The Ring-A-Ding UFOs by Robert Tralin

The Ring-A-Ding UFOs, published in 1967, is the third of the Miss from S.I.S. spy thrillers by Robert Tralins. It fits roughly into the “sexy lady spy” sub-genre (a sub-genre I adore) although the sexiness here is very very restrained indeed. The emphasis is on fast-paced goofy fun.

Lee Crossley is ostensibly a travel writer but she’s actually a secret agent, working for S.I.S., an all-female international counter-intelligence agency. With her sidekick David Dudley she’s investigating an old Spanish fortress in Florida. S.I.S. has no idea what is going on in this fortress but they suspect it’s something sinister. Lee and David will have to get inside but first they’ll need to dodge the crocodiles. Crocodiles, not alligators, which puzzles Lee.

Our two daring spies are disabled by a barrage of unearthly noise and Lee finds herself sliding down a long damp fleshy tube (yes there could be a bit of symbolism here).

Of course there’s a mad scientist. In fact something more sinister and terrifying than a mere mad scientist - a mad evil psychiatrist. The old fortress is now a mental hospital but the patients aren’t being cured. It’s possible they’re subjects of a hideous experiment and there may be aliens behind it. And yes, there may be UFOs.

There’s definitely something nasty in the swimming pool.

Luckily Lee has plenty of gadgetry with her. Deadly lipsticks, hairbrush communicators, that sort of thing. And a life-saving bra. One of the things I’ve learnt from reading so many sexy lady spy thrillers is that lady spies always have something interesting concealed in their bras. And in the case of some fictional lady spies, in their panties as well.

Apart from aliens and UFOs this story also involves brainwashing. Brainwashing intended to be on a very large scale.

Lee and Dudley get captured repeatedly but they’re not easy to keep hold of when you’ve caught them.

There’s quite a bit of exciting action but no graphic violence.

There’s no nudity or sex at all.

This book is obviously not taking itself too seriously. The plot has plenty of wild craziness. It’s a spoof, but there is a reasonable spy thriller plot here. And there will definitely be plot twists.

There’s a suitably insane mad scientist chief villain but he has a few weaknesses. He’s rather attracted to pretty young ladies and his judgment is a bit touch and go in that area.

Tralins keeps things moving along at a breakneck pace.

The Ring-A-Ding UFOs is pure entertainment and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the second book in this series, The Chic Chick Spy (which I enthusiastically recommend), as well as a fairly interesting SF novel by Tralins, The Cosmozoids.

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

Robert E. Howard's The Lost Valley of Iskander

Robert E. Howard created numerous series characters besides Conan. One of the more interesting was a 19th century gunslinger from Texas named Francis Xavier Gordon who becomes a renowned swordsman and adventurer in central Asia. He becomes known as El Borak. Five El Borak stories were published during Howard’s lifetime with several others appearing posthumously. The Ace paperback The Lost Valley of Iskander collects three of the El Borak stories.

These are adventure stories with exotic settings rather than sword-and-sorcery. There are no actual supernatural elements.

The novel The Daughter of Erlik Khan was published in the pulp Top Notch in 1934. El Borak has been hired by two Englishmen, Pembroke and Ormond, to find a friend of theirs who has disappeared. El Borak soon discovers that he has been tricked. He has also been given a reason to seek revenge.

His pursuit of the treacherous Englishmen will take him into the country of fierce Kirghiz tribesmen who tend to kill outsiders on sight. They are devil-worshippers. Along the way El Borak encounters a troop of Turcoman bandits and he soon assumes their leadership. His quest will take him to a mysterious forbidden city where he will, quite unexpectedly, find the beautiful and formidable Jasmeena. They are old friends. She needs his help. She’s in a very awkward situation indeed. Being worshipped as a goddess is not all it’s cracked up to be.

This is a fine adventure story anyway but it’s Jasmeena who makes it really interesting. She’s not a good girl and she’s not a bad girl. She’s ambitious and she’s out for what she can get but she isn’t a scheming spider woman. You wouldn’t want to trust her too far but she’s not malicious or cruel. Perhaps El Borak doesn’t entirely approve of her but he rather Iikes her. She’s feisty and sexy and she’s just what a rollicking tale of adventure needs.

This is an action-packed tale of betrayal and revenge. Fine stuff.

In the short story The Lost Valley of Iskander El Borak has to deliver a package of vital documents that prove that a master criminal named Hunyadi is plotting to embroil the whole of central Asia in a religious war. And El Borak discovers a lost civilisation in a hidden valley - descendants of the soldiers of Alexander the Great.

The lost civilisation angle is cool and Hunyadi is a suitably menacing villain. A fairly good story.

The novella Hawk of the Hills was published in Top Notch in June 1935. An Englishman named Willoughby, a sort of unofficial agent of the British Government, is trying to negotiate an end to a feud between two bandit armies. One of which is led by none other than El Borak.

Willoughby is well-meaning and his theoretical understanding of diplomacy is sound but he just doesn’t understand the psychology of the wild tribesmen of the North-West Frontier. He doesn’t understand the complicated loyalties and he can’t comprehend the intricate webs of treachery, ambition and greed that motivate the bandit chieftains. El Borak thinks Willoughby is a nice guy but a man out of his depth. El Borak knows that the way to end his blood feud with the perfidious Afdal Khan is to kill him. That deeply shocks Willoughby.

There are plenty of battles and sieges and narrow escapes, there’s an impregnable castle and there are running fights in cave systems. This is Robert E. Howard in top form.

The North-West Frontier is an ideal setting for stirring violent tales of adventure. It’s a world apart from the civilised world.

El Borak is a fine hero. He has a code of honour but he’s no Boy Scout. He’s a realist. He is at heart as much of a barbarian as Conan.

The El Borak stories are terrific. Highly recommended.

Boileau-Narcejac’s She Who Was No More

Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac’s novel Celle qui n'était plus (translated into English as She Who Was No More) was published in 1952. It has also appeared with the title Les Diaboliques.

The ingeniously-plotted psychological crime novels of the writing team of Pierre Boileau (1906-1989) and Thomas Narcejac (1908-1998) had a huge impact on French crime fiction.

She Who Was No More was the basis for one of the masterpieces of French cinema, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955). This was much to the disappointment of Alfred Hitchcock who had been after the film rights. A few years later Hitchcock adapted another Boileau-Narcejac novel, D'entre les morts, as Vertigo.

In his film Clouzot made major changes to the plot.

It was filmed again, much less successfully, as Diabolique (1996) with this American production making further changes to the plot.

The novel begins with traveling salesman Fernand Ravinel planning to murder his wife Mireille, with help from his mistress Lucienne. The money from Mireille’s life insurance will set them up in Antibes. They have chosen an ingenious murder method - they will sedate her and then drown her in the bathtub. The body will then be dumped in a lavoir (a kind of open-air laundry with a large pool). A few days later Fernand, having established an alibi, will discover the body. It will appear to be a clear case of suicide and he and Lucienne will claim the insurance money.

