The Red Skull (Doc Savage)

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are definitely bad guys.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Red Skull is fine pulp adventure. Highly recommended.

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

J.J. Allerton’s Moon of Battle

J.J. Allerton’s science fiction novel Moon of Battle originally appeared in Amazing Stories in December 1949. Allerton is a very obscure writer about whom I know nothing.

There are many ways in which the heroes of fiction novels travel to other planets. Pratt, the hero of this book, travels to the Moon in a truck. A big 18-wheeler.

Well actually he’s driving to Phoenix and then the transmission fails and he almost crashes rounding a steep curve, and suddenly he’s on the Moon.

Even given the limited knowledge of the Moon in 1949 this story is pretty fanciful. The Moon is inhabited. Some of the inhabitants are rather strange, some are so big that they’re almost giants and some seem to be essentially human.

One thing the author does know about the Moon is that it has very low gravity, and he makes good and frequent use of this.

The giant he encounters first tries to kill him but they soon become fast friends.

And then there’s the girl. There has to be a girl. Her name is Maeri. She isn’t wearing much in the way of clothing. Pratt thinks she’s a swell girl.

Of course her father is some of tribal chieftain. There are many lunar societies, all of them at very primitive technological levels. And it seems like a major war on conquest my be about to get under way. Pratt has to get involved because, as I said, Maeri is a swell girl. He can’t let anything bad happen to her. Maeri’s brother and other members of the tribe are preparing to face the threat on invasion by the Hammers.

Of course Pratt and his pals are captured and they have to face the horrors of the pot. Which is not a cooking pot. Well, not exactly.

There’s lots of crazy stuff to come. Allerton throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix and maybe it doesn’t all make sense but it keeps the reader on his toes.

The odds are stacked against Pratt except for one thing - he still has his truck. And the gas tank is full. A truck-driving man is never beaten as long as he still has his truck. And even the boldest space aliens get nervous when faced by a huge 18-wheeler. The truck is no gimmick. It’s an absolutely essential ingredient in the story.

The pacing is brisk and there are betrayals and things are not necessarily what they seem. These are pretty basic ingredients for a science fiction tale but Allerton handles them competently enough.

This book’s biggest flaw is its biggest strength. The idea of a guy suddenly appearing on the surface of the Moon at the wheel of a big ole semi-trailer is definitely goofy and dumb. And at the same time it’s pretty darn cool.

Pratt is a cool unflappable tough guy hero. He’s not taking any nonsense from a bunch of weird space aliens.

Of course he and Maeri will fall for each other. This romance angle could have been fleshed out a bit more.

There’s nothing startling here but it’s reasonably enjoyable in a very pulpy way and one can’t help thinking that there should have been more truckers in space science fiction stories. Recommended as long as you’re not setting your expectations too high.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Murray Leinster’s The Mutant Weapon in a two-novel paperback edition.

Robert E. Howard's The Lost Valley of Iskander

Robert E. Howard created numerous series characters besides Conan. One of the more interesting was a 19th century gunslinger from Texas named Francis Xavier Gordon who becomes a renowned swordsman and adventurer in central Asia. He becomes known as El Borak. Five El Borak stories were published during Howard’s lifetime with several others appearing posthumously. The Ace paperback The Lost Valley of Iskander collects three of the El Borak stories.

These are adventure stories with exotic settings rather than sword-and-sorcery. There are no actual supernatural elements.

The novel The Daughter of Erlik Khan was published in the pulp Top Notch in 1934. El Borak has been hired by two Englishmen, Pembroke and Ormond, to find a friend of theirs who has disappeared. El Borak soon discovers that he has been tricked. He has also been given a reason to seek revenge.

His pursuit of the treacherous Englishmen will take him into the country of fierce Kirghiz tribesmen who tend to kill outsiders on sight. They are devil-worshippers. Along the way El Borak encounters a troop of Turcoman bandits and he soon assumes their leadership. His quest will take him to a mysterious forbidden city where he will, quite unexpectedly, find the beautiful and formidable Jasmeena. They are old friends. She needs his help. She’s in a very awkward situation indeed. Being worshipped as a goddess is not all it’s cracked up to be.

This is a fine adventure story anyway but it’s Jasmeena who makes it really interesting. She’s not a good girl and she’s not a bad girl. She’s ambitious and she’s out for what she can get but she isn’t a scheming spider woman. You wouldn’t want to trust her too far but she’s not malicious or cruel. Perhaps El Borak doesn’t entirely approve of her but he rather Iikes her. She’s feisty and sexy and she’s just what a rollicking tale of adventure needs.

This is an action-packed tale of betrayal and revenge. Fine stuff.

In the short story The Lost Valley of Iskander El Borak has to deliver a package of vital documents that prove that a master criminal named Hunyadi is plotting to embroil the whole of central Asia in a religious war. And El Borak discovers a lost civilisation in a hidden valley - descendants of the soldiers of Alexander the Great.

The lost civilisation angle is cool and Hunyadi is a suitably menacing villain. A fairly good story.

The novella Hawk of the Hills was published in Top Notch in June 1935. An Englishman named Willoughby, a sort of unofficial agent of the British Government, is trying to negotiate an end to a feud between two bandit armies. One of which is led by none other than El Borak.

Willoughby is well-meaning and his theoretical understanding of diplomacy is sound but he just doesn’t understand the psychology of the wild tribesmen of the North-West Frontier. He doesn’t understand the complicated loyalties and he can’t comprehend the intricate webs of treachery, ambition and greed that motivate the bandit chieftains. El Borak thinks Willoughby is a nice guy but a man out of his depth. El Borak knows that the way to end his blood feud with the perfidious Afdal Khan is to kill him. That deeply shocks Willoughby.

There are plenty of battles and sieges and narrow escapes, there’s an impregnable castle and there are running fights in cave systems. This is Robert E. Howard in top form.

The North-West Frontier is an ideal setting for stirring violent tales of adventure. It’s a world apart from the civilised world.

El Borak is a fine hero. He has a code of honour but he’s no Boy Scout. He’s a realist. He is at heart as much of a barbarian as Conan.

The El Borak stories are terrific. Highly recommended.

T. T. Flynn’s The Complete Cases of Val Easton

The Complete Cases of Val Easton is a collection of spy novellas by T. T. Flynn (1902-1978). They were originally published in the Dime Detective pulp magazine between 1932 and 1935.

Flynn wrote pulp crime stories and westerns as well, his best-known being The Man from Laramie (filmed by Anthony Mann in 1955).

There’s a certain amount of continuity in the five novellas in this collection. The hero is facing the same bad guys each time.

