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.

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.

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.

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.

Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying

A Kiss Before Dying was Ira Levin’s first novel. It appeared in 1954. It was a very impressive debut for a 23-year-old writer. It was a bestseller, as were all of Levin’s subsequent books.

New York-born Ira Levin (1929-2007) was not a prolific novelist but he was an extraordinarily interesting one.

At first you think this is going to be an inverted detective story with a psychological tinge, somewhat in the mould of Frances Iles’ Malice Aforethought and Before the Fact. With perhaps some noir fiction flavour.

Then at a certain point it switches gears and switches focus, and then throws in a huge plot twist right out of left field, and we realise this is going to be a different kind of book altogether. It could be assigned to a couple of different genres but to say more might risk spoilers.

Given the ambitious and slightly unusual structure I’m going to be even more vague than usual in discussing the plot.

The story does involve a murderer. We do know his identity right from the start. We have some inkling of his motivations. The full scope of his motivations slowly becomes more obvious.

He’s a fine character creation, a young man who comes across as smooth and charming and confident but he is in fact a total loser. It’s all bluff. He’s never held down a job for more than a few weeks. He’s now a college student, which for him is clearly a retreat from a real world which is too much for him to deal with. In a vague sort of way he recognises his own inadequacy, which is what leads him to murder.

Initially murder is a way to avoid inconvenience but it occurs to the young man that it could be profitable as well. He will need to be very clever but he really does believe that he’s very clever.

So there’s a fine character study here but it’s the intricate and daring structure that raises this novel to the status of greatness.

And there are some extraordinarily subtle and clever clues.

This is an ambitious book but Levin doesn’t put a foot wrong.

There are some great set-pieces with a very cinematic feel. With some very tense and imaginative murder scenes. Almost all of Levin’s novels were filmed and, remarkably, all the film adaptations are excellent. He just had a knack for writing books that would translate extremely well to film.

One word of warning - some reviews and online plot synopses reveal a very very big spoiler.

A Kiss Before Dying has its own distinctive flavour and it’s very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the first of the two movie adaptations of this novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1956). And I’ve reviewed Ira Levin’s much later thriller, the excellent and rather under-appreciated Sliver.

Charles Eric Maine’s Timeliner

Timeliner is a 1955 science fiction novel by Charles Eric Maine and it’s a time travel story, of sorts.

Charles Eric Maine (1921-1981) was a successful English writer of science fiction as well as detective fiction. He co-edited a science fiction magazine called The Satellite and wrote quite a few science fiction novels in the 50s and early 60s.

It is 1959 and Hugh Macklin is a British scientist engaged in top-secret research on time travel. His team has constructed a time travel capsule. Only it’s not time travel as such that he’s working on, but psycho time travel. What is psycho time travel? To tell the truth Hugh Macklin doesn’t really know. He believes it’s possible but he doesn’t know what will actually happen if it’s attempted. But he’s about to attempt it anyway. It works by dimensional quadrature. Macklin invented the technique but he doesn’t understand it.

His other current preoccupation is his marriage to Lydia which seems to be heading for the rocks. He’s a scientist so he has an analytical mind. He can’t deny that there is evidence suggesting that she is having an affair. But he’s a man and he does love her and he doesn’t want to accept that this might be true. Lydia will indeed betray him, but not in a straightforward way. His marital problems will soon complicate his scientific experiment.

The experiment is made. And now Hugh Macklin is Eddie Rayner and it’s 2035 and he’s on the Moon, in the newly established moonbase. Only he’s not really Eddie Rayner, he’s still Hugh Macklin. Only he’s not really Hugh Macklin any longer, he’s Eddie Rayner. And he has no idea how he got to the Moon and why it’s now 2035. The experiment was not supposed to work like this.

In Eddie’s wallet is a photograph of Eddie’s girlfriend Valerie. Except that the girl in the photo is Lydia. Only it isn’t. But it is.

And then he’s on Venus 400 years later. He’s now someone different but he’s still Hugh Macklin.

Macklin is now a timeliner but he doesn’t know it yet and he doesn’t understand the full implications although he is starting to become aware that there are some serious ethical and moral implications. He’s not comfortable about these things but he has no idea what he can do about. This is a science fiction novel that does confront ethical issues and it doesn’t do it in a simplistic way. Hugh Macklin is a scientist. He assumes that scientific and technological progress are always good, and if that means a scientist is tempted to do morally questionable or even reprehensible things well that’s the price of progress. At the same time he does feel uncomfortable about such things.

