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.

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls was published by Monarch Books 1962. It has more recently been reprinted by Black Gat Books. It appears that it may also been published as Trailer Park Trash.

I know very little about Glenn Canary (1934-2008) other than the fact that he started as a newspaperman and he wrote a handful of novels and short stories.

The title obviously suggests that this is going to be sleaze fiction but that needs to be qualified. In the 50s and early 60s there was a lot of crossover between sleaze fiction and hardboiled/noir crime fiction, both of which were popular pulp genres. There were a lot of sleaze novels that had crime fiction plots and there were crime novels that were quite sleazy. Many authors wrote in both genres.

There was in the late 50s and early 60s a curious craze for trailer park sleaze. For a lot of people the American Dream wasn’t quite the world of TV series like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. Home ownership was hopelessly out of the reach of many people, either permanently or temporarily. The best they could aspire to was life in a trailer park. There was much clucking of tongues over the immorality that supposedly flourished in trailer parks. This was mostly media hysteria but there was some truth to it. They did attract transients and drifters and undoubtedly there was a fair amount of illicit sex.

Not surprisingly this made trailer parks a splendid setting for sleaze novels.

Trailer Park Girls fall into the category of hardboiled crime/noir spiced up with sex. This is the tale of three guys who live in a trailer camp, and three girls who live in the same camp.

Three young guys who met in the army share a trailer. Burt Stone is the one who comes up with the idea for the robbery. He was all set to be a doctor. He’s finished his undergraduate studies and now he’s ready for medical school. That won’t be a problem. He has ten thousand dollars set aside, enough to support him until he qualifies as a doctor. Only he doesn’t have that money after all. His brother stole it. But has a plan to rob a department store with his two buddies. That should net him the ten grand he needs.

Al Needs is a tough guy with a nasty streak. Jack Cannon is a huge good-natured bear of a man. They could both use some money. These three guys are not really hopeless losers, they’re just not as smart or as hard as they think they are and they’ve convinced themselves the robbery will be child’s play and they haven’t considered the possibility that it could all go wrong.

They get mixed up with the three girls. Sally pairs off with Al. Fran pairs off with Jack. Burt doesn’t want any emotional entanglements but he just drifts into an affair with Marianne and before he knows what’s happening they’re in love.

Of course one of the girls finds out about the robbery and she wants in. The other two girls don’t want to be mixed up in it but they are whether they like it or not.

The robbery does not take place until very late in the story but this is not a classic heist story in which the focus is on the preparations for the robbery and the detailed mechanics of pulling it off. This is a character-driven story rather than a plot-driven story. Canary is much more concerned with the character motivations and interactions, especially the growing tension between Burt and Al and the complicated relationship between Burt and Marianne.

Right from the start Burt wanted the trio of robbers to have nothing to do with women until after the robbery. He was sure that any involvement with women would sow dissension and and pose dangers. He was right. But he couldn’t stop it from happening and he couldn’t stop himself from getting deeply involved with Marianne. She presents him with a choice - back out of the robbery or lose her. But he doesn’t see any way that he can back out.

The main focus is on Burt and Marianne. Especially Burt. He’s a typical noir protagonist. He’s basically a very decent guy. In the normal course of events he’d have become a doctor and led a blameless life. But having that money stolen by his brother has distorted his thinking and embittered him. And now events are moving out of his control. This is all classic noir fiction stuff.

There is a femme fatale of sorts but it’s not Burt’s girlfriend, it’s Sally. She’s the most reckless of the three girls.

There are no real villains here, just people who make mistakes. Maybe some will lean from their mistakes and maybe some of them won’t.

There’s some violence and a lot of sex. The sex isn’t very graphic but it does have an edge of noir desperation to it. People who need love but don’t realise it and sometimes don’t recognise it when it’s there.

As to how noir this novel is, that depends on how you read the ending but it does have a noirish atmosphere.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy by Mallory T. Knight

The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy was the first of Mallory T. Knight’s The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. sexy spy thrillers. It was published in 1967.

Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1926-1987) wrote a number of spy thrillers in the late 60s and on into the early 70s under the name Mallory T. Knight.

This being the first book in the series we start with a very very brief rundown of the hero’s backstory. Tim O’Shane was a Marine Corps captain just happily having an affair with a marred woman in Paris. During one of their bedroom romps he discovers an odd capsule-shaped objected secreted about her person. The hiding place was unlikely to be found, except perhaps by a randy Marine Corps captain. Tim figures he should pass this discovery on to the intelligence guys.

The next thing he knows Tim has been recruited by T.O.M.C.A.T. (Tactical Operations Master Counterintelligence Assault Team), an international espionage and counter-espionage group. It’s run by an 83-year-old Scotsman with a prodigious appetite for tobacco, good whisky and beautiful women.

Tim’s latest case begins with another bedroom romp, with a Polish cryptographer. On this assignment he’ll be working for the Russians. Actually working for them, in their interests. He’ll be working for Soviet spymaster Pletnikov. In this story the Russians are the good guys. So are the Americans. This was 1967 and the fashionable enemy in spy fiction was no longer the Soviet Union but Red China. Tim has to prevent a Chinese plot involving stolen Soviet nukes but it involves something else as well - unleashing the Joy Dragons on an unsuspecting America.

The Joy Dragons are specially selected nymphomaniacs. Their mission is to sleep with as many American men as possible. The men will certainly get plenty of joy (these girls will make sure of that) but they’ll get an unexpected bonus - a virus. Not a killer virus, but maybe more devastating.

He’ll have to shake off the CIA agent tailing him. This mission will be difficult enough without those guys getting mixed up in it. One advantage Tim has is a diplomatic passport - he’s a special envoy for Satyria, a tiny independent state run by a crazy Greek billionaire who also happens to bankroll T.O.M.C.A.T. among other assorted business and political ventures.

Pletnikov has had a break. The Russians have located one of the Joy Dragons. She might lead Tim to Alexander Wang, the mysterious Chinese agent who cooked up the whole nefarious scheme. She does indirectly lead him to the glamorous but deadly Mona Kee.

This was 1967 so there is of course an attempt to inject some Swinging 60s flavour into the proceedings.

There are, naturally, lots of gadgets including a tricked-out Lamborghini 350GT. And a helicopter with a balloon attachment.

There’s a fair amount of action, including both martial arts fights and gunplay, some explosions and a fight with a tiger.

The trick with the sexy spy thriller genre is to get the balance right. There has to be enough sexiness to provide decent titillation without derailing the spy thriller plot. This book strikes just the right balance. Tim beds a whole succession of gorgeous women, there are naked women wandering about all over the place, but there is a genuine and quite decent spy thriller plot.