Val Easton is an American Secret Service agent. He’s a fairly typical square-jawed pulp hero. Nancy Fraser is a highly capable American lady spy with a talent for disguise.

These are very pulpy stories and the plots do not contain any real surprises although they are enlivened by some lurid crazy details and some colourful settings. And fine larger-than-life villains. There’s a very obvious Sax Rohmer influence.

The best thing in the stories is the beautiful but deadly Tai Shin, the daughter of one of the chief villains. Sax Rohmer’s 1931 Fu Manchu thriller The Daughter of Fu Manchu had introduced Fu Manchu’s wicked daughter, the Lady Fah Lo Sue. She was played by Myrna Loy in the terrific 1932 movie The Mask of Fu Manchu and Loy gave us one of the coolest, sexiest, wickedest and most depraved bad girls in cinema history. Tai Shin is very obviously inspired by Fah Lo Sue but she’s made interesting by being made slightly ambiguous. She’s a bad girl but she seems to have fallen in love with Val Easton so she can be either an enemy or an ally, or sometimes both.

In the first story, The Black Doctor (written in 1932), Val is aboard a passenger liner when he meets a pretty young woman named Nancy Fraser. He soon finds out that she is a fellow agent. There may be a British agent aboard as well. And soon there are a couple of corpses.

They don’t know it yet but Val and Nancy are up against international spy Carl Zaken, the infamous Black Doctor.

In a hotel in New York there are more corpses. Whatever the foreign agents are after is important enough to kill for.

The second story, Torture Tavern, dates from 1933. That earlier case is not quite over after all. There are loose ends remaining, dangerous ones. There’s more shipboard action. There’s a dead cop by the dockside. There’s a link to an extraordinary potential catastrophic discovery made at a Philadelphia chemical plant. The French secret service is involved. And there’s a new and terrifying enemy, Chang Ch’ien, a one-time associate of the Black Doctor.

There are three women in this story. Two will find themselves in deadly danger. The third is Tai Shin - beautiful and seductive but very dangerous indeed.

The Jade Joss, from 1933, has a very Sax Rohmer feel to it. The bad guys have stolen a jade mask belonging to a long-dead Chinese warrior emperor. The idea is that anyone who possesses that mask could set the whole of Asia aflame. It’s a good story.

In The Evil Brand, published in 1934, Val’s nefarious opponents are trying to gain control of a Chinese secret society, which will in turn give them almost unlimited power.

The Dragons of Chang Ch’ien, dating from 1935, concerns a mysterious Chinese named Li Hung. He may be a businessman, a Chinese government agent, a member of a sinister secret society or something else entirely. Whatever he is he is clearly an important man and it seems that someone is out to get him. And there’s a connection with the upcoming marriage of a wealthy American munitions manufacturer.

The Val Easton stories are fun if you like pulp crime with a Sax Rohmer-ish flavour. Recommended.

Doc Savage 5 - Pirate of the Pacific

Pirate of the Pacific, published in 1933, is the fifth of the Doc Savage novels. It was written by Lester Dent.

Doc Savage is a superhero of a kind but he has no superhuman powers. He has simply developed his own physical, psychological and intellectual powers to an extraordinary degree. He is a scientist and inventor and is fabulously wealthy. He uses his wealth and his physical and intellectual capabilities to fight crime and injustice everywhere.

The major flaw of the Doc Savage stories is that Doc is much too perfect. He never makes mistakes. He never fails to foresee danger. He does not even have a few minor weaknesses that might make him seem human.

His five assistants are not quite as perfect, but almost.

The previous book in the series, The Polar Treasure, had taken Doc Savage and his friends to the Arctic in a super-advanced submarine. On their arrival home they are bombed from the air. And they discover that they now have pirates to deal with.

Piracy was rife in the South China Sea at that time but Tom Too is more than just an ordinary pirate. He has much grander ambitions. He wants his own country. He is plotting to take over the Luzon Union (we’re clearly talking about the Philippines here). Tom Too controls a huge pirate fleet ad a vast army of cutthroats. He is very much a megalomaniac and an evil genius and a Super Villain.

Juan Mindoro has asked Doc for help. Mindoro runs a secret society in the Luzon Union but his secret society is not sinister. He’s one of the good guys.

Tom Too’s influence even extends to New York where his henchmen murder one of Mindoro’s old friends and associates.

Tom Too’s organisation is gunning for Doc Savage as well.

Doc and his buddies head for the Luzon Union upon aboard the passenger liner Malay Queen. It’s a voyage marked by non-stop mayhem.

Tom Too’s tentacles are everywhere. Almost anyone could be one of Tom Too’s agents.

Doc’s buddies keep getting captured by the bad guy but Doc is never dismayed.

Doc has a number of non-lethal weapons at his disposal. He prefers to capture bad guys alive. They are sent to an institute that Doc funds where they are reprogrammed to be useful law-abiding citizens. Yes, perhaps a bit Clockwork Orange-y. It is an early example of the interest in brainwashing and mind control that became more and more of a feature of pop culture and reached a fairly spectacular lowering in the 60s. It’s intriguing to see these elements, which would increasingly be the province of fictional bad guys, being used here by the good guy.

It should be assumed that Doc’s methods are entirely non-lethal. He isn’t one of those moralistic superheroes who won’t kill. He doesn’t in the least mind killing bad guys if he has to and he and his crew never go anywhere without a supply of machineguns and grenades.

Interestingly I don’t recall a single female character in this book. Not even a very minor female character.

Pirate of the Pacific is breathtakingly politically incorrect and those who enjoy being offended will have a field day.

One thing you have to say about Lester Dent - he understood that pulp action adventure is all about action. And the pacing doesn’t flag for a moment.

Pirate of the Pacific has zero subtlety and complexity but it’s excellent pulp fun and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two of the earlier Doc Savage books, The Polar Treasure and Land of Terror.

Peter Cheyney's Poison Ivy

Between 1936 and 1951 Englishman Peter Cheyney enjoyed great success with his pulp thrillers in the American style. He had never been to America but that didn’t worry him. He knew the America that mattered to his readers - the America of the movies and the pulps. Some of Cheyney’s books are set in the United States but some are not. They do however all have an American-style hardboiled pulp flavour.

His best-known series characters were private detective Slim Callaghan and FBI agent Lemmy Caution. Lemmy Caution was immortalised in a wonderful series of French movies in the 1950s and early 60s with the great Eddie Constantine in the title role.

Poison Ivy, published in 1937, was the second Lemmy Caution novel.