He’s not a straightforward hero. He’s certainly no villain. He is perhaps a species of mad scientist. He is blinded by his scientific ambition. This makes him reckless. His project is nowhere near sufficiently advanced to justify a live test but he goes ahead with one. He avoids facing up to ethical dilemmas. He doesn’t understand people particularly well. He’s fundamentally decent but he is definitely a flawed hero.

The psycho time travel is a clever and original idea and as Macklin slowly learns more it becomes more clever and more original. Affinities are the key. And the ethical problem involved is a rather nasty one.

Of course he would like to return to the 20th century but that appears to be impossible. He doesn’t know what went wrong in 1959. He does however know one curious fact which may be a clue.

Maybe he’s destined to remain a timeliner for all time. Maybe he’s trapped on a temporal rollercoaster.

An intelligent inventive science fiction novel with cool ideas and a bit of depth. I recommend this one very highly.

I’ve reviewed a couple of Maine’s other science fiction novels, Wall of Fire and Spaceways. The latter is excellent and was made into a very good movie by Hammer, Spaceways (1953).

Men’s Adventure Quarterly #11

Issue 11 of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, edited by Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, is the UFO issue. This time it’s all non-fiction articles from men’s adventure magazines dealing with the sinister visitors from outer space. But since the subject is UFOs most of these non-fiction articles are in fact pure fiction. But that makes them more fun.

And there are articles from some of the respectable UFO experts of the late 40s and the the 50s, such as Donald E. Keyhoe - the man who did more than anyone else to give belief in UFOs a vague gloss of respectability.

Some of the articles present lots of evidence although whether that evidence would stand up under any genuine investigation is highly debatable. Some of the most entertaining articles are pure moonshine and those articles are the most fun. I had no idea of the threat we faced from underwater UFOs.

The history of our civilisation for the past century or so has been an endless cycle of outbursts of mass hysteria. The UFO scare was just one of the mass hysteria outbursts of the 50s. There was of course the Red Menace, but there was also Juvenile Delinquency and of course the “comic books are undermining the moral fibre of our youth” scare.

The UFO scare was the most interesting.

In an odd way it was also the most plausible. In the late 1940s even reputable scientists were inclined to accept the idea of a universe teeming with intelligent life. The reasons why contact with alien civilisations was actually very very unlikely were not fully appreciated. When the UFO craze started to gather steam around 1947 it was not necessarily the province of cranks and nutters. It was really only in the 70s that belief in UFOs became a fully-fledged fringe belief.

Of course there was always an edge of paranoia. In some of the articles you can see the paranoia take on a vaguely political edge, with space aliens being seen almost as commies from space.

It’s also interesting to see just how much the government was mistrusted, even in the early 50s. There was also a certain degree of mistrust of the military. I’d never really thought about it before but the UFO scare really was the moment when a lot of people first seriously considered the idea that the government might be systematically lying to them. In the case of UFOs the government probably wasn’t lying, but it’s significant that people believed it might be.

There are as usual a number of photo features focused on some of the great science fiction babes of movies and TV, in this case including Anne Francis and Mara Corday. And there’s a cool photo feature on Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s wonderful UFO TV series.

This volume is beautifully presented and glossy which is what we’ve come to expect from this publication. And of course we get the original artwork from the various men’s adventure magazines.

This issue is a treat for UFO buffs. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several previous issues of Men’s Adventure Quarterly - #4 The Jungle Girl Issue, #6 the Heist Issue and #7 The Gang Girl issue. I highly recommend them.

William P. McGivern’s The Galaxy Raiders

William P. McGivern’s science fiction novella The Galaxy Raiders appeared in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in February 1950.

William P. McGivern (1918-1982) was an American writer best-known for his crime fiction but early in his career he wrote science fiction as well.

In 1950 it was not yet generally understood just how hostile and uninviting the other planets in our solar system are. In this book it is assumed that Jupiter is a rocky planet just like the Earth and there’s no mention of the extreme gravity.

Even taking this into account it’s clear that the author’s understanding of scientific subjects was seriously limited. The science in the book is for the most part pure nonsense.

It’s amusing how wildly optimistic science fiction writers were in the 1940s and 1950s. In this story the first manned mission to Jupiter took place in the 1970s! The novel begins eleven years later. Commander Storm had been a member of that first expedition, in the spaceship Astro Star. That mission had been the brainchild of a brilliant scientist, Commander Griffith. Griffith and his family were left behind when the expedition retuned to Earth.

