Richard Jessup's Night Boat to Paris

Night Boat to Paris is a spy thriller by Richard Jessup (1925-1982). It was a paperback original, published by Dell in 1956.

Jessup was an American writer, mostly of paperback originals in various genres notably spy fiction, crime and westerns. His best-known book was The Cincinnati Kid.

It’s clear from the outset that this is going to be a hardboiled spy novel. The protagonist did a lot of work for the British during the war. Intelligence work, top-secret stuff behind enemy lines. The stuff that makes you a hero during wartime then the peace comes and you’re a nobody and you figure out that the skills you picked up are really only useful for a criminal career. So he became a moderately successful criminal. He owns a pub.

When British Intelligence wants him back for one job it doesn’t take much to persuade him. Arguments about patriotism, Queen and Country, duty, that sort of stuff - those things don’t interest him at all. But he’ll do the job if he’s offered enough money. Boyler, his old boss in British Intelligence, offers him enough money. More than enough.

The job is a heist. Reece will need five very reliable men. They have to be common criminals. I’m not giving away any spoilers here - the entire British Intelligence plan is explained right at the very start of the book. There will be a party in Arles, in France. The kind of party that attracts the rich, the powerful, the famous. There will be rich pickings for any gang of thieves at that party. Very rich indeed. As far as Boyler is concerned Reece and his gang can keep whatever they steal. British Intelligence just wants one thing - one envelope. They want to it appear that the envelope was stolen by accident. It has to appear to be just a simple, albeit ambitious, robbery.

Reece assembles his team. They’re good men but Reece has the sneaking suspicion that there may have been a leak. Perhaps he’s just jumpy. In fact he knows he’s jumpy. He has another suspicion - that maybe he was the wrong man for this job. Maybe he’s lost his nerve.

His gang are a motley crew. They were all in the war. Reece fought for the British. Tookie for the Americans, Jean Sammur fought for the French. Marcus was in the Italian army. Otto was in the German army. They all lost something in the war - their innocence. They lost their belief in Causes. They don’t care about causes or ideals now, but they do care about money.

This is both a heist story and a spy story. In common with most good heist stories most of the novel is concerned with the lead-up to the heist.

There’s a very hardboiled feel to this novel, and definitely a suggestion of noir fiction. Reece is more like a typical noir protagonist than a typical spy fiction hero. He’s cynical and embittered. He really just wanted to be left alone. His criminal record is long but it’s mostly fairly petty stuff. The only murders he has ever committed were committed for King and Country. He didn’t like what being a wartime secret agent did to him. He doesn’t like what being forced back into the job is doing to him. British Intelligence is making him a murderer again. He has already had to kill men on this job. These were murders for Queen and Country but that doesn’t make it feel any better.

Reece is a troubled flawed hero. Perhaps this job will solve his problems. He’ll have enough money to become a respectable businessman. Perhaps the job will destroy him. There’s that slight noir hint always lurking in the background in this novel.

The book succeeds as a heist thriller, a spy thriller and a noir novel. The plot has some genuinely shocking twists and a nicely nasty edge to it. There’s some fairly shocking violence. The spy game is a very dirty game. The obvious twist is not the real twist. There’s plenty of action and there’s decent suspense.

Night Boat to Paris is very much above-average pulp fiction and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed another of Jessup’s spy thrillers, The Bloody Medallion (written under the pseudonym Richard Telfair). It’s excellent.

Kermit Jaediker's Tall, Dark and Dead

Tall, Dark and Dead is a private eye thriller by Kermit Jaediker, published in 1947 by Lion Books. I’d love to be able to tell you something about the author but my knowledge on this subject is an absolute zero.

Lou Lait (who narrates the tale) is a new York private detective. He’s an ex-cop. He’s not a crook but he’s not a Boy Scout either. When Tina Van Lube (married to the very wealthy Jan Van Lube) walks into his office it doesn’t sound like it’s a terribly complicated case she’s offering him. All he has to do is to steal some letters for him. Or rather, all he has to do is find someone who can steal the letters for her. That will be easy - Lait has a friend named Willie who is an ex-safe cracker turned escape artist. Willie should be able to handle the job very easily. 