A few days later Fernand makes a disturbing and impossible discovery. He comes up with all sorts of wild theories to explain it. Some of the theories are quite bizarre. Or perhaps he is going mad? He is sure that Lucienne can explain it.

I can’t tell you any more details about the plot, but there are some nasty little twists coming up.

While the plot is very clever this is primarily a psychological crime novel with the focus on Fernand. Right from the start he is puzzled his motivations. He doesn’t really wish Mireille any harm. Perhaps he still loves her. Perhaps he loves Lucienne. It has occurred to him that Lucienne is mostly interested in the insurance money. He is not sure how far Lucienne has manipulated him.

He feels guilty and comes up with unlikely rationalisations. He tells himself that he is not really a criminal.

All of these ideas are going through his mind right at the beginning so I’m not revealing any spoilers here.

This novel takes us on a deep dive into the chaotic and disturbed mind of Fernand. He was probably always unstable but now, under extreme stress and guilt, his fevered imagination has gone into overdrive. He even starts to believe that something uncanny or supernatural is going on. His grip on reality, always tenuous, is slipping badly.

This could at a stretch be thought of as noir fiction. The influence of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity is fairly obvious. The difference is that She Who Was No More has hints of horror fiction as well.

The English translation is available in paperback from Pushkin Vertigo.

I’ve also reviewed Clouzot's film adaptation Les Diaboliques (1955) and Boileau-Narcejac’s Vertigo (the English-language title of D'entre les morts).

C. L. Moore’s Judgment Night (SF Masterworks collection)

Catherine L. Moore (1911-1987) is best remembered for her Jirel of Joiry sword-and-sorcery stories and her Northwest Smith sword-and-planet tales published in pulp magazines in the 1930s. As a pulp writer she was certainly in the same league as Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. After the death of her husband Henry Kuttner in 1958 she retired from fiction writing. Judgment Night in the SF Masterworks series includes five of her longer works from her later career in the 1940s and 50s.

Her novella Paradise Street (published in Astounding Science Fiction in September 1950) is a western set in space, or at least it’s a frontier story. This is a future in which humans have colonised distant planets but have encountered no other intelligent species. The setting is the planet Loki, once the domain of fiercely independent trappers and prospectors. The story’s hero, Jaime Morgan, is one of the last of that breed. Now the settlers have come, much to Morgan’s disgust. Loki is becoming a civilised planet. Morgan wants nothing to do with civilisation. Civilisation is for those who care nothing for freedom.

Morgan has arrived in his spaceship with a cargo to sell - a very valuable perfectly legal substance but now it’s become valueless. Or maybe it hasn’t. Either way it’s now impossible for Morgan to sell it on Loki, and he’s broke and he has no fuel for his rocket. Then he gets an offer. He doesn’t like the offer but he has no choice. It means working for people he neither likes nor trust. It means taking orders.

Morgan is a frontiersman. He knows how to survive in the wilderness. In the civilised world he is helpless. His world will soon no longer exist, so this is very much a story of the vanishing of the frontier, and the consequences of that. Civilisation is all well and good, but it comes at a price.

Morgan knows he is being lied to but he doesn’t know just how many lies he is being told and just how vast the web of deception in which he is entangled really is. What he thinks is going on is not at all what is really going on. There are various factions and alliances and conspiracies. And Morgan just isn’t equipped to deal with this new world of complex machinations and manipulations. He is however well equipped to deal with action and he gets plenty of that.

Morgan is a likeable flawed hero. Most of his problems are of his own creation but he can’t help being the man he is, and that man is in many ways rather admirable. He refuses to face the future, but we admire him for that. Nothing matters more to him than his freedom and he is willing to pay the price to remain a free man. His judgment is often poor, but he cherishes the right to make his own mistakes. He drinks too much and he gambles too much. Paradise Street is excellent.

Promised Land is a novelette published in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1950. It deals with posthumanism. The solar system is being colonised but survival on the other planets and the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn is near impossible. Two solutions have been tried - altering people to suit the conditions on those planets and altering the conditions on those planets to suit people.

The incompatibility of these approaches is now evident on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The present population is composed of humans heavily modified for local conditions (know as Ganymedans) but as the terraforming of the planet advances it will become habitable for normal humans but no longer habitable for the Ganymedans. That is likely to set off a power struggle. Another story with a flawed hero, and an ambiguous villain. Moore had a knack for taking ideas that were around at the time but taking them in unexpected and provocative directions. Fascinating story.

The 1945 novelette The Code appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1945. Again she takes a straightforward idea, scientists trying to reverse the ageing process. Then she veers off into wild crazy directions involving the nature of time, parallel universes, evolution, alchemy, the nature of personality, the nature of memory and Faust’s bargain with Mephistopheles! And she makes it work. Bizarre but brilliant story.

Heir Apparent appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in July 1950. It’s set in the same universe as Promised Land. Earth’s empire is controlled by Integrator Teams - seven humans and a computer linked together functioning as one mind. Two outcasts from such a Team are at the centre of a vast power struggle. They may be the prime overs or they may be pawns. These two men hate each other but there is still a weird link between them, the legacy of having been on the same Integrator Team. A superb story.

C. L. Moore’s 1940s and 1950s SF was very cutting edge indeed. She mixes philosophical and even spiritual themes with SF and in a couple of these tales she is playing around with proto-cyberpunk concepts - group minds, man-machine interfaces, virtual reality, posthumanism. She was ahead of her time. These stories also display her ability to write cerebral SF with emotional depth.

Catherine L. Moore was one of the giant of science fiction, a dazzling talent with a formidably varies output. This collection is very highly recommended.

I reviewed the lead story in the collection, the novel Judgment Night, separately a couple of years ago. And I've reviewed her Jirel of Joiry sword-and-sorcery stories and her Northwest Smith stories.

Paul Tabori’s The Doomsday Brain

The Doomsday Brain, published in 1967, was the first volume in Paul Tabori’s Hunters trilogy.

Hungarian-born Paul Tabori (1908-1974) wrote in various genres and his work tends to be wild and imaginative, rather eccentric and often brilliant.

The Doomsday Brain is a spy thriller with some science fiction elements.

An eccentric tycoon has established an international crime-fighting and counter-intelligence network known as The Hunters. They insist that they’re not in the business of revenge and they’re not vigilantes but since they track down criminals who have not been brought to justice by the proper authorities they certainly seem to have some vigilante tendencies.

Computers are malfunctioning all over the world. These do not appear to be random malfunctions, It’s beginning to look like there’s a conspiracy afoot.

It may have something to do with a German war criminal on the run. He now calls himself Master Brug. His mad scientist inclinations have led him to an interest in computers and their potential for mind control.

This mad scientist is fascinated by the idea that the human brain is a kind of organic computer (a delusion that still has its adherents today).