Space exploration had not been a priority then. Now it’s a high priority, due to the looming threat from the mysterious Galaxy X. The Astro Star II is the most advanced spaceship ever built and it’s now on its way to Jupiter.

There is a surprise on board the Astro Star II. Her name is Margo. She’s beautiful and brave and bold but there are not supposed to be any women among the crew. She also has a personal agenda, relating to that earlier expedition.

There are some more surprises in store on Jupiter. Not the least being a vast robot army led by a scantily clad amazon warrior wielding an antique ray gun. Her name is Karen. She’s very very angry.

Commander Storm has other problems - disloyalty within his crew. They don’t believe that the stories about the sinister Galaxy X are true. They believe that Commander Griffith invented those stories.

And that’s when it becomes frighteningly clear that the threat from Galaxy X is very real indeed.

There’s some action, some fairly cool monsters and there are characters with at least slightly complex motivations.

The most interesting thing about this story is Commander Storm. He is very much a flawed hero. He is intelligent, brave, determined and dedicated. He is also a difficult and abrasive man who drives his subordinates too hard and he just does not have that quality that a leader needs - the ability to inspire loyalty and confidence. As far as discipline is concerned he makes mistakes - he is either not strict enough or too strict. He is a driven man and that sometimes clouds his judgment. He creates many of his own problems.

Despite some silly science stuff it’s a reasonably engaging story. It’s not top-tier pulp science fiction but it’s worth a look.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with Frank Belknap Long’s Space Station #1 in a two-novel edition.

I’ve also reviewed McGivern’s most famous book, The Big Heat (not bad but sadly not as good as Fritz Lang’s movie adaptation) and his 1944 science fiction novella The Mad Robot.

James Hadley Chase’s Lay Her Among the Lilies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Stanton's The Return of Gwendoline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return of Gwendoline is reasonably good fun. Recommended.

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

Death’s Lovely Mask by John Flagg

Death’s Lovely Mask is a 1958 John Flagg thriller. Between 1950 and 1961 American writer John Gearon wrote eight espionage/crime thrillers, most of them published under the pseudonym John Flagg. All were published as Fawcett Gold Medal editions.

Quite a few, including Death’s Lovely Mask, feature private eye Hart Muldoon. Muldoon is a former CIA agent who still does occasional jobs for the Agency. Some of the Hart Muldoon books are spy thrillers and some are crime thrillers but the latter always have some suggestion of international intrigue. All have exotic European locations and all have a similar feel. And all of them are excellent.

Muldoon is a bit on the cynical side. Mostly he just wants to get enough money to retire to a cabin in Maine. He’s tired of being mixed up with spies and crooks.

In this book he’s roped into doing a job for the US Government but it’s the sort of job that needs to be handled discreetly. It doesn’t take too long for Muldoon to wonder if there are important things he hasn’t been told about.

A young Arab prince wants to marry a pretty young Israeli girl. That’s obviously going to create tension in the prince’s tiny but oil-rich desert state. It’s that oil that concerns the State Department. Lots of groups including the intelligence agencies of several countries and at least one international corporation are interested in this proposed wedding. Some want the marriage to go ahead while others want it stopped at all costs. Some of these groups would like to eliminate the young prince altogether.

The US Government just wants the oil to keep flowing and they don’t want the whole situation to explode into a major international crisis.

Muldoon has been in Naples having a rather pleasant sexual dalliance with a married woman, Linda Pawlings. He might even be in danger of falling in love with her. Linda is mixed up in the plots concerned the prince’s wedding but Muldoon can’t figure out why and how she’s involved. What he has to do is to follow her to Venice which seems likely to be the setting for whatever dramas might unfold.

There are some very unsavoury characters involved. Rich elderly American widows, Italian movie starlets, whores, gigolos and men with exotic erotic tastes. There’s an overwhelming atmosphere of corruption, decadence and sleaze. This is something that John Flagg did extremely well.

Muldoon is no prude and he’s no Boy Scout but even he is a bit shocked. On the other hand there are some luscious very available women and Muldoon is fond of the ladies.

Things get complicated when the Egyptian falls into the canal and drowns. No-one is sure where he came from. He probably wasn’t who he claimed to be. And maybe he didn’t fall. Maybe he was pushed.