Lemmy is investigating a plot involving gold. The FBI have very little hard information but it appears that there may be an attempt to steal a shipment of gold bullion. What’s worrying is that three FBI agents assigned to the case have already been murdered. And while Lemmy is waiting to make a contact in a night-club a fourth G-Man is slain. Lemmy is going to be up against some very dangerous opponents.

At the night club he sees Carlotta for the first time. She’s the singer. She’s a whole lot of woman. Lemmy has encountered some swell-looking dames in his time but Carlotta is in a league of her own. And swell-looking dames just happen to be one of Lemmy’s hobbies. He later finds out that her nickname is Poison Ivy.

Of more immediate concern is the presence of two corpses in the night club. One is a G-Man. The other is Willie the Goop. Carlotta was Willie’s girl, or at least that’s what Willie thought. Rudy Saltieri had other ideas. Rudy is a mobster and a particularly dangerous and ruthless example of the breed.

Lemmy has some ideas about the identity of Willie’s slayer. His favoured suspect has an alibi but Lemmy figures the alibi is not going to stand up. He has an instinct for such things.

Lemmy has a rough time on this case. He gets beaten up several times and he gets kidnapped. In fairness to Lemmy he hands out quite a bit of punishment to the bad guys along the way. There’s always plenty of action in a Lemmy Caution story. Lemmy is handy with a gun but he’s even handier with his fists. And Lemmy figures that while it’s a good thing to persuade a suspect to co-operate it’s a lot easier to do so if you knock seven daylights out of the guy first.

This is of course a heist story and it’s a pretty clever heist. The rather neat plot involves yachts, trains and a séance. And plenty of twists and double-crosses.

And dames. Two very seductive dames. They’re probably not nice girls but bad girls tend to make a case a lot more interesting.

Lemmy finds plenty of opportunities to trade wisecracks with the villains and to engage in some erotically-tinged verbal sparring with both the dames. Lemmy is as quick with a wisecrack as he is with his Luger automatic.

Lemmy is a bit of a rogue and he’s more than a little rough around the edges but he’s a likeable hero.

I have serious doubts as to whether Cheyney got all the American slang right but I am sure that he didn’t care. If your book has plenty of action and the right overall flavour there’s no need to stress about minor points of accuracy.

Poison Ivy is energetic fast-paced fun and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the excellent French film adaptation, Poison Ivy (1953). I’ve reviewed several of Cheyney’s other Lemmy Caution thrillers - Dames Don’t Care, I’ll Say She Does! and Never a Dull Moment.

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.

Robert Tralins' The Miss from S.I.S.

The Miss from S.I.S., published in 1966, is the first of the Miss from S.I.S. spy thrillers by Robert Tralins. It belongs to the “sexy lady spy” sub-genre and that’s definitely the sort of stuff I go for.

Lee Crosley is a travel writer and she’s doing a story on a playboy billionaire and then mayhem erupts in the guy’s penthouse apartment. Explosive mayhem. Literally explosive. This billionaire had a few secrets. Lee is lucky to get out in one piece.

Lee Crosley has a few secrets as well. She’s actually a secret agent, working for S.I.S., an all-female international counter-intelligence agency. That billlionaire’s secrets have a connection with several other cases of rich men who have suffered curious and unexpected fates. S.I.S. suspects there’s a plot afoot with very very high stakes indeed. So high that Lee’s mission has Code One status. That means she is to consider herself expendable. The double 0 number gives Bond a licence to kill, but a Code One gives Lee a licence to get herself killed.

In this case she also has a licence to go to bed with the chief male suspect.

Any self-respecting lady spy will have a few gadgets at her disposal, such as a high-tech girdle and deadly high heels.

The basic setup is good.

The conspiracy in this case is very high level. Very close to the top. And Lee’s cover might not be as air-tight as she’d hoped.

There’s a reasonable amount of action. The plot is sound enough but doesn’t have enough of the outrageous elements required for a really good lighthearted spy romp.

The major weakness is that for a sexy spy thriller it’s just not very sexy. It’s not sexy at all. It’s much much too tame.

The second book in the series, The Chic Chick Spy, is an enormous improvement. It has the essential ingredients that the first book lacks. It also has a lot more energy and much more of a sense of zany fun. It’s a whole lot sexier. I get the feeling that for the second instalment Tralins decided to change direction fairly radically.

Of course there is sometimes doubt about the authorship of pulp novels. Publishers often had several writers all using the same house name. The change of style here is so noticeable that you might suspect that this is such a case but as far as I now Robert Tralins did write all three Miss from S.I.S. novels.

I have yet to read the third book but I have a copy on order.

The Miss from S.I.S. is by no means terrible. It’s a breezy lightweight spy potboiler. It’s just that there are other similar books that do the same sort of thing with a bit more panache. But it’s worth a look.

I’ve also reviewed the second book, The Chic Chick Spy (which I wholeheartedly recommend), as well as a fairly interesting Robert Tralins SF novel, The Cosmozoids.

Fans of sexy lady spies might want to check out some more of my reviews. James Eastwood’s The Chinese Visitor is the first of his Anna Zordan spy novels. Lust, Be a Lady Tonight kicks off The Lady from L.U.S.T. series. And Jimmy Sangster's Touchfeather is a delight. And for fans of sexy spy thrillers in general there’s Clyde Allison's outrageous Gamefinger (Man From Sadisto 6).

Ki-Gor, The Complete Series Volume 1

The Ki-Gor stories by John Peter Drummond were published in the pulp magazine Jungle Stories, beginning in 1938. The Complete Series Volume 1 edition contains six early stories.

These are jungle adventure tales very very obviously influenced by the Tarzan stories. In fact the basic premise is pretty much lifted directly from the original 1914 Edgar Rice Burroughs novel Tarzan of the Apes.

A formula soon emerges in these stories. These are not tales of a jungle man battling poachers or diamond smugglers or anything along that line. Ki-Gor is pitted against more outrageous dangers - crazed would-be emperors, armies of man-like apes and lost civilisations.

He acquires several allies including his faithful elephant Marmo. But the most important is American society girl and heiress, and daring aviatrix, Helene Vaughn. Ki-Gor has never seen a cute redhead before and he’s impressed. To Helene Ki-Gor seems to be a tall muscular wild half-savage untamed wild man. That’s how she likes her men.

Pretty soon they are obviously shacked up together in various jungle lairs. He always refers to her as his woman. In the sixth story, completely out of the blue, it is suggested that they actually married during their brief time together in England. Perhaps the author decided it might be wise to throw that in to counter possible accusations of immorality since it’s very plain in the first five stories that Ki-Gor and Helene are sharing a bed.