Tina is of course being blackmailed. During the war her husband had been reported killed in action. To console herself Tina had begun an affair with columnist Erskine Spalding. Her husband then turned up alive, she ended the affair, and Spalding turned nasty. Hence the blackmail. 

It isn’t really all that risky. Even if they get caught they’re not likely to be in much trouble. Both the police and the courts would be very sympathetic to guys acting on behalf of a lady who is a victim of blackmail, especially given that the affair she had with Spalding was technically quite innocent.

The job goes smoothly, except for the murder. That’s a complication Lait hadn’t expected.  Willie gets arrested but even the cops don’t really think he did it. Apart from getting Willie out of a jam (and Lait is genuinely concerned for his friend) Lait has a very big motivation to solve the murder. Spalding’s paper has offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of the killer, and ten Gs was an enormous amount of money in 1947.

There are plenty of suspects and Lait has to admit he doesn’t know what the motive for the murder was. It could have involved fiery dancer Lolita, or Tina’s chronically broke and useless brother, or Tina herself, or Spalding’s secretary Miss Prescott (the main beneficiary of his estate). Or it could have have involved South American politics, which Spalding and Lolita and the Durkins (friends of the Van Lubes) were mixed up in. Lait has no idea, but he wants that ten grand reward.

This is not noir fiction but a stock standard hardboiled private eye yarn. Lou Lait is very much your typical fictional hardboiled private eye, maybe a bit smarter than most (he spots a couple of non-obvious clues). He doesn’t have a whole lot of personality. 

Jaediker’s style is basic pulp, without any embellishments but without anything distinctive to it.

A major weakness is that the two main female characters, both of whom have definite femme fatale potential, aren’t allowed to play any significant role in the story. There’s no romance and no sexual tension. 

The author has several plot strands going but he isn’t able to bring them all together at the end. It’s more like three separate stories that aren’t related and at least one of them ends in a disappointingly straightforward manner. Structurally this is a mystery novel (we even get all the suspects gathered together at the end for the detective’s big revelation of the identity of the murderer) but the plotting is too sloppy to make it a satisfactory one. There is however one very clever clue. It can’t be called fair play since too much vital information is withheld until the end. 

Tall, Dark and Dead is a fairly disappointing crime story. I can’t recommend this one.

Stark House Noir have reprinted Tall, Dark and Dead in a paperback edition with two other crime thrillers, Frederick Lorenz’s The Savage Chase and D.L. Champion’s Run the Wild River (neither of which I’ve read yet).

This Island Earth by Raymond F. Jones

This Island Earth is by far the best-known work of American science fiction author Raymond F. Jones (1915-1994). It was serialised in Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1949 and published in novel form in 1952.

Cal Meacham is an engineer with Ryberg Electronics. He’s ordered some condensers from one of their regular suppliers, a firm called Continental. Instead of the condensers he gets an odd letter from Electronic Service-Unit 16 and some tiny glass beads. He contacts Continental but they deny having sent either the letter or the beads. Nobody has ever heard of Electronic Service-Unit 16. Cal is annoyed but on a whim he decides to test the beads. It turns out they are condensers, they’re just much much smaller and much much more efficient than anything he’s ever seen before. And they have some odd properties.

Then Electronic Service-Unit 16 sends him a catalogue. One odd thing abut the catalogue is that it’s not printed on paper but on a substance he has never seen before. Among the many unfamiliar items in the catalogue are components for an interociter. Cal has never heard of an interociter but he decides that he’d like to see one. In fact he’d like to build one. So he orders all the components.

His idea is of course quite silly. To build an unknown device out of hundreds of components (the purpose of all of which are quite unknown to him) without having any knowledge of what the device is or is supposed to do is obviously quite impossible. The strange thing is, he succeeds. And the interociter works.

The successful completion of the interociter results in a job offer from a completely unknown outfit who call themselves Peace Engineers. They have a huge industrial complex near Phoenix. Cal finds himself in an engineer’s dream - he has unlimited resources at his disposal for the kinds of research projects that had only ever been impossible dreams for him.