Things get really exciting at the Masked Ball. Masked balls are always fun in thrillers and Flagg knew how to use such plot devices.

Muldoon wants to keep the prince and his intended bride alive. He also wants to keep Linda alive even if she now hates him and he wants to keep Nina alive even if he can’t trust her.

The plot has plenty of nice twists but the author is equally concerned with creating an atmosphere of decadence, danger and treachery (which he does expertly) and with the effects of treachery on the people who embrace lives of deception and violence.

Death’s Lovely Mask is a superior thriller by a rather neglected master of the genre. Highly recommended.

I’ve read lots of John Flagg’s thrillers and they have all been thoroughly enjoyable. The good news is that all the John Flagg thrillers are currently in print from Stark House.

His two earlier Hart Muldoon books, Woman of Cairo and Dear, Deadly Beloved, are both excellent. I also very much liked his non-Hart Muldoon thrillers The Persian Cat, Death and the Naked Lady and The Lady and the Cheetah.

John Flagg's Murder in Monaco

Murder in Monaco is a 1957 John Flagg thriller. American writer John Gearon wrote eight espionage/crime thrillers between 1950 and 1961 mostly using the pseudonym John Flagg. All were published as Fawcett Gold Medal editions.

Murder in Monaco is one of several that feature ex-CIA agent Hart Muldoon. The somewhat cynical and slightly embittered Muldoon now works as a freelancer and private detective, mostly in Europe, mostly in glamorous locales. The locales may be glamorous but his cases tend to be sordid. He has a knack for getting mixed up in with very powerful, very ruthless, very corrupt criminals.

This time Muldoon is offered a lot of money for a job but is given no details. That’s how he meets Nancy Trippe, in Monaco. And becomes aware of The National Alert, published by Charles Pless. The National Alert is a scandal sheet and it’s a glossy high-profile very profitable scandal sheet. Some threats have been made but the nature of the threats is obscure.

Of course there’s a murder. Blackmail might be an obvious motive but revenge is a definite possibility as well The National Alert has ruined reputations and destroyed lives. And there are so many emotional and sexual intrigues among the circle of possible suspects. Love and lust must be considered as motives. And one must never forget greed.

There are four women, they’re all suspects and they all have motives and they’re all dangerous in very different ways. Alva is a very successful middle-aged writer with some scandals in her past and a taste for handsome young men. Nancy Trippe is a nymphomaniac and an obvious femme fatale type. Myra is a timid little mouse. They’re always dangerous - all those repressed passions. And Amy is sweet and innocent. Muldoon has been a private eye for a long time. He knows you never trust sweet and innocent.

There are quite a few men with motives as well. Harold is a gigolo and he hasn’t been loyal to the woman who assumes that she owns him. There’s ex-Governor Thorne, a politician whose sister has a scandalous past. There’s Black. He’s a private eye, he’s ex-FBI, and he’s very shady. Plus the crazy unstable American named Cooladge. And Marius, who has wide-ranging business interests, none of then legal.

Nobody wants the cops involved. They all have sound reasons for wanting his whole affair handled discreetly.

Muldoon doesn’t actually have a client yet but he’s confident that if he sticks around he’ll get one, and it’s likely to be a big payday for him.

This is not noir fiction but there is plenty of corruption and plenty of sleaze and decadence. There are ruthless rich people, and ruthless poor people who to become rich people. Almost all the characters have at some stage jumped into bed with someone they should have kept away from.

There’s not much action but there is decent suspense.

Muldoon is a fine hero. He’s at best moderately honest. He’s ethically flexible. He’s mildly interested in seeing justice done but he’s very interested in getting paid. He’s by no means a bad guy. He’s no anti-hero and he’s definitely no thug. But he does have to pay the rent. A man has to prioritise. He likes women and if they’re available he won’t say no. He certainly isn’t going to say no to the cute little Hungarian blonde. She looks very appealing in her scanty bikini. She looks even more appealing out of it.

Murder in Monaco is fine entertaining stuff. Highly recommended.

I’ve read a whole bunch of John Flagg’s thrillers and I’ve enjoyed all of them. I’ve read a whole bunch of John Flagg’s thrillers and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Some are spy thrillers and some, such as Murder in Monaco, are more in the PI thriller mould but the exotic settings will give them appeal for spy fans.  His two earlier Hart Muldoon books, Woman of Cairo and Dear, Deadly Beloved, are both excellent. I also very much liked his non-Hart Muldoon thrillers The Persian Cat, Death and the Naked Lady and The Lady and the Cheetah.

