Robert Bloch’s Psycho

Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho dates from 1959. A year later it would be the basis for one of Hitchcock’s most famous movies. I like Bloch as a writer so I can’t offer any adequate explanation for the fact that I had never read the novel until now.

There is one problem here. If you’ve seen the movie (and I’ve seen it several times) then you know something very important about Mother right from the start. I think it’s obvious that Bloch expects the reader to have very strong suspicions by the halfway point but it’s also obvious that he doesn’t intend for the reader to be absolutely certain. When you know for a certainty right from the beginning it does inevitably lessen the enjoyment of the novel quite a bit.

The movie followed the novel very closely, but with a couple of subtle but important differences of focus.

I never assume that everyone has seen a movie even when it’s as well-known as Psycho so I’m going to try to avoid spoilers.

Mary Crane (she becomes Marion Crane in the movie) has stolen a great deal of money from her boss. It’s Friday. Nobody will know the money is gone until the banks open on Monday (banks being closed on weekends was always a useful plot device in crime thrillers of the past). Mary has covered her tracks well. She has switched cars several times. Now she’s lost so she’s very grateful when she sees the motel Vacancy sign. She needs to eat, and to sleep.

The motel manager is a slightly odd guy named Norman Bates. He lives in the house behind the motel with his mother.

The first thing Mary needs to do is to change her clothes. Of course she doesn’t know that Norman is watching her undress through a hole in the wall.

After having dinner (which Norman was kind enough to prepare for her) she really needs to take a shower.

Other people will become involved. People like insurance investigator Arbogast. He wants to recover the stolen money. He’s prepared to offer Mary a deal. If she returns the money no charges will be laid. Mary’s boyfriend Sam Loomis and her kid sister Lila will also become involved. They all want to find Mary.

Hitchcock made a very daring narrative choice in the film. Something happens a third of the way through that you don’t expect to happen at that stage. This also happens in the novel but in the novel it’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing you find in plenty of crime novels. It’s a very big deal in the movie because Hitchcock very cleverly misleads us into thinking that a particular character is the central character but the central character is actually someone else. It’s just a slight change of emphasis but it’s enough to demonstrate Hitchcock’s genius.

The movie made a few interesting changes. In the novel Norman Bates is 40, very overweight and balding. Apart from his other issues he is clearly very physically unappealing to women and that’s a major part of his problem. You get the feeling that all it would have taken would have been for one woman to go on a date with him and then he might have had a chance of avoiding all the subsequent disasters. By casting Tony Perkins, a fairly good-looking actor with a great deal of charm, Hitchcock emphasises Norman’s tragedy. He is not a hopeless loser because women find him repulsive. He really didn’t have to end up as a hopeless loser.

This makes him a tragic oddly sympathetic monster which was presumably Hitchcock’s intention. And Hitchcock’s instincts were correct. The movie packs more of an emotional punch. All Norman needs is to find the confidence to actually approach a woman. If he did, she might well go out with him. But he never does find that confidence and tragedy ensues.

It’s intriguing that Brian De Palma made a similar change when he adapted Stephen King’s Carrie. In King’s novel Carrie is very overweight which emphasises her inability to attract interest from boys. In De Palma’s movie Carrie is no super-babe but she’s kinda cute in her own quirky way. When Tommy takes her to the prom he really isn’t embarrassed to be seen with her, or to be seen dancing with her and kissing her. Carrie goes so close to making it.

Psycho is very much one of those stories that requires the reader (or the viewer in the case of the movie) to take the wild and wacky theories of psychiatry seriously. Back in 1960 people actually did take this stuff seriously. It’s also a story that really doesn’t work once you know the solution, and that’s an even bigger problem with the novel. At least the movie has Hitchcock’s stunning visual set-pieces. Psycho is far from being my favourite Hitchcock movie and the novel really doesn’t do much for me at all. Both the novel and the movie are greatly weakened by having things over-explained in a very unconvincing fashion. Worth reading perhaps if you’re a very keen fan of the movie.

James Hadley Chase's The Doll’s Bad News

The Doll’s Bad News (AKA Twelve Chinks and a Woman AKA Twelve Chinamen and a Woman) is a 1941 James Hadley Chase crime thriller. It was his third published novel.

James Hadley Chase (1906-1985) is an interesting figure in pulp fiction history. There was a time when paperback editions of his books were absolutely everywhere. Anywhere that paperbacks were sold his books would be there. He wrote ninety-odd novels which sold by the truckload. He is now almost entirely forgotten.

