James Leasor’s Passport to Oblivion

Passport to Oblivion, published in 1964, is the first of James Leasor’s Dr Jason Love spy thrillers.

James Leasor (1923-2007) was a reasonably prolific British writer of thrillers whose output included ten Dr Jason Love novels.

It begins with a British agent (code-named K) in Tehran being hunted down and killed.

K’s superior at MI6, MacGillivray, has no idea what has happened to K. He just knows that he has suddenly disappeared and that he was trying to get a message back to London. But he doesn’t know what the message was.

Someone will have to be sent to find out what happened but that’s a problem. This is 1964. Most of MI6’s agents are in fact KGB agents. The only way to be sure that an agent can be trusted is to employ someone who is more or less an amateur. An obscure country doctor, Dr Jason Love, seems like a possibility. MacGillivray used him once before on a very small job, many year earlier. Love proved to be fairly sensible and capable of exercising some initiative. Love has no spy training but he’s an ex-soldier and a judo instructor. The fact that he’s a doctor might be useful as a cover.


And there’s something else. Love is obsessed with Cord motor cars (the Cord being a highly advanced American luxury car of the 1930s). And it just happens that a very very rare Cord indeed, a Le Baron limousine, is rumoured to have recently turned up in Tehran of all places. That would give Love an excuse to be poking about the back streets of the city.

Something odd has also happened in Canada and there is a possibly very tenuous link to K’s disappearance.

Love’s first stop is Rome where he meets British agent Simone. She is very annoyed when he refuses to sleep with her.

In Tehran Love does eventually find out what happened to K. He also finds out something else. It’s not a certainty, but it seems likely that his cover has been blown. Which would mean there’s a leak somewhere.

He also finds out what K had uncovered. It’s a major conspiracy that could have serious consequences for Britain.

The reluctant spy was a popular trope in British spy fiction in the 30s and 40s. It was out of fashion by the 60s but Leasor has come up with a convincing reason for reviving it. And Dr Love isn’t so much a reluctant spy as a somewhat bewildered moderately keen amateur. He’s bewildered but he’s not unintelligent. And he is resourceful. And given that he’s a former soldier and teaches judo he’s also quite capable of handling himself in unarmed combat.

This was 1964 and Bond Fever was approaching its height. The trick if you were a spy writer at this time was to capture some of the Bond glamour without making your spy a mere Bond clone. Passport to Oblivion does have some glamour and exotic settings and some action. Jason Love doesn’t have the fancy gadgets that feature in the Bond movies but he has a few simple nifty little devices. There’s some sex, but oddly not for Dr Love. The novel does however acknowledge the importance of sex as a motivation for spies.

Jason Love is a likeable hero and he gradually learns that spies have to be ruthless at times. He’s not fond of violence but having been through the war it doesn’t scare him and if it’s kill or be killed he’d prefer to be the one doing the killing. He treats it as an extension of his wartime military service. Sometimes soldiers have to kill, and sometimes spies have to kill. One thing in his favour is that he’s not excessively trusting.

The plot is solid enough, the conspiracy has some pleasingly wild elements and there’s some fine suspense towards the end. Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

Passport to Oblivion was filmed as Where the Spies Are in 1966. The movie has a slightly more lighthearted approach which doesn’t quite come off.

Fantasmagoriana

Fantasmagoriana is the collection of ghost stories that Lord Byron and his pals were reading on that fateful night in 1816 at the Villa Diodati when Byron suggested his famous challenge - they would each write a ghost story. As a result Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, the most influential vampire story in history.

It’s a collection of eight German supernatural tales translated into French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès in 1812. That’s the version the Byron-Shelley circle read. An English translation by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson came out in 1813. Miss Utterson translated only five of the tales but added one of her own. The paperback edition from Dark Moon Books includes English translations of all eight stories plus Miss Utterson’s story.

The Spectre-Barber by Johann Karl August Musäus is not at all what you’re going to be expecting from a ghost story. In tone it’s perhaps halfway between gothic fiction and fairy tale. A young man fritters away his inheritance and now he can’t marry the girl he loves. He spends a night in a hunted castle. He encounters a ghost - a ghostly barber. A very odd story.

The Family Portraits by Johann August Apel is an unbelievably convoluted tale which involves several portraits which are the instruments by which family curses bring about the deaths of various members of an ancient noble lineage. There were crimes committed in the distant past, with the perpetrators condemned to be the instruments of revenge - with the victims being their own descendants. Quite a good story.

In The Death’s Head by Friedrich Laun a circus troupe is led by a man who seems out of place. He is in fact from a good family but was disinherited. He is a ventriloquist of rate skill and accepts a challenge. He will cause a skull to speak. The performance does not turn out the way he had intended. A nicely creepy tale.

The Death-Bride by Friedrich Laun is told in an interestingly indirect way, with a story within a story. In both that story and the framing story there is a bride-to-be betrayed by her lover. There is a horrifying vow made by the young couple - wishing a curse upon each other in the event of betrayal. There is the mysterious Death-Bride, possibly a ghost or possibly a legend. And there are twin sisters. And a prediction. A strange creepy terrific story.

The Fated Hour by Friedrich Laun concerns two sisters, Florentina and Seraphina. Seraphina dies but in the year before her death she sometimes seemed to be in two places at once. Seraphina had an intense interest in astrology. Perhaps she really could see the future. Perhaps even to the exact hour. An excellent story.

The Revenant by Friedrich Laun differs from the other stories here in an important respect but I can’t tell you how without revealing spoilers. Julie is a young girl who wants to Mary but her father is against it. The father has a curious ability. He can see ghosts. Not the ghosts of the dead but the ghosts of living people.

When Julie does marry she and her husband come to share this belief that the ghosts of the living walk abroad. This is significant for its connection to a vow they make to each other. An OK story.

The Grey Chamber, a True Story by Heinrich Clauren is a fairly straightforward ghost story. A young man named Blendau spends the night in the house of a friend but the only available room is the haunted Grey Chamber.Centuries earlier a young woman named Gertrude had been violated there and later took her own life. Her curse is that for three hundred years she will haunt this room, and she makes another reappearance on this night. A routine story although the atmosphere is effective.

In The Black Chamber, an Anecdote by Johann August Apel a group of learned men are discussing their experiences with ghost. The second half of the story is in fact the second half of Clauren’s The Grey Chamber.

In The Storm by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson a wedding takes place in an isolated chateau. The guests, including a young Spanish widow, are compelled to stay the night. The daughter of the house and the Spanish widow witness something terrifying. A story that relies almost entirely on hints and suggestion.

Fantasmagoriana is a must-read for its historical importance and as a sample of the German gothic horror tradition. It’s also pretty enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Carter Brown’s The Hong Kong Caper

The Hong Kong Caper, published in 1962, was the second of Carter Brown’s Andy Kane novels. Andy Kane featured in only three novels which is a pity because he’s a great character. The Hong Kong Caper is a partial rewrite of his 1957 novel Blonde, Bad, and Beautiful.