The first story, Ki-Gor: King of the Jungle, begins with bold but foolhardy young American aviatrix Helene Vaughn crashing her red monoplane in the African jungle. She is rescued from several imminent dangers by a blond-haired blue-eyed jungle man. He speaks English, after a fashion. She soon figures out that he is English, the son of a missionary who perished in this jungle twenty years earlier. His name is actually Robert Kilgour. He calls himself Ki-Gor. He has lived alone in the jungle from the age of six.

Ki-Gor is pretty much a Tarzan clone, although perhaps a bit more bloodthirsty. He is of course totally uneducated but he’s intelligent and quick-witted. Helene makes an ideal mate for him - she’s resourceful and she loves adventure and she soon discovers that she prefers the jungle to civilisation.

Helene wants him to take her to the nearest village but Ki-Gor warns her that the local tribe is extremely hostile. She soon discovers that he’s not kidding about that.

Ki-Gor is very friendly. He ties her up and takes her back to his cave. Then he unties her, they have a meal and survive a ferocious attack by those hostile tribesmen. The shared danger creates a bond between them, but naturally he ties her up again before he goes to sleep. She might run away. You know what girls are like. She does run away but he recaptures her and they have more escapes from danger. This is a pretty entertaining start to the series.

As these stories progress other regular characters star to make their appearance. Like George, chief of a tribe of brave warriors. George is black but he’s an American. He becomes Ki-Gor’s ally when Helene is in danger. George is not going to let an American girl come to harm.

The second story is Ki-Gor and the Stolen Empire. Helene is naturally anxious to make contact with civilisation. Ki-Gor arranges for her to meet a fellow European. He does so in his inimitable fashion. He kidnaps the guy. The guy is Julio and he’s an insane megalomaniac. He will become a recurring villain, constantly cooking up fiendish new plots.

Ki-Gor and Helene are getting along well by now. He doesn’t tie her up any more. Ki-Gor is looking for a place for them to live. He assumes they will set up housekeeping together. He likes her. She is ignorant of the ways of the jungle but he knows a pretty girl when he sees one. Helene was not planning on spending her life in a jungle treehouse. She wants to go back to England (or at least she thinks she does). But she wants Ki-Gor to go with her. She’s grown fond of him and she can certainly appreciate his manly physique.

This is a kind of lost civilisation tale, with a mysterious city hidden in the jungle guarded by an army of chimpanzees. And there are rumours of treasure.

Ki-Gor and the Giant Gorilla-Men pits Ki-Gor against a Hindu with a hidden kingdom of his own. And an army of specially bred super-gorillas. It ends with a full-scale battle.

In Ki-Gor and the Secret Legions of Simba the shadow of war falls over Africa. Not just the Second World War but the prospect of a holy war in Africa. The story begins however with Ki-Gor and Helene in London. Ki-Gor quickly decides that he does not want to live in England among his own people. His home is the African jungle. Returning to Africa means parting from Helene but he knows they will not be parted forever. She is his woman.

Ki-Gor and the Forbidden Mountain involves another lost tribe. Their mountain home is protected by a ring of death - anyone who crosses the surrounding wasteland dies instantly and inexplicably. The tribe is ruled by a mysterious pale-skinned queen and they make their living from slavery. Ki-Gor will have to penetrate that ring of death - the tribe has kidnapped Helene.

This is another story in which the war plays a role in the background. The agent of a foreign power wants something from this hidden kingdom but hat exactly is it that he’s after?

Ki-Gor and the Cannibal Kingdom sees Ki-Gor’s friend George in trouble. Ki-Gor has to deal with cannibals and talking bulls.

These are fine pulp stories and if you love outrageous jungle adventures you won’t be disappointed. Highly recommended.

Fantômas: A Royal Prisoner

Published in 1911, A Royal Prisoner (Un Roi Prisonnier) was the fifth of the Fantômas novels.

The brilliant arch-criminal Fantômas is one of the most iconic figures in the history of French pop culture. Marcel Allain (1885–1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874–1914) wrote thirty-two Fantômas novels between 1911 and 1913. Allain wrote further Fantômas novels about his collaborator’s death. Fantômas later featured in TV shows, silent movie serials, movies and comics.

A Royal Prisoner begins with King Frederick-Christian of Hesse-Weimar (a tiny mythical kingdom) visiting Paris. It’s not an official visit. He’s in Paris to see his mistress, the glamorous courtesan Susy d’Orsel.

Reporter Jerome Fandor (one of the three recurring central characters in the novels) meets the king and they get drunk together. Then there’s an unfortunate incident, with a woman apparently committing suicide by throwing herself out of a window. The French authorities want it to be a suicide. Anything else would cause diplomatic nightmares. The problem is that a witness saw enough to make it certain that this was murder. And the only person with the woman at the time was the king. The king is now very much the prime suspect for murder.

Detective Juve (another of the recurring central characters) is instructed to investigate and to come to the politically acceptable conclusion that this was suicide. But Juve doesn’t operate that way. He intends to find and arrest the murderer, even if it is the king.

There is a great deal of confusion about the murder. A third person may have been present.

Meanwhile Jerome Fandor has been mistaken for the king. And he’s meet a pretty lacemaker who has fallen in love, thinking that she has fallen in love with the king.

Mistaken identities, false identities and disguises will play key roles in this story, as in many of the Fantômas stories. Both the police and the criminals are often operating on false assumptions.

There is also a threatened revolution in Hesse-Weimar. And a stolen diamond. One of the most valuable diamonds in the world.

These are all classic ingredients in Edwardian thrillers and mysteries. The Fantômas novels have a very pulpy feel. There are kidnappings and narrow escapes and secret passageways. In this case there’s a mysterious singing fountain, and the reason it sings will become important. There’s a wildly convoluted plot. There’s breathless excitement. There’s romance. There’s everything needed for a fun crime/espionage/adventure romp. Plus there’s the sinister figure of the ruthless criminal mastermind Fantômas. The ingredients are there and the authors know how to combine them to perfection.

One interesting element is the air of sexual sophistication. Susy d’Orsel is a courtesan. She is technically a prostitute. But she’s a nice girl and not one of the characters expresses the slightest disapproval of her. The king is having an open affair with such a woman but no-one expresses any disapproval. This truly was La Belle Époque. Paris was the city of love, which meant it was the city of sex.

Fantômas’s mistress, the wicked sexy Lady Beltham, naturally puts in an appearance.