Chase was English but at the end of the 1930s he figured out that the formula for success was to write American-style hardboiled gangster stories with American settings. He had never been to America but he gave himself a crash course in American slang and the geography of American cities. He got some details wrong but his books were fast-moving, exciting and entertaining. They were also violent and had an appealingly lurid style.

The Doll’s Bad News starts with New York private eye Fenner getting a new client. She wants him to find her sister. Then some unknown guy phones and tries to convince Fenner that the girl is an escaped lunatic. Fenner isn’t buying that. He tells his secretary to stash the frail away in a hotel somewhere but the girl does a vanishing act.

Then things turn nasty and the case becomes personal for Fenner.

Fenner has a lead that takes him to Florida, to Key West. He poses as a gangster. There are two major gang bosses, Carlos and Noolen. Either one might perhaps lead him to that missing sister and to the solution to a murder. Carlos is mixed up in an illegal immigration racket. There are lots of unsavoury characters. There’s a rich guy named Thayler who owns a yacht. The nature of Thayler’s involvement isn’t clear. There are a couple of dangerous dames. Glorie is Thayler’s woman although it’s probably more complicated than that. There’s also Nightingale, who runs the funeral parlour. He has connection with both gangs.

Fenner’s idea is to play the chief gangsters off against each other. It’s a dangerous game but at least it will make things happen.

Things do indeed happen. A full-scale gang war erupts. It doesn’t erupt spontaneously - Fenner makes it erupt. There are epic gun battles on land and sea and lots of explosions. Chase figures his readers want plenty of mayhem and that’s what he’s going to give them.

Although there is some lurid subject matter there is curiously a total lack of actual sleaze content. Glorie makes it clear she’s up for some bedroom hijinks but Fenner isn’t buying. The reason for this may be Paula. Paula is Fenner’s secretary and there are hints that they’re in love with each other.

Fenner is also smart enough to know that when a case involves dangerous females a private eye who starts hopping into bed with said females can find himself in a whole world of hurt. He already has quite enough on his plate.

Fenner is a fairly typical private eye hero although perhaps more inclined to co-operate with the cops than most. He doesn’t want to bring the cops into this case because he has personal grudges to settle but he is careful not to alienate the cops. There is a definite streak of ruthlessness to Fenner. He’s one of the good guys but he’s not averse to exacting some private justice.

Chase keeps things moving along at a very brisk pace. There’s plenty of hardboiled dialogue and atmosphere. There’s a complicated but effective plot. It’s all nicely pulpy.

There’s plenty to enjoy in The Doll’s Bad News. I’ll definitely be checking out more of James Hadley Case’s work. Highly recommended.

Robert Sheckley's Untouched by Human Hands

Untouched by Human Hands is an early collection of short stories by American science fiction writer Robert Sheckley (1928-2005).

It’s immediately apparent that Sheckley has a knack for creating truly bizarre alien races. Races that are physically incredibly alien, and socially and culturally incredibly alien. And alien in really interesting ways.

What really interests Sheckley is that if truly alien races encounter each other any meaningful communication will almost certainly be impossible. And actions will be misinterpreted in totally unpredictable ways.

He also has a taste for humorous or semi-humorous science fiction. Not an easy thing to pull off but he does it reasonably well. Some stories have a sting in the tail, some don’t.

And he has an extraordinary imagination.

The Monsters appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a first contact story. The trick is always to make aliens seem truly aliens. In this case Sheckley offers us two species (one of them obviously our own) that are almost unimaginably different physically. And even more unimaginably different culturally. Even when they learn each other’s languages they cannot communicate. Which predictably leads to serious problems. A clever story with some nice black humour.

Cost of Living was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1952. It’s a satire on consumerism and the cost of endless debt and it remains relevant today. This is a future in which people not only get themselves but also their children into perpetual debt.

The Altar appeared in Fantastic in 1953. A very ordinary inhabitant of the very ordinary town of North Ambrose, New Jersey, suspects that he has stumbled up the existence of strange cults in the town. He might be right.

Shape was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. The Glom are making another attempt to invade Earth. The Glom can take on any shape they choose, and yet at the same they have no freedom or individuality at all.

The Impacted Man appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1952. It concerns the galaxy in which we live as a vast artificial creation. A rip occurs in the fabric of this artificially manufactured space-time continuum and some poor schmuck gets caught in it.

