Harold R. Daniels’ The Girl in 304

Harold R. Daniels’ The Girl in 304 was published by Dell in 1956. It was one of around half a dozen crime novels from this author. There’s nothing noirish or particularly hardboiled about this tale. It’s an old-fashioned murder mystery with some police procedural elements.

The setting is Clay County. Ed Masters is the sheriff and he has a murder on his hands. A young woman’s body has been found just off a highway. She was stabbed multiple times. There is no indication of any sexual assault. Her dress and purse and nowhere to be found. She is clad only in her underwear and shoes.

Ed knows there’s something wrong with this picture, something that doesn’t fit. He knows what it is, but he doesn’t know what it means. It worries him. Ed is like that. He might not be the world’s greatest criminal investigator but he’s thorough and he’s a professional. He likes all the pieces of a puzzle to fit together.

Ed is going to need help. He gets that help from Dunn, a lieutenant on the State Investigation Bureau. They have worked together before and they trust each other. It’s still Ed’s case. It’s the more esoteric forensics stuff that Ed needs help with and Dunn is just the guy for that. He’s never happier than when he has a test tube in his hands. And there will be some moderately complicated forensic evidence in this case.

There’s a minor problem with jurisdiction. The crime was committed in Clay County so it’s a case for Sheriff Ed Masters but the case is linked to events in nearby Clay City. There’s been bad blood for years between The city police and the Sheriff’s Department and this will cause Ed a lot of trouble.

The woman’s name was Lucy Carter. She was a part-time prostitute. She arrived in Clay County a few months earlier. Nowhere is sure where she came from before that. She worked as a carhop at Benny’s Drive-In for a while. Benny’s has an unsavoury reputation. It’s not technically a brothel, no laws are actually broken, but in practice it is a brothel.

Quite a few people in Clay County were linked to Lucy Carter. Some were respectable men, others not so respectable. Eventually Ed finds out a few things about Lucy’s past, things that could be very significant indeed. Ed also finds out a few things from Evelyn, another part-time prostitute.

There are half a dozen possible suspects. They all had motives for killing Lucy. They all had alibis but the sorts of alibis that Ed knows would never stand up to a thorough investigation. Alibis are like that.

Ed Masters is a really decent guy. He’s honest and dedicated, and fairly competent. He does make some big mistakes. They’re understandable mistakes. He concentrates on the promising leads and if those leads point to a particular suspect he focuses on that suspect. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes Ed loses sight of the fact that his prime suspect is not the only plausible suspect. Occasionally he is swayed by personal feelings.

In other words he’s a good solid ordinary cop but he’s fallible. His biggest asset as an investigator is that tendency to worry mentioned earlier. If he can’t make a puzzle fit together neatly, if he can’t tie all the evidence together, he’ll keep worrying about the problem. He’s not the kind of cop who would ever want to charge someone unless he really was satisfied about the evidence.

Ed’s attitude towards prostitution is interesting. He doesn’t give a damn if Lucy was a hooker. It’s not just that as far as he is concerned murder is murder even if the victim was an immoral woman. He genuinely does not see her as having been an immoral woman. He doesn’t seem to have any negative feelings about Lucy, or Evelyn, because of their means of earning a living. On the other hand he has an intense dislike of men who prey on prostitutes, men such as crooked cops. And there is such a crooked cop involved in this case. What makes things awkward is that the corrupt officer is a city cop. This novel certainly does not gloss over police corruption and incompetence - the entire Clay City P.D. is rotten.

The climax comes in swamp country and involves some neat plot twists.

The Girl in 304 is a top-notch mystery. Highly recommended.

Black Gat Books have issued this book in paperback at a very reasonable price.

Curt Siodmak's Hauser’s Memory

Hauser’s Memory is a 1968 science fiction espionage novel by Curt Siodmak.

Curt Siodmak (1902-2000) enjoyed success as a novelist and a screenwriter, and occasional film director. He is best-known for his screenplay for the Universal horror classic The Wolf Man and for his best-selling science fiction novel Donovan’s Brain. He was the younger brother of the great film director Robert Siodmak.

Dr Cory is a rather emotionally detached scientist working in the field of memory. He believes that memories are encoded in RNA and that by injecting RNA from one animal into another the memories of the first animal can be transferred to the second. Cory has done some experiments that seem to indicate that this really is possible. It should be possible to do it with humans as well but of course performing such an experiment on people would be ethically dubious.

Then Cory is approached by the CIA - they have in their hands a defector named Hauser and they want the secrets locked in that defector’s brain. Unfortunately Hauser was shot. He is now in a coma and is not expected to survive the night and is not expected to regain consciousness. Hauser was a German who ended up in the Soviet Union after the war. He had been doing top-secret military research for them.

