Robert Tralins' The Miss from S.I.S.

The Miss from S.I.S., published in 1966, is the first of the Miss from S.I.S. spy thrillers by Robert Tralins. It belongs to the “sexy lady spy” sub-genre and that’s definitely the sort of stuff I go for.

Lee Crosley is a travel writer and she’s doing a story on a playboy billionaire and then mayhem erupts in the guy’s penthouse apartment. Explosive mayhem. Literally explosive. This billionaire had a few secrets. Lee is lucky to get out in one piece.

Lee Crosley has a few secrets as well. She’s actually a secret agent, working for S.I.S., an all-female international counter-intelligence agency. That billlionaire’s secrets have a connection with several other cases of rich men who have suffered curious and unexpected fates. S.I.S. suspects there’s a plot afoot with very very high stakes indeed. So high that Lee’s mission has Code One status. That means she is to consider herself expendable. The double 0 number gives Bond a licence to kill, but a Code One gives Lee a licence to get herself killed.

In this case she also has a licence to go to bed with the chief male suspect.

Any self-respecting lady spy will have a few gadgets at her disposal, such as a high-tech girdle and deadly high heels.

The basic setup is good.

The conspiracy in this case is very high level. Very close to the top. And Lee’s cover might not be as air-tight as she’d hoped.

There’s a reasonable amount of action. The plot is sound enough but doesn’t have enough of the outrageous elements required for a really good lighthearted spy romp.

The major weakness is that for a sexy spy thriller it’s just not very sexy. It’s not sexy at all. It’s much much too tame.

The second book in the series, The Chic Chick Spy, is an enormous improvement. It has the essential ingredients that the first book lacks. It also has a lot more energy and much more of a sense of zany fun. It’s a whole lot sexier. I get the feeling that for the second instalment Tralins decided to change direction fairly radically.

Of course there is sometimes doubt about the authorship of pulp novels. Publishers often had several writers all using the same house name. The change of style here is so noticeable that you might suspect that this is such a case but as far as I now Robert Tralins did write all three Miss from S.I.S. novels.

I have yet to read the third book but I have a copy on order.

The Miss from S.I.S. is by no means terrible. It’s a breezy lightweight spy potboiler. It’s just that there are other similar books that do the same sort of thing with a bit more panache. But it’s worth a look.

I’ve also reviewed the second book, The Chic Chick Spy (which I wholeheartedly recommend), as well as a fairly interesting Robert Tralins SF novel, The Cosmozoids.

Fans of sexy lady spies might want to check out some more of my reviews. James Eastwood’s The Chinese Visitor is the first of his Anna Zordan spy novels. Lust, Be a Lady Tonight kicks off The Lady from L.U.S.T. series. And Jimmy Sangster's Touchfeather is a delight. And for fans of sexy spy thrillers in general there’s Clyde Allison's outrageous Gamefinger (Man From Sadisto 6).

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, published in 1871, is a sequel to his 1865 classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The full title is Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There but it’s also known as Alice Through the Looking-Glass.

This time young Alice passes through a mirror into the looking-glass world in which everything is back-to-front, but in extremely complex ways. She also finds herself participating in a game of chess, of a sort. She meets chess pieces that have come to life and finds that in this world even time is back-to-front.

Lewis Carroll was of course the pen-name of the great Victorian mathematician and logician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898). Apart from being a charming children’s nonsense book this book is also an extraordinarily clever, devious and intricate set of games with both logic and language.

This is one of those children’s books that really does delight children but it delights adults even more. There are so many layers here that only an adult could appreciate.

Alice finds herself in a world in which logic is turned on its head to create nonsense but the nonsense is in its own way strictly logical. Bizarre games are played with language but again the nonsense that results from this does actually follow logical rules. If you push logic far enough it becomes both logical and illogical.

And Alice’s adventure in the looking-glass world is a game of chess, of sorts.

The games played with time are amusing and on the surface silly but it fact they’re the sorts of games you’ll find in serious works of science fiction. Through the Looking-Glass is a children’s fantasy book but it really is a science fiction novel as well.

The book includes several of Lewis Carroll’s best-known poems, such as Jabberwocky. He had a knack for writing nonsense verse that isn’t mere gibberish. It actually hangs together as a poem. He’s playing games with words and sounds and names but they’re not purely random games. Everything in this novel is intricately thought out.

Mirrors and mirror images and pairs recur throughout the story.

The character of Alice may have been based very loosely on Alice Liddell, or perhaps one of her sisters. The original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written to entertain the girls but Dodgson quickly realised that the story had commercial potential and the heroine’s character may have been altered somewhat to enhance the story.

It is important not to try to analyse this book in terms of anachronistic modern literary theories or ideologies. It’s also important not to try to impose silly Freudian readings on to it, Freudianism being much greater nonsense than anything Dodgson comes up with in the novel with the difference that Dodgson’s nonsense stuff at least obeys logical rules.