Untouched by Human Hands was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. A couple of rather amateurish spacefarers are in trouble. Their food supplies are gone. They find a building. The construction of buildings implies a reasonably advanced civilisation so surely it should be possible to find food. Unfortunately these aliens are so different from ourselves that although our spacefarers find plenty of food they cannot eat any of it.

The King’s Wishes was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953. This is a wild story. A couple who run an appliance store have a problem with a burglar. But he’s not an ordinary burglar. He’s a ferra. A sort of djinn. He’s very friendly but he insists that he has to steal appliances to take back to his king. It turns out that this kingdom is very distant, in more ways than one. A very clever very playful story.

Warm was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. A young man, Anders, starts hearing a voice. The voice can’t tell him where it’s from but it will tell him when he’s getting warm. Anders starts to see things in a new and disturbing way. He starts to see reality as it really is.

The Demons was published in Fantasy magazine in 1953. A hideous red-scaled monster named Neelsebub has tried to conjure a demon but instead he’s ended up with a mild-mannered insurance salesman from New York, by the name of Arthur Gammett. Neelsebub wants Arthur to produce a vast hoard of gold for him. Arthur of course cannot do this but he decides to do some demon-conjuring of his own. This is a fun story that is like a farce, but with demons and pentagrams.

Specialist was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a variation on the living spaceship idea which would become popular many decades later but this spaceship is entirely made up of an assortment of living creatures, each serving a very specialised purpose. Of course if a member of the crew is killed then that component of the spaceship no longer exists, which can be a very serious problem.

Ritual appeared in Climax in 1953. The inhabitants of a planet have been waiting 5,000 years for the gods from the stars to return. Then finally two gods land in a spaceship. The gods are strange - they have two legs and two arms and, bizarrely, no tails. But the planet’s spiritual leader, Elder Singer, is prepared. The rituals must be followed. There must be four days and four nights of ritual dances before the gods can be offered food or water. The gods seem to be begging for food and water but Elder Singer knows that that is part of the ritual. Everything is ritual. Another excellent story of disastrous mutual incomprehension between alien races who have nothing but friendly intentions.

Beside Still Waters appeared in Amazing Stories in 1953. It’s a low-key tale of the friendship, of sorts, between an old man and a robot one a tiny asteroid.

Seventh Victim was later expanded into a novel The 10th Victim. Both the story and novel are reviewed here. And I've reviewed the superb movie adaptation, The 10th Victim (1965).

A collection of truly offbeat eccentric but delightfully clever tales. Highly recommended.

Jimmy Sangster's private i (Spy Killer)

Jimmy Sangster was much better known as a screenwriter but he wrote a lot of novels. In the late 60s he wrote four spy thrillers, two featuring glamorous lady spy Katy Touchfeather and two featuring a spy named John Smith. A man whose real name really is John Smith. The first of the John Smith spy novels, private i, was published in 1967. It was later reissued with the much less interesting title Spy Killer.

The novel opens with John Smith in a lunatic asylum. He isn’t mad, but there seems no escape. We then flash back to the events that led him to such an unpleasant place.

John Smith works as a private enquiry agent (the British name for a private detective). He’s broke so he’s pleased to have a new client, a Mrs Dunning. The case should be straightforward. It’s a routine divorce case. The one very slight complication is that Mrs Dunning is John Smith’s ex-wife Danielle. Perhaps he should have realised that with Danielle involved the case probably wasn’t going to be straightforward after all.

Finding himself suspected of a murder is rather disturbing.

Smith gets really worried when Max shows up. Max had been his boss when he was in the Secret Service. The last thing Smith wants is to get mixed up in the sleazy world of espionage again. But that’s what’s happened.

And if Max is involved then Smith really wants nothing to do with any of it. He doesn’t have a choice. There is that murder charge hanging over his head.

Max wants the notebook. Smith doesn’t know anything about a notebook. But now he figures that if he doesn’t find the notebook Max will throw him to the wolves.

This was a time when spy fiction, and especially British spy fiction, was becoming very dark and cynical. This novel dials the cynicism up to the max. Smith quit the Secret Service after being ordered to take part in a massacre of poor dumb deluded young people who had been manipulated by various intelligence agencies. Smith particularly disliked having to blow a young girl’s face off with a shotgun. That’s when Smith decided he wasn’t cut out to be a spy.

And he knows Max’s methods. If someone is even a minor threat, or even just a minor inconvenience, Max has that person killed. They don’t have to be enemy agents. The British Secret Service is like a more amoral version of Murder Inc.

Smith wants to get rid of that notebook but he knows that as soon as he does he can look forward to a bullet in the back of the head.