The CIA (an organisation never troubled by ethical considerations) wants Cory to transplant Hauser’s RNA, and therefore his memories, into the brain of a volunteer. Of course this will probably kill both Hauser and the volunteer but the CIA is prepared to take the risk.

The experiment is eventually performed, due to a series of misadventures, on Cory’s young assistant Dr Hillel Mondoro. Whether the experiment has been a complete success or not is uncertain but Mondoro now knows things he couldn’t possibly know. Suddenly he speaks fluent German. He has memories that are not his own. He is Hauser, but he is still Mondoro. The two personalities come and go. Sometimes he is Hauser but on some level he knows that he isn’t really, and sometimes he is entirely Hauser.

Cory and Mondoro are just scientists. They have no interest in politics. It would all be nothing but an exciting scientific breakthrough but for two things. Firstly, Mondoro’s memories include vital Russian defence secrets. The Russians think those memories belong to them. Secondly, the CIA thinks Hauser’s memories belong to them. Of course Hauser’s memories and scientific knowledge are now locked up in Mondoro’s brain. So the CIA and the Russians both want Mondoro.

An added complication is that Mondoro now not only has Hauser’s memories, he has Hauser’s will. There were important things of a personal nature that Hauser intended to do. The Hauser personality is still determined to do those things. The Hauser personality has its own agenda that has nothing to do with the agendas of the CIA and the Russians. Under the influence of the Hauser personality Mondoro suddenly hops on a plane to Copenhagen, and then goes to Berlin. With Cory trailing after him hoping to keep him safe, and with both the CIA and the Soviet intelligence people after him as well.

The science in this story may seen fairly screwy but this was 1968. RNA and DNA were all the rage. They were thought to be the secret to everything. It’s also worth noting that human behaviour is still very poorly understood. We don’t know how much of our behaviour is innate and how much is learned. Siodmak’s ideas might be bold and speculative but in 1968 they would have seemed plausible. And Siodmak develops his ideas skilfully and subtly, and with as much emphasis on the ethical problems as on the scientific implications. This is clever intelligent science fiction.

This is also clever intelligent spy fiction. There are so many layers of ambiguity and betrayal and duplicity, and so many complex motivations on the part of both the individual characters and the spy agencies on both sides. There’s ambiguity right from the start. Did Hauser really want to defect? It seems that he had certain plans of a personal nature that led him to want to leave Russia but it’s by no means certain that he really wanted to defect. It’s possible he was simply snatched by the CIA. There’s also some uncertainty as to how he got shot.

Hauser was a complicated man with a complicated past. He may or may not have been guilty of more than one act of political betrayal, and more than one act of personal betrayal. But in these cases was he really the villain or the victim? Poor Mondoro has to try these things out, on the basis of confused and fragmentary memories. This is a rather cerebral spy story but with plenty of suspense and some action as well.

Siodmak’s novel manages to work exceptionally well as both unconventional science fiction and an unconventional spy thriller with some moral depth as well. Very highly recommended.

Peter Stafford’s The Wild White Witch

If historical fiction is fun and sleaze fiction is fun then if you combine the two you’ll get double the enjoyment. It’s not surprising that historical sleaze enjoyed quite a vogue for a while. Peter Stafford’s 1973 novel The Wild White Witch is a satisfyingly outrageous representative of the breed.

And it’s not just historical sleaze - this is a story of madness and lust in the tropics where the hot sun unleashes forbidden passions.

Peter Stafford was a pen name used by the fairly prolific Hungarian-born writer Paul Tabori (1908-1974). There was another author named Peter Stafford active at the same (who wrote books on psychedelics) so there is some potential for the two to get confused.

In 1830 Jeremy Radlett, the 22-year-old youngest son of a Scottish laird, receives an invitation to join his uncle Richard at his estate in Jamaica. No member of the family has seen nor heard anything of Richard Radlett for decades but he has apparently prospered in the West Indies and being childless he intends to make young Jeremy his heir. Jeremy takes ship for Jamaica.

Jeremy is in for some surprises when he reaches Rosehall, his uncle’s sugar plantation. His uncle is dead but has left a beautiful young widow, Melissa. Melissa has inherited the estate.

Jeremy is obviously disappointed but is persuaded to stay on as a guest. Jeremy is rather an innocent and the brutal realities of planation life shock him.

Jeremy is an innocent in other ways as well. He is a virgin. He knows little of sex but he does know that no decent woman enjoys it. He is in for quite an awakening when Melissa takes him to her bed. Her sexual appetites are voracious. Jeremy had no idea that such pleasures were possible.