For this sub-genre the tone also has to be right. It needs to be amusing and lighthearted and the plot needs to be fairly outlandish and crazy but without becoming an out-and-out spoof.

A sexy spy thriller has to work equally well as sleaze fiction and spy fiction.

In this case the author manages these balancing acts pretty well. The result is a lightweight but very entertaining read. Highly recommended.

Other sexy spy thriller series worth checking out are Gardner Francis Fox’s Lady from L.U.S.T. books beginning with Lust, Be a Lady Tonight and Lay Me Odds, and James Eastwood’s Anna Zordan thrillers such as Seduce and Destroy. Clyde Allison’s Agent 0008 books such as Gamefinger are much more out-and-out spoofs and much sleazier but fun if you like that sort of thing. But the best of the sexy spy thriller genre is probably Jimmy Sangster's Touchfeather.

Theodore Roscoe’s Tarantula Tower

Tarantula Tower is the fourth collection of Theodore Roscoe’s stories of the adventures of curio hunter Peter Scarlet and his friend the naturalist Bradshaw. It’s been issued by Steeger Books in their Argosy Library series. The stories were originally published in various pulp magazines between 1933 and 1935.

The stories take place in a variety of exotic settings - central Asia, the Red Sea coast of Africa, the Dutch East Indies (as Indonesia then was) and British India. These are tales of adventure with touches of horror and weird fiction, although without any supernatural elements. There are monsters, but they are human monsters.

The stories generally have a nasty but clever sting in the tail and an atmosphere of the weird and the mysterious.

Although referred to as the Scarlet and Bradshaw stories the two men only occasionally appear in the same story.

Tarantula Tower appeared in Argosy in September 1933. Bradshaw explains where his horror of spiders originated. It started in central Asia, with a broken-down Russian officer who claimed to know where the Russian Crown Jewels had been concealed. They were hidden in a tower on a tiny island in the middle of a lake. He will take Bradshaw there. All he wants in return is a modest cash payment. The jewels are of no use to the Russian officer. He is being trailed by Bolshevik spies who would not let him get away with them.

The island is there. So is the tower. So are the jewels. But it’s not that simple as devious plot twists start to kick in. There’s something very strange, in fact quite impossible, about that tower.

Plenty of menace and creepiness in this clever story in which the mystery is never quite resolved.

Octopus appeared in the January-February 1934 issue of Action Stories. Peter Scarlet is in Somaliland. He doesn’t want to be there but he received a letter from an old buddy. Two old buddies were searching for treasure. Peter Scarlet is experienced enough not to get himself involved in such follies but when a friend needs urgent help that’s a different matter.

Scarlet will encounter the Green God of Sheba which is no god but it’s pretty formidable and dangerous just the same. It seems like the little American curio hunter might meet his doom in a sinister pool at the bottom of a ravine, a pool concealing some unknown horror. Plenty of action and excitement in this story.

Blood of the Beast was published in the March-April issue of Action Stories. Peter Scarlet faces a deadly stand-off with a madman bent on revenge. And the madman possesses the ultimate weapon- a bloodthirsty murderous pet orang-utan! A solid tense little story.

The Evil Eye appeared in Action Stories in June 1934. The setting is the Moluccas in the Dutch East Indies. A Prussian officer who is also a racketeer and a killer served a long prison sentence (which he thoroughly deserved) and died soon after his release.

Three years after his death the five men responsible for sending him to prison receive letters from the dead man. They are told that if they go to his castle and look his portrait straight in the eye they will find the key to a vast treasure.

Peter Scarlet tracks down the Dutchman, Schneider, who painted that portrait. By this time Scarlet is the only one of the five left - the others have all mysteriously disappeared. Scarlet and the Dutchman set out to solve the mystery, and a nasty little mystery it it. A fine story.

Port of Missing Heads was published in Argosy in 1935. The setting is Bhutan. It’s the most outrageous story in this collection. Bradshaw was acting as guide to a rich American on a hunting expedition. The American wanders off from the camp and is never seen again - until his head turns up in the river near the local police outpost. It’s the latest in a long series of decapitated heads found in the river. Apart from the obvious mystery surrounding these men’s fates there seems to be no rational way the heads could have ended up in that particular river.

It has something to do with the popular local superstition regarding the Little Dog. The Little Dog is actually a giant dog, with a tongue of diamond. Many have sought to find Little Dog. It has always ended badly for the seekers. Bradshaw has no choice - he must find the golden dog to clear himself of suspicion of murder. A nicely strange and creepy story.

Final Thoughts

Roscoe was one of the greats of pulp fiction, a solid prose stylist with a deliciously twisted imagination. This collection is huge amounts of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of the Scarlet and Bradshaw collections - The Tower of Death, The Ruby of Suratan Singh and Blood Ritual - as well as the miscellaneous story collection The Emperor of Doom and his excellent mystery/adventure/horror novel Z Is For Zombie.

Robert Silverberg's The Hot Beat

The Hot Beat is a 1960 noir-inflected sleazy hardboiled crime thriller by Robert Silverberg.

Robert Silverberg (born 1935) is best-known as one of the grandmasters of science fiction. He had just started to establish himself in the genre when the science fiction market to which he was selling temporarily collapsed. He turned to other genres such as men’s adventure fiction, sleaze fiction and crime fiction and became a very prolific and very successful writer of pulp paperback originals. The Hot Beat was written (using the pseudonym Stan Vincent) for a short-lived paperback original publisher, Magnet Books.

Bob McKay is a band leader. He’s young and he has the world at his feet. He’s the toast of the town. And then he hits the skids. He’s been pushing himself too hard and when you make a living in nightclubs it’s all too easy to reach for the bottle when you need to relax. McKay reaches for that bottle way too often. He loses everything, including his girl Terry. Terry is a starlet whose career has so far gone nowhere but she’s a swell kid. She just can’t put up with McKay’s drunken unpredictability any longer.

McKay has reached rock bottom. And then things get worse. He’s arrested for the murder of B-girl Doris Blair. He knew Doris but he didn’t kill her. The cops, who in this novel behave like moronic thugs, don’t care. He’s a convenient suspect. They’re happy to railroad him all the way to the gas chamber. They intimidate witnesses into identifying McKay.

Newspaper columnist Ned Lowry covers the seamy side of life but he can’t stand thuggish cops and he can’t ignore such an obvious miscarriage of justice. He gets a hotshot lawyer interested in the case.

And along with Terry, the aforementioned starlet, he starts playing amateur private detective. They really are amateurs but they’re motivated and gradually they start to see a picture emerging that is sharply at variance with the cops’ version.

