living selling wristwatches). Everything he does have to fit a timetable. He has only six hours on the island before he has to catch the steamer back to the mainland. He has to sell 89 wristwatches in that time. He needs to know how long each sale will take. If sales are slow early on he has to recalculate his timetable.

He has to know exactly how long it will take him to get back to the pier. That timetable has to be constantly revised as well.

Matthias is obsessed by numbers. He needs to know exactly how many wristwatches he needs to sell, and the wristwatches come in different styles with different prices. He does the calculations in his head again and again.

Matthias is constantly trying to piece together the story of his day on the island. Possibly not the story, but a story. A narrative. Memories and observations can be pieced together in different ways to make stories that are not necessarily the same story or the real story. He is doing what a novelist does - piecing together various plot elements in order to construct a narrative but the plot elements do not necessarily have to be put together in just one way. They can make different narratives. A novelist’s narrative does not have to be true. A novelist deals with stories but perhaps not with truth or reality. Perhaps there is no true narrative. A novelist’s narrative does however have to make sense on its own terms and it has to suit the novelist’s purpose.

Matthias is trying to construct a narrative that will suit his purpose. He is having a lot of difficulty doing this. He has to make a lot of revisions. A lot of recalculations.

It all sounds very dry and intellectual and very arty but in fact it’s very entertaining. There was always a playfulness about Robbe-Grillet’s work. And he hoped the reader (or the viewer in the case of his film) would enjoy the games as well. The Voyeur is highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Robbe-Grillet’s delightfully playful 1965 novel La Maison de rendez-vous. He was also a brilliant film director. I’ve reviewed many of his movies - the hypnotic L’immortelle (1963), his superb exercise in surrealism La Belle Captive (1983), the wildly strange and erotic Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) and the enticingly puzzling Playing with Fire (1975).

Happily the English translation of The Voyeur is easy to find.

Victor Canning's The Golden Salamander

Victor Canning (1911-1986) was a very popular English thriller writer who had a 50-year career. His thriller The Golden Salamander was published in 1949.

David Redfern is one of those Englishmen left somewhat adrift after wartime military service although in David’s case it was the death of his wife Julie after his return from the war that hit him harder. He blames himself (wrongly) for her death.

Now he’s in a little town named Kabarta, in Algeria, doing a job for an English university at which he was once a fellow. The job is to take charge of a huge shipment of Etruscan antiquities and arrange their shipping to England. What are Etruscan antiquities doing in Algeria? They were sent there for safekeeping during the war. They belonged to a wealthy Frenchman. He has now bequeathed them to David’s university. The man, a rich guy named Serafis, in whose house they are being stored is anxious to see them gone.

Etruscan civilisation is one of David’s subjects so he’s the ideal man for this job.

On his way to Kabarta he encounters a mudslide and has to abandon his rented car and finish his journey on foot. He comes across a lorry that has been stranded. He is curious enough to look inside one of the crates that has fallen from the lorry. It contains guns. He realises he has stumbled across a gun-running operation. He isn’t interested. It’s not his business. The war left him with a total lack of interest in causes and patriotic duty.

He meets a likeable American named Joe. Joe is an artist. He knows there’s something missing in his painting. He came to Kabarta in the hopes of finding it. There’s also a young Frenchman named Max. His paintings have what Joe’s lack but Max is looking for something else that’s missing in his life.

This is true of many of the characters in this book. They’re looking for something. David is certainly looking for something. Maybe he had it once. Maybe he never had it. But he needs to find it.

He meets a girl. Her name is Anna. He had no intention of falling in love again but it seems like it’s going to happen anyway. Maybe he loves her the way he was never able to love Julie. That could be one of things he’s looking for. But he’s looking for something else as well. Perhaps it’s a sense of purpose. Or perhaps it’s a moral strength. He has stumbled upon something illegal and wicked but he does nothing. That will have consequences. In this novel actions have consequences. David will learn this and it’s a hard lesson.

Despite his determination not to get involved in doing anything about the gun-running he does become involved. The problem is that he doesn’t understand the situation. He thinks he’s a world-weary cynic but there’s a touch of naïvete to him. He’s basically a good man and he doesn’t understand evil or corruption. David is a complex and interesting character. He is very much a flawed hero.

Among the Etruscan antiquities he discovers something not listed in the catalogue. It is a golden Etruscan salamander. Something about it haunts David. It’s as if it’s a symbol but he has to figure out what it symbolises for him.

It all builds to a very tense and exciting extended action finale. It’s a kind of hunt, with David as the hunted.