Andy Kane is based in Hong Kong. This was during the days of British rule in Hong Kong. It was a rather wild and wicked city. It’s a perfect setting for a Carter Brown thriller.

Andy Kane is not quite a private eye. He’s an entrepreneur with varied business interests, some of them legal. He’s a smuggler and an adventurer. The Hong Kong Police know all about him but they don’t consider him to be a particular menace to society. He might be a smuggler but he’s never touched dope and ordinary smuggling is not considered to be a big deal.

Glamorous brunette singer Natalie Dove offers Andy a proposition. It sounds like a tall tale. A Chinese Nationalist leader making his escape by air in 1944, carrying a million dollars in a briefcase, the plane crash-landing in Kwan-Po Bay, the pilot surviving but ending up in prison and passing on the story to a fellow prisoner. The pilot was Natalie’s brother. And she has a map showing the location of the sunken briefcase.

Andy stopped believing in treasure maps about the time he started wearing long pants. But then he gets another offer that seems vaguely connected. And then a third offer, once again with the story about the million dollars. This time the story is told by a glamorous blonde, Tess Donavan.

Andy still doesn’t believe it but he has been offered several thousand dollars up front. He does believe in money. So he figures he’ll play along.

After the murder and several encounters with very nasty hoodlums and an interesting conversation with Sub-Inspector Cross regarding a Chinese secret society Andy starts to get more interested. And he does owned a powered junk and a couple of sets of scuba gear. The briefcase should be in shallow water - no more than 12 feet deep.

The whole thing would be easy except that it’s in Red Chinese waters. Andy has entered Red China illegally before but it’s always a risky proposition.

Of course with two gorgeous dangerous dames involved you know things will get lively. Especially if the two dames hate each other. Plus each of the women has a partner in on the deal and the two guys don’t seem likely to be very trustworthy. And one man has already been murdered.

This is I guess a kind of caper story. There’s plenty of action involving guns, knives and spears. And Red Chinese patrol boats, and pirates.

Andy Kane is more morally compromised than Carter Brown’s other series characters. He’s basically a charming rogue. Combined with the exotic setting this makes The Hong Kong Caper great slightly disreputable fun and I have no idea why Brown apparently lost interest in the character. Perhaps he was increasingly focused on the American market and wanted to concentrate on thrillers with American settings.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Hong Kong Caper and I warmly recommend it.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Carter Brown’s Al Wheeler mysteries including No Harp for My Angel as well as one of his Danny Boyd PI thrillers, The Savage Salome and one of the delightfully sleazy Mavis Seidlitz lady PI books, The Bump and Grind Murders. And also one of his books featuring Hollywood troubleshooter Rick Holman, Where Did Charity Go?

Robert Tralins' Android Armageddon

Android Armageddon is a 1974 dystopian science fiction novel by Robert Tralins.

Sandor Robert Tralins (1926-2010) was an immensely prolific American writer of pulp novels, published under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms.

The story takes place on Earth’s colony planet Pulsar 143, in the city of Mnemosyne, several centuries in the future. Mnemosyne was the classical goddess of memory and that’s important.

It begins with an attempted alien invasion. The hero of the successful resistance, Doyle, is given a plum job as commandant of the Orrery. But is this a reward or a punishment? Or a means of controlling him? Mnemosyne is ruled by the Secretariat. It’s a totalitarian regime in which supreme power is vested in a super-computer. An artificial intelligence.

Dissent is brutally suppressed. As Commandant of the Orrery Doyle has his thoughts probed. He must agree to show unswerving unquestioning loyalty to the Secretariat. In reality Doyle abhors the Secretariat and everything it stands for. He has reluctantly accepted this post since it might offer possibilities for undermining the totalitarian regime in Mnemosyne. The post gives him some powers but involves huge risks.

Perhaps there are other rebels. Perhaps there is hope.

Firstly he needs to now if he can trust his girlfriend Petra. She’s been getting very close to Kagan and Kagan is definitely a man not to be trusted.

There is a secret concealed in the Orrery, a secret Doyle needs to discover. Memory is the key. An important part of the training of leaders like Doyle is mnemonics, specifically the mnemonic technique of the memory room in which objects in a room are the mnemonic code keys. Which is cool because this is a very ancient technique not used for centuries but Tralins uses it in a far future high-tech setting. In this story it’s part of the mind code, the mental training given to the elites. It’s one of a number of very cool touches in this novel.

Doyle will need to find a way to destroy, disable or neutralise the central computer but in the meantime he has to stay alive and stay out of trouble. Dissenters in this world face worse fates than prison.

There are several nice little touches. The building housing the master computer is called the Orrery, an orrery being a mechanical model of the solar system.

There are android servants everywhere, known as servomen and servomaids. Only they’re not androids. They’re human beings who have been modified to reduce their intelligence dramatically so they can function as mindless zombie drones. It’s creepy, but then this is a sinister future dystopia.

Having spent much of his career in spaceships on the Frontier, traveling at near light speed, Doyle has aged only seventeen years in the past century. This is significant because it means that Doyle remembers the past, he remembers Earth before the space colonisation began. This is one of the reasons he is determined to oppose the Secretariat. He knows from personal experience that the past was better.

For an obscure book by an obscure author Android Armageddon is a lot more complex and clever and interesting than you might expect. This is not a shoot ’em up space opera. There’s not much action but there’s suspense, lots of paranoia and a well-realised future world. The ending has a few odd touches.

Android Armageddon is above-average pulp science fiction. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Tralins’ fairly interesting 1966 sci-fi novel The Cosmozoids which deals with aliens and the paranormal and his hugely enjoyable 1966 sexy lady spy romp The Chic Chick Spy.

Philip McCutchan’s Redcap

Redcap, published in 1961, was the second of Philip McCutchan’s Commander Shaw spy thrillers. The fact that Shaw, like James Bond, is an ex-naval officer who served in the Second World War might lead one to expect him to be a Bond clone.

What’s interesting about Redcap is the time setting. It’s obviously set some time in the future. It’s not the technology - slightly futuristic technology is a common enough ingredient in spy stories with contemporary settings. But the international situation described in this novel is very very different from that of 1961. McCutchan has done a lot of speculating and extrapolating.

The problem of chronology is complicated by Shaw’s age. He has to be old enough to have served in the Second World War but young enough to still be an active field agent. Which makes the late 60s the most likely time setting.

The future setting was a bold choice since it’s the sort of thing that can date a book very quickly.

An international agreement to prevent nuclear war has been signed but it might actually work because there is a way to enforce this agreement. That’s what Redcap is for.

Redcap has to be taken to Australia. It’s too heavy and much too valuable to be entrusted to air transportation. It will go by sea, aboard the world’s first nuclear-powered passenger liner.

The clue that there is a threat to Redcap comes from Donovan, with Donovan’s daughter Judith acting as go-between. Donovan is a disgraced British spy and he’s been dead for years, only he isn’t dead. The clue is fragmentary and ambiguous but very very worrying.

And according to Donovan Karstad is involved. That’s bad. Also Lubin has disappeared, which is also bad.

