Philip McCutchan’s Redcap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johnson McCulley's Daughter of the Idol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Mayo's Shamelady

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

John D. MacDonald’s Nightmare in Pink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. Merritt's The Fox Woman and Other Stories

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Munro's Die Rich, Die Happy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

The villain of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician was inspired by Aleister Crowley although the story itself is pure fiction.

Maugham had met Crowley and while he disapproved of him and considered him to be a charlatan he was strangely fascinated by the notorious occultist. And while many of the extraordinary tales Crowley told about himself were untrue Maugham had to admit that they were not all untrue. Crowley was a remarkable man. It was obvious to Maugham that he was a perfect subject for a novel.

Maugham’s novel begins with a brilliant young surgeon who is engaged to be married to the beautiful Margaret, who had been his ward. In Paris they encounter the notorious occultist and magician Oliver Haddo. Haddo is wildly eccentric and slightly sinister but he is charismatic and fascinating.

Haddo seems to be intent on seducing Margaret. Is he simply making use of standard techniques of hypnotism (aided by his charismatic personality) or does he possess actual occult powers?

And is he intent on mere seduction? There is a possibility that he has something much stranger and much more shocking in mind.

Maugham did not believe that Crowley possessed any real magical powers but had to admit that he certainly had the ability to convince people that he did. Oliver Haddo might well have obtained such powers.

The story of Maugham’s novel of course has no connection whatsoever to any events in the life of Aleister Crowley. Crowley simply served as a jumping-off point. And of course in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were many occult practitioners so Haddo is perhaps more representative of a breed than of an individual.

Either way Oliver Haddo is a wonderful and memorable larger-than-life character. He entirely dominates the story.

This was a period of intense interest in the occult so in commercial terms the idea was a winner. It was very much in tune with the cultural obsessions of the day. The reading public had an inexhaustible appetite for thrillers with an occult flavouring.

The novel is an unashamed potboiler (and I have no problems with that). It can be regarded as an occult thriller, a melodrama, a romance and even as gothic horror. It’s not what you expect from Maugham, excepting that being a Maugham novel it’s extremely well-written. He has some fine suspense, some genuine chills and thrills and a perverse love story. And the love story is quite powerful.

This is a very early example of the occult thriller genre which would reach its full flowering in the works of Dennis Wheatley.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Magician. Highly recommended.

Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926) is a superb movie adaptation of the novel.

Crowley was himself a talented writer. His Simon Iff Stories are splendid occult detective stories, Crowley’s most famous novel, Moonchild, does touch on some of the occult practices described in Maugham’s novel. So it is possible to get both sides of the story.

William P. McGivern’s The Mad Robot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick is your standard pulp hero.

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

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

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

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

John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-By

The Deep Blue Good-By was the first of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. It was published in 1964.

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) had already written several dozen novels but it was the Travis McGee novels that really put him on the map.

Travis McGee is not a private eye. Not exactly. He’s such a maverick and loner and general outsider that even getting a private investigator’s licence and working as a regular PI would threaten his fierce sense of independence. He is a kind of freelance investigator-troubleshooter of a very special sort. If someone has stolen something from you and it’s the kind of case the police either won’t or can’t take on, or if you have a good reason not to want cops involved, and if the case is so risky and so speculative and the chances of failure are so high that no regular PI would take it on then you go to Travis McGee. He will recover your property, and take a fifty percent cut.

That makes McGee sound greedy but he isn’t. If he doesn’t recover the property he gets nothing, not even his expenses. And if you thought you had no chance of ever getting any of your property back then you’re going to be happy to accept his terms. Half is a whole lot better than nothing.

McGee’s lady friend Chookie (yes, Chookie) has advised her friend Cathy to talk to McGee. Cathy’s father came back from the war with a great deal of money. He died in prison, with the money still hidden somewhere. A smooth-talking sleazeball known as Junior Allen seduced Cathy and he now has that money. Losing the money was bad enough but Cathy had her heart dragged through the dirt as well.