At the Peace Engineers he meets an old friend named Ole, also an engineer. It seems that Peace Engineers has been head-hunting talent from all over the country. He also meets Dr Ruth Adams. Ruth is the staff psychiatrist at the Peace Engineers complex. She is beautiful and charming but there is one thing about her that is disturbing - the fear he sees in her eyes.

Ruth and Ole are suspicious of the setup at Peace Engineers. They’re convinced that there’s something they haven’t been told.

And then Cal makes two discoveries. The first is the spaceship. The second is that the interociter is more that it appears to be. He confronts the head of the project (a man known as the Engineer) and is told a fantastic story that he believes. Later he’ll be told a quite different story.

Cal and Ruth find out that they are caught up in a vast universe-spanning conflict but the nature of the conflict, their part (and humanity’s part) in that conflict and the potential consequences are perhaps beyond ordinary comprehension.

This novel starts exceptionally well. The first third, the rather low-key buildup to Cal’s initial discoveries is handled very cleverly. Both Cal and the reader are given tantalising hints of very strange things that could have all sorts of explanations. The second third, on a much more cosmic scale (although still with a very real human dimension) is excellent as well. Then it gets a bit side-tracked by politics for a while. But the ending redeems it, with some interesting ethical and intellectual dilemmas involving the nature and psychology of war, the fate of those caught up in wars they did not choose and the advantages and disadvantages of relying on technology.

Cal is an intriguing hero. He’s a mixture of intellectual boldness and naïvete, caught between cold logic and emotion.

This Island Earth is a pretty decent example of 1950s American science fiction that manages to maintain both an epic and a human scale. Recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the 1955 film adaptation.

Laurence M. Janifer’s Slave Planet

Laurence M. Janifer’s Slave Planet was published in 1963.

Laurence M. Janifer (1933-2002) was an American writer of science fiction, under his name and a number of pseudonyms.

The slave planet of the title is Fruyling’s World. At some unspecified date in the future humans have colonised Mars and the Moon, and at a later date a planet known as Fruyling’s World. These four planets comprise the Confederation. Fruyling’s World was already inhabited by intelligent life - smallish vaguely reptilian bipedal creatures the humans have christened the Alberts. No-one seems to be sure how intelligent the Alberts are. They can speak and understand human language and can be trained to perform fairly simple tasks. They may be less intelligent than humans, or they may simply not yet have evolved higher culture.

Fruyling’s World is of interest to humans for one reason - its incredibly valuable deposits of certain rare and essential metals. The planet has been colonised by humans purely as a mining operation and it’s a company planet. Associated Metals runs the planet, at a very tidy profit. One of the reasons it’s so profitable is that it was not necessary to instal expensive machinery to run the mines because there was a much cheaper alternative. That alternative was to use the Alberts as slave labour. The company has managed to keep the nature of its operation secret for a century because the ruling ideology of the Confederation is based on liberal concepts such as freedom. Slavery is not exactly compatible with that ideology and if the people of the Confederation ever found out what was going on on Fruyling’s World there would be outrage, demands for government action and possibly war.

Now the secret has leaked out.

Johnny Dodd is one of the masters (all the humans on Fruyling’s World are masters) and he hates it. But there’s no escape for the slaves or the masters. The company does not allow any of its employees to leave the planet for any reason (for fear they might reveal its secrets).

The most noteworthy thing about the novel is its treatment of slavery as something that dehumanises both slave and master, and its treatment of the effects of guilt. No matter how much they may deny it all the humans on Fruyling’s World feel guilt. They are all of them also in denial - denial about every aspect of their situation. It is an entire society built on a foundation of denial.

Johnny would like to rebel but after a century the humans on Fruyling’s World have been pretty thoroughly indoctrinated into the idea that slavery is inevitable and even desirable and really it’s the best thing for the Alberts as well. Both the humans and the Alberts have been indoctrinated into believing that any change in the situation is unthinkable.