The trail leads the three Hunter field operatives to eastern Europe - to Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.

There are various shady characters involved as well as an assortment of Eastern Bloc government and secret police officials some of whom may be thinking of defecting, some of whom may be double agents, some may be sympathetic to the Hunters and some may be in league that that German mad scientist. 

There is limitless potential for double-crosses. And a great deal of paranoia.

Naturally there are women involved, who may be dangerous or treacherous but they’re definitely willing to employ the arts of seduction.

Mind control in various forms was a major obsession in 1960s spy and sci-fi novels, TV series and movies. This novel is interesting because it deals with computers as a tool for world domination. This was 1967. Nobody really knew just how many things computer might potentially be used for. The idea that computers might be used for sinister purposes, for gaining power through the control of information, was beginning to gain traction. This is a novel about the use of computers to achieve world domination which was still a fairly exciting new idea for writers to explore.

Exactly how the computer mind control works does get glossed over a bit. But this is a spy thriller, not a textbook.

It’s a reasonably action-packed story, the Hunters make use of some cool and offbeat gadgets, there’s 1960s cutting-edge tchnology and it builds to a fairly wild climax (as Tabori’s novels tend to do).

The Doomsday Brain is decent entertainment and it’s recommended.

I’ve reviewed some of Tabori’s other books. His Demons of Sandorra is a superb provocative nicely crazy dystopian science fiction novel. The Green Rain is an intriguing sci-fi satire. The Wild White Witch (written using the pseudonym Peter Stafford) is hugely entertaining historical sleaze with admixtures of voodoo and witchcraft.

Dennis Wheatley’s The White Witch of the South Seas

The White Witch of the South Seas, published in 1968, was the last of Dennis Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust thrillers. Wheatley wrote in various genres including science fiction and spy fiction but became best known for his “Black Magic” series of occult thrillers. He created a number of popular series characters. What’s interesting is that some of these characters featured in both Black Magic occult thrillers and straightforward espionage thrillers.

That’s the case with Gregory Sallust and The White Witch of the South Seas straddles both genres. In fact it’s a spy/crime/occult/adventure thriller.

Gregory Sallust is a dashing British gentleman spy with quite an eye for the ladies. Wheatley’s thrillers can be somewhat on the sleazy side. Ian Fleming was a fan and Gregory Sallust was certainly one of the models for James Bond.

The story begins in Brazil. Retired British spy Gregory Sallust gets caught up in a treasure hunt. Towards the close of the 18th century a Spanish ship was wrecked just offshore of an island somewhere to the west of Fiji. The ship may or may not have been carrying a hoard of gold.

To whom does the gold belong? The hereditary ruler of the island, the Ratu James, thinks it’s his. The island is a French possession, so the French feel that perhaps it should belong to them. James has persuaded Gregory to back him but he is also seeking financing from a Brazilian millionaire. Lacost, a French adventurer with decided criminal tendencies, is after the gold as well.

The situation is complicated by two women. Olinda is married to the Brazilian millionaire but she has fallen in love with James and he’s hopelessly in love with her. Gregory has begun an enjoyable sexual liaison with glamorous Frenchwoman named Manon. Manon has her own interest in this treasure hunt and it’s unfortunate for Gregory that he is unaware of this.

There will be various attempted murders, vicious gunfights at sea, the usual perils of the deep and countless double-crosses. There’s also a malevolent witch-doctor to deal with. And of course, there’s the White Witch of the South Seas.

This is an occult thriller of sorts, but not quite in the conventional sense. There is a spy thriller aspect and it’s interesting since it involves the French, the British, the Russians and the Americans. What’s really interesting is that despite Wheatley’s reputation as a political reactionary he’s clearly far more sympathetic to the Russians than to the Americans! And this was the late 60s, de Gaulle was in power in France and there was no love lost between de Gaulle and the British. The French are not the bad guys in this story, but they’re not quite the good guys. Wheatley was a complicated man and his views on most subjects were far from straightforward.

This is Dennis Wheatley, so there are touches of sleaze.

There’s no shortage of action. And yes, there are suggestions of occult powers.

If Wheatley has a fault it’s his tendency to go off on lengthy tangents but in this case the tangents are fascinating, dealing with Brazilian history, French colonial history and the cultures of various South Pacific peoples (including some lurid accounts of cannibalism).

The White Witch of the South Seas is wild adventure in very off-the-beaten-track exotic settings and it’s enjoyable stuff. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed two of Wheatley’s earlier Gregory Sallust thrillers, Contraband (from 1936) and the totally outrageous They Used Dark Forces (from 1964).

John D. MacDonald’s Nightmare in Pink

Nightmare in Pink, published in 1964, is the second of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels.

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) was already a prolific novelist but it was the Travis McGee books that made him a very big deal in the world of crime fiction.

Travis McGee is not exactly a private eye. To get a private investigator’s licence would involve filling in forms and would give him at least an unofficial status. McGee doesn’t want any of that stuff. And private eyes have to work at least semi-regularly and have an office. McGee’s not having any of that either. McGee goes his own way. And who needs an office when you have a houseboat like The Busted Flush moored in Fort Lauderdale.

McGee takes on cases on a very unofficial basis, usually involving the recovery of stolen money. The cases are so risky and so speculative and so likely to end in failure that no-one else will touch them. If he recovers your property he gets half. His clients don’t complain. Without McGee they know they’d have no chance of getting anything.

This is a more personal case. McGee has an old army buddy named Mike who is now in a Veterans’ Hospital and he won’t ever be coming out. Mike is worried about his kid sister Nina. Her fiancé was killed and he was in possession of a large sum of money. Nina assumed he had stolen it from his employer, investment banker Charles Arminster. Mike wants McGee to find out what really happened, so that Nina can stop torturing herself.

McGee has no intention of getting romantically involved with Nina, but he does.

He comes across hints that something odd has been going on at Charles Arminster’s bank.

The plot takes a long long time to really get going. McDonald likes to indulge himself in philosophical ruminations on life and love and at time he goes overboard in this direction. 

The plot is serviceable but very straightforward and you can see how it’s going to play out very early on.

McGee does eventually land himself in a very unpleasant very bizarre situation. I’m not going to risk spoilers but it does tap into some of the major obsessions of that time period.

I don’t think dialogue was McDonald’s forte. At times it seems a little phoney. Not quite the way real people talk.

McDonald was clearly not trying for a hardboiled flavour. At times I get the uncomfortable feeling that he’s trying to be a bit too literary. The romance angle is fine but it overshadows the crime plot.

McDonald is very cynical about the world of 1964. Looking back from the perspective of today of course it seems like paradise on Earth.

There’s very little action and very little suspense. The pacing is leisurely.