There’s plenty of potential for treachery and no-one can really be trusted. Donovan was believed to be a traitor. Shaw and many others don’t believe it, but there’s no way to be sure. Karstad is Norwegian and was definitely a traitor but maybe he’s had a change of heart. Lubin is a top Russian electronics specialist and his loyalties are entirely a mystery. Judith is a sweet girl and very cute but in the world of espionage sweet cute girls can be deadly.

The passenger liner sets sail for Australia with Shaw aboard. He’s uneasy from the start. He’s fairly sure he’s being watched. The first murder naturally increases his unease.

There’s plenty of action and it’s handled pretty well. A lot of the action takes place at sea and personally I adore nautical mysteries and thrillers. McCutchan had a naval background and it shows. He has a real knack for using the sea itself as a source of menace. The action at sea is superbly done.

Shaw is a basic hero type with one weakness - he has a very delicate stomach. Overall he’s less ruthless than Bond but he has his moments. Although he has a girlfriend (her name is Debonnair Delacriox which is awesome) this is spy fiction with zero sex.

It’s fast-moving and the pace just keeps accelerating and it gets rather violent. This is a fine spy thriller and it’s highly recommended.

McCutchan wrote more than twenty Commander Shaw books and if I find any more with nautical backgrounds I’ll be grabbing them.

Johnson McCulley's Daughter of the Idol

Daughter of the Idol is a 1909 novel by Johnson McCulley, originally serialised in Railroad Man’s Magazine. Steeger Press have reprinted five Johnston McCulley novels including this one in a mammoth paperback omnibus edition, King of Chaos and Other Adventures.

Johnson McCulley (1883-1958) was a prolific American writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. He is of course most famous as the creator of Zorro.

Daughter of the Idol takes place almost entirely at sea, aboard a tramp steamer. Shipboard thrillers and adventure tales are always a joy to me.

Minding his own business on the docks in San Francisco a young lad named Roland is accidentally shanghaied aboard the tramp steamer Faraway but his uncle, the famed explorer Dick Engle, was deliberately snatched. Initially no-one knows the lad is aboard, until he is discovered by Ruth Holland. Ruth is a beautiful young lady but is very enigmatic about her presence aboard the steamer. She will not explain why things are so tense between her and Dick Engle.

The steamer is bound for a remote Pacific island. The steamer’s crew comprises natives of this island and they seem to be in awe of Ruth, as if they consider her a sacred personage.

A man named Welch, a thorough-going villain, is the prime mover in some mysterious plot. It involves an idol. Welch may be an adherent of a blood-soaked cult centred on the island. Whether he is really sincere about his allegiance to the cult or whether he’s after money or power or a woman remains uncertain.

The steamer’s skipper was in league with Welch but he’s having second thoughts.

Now the action begins and it doesn’t stop. There are gunfights. Some of the good guys get captured by the bad guys. Some of the bad guys get captured by the good guys. There are more gunfights. There are hair’s-breadth escapes. There are fistfights. There are more gunfights. And piracy.

Ruth, Uncle Dick and Roland will need to do something before they reach the island.

That’s where the executions will take place. Perhaps executions, or perhaps human sacrifices.

Dick Engle is a brave hero but he’s not infallible. Ruth is a fine feisty heroine but sometimes she jumps to conclusions. Dick and Ruth are in love but they’re not sure if they trust each other.

Roland is a brave resourceful lad. The captain of the Faraway adds some interesting uncertainty. Maybe our heroes can trust him and maybe they can’t. Welch is a pretty effective villain, ruthless and calculating rather than crazed.

McCulley knows how to handle both action and suspense and create an air of breathless excitement and danger. The nautical setting and the exotic remote island add some splendid atmosphere. There’s a plot with plenty of twists and betrayals. There’s superstition and mystery. And there’s a tangled romance.

McCulley is one of those largely forgotten adventure writers who does not deserve to anguish in obscurity.

Daughter of the Idol is a marvellous adventure yarn and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the title story from this collection, King of Chaos, and the first of McCulley’s terrific Zorro novels, The Curse of Capistrano.

Douglas Sanderson's Prey by Night

Prey by Night is a 1955 thriller written by Douglas Sanderson using the pseudonym Malcolm Douglas.

Douglas Sanderson (1920-2002) had an odd life and an odd career. He was born in England. He moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen. Then he moved to Spain, then back to Canada, spent a brief period in the United States and then moved permanently to Spain. He originally tried his hand at “serious” literature with little success. He switched to frenetic hardboiled thrillers and enjoyed considerable success. He might be better remembered today except for the fact that he switched between his own name and two pseudonyms and at the peak of his powers as an author he wrote four novels which were only ever published in French. They sold well in France but have never been translated into English. Eventually he decided he liked drinking more than writing.

Bill Williams is an American smuggler based in Tangier. He’s 26 years old. He smuggles all kinds of things into Spain, but mostly fairly innocuous stuff like cigarettes and nylon stockings. He won’t touch narcotics. He works for the Marquesa. She’s an ageing Spanish noblewoman who isn’t really Spanish and while she’s a real marquesa the title was bought. Bill’s business partnership with her was sealed in the bedroom. That’s how she operates. If you want to be in business with her you first have to satisfy her physical appetites. Bill wasn’t happy about this part of the deal, the marquesa is thirty years older than he is, but it’s a profitable partnership.

And, much to Bill's relief, she now has a new young bed partner, a guy named Page.

Bill has a very fast boat and he knows how to handle it, with the assistance of a 17-year-old Spaniard named Paco. Paco is a fine seaman, he’s brave and he’s a good kid. Bill is not so sure about his new crewman, Griswold. Maybe he’s just a drunk, which is bad enough.

Everything goes wrong on the next smuggling run. So wrong that it can’t be bad luck.

Smuggling into Spain is dominated by a crime syndicate known as the Association. There are also independent operators, like the Marquesa. Perhaps there are others. There are independent brokers, like Silva. Competition is ruthless.

Bill knows that someone is trying to set him up. It could be any one of a dozen individuals or gangs. He doesn’t know exactly why.

It could be the Association, or Silva. Or another group. Or the Marquesa. It could be Griswold, or Page. Or Navarro, a rich man with a very expensive hobby (breeding bulls for the arena). Or Hatherton, an enigmatic Englishman, reputed to be a tough guy. Or Hatherton’s cute bed-hopping blonde wife Lavinia. Or Ferrer, who buys from the Marquesa.

He also has to worry about a Spanish cop named Blanco. Blanco appears to be honest, which is always annoying. He also seems to be efficient, which is even more annoying.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Bill is sleeping with Paco’s slightly older sister Maria. If Paco finds out he will try to kill Bill. It’s a matter of defending his sister’s honour.

Bill is a fairly tough guy but he’s not a thug and he’s not exactly a hardened criminal. He certainly doesn’t think of himself as a real criminal. He’s not a bad guy. He’s moderately smart but whether he’s smart enough remains to be seen.