Fantômas himself is a figure of mystery. We see the story from the points of view of Juve and Jerome Fandor. They suspect Fantômas’s involvement early on but they can’t prove it. Fantômas is ever elusive. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he fails, but bringing him to justice seems impossible. He is sinister and ruthless. One of the great fictional super-villains.

A Royal Prisoner is fast-paced crazy pulp fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Fantômas novels - Fantômas, A Nest of Spies (L'Agent Secret) and The Daughter of Fantômas - as well as the insanely entertaining 60s movie Fantomas (1964).

A.S. Fleischman’s Venetian Blonde

A.S. Fleischman’s thriller Venetian Blonde was published in 1963. You couldn’t really come up with a cooler title for a thriller.

A.S. Fleischman (1920-2010) had been a professional magician. He wrote some excellent spy thrillers in the early 50s. Venetian Blonde came later and it’s a crime thriller rather than a spy thriller. Fleischman later had a hugely successful career as a writer of children’s books.

Venetian Blonde is moderately hardboiled with perhaps some hints of noir.

Skelly has just arrived in Venice California. He is a professional cardsharp. He is very good at it. Or at least he was. Now he’s lost his nerve. The skill is still there but to be successful as a cardsharp you need nerve as well. His big problem is that he owes 125 grand to a guy who can get quite unpleasant about such things. If Skelly is really lucky he’ll just have both his legs broken but it’s more likely he’ll be found floating face down in a canal. He can avoid all this unpleasantness by paying back the 125 grand. The trouble is that his personal fortune at this amount amounts to $31.45.

He meets two women. One is the psychic and mystic Evangeline Darrow. Her real name is Maggie. She’s married to a con artist buddy of Skelly’s. Maggie is working on a long con and the payoff could be huge. She needs Skelly. Skelly isn’t interested but then he thinks about the prospect of being found floating face down in that canal and figures maybe he will join Maggie in the con.

The other woman is Viola. She’s a cute blonde and she’s a crazy beatnik chick and she keeps following Skelly around like a puppy. This annoys Skelly, until he realises he’s fallen in love with her.

The con Maggie is working on involves a very very rich old lady, Mrs Marenbach. Maggie figures that if she can put the old dame in touch with her deceased nephew Jamie it could be good for a cool million. Mrs Marenbach is no fool and she’s very suspicious but Maggie has an angle that she’s confident will work.

Skelly gradually starts to suspect that something doesn’t add up. There’s something Maggie hasn’t told him. He isn’t even sure who else is on this deal. Maggie claims her husband is in Mexico, but maybe he’s much closer to hand. He’s also a bit concerned by Porter, the sleazy private eye.

The con itself is clever enough and Fleischman throws in some neat plot twists.

Fleischman’s background in stage magic and vaudeville and his obvious familiarity with the mindset of carnies gives the book an authentic flavour. Fleischman clearly understood the tricks used by phoney mediums.

And there’s nothing better than noir fiction that involves phoney spiritualists, illusionism and con artists.

Skelly isn’t a bad guy. He’s dishonest but there are limits to his dishonesty. He’s a crook with ethics, of a sort. He’s not as cynical as he thinks he is.

Maggie is every bit as cynical as she thinks she is. She’s beautiful and sexy and that makes her dangerous. Skelly’s problem is that he’s not sure just how cynical and dangerous she might be.

There’s some nice hardboiled dialogue liberally sprinkled with carnival and criminal argot.

There’s not much violence but the threat of murder hovers in the background.

And there’s a quirky love story as well.

Venetian Blonde is a very enjoyable read. Highly recommended. It’s been reissued by Stark House in a double-header edition paired with Fleischman’s Look Behind You, Lady.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Fleischman’s spy thrillers. They’re all set in exotic locations and they’re all excellent - Malay Woman, Danger in Paradise, Counterspy Express and Shanghai Flame.

Charles Williams' All the Way (The Concrete Flamingo)

All the Way is a noir novel by Charles Williams, published as a paperback original by Dell in 1958. It was reprinted in Britain in 1960 as The Concrete Flamingo. It was filmed in 1960, as The 3rd Voice.

American writer Charles Williams (1909-1975) is one of the greats of hardboiled/noir fiction.

The narrator, a man named Hamilton, is sitting on a beach. There’s an attractive blonde nearby reading a book. But then he realises she isn’t reading the book at all. She is listening to him. Listening very intently. He tries to pick her up but gets the brush-off. Later she agrees to meet him. Her name is Marian.

She knows a lot about him. His name is really Jerry Forbes. He had to change his name and leave Vegas in a hurry after an unfortunate incident. He is not a murderer on the run or anything like that. He is not a criminal. He did however slug a guy, hard enough to break his jaw, in a disagreement over a woman. Leaving Vegas seemed like a good idea.

He finds out why she was listening to him. It’s his voice. His voice is uncannily similar to someone else’s. There’s a reason that that interests her. She has a plan. It’s not exactly legal but she assures him that he won’t be running any risk. And there’s $75,000 in it for him. OK, the plan does involve a murder, but it’s foolproof. And 75 grand is 75 grand.

Jerry is not a criminal but 75 grand (an immense fortune in the 1950s) would tempt anybody. He would like that $75,000 but the real reason he agrees to Marian’s scheme is Marian. He is becoming obsessed by her.

Marian is a bit strange. She is bitter and she has good reason to be bitter. A woman who has been dumped by her man for another woman (a woman more than ten years younger) can get very bitter. That’s what her plan is all about - revenge.

Her plan involves perfect alibis. Alibis that cannot be broken. That’s where Jerry’s voice comes in.

Marian is quite willing to sleep with Jerry. She’s very good in bed but she seems a bit disconnected from it all. This is a girl with a lot of red flags showing but Jerry doesn’t care. He wants her.

Jerry isn’t seeing things very clearly. Marian tells him that she’s using him but it makes no difference. He is in love with her and he knows she will learn to love him.

You can see some obvious plot twists on the way but the actual plot twists are not the ones you expect. The ending is brilliant and powerful.

You expect a Charles Williams story to have a nautical flavour and while this is not really one of his full-blown nautical thrillers boats do play a fairly significant part in the story.

There’s a love story here but it’s kept nicely ambiguous. Marian’s feelings towards Jerry are kept deliberately unclear. In a story such as this the reader will always expect one of the lovers to betray the other. This story has a few surprises in store in that department.

The plotting is excellent. Marian’s scheme is risky but fiendishly clever and elaborate. It’s a plan that deserves to work.

Jerry isn’t the smartest guy in the world and he’s not the most honest but he means well. He really does love Marian. He will do anything for her.