Silverberg’s knack for pulp fiction is much in evidence - an understanding of the necessity for breakneck pacing, the ability to sketch characters quickly and economically, the ability to capture the right atmosphere of seedy corrupted glamour. He also makes sure to have all the right ingredients - some action, some romance, some suspense, some sleaze.

McKay is a typical noir fiction loser. He’s not such a terrible guy but he has a genius for self-destruction. In most novels of this type he would have to set out to prove his own innocence. In this story McKay does practically nothing. The focus is entirely on the two amateur sleuths.

Terry is the most interesting character here. She’s no Girl Scout, she knows that making it in Hollywood will mean doing a certain amount of wallowing in the gutter, but she has limits. She has tried very hard not to be corrupted. She’s not sure how well she has succeeded. She hasn’t learned to hate herself but she’s also aware that at times she has behaved badly. She’s not a femme fatale, but also not quite a stock-standard Good Girl. To achieve stardom she is prepared to sleep her way to the top but at least she feels bad about it. She’s not a villainess in need of redemption, but she does need to take stock of her life.

There’s a solid enough mystery plot here and I always enjoy mysteries or thrillers with a seedy-glamorous showbiz background.

Hard Case Crime rescued this novel from obscurity in 2022. One thing I have to say about Hard Case Crime - they’re one of the very very few modern publishers who understand the importance of great stylish sexy book covers. The original painting by Claudia Caranfa for the cover of this one gets the tone just right.

To make this paperback edition even more enticing it also includes three late 50s crime short stories by Silverberg.

Drunken Sailor is rather a nothing story about a naïve young sailor on shore leave. It appeared in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in October 1958.

Naked in the Lake was published in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in February 1958. A married man decides it’s time to get rid of his inconvenient mistress but there are some nasty surprises in store for him. It’s an OK story.

Jailbait Girl appeared in Guilty Detective Story Magazine in September 1959. Now this is a terrific little story about a con artist and it has a delicious sting in the tail.

Having now read a couple of Silverberg’s noir novels I’m inclined to think that this genre was not quite his forte. He was better suited to sleaze fiction since he was good at dealing with human relationships and human motivations. He was one of the very best sleaze fiction writers. He doesn’t quite have the gift of a making a more straightforward crime novel come to life. The Hot Beat is still worth a look.

The inclusion of the three short stories, and especially Jailbait Girl, is enough to bump this Hard Case Crime paperback up into the recommended category.

Jack Bechdolt’s The Torch

Jack Bechdolt’s novel The Torch was serialised in Argosy in 1920. The Torch has some claims to being a post-apocalyptic novel.

Jack Bechdolt (1884-1954) was an American who wrote a handful of science fiction novels and short stories.

The novel is purportedly written in the 32nd century and tells of the Dark Ages that followed the Great Disaster of the 1980s. Civilisation collapsed completely and the world sank into barbarism. The story takes place in the late 21st century.

The setting is Manhattan, Manhattan being a feudal kingdom surrounded by the hostile and savage Wild Folk. Manhattan is ruled by a ruthless elite served by a slave class. Traces of a once great civilisation still survive on the island but the current level of technology is distinctly mediæval. There is no electricity. There are no cars or railways. There do not even seem to be firearms.

Captain Fortune is an ambitious young officer in the service of the Towerman of Manhattan. The current Towerman is Wolff, well-meaning but weak. On his death his daughter Alda will succeed him but of course it is a certainty that the real power will be in the hands of her husband. She does not yet have a husband but there are powerful men anxious to step into that role.

There is much intrigue and treachery afoot.

Fortune is very ambitious indeed and his ethics are decidedly flexible. He is aiming for power. It seems likely that Alda will be the key to that power. He might perhaps aspire to be the power behind the throne. He might even aspire to be her husband and consort and effective ruler. There are no limits to the dreams of a man who is both ambitious and young. And Alda certainly seems to be taking a close interest in him.

In the meantime he has another woman on his mind. A young woman he met just once, on a tiny island. It’s the island where the half-ruined statue of the Great Woman stands. The young woman is Mary and Fortune soon discovers some disturbing things but her. The most disturbing is that she is one of the leaders of a dangerous bands of revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the Towerman’s regime.

Fortune is soon deeply enmeshed in intrigue and dealing with all manner of divided loyalties. Whichever way he jumps he will be guilty of betrayal. He has become quite skilled in the art of treachery but he has also made the disquieting discovery that he has a conscience. He becomes increasingly troubled and confused.

Much of the action takes place in the mysterious network of tunnels underneath Manhattan. No-one knows what mysterious purpose they once served.They are of course the remains of the subways.

There’s lots of symbolic significance to that statue of the Great Woman. Her arm has long since gone. It is believed she once held something in that arm. Some say it was a sword but most people think it was a torch. The torch serves throughout the book as a heavy-handed symbol of freedom and revolution.

There’s a reasonable allowance of action scenes.

The plot is fairly standard - a ruthless elite lording it over the oppressed masses who are planning rebellion and a hero faced with difficult choices. It’s perhaps just too standard and therefore too predictable.

Do you have to remember that this novel was written in 1920. Some of the things in this tale that now seem like clichés had not yet become clichés. The idea of an elite class and a slave under-class does go back to at least 1895, to the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine.

Fortune is at least a moderately interesting hero with a very definite dark side. The leaders of the revolution, Mary and Zorn, are a bit too idealised. Alda is a reasonable beautiful but evil queen type of figure.

The Torch is mostly interesting as an early example of the post-apocalyptic genre that was just starting to become popular. It’s reasonable entertainment and it’s worth a look if that genre interests you.

I’ve reviewed several other early post-apocalyptic and end-of-the-world novels, such as The Sixth Glacier by Marius from 1929 and J. J. Connington’s provocative Nordenholt’s Million from 1923.

M.G. Braun’s That Girl from Istanbul

That Girl from Istanbul is the fourteenth in M.G. Braun’s long-running and extremely popular series of Al Glenne spy novels. In was originally published in French, as Pas de bonheur pour Spyros, in 1959. The English translation dates from 1966.

M.G. Braun (1912-1984) was an amazingly prolific French writer of pulp fiction.

The French police stumble upon something big when they shoot a top Soviet spymaster by accident. It’s a plot to kidnap a Turkish girl. She seems like a very pleasant very ordinary girl and there’s no reason why the KGB would want to kidnap her.

Eventually the French begin to suspect that the kidnapping could have unexpected international repercussion. They send their ace counter-espionage agent Al Glenne to Istanbul.

Al runs into his old buddy Jeff Cavassa. Jeff is a CIA agent. He’s in Istanbul on another mission but their respective missions seem highly likely to be connected.