It’s a game of intrigue with multiple players and nobody, not even those doing the most active conspiring, sees the complete picture. Nobody is sure who is double-crossing whom. And they’re not all motivated by greed. Some are motivated by jealousy. The Marquesa and Lavinia are motivated by lust. Which makes their actions unpredictable.

The tone is reasonably hardboiled with a touch of cynicism. There’s a nicely twisty plot, there’s suspense and there are some fine action scenes both on land and sea. Speaking personally there are few things I love more than a nautical thriller.

Prey by Night is filled with frantic action and it’s highly recommended.

James Mayo's Shamelady

Stephen Coulter (1914-1986) was an English author who wrote the five Charles Hood spy thrillers using the pseudonym James Mayo. The third of these spy novels was Shamelady, published in 1966.

I have the impression that Charles Hood’s backstory changed a little from one novel to the next.

In Shamelady he’s not exactly a spy or a secret agent or even a private eye. He works for a consortium of banks. He’s a kind of trouble shooter. It is mentioned in passing that he had worked for the Secret Service. He had killed for them, and apparently he has killed for the bankers as well.

As this story begins he has been instructed to meet a girl named Alex in New York. He has no idea what it’s all about but it presumably involves some kind of criminal activity or shady financial dealing.

Alex is apparently out of town but will be back on Boxing Day. It’s now Christmas Eve, so Hood has two days to kill. He finds himself at one of the legendary Christmas parties organised a very rich and eccentric couple, the Sessels. There are supposed to be some very friendly girls at these parties. Hood likes girls very much indeed. It’s an amusingly wild party but there is something not quite right. Hood can’t quite put his finger on what it is that makes him uneasy.

On the other hand he does meet Bonbon. She’s a charming witty very kooky redhead. He likes her a lot by the end of the evening he has discovered that she is also very good in bed.

The next day it’s back to work, arranging to meet Alex. And he discovers that she is now deceased.

This makes it even more likely that there is something big going down. Maybe Bonbon’s friend Rosario could be a lead. Rosario has become very very rich by marrying multiple times and marrying wisely.

Hood’s vague uneasiness increases. Just odd little things that worry him.

Pulling the strings is a diabolical criminal mastermind who is motivated not by money or power but by boredom. He needs to make his life exciting even if that involves extreme danger. Charles Hood has a similar outlook on life so he’s not entirely unsympathetic but on the other hand he is firmly on the side of law and order.

The plot involves gold, aeroplanes, perfume and exotic flowers (including one known as the Shamelady which opens up for you if you stroke it the right way). There’s also the island with the nude girl, the decaying chateau, some very scary henchmen, plagues of bugs and a super-computer named Lulu. Lulu is the key to various daring and insanely ambitious criminal enterprises.

This was of course 1966 so Lulu uses punch cards but this was a time when people were starting to have wild expectations of computers could do. It was also a time when it was starting to occur to some people that computers could be used for sinister purposes, such as crime.

Charles Hood is a charming womaniser. He firmly believes that the best way to get vital information from pretty female suspects is to sleep with them. And even if they don’t have useful information time spent making love to pretty girls is never time wasted. The arch-criminal likes girls as well. Everybody in this story likes girls, and the girls like men. It’s sexy in a good-natured slightly naughty way but not actually sleazy.

There’s enough action to satisfy any reasonable reader and there’s plenty of woman in peril stuff to keep the tension nice and taut. The tone is not actually tongue-in-cheek but it is witty and the plot is outrageous with some definitely bonkers touches. It’s the genuinely interesting arch-villain that makes this book really notable, and it’s a fast-paced and consistently enjoyable read. Highly recommended.

Valerian Complete Collection vol 1

The French Valérian and Laureline science fiction comic book series was written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières. The series was immensely popular and ran from 1967 to 2010. It was inspired to some extent by the success of Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella comics, but without the erotic overtones.

The setting is the 28th century. The city of Galaxity is the capital of Earth’s galactic empire. Science and technology have created unlimited prosperity. Government is in the hands of technocrats and scientists. In 1967 that sounded utopian. Today of course the idea of rule by technocrats and scientists sounds like a recipe for a dystopian nightmare.

The overwhelming majority of people do no work at all. They spend their entire lives in artificially induced dreams. Which also sounds a bit dystopian!

Valérian and Laureline are among the tiny majority who still do useful work. They are spatio-temporal secret agents who travel through space and time and act to prevent any tampering with time and space. Like Time Lords.

Bad Dreams was the first Valérian and Laureline adventure, published in the magazine Pilote in 1967. Valérian is sent back to the 11th century to apprehend a mad scientist, Xombul, who is making use of sorcery with the intention of taking over people’s dreams. He wants to shock them out of their dream existence (which might be a good thing but might be dangerous). And of course he wants supreme power for himself (which is definitely a bad thing).

Valérian meets a cute 11th century forest girl named Laureline. In the course of the adventure she is temporarily tuned into a unicorn and since as everybody knows unicorns can read minds she now knows that the world of the 28th century exists and she knows what it’s like. This means that she can no longer be permitted to remain in the Middle Ages, so she is recruited as a spatio-temporal agent. She and Valérian will henceforth operate as a team.

This first adventure is as much fantasy as science fiction with perhaps just a hint of the French concept of le fantastique. Magic is introduced without the least embarrassment.

The City of Shifting Waters and Earth in Flames, written in 1968, form a single adventure in two parts. Valérian and Laureline are sent to New York in 1986. Nobody really knows what happened in those times, prior to the 23rd century. That time period is a dangerous forbidden zone. They find a flooded Manhattan being looted by feral hippies.

Xombul has come up with another nefarious plan which has something to do with a lost scientific library. There are two scientific geniuses is this tale, Xombul the mad scientist and Schroeder the eccentric but certainly not evil young scientist who is on the verge of discovering the secret of time travel. Given that nothing is known of this time period perhaps at some stage he really did unlock the secret.

The American setting was not chosen randomly. Christin and Mézières had spent some considerable time in the United States and had picked up a love of the American landscape.

The third story, Empire of a Thousand Planets (dating from 1971), moves us into full-blown space opera territory. The planet Sirte is the centre of an interplanetary empire but the Sirtean had never discovered spatio-temporal travel. Now their empire is decaying. The prince’s rule is fragile and perhaps mostly illusory. The Merchants’ Guild is hatching conspiracies. And then there are the mysterious Enlighteneds, possibly a priestly caste with great powers but possibly something stranger.

It’s a confusing situation with no clearcut good guys and bad guys.

The first two stories are fun but a little tentative but by the third story the series has really hit its stride. Mézières’ visual style is becoming more confident and more flamboyant and Christin’s storytelling is becoming more ambitious. This is the European approach to comic books which is quite unconcerned with genre boundaries but very concerned with aesthetic style. Highly recommended.

In 2017 Luc Besson brought Valérian and Laureline to the big screen in the underrated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Besson drops the time travel angle (which would have added too many complications) but he captures the overall feel of the comic wonderfully well.

J.R. Salamanca's Lilith

Lilith is a 1962 novel by J.R. Salamanca which was made into an excellent 1964 movie. Vince is an aimless young man just out of the army who joins the staff of a mental hospital where he meets a disturbing young woman named Lilith.