The Golden Salamander is a fine suspense thriller with a bit more substance and psychological depth than you generally expect in this genre. Canning is a writer deserving of rediscovery. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the movie adaptation of this novel, The Golden Salamander (1950), as well as Canning’s excellent 1948 thriller Panther’s Moon.

Karl Tanzler von Cosel's The Secret of Elena’s Tomb

The Secret of Elena’s Tomb was published in Fantastic Adventures in September 1947. It claims to be both a true story and an autobiographical story. And, weirdly enough, it is.

Karl Tanzler von Cosel (1877-1952) was a German-born radiologist who actually did preserve a woman’s corpse and attempt to bring it back to life. This really is his autobiographical account of those events. To say that he was eccentric would be an understatement. He was clearly quite mad, although probably well-intentioned.

The Secret of Elena’s Tomb is partly a true story. A great deal of it is certainly true. He unquestionably believed that all of it was true.

Von Cosel lived for a time in Australia, was interned during the First World and later moved to the United States. In his youth he believed he was visited by the spirit of a long-dead ancestress. While living in Australia he believed he was given a glimpse of his future bride. In Florida he met a young Cuban woman named Elena. She was dying of tuberculosis. He tried to save her life with various treatments, some scientific and some very much in the realm of pseudoscience. He had a kind of mystical belief in the power of electricity.

He also built an aircraft. He intended that he and Elena would fly away in it to some remote South Pacific isle.

Elena died but he refused to believe that her death was final. He stole her body from its tomb and kept it with him for seven years, making various attempts to preserve the body and revivify it. Eventually he was arrested. He was certified as mentally competent to stand trial but no really serious charges could be brought against him and his obviously sincere belief that he had acted for the best counted in his favour and all charges against him were dropped after he had spent a very brief period behind bars. The case became a media sensation at the time. All of this really happened.

All of this is recounted in von Cosel’s story. I’m not giving away spoilers since his story opens with his release from prison so we know how the story is going to end. And the interest in his story is not in the events themselves but in his motivations and in his interpretations of the events.

All of this is pretty much true. But von Cosel truly believed that Elena was not really dead and that she talked with him and sang to him after her death. He also recounts various dreams. It’s clear that he believed that dreams were more than just dreams, that they were in some sense true. Perhaps more true than waking life.

Many years after his own death in 1952 sensational accusations of necrophilia were levelled against him but the evidence is dubious. In his own account it appears that he believed that he and Elena had some kind of real married life after her death but his inability to distinguish between reality, dreams, wishful thinking and his odd mix of pseudoscientific, esoteric and mystical beliefs makes it impossible to know exactly what form this strange imaginary married life took.

It’s obviously a very creepy and disturbing first-person account of madness and obsession but it’s also a weirdly moving love story. For Karl Tanzler von Cosel love really was something that never dies. It’s worth reading just for its historical curiosity value and for its strangeness.

Armchair Fiction have paired this book with Leroy Yerxa’s novella Witch of Blackfen Moor in one of their two-novel paperback editions.

Owen Dudley’s Run If You Can

Owen Dudley’s Run If You Can was published in 1960. The tagline will certainly get your attention - So Lovely, So Nude, So Evil.

Dudley Dean McGaughey (1909-1986) wrote a huge number of pulp novels in various genres including both westerns and crime fiction under many different pseudonyms including Owen Dudley.

Ed Dunlap is in the construction business in partnership with his old army buddy Jake Armistead. Now Jake is dead. He was hit by a truck in the little town of Palm Oasis. That means Ed will have to return to Palm Oasis. It’s not a pleasant thought. He hasn’t been back there since he and his ex-wife Clissta were tried for the murder of his uncle. They were acquitted but as Ed soon finds out out he isn’t popular in Palm Oasis.

That’s partly his stepbrother Quince’s doing. Ed and Quince have always hated each other. Ed has hated Quince even more since he caught him in bed with Clissta.

Now Ed is going to have to deal with both Clissta and Quince again. Ed has a very strong suspicion that Jake was murdered. There’s also the matter of the forty-one thousand dollars that has disappeared.

It doesn’t take Ed long to figure out that Palm Oasis is a very bad place for him to be. Especially with crooked sheriff Bert Crackling out to get him. He doesn’t have much choice. If he can’t recover that money his construction business is finished.

Ed has an ally, of sorts. Her name is Pat. She’s seventeen. Ed assumes Jake was sleeping with her but Pat has a different story, a very different story.

From this point on the well-constructed plot comes up with some nice twists.

There’s certainly a strong noir flavour here. Ed is a decent guy and while he doesn’t have any typically noir character flaws he does have some serious noir vulnerabilities. He’s getting in deeper and deeper and he doesn’t know exactly what it is that he’s getting into.

