Donald Hamilton's The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew was the second of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novels. Matt Helm is a US spy, he works for an ultra-secret intelligence agency, his boss is named Mac and he uses his work as a photographer as a cover. Those are the only real resemblances between the novel and the movie of the same name, in fact they’re the only resemblances between the Matt Helm novels as a whole and the Matt Helm movies.

Not only is the plot entirely different, the tone of the novel is a million miles away from that of the films. The Matt Helm novels were intended as serious hardboiled spy stories and on that level they work pretty well. They were obviously influenced by the success of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels - there’s plenty of sex, plenty of violence and also plenty of glamour. Both Fleming and Hamilton were surprisingly successful in combining glamour with hard-edged and often brutal stories. Hamilton’s novels might not be quite as good as Fleming’s but they’re certainly not without interest.

The early novels in this series have to be read in sequence. Matt Helm had been a wartime operative (with the code-name Eric) for a very hush-hush US agency that the Germans nicknamed the Mordgruppe. They were also known in some quarters as the Wrecking Crew. Their boss was known only as Mac. They operated behind enemy lines and their speciality was assassination. After the war Helm retired into civilian life, moved to New Mexico, married and had a family and made a living as both a photographer and an author of western novels. How he came to find himself working for Mac’s outfit again well over a decade later is told in considerable detail in the first novel in the series, Death of a Citizen. That novel provides essential and detailed background information on the kind of man Matt Helm is and on his wartime career and the beginnings of his new career as a Cold War spy.

The Wrecking Crew sees Helm is Sweden, tracking a shadowy Soviet agent named Caselius. An American journalist named Taylor had uncovered some facts about this Soviet spy and as a result had been gunned down with a machine pistol in East Germany. His wife Louise survived the attack and she’s now the best lead they have. She’s writing an article about industrial and mining developments in northern Sweden for a magazine so Helm is off to Sweden where he will be taking the photographs to accompany the article. His mission is to kill Caselius.

There’s no namby-pamby nonsense about bringing Caselius to justice. Mac’s agency doesn’t work that way. They deal with people who are much too dangerous to be allowed to live. Helm accepts this as part of his job. He killed in the cause of freedom during the war and he sees no problem in killing in the cause of freedom in this new undeclared war, the Cold War. The stakes are just as high, the dangers are just as real, and his targets are just as much of a threat to civilisation.

Helm got the assignment because his cover as a photographer is perfect for the job and he speaks Swedish (he is in fact of Swedish ancestry).

First Matt has to make contact with the resident American intelligence agent in Sweden, or rather she makes contact with him. Sara Lundgren doesn’t like Helm and she doesn’t approve of his methods. Working with her is going to be a challenge. Working with Louise Taylor will be a challenge of a different sort. Both are, in their very different ways, dangerous women. And they’re not the only dangerous women Matt will encounter. There’s also Elin, a very very distant cousin of his.
 
Helm will also encounter some very dangerous men, some of whom may or may not be on his side. In fact it becomes more and more difficult to tell who is on his side. Everyone seems to have their own agenda and everyone he meets could turn out to be really working for the Russians. The ones who are simply working for the Soviets aren’t the problem. Much more difficult are the people with personal agendas. Most difficult of all are the starry-eyed idealists who think they are saving the world. Matt doesn’t trust anyone who thinks they are saving the world, and it’s a sound policy.

Matt Helm is a professional assassin and he’s a tough guy. He has his own personal problems to deal with and compared to many fictional secret agents he’s a remarkably well-rounded character. He has a personal life and he has emotions, and he doesn’t always enjoy the things he has to do. He is not troubled by killing; he believes that the people he kills are being killed for good reasons and he doesn’t lose any sleep over it. He’s not a conscienceless killer; he simply believes that sometimes it is necessary. But in operations of this kind other people can get killed as well, and that does sometimes bother him.

These novels lack the kind of tedious nihilistic cynicism that started to afflict spy fiction during the 60s. They don’t have that “both sides are just as bad as each other” kind of attitude. Matt Helm moves in a world where there are good guys and bad guys. The good guys aren’t perfect but they’re still the good guys and the bad guys aren’t necessarily psychopathic monsters but they’re still the bad guys. Personally I find that refreshing.

It has other things going for it, but most all all, The Wrecking Crew is fast-paced action-filled fun. Recommended, but if you read Death of a Citizen first you’ll appreciate The Wrecking Crew even more.

S. S. Van Dine’s The Scarab Murder Case

The Scarab Murder Case, published in 1929, was the fifth of S. S. Van Dine’s twelve Philo Vance mysteries. This one has, as the title suggests, an Egyptology background to it. I’m a sucker for anything to do with Egyptology and since I’ve loved the other Philo Vance books I’ve read it was pretty near a dead set certainty that I’d love this one. Which I did.