Charles Williams' River Girl

River Girl, published in 1951, was the third novel by Charles Williams. Earlier that year he had had a major bestseller with Hill Girl.

Jack Marshall is a crooked deputy sheriff in a small town. He’s crooked in a small way. The sheriff, Buford, is crooked in a big way. They’re both under pressure from a crusading preacher.

Marshall is unhappily married and in debt and he’s disillusioned. Maybe a fishing trip will help.

That’s where he meets Doris. Doris and her husband Roger Spevlin live in a small shack at the far end of the lake. There’s something odd about them. They don’t talk the right way, the way people living in a remote shack eking out a living from trapping catfish should talk.

Doris is young and very beautiful but she’s very much on edge. And obviously very lonely. Marshall knows he should stay away from her. He also knows that he won’t.

Buford and Marshall are facing a major problem - a grand jury that could potentially blow the lid off the town’s corruption. That preacher, Soames, is planning to lead a moral crusade.

And there’s another problem. That girl in Abbie Bell’s whorehouse. That’s a scandal that will have to be hushed up.

All of these things - the grand jury, the young whore, Marshall’s obsession with Doris Spevlin - will intersect in interesting unpredictable ways.

The last thing Jack Marshall should do at this point in time is sleep with Doris Spevlin. But of course he does. They fall in love. Doris needs rescuing and Marshall starts to plan crazy ways of rescuing her. It all blows up in his face.

This is very much much noir fiction. Jack Marshall is a classic noir protagonist. He’s neither a good man nor a bad man. He’s a corrupt cop and he’s cynical but on the other hand he’s not violent. He has no desire to hurt anyone. He just wants to take his bribes (mostly to keep his status-obsessed wife happy) and be left alone and to spend as much time as possible fishing. He really does fall deeply for Doris. He really is trying to be a knight in shining armour although of course in payment for his trouble he expects to get the girl.

Jack’s biggest weakness is that he’s smart but not quite smart enough to get away with his complicated schemes.

Doris belongs to what I think of as the “innocent femme fatale” sub-type. She’s not a bad girl but she’s trouble and Jack should run away from her as fast as he can. Although she’s the one who leads Jack to disaster she’s perhaps the closest thing this book has to a reasonably admirable character.

Dinah is more of a classic femme fatale. She’s Buford’s mistress. She’s beautiful, glamorous, sexy and clever. She takes one look at Jack Marshall and decides he’s a big, dumb, hulking thug. That’s OK. Big, dumb, hulking thugs excite her quite a bit. Then she realises that he’s clever and devious. Now she’s really excited. With Dinah what you see is what you get. She looks like a very high-priced whore which is in practice what she is. But then she doesn’t pretend to be a Sunday school teacher.

Buford is not quite a straight-out villain. He’s as crooked as they come but his corruption is relatively harmless. As far as he’s concerned if a man wants to have a drink after hours or place a few bets or have a bit of fun with the girls at Miss Abbie’s cat house there’s no harm in any of that. By taking bribes to let those things happen he’s just allowing people to enjoy themselves. He would never take a bribe from a murder or an armed robber.

There aren’t any out-and-out villains in this story. All the characters are morally ambiguous without being evil.

Since this is noir fiction there is of course a sense of impending doom. Jack and Doris are like fish who’ve taken the bait.They can struggle but there’s no escape. It’s hard to see any way out for them. The odds are just stacked against them. All they have is their love but that may not be enough.

River Girl is top-notch noir fiction. Highly recommended.

Stark House have paired this one with another Williams classic, Nothing in Her Way.

Honey West - Girl on the Prowl

Girl on the Prowl, published in 1959, was the fifth of G.G. Fickling’s Honey West private eye thrillers. G.G. Fickling was in fact a husband-and-wife writing team.

Honey West inherited a private detective agency from her murdered father. Honey handles all the cases herself. She’s cute and sexy but she’s a hard-nosed professional PI.

You know this is a real Honey West book because by the end of the second paragraph Honey is naked. It’s not her fault. She just has really bad luck with her clothes. They just keep falling off. In this case she is, or was, wearing a bikini but with her 38-inch bust Honey was just too much woman for her bathing suit. Poor Honey will lose her clothes on several further occasions. It’s just one of those things that a lady PI has to deal with.

