Douglas Sanderson's Prey by Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malko: Angel of Vengence

Gérard de Villiers wrote around two hundred Malko spy thrillers, often referred to as the SAS thrillers. A small number were translated into English, including Malko: Angel of Vengence in 1974. I believe the original French title was L'Ange de Montevideo.

Gérard de Villiers (1929-2013) was a staggeringly prolific writer. The Malko novels were just part of his output.

The hero of the Malko series is His Serene Highness Prince Malko Ligne, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Black Eagle, Knight of the Order of Landgrave Seraphim of Kletgaus, Knight of the Order of Malta. He owns a very nice castle back home in Austria but the upkeep on old castles requires a lot of money. His job as a mercenary agent and assassin for the C.I.A. pays for castle maintenance and for his other hobby, women. The C.I.A. considers him to be reliable.

C.I.A. agent Ron Barber has been kidnapped by guerrillas in Uruguay. Barber was engaged in routine C.I.A. activities in that country - mass murder, torture, kidnapping, just the usual stuff. All with the approval of the U.S. Government. Now the guerrillas are likely to torture him to death. Never has a man so richly deserved his fate but the C.I.A. doesn’t see it that way. They want him back. Prince Malko is called in to rescue him.

There are two factions in Uruguay - the bad guys (supported by the Americans) and the other bad guys (opposed to the American-backed government). But it’s more complicated than that, with a bewildering series of betrayals and counter-betrayals and escalating reprisals. There are many individuals involved who will readily switch allegiances. The two Uruguayan factions have their own agendas. The C.I.A. has its own agenda. Malko works for the C.I.A. but that doesn’t imply that he shares their agenda.

Some of these players are motivated by greed and the lust for power. Some are motivated by sexual lust, or jealousy. Some are motivated by ideology (they’re the most dangerous). And some just enjoy the game.

There are more kidnappings and murders. The plot is complex and clever and I have no intention of revealing any details at all - this is too good a story to risk even the mildest spoilers. I do like the ending. It’s not the ending you would get in an American pulp spy thriller but it works for me.

It’s obvious from my brief plot synopsis that this novel has a very different flavour compared to British and especially American spy thrillers. The cynicism about the activities of the C.I.A. is off the scale.

Espionage, terrorism, counter-terrorism, political activism are all dirty games. No-one can play these games while keeping their hands clean. The good guys employ torture as a matter of routine, as do the bad guys.

There’s a real edge of brutality. The torture scenes are fairly graphic. There’s an abundance of violent exciting action.

It also features sexy killer nuns with guns, always a nice touch in a spy thriller.

There’s a lot of sex. Prince Malko is happily married but he’s always willing to jump into bed with any available woman. There are three women who play vital roles in the story. They all utilise the most powerful weapon in a woman’s arsenal - sex. They utilise with a great deal of skill and panache. Malko is a man of the world who has had a lot of women but even he is impressed by some of Laura’s bedroom skills. He’s also impressed that she’s willing to display these skills in the middle of a crowded restaurant. The sex is quite graphic and it’s unapologetic. There’s a nicely continental feel to this novel. Sex is not treated with coyness, or with sniggering.

Malko is an interesting hero. His ethical standards are low, but not as low as those of most of the other players in the game. He is motivated mostly by money. It’s not just that castle that requires money. Keeping his wife back home in Austria happy requires money as well. Malko loves his wife. He has never even considered being faithful to her. She doesn’t expect that. Bourgeois morality is not for the aristocracy.

Malko: Angel of Vengence is hugely entertaining and very stylish. This is top-tier spy fiction. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the slightly earlier Malko: West of Jerusalem.

Peter O’Donnell’s The Impossible Virgin

The Impossible Virgin was published in 1971. It was the fifth of Peter O’Donnell’s eleven Modesty Blaise novels. The Modesty Blaise comic-strip debuted in the London Evening Standard in 1963. The comic-strip adventures are excellent and I recommend them but the novels have more depth and psychological complexity and were able to deal more openly with adult themes.

People unfamiliar with either the comic strip or the novels sometimes make the mistake of thinking of Modesty Blaise as a female James Bond. Nothing could be further from the truth. She is almost the exact opposite of Bond in every way. Bond is British to his bootstraps and fiercely patriotic. He has a naval background and is accustomed to obeying orders. He has never questioned authority. He is a professional spy working for the British Government. He is a straightforward old-fashioned kind of guy.