There are a few problems. It’s fairly clear that the brutal overseer Arkell had been accustomed to sharing Melissa’s bed. Arkell is not at all happy about relinquishing his position as Melissa’s bed partner. He will make a dangerous enemy. And the slave population may be planning to revolt.

Then Jeremy discovers the secret door, which leads to an underground cavern. He witnesses rites so depraved that he is scarcely able to believe them. Surely Melissa could not be connected in any way with such things.

Given the setting you might expect voodoo to figure in this tale, but this is essentially a witchcraft story.

The setting is a society based on slavery but the book goes out of its way to make its abhorrence for slavery obvious so don’t make the mistake of having a knee-jerk reaction to the subject matter.

There is plenty of graphic sex and assorted debaucheries and depravities. Jeremy’s bedroom romps with Melissa are steamy to say the least. This is one of those sleaze novels that promises all manner of lurid delights and thrills and this one delivers the goods.

There’s a memorably depraved villain (or villainess - I’m not going to tell you which it is).

You can’t really go wrong with an overcooked extra-sleazy tropical gothic melodrama. It’s a formula that works for me. And this one is nicely scuzzy and it’s done with a reasonable amount of style and energy.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wild White Witch. Highly recommended.

A.S. Fleischman’s Look Behind You, Lady

A.S. Fleischman’s spy thriller Look Behind You, Lady was published by Fawcett Gold Medal as a paperback original in 1952.

New York-born A.S. ‘Sid’ Fleischman (1920-2010) had three careers. Initially he was a professional magician working in vaudeville. From 1948 to 1963 he was a moderately successful writer of paperback originals, mostly thrillers and mostly spy-themed. He then embarked on his third career as a very successful writer of children’s books.

During his wartime naval service he got to know the Asia-Pacific region reasonably well. Not surprisingly his thrillers tend to have exotic settings.

This one is set in Macau and it would be hard to imagine a better setting for a spy story. This was Macau when it was still a Portuguese colony and it was one of the most exciting, dangerous and glamorous places on the planet. If you were interested in gambling or women or both it was the place to be. The gambling was for high stakes. The women were beautiful, stylish and expensive. They played for high stakes as well.

There is nothing I love more than thrillers (both books and movies) set in the tropics or Asia in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. It’s a world that is now long gone. You can approve or disapprove of that vanished world but it was exciting, perilous and sexy. An overheated steamy world of intrigue and forbidden sex. Fleischman had a knack for bringing that world to life.

Fittingly the hero of Look Behind You, Lady is a professional magician. Bruce Flemish is having a successful run at the China Seas Hotel in Macau. Then he meets the girl. Her name is Donna. Or her name might be Donna. Flemish doesn’t want to get involved, but he does like the way her hips move. He likes it a lot. Other parts of her anatomy seem very satisfactory as well. She gives him her room number but he has no intention of doing anything about it.

Then the owner of the hotel pays him to do a very simple job. All he has to do is slip a roll of banknotes into the pocket of some guy, an importer. A very simple task for a magician.

Flemish starts to go cold on the idea when he sees the woman sitting at the table with the importer. It’s Donna.

This is just before someone tries to garrotte Flemish. Flemish is not much of a tough guy but he takes exception to attempts to kill him. He figures it might be worthwhile to meet Donna after all.

Donna has a proposition for him as well. She’s a spy, of sorts. Strictly an amateur. Flemish has no desire whatever to get involved in espionage. But Donna seems frightened, and she does move her hips nicely.

Flemish is caught up in a dangerous game. He doesn’t know what the game is. He doesn’t know who the players are, or which of them are working with each other or against each other. He has no idea which are the good guys. Maybe they’re all bad guys. He doesn’t know if he can trust Donna.

The double-crosses start early and they keep coming. Maybe everyone is deceiving everyone else. Maybe they’re not all lying. But they might be.

Flemish is not a bad guy and he’s not totally dumb but he’s way out of his depth. He would be better off sticking to his magic tricks. It’s too late for that. He’s fallen for this dame and there’s nothing he can do about it.

There’s good suspense and a fair helping of action. There’s a touch of sexiness. There’s superb atmosphere.

This is a top-rank thriller by a very underrated writer. Highly recommended.

Look Behind You, Lady has been paired with Venetian Blonde in a Stark House two-novel edition.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Fleischman’s thrillers and they’re all good - Malay Woman, Danger in Paradise, Counterspy Express and Shanghai Flame.

Chester Gould's Dick Tracy

Clover Press’s The Complete Dick Tracy Volume 1 1931-1933 collects the very earliest of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strips. The strip made its first appearance in October 1931.