The noir flavour is strengthened by the presence of three dangerous females and any or all of them could qualify for the femme fatale label.

There’s also a very squalid atmosphere of corruption. Palm Oasis is a rotten town where money can buy anything and there aren’t too many people in the town who haven’t sold out. Those that haven’t are too dumb or too apathetic or too scared to do anything about it.

Ed isn’t dumb. Maybe it’s not very sensible to pursue this matter but he’s fairly smart and he can work things out. The trouble is that when he does figure things out he finds he doesn’t have too many good options.

There’s a very hardboiled feel which the author handles well. There’s plenty of action and violence. There’s also some definite sleaze. One of the three dangerous dames is jailbait, one is a high-priced whore and one is a nymphomaniac.

All the noir fiction ingredients are here. Whether such a story is truly noir naturally depends on whether the hero can succeed in extricating himself from the appalling nightmare he’s landed himself in. If he cannot then it’s noir. If he can, then it’s merely noir-flavoured. And naturally I have no intention of giving you any hints as to how this one ends.

On the whole I found Run If You Can to be a pleasant surprise, coming from an author I’d never heard of. It’s well-crafted with plenty of suspense and with a nice cast of noirish characters. Highly recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Milton K. Ozaki’s The Scented Flesh in a two-novel crime fiction paperback edition.

Willard E. Hawkins' Scratch One Asteroid

Scratch One Asteroid is a science fiction novella by Willard E. Hawkins that was first published in Amazing Stories in November 1952.

Willard E. Hawkins (1887-1970) wrote a smallish quantity of short form science fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s. Scratch One Asteroid seems to have been one of his last published stories.

The background to the story is that Mars and Venus have been colonised. Both planets had their own native inhabitants (in 1952 this still seemed vaguely plausible) but there is no interstellar space flight.

Brent Agar and Pete Monson are convicts on their way to the prison planetoid Ceres. Brent is determined to escape. When he finds out that there is, very unusually, a woman aboard the prison spaceship he thinks his chance has come. Her name is Vesta Clement, she’s a passenger and she’s being dropped off at a private resort planetoid. Brent and Pete hijack Vesta and the space tender and they’re very pleased to have gained their freedom but that freedom turns out to be an illusion.

The private planetoid belongs to Vesta’s fabulously rich uncle Wade Ballentine. He lives there alone apart from a surprisingly large staff of Venusians. Brent and Pete are his prisoners while Vesta is his guest.

Brent is suspicious of the whole setup. Wade Ballentine’s story doesn’t add up. Brent thinks that he and Pete and in danger and that Vesta is in even more danger. Brent is a convict but he’s basically a pretty decent guy. He really doesn’t want any harm to befall Vesta. He feels rather protective towards her.

What Brent needs to do is to figure out what Ballentine is up to. Brent has a hunch that whatever it is it’s highly illegal and that Ballentine isn’t going to want any witnesses left alive.

This is space adventure rather than anything approaching hard science fiction but the author is at least aware that a tiny planetoid would have very little gravity indeed. He comes up with some simple technobabble to deal with this and with the problem of providing an atmosphere for what is little more than a smallish asteroid. He doesn’t try to make the technobabble convincing because it’s not necessary. This is an adventure tale and he wants to get on with it.

There’s neither the time not the necessity for any real characterisation. Pete is good-natured and a bit thick-headed. Brent is resourceful, determined and fundamentally a nice enough guy. Vesta is just your basic rich girl although she’s pleasant and rather pretty.

The idea of asteroids being turned into luxury private estates or exclusive resort hotels in space is a reasonably good one. It is implied that one of the attractions of such private planetoids is that they’re outside normal legal jurisdictions.

Hawkins’ prose is basic but serviceable.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with The Secret Kingdom by Otis Adelbert Kline and Allen S. Kline in a two-novel paperback edition.

Some of the obscure pulp stories Armchair Fiction have unearthed turn out to be neglected gems. Even the weaker ones, such as this, are interesting in giving us a glimpse of the range of fiction published by the pulps. We can appreciate the gems more fully when we can compare them to the run-of-the-mill stories. This is a lightweight pulp story but it’s harmless and at least moderately entertaining. Worth a look but don’t set your expectations too high.

Colin Wilson’s The God of the Labyrinth

Colin Wilson’s The God of the Labyrinth was published in 1971.

Colin Wilson (1931-2013) was one of the most fascinating literary figures of his age. To say that his intellect was wide-ranging would be an understatement. He became a sensation at the age of 24 with his book The Outsider which to a large extent introduced existentialism to the English-speaking world. He wrote on philosophy and on the occult. He wrote crime novels and science fiction.