As so often they will be working together, but not quite as a team. The Americans don’t trust the French and the French are certainly not silly enough to trust the CIA. Al can never be sure that Jeff is telling him everything he knows, and Al likes to tell the CIA only what he absolutely has to tell them. The CIA wants the mission to be a coup for them. The French very naturally want it to be a coup for themselves.

They find the girl, and then lose her. There’s something very odd about her behaviour. She seems like she’s been drugged but she hasn’t been. Or maybe it’s some new drug.

The plot provides various twists and turns and becomes a chase across Turkey. Al and Jeff have to find that girl but of course they can’t let the Turkish counter-intelligence people know what they’re up to.

Much mayhem ensues.

There are double agents and there’s one guy who might be a triple agent. You can never be sure where a spy’s loyalties lie. The ones who are ideologically dedicated can be more untrustworthy than the ones whose motivations are purely mercenary.

I’ve been reading quite a bit of French spy fiction recently. They tend to be very cynical and quite open about the brutality of the world of espionage. How do spies deal with inconvenient witnesses, such as some poor schmuck of a truck driver who isn’t really involved in espionage and isn’t really involved in any serious crime? Jeff has the answer to that. You shoot the guy in the back of the head. OK, he’s unarmed and he’s promised to keep quiet and he’s running away but witnesses are always a worry. Al isn’t bothered by this. He’d have done the same thing himself.

French spy fiction also tends to be very good. They don’t take a simplistic good guys vs bad guys approach.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other M.G. Braun Al Glenne thrillers including Apostles of Violence (which is extremely good) and Operation Atlantis (also excellent). I have to be honest and say that That Girl from Istanbul isn’t quite as good as those two titles. 

But That Girl from Istanbul is still a fine spy thriller and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed several of Gérard de Villiers’ Malko spy thrillers - West of Jerusalem, Man from Kabul and Operation New York. They’re also interesting and very very good.

John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-By

The Deep Blue Good-By was the first of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. It was published in 1964.

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) had already written several dozen novels but it was the Travis McGee novels that really put him on the map.

Travis McGee is not a private eye. Not exactly. He’s such a maverick and loner and general outsider that even getting a private investigator’s licence and working as a regular PI would threaten his fierce sense of independence. He is a kind of freelance investigator-troubleshooter of a very special sort. If someone has stolen something from you and it’s the kind of case the police either won’t or can’t take on, or if you have a good reason not to want cops involved, and if the case is so risky and so speculative and the chances of failure are so high that no regular PI would take it on then you go to Travis McGee. He will recover your property, and take a fifty percent cut.

That makes McGee sound greedy but he isn’t. If he doesn’t recover the property he gets nothing, not even his expenses. And if you thought you had no chance of ever getting any of your property back then you’re going to be happy to accept his terms. Half is a whole lot better than nothing.

McGee’s lady friend Chookie (yes, Chookie) has advised her friend Cathy to talk to McGee. Cathy’s father came back from the war with a great deal of money. He died in prison, with the money still hidden somewhere. A smooth-talking sleazeball known as Junior Allen seduced Cathy and he now has that money. Losing the money was bad enough but Cathy had her heart dragged through the dirt as well.

Doing a bit of digging on the subject of Junior Allen leads McGee to a woman named Lois. She was another of Allen’s victims. A picture is starting to emerge. Allen is not just a thief. He enjoys psychologically and emotionally (and sometimes physically) brutalising women.

Lois is a mess. So much of a mess that if McGee hadn’t found her she might have succeeded in starving and drinking herself to death. McGee becomes a full-time nurse to her.

Which brings us to Travis McGee’s fascinating attitude towards women. He likes women, but not just as bed partners. He’s no Boy Scout. He likes sex. But he really likes women as people. He doesn’t owe Lois anything but she needs him so he’ll be there for her. He’s just the kind of guy who could never walk away from a woman in need of help.

Slowly McGee puts the pieces of the puzzle together - where that money came from originally, why it was hidden, how Allen got his hands on it. And he finds out that Allen has further plans. Nasty plans. It’s none of McGee’s business but he intends to wreck those plans.

There’s plenty of action, and some moderately graphic violence. Much of the action happens at sea. Allen is a tough guy and he’s plenty mean. But Travis McGee is a tough guy as well and he’s willing to play dirty when necessary.

The plotting is clever. McDonald’s writes very entertaining prose with some cynicism and quite a bit of passion - Travis McGee is a man of very strong views. McGee does not really approve of the modern world. He doesn’t approve of rules and regulations. He also doesn’t approve of progress. He loves south Florida. He likes it just the way it is. He doesn’t think it needs more resort hotels and shopping malls and condos and highways.

There’s some sex but there’s also an atmosphere of twisted cruel perverted sexuality. Junior Allen has some major issues with women.

McGee is far from being a perfect hero. He can be extraordinarily ruthless and he has only a limited respect for the law. He doesn’t have too much in the way of ethical standards. What he does have is a certain basic decency. And an old-fashioned attitude towards women. Old-fashioned in a good way.

This book is huge amounts of fun, with a hardboiled feel and some noir fiction touches. It’s just different enough from standard PI stories, and Travis McGee is just different enough from standard PI heroes, to give it a flavour of its own. Highly recommended.

Charles Eric Maine’s Wall of Fire

Charles Eric Maine’s science fiction novel Wall of Fire was published in Satellite Science Fiction in June 1958. I believe it was also published as Crisis 2000.

Charles Eric Maine (1921-1981) was an English science fiction and crime writer.

Wall of Fire begins in the fairly near future.

The Festival of Earth is about to begin. It’s a kind of World’s Fair. This is another of those well-intentioned attempts to bring all the nations of the world together in peace.

U.S. Senator Drabin has broadcast a message welcoming everyone on the planet to attend. As a kind of feeble joke he adds that visitors from other planets are welcome as well. When the flying saucer lands in the middle of the Festival Stadium it appears that aliens from another planet have taken him at his word.

There’s much consternation. In this future interplanetary space travel is still a dream. No evidence has ever been found of life elsewhere in the Universe. No-one had any reason to believe that aliens existed. But here they are.

The weird thing is, they all look vaguely like Senator Drabin.

The aliens come from Saturn. In 1958 readers would still buy the idea of intelligent life elsewhere in the Solar System. Within a few years such an idea would stretch credibility too much and aliens in science fiction would originate in distant star systems.

No-one knows if the aliens are friendly or hostile. The aliens have erected a force barrier around their spaceship. The general consensus is that this is probably a hostile invasion, although Senator Drabin and scientist Lynn Farrow strongly disagree.