I didn’t enjoy this one anywhere near as much as I enjoyed MacDonald’s first Travis McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-By. It's moderately entertaining but I was a bit disappointed by Nightmare in Pink. Perhaps part of my disappointment is the New York setting - I like McGee more when he’s on his home turf in Florida. That’s what gave the first McGee novel such a wonderful flavour. This one comes across as more generic. It is however worth a look.

I’ve also reviewed The Deep Blue Good-By (which really is very very good).

A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar

The Ship of Ishtar is one of the greatest and most influential fantasy novels of all time but it has a complicated history. A. Merritt wrote it as a novelette in 1919. He sold it to Argosy All-Story Weekly. The editor didn’t publish it, not because he didn’t like it but because he liked it so much he advised Merritt to expand it into a novel. The novel was serialised in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1924. Unfortunately the hardcover edition in 1926 was a censored butchered version. The numerous paperback editions, which sold millions of copies, were the butchered version.

The 2024 Centennial Edition published by DMR Press is Merritt’s original version and is therefore an essential purchase. It also includes the wonderful illustrations (including those by the great Virgil Finlay) from several of the earlier published editions.

John Kenton has returned from service in the First World War not exactly a broken man, but deeply scarred. He is rich and he has financed an expedition by an archaeologist named Forsyth. Forsyth has sent him an odd Assyrian stone block covered with inscriptions. Kenton discovers that the block is hollow. Inside it is a toy ship. Suddenly Kenton is standing on the deck of this ship. It is no longer a toy ship. It is the Ship of Ishtar.

He has not exactly travelled in time. He is definitely no longer in the United States in 1924 but as becomes apparent as the story progresses it is tricky to say exactly where, or when, he is now. He has perhaps traversed a portal.

He is caught up in a conflict between two Assyrian deities, the dark god Nergal and the goddess Ishtar. Kenton falls in love with the beautiful priestess of Ishtar, Sharane.

There are some odd things about this world in which he finds himself. For one thing, there’s no night and day. The ship was created by the gods several thousand years ago, but the crew includes a Persian and a Viking, who obviously originate from much later time periods.

Kenton has entered what might be a magical world, or an alternative universe, or the abode of gods or something else entirely. It becomes more and more difficult to say exactly what might be going on. This world may be a world of the past, or a world somehow outside of time and space as we understand those concepts.

The ship makes landfall at various harbours and much of the action takes place in the island kingdom of Emakhtila. This is a world partly constructed from elements of past histories and mythologies but it’s also an imaginary realm. It is a separate world created by the gods, totally separate from the real world.

There’s a fine tale of action and adventure here, and a fine love story as well. This is a love that defies the gods.

It is however the atmosphere and the mysterious ambiguous nature of the world that Kenton has entered that impress most. This is a thoroughly pagan world. Kenton and his companions and Sharane are in the hands of the gods. This is a world of fatalism. Men and women are but toys to the gods. The fact that the gods continually directly intervene in human affairs, in often capricious ways, is taken for granted.

Merritt has tried to create (or re-create) a world of myth and legend. Kenton’s instinct is to fight against fate. He’s a hero from the world of pagan mythology but even the bravest hero cannot necessarily prevail against the gods. He can however choose to die as a hero should. But Kenton does not belong entirely to this world - perhaps he will not be constrained by the dictates of fate.

The Ship of Ishtar is truly one of the masterworks of fantasy fiction and it’s very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Merritt’s novels The Face in the Abyss and The Metal Monster and his excellent short story collection The Fox Woman and Other Stories. All of Merritt’s books are very much worth reading.

Thomas M. Disch's The Prisoner TV tie-in novel

The first of the original novels inspired by the hit 1967 television series The Prisoner, Thomas M. Disch's The Prisoner, begins with a definite sense of déjà vu. 

It's not quite faithful to the series but it is an interesting riff on the same theme and it's a wild crazy entertaining science fiction spy thriller. 

Lots of paranoia and weirdness.

My full review can be found here.

Fritz Leiber’s Swords and Deviltry

Swords and Deviltry, published in 1970, is a collection of three of Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Leiber wrote a vast number of these stories beginning in 1939, with the final story being written in 1988. In 1970 the stories were collected in seven paperback volumes arranged in internal chronological order (which was wildly different from the publication order). Swords and Deviltry was the first of the seven volumes.

In these three tales we see two young men discovering their destinies, but this is sword-and-sorcery not high fantasy so while their destinies will involve deeds of heroism they’ll also involve a good deal of thieving. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are not exactly law-abiding citizens. In fact they’re rogues and criminals, but rogues not entirely lacking in honour.

Leiber was determined that if he was going to write sword-and-sorcery he was not going to write mere Conan pastiches. He created his own distinctive style of sword-and-sorcery.

Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were perhaps the single most important influence on the development of Dungeons and Dragons. The world of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser is the world of D&D, created by Leiber thirty years before anyone had thought of role-playing games.

The first story in this collection, the novella The Snow Women, was written in 1970 and it introduces us to Fafhrd. He is eighteen years old, a young giant, still dominated by his mother but chafing at this domination. Home for the Snow Clan is the frozen northern wastes. The Snow Women are witches.

Each year a travelling show arrives, much to the delight of the men and the horror of the women who strongly disapprove of fun of any sort.

Fafhrd has rescued a female dancer, Vlana, from the jealous wrath of the Snow Women and that is likely to cause a breach with his mother. Fafhrd is captivated by the free-spirited slightly wicked Vlana but he has been courting a local girl, Mara. He is caught between these two very different women.

This is a tale that give us a very detailed backstory on Fafhrd. I’m not necessarily a fan of detailed backstories but this one does set up some of the important themes of this story cycle. The clash between barbarian and civilised societies is a perennial theme of sword-and-sorcery with, usually, a contrast being drawn between the freedom, bravery and nobility of barbarians and the corruption and wickedness of civilisation. In this story Leiber turns that on its head. The Snow Clan is a society run entirely by women. It is a repressive stifling rules-obsessed pleasure-hating society. The Snow Women ruthlessly crush anyone who defies the rules.

Vlana comes from the world of civilisation, a world of freedom and pleasure and opportunity, a world to which Fafhrd longs to escape. Fafhrd wants to breathe free city air. This is the story of Fafhrd’s first steps on the road to adventure.

The short story The Unholy Grail had originally been published in 1962. This gives us the Gray Mouser’s backstory. He was a young man known as Mouse, an apprentice wizard. An apprentice to a very humble country wizard named Glavas Rho. He is teaching Mouse white magic although he suspects that the young man may well be tempted to dabble in darker forms of magic.

The cruel and ruthless local lord abhors wizards, for reasons connected to his now deceased wife - a woman he feared greatly. The duke both fears and hates his daughter Ivrian. And the daughter has formed a secret tentative romantic attachment to Mouse. This is a situation that is likely to end badly, and it does. 

This is a story of jealousy, betrayal, suspicion and revenge and the meek young man known as Mouse becomes a more morally ambiguous but much more formidable figure, the Gray Mouser.