Reading the novel cleared up for me something that was rather confusing in the movie. In the movie the story appears to takes place in the early 1960s but the time period doesn’t quite make sense. In the novel it is absolutely clear that Vince begins his employment at the hospital in 1946 or 1947. And a great deal of the character motivations (which are the same in both the novel and the movie) are much more comprehensible in a late 40s setting.

The first quarter of the novel gives us a detailed backstory for Vince. It’s a bit dull but necessary. The movie gives us the essentials of his background through a few subtle hints which work well in a movie but would not have worked in a novel. In both cases we find out that there are events in his past with which he has never come to terms and that while he definitely does not dislike women he is all at sea when it comes to emotional relationships.

Vince has no formal qualifications but is employed as an occupational therapist and will be trained on the job at the Poplar Lodge Hospital in his hometown in Maryland.

Lilith is one of the patients. She is twenty-two, beautiful and enigmatic. She is sweet but very disturbing. Everyone is disturbed by her but Vince is particularly vulnerable in this regard.

It is important to note that Poplar Lodge is not a state hospital but a very expensive private hospital. The patients are from very rich families. They are well-educated and highly intelligent. They are also schizophrenic. Vince is warned that crazy and intelligent is a dangerous combination. These patients are quite capable of outsmarting even experienced staff members. Lilith is very very intelligent and very very crazy.

At Poplar Lodge the patients are treated entirely by psychoanalysis. Drugs and shock therapy are not used. This means their sexual urges are intact. This will become important.

Vince is also told that whereas the delusions of schizophrenics are almost always unstable, irrational and illogical Lilith is different. She has created a complex fantasy world that is stable, coherent, logical and internally consistent. It just happens to be a complete delusion.

Lilith comes across more like a refugee from the realm of faerie than an everyday mental patient. It’s not that her delusions come and go. She lives permanently in her fantasy world. She is entirely disconnected from the real world.

A complicating factor is Warren, another patient. He is twenty-two, painfully shy, socially inept. He is hopelessly in love with Lilith.

The best part of both novel and movie is the jousting tournament. This is apparently a real thing in Maryland. The riders carry lances but don’t tilt at each other. The object is to spear metal rings suspended from an archway while riding at full speed. It requires great skill. Vince enters the tournament. He will be wearing Lilith’s colours - her blue scarf. Lilith is delighted. Now she imagines Vince as a knight in shining armour competing to win the favour of a fair lady, Lilith being the fair lady. Vince is almost seduced by the fantasy as well. He is realising that he is in love with Lilith.

There’s obvious potential for all this to end very badly. While the movie follows the plot of the novel very very closely the ending is different. The movie’s ending is superior but what matters is that in both novel and movie the ending is not quite what we expect.

While the treatment of mental illness may have changed the story is still relevant. It still raises important questions about the fantasies we all construct for ourselves, and about the seductive nature of fantasy worlds. Lilith wants to remain in her fantasy world. She is mad but happy. It also suggests how very easy it is to be drawn into another’s fantasies.

There’s so much that is fascinating and provocative and disturbing in this novel that it’s sad that it’s now so completely forgotten. Highly recommended.

It’s long out of print but affordable used copies are not too difficult to find.

I’ve also reviewed the movie, Lilith (1964).

The Red Skull (Doc Savage)

The Red Skull is a Doc Savage novel published in the Street & Smith Publications pulp magazine Doc Savage Magazine in August 1933.

It was written by Lester Dent, writing as Kenneth Robeson. Kenneth Robeson was a house name at this publisher. Lester Dent wrote most of the Doc Savage Magazine stories.

The Red Skull begins with an entertaining shootout on a golf course involving an aeroplane. A cowboy kind of guy from out West is trying to get a message to Doc Savage. His buddies need some help.

Doc and his assistants - Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny and Long Tom - are always ready to help anyone in need.

In this case it’s something to do with a radium mine in Canada, but Doc has a feeling that the whole story is phoney. Doc believes that somebody really does need his help but that the message may have been tampered with.

So Doc has to try to figure what’s really going on, but he doesn’t where it’s going on or who it is needing help, or what it’s about or who the bad guys might be.

But there are definitely bad guys.

The trail leads Doc and his crew to Arizona. There’s a dam under construction. Somebody seems to be sabotaging the construction, for no obvious reason.

Of course there is a reason. But in the meantime there’s more than sabotage going on. There are attempted murders. Doc’s assistants are among the intended victims, and the beautiful secretary of one of his lieutenants is kidnapped.

Doc is also puzzled by the plane crash involving one of the owners of the dam construction company. It doesn’t seem to add up.

There’ll be plenty of meyhem before this story is concluded and it builds to a satisfying action climax.

Doc Savage doesn’t like to kill bad guys (although in the early stories many of them do come to a sticky end). Doc prefers to capture them and send them to his private clinic where they get the Clockwork Orange treatment - they get brainwashed and turned into respectable law-abiding citizens. In the early 1960s brainwashing became a major pop culture obsession and figured in countless spy and science fiction stories, and was always seen as something sinister. It’s odd to see it treated in such a positive way in 1933.

He makes use of gadgets, most notably various methods of dispersing knockout gas, and occasionally gas of a more lethal nature.

Doc has an ultra-advanced high-speed aircraft of his own design, and a high-tech autogyro. I’m always delighted by any kind of 1930s high technology.

There was never any doubt that Lester Dent knew how to keep a pulp adventure story powering along.

The Red Skull is fine pulp adventure. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several earlier Doc savage novels - The Man of Bronze, Land of Terror and The Polar Treasure and I recommend all of them.

Michael Avallone’s The Alarming Clock

The Alarming Clock, published in 1956, is one of Michael Avallone’s many Ed Noon pulp private eye thrillers (he wrote at least thirty Ed Noon books).

Michael Avallone (1924-1999) was an amazingly prolific American author in various pulp genres.

The Ed Noon books are long out of print and used copies can be pricey. They may for all I know be available as ebooks - I have zero knowledge of and interest in ebooks.

The Alarming Clock starts promisingly. PI Ed Noon has a package delivered to him, with a very cryptic note attached. The package contains an alarm clock. What’s weird and disturbing about the clock is that there’s nothing weird and disturbing about it. It’s just a very ordinary cheap alarm clock. There has to be some secret attached to it but Ed can’t even guess what it could be.

In the early stages I thought the story had a slight Maltese Falcon vibe. The key to The Maltese Falcon is the falcon but nobody is sure if it really exists, if it does exist it might be a fake, it’s reputed to conceal immense riches but it might turn out to be worthless and if it’s a fake there may be more than one falcon. Despite all this uncertainty a motley collection of shady characters are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths and double-cross each other to get hold of it.

Which is also the case with this clock. It might contain hidden diamonds, or the key to finding some hidden treasure, it might conceal vital military secrets, or a stolen top-secret device, or it might contain evidence of a crime (or it might be the evidence). Or it might be just a very ordinary cheap alarm clock.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, Avallone reveals too many clues as to its true nature too early on so we know what kind of story it’s going to be.