And he wrote novels like The God of the Labyrinth which are difficult to classify. You could call it an existentialist literary detective story combined with philosophical musings on sex and consciousness.

The first-person narrator is Gerard, a writer who had achieved notoriety with the publication of a scandalous sex diary. Sorme is on a lecture tour in the United States when he is offered a commission by a sleazy publisher to write an introduction to an erotic journal by a moderately obscure Irish rake named Esmond Donnelly. The manuscript Sorme is given is disappointingly brief and with few literary qualities. Sorme had however come across Donnelly’s name is another context a few days earlier. He is a firm believer that coincidences are not coincidences. He feels compelled to accept the commission.

The publisher tells him that he would be delighted if Sorme could find more material. Sorme is convinced that what he means by this is that he wants Sorme to forge the additional material, which Sorme certainly has no intention of doing. Then Sorme discovers that the whole existing manuscript is a forgery. There almost certainly was however a genuine manuscript which may still exist. Tracking down the original manuscript will be an interesting challenge and Sorme is becoming fascinated by Donnelley. In fact he’s becoming obsessed.

Finding the manuscript really does require the skill and patience of a detective. It may be in the hands of Donnelly’s descendants, or in the hands of descendants of various people with whom Donnelly was involved.

Sorme finds a variety of genuine writings by Donnelly, more than enough to justify a book.

The God of the Labyrinth includes copious extracts from Esmond Donnelly’s diaries. Some is mostly interested in the erotic material, not for prurient reasons but for philosophical reasons. Sorme believes that sex can be the key to unlocking elevated states of consciousness and he suspects that Donnelly held similar views. Esmond’s sexual adventures in some ways parallel Sorme’s own. Sorme also sees sexual desire as being driven not by purely physical desire. It’s an attempt to establish some mystic communion with a member of the opposite sex. When a man and a woman have sex it’s much more than a union of two bodies, or at least it can be much more.

We’re often not sure whether we’re getting the opinions of Donnelly or of Sorme or of Wilson. Wilson was certainly interested in ideas similar to those espoused by Donnelly and Sorme.

Sorme finds lots of manuscripts. Some are forgeries, some are not. Some were written by Donnelly and some by others. Donnelly had been associated with some interesting literary figures. Sorme comes to realise that there is more at stake than an erotic diary. Donnelly’s interests ranged well beyond sex, perhaps into more esoteric fields. Sorme keeps coming across references to the Sect of the Phoenix, and even to the Hell Fire Club.

This novel is more than a literary detective story and as it progresses it becomes more and more difficult to be sure exactly what kind of a story this is.

Donnelly becomes an ever more elusive character, and Sorme becomes ever more obsessed.

There’s plenty of sex but it would be misleading to call this an erotic novel. It’s very cerebral and very obscure but it’s always interesting. No-one but Colin Wilson could have written this novel. As a writer he was a one-off and this novel is a one-off. But it is weirdly fascinating and it is highly recommended.

Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun

Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (using the name Robert Markham) in 1968. This was the first of the many James Bond continuation novels. I have always avoided these novels because I don’t really approve of other writers carrying on the adventures of characters created by deceased writers. I have however made an exception in the case of Colonel Sun.

Kingsley Amis really was qualified to write a Bond novel. He was not that much younger than Ian Fleming. The world of postwar austerity, of ever-declining British power, of Britain becoming a subservient satellite of the United States, of that vague sense of dissatisfaction that Britain had won the war and was now much worse off than before, the loss of optimism and national self-confidence - these things formed the historical background of Fleming’s Bond novels and they explain much of the character of James Bond and of the novels. Amis was as familiar with this world as was Fleming. He may not have agreed with all of Fleming’s views but he certainly understood where Fleming was coming from, which meant that he understood where Bond was coming from. He knew what made Bond tick.

Amis had written what is still the best non-fiction book on Bond, The Bond Dossier. He understood the Bond novels.

Colonel Sun opens with an attempt to kidnap both M and Bond. Bond escapes. He then realises that the only way to crack the case is to get himself captured. The kidnappers have set an obvious trap for him in Greece but he’ll have to walk right into it.

MI6 have no idea of the identity of those behind this sinister plot. The answer turns out to be rather complicated. The potential for betrayals and double-crosses and misunderstandings and divided loyalties is enormous.

There is a girl of course. A Greek girl named Ariadne. Maybe Bond should not trust her but it soon transpires that he’s fresh out of reliable allies so he’ll have to take a chance on her. Ariadne is very much a Bond Girl, a worthy successor to the Bond girls created by Fleming.