Doing a bit of digging on the subject of Junior Allen leads McGee to a woman named Lois. She was another of Allen’s victims. A picture is starting to emerge. Allen is not just a thief. He enjoys psychologically and emotionally (and sometimes physically) brutalising women.

Lois is a mess. So much of a mess that if McGee hadn’t found her she might have succeeded in starving and drinking herself to death. McGee becomes a full-time nurse to her.

Which brings us to Travis McGee’s fascinating attitude towards women. He likes women, but not just as bed partners. He’s no Boy Scout. He likes sex. But he really likes women as people. He doesn’t owe Lois anything but she needs him so he’ll be there for her. He’s just the kind of guy who could never walk away from a woman in need of help.

Slowly McGee puts the pieces of the puzzle together - where that money came from originally, why it was hidden, how Allen got his hands on it. And he finds out that Allen has further plans. Nasty plans. It’s none of McGee’s business but he intends to wreck those plans.

There’s plenty of action, and some moderately graphic violence. Much of the action happens at sea. Allen is a tough guy and he’s plenty mean. But Travis McGee is a tough guy as well and he’s willing to play dirty when necessary.

The plotting is clever. McDonald’s writes very entertaining prose with some cynicism and quite a bit of passion - Travis McGee is a man of very strong views. McGee does not really approve of the modern world. He doesn’t approve of rules and regulations. He also doesn’t approve of progress. He loves south Florida. He likes it just the way it is. He doesn’t think it needs more resort hotels and shopping malls and condos and highways.

There’s some sex but there’s also an atmosphere of twisted cruel perverted sexuality. Junior Allen has some major issues with women.

McGee is far from being a perfect hero. He can be extraordinarily ruthless and he has only a limited respect for the law. He doesn’t have too much in the way of ethical standards. What he does have is a certain basic decency. And an old-fashioned attitude towards women. Old-fashioned in a good way.

This book is huge amounts of fun, with a hardboiled feel and some noir fiction touches. It’s just different enough from standard PI stories, and Travis McGee is just different enough from standard PI heroes, to give it a flavour of its own. Highly recommended.

Charles Eric Maine’s Wall of Fire

Charles Eric Maine’s science fiction novel Wall of Fire was published in Satellite Science Fiction in June 1958. I believe it was also published as Crisis 2000.

Charles Eric Maine (1921-1981) was an English science fiction and crime writer.

Wall of Fire begins in the fairly near future.

The Festival of Earth is about to begin. It’s a kind of World’s Fair. This is another of those well-intentioned attempts to bring all the nations of the world together in peace.

U.S. Senator Drabin has broadcast a message welcoming everyone on the planet to attend. As a kind of feeble joke he adds that visitors from other planets are welcome as well. When the flying saucer lands in the middle of the Festival Stadium it appears that aliens from another planet have taken him at his word.

There’s much consternation. In this future interplanetary space travel is still a dream. No evidence has ever been found of life elsewhere in the Universe. No-one had any reason to believe that aliens existed. But here they are.

The weird thing is, they all look vaguely like Senator Drabin.

The aliens come from Saturn. In 1958 readers would still buy the idea of intelligent life elsewhere in the Solar System. Within a few years such an idea would stretch credibility too much and aliens in science fiction would originate in distant star systems.

No-one knows if the aliens are friendly or hostile. The aliens have erected a force barrier around their spaceship. The general consensus is that this is probably a hostile invasion, although Senator Drabin and scientist Lynn Farrow strongly disagree.

The actions of the aliens are somewhat ambiguous. Some contact has been made with the aliens but it’s still impossible to guess their intentions.

The trick to writing an interesting first contact story is to make the aliens truly alien - both physically and culturally. This novel manages that extremely well. If possible the cultural alienness has to be a logical consequence of the physical alienness and Maine manages that as well. Apart from being inherently more interesting it also makes the ambiguity of the actions of the aliens more convincing - their actions might appear to be potentially hostile simply because they’re so culturally different. On the other hand any apparently friendly move on their part has to be viewed sceptically as well.

In this book it’s not just the actions of the aliens that are ambiguous - the response of the various American officials are just as ambiguous so the aliens may well be as confused as the humans. And there are major differences within American officialdom as to the appropriate response - should they try to make peaceful contact or simply nuke the aliens just in case.