The actions of the aliens are somewhat ambiguous. Some contact has been made with the aliens but it’s still impossible to guess their intentions.

The trick to writing an interesting first contact story is to make the aliens truly alien - both physically and culturally. This novel manages that extremely well. If possible the cultural alienness has to be a logical consequence of the physical alienness and Maine manages that as well. Apart from being inherently more interesting it also makes the ambiguity of the actions of the aliens more convincing - their actions might appear to be potentially hostile simply because they’re so culturally different. On the other hand any apparently friendly move on their part has to be viewed sceptically as well.

In this book it’s not just the actions of the aliens that are ambiguous - the response of the various American officials are just as ambiguous so the aliens may well be as confused as the humans. And there are major differences within American officialdom as to the appropriate response - should they try to make peaceful contact or simply nuke the aliens just in case.

Maine is no great prose stylist but this is ideas-driven science fiction so that’s no great problem. This is genuine science fiction but the science is too fanciful to qualify it was hard science fiction. It might be fanciful, but the speculations here are interesting and at least somewhat provocative.

Wall of Fire is reasonably enjoyable. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds in a two-novel edition.

I’ve reviewed another of the author’s science fiction novels, Spaceways, which I liked a lot.

Malko 2: Operation New York

Malko 2: Operation New York is one of the few Malko spy thrillers by Gerard de Villiers that have been given an English translation. It was originally published in French in 1968 as Magie Noire à New York. The English translation dates from 1970.

The hero of this espionage series is His Serene Highness Prince Malko Ligne, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Black Eagle, Knight of the Order of Landgrave Seraphim of Kletgaus, Knight of the Order of Malta. He works on a semi-official basis for the C.I.A. - semi-official because the C.I.A. does love plausible deniability and the jobs they give Malko are usually even more illegal, unconstitutional and immoral than their regular activities.

Malko regards the C.I.A. with a certain amount of sophisticated European aristocratic contempt. But they pay well, and Malko owns a castle and castles are very expensive to maintain. Malko is trustworthy but totally non-ideological. He is not interested in causes. He is interested in money and women. And the women who attract Malko’s eye also tend to be very expensive to maintain.

As his book opens Malko has no active case on which to work and he’s enjoying himself in New York City. He’s also enjoying Sabrina. Sabrina is rich and gorgeous and breathtakingly uninhibited in bed. She’s Malko’s kind of girl. Unfortunately Malko has walked into a honey trap. Sabrina really was too good to be true. She is a Soviet spy, working for the GRU.

It’s an interesting variation on the basic honey trap theme. Malko will be blackmailed into working for the Soviets but in such a way that he cannot call on the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. for help, not even unofficially. He has been set up so that he appears to be a war criminal on the run. A war criminal named Rudi Guern. He has been set up so cleverly that proving that he is not Rudi Giern would be very difficult indeed.

His only way out is to find and expose the real Rudi Guern. Guern was supposed to have been killed in 1945 but it’s now obvious to Malko that Guern is still alive.

Obviously the Soviets will do everything possible to stop Malko from finding Guern. Malko will have to make contact with ODESSA, the underground organisation of former war criminals. If they find out what Malko is up to they will kill him, very unpleasantly. And Malko has an Israeli hit squad on his trail as well. 

Malko will have some narrow escapes from death and will have to endure various beatings and torture.

Despite the book’s title the action takes place mostly in Germany, and at sea on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean.

Of course Malko encounters quite a few beautiful, dangerous and possibly treacherous women. He goes to bed with all three. Malko often has to sleep with gorgeous women in the line of duty. It’s a duty he accepts without complaint. The most interesting of the three is Phoebe. She’s the craziest. She likes to be whipped. Malko is not into that sort of thing but he’ll do anything to please a lady.

The three women are all different and all interesting and colourful. Malko’s feelings for these women are complex. He tries to avoid emotional entanglements but sometimes, much to his alarm, he discovers that he actually cares about them.

Malko is basically a decent guy doing a dirty job. He doesn’t enjoy torturing people. He leaves that sort of thing to his faithful manservant, a retired Turkish professional assassin. Malko hates to see innocent bystanders get hurt. He doesn’t mind if bad guys get hurt. They’re professionals and they know the risks of the job. Sometimes innocent bystanders do get hurt. When that happens it’s a tough break.

Malko is not a conscienceless killer but he has no illusions about his job. His job sometimes involves doing bad things but the pay is good. Sometimes the jobs do trouble his conscience.

The Malko novels get very dark and very cynical at times. People get hurt very badly and sometimes they’re people who don’t deserve it. The world of espionage is cruel and vicious. It’s not a civilised game for gentlemen.

These novels manage to be enjoyably pulpy and at the same time fairly intelligent spy thrillers. There’s a lot more moral complexity than you will find in most American pulp spy series of that era. Malko 2: Operation New York is an above-average spy novel that can be highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several other Malko novels - West of Jerusalem, The Man from Kabul and Angel of Vengeance.

H. Bedford-Jones's Buccaneer Blood

Buccaneer Blood from Altus Press collects five rollicking pirate adventure tales by H. Bedford-Jones, all published in the pulp magazine Argosy in the early 1930s.

Canadian-born H. Bedford-Jones (1887-1949) was an incredibly prolific pulp writer, mostly of adventure stories (often in historical settings) although he also wrote science fiction and westerns.

These five loosely linked short stories recount the adventures of Irish soldier of fortune and pirate Denis Burke.

Escape! appeared in Argosy in November 1931. In 1703 Burke is in the French service, until he is rash enough to make a very unflattering remark about Louis XIV. Now he will need to leave France in a hurry, keeping one step ahead of the king’s wrath.

Burke can be hot-headed but he is clever and determined and his boldness counts in his favour. He is a master of the art of bluff. If he can find a ship he has a chance. He will have to steal the ship but that prospect does not daunt him.

Luck of the Sea Burkes was published in Argosy in January 1932. Having assumed the name Captain Mayo Denis Burke has his first success as a pirate, capturing a fine Spanish frigate. He learns of great riches that are his for the taking, if he and his crew are prepared to fight hard enough. His crew will certainly fight for money.

There is a woman involved as well. There usually is where Denis Burke is concerned.

Spanish Gold appeared in Argosy in March 1932. A Spaniard tells Burke of a sunken galleon, lying in shallow water with a fortune aboard. This sets off a series of double-crosses and deceptions. Everyone wants that fortune but it’s not as straightforward as it sounds.

Burke encounters a woman from his past. Maybe she’ll be an ally.

There’s also plenty of action and suspense.