The plot is complex but it feels reasonably Bondian. The only departure from the Bond novels is that suddenly Red China is a major threat, which by 1968 was becoming a standard feature of spy fiction. This is a Cold War thriller, which was not something that Ian Fleming was really into. Fleming felt that too much obsession wth the Cold War would have dated his books and of course he was right. But this is a Cold War thriller with a difference. I can’t explain the difference without revealing spoilers so I won’t.

Colonel Sun himself is a typical Bond villain in some ways, although less colourful than Fleming’s Bond villains. He does have the sadistic tendencies of a Bond villain. Colonel Sun is an enthusiastic disciple of the Marquis de Sade and a believer in de Sade’s philosophies.

Fleming’s interest in sadomasochism has been exaggerated but it was real and Amis puts quite a bit of emphasis on it.

This is a Bond who is still recovering, physically and emotionally, from the traumatic events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Amis maintains the continuity from that book. This is also a Bond very much in tune with the Bond of the later Fleming novels and short stories. He’s lost some of his sense of certainty. He has developed a few moral qualms about the job. This is quite consistent with the way Fleming was developing the character in stories like For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights. You’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of Colonel Sun if you’re familiar with Fleming’s Bond stories.

There’s some sex, but no more than you get in a Fleming Bond novel. The fact that Bond gets emotionally involved with Ariadne is also perfectly consistent with Fleming’s Bond - Bond is a man who cannot have a sexual relationship with a woman without becoming emotionally entangled.

Amis’s style is close enough to Fleming’s to feel authentically Bondian.

It’s a fine exciting spy thriller tale. Highly recommended.

Edgar Wallace's The Frightened Lady

The Frightened Lady is a 1933 Edgar Wallace thriller.

Fairly typically the setting is a country house in England. Marks Priory is the estate of the young Lord Lebanon but he is definitely not in charge. He is entirely under the thumb of his mother. He doesn’t like it but every attempt at rebellion on his part has failed. Lady Lebanon is a formidable woman. She has intense family pride. An expert in heraldry, she is obsessed by the family’s history. She is not not just a Lebanon by marriage but by birth as well. She married her cousin. It is a very ancient family.

Young Lord Lebanon has other problems, specifically the rather sinister Dr Amersham. The relationship between his mother and Dr Amersham is obscure but it does appear that the doctor has some kind of hold over her. The servants detest Dr Amersham, probably with good reason.

Chief Inspector Bill Tanner of Scotland Yard becomes involved with this ancient family when the chauffeur is murdered. Tanner was in fact more or less on the scene at the time. He was in the village, Marks Thornton, investigating a case of counterfeiting.

There are all kinds of tensions at Marks Priory. The gamekeeper Tillings suspects his wife of being unfaithful, possibly with the chauffeur. There are two hardboiled American footmen which is very strange. One has to wonder how on earth they came to be in the service of such an old and distinguished family. Lord Lebanon has tried to dismiss them but has been overruled by his mother. Lady Lebanon’s secretary Ilsa Crane is terrified but nobody knows why. Every member of the family and every member of the staff seems anxious, unhappy and secretive.

And more murders will follow.

There are secrets here, possibly from the past. There might also be a question of money, the Lebanon family being extremely rich. There are sexual tensions. There are jealousies. There could be all sorts of motives for murder here.

Tanner is an efficient cop with an impressive record. His two off-siders are perhaps less formidable. Detective Sergeant Ferraby is young but very keen. Tanner regards Detective Sergeant Totty as the worst detective he has ever encountered, with a tendency to indulge in fanciful speculation. Totty is however almost a genius when it comes to spotting physical clues.

Ferraby gets himself personally involved when he takes a shine to Ilsa Crane.

There are plenty of suspects in the sense that there are plenty of people here with things to hide. Coming up with a plausible explanation for the crimes is a challenge even for a man as experienced as Bill Tanner, and he is unable to connect all the pieces of the puzzle until the very end. Despite his experience he has made a couple of false assumptions.

Wallace invites the reader to make false assumptions as well. He plays fair with the reader but like any good detective story writer he uses misdirection quite skilfully. He allows us to mislead ourselves.

The construction of Marks Priory began in 1160. It has been modified and extended and rebuilt several times. You won’t be at all surprised to learn that it is suspected that the house may contain secret passageways - this is an Edgar Wallace thriller after all.

This is closer to being a straightforward country house murder mystery than the more outrageous type of thriller for which Wallace was known, although there are a few outrageous touches and a few familiar Wallace trademarks.

The Frightened Lady is fine entertainment and is recommended.

The novel was filmed in 1940 as The Case of the Frightened Lady.

Jay Dratler’s The Pitfall

Jay Dratler’s The Pitfall was published in 1947.