On the other hand, like The Maltese Falcon, the story still has a motley collection of very suspicious characters prepared to take drastic steps to get hold of it. They could be rival criminal gangs or rival spies or even undercover Feds.

Ed Noon did not come down in the last shower. As soon as he got the clock he played the old switcheroo. And someone else then plays the same trick. So now nobody knows how many clocks there are or which is the real one.

Any good PI thriller requires at least one dangerous dame. This one has two. One blonde and one brunette, both glamorous and they hate each other (in the way that only women can hate other women) which adds to the fun. Ed loves Alma but that doesn’t necessarily mean he can trust her. He is sure that he can’t trust Myra but he might of course be wrong about that. Nobody in this tale is what he seems to be. The good guys might really be bad guys and the bad guys might really be good guys.

The book is not short on action. The violence is not graphic. There’s no sex.

Avallone keeps the true nature of the clock concealed quite skilfully. We can make guesses. The important thing is that the characters in the story are even more in the dark.

Ed Noon is a typical likeable wisecracking private eye, basically honest but he has occasional misunderstandings with the cops. He’s a PI of the down-at-heel type. He has pokey office and cannot afford a glamorous secretary, or even an unglamorous one.

Perhaps it needed a more colourful master villain but then it’s the nature of this story that we don’t know the identity of the master villain.

The Alarming Clock is perfectly decent moderately hardboiled entertainment and it’s recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the two Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV tie-in novels written by Michael Avallone, The Blazing Affair and The Birds of a Feather Affair. They’re both worth reading.

Michael Crichton’s Sphere

Michael Crichton’s novel Sphere was published in 1987. The novel was successful and was well received by critics. The 1988 film adaptation made some significant changes and was very poorly received and was a box-office flop. The fact that Crichton himself was not involved with the film in any way may account for its failure.

The novel begins with a team of four scientists assembled by the U.S. Navy to investigate what the Navy describes as an anomaly a thousand feet below the surface of the South Pacific Ocean. The Navy’s cover story is that it is an air crash scene.

The team comprises astrophysicist Ted Fielding, mathematician Harry Adams, zoologist Beth Halpern and psychologist Norman Johnson. Their investigation will entail spending a week in a deep-sea habitat. Norman is not happy about this but it’s his own fault. He’s the one who, eight years earlier, wrote the protocol for dealing with such a situation and who recommended the inclusion of a psychologist on the grounds that the situation would put the members of such a team under extreme stress.

This is not an air crash. It is a spacecraft crash, and there is clear evidence that the crashed spaceship has been on the ocean floor for at least three hundred years. Which obviously means that it’s an alien spacecraft.

The scientific team will be dealing with the first contact with an alien civilisation.

Norman Johnson’s specialities are the effects of stress and more specifically the effects of stress on human group dynamics. In this case there will be plenty of stress and the group dynamics will be complex and potentially explosive. There are tensions right from the start. This novel is, among many other things, a psychological thriller. And Crichton integrates the psychological thriller and science fiction elements seamlessly.

Right from the start the attitude of Harry Adams is puzzling. This is because he has figured something out. It is not only clear to him that the Navy has withheld important information he has also figured out exactly what it is that they haven’t been told. He is both worried and amused.

The fact that the team members are unaware that the situation is not what it seems to be is important and it’s also important that the reader is unaware of this. For this reason I’m going to be even more careful than usual about hinting at anything that might be a spoiler. Crichton has gone to a lot of trouble to reveal a whole series of secrets to us in a gradual way. Just as we think we know what’s going on he springs another surprise on us.

There’s not just the spacecraft. Aboard the spacecraft is the sphere. What is the sphere and how is it connected with the spacecraft?

Crichton started his literary career as a writer of thrillers and he never forgot the basic techniques of that genre. His skills at building suspense and establishing an atmosphere of menace and paranoia and very evident in Sphere.

This is a classic “put a bunch of people is an isolated confined space and watch them become more and more paranoid” story.

This is also Big Ideas science fiction and in this book he combines a number of big ideas in extremely interesting ways.

This is a novel that came out just before the wave of undersea science fiction adventure films such as The Abyss and it may well have helped to kick off that boom. Sphere is certainly a vastly better story than The Abyss.

Sphere is ambitious and it’s an impressive achievement. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed many of Crichton’s books including Scratch One, The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, Binary and Congo. And I’ve reviewed his movies Coma (1978), Looker (1981) and Westworld (1973).

Irwin R. Blacker’s The Kilroy Gambit

There’s nothing more exciting when you’re a vintage pop fiction fan than discovering a totally unknown book by a writer you’ve never heard of and then discovering it’s terrific. That was the case for me with Irwin R. Blacker’s 1960 spy novel The Kilroy Gambit. And the icing on the cake is that it was the first of a series of four books about American spymaster Richard LeGrande.

Irwin R. Blacker (1919-1985) was an American who wrote around a dozen novels altogether (all within the space of a decade) and also had a successful career as a writer for film and television.

The Kilroy Gambit is certainly not a James Bond-style action spy thriller. It is a spy thriller, but of a very particular type. It’s very serious in tone, but it’s quite unlike other serious spy thrillers of that era such as Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels such as Death of a Citizen. In some ways it’s an anticipation of John le Carre’s approach in which the focus is much more on the spymaster sitting in his office pulling the strings rather than on the field agents doing the actual spying stuff.

It’s also quite cynical, but it’s not the cynicism of a Len Deighton in which the whole business of espionage has a touch of the absurd to it. The Kilroy Gambit is a kind of political thriller, but focused on the sleazy politics of espionage.

The central character is middle-aged General Richard LeGrande who heads a shadowy U.S. agency knows as General Operations (GENOPS). Unusually LeGrande does not have a background as a field agent. During the war he was involved in covert operations but he was the man making the plans and giving the orders, not the agent in the field.

GENOPS is involved in covert operations that are perilously close to being black ops. What they do is pretty much illegal and certainly unconstitutional and probably in breach of international law. Their operations have to be kept secret not just from the Soviets but from the U.S. Government and Congress and the media and the American people.

He now faces his most dangerous enemy - not the KGB but a U.S. Senate inquiry. There’s not a single aspect of the activities of GENOPS that he can reveal to a Senate committee but if he refuses to reveal the nature of those activities it could be the end of his career and of GENOPS. He soon finds out that in Washington nobody has any friends. Every agency and individual on which he relies to protect him is willing to sell him out to gain a political advantage or to advance their own careers.

His immediate problem is an operation in Afghanistan involving arms caches which seems to have gone disastrously wrong. The idea of clever operations that end up as trainwrecks due to bungling or treachery would later be explored brilliantly by John le Carre in novels such as The Looking Glass War. This operation (whimsically codenamed Operation Kilroy) may have been completely blown. The covers of GENOPS agents may have been blown. GENOPS may have been betrayed by one of his own agents. There is a security leak which may have originated with one of the five subordinates who make up the inner circle of GENOPS.