Maine is no great prose stylist but this is ideas-driven science fiction so that’s no great problem. This is genuine science fiction but the science is too fanciful to qualify it was hard science fiction. It might be fanciful, but the speculations here are interesting and at least somewhat provocative.

Wall of Fire is reasonably enjoyable. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds in a two-novel edition.

I’ve reviewed another of the author’s science fiction novels, Spaceways, which I liked a lot.

Stephen Marlowe's Blonde Bait

Blonde Bait is a 1959 pulp crime thriller, with definite claims to being noir fiction, by Stephen Marlowe.

Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was born Milton Lesser in New York and wrote some good science fiction under that name. He later legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe and wrote quite a bit of pulp crime fiction under that name.

Chuck Odlum is the ski instructor at the Whiteface Lake Hotel and he also owns the hotel. Well, almost. His wife Inez owns the hotel. It’s at best a moderately successful marriage. Chuck feels that his wife treats him like an irresponsible kid. Which she does, and perhaps she’s right to do so. Either way it irks Chuck a bit. On the other hand things are great between them in the bedroom. It’s the kind of marriage that could easily last, unless some outside factor intervenes.

The outside factor in this case is a blonde. Her name is Bunny. She’s married. Maybe everything would have been OK if only Chuck had been able to forget those extraordinary blue eyes of hers, and the way her posterior looks in tight ski pants. Bunny is very young, very pretty and very blonde. Perhaps inevitably one of her ski lessons ends with the two of them tearing each other’s clothes off.

This in itself was not necessarily going to lead to disaster, but there are two complicating factors - a dead body and a Gladstone bag containing a huge amount of money.

Chuck is a fairly typical noir protagonist. He’s not a bad guy really. Having a weakness for cute blue eyes and shapely female posteriors doesn’t make him a bad guy, it just makes him human. His nagging feeling that his wife has no great respect for him does make him vulnerable to the lure of easy money. He could buy his own ski resort. Then he would be somebody. We do eventually realise why his wife has never trusted him to make important decisions. His judgment is not always sound and he has a knack for finding justifications for his errors of judgment. He’s not stupid but he’s not overly smart; he’s not wicked but he’s not overly virtuous. He’s an ideal noir protagonist. We like him enough to care what happens to him but we figure he’s likely to get himself into real trouble.

Bunny is a femme fatale of sorts but she’s one of that interesting variety who might turn out to be a devious spider woman or might just as easily turn out to be a kind of female noir protagonist, led to do questionable things by certain character flaws. She’s a bad girl but we like her anyway.

There are murders in this tale, but they’re not straightforward murders. There’s some degree of ambiguity about them. They’re the kinds of murders a person could commit and still be able to believe that they weren’t really murder.

There’s a solid noir plot. The protagonists make small mistakes but they’re mistakes they could get away with if they just got one or two lucky breaks. We do get a feeling of noirish impending doom, or at the very least a feeling that these people are not likely to come out of this unscathed.

There is a slight hardboiled edge to Marlowe’s prose.

The sleaze factor is fairly mild but Chuck is definitely a protagonist driven by lust. Maybe there’s love as well, but lust is where it all begins.

This is a very satisfying work of noir fiction by a somewhat underrated writer. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of the science fiction novels written by this author as Milton Lesser - Somewhere I’ll Find You from 1947 and Slaves to the Metal Horde from 1954. They’re both quite decent stories. I’ve also reviewed his very good 1955 hardboiled crime novel, written as Stephen Marlowe, Model for Murder.

F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Sulu Sea Murders

The Sulu Sea Murders was the seventh of F. Van Wyck Mason’s thirty-one Hugh North spy thrillers. It was published in 1933. While these novels are usually considered to be spy fiction it should be pointed out that many of the early books in this series are as much murder mysteries as spy thrillers, and quite a few are in fact pure murder mysteries. Such is the case with The Sulu Sea Murders. It’s a murder mystery but the exotic setting adds interest.