Johnny has met a girl to whom he is attracted. Her name is Norma and she works in the Psych section. Poor Johnny doesn’t know much about girls. He has also come to the conclusion that things can’t go on the way they are although he has no clear idea about how things could possibly changed, for the planet or for his own life.

There are also vague stirrings among the Alberts. Obviously things are going to change on Fruyling’s World.

This is also a novel that obviously asks questions about how we would behave if we ever did encounter alien life forms who were culturally and/or technologically much less advanced than ourselves. There’s plenty of science fiction dealing with encounters with more advanced (or equally advanced) alien civilisations but the subject of our behaviour if we clearly had the upper hand in the encounter has been less often explored.

This is actually a surprisingly cynical little book. It’s cynical about human motivations and very cynical about the lies we tell ourselves. In this story there are various points of view but all are based on a denial of reality. Some of the characters know themselves to be cynics. Some think of themselves as idealists. What they have in common is a reluctance to face truths.

Armchair Fiction have issued this novel as part of their series of double-novel paperback editions, paired with Paul W. Fairman’s The Girl Who Loved Death (which is rather good). This series is a cornucopia of very obscure and forgotten but extremely interesting pulp science fiction of the ’50s. I enjoyed The Girl Who Loved Death more but Slave Planet is not without interest.

Norbert Jacques' Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler

Dr. Mabuse is one of the greatest diabolical criminal masterminds in fiction. In Germany he became a pop culture icon on the scale of Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Mabuse was created by Norbert Jacques (who was born in Luxembourg but later became a German citizen) in his 1921 novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler). Dr. Mabuse’s place in German pop culture was cemented the following year when he became the subject of one of Fritz Lang’s most celebrated movies, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler.

Norbert Jacques wrote a sequel in 1932, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. A year later Lang directed a sequel to his film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. In 1960 Lang made another sequel, the excellent The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, which was so successful that it spawned four more Mabuse movies.

An English translation of Norbert Jacques’ original Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler by Lilian A. Clare was published in 1923.

Dr. Mabuse was by no means the first literary diabolical criminal mastermind. That honour probably belongs to Dr. Nikola, created by Australian writer Guy Boothby, who made his first appearance in the novel A Bid for Fortune in 1895. There are some definite resemblances between the two characters - both are masters of the art of hypnosis.

Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler begins when a young man named Hull loses a very large amount of money gambling. The man to whom he loses the money is a man probably in his sixties who goes by the name of Balling. Hull has extraordinary bad luck but, although he is usually a cautious gambler, he also makes some very reckless decisions. The curious thing is that all his friends insist that Hull brought Balling to the gambling club but Hull has no recollection of this at all. In fact he remembers very little of the evening. It seems more like a dream. Things get even stranger the next day when Hull tries to pay his gambling debt. He goes to the address that Balling gave him and finds a Herr Balling there but he’s not the same Herr Balling and this one knows nothing of any gambling debt.

Hull is both puzzled and disturbed by he has recently acquired a new mistress so he spends the 20,000 marks on her instead.

Gambling swindles have recently attracted the attention of State Attorney Wenk. This official is a bit like a combination of a District Attorney and a Chief of Detectives and he takes a very active part in investigations. He is convinced that gambling has become a threat to German society. The further he digs into the matter the more convinced he is that all these swindles are perpetrated by a single man.

The man concerned is of course Dr. Mabuse and he’s involved in more than gambling, as Even slowly comes to realise. Mabuse is a kind of Professor Moriarty, with a hand in crimes of all kinds including smuggling and currency speculation. Mabuse is more than just a master criminal. He has extraordinary hypnotic powers which he uses to turn his victims into not just willing accomplices but slaves.

Mabuse is an obsessive. He has grandiose plans. His crimes are to finance his kingdom of Citopomar in Brazil. He had vast holdings there which he lost as a result of the war. Now he intends to reclaim his kingdom. Whether Citopomar actually exists is an open question as it is possible that Mabuse is quite mad.

What makes the story more interesting is that his nemesis, State Attorney Wenk, is every bit as obsessed as Mabuse. He may even be as mad as Mabuse.

Mabuse and Wenk have one common obsession - the beautiful (and very married) Countess Told. There’s a great deal of twisted sexual obsession in this novel.