Buccaneer Blood is from a September 1932 issue of Argosy. Denis Burke is never really at his best when he isn’t at sea but he has a plan for the future which cannot be executed at sea.

He is trying to pass himself off as a French nobleman. He has good reasons for not wanting to be recognised as either Denis Burke or Captain Mayo.

His problem is that a French officer has indeed recognised him as the notorious wanted outlaw Denis Burke.

He may also have found love. He is not sure, but maybe he’s ready for marriage, something he had never considered before.

Spanish Blood is Proud Blood appeared in Argosy in March 1933.

Burke has fresh plans. Or rather a variation on earlier plans. If he succeeds he will no longer be a hunted man. His new plan is of course crazy and daring.

The trouble with being a pirate is that you find yourself associating with the wrong sort of people. Treachery is an ever-present danger. You have to be careful whom you trust.

Bedford-Jones did this sort of thing extremely well. He knew how to strike the right balance between action and romance and he knew how to keep a story powering along. He throws in lots of plot twists as well.

If you love pulp fiction and pirate adventures, and I assume that includes everybody, then Buccaneer Blood is highly recommended.

Carter Brown’s The Dame

Carter Brown’s The Dame, published in 1959, is one of his many Lieutenant Al Wheeler hardboiled mysteries. In fact it was the fourteenth of the 52 Al Wheeler novels (Carter Brown wrote 215 novels and 75 novellas which sold a total of around 120 million copies).

Lieutenant Al Wheeler from the sheriff’s office has to investigate the murder of glamorous movie star Judy Manners, only he gets to her luxury beach house to find her very much alive. There is a corpse, a naked woman, but it’s not the movie star.

The dead blonde was Judy’s secretary Barbara.

Judy thinks that she was the killer’s real target and that Barbara was killed by mistake. Al thinks it’s an interesting theory but he’s not convinced one way or the other.

Judy is married to fellow movie star Rudi Ravell. Rudi is as dumb as a rock but he’s handsome (and he knows it) and he has an eye for the ladies. He also has a very jealous wife.

Judy and Rudi were about to star in a new movie. The business deals behind the movie, involving a producer named Harkness and a financier named Luther, are perhaps not entirely honest and above-board. But then very little in Hollywood is honest and above-board.

There’s another dame involved, Camille Clovis. She lives expensively and has no job. She is almost certainly a kept woman, but kept by whom?

Any of the men could be sleeping with any of the women. That’s the way it goes with movie people.

Which means shady business dealings or sexual jealousy could be equally plausible motives. And everyone mixed up in the case has a motive for murdering someone.

Al is keen to get to grips with some hard evidence. He’s also keen to get to grips with the lovely Camille. He wouldn’t mind getting to grips with Judy Manners as well - that legendary 40-inch bust of hers certainly got his attention. The truth is that Al Wheeler has a very keen interest in the female of the species, and when when he’s on a case he finds plenty of opportunities to pursue that interest.

Maybe the crazy old guy who maintains the cemetery in the dusty little one-horse town of Oakridge can provide a clue. The old guy has some bitter memories and they involve some of the people mixed up in this murder case.

There could be a question of mistaken identity, or possibly several questions of mistaken identity. Al seems to be dealing with people who shoot first and ask questions later.

Carter Brown wrote pulp fiction with the emphasis on pulp. But he wrote very enjoyable pulp fiction. And he wrote well. There’s plenty of hardboiled dialogue and atmosphere, and plenty of sleazy atmosphere as well.

Al Wheeler is a likeable wise-cracking rogue. He might seem to be focused mainly on skirt but he has good cop instincts. He has a reputation for getting results and treading on toes in the process. As long as he keeps getting results he can get away with treading on toes and chasing dames.

The Dame is trashy fast-paced light entertainment and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a number of the Al Wheeler books - No Harp for My Angel, Eve it's Extortion and Booty for a Babe as well as his Danny Boyd PI novel The Savage Salome and his Hollywood trouble-shooter Rick Holman thriller Where Did Charity Go? and they’re all fun.

Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds

Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds was published in Amazing Stories in December 1952. Except that there was no such person as Gerald Vance. It was a Ziff-Davis Publishing house name used by lots of writers. Nobody is sure of the identity of the author of this book although Berkeley Livingston has been suggested. It does have a very similar feel to Livingston’s Queen of the Panther World, and it has the same flaws which we’ll get to later.

It begins with married couple Roger and Lydia Sherman inviting their friend Wayne to joining them on an adventure. It will be quite an adventure - a journey to another dimension or a parallel universe. Roger and Lydia are not quite sure which it is. They’ve invented a machine that can take them to strange new worlds but they themselves don’t understand the science behind the invention. Wayne thinks it sounds silly but he goes along anyway.

A nice touch is that the inter-dimensional travel machine is just the Shermans’ living room. They have made some high-tech alterations to it but it still just looks like a living room.

The three end up on a planet of giants and endless wars. It’s an Earth-like planet but it’s definitely not Earth and the inhabitants are fairly human-like but definitely not quite human.

There are several tribes and they fight these wars because that’s what they’ve always done. Naturally our travellers from Earth are caught in the middle. One tribe is particularly aggressive and is led by a man who is clearly mad and evil. There’s also a High Priest, who is more ambigous.

Roger and Lydia are of course captured and threatened with dire fates. Lydia has her clothes torn off so she has a fair idea of the fate in store for her.

Our Earth travellers do form an alliance with that seems to be the most friendly tribe. And they encounter a beautiful queen. Not a beautiful evil queen. She’s a beautiful noble virtuous queen. Wayne takes quite a shine to her, and the queen thinks Wayne is quite a man.

It all leads up to an epic climactic battle.

Another problem facing our earthly trio is that there is a time factor involved if they hope to return to Earth.

Armchair Fiction have made a huge number of pulp science fiction novels available to modern readers and a very high proportion of them really are either neglected gems or at the least very very good stories. Others however are merely routine.

Too Many Worlds falls into the routine class. The characters are just standard stock types. The setup has been used by other writers and used with much more style and flair. The world-building is unimaginative. This other dimension is simply Earth with taller people with bluish-tinted skin, plus six-legged horses. This world does not feel truly alien and its inhabitants do not feel truly alien. A major weakness is that the queen seems totally human and of normal stature for a human woman but the reason for this is never explained (except that she is intended as the love interest for the hero).

It’s not a terrible book. There’s some reasonable action. It has a certain amount of energy. It just doesn’t have anything that is likely to grab the reader’s attention. It’s competent by-the-numbers stuff. It’s interesting mostly as an example of lesser pulp science fiction which serves to illustrate the difference between inspired pulp writing and routine pulp writing. It’s hard to recommend this one.