Max wants the notebook. A foreign power wants the notebook. Smith has to hand it over or they’ll kill him. But he can’t hand it over because it’s his insurance policy. If he no longer has the notebook they’ll definitely kill him. It’s a tricky problem.

You expect double-crosses in a spy thriller but in this one it’s not just the bad guys but the good guys and even the hero planning double-crosses. And double-crosses piled on top of double-crosses.

The notebook seems to be a kind of McGuffin but the contents gradually become more significant. The contents also present Smith with more of a moral problem. He doesn’t have much in the way of ethics (his days as a British agent knocked all the idealism out of his system) but he does have some morals. He may however have to choose between mortality and survival.

This is a novel that relies more on paranoia and atmosphere than on action but there are some good action moments.

Smith is a fascinating character - he’s overweight and balding but that doesn’t mean that he’s not dangerous. Max is one of the nastiest villains in spy fiction and he’s one of the good guys. Although whether the British Secret Service in this novel can be described as good guys is very very debatable.

There are two women involved and at least one could turn out to be a femme fatale figure. Sangster is however a very fine writer and his plotting is very solid so jumping to conclusions can be a mistake.

An excellent story. Very dark, very cynical, very paranoid. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Touchfeather, the first of Sangster’s Katy Touchfeather novels, and it’s excellent.

Masamune Shirow's Black Magic

Black Magic is a very early manga by Masamune Shirow. It dates from 1983 so he was in his early twenties at the time. He hadn’t yet developed his mature style but he was already playing around with lots of cool ideas.

This is cyberpunk but very early cyberpunk. The genre was only starting to emerge at this time. Black Magic predates William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, the novel that really established a firm framework for the genre. The Japanese could be described as early adopters of cyberpunk.

There are seven sections to the book, some described as chapters and some as prologues. This is a world of AIs, bioroids and combat robots. The dividing line between computers, humans, bioroids and robots can be very blurred.

The setting is Venus, the only planet in the solar system in which intelligent life is to be found. The Venusians have built an artificial sun on Earth’s Moon. There is life on Earth but it hasn’t amounted to much. The Venusians have started to establish colonies on some of the other planets.

While it lacks the depth and complexity of his later mangas such as Ghost in the Shell this is very much a Masamune Shirow manga. His trademark interests and obsessions are all here. And he gives us lots of fast-moving violent mayhem.

The first prologue, Black Magic, introduces us to a cute girl who has magical powers. Very heavy-duty magical powers. There’s a super-computer than has created other super-computer. Some of these computers are mere machines, some appear to have consciousness. They’re all named after figures in Greek mythology. The cute magical girl, Duna Typhon, was created by one of these artificial intelligences. To what extent is she human? Are her powers magical or super high tech? These entities are not exactly gods. They are not worshipped as gods. But they are god-like and they do behave like goods.

The first chapter Bowman deals with interplanetary colonisation by the Venusians. The story takes place on one their colonies. A young female investigator named Pandora takes control of a new nuclear submarine. But why would anyone have constructed a ballistic missile submarine on a colony planet?

There’s a second prologue and then we move on to the second chapter, Booby Trap. The MA-66 is an advanced combat robot. Four of them are out of control. They will need to be destroyed. The MA-77 is even more formidable. It has advanced decision-making capabilities. An MA-77 has gone rogue as well. There’s lots of high-octane action in this chapter.

City Light moves the action to Saturn’s moon Titan, or at least to a spaceship on its way there and finding itself in trouble. There are people aboard the spaceship who should not be there. Sabotage may be afoot.

The Epilogue is perhaps unexpected although there have been plenty of clues pointing in this direction.

I always love Masamune Shirow’s footnotes. We don’t get many of those where but we do get some cool endnotes explaining the tech stuff. I love the guy’s playful tongue-in-cheek approach to these. You can tell he has fun doing these mangas.

Masamune Shirow was later slightly embarrassed by the old-fashioned graphic style of this early work. It is a bit old-fashioned but it’s lively.

If there’s a fault here it might be that the author is throwing a few too many ideas into the mix. It’s never quite clear where the magic fits in. He would later move to a more pure cyberpunk style with Appleseed and with Ghost in the Shell he produced one of the towering cyberpunk classics. And he was still in his twenties.

Black Magic’s flaws are actually its strengths. It’s wild and offbeat and surprising. And it’s great fun. Highly recommended.

The Booby Trap chapter was the basis for the 1987 anime OVA Black Magic M-66.