This is a novel that is very much a reflection of Germany at the beginning of the 1920s, devastated by the shock and humiliation of defeat in war. Wenk believes that German society is diseased and needs to be purified. To Wenk the disease is manifested by an obsession with money, a lack of purpose among the upper classes and the enthusiasm for modernist art and literature. Wenk is a man looking for a moral crusade.

Needless to say this book (and Lang’s film version) is often seen as some kind of anticipation of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis. In fact in 1921 the Nazi Party was just a handful of individuals and utterly obscure. The Freikorps, which opposed communism and were in some ways a precursor of the Nazis, did exist. And the German economy, soon to suffer the ravages of hyperinflation, was already shaky. The Nazi angle should not be exaggerated, but this book does reflect a growing feeling in some sections of German society that Germany had lost its way.

To Wenk Mabuse is the personification of all the evil forces threatening his country.

This novel has historical importance as the launching pad for one of the great fictional diabolical criminal masterminds and a key figure in the history of 20th century pop culture. The whole thing is outrageously complicated and melodramatic and the ending goes right over the top, but it’s weirdly fascinating and compelling. It’s a strange book that won’t be to everyone’s taste but it’s still recommended.

Death by Request

Death by Request was the only detective novel to be written by husband-and-wife team Romilly and Katherine John. Romilly John was the son of the painter Augustus John. The novel appeared in 1933.

The setting is an English country house owned by a certain Matthew Barry, a wealthy man in late middle age with a passion for Greek literature. Matthew’s son Edward is a harmless rather sickly and rather ineffectual young man who spends much of his time in pursuit of the local lepidoptera (which will play an important part in the plot). Matthew’s old friend, the Reverend John Colchester (who narrates the tale), is one of the assortment of guests that you’d expect to find in a country house murder mystery. There’s a blustering and foolish old colonel, a beautiful young widow of slightly doubtful moral reputation, there’s the handsome rake Lord Malvern, there’s Edward’s fiancée Judith Grant and there’s Phyllis Winter, a somewhat hysterical 17-year-old girl.

Of course one of these people is about to be murdered and the others will all be suspects. There is another important suspect, the butler Frampton. Did the butler do it? The police certainly think it’s possible. Frampton is after all a socialist.

The murder victim is found dead in his gas-filled bedroom. It might have been an accident but this possibility is soon dismissed. Suicide is considered next, but also rejected. This is murder.

And this is a locked-room murder mystery, for those who enjoy that sort of thing.

Inspector Lockitt has an abundance of suspects and an abundance of motives to work through. He makes little headway and seems relieved by the arrival of Nicholas Hatton. Whether Hatton is an actual private detective or merely an amateur is uncertain (the latter seems far more likely) but he seems to make more progress than the Inspector. Even he is unable to unravel this mystery and the lovely young widow Mrs Fairfax then tries her hand at detecting, with much greater success.

There are inheritances, there are romantic triangles, there’s blackmail and there’s jealousy. In fact the authors toss in everything but the kitchen sink.

There’s also a twist ending although even in 1933 it was by no means original.

The authors try very hard to maintain a light-hearted and at times almost farcical tone, with mixed success. There are a few amusing moments but the wit is rather laboured.

The locked-room puzzle itself is moderately clever but if you’re expecting the ingenuity and outlandishness of a John Dickson Carr you’re going to be disappointed. The twist ending is reasonably successful.

There are some problems. The pacing is a little slow, with a tendency to over-explain and over-complicate things. It’s the sort of fault you might expect in a first novel. There are plenty of possible motives but none of them seem truly convincing. The more successful writers of golden age detective fiction tried to make the motivations of their killers at least vaguely psychologically convincing. We should feel that the killer is someone who, once the motive is explained, might really have been tempted to commit murder. In this case the authors don’t quite succeed in selling us on the motives. It’s a pity because the plot does show some genuine cleverness.

For a first novel Death by Request shows some promise but presumably it failed to excite the reading public and it marked both the beginning and the end of their endeavours in the genre.