That’s not to say that this is a mere child’s tale. There’s clearly plenty of symbolism, but it’s not Freudian symbolism (or Jungian symbolism). Dodgson was a product of the 19th century. As an educated man he obviously had a familiarity with classical literature and mythology. And he was a High Church Anglican. And a mathematician. If such a man wanted to add symbolism to his story these are the sources on which he would have drawn.

Both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are must-read books, in fact they’re among the greatest treasures of English literature. They revolutionised children’s literature but they are much more more than children’s books. Very highly recommended.

The very cheap Wordsworth Classics paperback edition includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as well, and the wonderful original illustrations by John Tenniel.

James Hadley Chase’s Lay Her Among the Lilies

Lay Her Among the Lilies, published in 1950, was the third of James Hadley Chase’s thrillers featuring private detective Vic Malloy.

James Hadley Chase (1906-1985) was an immensely successful English writer of crime thrillers. He wrote around 90 novels. Most were set in the United States although Chase only ever made two brief visits to that country. He relied on maps and dictionaries of American slang to achieve the desired flavour.

The setting is Orchid City, a fictional city in southern California.

Vic Malloy (along with his partners Paula Bensinger and Jack Kerman) runs an agency called Universal Services. It’s basically a private detective agency but they will take all kinds of other assorted jobs.

Vic’s latest client is dead. She’s been dead for quite a while. In the pocket of a trench coat he hasn’t worn for a long time he finds a letter that he had received but had forgotten to open, and in fact he had forgotten that the letter existed. The letter is from a rich young woman named Janet Crosby. She wants Malloy to find out if someone is blackmailing her sister Maureen. She has enclosed five hundred dollars as a retainer. The letter was sent fourteen months ago. The difficulty is that Janet Crosby died on the very day the letter was sent.

Vic could simply return the money to her estate. He has a better idea. He will earn the money. He will take the case. His motivation is not greed. His business is thriving. He feels guilty about mislaying the letter and now he feels that the least he can do for Janet Crosby is to carry out her instructions.

Right from the start Vic senses that there’s something fishy going on. Janet’s death certificate was signed by a doddery old doctor who should have given up practising medicine twenty hears earlier and he wasn’t even her treating physician. Her treating physician was Dr Salzer and he isn’t a qualified medical practitioner. Janet died of a heart disease that would have produced debilitating symptoms long before her death, but two days before she died she was playing tennis.

Her sister Maureen is now ill and confined to bed, but the nurse caring for her tells Vic some very strange things that don’t add up at all. And then there’s the strange will left by the girls’ father, and the father’s death seems like it might be worth looking into as well. In fact there’s a whole bunch of stuff that Vic would like to look into. He has no idea what he is dealing with or looking for but he’s a sufficiently experienced investigator to know that there are almost certainly some serious cries involved. Possibly murder. Possibly more than one murder.

Vic gradually puts the pieces of the puzzle together and it makes a plausible picture but he is sure that there is something really big that he has overlooked. And he’s right about that.

It’s an outrageously complicated but entertaining plot with as many twists as any reader’s heart could desire. There’s murder, kidnapping, arson, gambling, medical malpractice, fraud - pretty much a full house of serious crimes.

And there’s a goodly amount of action, and some decent suspense. Our hero finds himself in plenty of danger, as do no less than three young women. Or maybe four.

Vic Malley is an honest private eye and in this instance he has that guilt about the forgotten letter to drive him on to uncover the truth. He’s a pretty tough guy and he’s pretty smart.

I have no doubt that an American reader at the time would have spotted plenty of minor local details that Chase got wrong but as a non-American reader seventy years later I wasn’t too bothered about stuff like that. It feels nicely hardboiled and that’s enough for me.

Lay Her Among the Lilies is a thoroughly enjoyable crime yarn and it’s highly recommended.

I also enjoyed, and reviewed, Chase’s 1941 novel The Doll’s Bad News.

Michael Crichton’s Binary

Binary, published in 1972, was Michael Crichton’s eleventh novel and the last that he wrote using the John Lange pseudonym. By this time Crichton was already a bestselling author following the huge success of The Andromeda Strain in 1969.

This is very much a techno-thriller. Technology plays a significant role but it’s all technology that actually existed in 1972. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff about the computer technology of that time. It deals with hacking. Hacking certainly went on at that time but it was a concept that had not yet entered public consciousness in a major way. Crichton always loved dealing with cutting-edge current technology rather than futuristic tech. He liked to be just a little ahead of the curve.