In the third story, the novella Ill Met in Lankhmar, we find out how these two slightly disreputable adventurers meet. They are, independently, doing some freelance thieving in Lankhmar. A dangerous thing to do - the Thieves’ Guild deals ruthlessly with outsiders. Fafhrd is living with Vlana while the Mouser is shacked up with Ivrian.

Fafhrd had made an unwise vow to Vlana, to aid her in revenging herself on the Thieves’ Guild. And now Fafhrd and his new friend the Gray Mouser, having had rather too much to drink, have foolishly decided on a head-on clash with the Guild.

Leiber handles the sorcery elements extremely well. The Snow Women’s snow magic consists entirely of a mastery of the power of coldness. And you can be in the grip of sorcerous power without being aware of it.

Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery can switch very quickly between lighthearted adventure and real darkness. 

These three stories tell you all you need to know about what makes these two slightly disreputable slightly cynical heroes tick and will leave you thirsting for more of their adventures. Highly recommended.

Peter Cheyney’s Dangerous Curves

Dangerous Curves, published in 1939, was the second of Peter Cheyney’s Slim Callahan private eye thrillers.

Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) was an Englishman who had a very successful career writing pulp thrillers in the American style, starting in 1936. He is best remembered for his terrific crime/spy thrillers involving FBI agent Lemmy Caution. Cheyney also wrote a popular series of novels featuring a home-grown pulp hero, private eye Slim Callaghan, set in the seedier sleazier underside of London.

Obviously with an English PI in an English setting the mayhem had to be toned down. You can’t have guys leaning out of cars blasting people with machine-guns or cops giving suspects the Third Degree. Slim Callaghan is tough enough but his toughness is more psychological than physical. And there’s just enough mayhem to make things exciting without seeming implausible in 1930s London.

Slim is working on the Riverton case. It’s a big case but it’s tricky and it gets very tricky indeed. Wilfred Riverton is a wealthy young man who will be a very wealthy young man indeed when his father dies, and that’s likely to happen soon. Wilfred is also a very foolish young man. He has fallen in with a bad crowd (in fact they’re out-and-out criminals) and they’re fleecing him. Gambling, dope, women - these are Wilfred’s vices. He is universally referred to as the Mug because that’s what he is.

His stepmother has hired Callahan Investigations to find out who is fleecing Wilfred and to get the young man out of their clutches while there’s still some of the family fortune left.

Wilfred’s stepmother is not much older than he is. She is very beautiful and very glamorous. The type of woman who might be no good but is dangerous anyway.

There are lots of dangerous no-good dames in this story. And lots of crooks some of whom are very tough and some of whom are just sleazy punks. It’s a situation that could end very badly, and it does. It ends with a shooting. The circumstances are slightly ambiguous but what really happened soon becomes clear. Only maybe it didn’t happen that way at all. There’s a fine mystery plot here with an abundance of neat little plot twists.

Slim Callahan likes to keep on the right side of the police but he has his own methods and if Detective Inspector Gringall knew what he was up to he might disapprove. Slim likes Gringall. He doesn’t want Gringall to know things that would just worry him.

Slim is a bit of a rogue but he’s a charming rogue. He’s very clever and there’s always the danger he’ll try to get too clever. He takes a lot of risks. But where’s the fun in life if you don’t take risks?

Slim drinks quite a bit but it seems to have no effect on him. Tough guys can handle their liquor. He likes fast cars and he likes women. And women like him.

The setting is London but it’s the seedy, sleazy, exciting London of night-clubs, gambling clubs, con-men, hoods and girls with flexible morals.

Cheyney does a fine job of capturing the hardboiled style but with an English flavour. And the man knew how to tell a story with energy and flair. This is pulp fiction with (thankfully) no literary aspirations.

Dangerous Curves is hugely enjoyable. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the first Slim Callahan thriller, The Urgent Hangman, and several of the Lemmy Caution books including Poison Ivy, Dames Don’t Care, I’ll Say She Does! and Never a Dull Moment. And I’ve reviewed his excellent 1942 spy thriller Dark Duet.

Frank Belknap Long’s Space Station #1

Frank Belknap Long’s science fiction novel Space Station #1 was published in 1957.

American science fiction/weird fiction writer Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994) was a close friend of H.P. Lovecraft.

Space Station #1 is by far the biggest space station ever constructed. This is the 2020s by which time Mars has been colonised. But all is not well on Mars. A fabulously wealthy man named Ramsey now runs the planet and the original colonists are impoverished and disaffected. They believe (correctly) that he has cheated them.

The protagonist of the novel is Lieutenant Corristan, a young officer on a space liner on its way to the station. He meets a charming young lady. She is accompanied by her bodyguard. Corristan finds out that she is Ramsey’s daughter Helen. Which makes it a very big deal when she vanishes. And then her bodyguard is murdered. The killer flees. Corristan gives chase, unsuccessfully.

Corristan expects to be regarded not perhaps as a hero but at least given credit for effort. He is mystified and dismayed when no-one believes a word of his account of the event. Helen Ramsey was not aboard the spaceship. The dead man was not her bodyguard.

When they reach the station Corristan finds himself diagnosed as another tragic case of space shock. He must have been hallucinating. Perhaps in time he will recover.

Corristan isn’t giving up. He escapes from custody and then he makes some truly puzzling and bizarre discoveries. These discoveries seem impossible, but Corristan is convinced that he is not mad.

It seems that things aboard the spaceship are not what they seem to be.

Corristan hasn’t just stumbled into a fight between two factions. There are three factions involved. There are multiple conspiracies.

And lots of paranoia.

What Corristan cares about is the girl. He’s only exchanged a dozen words with Helen Ramsey but he knows that he’s in love with her. He doesn’t even know if she’s still alive. He has no idea where she is.

And he’s soon in the middle of a space battle. A space battle that is not as wildly unrealistic as most science fiction space battles.

And the author doesn’t forget the thin atmosphere on Mars, and the implications of that. And he remembers to at least mention the low gravity. The space station spins to provide artificial gravity through centrifugal fore. This is not quite hard science fiction but at least the author makes an effort to keep things science fictional rather than just being an adventure in space.

There’s more drama when Corristan arrives on Mars. And a major battle seems likely, with no clear indication as to which groups belong to which factions and what their objectives are.

Corristan is a fine hero. His love for Helen Ramsey provides him with plenty of motivation. He’s gutsy and determined.

The plot has some very nice twists and there are enough hints of weird stuff to keep things interesting. There are conflicted characters and betrayals and suspicions.

This is a decent fairly grown-up and entertaining science fiction tale and I’m going to highly recommend it.

I’ve also reviewed Frank Belknap Long's Mission to a Distant Star, which is a good story ruined by a catastrophically bad ending.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with William P. McGivern’s The Galaxy Raiders in a two-novel edition.