Death by Request is a moderately enjoyable tale if you’re not in an excessively demanding mood. It’s certainly not a must-read. If you can find a copy in the bargain bin or in the library it’s worth picking up but it’s not a book that I’d suggest you go hunting for. I can only give this one a lukewarm recommendation I’m afraid.

T. C. H. Jacobs' Sinister Quest

Sinister Quest was the third of the Chief Inspector Barnard mysteries of T. C. H. Jacobs. It was published in 1934. T. C. H. Jacobs was one of the many pseudonyms used by English writer Jacques Pendower (1899-1976) who produced a huge number of books in various genres.

Sinister Quest is a murder mystery but with very marked thriller elements as well. I think it’s reasonable to say there was a definite Edgar Wallace influence on this work.

The novel is set in Devon, which happens to be where the author was born and raised.

Captain Montague Prothero is a guest at the Castle Hotel in Sidmouth in Devon. Among the other guests is a delightful young lady, Barbara Delaine. Miss Delaine having decided on a walk to nearby Peak Hill Prothero had followed her, hoping to strike up a closer acquaintance by running into her accidentally on purpose. He doesn’t find the lady but what he does find is a dead body in a quarry. What he doesn’t know is that he is being watched and that there is more than one watcher. 

Finding a dead body is not a very pleasant thing but in this case it is rather more shocking than usual - the dead man’s ears have been hacked off!

The local police having had a complete hash of the investigation Scotland Yard have been called in. Chief Inspector Barnard is dispatched to Sidmouth, accompanied by Sergeant Trotter. A murder investigation is always a serious matter but this case promises to be particularly important - the murderer may well be the infamous Ear Hound who has slain half a dozen London criminals, in each case lopping off the victim’s ears.

It is immediately apparent that the case is going to be a puzzling one. Soon after reporting the discovery of the body Captain Prothero disappears. The behaviour of Miss Delaine’s father is decidedly suspicious. There is the matter of Miss Delaine’s jade necklace, found near the the slain man’s body. There is the unexpected presence in Sidmouth of several notorious London villains. There is a mysterious message on a piece of paper that Captain Prothero found near the murder scene. And what of the inscrutable Chinese gentleman in the otherwise empty Ivy Lodge - empty of everything but a corpse?

It gets much more complicated than that - Chief Inspector Barnard will find that the case involves buried treasure, Chinese pirates, Italian gangsters, stolen gems, secret passageways, a madman obsessed with ears and lots more murders. The mysterious powers of the East will also play their part.

The overall tone and the various outrageous elements make this novel more of a thriller than a mystery, although there is definitely a mystery to be solved. Whether it qualifies as a fair-play mystery is another matter - Chief Inspector Barnard does hold back a couple of pieces of vital information. This book also plays fast and loose with the rules of detective fiction as laid down by S. S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox, and in fact breaks several rules outright.

It reminded me just a little of J. Jefferson Farjeon's At the Green Dragon which is also a bit of a hybrid of the thriller and the detective story.

Chief Inspector Barnard is pugnacious and determined but his arrogance, single-mindedness, blunt manner and very low tolerance for fools make him a difficult man to get along with. These qualities also make him quite an interesting detective hero. Sergeant Trotter is one of the few men at Scotland Yard who likes working with him - Trotter remains cheerfully oblivious to Barnard’s abrasiveness.

While golden age detective fiction purists might have some quibbles with the book Sinister Quest is undeniably entertaining. Recommended, on the proviso that you don’t mind the mix of mystery and thriller elements.

Ghost Stories of Henry James

Ghost Stories of Henry James is a Wordsworth collection that includes James’ best-known ghostly tale, The Turn of the Screw, plus nine short stories.

So much has been written about The Turn of the Screw that to say any more would be superfluous. Suffice to say it’s one of the great examples of subtle and ambiguous horror, a story of a governess who believes she must save two children from a ghost.

