Nicholas Freeling’s Love in Amsterdam

The first of Nicholas Freeling’s Van der Valk mysteries, Love in Amsterdam (AKA Death in Amsterdam), was published in 1962. Van der Valk is a Dutch police detective and these mysteries are set in Amsterdam.

It begins with a man named Martin in police custody. A woman named Elsa has been murdered. Martin knew Elsa very well over a long period of time and had obviously been her lover. He was in the vicinity of the murder scene at the time of the killing.

Inspector Van der Valk does not have enough evidence to charge him and is in fact inclined to believe that Martin was not the killer. He does however intend to keep Martin in custody for questioning. He is sure that Martin is lying about something important and he is convinced that that something is the key to solving the case.

Van der Valk makes it clear from the start that he has no interest in nonsense such as taking casts of footprints or looking for cigar ash or lipstick traces on cigarette butts or fingerprints. Van der Valk’s methods are psychological.

He is convinced that the secret to identifying the murderer is to find out why Elsa was killed. It’s the motive that interests Van der Valk. In fact the motive is the sole focus of his investigation. Van der Valk is also not interested in giving Martin the third degree or intimidating him. He believes that if he can get Martin to talk about Elsa and think clearly about the events of the fatal night and the events that led up to it then eventually Martin will want to tell him the truth. Van der Valk does not believe that he will get anything useful out of Martin unless Martin gives the information voluntarily. Van der Valk is prepared to manipulate Martin but he does so openly - he tells Martin exactly what he is doing.

It’s made clear that Van der Valk is not hoping for a confession. He genuinely does not believe Martin is a murderer. Martin is not a murderer but he is the key to catching a murderer.

Van der Valk is a man with a somewhat earthy sense of humour and he is perhaps a bit of a rough diamond but he’s an affable sort of chap and he and Martin get along quite well. Martin is more of a semi-willing collaborator in the investigation than a suspect. The fact that Martin is now happily married to Sophia may be part of the reason he is holding things back but it’s also likely that there are things Martin does not want to admit to himself.

Slowly the complicated and sordid truth about the relationship between Martin and Elsa is brought to life. They had a passionate, obsessive but unhealthy relationship. Elsa was promiscuous and she was manipulative and selfish. Elsa used men. Sex plays a major role in the story since it played a major role in Elsa’s life but for Elsa sex was always a weapon. There’s some kinkiness in this tale but it rings true given what we find out about the people involved.

It has to be said that if you’re hoping for anything resembling a traditional fair-play puzzle-plot mystery you’ll be very disappointed (and the plot most definitely does not play fair). The mystery plot is pretty feeble. But clearly Freeling had no intention of writing a mystery of that type. He doesn’t care about the plot at all. This is a psychological crime novel.

Generally speaking I dislike psychological crime novel. Too many of them try to put the reader inside the mind of a serial killer or a psycho killer of some kind and I have no desire to be put inside the mind of such a person. But Love in Amsterdam is different. Firstly, while there’s a killer there is no serial killer or psycho killer. Secondly and more importantly (and more interestingly) in this book Freeling is trying to put us inside the head of the victim rather than the killer. And since the victim is dead he can’t do that directly. The only way the reader (and Van der Valk) can get inside Elsa’s mind is indirectly, through Martin. This is a genuinely intriguing approach.

Of course we also get to know Martin very well. He’s quite fascinating. He’s not quite a loser but he’s made a lot of mistakes and he has taken an awfully long time to grow up. He has indulged in very self-destructive behaviour. But he’s not a total loser. He’s trying his best.

Elsa isn’t quite a monster, but she’s close. She’s the kind of woman who might not set out to destroy men’s lives but she will do so anyway. She is bad news, but fascinating in the way that Bad Girls always are fascinating.

If there’s a slight weakness here it’s the motive which I felt needed to be fleshed out just a little.

Overall a psychological crime novel with a genuinely interesting approach. Recommended.

Peter Rabe's Journey Into Terror

Journey Into Terror is a 1957 crime novel by Peter Rabe.

It opens with a killing. A senseless killing. Two criminal outfits shooting it out in Truesdell Square and a girl named Ann just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up with a bullet hole in her forehead.

Ann was John Bunting’s girl. They were to be married the following day. Now that his girl is dead Bunting is just an empty shell. He gets drunk. He gets drunk again. He keeps getting drunk. Then he hears another drunk, a guy known as Mooch, talking about all the people who have done him wrong over the years and how one day he will have his revenge.