Forbes is a Hollywood screenwriter. He knows this guy called Mac. Mac is a cop. Mac has made Forbes a very strange proposition. Mac busted a punk named Bill Smiley for petty thieving. Smiley is now behind bars but not for long. It was a very minor offence and he’ll be out in six weeks. But Mac has become obsessed by Smiley’s wife Mona. He has only met her briefly but he thinks she’s the most gorgeous most desirable woman he’s ever set eyes on. But she would never consider going to bed with Mac because he’s a cop.

Mac’s proposition is that Forbes should meet Mona, romance her, date her and (presumably) sleep with her. He should then introduce her to Mac and naturally she will then dump Forbes and jump into bed with Mac.

Forbes has three objections to this proposal. Firstly, he’s a happily married man. Secondly, it sounds like a recipe for trouble. Smiley is likely to come after him with murder on his mind. Thirdly, the whole idea makes no sense. It is incoherent, illogical, bizarre and crazy. Forbes is not interested.

On the other hand Forbes’ wife is pregnant at the moment and he’s not getting any bedroom fun. The more he thinks about it the more he decides he wants some bedroom action. And if Mona is as hot as Mac claims then he could definitely get interested. And what could go wrong?

We figure out right away that with Forbes we’re dealing with a classic noir protagonist. He knows the whole situation just has so much potential for disaster, and for several kinds of disaster all rolled up into into one package. He isn’t dumb enough to think it can work out any way but badly. But he goes ahead anyway. He decides not to think about all those disastrous outcomes that are not just possibilities but practically certainties.

He meets Mona, and from that moment on he is lost. She is as gorgeous as Mac claimed. There’s something else about her that drives him crazy. He thinks of her as his tigress. Her body drives him wild. When they go to bed together it’s magic. He is hooked completely. Where Mona is concerned he’s an addict.

Of course he has given no thought to the fact that Bill Smiley’s sentence was a very short one. He has given no thought to what will happen when Bill is released. He hasn’t thought about the fact that Mac is a very dangerous man and he’s a cop as well. Mac expects Forbes to fade out of the picture so that he can have Mona. Cops like Mac do not like being double-crossed. Forbes has also put out of his mind the fact that he has a wife and kid and that he’s not going to be able to walk out on them. All Forbes can think about is Mona, and her perfect body.

Mona to some extent fulfils the femme fatale role in the plot but she’s not a classic femme fatale. OK, she’s a married woman having an affair but she isn’t intending to wreck Forbes’s life. To begin with she doesn’t know Forbes is married. She doesn’t know she’s stealing another woman’s husband.

The one minor problem you might have with this book is accepting the idea that a man like Mac, a tough no-nonsense cop, would come up with that crazy scheme in the first place. It’s a somewhat contrived plot device. If you can accept it that initial premise then everything else in the plot flows smoothly and logically from there. There are lots of ways that life can come crashing down around Forbes’s ears but there’s no way to know which of the many possible disasters might bring that about. And there’s no way of knowing whether Forbes will somehow figure a way out, or whether he’ll get some lucky break.

Forbes is the narrator of the story and The Pitfall is a fine example of the effective use of first-person narration. All we know is what Forbes knows, or thinks he knows. Neither Forbes nor the reader really knows what is going on in Mona’s head, or which way she is likely to jump if things come to a crisis. Forbes is crazy about her and he may be seeing her through the rose-coloured glasses of love. Neither Forbes nor the reader has any idea what is driving Mac. Maybe Mac is totally sane and this is just a cruel game he likes to play with other people’s lives. Maybe he’s totally sane but in the grip of a sexual obsession. Or maybe when it comes to Mona he is just as insane as Forbes.

There’s no way for either Forbes or the reader to predict the actions of Mona or of Mac.

In fact the plot is resolved very neatly. This is top-tier noir fiction. Highly recommended.

The Pitfall has been re-issued in paperback by Stark House.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent movie adaptation - Pitfall (1948).

Ralph Milne Farley’s The Hidden Universe

Roger Sherman Hoar (1887-1963) was an American politician who also wrote a considerable amount of rather interesting pulp science fiction under the name Ralph Milne Farley. His novel The Hidden Universe was published in 1939.

Cathcart is an engineer but times are tough so he’s working as a truck driver for a huge industrial conglomerate, Frain industries. Malcolm Frain has a reputation as a slightly eccentric charismatic billionaire with a genius for business.

Like so many Frain Industries employees Cathcart hopes for a chance of a job in one of Frain’s colonies. Cathcart has another motive as well - his brother landed a job in one of the colonies a while back and Cathcart hasn’t heard from his since. He’d like to make sure his brother is OK. Nobody knows exactly where these colonies are but it's reasonable to assume that they're scattered in far-flung corners of the globe.