The other stories also mainly fall into the category of subtle and ambiguous horror, but are on the whole much less successful. James was either unable (or unwilling) to provide his readers with the kind of payoff they are entitled to expect in a ghost story. Being subtle and ambiguous is fine but a ghost story must at the very least make us uneasy. It doesn’t have to scare us out of our wits. Some of the best horror stories are not especially terrifying but they do give us a sense of unease, a sense of the uncanny, a feeling that things are not quite right. Most of these stories fail to do this.

Of course it can be legitimately argued that James was not consciously writing horror or even ghost stories, that he had other purposes, other agendas. That’s quite true but when a collection is put before the public as being a collection of ghost stories then I think the reader is entitled to judge those stories on that basis - on their success or failure as ghost stories.

Judged by other criteria some of these stories might well be considered to be good short stories. But a good short story is not necessarily a good ghost story.

The Private Life is a good example. It’s a clever examination of the idea that the face we show to the world is often very different from the face we show in private. It’s an amusing tale but as a tale of supernatural horror it’s a complete non-starter. The Friends of the Friends is interesting, a story of two people who seem fated never to meet, but again it’s not a story that will produce even the mildest unease. The Real Right Thing, about a man engaged to write a biography of a famous writer, is similar - an interesting idea but once again no actual sense of unease.

Sir Edmund Orme is closer to being an actual ghost story and although it’s somewhat unconventional it works rather well and is one of the more successful stories in this collection.

Owen Wingrave is a story in which James has tried to give us the payoff we expect but sadly it falls rather flat.

The Ghostly Rental is a surprising success. Surprising because it suffers from James’ worst flaws as a writer of ghost stories and yet it does give the reader a genuine frisson of horror. It’s a story of a man who caused his daughter’s death who must now collect rent from her ghost.

The Third Person is a humorous ghost story about a haunting that is brought to an end in a rather witty way. While it’s not the least bit scary it is a charming little story.

On the whole I’d say that this is a collection that may appeal strongly to fans of Henry James. They will find an assortment of stories that demonstrate the author’s skill as an observer of social mores and human behaviour. Fans of the ghost story are likely to be much less satisfied. It’s a volume that unfortunately I really cannot recommend to anyone looking for classic ghost stories.

H. Bedford Jones' The Master of Dragons

H. Bedford Jones (1887-1949) was an incredibly prolific pulp writer producing work for most of the well-known pulp magazines in a variety of genres.

The Master of Dragons collects four adventures of two American soldiers of fortune, O’Neill and Burket, in China in the 1920s. This was the era of the warlords, before the rise of the Kuomintang. Central government had all but disintegrated and military leaders (who were often little more than bandits) carved out what were virtually private miniature kingdoms, each warlord having his own private armies. These private armies were generously supplied with generals and colonels even if they only numbered a few hundred men.

In the first adventure the two American adventurers fall foul of one of the senior warlords, the wily Governor Wang. He finds himself outmanoeuvred though and can’t just have them killed, so he cooks up a better plan. He supplies them with a Fokker two-seater (O’Neill is a pilot) and sends them off to impose fines on his subordinate warlords. If they succeed they get a share of the proceeds. Wang can’t lose. If they’re successful he gets lots of money, if they fail and get killed he’s rid of two trouble-makers.

The other three stories recount their attempts to carry out this apparently impossible mission. There are double-crosses and narrow escapes, there’s plenty of action and they do a few good deeds along the way. They’re rogues, but they’re honourable rogues.

The unusual and exotic settings are effectively rendered despite the fact that the author had never been to China. Whether it accurately reflects warlord-era China or not is an open question but this is pulp fiction so what matters is entertainment rather than accuracy  and on the entertainment front these stories score highly.

Modern readers who insist in political correctness may not be pleased but the stories reflect the kinds of values that were once regarded as important - heroism, decency, friendship, loyalty. The people from whom O’Neill and Burket extort money are all criminals, and vicious criminals at that. Personally I have no requirement for political correctness in my reading matter and no interest in trying to impose today’s fashionable prejudices onto the past.

There’s a multitude of dastardly villains and it’s all good pulpy fun. O’Neill and Burket are likeable if cynical heroes. The author’s style is energetic and enthusiastic and if you’re a pulp fan there’s absolutely no reason why you won’t love this book.