And suddenly Bunting knows what he has to do. He has to kill the guy who killed Ann.

He doesn’t know where to start. All he has a name. Saltenberg. Saltenberg may have some connection with the events in Truesdell Square. Bunting has also heard that a whore named Joyce might know something. Joyce doesn’t know anything her sister Linda does. Linda isn’t a whore. She’s a widow. Since her husband died she’s been dead inside. Just the way Bunting has been dead inside.

Linda has some vague connection with Saltenberg. Saltenberg is a businessman but he’s not exactly an honest businessman.

The answer may lie in Florida, in a town named Manitoba. Bunting heads for Florida. Maybe Bunting is finally doing something positive, but maybe he’s being manoeuvred into it. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Linda tags along with him. She doesn’t care about Bunting or Florida and she doesn’t care about herself but Joyce has kicked her out and she has to go somewhere.

Bunting and Linda don’t get along. There is no whirlwind romance. There’s nothing between them. They don’t exactly hate each other. They don’t care enough to hate each other. But maybe in their own broken ways they have made some some kind of connection. At least Bunting is now vaguely aware of the existence of another human being even if he doesn’t like her. And for Linda it’s much the same.

Bunting finds out that Ann’s killer had to be one of four men. The four men are Tarpin and his associates. They’re decidedly shady businessmen. In fact they’re small-time gangsters. Bunting has found a way to infiltrate Tarpin’s gang. It’s not clear how he intends to find out which one of them was the killer. He just assumes that he’ll find a way. His objective is clear but he hasn’t given much thought to the methods necessary to achieve it. He’s an obsessive but not a very clear-headed one.

So this is a murder mystery as well as a revenge story. Neither Bunting nor the reader has any idea of the identity of the killer.

The real focus is on the two central characters, Bunting and Linda. They’re both severely broken people and they have a lot in common. They’re both dead inside. The question is whether there is any hope for them, whether they can find a way to put themselves back together. Maybe they’ll just destroy themselves, or destroy each other. Maybe they can give each other a reason not to destroy themselves.

They’re not exactly sympathetic characters. They have entirely shut down their emotions and they have also shut down their entire personalities. They’re zombies.

The four men who might have killed Ann have a bit more depth than you might expect. They’re not very nice men but they have their own vulnerabilities and fears.

This is a psychological crime novel with perhaps a slight noir feel, if you’re prepared to define noir very loosely.

Like the other Peter Rabe books I’ve read this is an odd but strangely fascinating tale. Highly recommended.

By the same author I have also reviewed Stop This Man! and The Box and they’re both odd books as well.

William P. McGivern’s The Mad Robot

William P. McGivern’s science fiction novella The Mad Robot was published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in January 1944.

William P. McGivern (1918-1982) achieved considerable success as a crime writer but early in his career he wrote a lot of science fiction stories for the pulps.

The fact that The Mad Robot is a story about robots written in 1944 is significant. At that time robots did no exist in even the crudest form. Computers were being experimented with but a truly practical general-purpose computer did not exist. The earliest computers were enormous. Transistors, integrated circuits, microchips all lay in the future. It was difficult to imagine that a computer small enough to allow a robot to act independently could ever be built. So in this story the robot have human brains. Or rather they have organic artificial brains constructed from human brain tissue.

Which actually makes the story a bit more interesting today, at a time when machine artificial intelligences seem to have certain serious and possibly insoluble limitations. Maybe organic artificial intelligences will eventually have more potential.

Space pilot Rick Weston is sent to Jupiter to check up on the experimental robot plant there. There’s no reason to think that anything untoward is happening there but it is felt that it would be advisable to send someone to do a bit of investigating.

A scientist named Farrel is in charge of the robot project, working closely with Martian scientist Ho Agar. The robots seem impressive. Rick is puzzled that Farrel seems so defensive and even paranoid.

Of course it turns out that there are problems. The robot brains suffer from certain very human weaknesses. Occasionally they go mad.

Naturally Dr Farrel has a beautiful young daughter, Rita. Rick thinks she’s pretty cute.

At first it appears that the robot project has been a huge success, but when a robot tries to kill him Rick starts to have his doubts.

McGivern was only twenty-five when he wrote this novella so you have to cut the guy some slack. It is rough around the edges and it does occasionally veer towards silliness. It is very very pulpy. On the other hand the basic idea is pretty good. McGivern just wasn’t quite experienced enough to carry it off.