Modesty is British only by marriage (a marriage of convenience). She has no idea what her own nationality or ethnicity might be - she’s probably southern European or Slavic. Modesty’s background is entirely criminal - she ran an organised crime gang. She has never obeyed an order in her life. She often does jobs for the British Government but strictly as a freelancer and she feels under no moral obligation to accept such jobs. She also does jobs for the French intelligence services.

Modesty is really a female Simon Templar - a retired criminal who is now a crimefighter and part-time spy. She is a female version of the gentlemen rogues who thrived in British popular fiction in the 1930s. Like the Saint she gets involved in capers for the adventure, or because she thinks a particular villain needs to be destroyed or occasionally for motives of personal revenge.

This caper begins when a low-level Soviet intelligence analyst makes an interesting discovery. It has no military significance but it could make him rich. It doesn’t turn out that way. A few months later he staggers into a bush hospital in Tanzania and promptly dies. He gives the appearance of having been tortured. The hospital’s only doctor is Giles Pennyfeather, a disreputable shabby socially inept eccentric Englishman. To look at him you wouldn’t trust him to operate on a stray dog, but the weird thing is that his patients do surprisingly well.

As it happens Dr Pennyfeather has at this moment acquired a kind of temporary nurse and assistant, a striking young woman who literally fell from the sky when she had to make a forced landing in her aeroplane. She has no medical training but she’s a quick learner. Her name is Modesty Blaise. She is in Tanzania purely by accident.

There is no way such a beautiful young woman would be interested in such a poor specimen of manhood as Giles Pennyfeather but Modesty thinks he’s rather adorable and she is soon sharing his bed.

Then two thugs arrive and starting beating up Dr Pennyfeather. They seem to be convinced he has some information they want. Modesty takes exception to their behaviour and deals with them accordingly but without knowing it she has become involved with some very dangerous very evil people.

There is an impossible virgin in this story, of a sort. There’s also Lisa, who is no virgin but is certainly very dangerous. The gorilla might also be a problem - he’s a real gorilla and he’s bad-tempered and being locked in a cage with him isn’t very reassuring.

Modesty will have to face most of these dangers alone, when the faithful Willie Garvin makes a sudden departure. Modesty will also need a certain special ability that she has - she can shut herself down mentally so that she is unaware of what is being done to her, and some rather nasty things are done to her in this caper.

Finding out why the impossible virgin’s virginity remains inviolate will be crucial.

There’s enough action here to satisfy fans and there’s plenty of suspense as Modesty’s position becomes seemingly hopeless.

The Impossible Virgin is a fine action/adventure novel and is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the earlier Modesty Blaise novels, Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth, A Taste for Death and I, Lucifer, which are all excellent. I’ve also reviewed several of the earlier volumes of the collected Modesty Blaise comics, The Gabriel Set-Up, The Black Pearl and The Hell-Makers which I also highly recommend.

Modesty Blaise: Warlords of Phoenix

Warlords of Phoenix collects three Modesty Blaise comic-strip stories from the tail end of the 60s. If you’ve only read the Modesty Blaise novels (which are wonderful) I urge you to check out her comic-strip adventures which are also excellent.

Peter O’Donnell created the character in 1963. He wrote the comic strip until 2001. It became the last of its breed - the ongoing comic-strip story unfolding three panels at a time in a daily newspaper.

Halfway through the second story in this collection, Warlords of Phoenix, the strip’s original artist Jim Holdaway passed away. He was replaced by a Spanish artist, Enrique Badía Romero. The result was a very slight change in style, with Modesty’s appearance subtly changed.

It’s also noticeable that there’s just a bit more nudity compared to the earlier strips.

The 1969 story Takeover was the last to be drawn entirely by Jim Holdaway whose collaboration with O’Donnell went back to the 1950s when O’Donnell was writing the popular Romeo Brown comic strip.

In this adventure the Mafia is trying to take over organised crime in Britain. O’Donnell portrays the Mafiosi as smooth business types (albeit with a brutal and ruthless streak) capable of passing as reasonably respectable citizens. In 1969 this was still a slightly unusual approach in fiction dealing with the Mob.