T. T. Flynn’s The Complete Cases of Val Easton

The Complete Cases of Val Easton is a collection of spy novellas by T. T. Flynn (1902-1978). They were originally published in the Dime Detective pulp magazine between 1932 and 1935.

Flynn wrote pulp crime stories and westerns as well, his best-known being The Man from Laramie (filmed by Anthony Mann in 1955).

There’s a certain amount of continuity in the five novellas in this collection. The hero is facing the same bad guys each time.

Val Easton is an American Secret Service agent. He’s a fairly typical square-jawed pulp hero. Nancy Fraser is a highly capable American lady spy with a talent for disguise.

These are very pulpy stories and the plots do not contain any real surprises although they are enlivened by some lurid crazy details and some colourful settings. And fine larger-than-life villains. There’s a very obvious Sax Rohmer influence.

The best thing in the stories is the beautiful but deadly Tai Shin, the daughter of one of the chief villains. Sax Rohmer’s 1931 Fu Manchu thriller The Daughter of Fu Manchu had introduced Fu Manchu’s wicked daughter, the Lady Fah Lo Sue. She was played by Myrna Loy in the terrific 1932 movie The Mask of Fu Manchu and Loy gave us one of the coolest, sexiest, wickedest and most depraved bad girls in cinema history. Tai Shin is very obviously inspired by Fah Lo Sue but she’s made interesting by being made slightly ambiguous. She’s a bad girl but she seems to have fallen in love with Val Easton so she can be either an enemy or an ally, or sometimes both.

In the first story, The Black Doctor (written in 1932), Val is aboard a passenger liner when he meets a pretty young woman named Nancy Fraser. He soon finds out that she is a fellow agent. There may be a British agent aboard as well. And soon there are a couple of corpses.

They don’t know it yet but Val and Nancy are up against international spy Carl Zaken, the infamous Black Doctor.

In a hotel in New York there are more corpses. Whatever the foreign agents are after is important enough to kill for.

The second story, Torture Tavern, dates from 1933. That earlier case is not quite over after all. There are loose ends remaining, dangerous ones. There’s more shipboard action. There’s a dead cop by the dockside. There’s a link to an extraordinary potential catastrophic discovery made at a Philadelphia chemical plant. The French secret service is involved. And there’s a new and terrifying enemy, Chang Ch’ien, a one-time associate of the Black Doctor.

There are three women in this story. Two will find themselves in deadly danger. The third is Tai Shin - beautiful and seductive but very dangerous indeed.

The Jade Joss, from 1933, has a very Sax Rohmer feel to it. The bad guys have stolen a jade mask belonging to a long-dead Chinese warrior emperor. The idea is that anyone who possesses that mask could set the whole of Asia aflame. It’s a good story.

In The Evil Brand, published in 1934, Val’s nefarious opponents are trying to gain control of a Chinese secret society, which will in turn give them almost unlimited power.

The Dragons of Chang Ch’ien, dating from 1935, concerns a mysterious Chinese named Li Hung. He may be a businessman, a Chinese government agent, a member of a sinister secret society or something else entirely. Whatever he is he is clearly an important man and it seems that someone is out to get him. And there’s a connection with the upcoming marriage of a wealthy American munitions manufacturer.

The Val Easton stories are fun if you like pulp crime with a Sax Rohmer-ish flavour. Recommended.

Sax Rohmer's The Green Eyes of Bâst

The Green Eyes of Bâst is a 1920 potboiler by Sax Rohmer. It’s a lurid mystery which may or may not deal with supernatural happenings.

It begins with a policeman receiving an odd instruction to visit the Red House to check that the garage has been locked properly. What’s odd is that everyone knows that the Red House has lain empty for some considerable time. Inside the garage is a large packing case marked with the design of a cat-like figure.

The narrator, a journalist named Addison, had accompanied the constable on his strange errand. And on that same night he had the impression of being followed by a figure that seemed both female and perhaps slight feline. What struck him most were the startling green eyes.

Shortly afterwards the body of Sir Marcus Coverly is found at the docks, in that very packing case.

A short time before Addison had been involved in a romantic triangle involving a pretty actress named Isobel and Eric Coverly, brother of the late Sir Marcus.

It will soon become apparent that another romantic triangle had formed, involving Isobel and the two brothers. Also, Eric Coverly has now inherited the baronetcy.

Inspector Gatton of Scotland Yard being an old friend our narrator is asked to consult, unofficially, on the case.

A significant clue appears to be a cat figurine. It is fact a representation of the Egyptian cat-goddess Bâst. There are other possible connections to Egypt. There’s a second rather striking and mysterious woman mixed up in the case. There’s a possibly sinister doctor, who seems to have an interest in things Egyptian.

There was a third Coverly brother, Roger, now deceased. His mother has possession of the family estate which will now eventually pass to Eric Coverly.

Quite a few of the characters have some connection to Egypt.

There’s a sprawling ancient house, once an abbey, now inhabited by Roger Coverly’s mother. And perhaps by a mysterious doctor. He may be a mad scientist but he is a student of the occult as well as being a student of science and those two interests can overlap in disturbing ways.

Madness of various kinds might be involved.

This could be simply a story of a family feud over an inheritance, but it could be something much stranger. There is evidence that points to unimaginable horrors and creatures that are neither human nor non-human. With Sax Rohmer you never know. You might get an entirely rational explanation at the end. Or you might get an explanation that challenges our entire understanding of the natural world. And in this case the weirdness might not necessarily be the kind of weirdness we’re expecting.

In this tale he demonstrates great skill in feeding us just enough hints of serious weirdness to keep us interested but he has no intention of revealing the truth until the end.

This is Sax Rohmer at the top of his game. Very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed many of Sax Rohmer’s books. The Bride of Fu Manchu and The Mask of Fu Manchu are fine mid-period Fu Manchu books. The Dream Detective is a terrific collection of clever occult detective stories. The Leopard Couch and Brood of the Witch-Queen are typical of his excellent gothic horror fiction/weird fiction. The Sins of Sumuru introduces us to his final creation, the glamorous sexy female diabolical criminal mastermind Sumuru. Sumuru is a diabolical criminal mastermind with a genuinely objective in mind.

Richard Deming’s Kiss and Kill

Richard Deming’s Kiss and Kill was published in 1960. It can be described as moderately hardboiled and very noir.

Richard Deming (1915-1983) wrote an enormous number of novels under his own name and a bunch of pseudonyms and his output included a lot of TV tie-in novels.

The protagonist in Kiss and Kill is a con artist and I have to say up front that I seriously love stories about con artists. In this book we get detailed accounts of several fairly clever cons. But this novel is in fact the story of how two bunco artists get into the murder business.

Sam is working on a long con when he meets a dark-haired girl in a bar. Her name is Mavis. There’s something odd about her. Sam figures she’s a meek little receptionist on vacation trying desperately to appear rich and sophisticated and badly overdoing it.