To get a shot at a job in the colonies Cathcart has to go through an interview with Frain’s daughter Donna. Cathcart is fascinated by Donna from the start.

Cathcart gets his chance and as soon as he arrives in the colony he notices some odd things. Things that interest him as a man with scientific training. Things like the length of the days and the fact that no stars are visible at night.

He is employed as an assistant to Dr Freundlich, a good-natured scientific genius who is a big deal in the colony. Dr Freundlich has noticed other odd things about the colony.

The colony is, superficially at least, a utopia. Everybody has a good well-paid job. Good housing is available to everyone. There is prosperity and security. Of course there will always be trouble-makers and there’s a faction known as the Populists constantly trying to create unrest.

Both Dr Freundlich and Cathcart become more and more determined to find an explanation for the increasing number of puzzling things they keep noticing. They’re subtle things which most people would not be aware of but to scientists they are very disturbing indeed. There is something about the light. And the way it rains. The explanation they eventually come up with is crazy and impossible but they’re convinced that it’s true.

That explanation has momentous consequences for those hoping one day to return to their old lives and their old homes.

There are some wildly inventive and imaginative ideas in this novel. They might be scientific nonsense but they are undeniably clever and there’s lots of deliriously loopy technobabble. The world in which Cathcart finds himself is very strange indeed but I don’t propose to spoil things by giving you any hints as to the bizarre nature of that world.

There’s also political intrigue as Cathcart reluctantly gets mixed up with the Populists. There are others who suspect that there’s something odd about this colony but Cathcart is not at all sure if he can trust them. He’s also not sure that he can trust Donna although he’d very much like to.

The novel offers adventure and action and romance and a great deal of wild craziness. It’s fast-paced and pulpy and fun.

The pulp science fiction of the 1920s and 30s is well worth exploring. Science fiction was not yet totally dominated by spaceships and death rays. There weren’t really any rigid genre conventions. There were plenty of wildly entertaining offbeat stories such as this. If wildly entertaining and offbeat are concepts that appeal to you then The Hidden Universe is highly recommended.

This novel is published in an Armchair Fiction two-novel paperback edition, paired with Frederik Pohl’s Danger Moon.

I’ve also reviewed Ralph Milne Farley’s 1924 novel The Radio Man and it’s very much worth checking out.

Victor Canning's Castle Minerva

Victor Canning (1911-1986) was an English writer whose first novel was published in 1934, his last in 1985. He wrote historical fiction, children’s books, private eye thrillers and spy fiction. He was very successful but sadly is now largely forgotten. His spy thriller Castle Minerva appeared in 1955.

David Fraser had done espionage work during the war but has settled down into a contented life as a schoolmaster. On a climbing holiday in Wales he runs into his old commanding officer, Colonel Drexel. Drexel saved David’s life during the war so when Drexel asks him to take on a cloak-and-dagger job he cannot refuse.

It seems simple. He has to babysit a young Arab prince named Jamal, in a villa in the south of France near the Spanish border.

David has a bit of a thing for aquariums and in the local aquarium he spots a pretty young woman. Being an ex-spy David knows when he’s under surveillance and this girl definitely seems to be watching him. Then she drops her handbag, and it’s obvious that she has done this deliberately. She is trying to attract his attention. She certainly has no trouble doing that. They meet again later. Her name is Sophie. David is hopelessly in love with her.

By this time alarm bells should be ringing in David’s head. It’s not just the meeting with the girl. It’s also her two male friends, very unsavoury types to be friends of such a nice girl. And there’s the missing key. And the ’phone call about the motor launch. And the dogs that don’t bark when they should. Those alarms bells don’t ring because David is too busy daydreaming about his future life with Sophie. They will of course get married. He’s not sure how many children they will have. Sophie certainly reciprocates his romantic feelings.

David has also made the acquaintance of Dunwoody, a genial eccentric middle-aged Englishman who always just happens to be on hand when something interesting happens.

Then David’s world collapses about his ears. The job he’s doing for Drexel goes very wrong. Jamal is gone. David is under police suspicion. He realises that Drexel thinks his protégé has turned traitor. David is held prisoner, but not by the police. He knows that Sophie cannot be involved in anything underhand. She is after all the girl he’s going to marry. But David is in a lot of trouble and things just keep getting worse.

There has been betrayal but there are quite a few suspects.