The book is also interesting for its treatment of defectors. Richard LeGrande has never liked defectors. If a man will betray his own country, Russia, then he is highly likely to betray the U.S. as well. Even assuming he’s a genuine defector and not a KGB plant. Defectors are so untrustworthy that in practice they’re a lot more trouble than they’re worth. And Richard LeGrande now has two defectors to worry about.

There’s also the problem that one member of this inner circle, Janet Garner, happens to be his mistress. This not very well kept secret may be about to be aired publicly. That could cause difficulties with his wife.

These nightmares would be enough to deal with but when they happen just as he is about to face a very hostile Senate committee then Richard LeGrande is a man under extreme pressure.

The narrative switches constantly between the Washington witch-hunt against him, his attempts to figure out how Operation Kilroy went so badly wrong and a dangerous mission by a GENOPS field agent, who happens to be his mistress Janet.

There’s almost no action at all, although there are some fine suspenseful moments involving real danger.

It’s the details of operational planning, the portrait of the murky world of Washington politics and the emphasis on a man slowly being crushed by intolerable personal and professional pressures that makes this a fascinating and extremely fine unconventional spy thriller. Very highly recommended.

Peter O’Donnell's Modesty Blaise: Mister Sun

This volume contains three Modesty Blaise comic-strip adventures written by Peter O’Donnell with artwork by Jim Holdaway.

Comic strips published three frames at a time in daily newspapers were once immensely popular. It’s a format that is now more or less extinct. These were almost always aimed at kids and younger readers. What made Modesty Blaise revolutionary when the strip debuted in 1963 was that it was aimed much more at grown-ups.

In fact, as is evident in this collection, Modesty Blaise was definitely for grown-ups. It wasn’t just the occasional nudity. The tone could be quite dark and even grim. In the worlds of crime and espionage people get hurt. Good people get killed. Straightforward happy endings are not guaranteed.

Mister Sun is a very early Modesty Blaise adventure, from 1964. A few years earlier Modesty had unofficially adopted a young Vietnamese boy named Weng and paid for his university education in Hong Kong. Now he has become involved with organised crime. It doesn’t make sense. He’s not that kind of kid. Apparently he was trying to get hold of a great deal of money very quickly, for some undisclosed purpose. But if he needed money Modesty would have given it to him gladly.

And Weng has no idea of the trouble he’s landed himself in getting involved with the sinister crime lord Mister Sun. And Mister Sun and Modesty Blaise have clashed before so Modesty suspects a particularly sinister purpose behind Mister Sun’s recruitment of Weng.

There are lots of unexpected ramifications and lots of plot twists to come. This is a rare Modesty Blaise story that involves current events (in this case the war in Vietnam), something that O’Donnell was later careful to avoid. Mister Sun is a suitably dangerous villain and he controls a vast criminal network. It’s a good story.

The Mind of Mrs Drake is unusual in having hints of the paranormal. There is a woman who earns her living as a psychic and she may or may not have some actual psychic abilities. She also happens to be a spy. Her psychic abilities make her very effective at recruiting agents - she knows their dirty little secrets and their weaknesses and their fears, all the things that can be used to manipulate them.

British counter-intelligence have sent in Modesty’s young friend Jeannie Challon as bait. This is Jeannie’s first counter-espionage assignment.

Mrs Drake has an accomplice, an osteopath, and while he lacks her special skills he is much more ruthless and much more dangerous.

The danger for Jeannie Challon is that Mrs Drake’s psychic abilities may have put her one step ahead of her adversaries. Jeannie’s cover could be blown and she would have no way of knowing it.

Modesty dislikes having to kill people but when she decides that someone really does need killing she puts her scruples to one side. This is one of the stories in which that ruthless side of Modesty is in evidence. A very good story.

The Killing Ground is a very brief story that O’Donnell and Holdaway had to produce in a hurry to fill a publication gap. It’s yet another retelling of The Most Dangerous Game. It’s OK but it is obviously a filler story.

Mister Sun and The Mind of Mrs Drake are top-tier Modesty Blaise adventures making this a very desirable purchase.

I’ve reviewed three other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up, Warlords of Phoenix, The Black Pearl and Uncle Happy, as well as the first five novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth, A Taste for Death, The Impossible Virgin and I, Lucifer.

William Vance’s Bait

Bait is a sleaze novel with a hint of noir by William Vance (writing as George Cassidy) published in 1962.

Melody Frane is an itinerant farm worker in her late teens. Her mother is a drunk and a whore. Melody is constantly trying to avoid the attentions of men but with a body like hers it’s a losing battle. She’s working on a farm which is part of the vast business empire of Harry Ransome.

When company pilot Kenney Ward tries to make her in the cockpit of his plane her problem is that she wants him to stop, but her body definitely doesn’t want him to stop. She wants to be a good girl but she hungers for love and she hungers for men.

She gets herself fired and realises she doesn’t have too many good options. She has no education to speak of. She has no social polish. She has no skills. She has one possibly useful asset - her luscious body.

Then she attracts the attention of the company boss, Harry Ransome. After having sex with her he offers to employ her as his secretary. She is puzzled by this - she cannot type or take shorthand, in fact she has no office skills. Her assures that this won’t be a problem - he’ll send her to Las Vegas for training. Mrs Matthews will take care of her. She accepts the offer.

Melody is naïve but she knows what men want and she realises that being Harry’s mistress will be part of the deal. Had she known that Harry Ransome was married alarm bells might have started ringing. On the other hand she enjoyed the sex with him.

She becomes more puzzled when the training involves no shorthand or typing. Slowly it dawns on her that she is being trained as a courtesan. She is shocked. She thinks of herself as a good girl (despite her propensity for hopping into bed with men). And it does seem like she will be well paid. She likes that idea.

Kenney meanwhile has decided he wants to save her and marry her. She’s not sure about the marriage idea but he is awfully good in bed. Kenney means to win her but Harry Ransome is not likely to relinquish such a useful asset and such a satisfactory bed companion.

There was a considerable crossover between the sleaze, noir and hardboiled genres in the 50s and early 60s. There were noir novels with generous helpings of sleaze and there were sleaze novels with a very noirish flavour. Bait falls into the latter category.

The sleaze elements are very coy even for 1962. There’s not even a hint of even mildly graphic sex. The shock value comes from what would at the time have been considered moral depravity. Melody has a lot of sex. The real shock factor is that she enjoys it.

What makes this novel interesting is the moral ambiguity. There are are no real villains. Kenney’s attempted seduction of Melody in the plane goes way beyond seduction. He intends to take her by force. But he’s one of the good guys. Harry Ransome exploits Melody but she gives herself to him willingly and she’s also willing to be exploited, at least up to a point. He’s not quite an out-and-out villain and to some extent he’s driven by pressure to keep his head above water in a cutthroat business world, and by an unsatisfying marriage.

Melody is a nice girl who causes most of her own problems through her extraordinary mixture of innocence, greed for the good things in life and wantonness. She’s a good girl but if a man is nice to her she’ll drop her panties in a trice.