By the hotel swimming pool he runs into her again and he is vastly amused when he realises she’s a fellow bunco artist and she’s selected him as her mark. She’s rather devastated that he sees through her at so easily. This is obviously her first time and she’s a bungling amateur but it just so happens that Sam needs the services of a young woman for the con he’s working at the moment. He persuades her to be his assistant.

She’s a very quick learner and she has a natural flair for the con game.

Mavis wants to be Sam’s regular partner. He’s agreeable to that but suggests that they might as well make it a personal partnership as well by getting married. She’s happy with that suggestion.

They’re quite successful but Sam feels that the bunco game is too risky. The mark might call in the police. And might give evidence if there’s a trial. Sam comes up with a variation which he considers to be superior. If the mark is no longer alive there’s no danger. And murder is risk-free if you know what you’re doing. This at least is Sam’s view.

Mavis is hesitant at first but she trusts Sam and she can see the logic in his arguments. Her moral qualms about murder are easily overcome.

These are still cons of a sort it’s just that the payoffs are achieved in a different way.

This definitely qualifies as noir fiction. It also belongs to a sub-genre I’d describe as anti-hero crime fiction which is certainly closely related to noir fiction. The outstanding anti-hero protagonist is of course Donald E. Westlake’s Parker who made his first appearance in 1962 in The Hunter. Westlake had already experimented with an anti-hero protagonist in his underrated The Cutie, published the same year as Kiss and Kill. These anti-heroes are not quite like the violent psychos and serial killers which were also becoming popular in crime fiction. An anti-hero is oddly attractive and we can admire him for his cleverness and, as is the case with Parker, we find ourselves hoping he’ll get away with his crimes and appalled at ourselves for hoping such a thing.

Mavis is not quite a femme fatale. Sam has her figured out from the start. She is not corrupting him or tempting him into crime or wickedness. It’s more that he tempts her into getting more deeply into moral corruption. We also find her oddly admirable - she is a very shrewd operator.

We can’t help liking Sam and Mavis, apart from the minor detail that they’re cold-blooded murderers.

This is a clever crime tale with satisfying twists and a nicely cynical atmosphere. Highly recommended.

And it’s in print, from Wildside Press.

A. Merritt's The Fox Woman and Other Stories

The Fox Woman and Other Stories collects the shorter fiction of Abraham Merritt (whose work was always published under the byline A. Merritt). The stories were written between 1917 and 1948.

Merritt wrote one of the all-time great fantasy novels, The Ship of Ishtar, as well as some of the greatest of all lost world stories.

The novelette Fox Woman (from 1946) is set in China. The bandits who killed her husband are on the trail of a woman. She sees no hope of escape. She is about to flee up the stairway to a temple when she sees a fox. She doesn’t know why, perhaps she is simply mad with fear, but she asks the fox to help her. She desires only revenge. The fox vanishes. Then she sees a beautiful woman. Unaccountably the bandits turn on each other.


She is taken in by an old priest. And by the foxes. They are of course fox spirits. She gives birth to her child. And perhaps she will have her revenge.

Fox spirits are a major and fascinating feature of Chinese folklore and I love any story in which they are involved. An excellent tale.

In The People of the Pit (dating from 1917) a couple of gold prospectors in the Yukon see a strange light playing on the face of a mountain. Suddenly a man appears, horribly injured, and he tells them a story of terror. There is a vast pit within the mountain, but the inhabitants are far from human.

There have been many tales of mirrors as portals into other worlds but Through the The Dragon Glass, written in 1917, is certainly an early example, and a very good one. It relies mainly on a nicely disturbing atmosphere of decadence and obsession.

The Drone (dating from 1934) concerns shape-changers. Werewolves and fox-women and so forth. A group of explorers who have seen many strange things in many strange lands recount things they have seen. Perhaps physical shape-changing, or perhaps not physical. An interesting story.

The Last Poet and the Robots (written in 1934) is set in the very distant future. Narodny is a great scientist but he cares more about poetry and music than science. He does not hate humanity. He is merely indifferent. He has constructed a vast underground world, a world of beauty and poetry and song. But now he will have to stir himself to confront a deadly threat. Which means he will have to deal with the robots. Good story with strong hints of decadence.

Three Lines of Old French (from 1919) deals with a theme that obviously obsessed Merritt - the blurred boundary between reality and the life of the mind. In the First World War a soldier has a dream, or maybe a vision, or maybe it really happened. Maybe the true reality lies in our subconscious or our dreams.

The Women of the Wood dates from 1934. On the opposite shore of a lake a man sees something odd. There’s a forest. A wood cutter and his sons are chopping down the trees. Then it’s almost as if one of the sons is deliberately struck by an overhanging branch. The woodcutters hate the forest in a way that seems bizarre and irrational.

And then the narrator enters the forest. He gets the impression the trees are not just alive but conscious. It’s as if they’re tree-women. They want his help. He feels compelled to help them, although he is horrified by their request. Of course it might all be his over-active imagination. Or perhaps not. A story with a wonderful sense of magic, or at least of an almost magical quasi-mystical atmosphere. A great story.

The White Road and When Old Gods Wake are fragments of novels that were never written.

A superb and varied collection and a must-read for fans of weird fiction.

I’ve also reviewed Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss.

Wika by Thomas Day and Olivier Ledroit

Wika is a graphic novel written by Frenchman Thomas Day and illustrated by French comics artist Olivier Ledroit. The English translation was published in 2021.

Wika is a fairy princess. Her father is murdered by Prince Oberon. Wika is lucky to escape. In order to facilitate her escape her wings are cut off. She is caught up in a vast power struggle. Oberon, now King Oberon, aims for absolute power. His destiny was to unite the entire realm but that obsession has been perverted, mainly as a result of his illicit passion for his sister Titania.

Wika finds herself leader of a vast rebellion. Wika also finds time for love. This is to some extent at least a coming-of-age story.

Day’s plot is insanely complex. He has fallen for the temptation to throw too much stuff into the mix. The basic idea of a power struggle in the realm of Faerie, a struggle complicated by jealousy, lust, betrayal and revenge, is very good. Adding elements of Norse mythology was an interesting idea. He has however added bits and pieces from so many mythologies and drawn from so many sources that it all gets very unwieldy.

There are dozens of characters most of whom do very little apart from distracting us from the main theme.

It is, surprisingly, relatively free from ideological propagandising and preaching. It doesn’t even go overboard with the Girlpower! thing. Naturally the chief villain is male and the forces of good are led by a woman but there’s no way it could possibly have been otherwise in the 2020s. It does it least have positive male characters and negative female characters.

The most startling thing is that Wika is female and she enjoys being female. And her sexual and emotional interests are directed at males. She even has a totally satisfying relationship with a male.

The main problem is that there’s too much plot, too many characters, too many battles. There’s no time to develop anything in real depth. The motives of most of the individuals and factions involved remain obscure.