Hugh North is an officer in the US Army’s intelligence division, G-2, but in the early books he works for the Department of Criminal Investigations. He is essentially a military policeman. He holds the rank of captain (by the time the series ended in 1968 he had been promoted to colonel).

The Sulu Sea Murders opens with the murder of a pearl diver in the Philippines. All that is known of the murderer is that he is a member of the American garrison on the nearby island of Sanga Sanga. Hugh North is sent to Sanga Sanga to investigate.

The American garrison is quartered in Fort Winfield, a very old castle built by the Spanish. It’s a rabbit warren. There are parts of the castle that the Americans have never even attempted to explore - it would to be too easy to become hopelessly lost.

There’s one thing North is pretty sure of - pearls are involved somewhere in this case. It soon becomes obvious that the atmosphere at Fort Winfield is not merely tense, it’s explosive. There are professional jealousies among the officers. The commanding officer, Major Flood, is hated by all.

There are three women each of whom seems to be at the centre of romantic and sexual intrigues. One is Flood’s French-born wife. Theirs is clearly not a happy marriage. Then there’s Captain O’Hare’s wife, universally referred to as Anytime Annie. There’s also Manuela, the beautiful young daughter of the local Spanish grandee. All three women are engaged in flirtations or affairs.

Those pearls also suggest that greed is going to play a part in this tale.

There are countless motives for murder, and there are several murders in quick succession. In two cases the identity of the killer seems obvious but Hugh North is not satisfied. He doesn’t like jumping to obvious conclusions.

Hugh North is very much a scientific detective. Forensic science provides some of the vital clues that will eventually lead to a solution of the case. North doesn’t rely too much on flashes of intuition. He is patient and methodical.

The old Spanish fortress plays a major role in the story. As does a shipwreck. There’s also the curious and colourful profession practised by one of the chief murder suspects before he enlisted in the army. There are conflicted loyalties and there are double-crosses.

The climate becomes almost a character in the story. The stifling heat raises tensions ever higher and there’s a hurricane on the way. The approaching hurricane plays a key role in the plot, adding a crucial time element.

This book is very much in the vein of the puzzle-plot mysteries of the golden age of detective fiction and I think it qualifies as a fair-play mystery. This one has a pleasingly intricate plot that comes together neatly at the end.

I am personally a huge fan of mysteries, thrillers, horror tales and melodramas in tropical settings. You get that feel of overheated passions and the loosening of moral restraints which always leads to entertaining emotional mayhem. It always works for me and it works in this book.

The Sulu Sea Murders is thoroughly enjoyable and is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of F. Van Wyck Mason’s other Hugh North novels - The Shanghai Bund Murders, The Fort Terror Murders, The Singapore Exile Murders, The Branded Spy Murders and The Budapest Parade Murders.

I’ve also reviewed his The Castle Island Case which doesn’t feature Hugh North but is a fascinating illustrated murder mystery with photographic clues.

W. Somerset Maugham’s Miss Thompson (Rain)

Rain is one of the best known short stories by W. Somerset Maugham (one of the grandmasters of the art of short story writing). It was originally published as Miss Thompson in the American magazine The Smart Set in April 1921. Maugham claims to have written the story in 1920. It’s a longish short story, long enough to be regarded in some genres as a novelette.

The story was adapted into an astonishingly successful stage play, Rain, by John Colton and Clemence Randolph. The success of the play was presumably the reason the title of the story was changed to Rain.

The story was made into a silent film in 1928, with Gloria Swanson starring and with the title Sadie Thompson. 

A few years later it was made into a talkie, Rain (1932), with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston. That movie was a commercial flop, for reasons I have never been able to fathom. It has since built a substantial cult following.

In 1953 it was filmed again as Miss Sadie Thompson with Rita Hayworth. This was a sanitised squeaky clean version and a waste of Miss Hayworth’s considerable talents.

This is the story of a battle of wills between a prostitute and a preacher.

The 1920s and early 30s were a period of rebellion against the moralising and social rigidity of the late Victorian era. It was also a period in which at least some sections of society were embracing sexual freedom. The flapper became a symbol of rebellion, and so too did the prostitute. Books and movies not only dealt with prostitutes sympathetically but even admiringly. They were seen as women determined to live their own lives even if it meant flaunting social conventions.