Luckily a hunky guy, Kirk Tempest, comes to her rescue but when he takes her back to his house to find some clothes for her he starts to get fresh. They have a bit of an altercation, they both end up falling into the swimming pool and Kirk is now very dead. But that wasn’t Honey’s doing. He’s dead because he’s impaled on a spear from a spear-fishing gun. It’s a bizarre accident. It was an accident because there was no-one around. Except that maybe it wasn’t an accident.

There were two Tempest brothers and a sister. The sister Jewel, is a famous strip-tease artiste. Her gimmick is that she always a gold mask over her face. There may be a reason for this. She may have been disfigured in a fire. But everything about the Tempest siblings is mysterious. The relationship between them is very mysterious. Love, hate, jealousy and other assorted passions were involved.

Jewel’s other trademark is her gold G-string. And a gold G-string is now a vital piece of evidence;. This particular G-string may have been concealing something other than the thing that G-strings are designed to conceal. It might conceal valuable information.

There will be lots of women wearing gold masks in this story. How many women? Who can tell? They are after all wearing masks.

There’s more than one gold G-string as well. And somebody wants to get their hands on one or more of those G-strings.

Jewel Tempest is to be interviewed on a TV talk show. At this point the authors begin their campaign of deception. Whenever Jewel makes an appearance we can never be sure it is really her, and none of the other characters can ever be sure either. There’s doubt about the identities of all three siblings. And there’s a woman who may be masquerading as Jewel, and possibly there’s a woman masquerading as a woman masquerading as Jewel.

The Tempests are mixed up with various showbiz people. All of them are sleazy, dishonest, greedy and ambitious and they’re all entwined in a web of mostly perverse sexual betrayals and jealousies.

The Honey West novels are all fast-moving and fairly hardboiled and they’re all sleazy but mostly they’re sleazy in a fun good-natured way. Girl on the Prowl amps up the perversity factor quite a bit.

Honey is not quite a stereotypical modern kickass action heroine. The Honey West novels are not non-stop fistfights and gunplay and martial arts action. Honey can handle herself but mostly she relies on her wits. She’s a private eye, not a super-heroine. She’s very good at nosing around in things that are none of her business, and persuading people (through charm, sexual allure and cunning) to tell her things they’d rather not tell her. She just keeps plugging away a a case until she gets results and she doesn’t mind exposing herself to danger.

Girl on the Prowl boasts an outrageous plot but it’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West novels - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis.

Bill S. Ballinger's The Longest Second

The Longest Second is a 1957 crime novel by Bill S. Ballinger. Assigning it to a particular crime sub-genre is a bit tricky. It’s certainly a mystery novel. It has some hardboiled flavouring. It has some affinities to noir fiction. But there’s other stuff going on as well.

Bill S. Ballinger (1912-1980) was an American crime writer who enjoyed great success in his lifetime as a novelist and a writer for film and television. He had a definite taste for narrative experimentation. Perhaps that’s why he isn’t as well remembered as he should be - his experiments could be rather bold. This novel uses a technique (the split narrative) that he employed quite often, in novels such as Portrait in Smoke, but in The Longest Second he’s throwing in some other experiments as well.

There is a serious crime, but there’s nothing simple about it. There’s a mystery to be solved and there are three separate investigations being conducted, not all of them by the police.

A man getting his throat cut certainly qualifies as a serious crime. The man involved is not very happy about it at all.

I don’t want to give any details at all about the plot for fearing of spoilers. The plot does involve silversmithing, stained glass, an Arabic inscription and two women. One of the women might perhaps be a femme fatale.

The story is also very much about memory and identity. It concerns a man who has neither.

It’s also a story about the past. Everything hinges on the mysterious past of a particular man.

The storytelling techniques used here are definitely risky. Ending such a story in a satisfying plausible way is a challenge. There’s the danger that the whole thing will turn out to be too clever for its own good. Ballinger pulls it off reasonably well although it is, unavoidably, a little contrived.

Ballinger is doing more than experiment with narrative structure. He’s being equally daring with the entire concept of characterisation. And with character motivation. This was seriously avant-garde stuff in the 50s but Ballinger manages to make the book an exciting and engrossing mystery story as well. There are plenty of indications early on of the direction the story might be taking but the ending is still not quite what you might be anticipating.

This is one of those books in which the reader knows a lot more about what is really going on than any of the characters do but there’s still crucial stuff we don’t know.