There is at least an attempt to explain Oberon’s motivations as being more than just a natural inclination to evilness. And there’s some attempt to explain’s Wika’s motivations.

There’s plenty of magic but it’s fairy magic, not Secret Women’s Magic.

There’s some eroticism but it’s very very restrained. Which is I think something of a flaw. It makes the character motivations less complex and less interesting.

The strength of the book lies in Olivier Ledroit’s visual style. This in insanely baroque and extravagant. The influence of art nouveau and late 19th century Symbolist art is obvious. The steampunk elements emphasise the late 19th century feel. That’s certainly more interesting than just aiming for a traditional fairy tale aesthetic.

I don’t claim to have a vast interest in or knowledge of comic book art. My interests in comics are very specialised. I do think there’s a bit of an Esteban Maroto vibe here.

Ledroit goes for jewel-like detail and complexity. Every single panel is a visual tour-de-force. It’s overwhelming and hallucinogenic but it works for me. And the style is nothing if not distinctive.

Even if it is a trifle over-complicated it’s an entertaining and ambitious story and it does achieve an epic feel.

If you’re a fan of European comics (which to my mind are mostly much more interesting than American comics) then Wika is well worth worth seeking out.

James Munro's Die Rich, Die Happy

Published in 1965, Die Rich, Die Happy is the second of the four thrillers featuring British spy John Craig written by James Mitchell under the pseudonym James Munro.

James Mitchell (1926-2002) is famous as the creator of the superb 1960s British spy television series Callan, the greatest TV spy series ever made. Mitchell was also a reasonably prolific novelist.

John Craig made his first appearance in the novel The Man Who Sold Death.

Craig, like David Callan, is an ex-soldier recruited by MI5. Both are capable of ruthlessness and both have consciences. Both are British Government assassins.

At the beginning of Die Rich, Die Happy John Craig is drunk. He’s been drunk for weeks. It’s because of a woman. The woman is dead. That’s why Craig is drunk.

But now his boss Loomis needs him for a job. It’s to do with a tiny middle Eastern principality called Haram. The British still regard it as part of their sphere of influence but the Red Chinese have other ideas. Haram has oil but there’s something else that makes it really important.

This novel is one of many spy novels of the 60s that reflect an interesting shift in the genre, with the Chinese displacing the Soviets as the chief bad guys. In fact in this case the Russians have quite voluntarily and quite happily provided the British with some very important intelligence.

While trying to get himself back into shape for his upcoming mission Craig gets mixed up in an odd adventure in the Greek islands. It involves a very pretty girl. She’s an Arab, a Tuareg. She claims to be a princess. Her name is Selina. She’s certainly spirited enough and feisty enough and troublesome enough to be a princess.

Craig’s mission is to keep a Greek billionaire named Naxos alive. It’s possible that it’s not Naxos who is in real danger but his wife Philippa. Philippa is a charming gorgeous blonde. She’s also an ex-junkie, an ex-stripper and an ex-whore. Another British agent, Grierson, is assigned to help Craig.

Naxos and his wife are the keys to control of Haram. It would be easier to protect Naxos if the tycoon would be more co-operative, and he might be more co-operative if he could be persuaded to trust Craig.

The women make it complicated. There are three of them. It’s not so much that Craig can’t trust them, it’s more that they’re highly unpredictable. Philippa is unstable. Selina is a princess with lots of princess attitude. Glamorous Italian movie starlet Pia Busoni is as difficult to handle as you’d expect a glamorous Italian movie starlet to be.

There’s plenty of action, and violence. There are people who are going to need killing. That’s why Craig was given the mission. Killing people is what he does. He does it extremely well.

Given that Mitchell went on to create Callan it’s fair to say that he was fascinated by the psychology of killers. Not serial killers or psycho killers but men who kill for a living, who kill for the government. They’re slightly different characters but they’re both complex and they both pay a psychological price for their profession. Both have one major weakness. They don’t just kill, they think about it, and they have a conscience about it.

Craig has another weakness. He gets emotionally involved with women he encounters on a professional basis. In this case he excels himself - he gets emotionally involved with all three women. And he hates seeing a woman get hurt.

It’s a nicely plotted exciting tale with an intriguing flawed hero and Die Rich, Die Happy is highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first book in the series, The Man Who Sold Death.

Roy Norton's The Glyphs

The Glyphs is a lost civilisation novel by Roy Norton which was originally published in The Popular Magazine in 1919.

Roy Norton (1869-1942) was an American newspaperman who wrote a lot of westerns and a handful of science-fiction novels.

A moderately honest American big game hunter, explorer and adventurer named Hallewell encounters an eccentric and definitely not very honest Italian archaeologist. Dr Morgano has made a thrilling discovery - it is a key which will allow him to decipher ancient inscriptions in the Mayan tongue. He wants Hallewell to led an expedition to Guatemala so that Dr Morgana can get cracking on reading those inscriptions. Halelwell is not interested until Dr Morgano mentions the possibility of long-lost treasure.

A huge eccentric English explorer and hunter named Wardrop is persuaded to join the expedition, and pay the bills.

Dr Morgano might have flexible ethics in many respects but he really is a great archaeologist.

Accompanied by a guide who is a descendant of the Mayans they set off into the jungle of Guatemala.

They find an ancient road which will take them to a lost city but the road ends at a chasm. The Mayans destroyed the bridge centuries before. Hallewell does find a cave. Perhaps there is another way to reach the city.

This is a jungle adventure in which the most dangerous foe is the jungle itself. It’s a green hell. There is no action. There are no encounters with hostile tribesmen. There are no battles. 

There is however plenty of danger and excitement. An explorer who takes one wrong step could be entombed in a mountain forever. A mistake with a rope could lead to a deadly plunge into an almost bottomless chasm. There are venomous snakes and other nasty crawly things.

This is an epic of survival and endurance.

It’s also a tale that focuses on the motivations of the explorers. Hallewell, Wardrop and Dr Morgano are far from perfect but there’s a certain core decency in all three men. Morgano is genuinely driven by intellectual curiosity. Wardrop is driven by a taste for adventure but he is to some extent at least infected by Morgano’s enthusiasm for knowledge. Hallewell hopes for treasure but he can’t help being excited by the idea of being associated with what might be the scientific discovery of the decade. The Mayan guide hopes to revive his people’s past glory.

Respect and admiration has grown up between all four men. They don’t always agree but treachery is just not in their makeup.

They do reach a lost city and what they find there is not quite what they expected. Perhaps they have discovered as much about themselves as about the ancient Mayans.

This is a well-written novel that offers entertainment and excitement without relying on action clichés. Highly recommended. Norton is an author worthy of rediscovery.

The Glyphs has been reissued by Armchair Fiction in their marvellous Lost Worlds series.

I’ve also reviewed Roy Norton’s 1909 lost civilisation novel The Land of the Lost, and it’s pretty good also. Also reissued by Armchair Fiction.