An interesting aspect to this novel is Canning’s brutally realistic, even cynical, view of the worlds of espionage and government. The background to David’s adventure is a power struggle in the tiny Arab principality of Ramaut. There are several players in this power struggle, one of them being the British Government. The British Government isn’t interested in freedom and democracy, or high moral principles, or the welfare of the people of Ramaut or even for that matter the welfare of the British people. Ramaut has zero strategic importance. But there is oil in Ramaut. The British Government is serving the commercial interests of a British oil company. The only consideration is money.

There is plenty of moral murkiness in this story. The bad guys don’t do bad things because they’re evil. They’re not actually evil. They do bad things for comprehensible motives. The good guys aren’t exactly paragons of virtue. Even David is no knight in shining armour. He doesn’t give a damn about freedom and democracy or Queen and Country or the people of Ramaut. His motivations are entirely personal. He doesn’t like being betrayed, he wants revenge for wrongs he has suffered and he wants the girl. He is a decent man and a likeable hero but he’s no saint.

Sophie is complicated as well. There are things about her that David needs to know but doesn’t. She could of course be the femme fatale here but she could just as easily be a victim or an innocent bystander.

This is very much a psychological spy novel. It’s more in the gritty realist tradition of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and (later) Len Deighton than in the action-adventure Bond tradition. There is plenty of moral complexity. But it’s also very entertaining. The plotting is tight and clever, Canning pulls off some superb suspense sequences and some fine action scenes. There’s nothing dull about this novel.

Castle Minerva is superb spy fiction. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Canning’s excellent 1948 spy thriller Panther’s Moon (which really does involve panthers and oddly enough there are real tigers involved in Castle Minerva).

M. Scott Michel's The Black Key

The Black Key is an obscure 1946 murder mystery which belongs to a bizarre but fascinating sub-genre - the psychiatric murder mystery.

M. Scott Michel (1916-1992) was an American playwright and crime writer. He wrote a handful of mysteries in the late 40s and early 50s. Intriguingly Michel seems to have written at least one other psychiatric mystery.

Alex Cornell is a prominent psychoanalyst who has a disturbing patient show up on his doorstep. A pretty young blonde Englishwoman has no idea of her own name or where she comes from, she has no memory of anything, but she fears she has murdered a woman. She doesn’t remember doing so but she does remember the woman’s murdered body at her feet. Alex is dubious until he sees the body for himself.

Obviously he should turn the young woman over to the police but he doesn’t. He is fascinated by her. He is also fascinated by the opportunity to play amateur detective and to solve the murder by means of psychoanalysis.

He discovers that the girl’s name is Serena. The murdered woman was Marion. Marion was a live-in nurse employed by a rich old guy named Dudley Briggs. The Briggs household also includes Dudley’s niece Pauline, his nephew Richard and Pauline’s friend Serena.

Dudley had intended to marry Marion, which would have put the inheritances of Pauline and Richard in doubt. Richard is an idle drunk who hopes for a political carer. Pauline is a doctor and she has lots of secrets. For starters there’s the mysterious deaths of her parents many years earlier. Her father may have been a madman and it may have been a murder-suicide. There’s also something involving Pauline that happened years ago in London.

There’s another doctor involved with this household. There’s Richard’s fiancée Edna and Edna’s father. There’s also Roff. We don’t know where he fits in. Perhaps he’s Pauline’s lover. And there’s the Cockney blackmailer. 

All of these people seem to have motives for murder. Perhaps Serena had a motive as well. The second murder makes things even more puzzling.

Alex is frantically analysing Serena’s dreams. He is sure they will provide the answers. This is not just a psychiatric mystery, it’s a Freudian psychiatric mystery. We get lots of wacky psychobabble and Freudian psychobabble is even more fun than the regular kind. Alex is excited to find all kinds of symbols in Serena’s dreams. Flowers, coffins, clouds, mysterious bearded men, men with thick glasses, a sinister ugly man. And most of all, the black key. Alex is in Seventh Heaven. He comes up with all kinds of delightfully loopy explanations for these symbols.

Alex does a bit of regular amateur detective stuff as well, with mixed success.

Of course Alex and Serena start to fall in love, so we get even more musing psychobabble about transference.

Of course it is impossible today to take any of this seriously, it all just seems so silly and wacky, but in 1946 people took psychoanalysis very seriously indeed. And it was a very big thing in the arts and entertainment.

I simply adore 1940s mystery novels and movies dealing with psychiatry, like Hitchcock’s 
Spellbound (1945) and Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949).

The Black Key is totally off-the-wall and I won’t pretend that the plot is even slightly believable. The dream clues are just crazy and ludicrously contrived. But if you don’t mind that it doesn’t make sense it is entertaining and it’s highly recommended if only for its oddness.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Robert Moore Williams’ Somebody Wants You Dead in a two-novel paperback edition.