Of course the spirit of rebellion was fairly thoroughly crushed by the Depression, by a resurgence in religious moralism and by the Second World War which trained the population to accept a high degree of social control.

The story begins with the arrival of a steamer at Pago Pago. The passengers include a Dr Macphail and his wife. They also include fanatical puritan missionary Mr Davidson and his malevolent wife. The passengers also include Sadie Thompson. It is to be a very brief stopover. The passengers will soon be departing for other destinations, but an outbreak of measles strands them in Pago Pago for two weeks. The only accomodation on offer is provided by a half-European trader. The passengers are not pleased, and the relentless rain adds to their discomfort.

Davidson and his wife are scandalised by Sadie’s behaviour. She entertains men in her room. They listen to records and they dance. Davidson fears they do other things. He is convinced that Sadie had been working in Honolulu’s notorious red-light district. He is convinced she is a prostitute. Which she almost certainly has been. Whether she is plying her trade in Pago Pago is left obscure, but Davidson sees her very existence as a threat to morality. 

Davidson has proudly told Dr Macphail of his campaign to eradicate sin on the small island where his mission is located. To Macphail it sounds like Davidson and his wife are brutal merciless unscrupulous tyrants who have instituted a reign of misery on the island but Davidson has no doubt he is doing the Lord’s work. Both Dr Macphail and the reader will suspect that Davidson is motivated by an intense pleasure in exercising power over the lives of others. 

And Davidson has no intention of permitting the existence of sinners like Sadie. He is going to save her soul. If that fails she must of course be destroyed. And Davidson has found a way to destroy her - if he has her sent back to San Francisco she will go straight to prison.

The odds seem to be in Davidson’s favour. And it appears that Sadie, utterly defeated, will agree to whatever fate Davidson decrees for her.

But there are some major plot twists to come.

And some slight differences to the 1932 film version. The endings are very very similar with the ending of the story having a slightly harsher edge to it, but to my mind both endings work.

Maugham was a fine writer who was especially adept at the short story format. He seems to be out of fashion these days which is a great pity. This is a superb novelette with plenty of overheated tropical atmosphere and some nice touches of sleaze, hypocrisy, repression, sin and guilt. Very highly recommended.

Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man

Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man was published in 1966.

Dan J. Marlowe (1917-1986) was an American writer of noir-inflected pulp crime fiction.

Jim Wilson has decided to murder his wife Mona. He also intends to get away with it. There are various ways to go about getting away wth murder. Jim intends simply to shoot her, with plenty of witnesses. If he plays it right no jury will convict him.

He has some personal resentment towards Mona but that’s not why he wants to kill her. It has more to do with her father, Judge Harrington. Judge Harrington runs the town of Moline in South Carolina and in fact most of the county. He hates Jim and has made things difficult for Jim’s construction company. Jim wants revenge, but he wants more than that. He wants to replace Harrington. He wants to be the guy who runs things in Moline. And he has a pretty good plan to bring this about.

The plan is elaborate and it involves Ludmilla Pierson, with whom he went to high school. It involves blackmail, but he’s interested in influence, not money.

Jim Wilson’s plot to oust Harrington slowly matures. Harrington is old and his health is failing but he’s still powerful. Jim has to cover every angle.

He also discovers that while he’d always considered Judge Harrington a big shot there are much bigger much more powerful players in this game. Jim is moving into the big leagues.

These people are not exactly gangsters and this is not exactly a gangster story. They’re businessmen and politicians, they’re thoroughly corrupt, but they don’t deal in rackets like narcotics and gambling. They deal in rackets like construction. It’s all about carving up a territory and then making sure the right people get the right contracts from city and county and state officials. It’s crooked but respectable. These people don’t have rivals gunned down by machine-guns, but they do play hardball and if someone needs to be taken out of the picture they get the cops to do it. They own the cops.