To the extent that this is borderline noir Melody is both the noir protagonist and the femme fatale. Her stunningly impressive bust measurement, her healthy sexual appetite and her tendency to defend her virtue in a very half-hearted manner make her a dangerous young lady.

The author is aiming for a bit of complexity rather than a god vs evil story.

Bait pulls its punches a bit but it’s a fairly enjoyable potboiler. Recommended. It’s available in paperback from Black Gat Books.

Murray Leinster’s The Mutant Weapon

The Mutant Weapon is a science fiction novella (or maybe at a stretch a short novel) by Murray Leinster (1896-1975). Leinster was a prolific American science fiction writer who deserves a lot more attention. He wrote mostly short fiction.

The Mutant Weapon was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1957. It’s part of his extensive Med Service series.

The story takes place in a future in which humans have colonised hundreds of planets. But Leinster understands something that so many other science fiction writers have failed to understand. Any kind of interstellar empire or federation would be impossible. When travel between the colony worlds takes years there can be nothing even approaching a central government. All the colony worlds are in practice entirely autonomous. They recognise no central authority.

The one partial exception is the Med Service. Med Service spaceships are constantly visiting other worlds. A Med Service man has in theory vast authority but has no means of imposing that authority. Because the Med Service is universally recognised as useful in practice any planetary government will almost certainly quite voluntarily recognise a Med Service man’s authority. The Med Service is the only way the colony worlds can have access to the latest medical technologies.

Calhoun is a Med Service man about to conduct a routine health examination on a brand new colony. His ship has a crew of two, the second crew member being Murgatroyd. Murgatroyd is a tormal. Tormals are cute monkey-like animals but they have a couple of very significant biological peculiarities that make them incredibly useful. Calhoun is very fond of Murgatroyd.

No-one has ever interfered with the Med Service. Why would they? It would make no sense. So Calhoun is more than a little puzzled when someone tries to destroy his spaceship.

When Calhoun does land there are more puzzles. A vast city apparently empty. A man lying dead in a field. He has starved to death but he is surrounded by food. This is impossible.

What is happening on this planet is bizarre, inexplicable, sinister and terrifying. With horrifying implications. It’s a plague but it breaks all the rules of known medical science.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot other than that it contains some very cool ideas and twists.

I like Calhoun. He’s not at all a straightforward action. He’s a doctor and he detests the idea of harming people. On the other hand he has an extraordinary steely determination and a very strong sense of justice. He can be a very formidable adversary and when he has to resort to action he does so in extremely devious and imaginative ways.

And while the focus is on Calhoun’s search for answers there is some action and suspense and a very real sense of menace. And evil. And it’s a nasty kind of calculated evil.

Calhoun is a man who thinks in terms of probabilities. Actions have consequences which can to some extent be predicted. And ingenious plans fail because the people who devise ingenious master plans never take chance consequences into account.

The Mutant Weapon is clever superior-grade science fiction and it’s highly recommended.

Murray Leinster should be regarded as one of the science fiction greats. I’ve reviewed his 1953 alien invasion tale The Invaders and absolutely superb short story collection The Best of Murray Leinster.

Armchair Fiction have paired The Mutant Weapon with J.J. Allerton’s Moon of Battle in a two-novel paperback edition.

Kingsley Amis's Girl, 20

Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was at one time a very big deal indeed in the literary world. He now seems to have fallen very much out of fashion which is a great pity. Among other things he was one of the great comic writers, at his best the equal of Evelyn Waugh. Kingsley Amis also had the knack of pleasing both critics and the book-buying public.

Girl, 20 was published in 1971, to considerable critical acclaim.

The narrator is 33-year-old music critic Douglas Yandell but the book is dominated by the larger-than-life 54-year-old conductor Sir Roy Vandervane. Roy is both appalling and fascinating. He has achieved success and is a well-known public figure although the suspicion does attach itself to him that perhaps he has never lived up to his early promise and he has never quite reached the top rank as a conductor. He is a champagne socialist, an inveterate liar and an outrageous hypocrite. He has been a poor husband and a dismal father to his three children.

Douglas likes Roy but disapproves of him. Douglas is serious minded and fairly conventional in outlook and despises Roy’s political posturing.

Now Roy’s wife Kitty wants Douglas’s help. She fears that Roy has embarked on another of his “goes” this being her term for his affairs with younger women. He has had a long series of “goes” with progressively younger women. Kitty has at one time been one of his “goes” and she had succeeded in stealing him from his first wife. She fear that sooner or later one of these girls will steal Roy away from her for good.

Douglas becomes embroiled in Kitty’s plottings and in Roy’s. Roy has a way of manipulating people to do what he wants them to do. Even when you know what he is up to, and Douglas is most certainly aware, somehow you get sucked into his schemes anyway.

There are countless complications. There’s Douglas’s girlfriend Vivienne. There’s nothing serious between them but she suits him. There’s Roy’s eldest daughter Penny, whom Douglas tried to seduce a couple of years earlier. There’s Penny’s boyfriend.

And there’s Roy’s increasing involvement in hare-brained political activities. Roy is in danger of making a fool of himself in multiple ways. Douglas feels he has to save Roy from himself. That is not going to be easy and may prove to be impossible.

Amis was a great comic writer and this is a very funny book. It’s perhaps a satire but if so Amis has a large collection of targets in his sights.

I think it’s important not to fall into the trap that so many readers today fall into, of assuming that the narrator’s opinions coincide precisely with the author’s. Douglas Yandell is what would later come to be known as a “young fogey” - a young intellectual who ostentatiously adopts old-fashioned attitudes and outlooks and aesthetic tastes. Douglas is also an intellectual snob. His field is music and he has nothing but contempt for current pop music but this contempt extends to all 20th century music, including Mahler! Amis may have had some such tendencies but it would be a mistake to assume that Douglas is merely an authorial mouthpiece.

Douglas is saddened by Roy’s desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with the younger generation. Roy is certainly an absurd figure, but Douglas is somewhat absurd as well.

And while he disapproves of Roy’s womanising that doesn’t stop Douglas from doing his best to get into Roy’s daughter Penny’s pants. He is a bit of a hypocrite as well. Perhaps Douglas mostly disapproves not of Roy’s womanising, but of the clumsiness with which he goes about it.

Douglas despises Roy as a champagne socialist. Amis himself was at one time a communist. From the mid-50s onwards he moved steadily towards much more conservative views (bearing in mind that such words had totally different meanings in 1971) but what makes Roy ridiculous is the shallowness and opportunism of his views.

Amis cannot be accused of having a limited stereotypical view of women. The female characters cover a broad spectrum. Kitty is neurotic and manipulative. Vivienne is basically a nice girl. Penny is a bit of a mess but given the utter chaos of the Vandervane household that’s hardly surprising. Sylvia, the object of Roy’s lusts, is a horror but she’s young so she has some excuse.

Girl, 20 is definitely takes an acerbic view of the emerging hippie culture, but Amis’s views of the arty-intellectual elite are every bit as acerbic.

This is a very very funny book by one of the four great humorous writers of the 20th century (the others being P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Norman Lindsay). Very highly recommended.