Marian is obviously playing a femme fatale role but she is not a straightforward femme fatale. I always like complicated ambiguous femmes fatales and Marian qualifies on both counts.

This is genuine noir fiction. It ticks most of the noir boxes. It’s beautifully written and the noir sense of doom builds very slowly. Jerry is not really committed to anything until late in the story. He can still back out. Except that he can’t back out. He has to have Marian.

This is top-tier noir fiction from a top-tier writer. Highly recommended.

Stark House Noir have paired this with another excellent Charles Williams novel, The Sailcloth Shroud. This two-novel volume is pretty much a must-buy for noir fans. I’ve also reviewed Williams’ superb 1954 novel A Touch of Death.

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls was published by Monarch Books 1962. It has more recently been reprinted by Black Gat Books. It appears that it may also been published as Trailer Park Trash.

I know very little about Glenn Canary (1934-2008) other than the fact that he started as a newspaperman and he wrote a handful of novels and short stories.

The title obviously suggests that this is going to be sleaze fiction but that needs to be qualified. In the 50s and early 60s there was a lot of crossover between sleaze fiction and hardboiled/noir crime fiction, both of which were popular pulp genres. There were a lot of sleaze novels that had crime fiction plots and there were crime novels that were quite sleazy. Many authors wrote in both genres.

There was in the late 50s and early 60s a curious craze for trailer park sleaze. For a lot of people the American Dream wasn’t quite the world of TV series like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. Home ownership was hopelessly out of the reach of many people, either permanently or temporarily. The best they could aspire to was life in a trailer park. There was much clucking of tongues over the immorality that supposedly flourished in trailer parks. This was mostly media hysteria but there was some truth to it. They did attract transients and drifters and undoubtedly there was a fair amount of illicit sex.

Not surprisingly this made trailer parks a splendid setting for sleaze novels.

Trailer Park Girls fall into the category of hardboiled crime/noir spiced up with sex. This is the tale of three guys who live in a trailer camp, and three girls who live in the same camp.

Three young guys who met in the army share a trailer. Burt Stone is the one who comes up with the idea for the robbery. He was all set to be a doctor. He’s finished his undergraduate studies and now he’s ready for medical school. That won’t be a problem. He has ten thousand dollars set aside, enough to support him until he qualifies as a doctor. Only he doesn’t have that money after all. His brother stole it. But has a plan to rob a department store with his two buddies. That should net him the ten grand he needs.

Al Needs is a tough guy with a nasty streak. Jack Cannon is a huge good-natured bear of a man. They could both use some money. These three guys are not really hopeless losers, they’re just not as smart or as hard as they think they are and they’ve convinced themselves the robbery will be child’s play and they haven’t considered the possibility that it could all go wrong.

They get mixed up with the three girls. Sally pairs off with Al. Fran pairs off with Jack. Burt doesn’t want any emotional entanglements but he just drifts into an affair with Marianne and before he knows what’s happening they’re in love.

Of course one of the girls finds out about the robbery and she wants in. The other two girls don’t want to be mixed up in it but they are whether they like it or not.

The robbery does not take place until very late in the story but this is not a classic heist story in which the focus is on the preparations for the robbery and the detailed mechanics of pulling it off. This is a character-driven story rather than a plot-driven story. Canary is much more concerned with the character motivations and interactions, especially the growing tension between Burt and Al and the complicated relationship between Burt and Marianne.

Right from the start Burt wanted the trio of robbers to have nothing to do with women until after the robbery. He was sure that any involvement with women would sow dissension and and pose dangers. He was right. But he couldn’t stop it from happening and he couldn’t stop himself from getting deeply involved with Marianne. She presents him with a choice - back out of the robbery or lose her. But he doesn’t see any way that he can back out.

The main focus is on Burt and Marianne. Especially Burt. He’s a typical noir protagonist. He’s basically a very decent guy. In the normal course of events he’d have become a doctor and led a blameless life. But having that money stolen by his brother has distorted his thinking and embittered him. And now events are moving out of his control. This is all classic noir fiction stuff.

There is a femme fatale of sorts but it’s not Burt’s girlfriend, it’s Sally. She’s the most reckless of the three girls.

There are no real villains here, just people who make mistakes. Maybe some will lean from their mistakes and maybe some of them won’t.

There’s some violence and a lot of sex. The sex isn’t very graphic but it does have an edge of noir desperation to it. People who need love but don’t realise it and sometimes don’t recognise it when it’s there.

As to how noir this novel is, that depends on how you read the ending but it does have a noirish atmosphere.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

Theodore Roscoe’s Tarantula Tower

Tarantula Tower is the fourth collection of Theodore Roscoe’s stories of the adventures of curio hunter Peter Scarlet and his friend the naturalist Bradshaw. It’s been issued by Steeger Books in their Argosy Library series. The stories were originally published in various pulp magazines between 1933 and 1935.

The stories take place in a variety of exotic settings - central Asia, the Red Sea coast of Africa, the Dutch East Indies (as Indonesia then was) and British India. These are tales of adventure with touches of horror and weird fiction, although without any supernatural elements. There are monsters, but they are human monsters.

The stories generally have a nasty but clever sting in the tail and an atmosphere of the weird and the mysterious.

Although referred to as the Scarlet and Bradshaw stories the two men only occasionally appear in the same story.

Tarantula Tower appeared in Argosy in September 1933. Bradshaw explains where his horror of spiders originated. It started in central Asia, with a broken-down Russian officer who claimed to know where the Russian Crown Jewels had been concealed. They were hidden in a tower on a tiny island in the middle of a lake. He will take Bradshaw there. All he wants in return is a modest cash payment. The jewels are of no use to the Russian officer. He is being trailed by Bolshevik spies who would not let him get away with them.

The island is there. So is the tower. So are the jewels. But it’s not that simple as devious plot twists start to kick in. There’s something very strange, in fact quite impossible, about that tower.

Plenty of menace and creepiness in this clever story in which the mystery is never quite resolved.

Octopus appeared in the January-February 1934 issue of Action Stories. Peter Scarlet is in Somaliland. He doesn’t want to be there but he received a letter from an old buddy. Two old buddies were searching for treasure. Peter Scarlet is experienced enough not to get himself involved in such follies but when a friend needs urgent help that’s a different matter.

Scarlet will encounter the Green God of Sheba which is no god but it’s pretty formidable and dangerous just the same. It seems like the little American curio hunter might meet his doom in a sinister pool at the bottom of a ravine, a pool concealing some unknown horror. Plenty of action and excitement in this story.