Dick Tracy would become a major American pop culture icon. By the end of the 1930s there had been several movie serials. Feature films followed in the 40s and as late as 1990 the character’s iconic status remained intact, with Warren Beatty’s  excellent 1990 Dick Tracy movie being a box office success.

The early newspaper strips have a somewhat gritty realistic style. By the 40s they had become much more flamboyant with a gallery of bizarre and colourful villains. Later the strip would become known for featuring gadgetry such as the famous wristwatch radio and some science fiction elements eventually made their appearance.

But in 1931 Dick Tracy was just a police detective battling ordinary mobsters and assorted everyday criminals.

It’s worth remembering that Prohibition was still in force when the comic strip first appeared. Eliot Ness and his Untouchables were pursuing Al Capone. The hard-edged gangster movies of Hollywood’s pre-code era were hugely popular. Dick Tracy as a character owes something to Eliot Ness and the strip’s first major villain, Big Boy, was to some extent modelled on Capone.

The chief villains in these very early strips were racketeer Big Boy, smooth hoodlum Stooge Viller, lady gangster Larceny Lu and the sinister tramp Steve. There’s a glamorous gangster’s moll named Texie. The crimes were fairly straightforward. Larceny Lu runs a car stealing racket. Steve gets mixed up in kidnapping. There’s an attempt to frame Tracy (and attempts were made to bribe Eliot Ness). These were the sorts of crimes that real-life criminals committed.

Junior, the orphan kid taken in by Tracy, makes his appearance. I’m sure Junior was very popular with younger readers at the time although I find him to be rather irritating.

At this stage Tracy’s girl is Tess Trueheart. She’s a likeable character although their romance has its ups and downs.

Dick Tracy is a typical square-jawed action hero for the most part but he’s not infallible. On occasions he’s a bit naïve and even inclined to lose confidence when things go against him. He has an amazing ability to get himselt framed by his hoodlum enemies. However he always picks himself up again.

There’s some hardboiled flavouring but it’s Hardboiled Lite is such a thing is possible. Given that it was aimed at a young readership and that it was published in newspapers, always sensitive to accusations of immorality or condoning lawlessness, the tone had to be kept lighthearted and optimistic. The violence is very very muted. The villains are villainous enough but not evil enough to upset the kiddies. In fact of course the kiddies would probably have loved more violence and evilness - it was the parents who would have demanded that the strip be as innocuous as possible.

This collection includes the daily strips which form extended story arcs but it also includes the Sunday strips which at that stage were standalone stories. And the Sunday strips are in colour.

The visual style is definitely iconic.

Dick Tracy is a key figure in American pop culture. The comic strip evolved over the years but it’s worth getting this volume to go right back to where it all began. The birth of a legend. Highly recommended.

Charles Williams' All the Way (The Concrete Flamingo)

All the Way is a noir novel by Charles Williams, published as a paperback original by Dell in 1958. It was reprinted in Britain in 1960 as The Concrete Flamingo. It was filmed in 1960, as The 3rd Voice.

American writer Charles Williams (1909-1975) is one of the greats of hardboiled/noir fiction.

The narrator, a man named Hamilton, is sitting on a beach. There’s an attractive blonde nearby reading a book. But then he realises she isn’t reading the book at all. She is listening to him. Listening very intently. He tries to pick her up but gets the brush-off. Later she agrees to meet him. Her name is Marian.

She knows a lot about him. His name is really Jerry Forbes. He had to change his name and leave Vegas in a hurry after an unfortunate incident. He is not a murderer on the run or anything like that. He is not a criminal. He did however slug a guy, hard enough to break his jaw, in a disagreement over a woman. Leaving Vegas seemed like a good idea.

He finds out why she was listening to him. It’s his voice. His voice is uncannily similar to someone else’s. There’s a reason that that interests her. She has a plan. It’s not exactly legal but she assures him that he won’t be running any risk. And there’s $75,000 in it for him. OK, the plan does involve a murder, but it’s foolproof. And 75 grand is 75 grand.

Jerry is not a criminal but 75 grand (an immense fortune in the 1950s) would tempt anybody. He would like that $75,000 but the real reason he agrees to Marian’s scheme is Marian. He is becoming obsessed by her.

Marian is a bit strange. She is bitter and she has good reason to be bitter. A woman who has been dumped by her man for another woman (a woman more than ten years younger) can get very bitter. That’s what her plan is all about - revenge.

Her plan involves perfect alibis. Alibis that cannot be broken. That’s where Jerry’s voice comes in.