Armchair Fiction have paired this short novel with Charles Eric Maine’s novel Wall of Fire (which I have not yet read) in a two-novel paperback edition.

Some Armchair Fiction science fiction pulp reprints that I do highly recommend include Paul W. Fairman’s The Girl Who Loved Death, Henry Kuttner’s Crypt-City of the Deathless One, Into the Fourth Dimension by Ray Cummings, Lester Del Rey’s Pursuit, J.F. Bone's Second Chance and Emmett McDowell's Citadel of the Green Death.

M.G. Braun's Operation Atlantis

M.G. Braun (1912-1984) was a Frenchman who wrote the very prolific Al Glenne spy novel series. Operation Atlantis is one of the handful of the Al Glenne books that has been translated into English. It was originally published in French as Action de Force in 1964.

The Al Glenne spy novels were among the 171 novels written by Braun.

Al Glenne is a French spy. At the moment he’s in Berlin. An elderly German archaeologist named Uhrich has been murdered. An archaeologist with a special interest in the lost city of Atlantis.

The man who killed him has met an unfortunate fate as well. Uhrich’s killer was Heinrich but Heinrich was working for a man named Müller.

The Soviets may be mixed up in this. Other Russians may also be involved - the N.T.S., a shadowy anti-Soviet movement. The French are involved - one of their agents had been shadowing Müller. That French agent has been blown to bits by a car bomb. The Americans are involved - by rather nefarious means they have obtained a taped telephone conversation. Al Glenne will once again be working with his old C.I.A., pal Jeff Cavassa.

It all concerns Atlantis. Maybe not the lost city itself. Maybe it’s a code name for something. Maybe it has some connection to Atlantis. Whatever it is the Soviets, the N.T.S., the French and the Americans are all extremely interested in it.

This does not mean that the French and the Americans are actually working together. They have their own agendas. The N.T.S. have their own agenda. Al Glenne likes Jeff Cavassa a lot but he doesn’t trust him. Cavassa is C.I.A. and the French and the Americans are as much rivals as allies. That’s what makes 1960s French spy fiction such as M.G. Braun’s books and also Gerard de Villiers’ Malko spy thrillers so interesting. The Americans are not necessarily the good guys.

In fact there aren’t any good guys in the world of espionage. Every major power has its own objectives which may be in conflict with the objectives of supposed allies. Al Glenne certainly regards the C.I.A. as rivals. Every major power and every intelligence agency pursues its objectives with no regard for morality. It’s all about power and influence.

Al has obtained some interesting information from Olga, an N.T.S. operative who was ordered to seduce him. Her brother Nicholas is a big wheel in the N.T.S. but there’s plenty of tension between Olga, her brother and her lover Gregor. There’s plenty of potential for betrayal here. There will be lots of betrayals in this story.

Al gets some more information from another potentially dangerous female, the Baroness Schuetter. Al gets a lot of his information in the bedroom. That’s a method favoured by Jeff Cavassa as well. Sex is a useful weapon in the world of spies.

The problem is that nobody knows what Atlantis is, they just know it’s a code name for something big. Al and Jeff could be wastig time chasing up fanciful leads.

There’s a solid spy thriller plot with a lot of action along the way and the action scenes are good.

The ambiguity and complexity of the characters lifts this book above the pack. Al is a pretty good guy but he’s an intelligence agent so his ethical standards are flexible. He’s quite happy to mislead Jeff, and Jeff is quite happy to mislead him. The other characters are often a mix of strength and weakness. For that reason their actions cannot be predicted.

Most of the characters have personal motivations which may be in conflict with the missions they’re supposed to be carrying out. The two women are more than just dolly birds. They’re complicated women trying to reconcile their emotions with their duty.

This is an above-average thoroughly enjoyable spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed another of Braun’s Al Glenne spy novels, Apostles of Violence (which is also very good).

Rufus King’s Secret Beyond the Door (Museum Piece No 13)

Rufus King’s crime novel Museum Piece No 13 was published in 1945 and was later retitled Secret Beyond the Door to tie in with Fritz Lang’s movie adaptation.

Rufus King (1893-1966) was an American crime writer whose work belongs to the fair-play puzzle-plot genre that blossomed during the golden age of detective fiction. He is best-known for his excellent Lieutenant Valcour mysteries.

This book begins with Lily arriving at her new husband’s mansion, Blaze Creek, to take up residence. Lily is a 30-year-old widow whose instinct has always been to go with the flow. She isn’t stupid but she is timid. She’s also very rich. Her new husband, Earl Rumney, is quite a bit older. His first wife died a year earlier. He owns a newspaper.

The atmosphere is uncomfortable from the start. Earl’s fifteen-year-old son Aderic is introspective, intellectually precocious and decidedly odd. She does not like Lily.

The women of the household make Lily uneasy. Earl’s rather controlling sister Diana seems to resent her. Leona Drumm certainly resents her. Leona is a columnist and a political zealot and she’s angling for a share in Earl’s newspaper. She had also had hopes of marrying Earl. Miss McQuillan is Earl’s live-in secretary. She has long been in love with Earl.

The most disturbing thing is Earl’s hobby. He collects rooms. Rooms in which something startling or horrific has happened. He buys the houses in which the rooms are located and then recreates them at Blaze Creek. It’s an obsession rather than a hobby. These are mostly rooms in which brutal murders were committed. Earl likes to sit in these rooms and soak up the atmosphere. He likes to show these rooms off to people, except for Room 13 which is kept locked.

Lily becomes more and more concerned. Is her husband crazy? Is this morbid obsession of his dangerous? Dangerous to him, and possibly not just to him? Lily was timid to start with. Now she’s becoming a nervous wreck. She would like to do something to help Earl but she doesn’t know how.

She confides in a psychiatrist. He is quite alarmed.

The presence of a psychiatrist in a story written in the 1940s is always promising. I do love mysteries and thrillers with psychiatric themes.

There’s a definite mystery plot here but this is mostly a suspense novel. It might be more accurate to describe it as a gothic psychological suspense romantic melodrama. It covers all bases. And it uses elements from multiple genres in a very skilful way.

Rufus King was most assuredly not a pulp writer. His style is polished and literary, and often quite witty.

Lily might be mousey but she’s likeable and she’s not a fool. Earl is complicated and enigmatic. His bizarre obsession could have several causes. It might be weird but harmless. It could indicate deep-seated problems. It could have terrifying implications.

This novel is a riff on a famous fairy tale. To avoid spoilers I won’t tell you which one although you’ll almost certainly figure it out pretty quickly.

The plot has a few very neat twists.