Blood of the Beast was published in the March-April issue of Action Stories. Peter Scarlet faces a deadly stand-off with a madman bent on revenge. And the madman possesses the ultimate weapon- a bloodthirsty murderous pet orang-utan! A solid tense little story.

The Evil Eye appeared in Action Stories in June 1934. The setting is the Moluccas in the Dutch East Indies. A Prussian officer who is also a racketeer and a killer served a long prison sentence (which he thoroughly deserved) and died soon after his release.

Three years after his death the five men responsible for sending him to prison receive letters from the dead man. They are told that if they go to his castle and look his portrait straight in the eye they will find the key to a vast treasure.

Peter Scarlet tracks down the Dutchman, Schneider, who painted that portrait. By this time Scarlet is the only one of the five left - the others have all mysteriously disappeared. Scarlet and the Dutchman set out to solve the mystery, and a nasty little mystery it it. A fine story.

Port of Missing Heads was published in Argosy in 1935. The setting is Bhutan. It’s the most outrageous story in this collection. Bradshaw was acting as guide to a rich American on a hunting expedition. The American wanders off from the camp and is never seen again - until his head turns up in the river near the local police outpost. It’s the latest in a long series of decapitated heads found in the river. Apart from the obvious mystery surrounding these men’s fates there seems to be no rational way the heads could have ended up in that particular river.

It has something to do with the popular local superstition regarding the Little Dog. The Little Dog is actually a giant dog, with a tongue of diamond. Many have sought to find Little Dog. It has always ended badly for the seekers. Bradshaw has no choice - he must find the golden dog to clear himself of suspicion of murder. A nicely strange and creepy story.

Final Thoughts

Roscoe was one of the greats of pulp fiction, a solid prose stylist with a deliciously twisted imagination. This collection is huge amounts of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of the Scarlet and Bradshaw collections - The Tower of Death, The Ruby of Suratan Singh and Blood Ritual - as well as the miscellaneous story collection The Emperor of Doom and his excellent mystery/adventure/horror novel Z Is For Zombie.

Robert Silverberg's The Hot Beat

The Hot Beat is a 1960 noir-inflected sleazy hardboiled crime thriller by Robert Silverberg.

Robert Silverberg (born 1935) is best-known as one of the grandmasters of science fiction. He had just started to establish himself in the genre when the science fiction market to which he was selling temporarily collapsed. He turned to other genres such as men’s adventure fiction, sleaze fiction and crime fiction and became a very prolific and very successful writer of pulp paperback originals. The Hot Beat was written (using the pseudonym Stan Vincent) for a short-lived paperback original publisher, Magnet Books.

Bob McKay is a band leader. He’s young and he has the world at his feet. He’s the toast of the town. And then he hits the skids. He’s been pushing himself too hard and when you make a living in nightclubs it’s all too easy to reach for the bottle when you need to relax. McKay reaches for that bottle way too often. He loses everything, including his girl Terry. Terry is a starlet whose career has so far gone nowhere but she’s a swell kid. She just can’t put up with McKay’s drunken unpredictability any longer.

McKay has reached rock bottom. And then things get worse. He’s arrested for the murder of B-girl Doris Blair. He knew Doris but he didn’t kill her. The cops, who in this novel behave like moronic thugs, don’t care. He’s a convenient suspect. They’re happy to railroad him all the way to the gas chamber. They intimidate witnesses into identifying McKay.

Newspaper columnist Ned Lowry covers the seamy side of life but he can’t stand thuggish cops and he can’t ignore such an obvious miscarriage of justice. He gets a hotshot lawyer interested in the case.

And along with Terry, the aforementioned starlet, he starts playing amateur private detective. They really are amateurs but they’re motivated and gradually they start to see a picture emerging that is sharply at variance with the cops’ version.

Silverberg’s knack for pulp fiction is much in evidence - an understanding of the necessity for breakneck pacing, the ability to sketch characters quickly and economically, the ability to capture the right atmosphere of seedy corrupted glamour. He also makes sure to have all the right ingredients - some action, some romance, some suspense, some sleaze.

McKay is a typical noir fiction loser. He’s not such a terrible guy but he has a genius for self-destruction. In most novels of this type he would have to set out to prove his own innocence. In this story McKay does practically nothing. The focus is entirely on the two amateur sleuths.

Terry is the most interesting character here. She’s no Girl Scout, she knows that making it in Hollywood will mean doing a certain amount of wallowing in the gutter, but she has limits. She has tried very hard not to be corrupted. She’s not sure how well she has succeeded. She hasn’t learned to hate herself but she’s also aware that at times she has behaved badly. She’s not a femme fatale, but also not quite a stock-standard Good Girl. To achieve stardom she is prepared to sleep her way to the top but at least she feels bad about it. She’s not a villainess in need of redemption, but she does need to take stock of her life.

There’s a solid enough mystery plot here and I always enjoy mysteries or thrillers with a seedy-glamorous showbiz background.

Hard Case Crime rescued this novel from obscurity in 2022. One thing I have to say about Hard Case Crime - they’re one of the very very few modern publishers who understand the importance of great stylish sexy book covers. The original painting by Claudia Caranfa for the cover of this one gets the tone just right.

To make this paperback edition even more enticing it also includes three late 50s crime short stories by Silverberg.

Drunken Sailor is rather a nothing story about a naïve young sailor on shore leave. It appeared in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in October 1958.

Naked in the Lake was published in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in February 1958. A married man decides it’s time to get rid of his inconvenient mistress but there are some nasty surprises in store for him. It’s an OK story.

Jailbait Girl appeared in Guilty Detective Story Magazine in September 1959. Now this is a terrific little story about a con artist and it has a delicious sting in the tail.

Having now read a couple of Silverberg’s noir novels I’m inclined to think that this genre was not quite his forte. He was better suited to sleaze fiction since he was good at dealing with human relationships and human motivations. He was one of the very best sleaze fiction writers. He doesn’t quite have the gift of a making a more straightforward crime novel come to life. The Hot Beat is still worth a look.

The inclusion of the three short stories, and especially Jailbait Girl, is enough to bump this Hard Case Crime paperback up into the recommended category.

Jack Bechdolt’s The Torch

Jack Bechdolt’s novel The Torch was serialised in Argosy in 1920. The Torch has some claims to being a post-apocalyptic novel.

Jack Bechdolt (1884-1954) was an American who wrote a handful of science fiction novels and short stories.

The novel is purportedly written in the 32nd century and tells of the Dark Ages that followed the Great Disaster of the 1980s. Civilisation collapsed completely and the world sank into barbarism. The story takes place in the late 21st century.