A State Department intelligence officer named John Graves has been in charge of a major surveillance operation. The target is John Wright. Wright is very wealthy and he’s a brilliant man but he does not appear to have broken any laws. This is something that makes Graves uncomfortable - he is not at ease with the idea of the American Government spying on its own citizens especially when they appear to be law-abiding citizens. Wright is under suspicion merely because he is the kind of man who might conceivably be a threat.

Wright is a political activist but like so many political activists his ideas are muddled and inconsistent. He seems to see himself as a political messiah. And while he has been careful to stay within the law there is now reason to suspect that he has now been involved at least indirectly in something illegal and genuinely worrying. Wright has a close associate, a man named Drew, who has been engaging in computer hacking. What’s worrying is that he has been hacking Defence Department computers. More worrying is that nobody can say for sure exactly what files he has been accessing, or why. When Graves figures that out it’s obvious that there is a very big problem indeed - Wright may be in possession of huge quantities of a terrifyingly potent nerve gas.

This is a political thriller but mostly it’s a psychological thriller. One of the files that has been hacked is Graves’ personal file. Graves realises that Wright’s primary motivation is game-playing. He is challenging Graves to a deadly game. Wright has been looking for a worthy opponent and Graves, a brilliant intelligence agent, qualifies on that count.

It’s possible that Wright doesn’t actually have any coherent political motive at all. He’s like a megalomaniac without a cause. What matters to Wright is winning the game and proving his towering genius to the world. He is probably quite insane. That could make Graves’ job extremely difficult except for the fortunate fact that Graves understands Wright’s madness. Graves is not insane, but in many ways his mind works the same way.

Wright has conceived a grandiose plan which consists of endless layers of complexity. Graves can never be sure how many further levels of fiendish complexity remain to be unraveled. And he can never be sure whether Wright is simply leading him on.

It’s a tense exciting story with plenty of fear but it’s Crichton’s handling of the psychological game-playing that makes it a great thriller. Graves and Wright are both great characters.

The nerve gas stuff is fascinating but it’s the 1972 computer tech that is most fun.

And there’s plenty of focus on bureaucratic madness, inter-agency rivalries and the catastrophic effects of the politicisation of every aspect of law enforcement and security.

Binary is superb entertainment. Very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Crichton’s novels - The Andromeda Strain, Scratch One and The Terminal Man. I recommend these books very highly.

Eric Stanton's The Return of Gwendoline

The Return of Gwendoline and Other Bizarre Art published by Vintage Fetish Classics and edited by Richard Pérez Seves includes two comic strip stories by Eric Stanton, The Return of Gwendoline (dating from 1965) and Deborah (dating from 1957), plus some of Stanton’s other drawings.

Eric Stanton (1926-1999) was an American fetish artist. His early work was heavily influenced by John Willie. His later work became seriously weird and disturbing, much much too much so for my tastes. But The Return of Gwendoline is still in the John Willie mould and in fact it’s a tale featuring WiIlie’s most famous creation, Sweet Gwendoline.

What made John Willie’s The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline so great is that it’s so good-natured. Poor Gwendoline gets herself into all kinds of scrapes (which invariably involve her being tied up) but nothing really bad ever happens to her. The chief villain Sir Dystic d’Arcy is more of a bungler than anything else, a figure out of melodrama or even farce, than a truly menacing figure. The emphasis is on cheerfully naughty fun.

Stanton captures at least some of that innocent feel in The Return of Gwendoline but it doesn’t quite have the same charm. And Stanton lacks Willie’s ability to come up with goofy outrageous storylines. There isn’t really much of a story here at all, whereas with Willie there was always an actual story.

There’s nothing wrong with Stanton’s drawings but again they don’t quite have the charm of Willie’s work. They’re more overtly erotic, but they lack just a little of the necessary spark.

Deborah on the other hand has an actual plot of sorts, about a young woman who is kidnapped because she is in possession of a key in the form of a pendant. It’s more engaging than The Return of Gwendoline. In fact it’s quite entertaining. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

This is fairly innocuous stuff. Unless you’re really sensitive to this kind of material you’re more likely to be amused than offended. It is supposed to be fun, and it is.

While I don’t think Stanton is as good an artist as John Willie I don’t want to sound like I’m judging him harshly. On the whole I like his artwork here.

This publisher has issued a lot of this sort of fairly mild S&M-tinged erotica (including other work by Eric Stanton) in very nicely presented editions.

Richard Pérez Seves has also written an excellent an exhaustively detailed biography of John Willie which I recommend very highly.

The work of people such as John Willie and Eric Stanton has had a considerable influence on pop culture in fields such as comics and especially underground comics. They’ve also has a certain influence on movies, notably Just Jaeckin’s delightful kinky adventure romp Gwendoline. And they’ve had a definite influence within the world of fashion.

The Return of Gwendoline is reasonably good fun. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed John Willie’s The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline which I recommend very highly even if you don’t share his erotic interests.