It is also only a novella so he didn’t the scope to flesh out the ideas or to engage in any ambitious world-building. It’s mentioned in passing that the experimental plant on Jupiter is contained within a bubble with an artificial atmosphere and artificial Earth gravity but the setting comes across as being rather generic. There’s a Martian character but there’s no attempt to make him seem truly non-human.

Rick is your standard pulp hero.

The plot has a couple of reasonably effective twists and we are kept in some doubt as to what is really going on. There are interesting echoes of Frankenstein.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with J. Hunter Holly’s 1963 novel The Running Man.

The Mad Robot is not great but it’s worth a look if you like robot tales that are slightly out of the ordinary.

I’ve also reviewed McGivern’s 1953 noirish crime classic The Big Heat.

Modesty Blaise: Uncle Happy

Uncle Happy collects two Modesty Blaise comic-strip adventures, Uncle Happy from 1965 and Bad Suki from 1968.

Uncle Happy represented an interesting step for Peter O’Donnell, the creator and writer of the comic strip. His concept for the character was a woman who underwent horrific experiences in childhood but survived and came out much stronger. She put herself back together again. A crucial aspect of the character is that despite those traumatic experiences she is a fully functional woman. She is perfectly capable of having normal emotional relationships with men, and she is perfectly capable of having normal sexual relationships with men.

It was therefore important to make it clear that Modesty has a sex life. In the early strips this was implied. In Uncle Happy it’s made quite explicit. Modesty has found a new man. They have moved in together and they are most definitely sleeping together. This was quite daring in 1965, for a comic strip published in daily newspapers.

Uncle Happy is also interesting for being set partly in Las Vegas, and for the fact that there is clearly a kinky sexual element to the nastiness of the chief villainess. It also demonstrates that Peter O’Donnell was quite comfortable dealing with female evil as well as male evil.

On a skin-diving holiday Modesty meets underwater photographer Steve. Pretty soon they’re shacked up together. Everything is going great until he gets kidnapped. Modesty rescues him but he won’t call the cops. Modesty suspects he’s mixed up in something criminal. They’re both keeping secrets from each other and their love affair fizzles out.

Then Willie Garvin shows up unexpectedly. He’s investigating the possible murder of an old girlfriend but there’s an odd link with Steve - the people who kidnapped him are the very people Willie is investigating. These people are a rich philanthropist and his wife. The philanthropist has earned the nickname Uncle Happy for providing disadvantaged kids with an island playground.

There’s plenty of action in this adventure and a couple of memorable twisted villains including a very nasty lady villain with a taste for sadism. A fine adventure.

Bad Suki is interesting for other reasons. O’Donnell preferred to avoid topical subject matter and in fact he preferred to avoid anything that would make his comic strips date. Modesty’s clothes (when she’s not on a mission) are stylish and elegant but in the 60s you’ll never see her wearing the latest Carnaby Street fashions. Her look is timeless.

Bad Suki was an exception to all of these rules. It deals with a subject very topical at the time - drugs. And it deals with the emerging hippie subculture. It’s an experiment that works reasonably well, but it was an experiment that O’Donnell did not care to repeat.

Willie rescues a hippie girl having a bad acid trip. Willie is no fool. He knows you can’t help people who don’t want to be helped. But he and Modesty feel sorry for the girl. They figure if they can’t help her directly they can deal with the drug pushers.

This is yet another Modesty Blaise adventure featuring underwater action. I’m not complaining. I love underwater action scenes.

It’s also a story that displays a ruthless side to Modesty that you don’t see in most of her adventures. In general Modesty hates killing and does so only when strictly necessary. But this time she intends to kill and she intends to enjoy it. This is another experiment that O’Donnell was reluctant to repeat.

So while Bad Suki can be a bit cringe-inducing at times when dealing with the far-out groovy hippie world it is an intriguingly atypical Modesty Blaise story.

So, two comic-strip adventures, one extremely good and one flawed but interesting. Which makes this volume a worthwhile purchase.

Both adventures feature Jim Holdaway’s art.

I’ve reviewed three other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up, Warlords of Phoenix and The Black Pearl, as well as the first three novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth and I, Lucifer.

Harold R. Daniels’ The Girl in 304

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curt Siodmak's Hauser’s Memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Stafford’s The Wild White Witch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wild White Witch. Highly recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chester Gould's Dick Tracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The visual style is definitely iconic.

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

Charles Williams' All the Way (The Concrete Flamingo)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s fast-moving and action-packed.

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

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

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.