The Mafia’s methods are sufficiently ruthless to discourage informers who might be tempted to talk to the police. Modesty will have to offer herself up as bait. Willie with then spring the trap closed. Her plan is sound enough, provided the Mafia guys are not suspicious enough to scent a trap. But these Mafiosi are very suspicious indeed and Modesty and Willie could be in trouble.

What’s most interesting about this story is that Modesty’s criminal past is a crucial plot ingredient. Her criminal past is also the key to her whole attitude towards the case but I won’t say any more about that for fear of revealing spoilers.

In Warlords of Phoenix Modesty and Willie are in Japan, visiting a very dear friend (and famed judo master). He’s 70 years old but he’s still a formidable master of the art.

His granddaughter’s boyfriend tries to murder her, apparently because she found out about his involvement with an organisation called Phoenix. Nobody knows anything at all about this organisation.

This organisation does however know quite a bit about Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. They have plans to use Modesty and Willie. Modesty and Willie will need all of their combat skills and experience - they are going to come up against some very highly trained killers.

There are plenty of clever action scenes.

Willie the Djinn takes Modesty and Willie into the desert, to a sheikh’s palace. It all started with the sheikh’s obsession with playing games with Modesty. Not sinister games - he genuinely just wants to play backgammon with her.

Modesty and Willie are caught up in palace plots and they have a whole troupe of pretty English dancing girls (the delightfully named Dollyrockers) to protect as well. And Willie is mistaken for a djinn.

There’s plenty of mayhem and the Dollyrockers join in with great enthusiasm. These girls just love having the chance to use submachine guns.

By this time O’Donnell was well and truly in the groove and these are three fine adventures. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up and The Black Pearl, as well as the first three novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth and I, Lucifer.

Don Smith’s Secret Mission: Tibet

Secret Mission: Tibet is a fairly early (1971) entry in Don Smith’s Secret Mission spy novel series. At that time there was a huge market for action-oriented spy thrillers. If you were at least a halfway competent writer and could turn out such books fairly quickly they might not make you rich but you’d certainly be able to pay the rent.

The hero of this novel is Phil Sherman (I believe he also features in some or all of the other books in this series). He’s not a professional secret agent. He’s an international businessman although not an overly successful one. He is persuaded to take on an espionage mission, not for the CIA or any of the usual suspects but for NASA. They’ve lost a couple of satellites. What worries them is that they’ve been talking to the Soviets and the Soviets have lost some satellites as well. All these satellites suddenly stopped transmitting while passing over a certain point in central Asia. It looks like foul play was involved.

A top NASA space scientist named Newton wants to find out what happened to those satellites but he wants the investigation to be secret. He’s afraid that if word gets out the US Government will get nervous and suspend the space program. He can’t ask the CIA for help - he certainly doesn’t trust those guys to carry out a discreet secret investigation. So he persuades his old pal Phil Sherman to help. Phil is sceptical but he is assured that all he has to do is get air-dropped into Tibet, place two radio direction finders, and then get air-lifted out. There’s no risk at all.

Phil Sherman has cause to regret his naïvete when he ends up imprisoned by the communist Chinese in an ancient Tibetan monastery. That’s what happens when you offer to help out an old buddy.

This novel was written at the height of hysteria over Red China. The Chinese Communists had taken over from the Russians as the chief villains in spy novels, TV series and movies. In this case the Chinese have a super-laser.

Phil isn’t the only prisoner in the monastery. There’s another American, Bill Rogers, who built that super-laser. There’s a middle-aged German, von Kruger. And there’s von Kruger’s beautiful half-Chinese daughter Suwary. The prisoners are not tightly guarded, the assumption being that the surrounding countryside is totally impassable so only a lunatic would try to escape. But Phil knows something that makes escape essential.

He was hoping to take just Rogers and the girl with him. Rogers because he is the key to the secret of the super-laser, Suwary because Phil has already discovered that she makes an enthusiastic and skilful bed-partner. He eventually finds he has to take von Kruger as well.

Most of the novel is an epic chase through hostile terrain with the Chinese snapping at the heels of the fugitives. There’s plenty of action and excitement.