The focus is very much on Lily. What matters is not necessarily what is happening but what she thinks is happening, or suspects is happening. Mostly all she has are suspicions but they’re eating her up.

An excellent novel by a writer who doesn’t get enough attention. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed four of Rufus King’s Lieutenant Valcour mysteries, including Murder Masks Miami and his three maritime mysteries (among the very best books in that sub-genre), Murder by Latitude, The Lesser Antilles Case and Murder on the Yacht. I recommend all his books very highly.

I’ve also reviewed Fritz Lang’s excellent and very underrated film adaptation, Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).

Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black

Cornell Woolrich’s Rendezvous in Black was published in 1948. Woolrich’s particular genius is that his stories were so perfectly adapted to film adaptation. Very few writers have had more stories adapted for film and TV and that made him a crucial figure in the history of pop culture. And it turned out to be almost impossible to make a bad movie from a Cornell Woolrich story.

He wasn’t a great prose stylist, not even close to being in the same league as a Raymond Chandler, but Woolrich had a knack for coming up with really nasty gut-punch plots.

This book starts with a guy named Johnny Marr, a very ordinary guy, waiting to meet his girl at a drugstore. They’ve been planning to get married for a long time and pretty soon it’s going to be possible. The guy has come into some money, more than enough for them to get married. But he is destined never to marry Dorothy. She is killed in an accident.

That sets in train a series of bizarre and inexplicable murders. Very complicated murders.

The detective investigating the first murder has a problem. He is the only one who believes it is murder. There is however not the slightest chance of proving it.

Two more strange murders occur, apparently totally unconnected except for one tiny detail. That tiny detail detail convinces the cop he’s on to something but he has no idea what it is that he’s on to. He just fears that there will be more murders.

This is a kind of suspense story in five parts, with the detective’s investigation hovering in the background.

It’s a suspense novel but there’s a mystery as well. The solution to the mystery is so clearly signposted that one must assume that Woolrich intends the reader to figure it out without any difficulty. The detective however simply does not have the vital pieces of the puzzle that would allow him to solve the case.

There’s some very fine suspense. Woolrich is generally regarded as a noir writer and to a considerable extent he is, but he’s not quite a typical noir writer. And Rendezvous in Black is not quite typical noir fiction. You expect a noir protagonist to be at least partially responsible for the mess he gets himself into. He’s usually a slightly ambiguous figure, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. In this case there’s no character flaw. It’s just pure dumb bad luck - the remorseless working of impersonal and indifferent fate.

You also expect a femme fatale to play a major part in the protagonist’s downfall. There’s no femme fatale here.

There is the classic noir feature of impending and inescapable doom. Mostly this is a suspense novel but there’s more to it than that. This is perhaps an existentialist crime novel, or an absurdist crime novel. That sets it apart from noir where you have the feeling that no matter how tragic the story it does have a kind of logical inevitability. In Rendezvous in Black there’s nothing logical about life - it’s as if the universe has played a horrible trick on Johnny Marr for no reason whatsoever except that that’s how the universe works. And most of the characters in this novel are in the same position - it is impossible to see any reason why such things should happen to them. So overall I think absurdism is closer to the mark here than noir.

The plot is also more satisfying if considered from that perspective. Sometimes we’re the victims of bizarre crazy coincidences that can never be understood in rational terms. The plot here is outlandish because that’s the way Woolrich wanted it to feel.

It doesn’t matter whether the characters in this book are good people or bad people. Some of them are very good people. Some are very bad. Some are neither particularly good or bad. It doesn’t matter. The universe will stomp you anyway. Noir is pessimist but this is a different kind of pessimism.

Rendezvous in Black is very Woolrichian and it’s powerful stuff. Highly recommended.

Like so many of Woolrich’s books this one has been filmed - Rendezvous in Black was the source material for Umberto Lenzi’s excellent 1972 krimi-giallo hybrid Seven Blood-Stained Orchids

I’ve also reviewed Woolrich’s 1942 Black Alibi.

Ghost In The Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor

Ghost In The Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor was the third of Masamune Shirow’s Ghost In The Shell mangas to be published (in 2003) but should be read before Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface (published in 2001).

Human-Error Processor is not so much a graphic novel as a group of short stories, but with some connecting tissue.

Fat Cat dates from 1991. Dead people are being used as cyber-zombies, manipulated by remote control. A young woman fears this fate may have befallen her father although she cannot (or will not) believe he is really dead.

Drive Slave dates from 1992. Azuma and Togusa have to keep a witness alive. The witness’s brain may have been infiltrated by micro-machines. This could be linked to a push to allow prefectural governments access to the very top secret data stored in Pandora. Not everyone is happy with this plan which has the potential to be a major security risk.

The Major has another priority - rescuing the kidnapped girlfriend of a top scientist.

Mines of Mind starts with a series of brutal murders. Several of the victims have tattoos, which seem to be military tattoos. There’s some link to a military prison, and to arms dealing.

Section 9 will have to work with military intelligence on this case. One thing that crops up again and again in the Ghost in the Shell universe is that when you have multiple intelligence agencies they are more likely to work against each other than with each other. There is no trust or goodwill between these agencies.

There’s an added factor - the military has assigned a guy named Kim to the case. Kim and Batou know each other and they do not like each other one little bit.

Lost Past is a hunt for a sniper. It would help if Section 9 knew the identity of the target, but they don’t.

These stories were written in between the publication of the two major Ghost in the Shell mangas and they are much less ambitious. These are routine Section 9 cases, although of course nothing that Section 9 does can really be described as routine.

Public Security Section 9 is a mythical counter-intelligence counter-terrorism unit. It tends to be a bit of a law unto itself. Mr Aramaki, who runs Section 9, doesn’t really take orders from anyone other than the prime minister.

In the original manga the focus was very much on Major Motoko Kusanagi, the female cyborg in charge of Section 9’s field operations. The Major makes appearances in Human-Error Processor but she’s a bit more in the background. Perhaps the intention was to flesh out the other members of the team a bit more, to show that guys like Togusa and Azuma are quite capable of handling routine assignments without need the Major to hold their hands.

There’s also a bit more of a police procedural feel, with an interesting mix of cyberpunk tech and old-fashioned police work (footprint evidence, interviewing witnesses).

They’re good solid stories and they have plenty of the paranoia that is so much a feature of the Ghost in the Shell universe.

I always love Masamune Shirow’s footnotes - they’re full of esoteric technical stuff but they’re also chatty and whimsical.

Don’t expect Ghost In The Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor to be quite on the level of the first manga. It’s just a lot less ambitious and low-key, but this is still top-grade cyberpunk. Highly recommended.

Kodansha have published this manga in an English translation (in the original right-to-left format).