And the characters are not automatons doing things because the plot requires them to do so. The key character does have choices. He has free will.

The Longest Second is wildly unconventional but it’s entertaining if you set aside your genre expectations and just go with it. Highly recommended.

Ballinger was for decades a totally forgotten writer but Stark House have now brought a lot of his novels back into print (The Longest Second had been out of print for half a century).

I’ve reviewed Ballinger's 1950 novel Portrait in Smoke (paired with The Longest Second in a Stark House two-novel edition) which I recommend very highly.

Robert Bloch’s Psycho

Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho dates from 1959. A year later it would be the basis for one of Hitchcock’s most famous movies. I like Bloch as a writer so I can’t offer any adequate explanation for the fact that I had never read the novel until now.

There is one problem here. If you’ve seen the movie (and I’ve seen it several times) then you know something very important about Mother right from the start. I think it’s obvious that Bloch expects the reader to have very strong suspicions by the halfway point but it’s also obvious that he doesn’t intend for the reader to be absolutely certain. When you know for a certainty right from the beginning it does inevitably lessen the enjoyment of the novel quite a bit.

The movie followed the novel very closely, but with a couple of subtle but important differences of focus.

I never assume that everyone has seen a movie even when it’s as well-known as Psycho so I’m going to try to avoid spoilers.

Mary Crane (she becomes Marion Crane in the movie) has stolen a great deal of money from her boss. It’s Friday. Nobody will know the money is gone until the banks open on Monday (banks being closed on weekends was always a useful plot device in crime thrillers of the past). Mary has covered her tracks well. She has switched cars several times. Now she’s lost so she’s very grateful when she sees the motel Vacancy sign. She needs to eat, and to sleep.

The motel manager is a slightly odd guy named Norman Bates. He lives in the house behind the motel with his mother.

The first thing Mary needs to do is to change her clothes. Of course she doesn’t know that Norman is watching her undress through a hole in the wall.

After having dinner (which Norman was kind enough to prepare for her) she really needs to take a shower.

Other people will become involved. People like insurance investigator Arbogast. He wants to recover the stolen money. He’s prepared to offer Mary a deal. If she returns the money no charges will be laid. Mary’s boyfriend Sam Loomis and her kid sister Lila will also become involved. They all want to find Mary.

Hitchcock made a very daring narrative choice in the film. Something happens a third of the way through that you don’t expect to happen at that stage. This also happens in the novel but in the novel it’s no big deal. It’s the kind of thing you find in plenty of crime novels. It’s a very big deal in the movie because Hitchcock very cleverly misleads us into thinking that a particular character is the central character but the central character is actually someone else. It’s just a slight change of emphasis but it’s enough to demonstrate Hitchcock’s genius.

The movie made a few interesting changes. In the novel Norman Bates is 40, very overweight and balding. Apart from his other issues he is clearly very physically unappealing to women and that’s a major part of his problem. You get the feeling that all it would have taken would have been for one woman to go on a date with him and then he might have had a chance of avoiding all the subsequent disasters. By casting Tony Perkins, a fairly good-looking actor with a great deal of charm, Hitchcock emphasises Norman’s tragedy. He is not a hopeless loser because women find him repulsive. He really didn’t have to end up as a hopeless loser.

This makes him a tragic oddly sympathetic monster which was presumably Hitchcock’s intention. And Hitchcock’s instincts were correct. The movie packs more of an emotional punch. All Norman needs is to find the confidence to actually approach a woman. If he did, she might well go out with him. But he never does find that confidence and tragedy ensues.

It’s intriguing that Brian De Palma made a similar change when he adapted Stephen King’s Carrie. In King’s novel Carrie is very overweight which emphasises her inability to attract interest from boys. In De Palma’s movie Carrie is no super-babe but she’s kinda cute in her own quirky way. When Tommy takes her to the prom he really isn’t embarrassed to be seen with her, or to be seen dancing with her and kissing her. Carrie goes so close to making it.

Psycho is very much one of those stories that requires the reader (or the viewer in the case of the movie) to take the wild and wacky theories of psychiatry seriously. Back in 1960 people actually did take this stuff seriously. It’s also a story that really doesn’t work once you know the solution, and that’s an even bigger problem with the novel. At least the movie has Hitchcock’s stunning visual set-pieces. Psycho is far from being my favourite Hitchcock movie and the novel really doesn’t do much for me at all. Both the novel and the movie are greatly weakened by having things over-explained in a very unconvincing fashion. Worth reading perhaps if you’re a very keen fan of the movie.