However most of the interest is provided by the webs of deceit and betrayal in which the four main characters are enmeshed. Phil Sherman cannot trust a single one of them. They cannot trust each other. Phil is pretty certain that all have lied about their backgrounds and motivations. Any one of them might at any moment betray one of the others. The author handles this aspect rather well. He builds up a nice atmosphere of paranoia.

There’s also a great deal of sexual tension. Phil doesn’t know if Suwary has slept with Rogers or not, but she might have. He doesn’t like that idea. Rogers is pretty sure Suwary has slept with Phil and he really isn’t happy about it. And Suwary may have slept with some of their captors.

This is a very solid novel of its type with suspense, well-handled action sequences and huge dollops of paranoia. I liked it enough to persuade me to look for further books in the series. Highly recommended.

Note: The cover features a girl in a skimpy fur costume wielding a very large sword. Tragically this cover illustration has zero connection with anything in the book. But hey, chicks with swords do help to sell books.

Battle Mask - Mack Bolan The Executioner 3

Battle Mask, published by Pinnacle Books in 1970, is the third of the Mack Bolan (or The Executioner) series of men’s action-adventure novels. The series eventually ran to a total of 464 novels over the course of half a century.

All but one of the first 38 novels were written by Don Pendleton (1927-1995). Pendleton later sold the rights to the character and apparently the series later changed dramatically. This is my first Mack Bolan novel so I can’t comment on these later changes.

Mack Bolan is a Vietnam vet who has been conducting a private war against the Mafia, with his own small private army. We get some backstory on the character. He was a sniper in Vietnam. He has a personal grudge against the Mafia and the methods he uses against them are the ones he learnt in Vietnam.

Now, for various reasons, he has to work alone and the Mafia is closing in on him. The odds against him are impossible. There may however be one way out. He could get a new face. He happens to know a surgeon (an ex-army doctor) who could perform such an operation.

First Mack has to throw a Mafia death squad off his scent. The opening pages are non-stop action as Mack uses every trick he knows to keep one step ahead of those Mafia goons.

Mack does not intend to keep running. His war against the Mafia is far from over.

His target will be West Coast capo Julian DiGeorge. Only a crazy man would try to infiltrate himself into the upper echelons of a Mafia Family operating entirely on his own but Mack Bolan intends to do just that. He makes use of the capo’s daughter Andrea, taking advantage of her uneasy relationship with her father.

The problem he faces is that sooner or later, even with a new face, his cover is going to be blown. Mobsters check up on new recruits very very thoroughly. The other problem he has it that the cops are after him. They don’t approve of his methods. Officially at least. Unofficially he may get some help from some cops.

What follows is a great deal of mayhem and carnage and Pendleton handles the action scenes with plenty of energy and style. Some of the violence is fairly grisly. Except in the opening scenes Bolan doesn’t rely on fancy weaponry. He relies on his jungle warfare training and his wits rather than massive firepower.

Bolan’s strategy is to pit one faction of mobsters against the other.

This is a classic one-man vigilante tale. Vigilantes are not overly attractive but Pendleton makes sure our sympathies remain with Bolan. He pulls no punches in describing the brutal methods used by the Mob. However ruthless Bolan might be his enemies are much much worse. We’re also told that Bolan saved the lives of lots of children in Vietnam. He’s a merciless killer with a sensitive side.

Pendleton doesn’t get into politics. This is a straight organised crime story.

The sleaze factor is non-existent. There’s no sex at all. There’s an attraction between Bolan and Andrea but nothing happens.

There’s some decent suspense. It seems that DiGeorge and his goons must at any moment figure out out that they’ve been conned and that their new recruit is actually their most feared enemy, Mack Bolan the Executioner.

It’s a pretty dark book. Lots of innocent people, good people, get hurt very very badly. Bolan is aware that his crusade against the Mafia has put those people in danger. For Bolan it’s a war but innocent civilians get killed in wars. He’s also aware that he’s putting Andrea in danger. There’s not a huge amount of moral complexity in this tale but there is some. And there are lots of betrayals.

Overall it’s a wild action-filled ride. Recommended.

Mickey Spillane’s The Delta Factor

Mickey Spillane’s 1967 novel The Delta Factor introduced his series character Morgan the Raider. In fact it was the only Morgan the Raider book to be completed by Spillane. A second, The Consummata, was completed many years later by Max Allan Collins.