The setting is Manhattan, Manhattan being a feudal kingdom surrounded by the hostile and savage Wild Folk. Manhattan is ruled by a ruthless elite served by a slave class. Traces of a once great civilisation still survive on the island but the current level of technology is distinctly mediæval. There is no electricity. There are no cars or railways. There do not even seem to be firearms.

Captain Fortune is an ambitious young officer in the service of the Towerman of Manhattan. The current Towerman is Wolff, well-meaning but weak. On his death his daughter Alda will succeed him but of course it is a certainty that the real power will be in the hands of her husband. She does not yet have a husband but there are powerful men anxious to step into that role.

There is much intrigue and treachery afoot.

Fortune is very ambitious indeed and his ethics are decidedly flexible. He is aiming for power. It seems likely that Alda will be the key to that power. He might perhaps aspire to be the power behind the throne. He might even aspire to be her husband and consort and effective ruler. There are no limits to the dreams of a man who is both ambitious and young. And Alda certainly seems to be taking a close interest in him.

In the meantime he has another woman on his mind. A young woman he met just once, on a tiny island. It’s the island where the half-ruined statue of the Great Woman stands. The young woman is Mary and Fortune soon discovers some disturbing things but her. The most disturbing is that she is one of the leaders of a dangerous bands of revolutionaries aiming to overthrow the Towerman’s regime.

Fortune is soon deeply enmeshed in intrigue and dealing with all manner of divided loyalties. Whichever way he jumps he will be guilty of betrayal. He has become quite skilled in the art of treachery but he has also made the disquieting discovery that he has a conscience. He becomes increasingly troubled and confused.

Much of the action takes place in the mysterious network of tunnels underneath Manhattan. No-one knows what mysterious purpose they once served.They are of course the remains of the subways.

There’s lots of symbolic significance to that statue of the Great Woman. Her arm has long since gone. It is believed she once held something in that arm. Some say it was a sword but most people think it was a torch. The torch serves throughout the book as a heavy-handed symbol of freedom and revolution.

There’s a reasonable allowance of action scenes.

The plot is fairly standard - a ruthless elite lording it over the oppressed masses who are planning rebellion and a hero faced with difficult choices. It’s perhaps just too standard and therefore too predictable.

Do you have to remember that this novel was written in 1920. Some of the things in this tale that now seem like clichés had not yet become clichés. The idea of an elite class and a slave under-class does go back to at least 1895, to the H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine.

Fortune is at least a moderately interesting hero with a very definite dark side. The leaders of the revolution, Mary and Zorn, are a bit too idealised. Alda is a reasonable beautiful but evil queen type of figure.

The Torch is mostly interesting as an early example of the post-apocalyptic genre that was just starting to become popular. It’s reasonable entertainment and it’s worth a look if that genre interests you.

I’ve reviewed several other early post-apocalyptic and end-of-the-world novels, such as The Sixth Glacier by Marius from 1929 and J. J. Connington’s provocative Nordenholt’s Million from 1923.

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.

Malko 2: Operation New York

Malko 2: Operation New York is one of the few Malko spy thrillers by Gerard de Villiers that have been given an English translation. It was originally published in French in 1968 as Magie Noire à New York. The English translation dates from 1970.

The hero of this espionage 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 works on a semi-official basis for the C.I.A. - semi-official because the C.I.A. does love plausible deniability and the jobs they give Malko are usually even more illegal, unconstitutional and immoral than their regular activities.

Malko regards the C.I.A. with a certain amount of sophisticated European aristocratic contempt. But they pay well, and Malko owns a castle and castles are very expensive to maintain. Malko is trustworthy but totally non-ideological. He is not interested in causes. He is interested in money and women. And the women who attract Malko’s eye also tend to be very expensive to maintain.

As his book opens Malko has no active case on which to work and he’s enjoying himself in New York City. He’s also enjoying Sabrina. Sabrina is rich and gorgeous and breathtakingly uninhibited in bed. She’s Malko’s kind of girl. Unfortunately Malko has walked into a honey trap. Sabrina really was too good to be true. She is a Soviet spy, working for the GRU.

It’s an interesting variation on the basic honey trap theme. Malko will be blackmailed into working for the Soviets but in such a way that he cannot call on the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. for help, not even unofficially. He has been set up so that he appears to be a war criminal on the run. A war criminal named Rudi Guern. He has been set up so cleverly that proving that he is not Rudi Giern would be very difficult indeed.

His only way out is to find and expose the real Rudi Guern. Guern was supposed to have been killed in 1945 but it’s now obvious to Malko that Guern is still alive.

Obviously the Soviets will do everything possible to stop Malko from finding Guern. Malko will have to make contact with ODESSA, the underground organisation of former war criminals. If they find out what Malko is up to they will kill him, very unpleasantly. And Malko has an Israeli hit squad on his trail as well. 

Malko will have some narrow escapes from death and will have to endure various beatings and torture.

Despite the book’s title the action takes place mostly in Germany, and at sea on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean.

Of course Malko encounters quite a few beautiful, dangerous and possibly treacherous women. He goes to bed with all three. Malko often has to sleep with gorgeous women in the line of duty. It’s a duty he accepts without complaint. The most interesting of the three is Phoebe. She’s the craziest. She likes to be whipped. Malko is not into that sort of thing but he’ll do anything to please a lady.

The three women are all different and all interesting and colourful. Malko’s feelings for these women are complex. He tries to avoid emotional entanglements but sometimes, much to his alarm, he discovers that he actually cares about them.

Malko is basically a decent guy doing a dirty job. He doesn’t enjoy torturing people. He leaves that sort of thing to his faithful manservant, a retired Turkish professional assassin. Malko hates to see innocent bystanders get hurt. He doesn’t mind if bad guys get hurt. They’re professionals and they know the risks of the job. Sometimes innocent bystanders do get hurt. When that happens it’s a tough break.

Malko is not a conscienceless killer but he has no illusions about his job. His job sometimes involves doing bad things but the pay is good. Sometimes the jobs do trouble his conscience.

The Malko novels get very dark and very cynical at times. People get hurt very badly and sometimes they’re people who don’t deserve it. The world of espionage is cruel and vicious. It’s not a civilised game for gentlemen.

These novels manage to be enjoyably pulpy and at the same time fairly intelligent spy thrillers. There’s a lot more moral complexity than you will find in most American pulp spy series of that era. Malko 2: Operation New York is an above-average spy novel that can be highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several other Malko novels - West of Jerusalem, The Man from Kabul and Angel of Vengeance.