Marian is quite willing to sleep with Jerry. She’s very good in bed but she seems a bit disconnected from it all. This is a girl with a lot of red flags showing but Jerry doesn’t care. He wants her.

Jerry isn’t seeing things very clearly. Marian tells him that she’s using him but it makes no difference. He is in love with her and he knows she will learn to love him.

You can see some obvious plot twists on the way but the actual plot twists are not the ones you expect. The ending is brilliant and powerful.

You expect a Charles Williams story to have a nautical flavour and while this is not really one of his full-blown nautical thrillers boats do play a fairly significant part in the story.

There’s a love story here but it’s kept nicely ambiguous. Marian’s feelings towards Jerry are kept deliberately unclear. In a story such as this the reader will always expect one of the lovers to betray the other. This story has a few surprises in store in that department.

The plotting is excellent. Marian’s scheme is risky but fiendishly clever and elaborate. It’s a plan that deserves to work.

Jerry isn’t the smartest guy in the world and he’s not the most honest but he means well. He really does love Marian. He will do anything for her.

Marian is obviously playing a femme fatale role but she is not a straightforward femme fatale. I always like complicated ambiguous femmes fatales and Marian qualifies on both counts.

This is genuine noir fiction. It ticks most of the noir boxes. It’s beautifully written and the noir sense of doom builds very slowly. Jerry is not really committed to anything until late in the story. He can still back out. Except that he can’t back out. He has to have Marian.

This is top-tier noir fiction from a top-tier writer. Highly recommended.

Stark House Noir have paired this with another excellent Charles Williams novel, The Sailcloth Shroud. This two-novel volume is pretty much a must-buy for noir fans. I’ve also reviewed Williams’ superb 1954 novel A Touch of Death.

Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita

Alexei Tolstoy’s celebrated Soviet science fiction novel Aelita was published in 1923.

Alexei Tolstoy (1883-1945) was a distant relative of the more famous Count Leo Tolstoy, writer of War and Peace. Alexei Tolstoy was quite an interesting character. He was born In Russia and lived for a time in Germany and in France. He returned to Russia in 1909.

He opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and went into exile. By 1923 he was back in Russia. Under the Soviet regime Tolstoy was lionised and lived like a millionaire. Reading between the lines of Aelita one gets the impression that he regarded revolutionaries with a certain amount of scepticism.

Aelita opens with an eccentric amateur scientist named Los who has constructed an egg-shaped spacecraft. He believes it can reach Mars. He persuades a soldier named Gusev to accompany him.

Mars turns out to be inhabited, by people who seem rather human. Mars has been home to a number of civilisations. The histories of Mars and Earth were at one time intimately linked, thanks to an event that occurred when the terrestrial civilisation of Atlantis was destroyed. There is a good reason that the Martians are so human-like.

Martian civilisation is fairly advanced. They have airships (which are always cool) and they have televisual communication. They also have what appears to be a kind of anticipation of nuclear power.

The Martians are reasonably friendly towards their two visitors from Earth, on the surface at least. In fact they’re suspicious. Mars has seen disastrous wars in the past. Once again Martian civilisation seems to have entered an era of instability. The two Earth men will be caught up in the turmoil, and Gusev will contribute to that turmoil. Gusev dreams of leading a socialist revolution on Mars. Like so many revolutions it will end in slaughter and widespread destruction.

One of the factors impelling Los to build his spacecraft was his loneliness and despair after his beloved wife’s death. On Mars he thinks he has once again found love, in the person of Aelita. She is the daughter of the Chief Engineer (the effective ruler of the Martian civilisation).

Los has a slightly mystical and rather pessimistic outlook on life. Gusev thinks the revolution will usher in a golden age.

There are plots and counter-plots, revolutions and counter-revolutions.

You might be put off reading this book, assuming that it’s going to be heavy on Soviet propaganda (Tolstoy was later to be very much in favour with Stalin) or that there’s going to be a lot of socialist utopianism. That isn’t really the case. There’s a certain degree of cynicism in this novel on the subject of political solutions. Revolutions just lead to chaos and suffering.

The novel also does not reflect a view of history as an inevitable progression towards a socialist promised land. In fact it reflects a very dark and pessimistic view of history as an endless cycle of violence and destruction.

Gusev has political enthusiasms but Los just wants to find love. Love is the only thing that ever brought him happiness. There is very definitely a love story at the heart of this book.

There’s some wild and intriguing alternative history going back 20,000 years or so into the pasts of both Earth and Mars. We get a detailed history of Atlantis.

It’s fast-moving and action-packed.

Aelita is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the history of science fiction, and it’s rather entertaining as well. Recommended.

The 1924 film adaptation is also regarded as a classic, although in my view t's a flawed classic.