Morgan (he doesn’t admit to having a first name but he’s gained the sobriquet Morgan the Raider) is a thief. He shares a name with history’s most famous pirate, and he shares quite a few of that buccaneer’s attitudes as well. Morgan is a thief on the grand scale. His most recent heist netted him forty million dollars. At least that’s what the authorities assume. He was caught but that didn’t bother him too much. He’s pulled more prison breaks than you’ve had hot dinners. And sure enough shortly after beginning his prison term he escaped again.

Escaped, only to be recaptured due to pure bad luck.

Now as the story proper begins he’s facing the prospect of serving the remaining thirty years of his sentence. Then he’s offered a deal by the government. They need someone with his unique skills, specifically his ability to escape from maximum security prisons. Morgan expects that the government will try to double-cross him. We are talking about the government after all. And he has no patriotic feelings whatsoever. He accepts the deal because he figures that he can probably double-cross the government more effectively than they can double-cross him.

The job he has to do involves breaking a scientist out of an impregnable 17th century fortress in a small Caribbean nation.

He is assigned a partner. He’s horrified. He has always been a loner. Then he discovers that the government agent assigned to him is a beautiful young woman named Kim. He decides that having a partner might not be so bad. And their cover story is that they’re newlyweds on honeymoon. That means they’ll have to share a bedroom. The idea sounds better and better to Morgan. Kim makes it clear that there’ll be no hanky-panky but Morgan is confident that he’ll be able to change her mind.

Morgan’s first step is to try to find out how he got recaptured. Someone fingered him, and he’d like to know the identity of that person. There are some other things he’d like to know as well. This sets up a major subplot and also provides Morgan with the kind of motivation that always appealed to Spillane - personal vengeance. A hooker provides him with information and she is murdered. She might have been a whore but she was a really nice girl, and Morgan doesn’t like seeing nice girls get murdered.

The basic concept, a master thief offered a deal if he agrees to do espionage work for the government, isn’t wildly original. And a year later it would be used as the basis for one of the best American TV spy series of the 60s, It Takes a Thief. It’s more than possible that the creators of the series borrowed the idea from Spillane’s novel.

Morgan soon discovers that this tiny Caribbean nation is thoroughly corrupt. It’s run by a dictator named Ortega. He has a brutal secret police chief named Sabin to keep the populace in line.

Morgan doesn’t care about politics but he does care about people and he has a soft spot for women. Women like Lisa Gordot. Lisa has run into major problems with Sabin. She can’t leave the island because Sabin has her passport. Sabin intends to keep tightening the screws on Lisa until she agrees to sleep with him. Lisa isn’t what most people would call a virtuous woman. She’s not exactly honest and while she isn’t a whore she has been known to make profitable use of her body. But Morgan likes her. And not just because she’s sexually available. Morgan isn’t exactly a model of moral rectitude himself and he feels a certain kinship for charming grifters like Lisa. And he really hates seeing women treated badly, even women like Lisa.

The last thing Morgan needs is to get mixed up in political dramas but on this island he finds that while he isn’t interested in politics, politics is interested in him.

To make things more awkward there’s a hurricane on the way. He has to get that scientist out of the fortress and make his escape and time is against him.

It takes a while for the real action to kick in but when it does it’s more than satisfactory. There’s a good deal of bloodletting, and plenty of narrow escapes.

Morgan isn’t just a variation on Mike Hammer. For a big-time career criminal he’s quite a soft-hearted easy-going guy. He’ll kill if he has to, but he tries to avoid it as much as possible. He likes women. He’s no monk. But he likes his women willing. He’s a pretty nice guy.

The plot has some nice twists and Spillane skilfully weaves together the multiple plot strands.

Incidentally you might be amused to find out that the title refers to a portion of the female anatomy.

The Delta Factor is less hardboiled than the Mike Hammer books and it could even be described as somewhat lighthearted. It’s a fun suspense thriller. Highly recommended.

W. Wirt’s When Tigers Are Hunting

When Tigers Are Hunting is a collection of W. Wirt’s Jimmie Cordie adventure stories originally published in various pulp magazine in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

W. Wirt was American and born in 1876 but apart from that not much is known about him. He claimed to have been a Federal agent and to have had various adventures in far-flung places but that was in a bio he provided for a pulp magazine so there’s no way of knowing how much of it was true.