Jim Wilson is a hard ruthless man and he’s smart, but he’s playing in a league with other smart hard ruthless players with more experience. Jim’s rise to the top seems unstoppable but the elaborate nature of his plans does mean that things could go wrong. He just needs to make one mistake. Trust one person he shouldn’t trust. Make one wrong assumption. Jim is learning, but is he learning fast enough?

There’s also the woman problem. Jim’s relationships with women are difficult. When he married Mona it didn’t take him long to realise he’d made a mistake. He doesn’t intend to make mistakes with Ludmilla or Veronica, but when sexual desire and emotional jealousies enter the picture any man can make a mistake.

There are some major plot twists which are pretty obvious and you have to wonder how a smart guy like Jim didn’t see them coming. But then what makes Jim an interesting anti-hero is that he’s smart but maybe the people he thinks he’s manipulating are actually just a bit smarter than he is.

This is noir fiction, if you’re prepared to define noir very broadly and very loosely. It has a noir kind of plot. There’s more than one femme fatale. But Jim Wilson isn’t quite a textbook noir protagonist. He doesn’t get corrupted. He’s corrupt from the start.

The Vengeance Man isn’t particularly violent. There’s some sleaze, but not a great deal. It is hardboiled, there is an overwhelming atmosphere of corruption and there’s as much paranoia as you could want. It’s reasonably entertaining and it’s recommended.

This novel is one of three in the Stark House Noir Classics paperback A Trio of Gold Medals, along with Fletcher Flora’s Park Avenue Tramp and Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed. All were originally Fawcett Gold Medal paperback originals.

Thorp McClusky’s Loot of the Vampire

Thorp McClusky’s short novel Loot of the Vampire was published in two parts in Weird Tales in 1936. It’s a vampire story in a contemporary big-city American setting.

Thorp McClusky (1906-1975) is a rather obscure American writer whose works appeared in pulp magazines in the 1930s.

It begins with a jewel robbery. The jeweller has been discussing the sale of a very valuable string of pearls to a European nobleman. The jeweller is found dead and the pearls are gone. The strange thing is that there’s no obvious way the killer could have made his escape.

Even more curious is the fact that the jeweller seemed to be suffering from a very serious case of anaemia. It’s almost as if there’s no blood at all in the body.

Then on the following day the dead jeweller turns up at the jewellery story, very much alive. The police commissioner and Detective-Lieutenant Peters are both puzzled and alarmed.

They do have a suspect, a Count Woertz. The count is about to hold a mind-reading session at a swank charity party. Lieutenant Peters poses as a guy wanting to have his mind read and discovers, to his consternation, that the count really can read minds.

Peters has an interest in the occult and he wonders if possibly they’re dealing with a vampire.

There’s no solid evidence against the count and the police commissioner has another problem. He’s in love with a sweet girl named Mary. They’re going to be married. The count has threatened to steal Mary away from the commissioner and the big worry is that he may be able to do just that by using some form of mind control.

There’s not much more than this to the plot. There are a couple of slightly creepy moments. There’s no action to speak of. There’s no reign of terror carried out by the vampire.

And to be honest there’s not much suspense. We don’t get enough of a sense that Mary is in real danger, and we don’t get enough of the feeling that the natural order is being threatened and that’s something I consider to be an essential element in supernatural horror.

The sea chase is the highlight and it’s not too badly done.

The vampire in this tale conforms to some of the rules of established vampire lore as it stood at the time, but not all. This vampire cannot tolerate sunlight but on the other hand he’s totally indifferent to garlic. The mirror stuff is an interesting variation on the usual idea. I like vampire stories that vary the rules a bit.

Loot of the Vampire is OK but it doesn’t quite deliver the goods. It’s recommended purely for its historical interest and its curiosity value.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with The Man Who Made Maniacs in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions.

This story seems to belong to a very short-lived 1930s genre, the weird detective story. These were basically hardboiled detective stories with some supernatural and horror elements added for extra spice. That’s actually a promising combination.

If the weird detective story genre attracts you then you should check out Off-Trail Publications’ volume Cult of the Corpses which includes two novellas of this type by Maxwell Hawkins and they’re both far superior to Loot of the Vampire.