Robert Sheckley's Untouched by Human Hands

Untouched by Human Hands is an early collection of short stories by American science fiction writer Robert Sheckley (1928-2005).

It’s immediately apparent that Sheckley has a knack for creating truly bizarre alien races. Races that are physically incredibly alien, and socially and culturally incredibly alien. And alien in really interesting ways.

What really interests Sheckley is that if truly alien races encounter each other any meaningful communication will almost certainly be impossible. And actions will be misinterpreted in totally unpredictable ways.

He also has a taste for humorous or semi-humorous science fiction. Not an easy thing to pull off but he does it reasonably well. Some stories have a sting in the tail, some don’t.

And he has an extraordinary imagination.

The Monsters appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a first contact story. The trick is always to make aliens seem truly aliens. In this case Sheckley offers us two species (one of them obviously our own) that are almost unimaginably different physically. And even more unimaginably different culturally. Even when they learn each other’s languages they cannot communicate. Which predictably leads to serious problems. A clever story with some nice black humour.

Cost of Living was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1952. It’s a satire on consumerism and the cost of endless debt and it remains relevant today. This is a future in which people not only get themselves but also their children into perpetual debt.

The Altar appeared in Fantastic in 1953. A very ordinary inhabitant of the very ordinary town of North Ambrose, New Jersey, suspects that he has stumbled up the existence of strange cults in the town. He might be right.

Shape was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. The Glom are making another attempt to invade Earth. The Glom can take on any shape they choose, and yet at the same they have no freedom or individuality at all.

The Impacted Man appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1952. It concerns the galaxy in which we live as a vast artificial creation. A rip occurs in the fabric of this artificially manufactured space-time continuum and some poor schmuck gets caught in it.

Untouched by Human Hands was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. A couple of rather amateurish spacefarers are in trouble. Their food supplies are gone. They find a building. The construction of buildings implies a reasonably advanced civilisation so surely it should be possible to find food. Unfortunately these aliens are so different from ourselves that although our spacefarers find plenty of food they cannot eat any of it.

The King’s Wishes was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1953. This is a wild story. A couple who run an appliance store have a problem with a burglar. But he’s not an ordinary burglar. He’s a ferra. A sort of djinn. He’s very friendly but he insists that he has to steal appliances to take back to his king. It turns out that this kingdom is very distant, in more ways than one. A very clever very playful story.

Warm was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. A young man, Anders, starts hearing a voice. The voice can’t tell him where it’s from but it will tell him when he’s getting warm. Anders starts to see things in a new and disturbing way. He starts to see reality as it really is.

The Demons was published in Fantasy magazine in 1953. A hideous red-scaled monster named Neelsebub has tried to conjure a demon but instead he’s ended up with a mild-mannered insurance salesman from New York, by the name of Arthur Gammett. Neelsebub wants Arthur to produce a vast hoard of gold for him. Arthur of course cannot do this but he decides to do some demon-conjuring of his own. This is a fun story that is like a farce, but with demons and pentagrams.

Specialist was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a variation on the living spaceship idea which would become popular many decades later but this spaceship is entirely made up of an assortment of living creatures, each serving a very specialised purpose. Of course if a member of the crew is killed then that component of the spaceship no longer exists, which can be a very serious problem.

Ritual appeared in Climax in 1953. The inhabitants of a planet have been waiting 5,000 years for the gods from the stars to return. Then finally two gods land in a spaceship. The gods are strange - they have two legs and two arms and, bizarrely, no tails. But the planet’s spiritual leader, Elder Singer, is prepared. The rituals must be followed. There must be four days and four nights of ritual dances before the gods can be offered food or water. The gods seem to be begging for food and water but Elder Singer knows that that is part of the ritual. Everything is ritual. Another excellent story of disastrous mutual incomprehension between alien races who have nothing but friendly intentions.

Beside Still Waters appeared in Amazing Stories in 1953. It’s a low-key tale of the friendship, of sorts, between an old man and a robot one a tiny asteroid.

Seventh Victim was later expanded into a novel The 10th Victim. Both the story and novel are reviewed here. And I've reviewed the superb movie adaptation, The 10th Victim (1965).

A collection of truly offbeat eccentric but delightfully clever tales. Highly recommended.