These stories are at the very very pulpy end of the pulp fiction spectrum.

These are pure action stories with very little plot. Each story begins with the heroes in the midst of an epic fight and the fighting rages on until the story ends. The heroes always run short of ammunition and have to resort to hand-to-hand combat. They always kill hundreds if not thousands of bad guys.

Whether you’ll enjoy these stories or not depends on what you want from your pulp fiction. If you just want non-stop action without any real rhyme or reason you’ll be content. If you want interesting stories, genuine thrills and suspense, real atmosphere and the occasional surprise you’ll be disappointed. These stories are about as basic as pulp fiction gets.

You definitely don’t want to read several of thee stories in one sitting because they’ll start to blend into one another. It’s essentially the same story every time.

He’s a Good Little Guy at That appeared in Frontier Stories in May 1928. Jimmie Cordie is one of four soldiers of fortune seeking treasure in Malaya. Actually to call them soldiers of fortune or adventurers would be rather generous. They’re murderous thieves. They’re after the treasure of a local snake god and if they have to machine gun a few hundred Malays to get it that doesn’t bother them one bit. They seem to enjoy killing.

Although these are described as the Jimmie Cordie stories he doesn’t seem to be the the leader of this band of thieves. Red Dolan seems to be the leader, although at times Grigsby seems to give orders. Putney just obeys orders.

They’ve come well equipped for treasure hunting - they have a machine gun, lots of rifles and automatics and a large supply of hand grenades.

Amidst all the carnage they create they come across a twelve-year-old English girl held captive by the tribesmen. And suddenly these cut-throats (Red Dolan in particular) turn into a bunch of sentimental softies. Now nothing matters except to save the little girl. It’s a weird little story, mixing extraordinary amounts of violence and brutality with amazingly soppy sentimentality.

The Major Wanted Him Alive appeared in Frontier Stories in June 1928. Cordie and pals are now, temporarily, Federal agents. Their job is to clean up a smuggling ring. Cordie goes undercover a stir-crazy cook. There’s lots of mayhem.

According to My Size and Disposition appeared in the October 1928 issue of Frontier Stories. This time Cordie and his friends are in China, caught in a struggle between rival warlords. And there’s something about a mining concession. There’s a lot of shooting but no actual plot.

Private Property was published in Short Stories in October 1928. Again there’s action aplenty and there’s a girl who needs rescuing although perhaps rescuing her isn’t such a good idea.

In The Jewel in the Lotus (from Short Stories, November 1928) Cordie and his pals are after a fabulous ruby when they get caught in a vicious struggle between rival Chinese factions. The priests always seem to be the bad guys in these stories and Cordie and his friends are once again fighting to save a brave young girl. They find that the jewel isn’t what they thought it was. A better story.

In When Tigers Are Hunting (from Frontier Stories, November 1928) the boys meet up again with the little English girl they rescued in He’s a Good Little Guy at That. She’s now eighteen and her father has been kidnapped. Jimmie has by now established a connection with a tong - he saved the life of the tong leader’s son. This provides him with very useful sources of intelligence.

As usual the bad guys fire thousands of rounds at our heroes and miss evert time, while the good guys never miss. They kill a few thousand Chinese and rescue the girl’s father.

That Fish Thing was published in Frontier Stories in January 1929. The fish thing is an amulet, Red Dolan has it and a tong will stop at nothing to get it back. Lots of mayhem again.

Right Smack at You! Is from Frontier Stories, April 1929. It’s a longer more ambitious story (more of a novelette) about the search for the treasure in the tomb of Genghis Khan’s son. It’s still basically non-stop action scenes but with a bit more of a plot.

Final Thoughts

These stories are not quite what I look for in pulp adventure fiction set in exotic locales. I prefer a bit more weirdness, a bit more intrigue, more romance, more of the mystery and strangeness of the exotic. If you share my tastes you probably won’t go for this collection.

But if you like relentless action with millions of rounds of small arms ammunition being expended and a few explosions as well you might find these tales to be just what you’re looking for. We all have our own tastes in pulp fiction and I’m not going to try to persuade you that my tastes in pulp are the only valid tastes.

With these thoughts in mind you’ll have to decide for yourself if you want to try When Tigers Are Hunting.