The very wealthy Benjamin H. Kyle is found murdered with his skull crushed by a statue of the Egyptian goddess Sakhmet. Kyle owned two adjoining brownstones in East Twentieth Street in New York. One of the houses had been converted into a museum of Egyptian antiquities, under the directorship of Dr Mindrum W. C. Bliss. Kyle’s body was found in the museum. The other house, the one next door to the museum, is occupied by Dr Bliss, his half-Egyptian wife, an old family retainer of Mrs Bliss’s named Hani and Kyle’s nephew Salveter. The body was discovered by Donald Scarlett, an Englishman and an amateur Egyptologist who had acted as a technical adviser on most of Dr Bliss’s archaeological digs.

In true golden age detective style we have been introduced to all the possible suspects within the first few pages, and any one of the characters enumerated above could have had both motive and opportunity for killing Mr Kyle. The obvious evidence points to Dr Bliss and both the District Attorney John F.-X. Markham and Sergeant Heath of the Homicide Bureau (characters who appear in virtually all the Philo Vance novels) are inclined to make an early arrest, but Markham’s old friend and frequent colleague, the brilliant amateur detective Philo Vance, has a deep and abiding suspicion of obvious evidence. He persuades Markham and Heath to hold off.

It soon becomes obvious that the evidence is less clear-cut than first appeared and it will take all Philo Vance’s talents to unravel this mystery.

This is classic, almost textbook, golden age detective fiction. The plotting is ingenious and fiendishly convoluted. The characters are colourful enough but in this type of detective fiction characterisation takes a back seat to the working out of the puzzle at the heart of the book. And this one has an undeniably clever puzzle, leading on to a very clever and somewhat surprising conclusion (surprising not in terms of the identity of the murderer so much as the manner in which the said murderer is brought to justice).

Whether you actually enjoy the book or not depends almost entirely on how you feel about Philo Vance. If you find him insufferable, and many people do, you will this book a chore to get through. If, like me, you simply adore Philo Vance then you’ll find the book to be an absolute delight. If you haven’t read any of the Philo Vance mysteries I’d be inclined to recommend that you start with the first of them, The Benson Murder Case, and then work through them in chronological order.

John Buchan’s The Power-House

John Buchan’s The Power-House precedes The Thirty-Nine Steps, the first of his Richard Hannay novels, by two years. It was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1913 and was published in book form in 1916. Like the Hannay novels it is a spy novel, although it is really little more than a novella.

The book features another Buchan hero, the barrister Sir Edward Leithen. What makes it interesting is that Leithen is most definitely not a man of action. He describes himself as a sedentary, settled sort of man and that’s what he is. He has rarely been out of London, and has never ventured further afield than Monte Carlo. In a spy novel you expect exotic locations and this novella provides them, but curiously enough the hero never leaves London apart for a brief foray which takes him no further than Dorset.

The novel does provide us with a fairly memorable diabolical criminal mastermind in the person of Edward Lumley. Lumley is a man in his 60s, a collector of old Wedgewood and a keen bibliophile and scholar. He is an urbane and civilised man but he heads an organisation known as the Power-House, an organisation that threatens the very existence of western civilisation.

Like many of the heroes of early spy fiction Sir Edward Leithen is drawn into the world of espionage by accident and against his will, although he has to admit that he rather enjoys himself. Leithen is a rising barrister and a Member of Parliament. It’s fitting that Buchan should choose a politician as his hero given that Buchan himself had an active career in politics which culminated in his appointment as Governor-General of Canada as the first Baron Tweedsmuir. 

Leithen’s pal Tommy Deloraine, also an MP, tells him of the strange behaviour of their old friend Charles Pitt-Heron. Pitt-Heron has suddenly converted a room in his house into a laboratory, has remained closeted in the laboratory performing mysterious experiments, and has then abruptly vanished. Tommy is convinced that there is something fishy going on, that Pitt-Heron has become involved, probably unwittingly (since he is a decent fellow), in something foolhardy and possibly even sinister. Tommy believes Pitt-Heron is in Moscow and sets off to find him.

While Tommy is off in foreign parts Leithen is becoming more and more heavily involved, mostly through a chain of coincidences which seem to keep leading him to an old gentleman named Edward Lumley. Lumley is clearly an educated and cultured man, a connoisseur of the arts, but there is something about him that suggests to Leithen that he may be very dangerous indeed. Lumley’s ideas quite frankly terrify Leithen. Leithen also finds that the trail leads to a sinister international organisation know as the Power-House.

Tommy follows Pitt-Heron’s trail to Bokhara but although he imagines that this is his adventure the crucial events of the story will unfold in London, and it is the sedentary Leithen who will be the hero of the hour.

Interestingly, given that Buchan was a staunch Tory, Leithen’s main ally in the struggle against the Power-House is a patriotic and courageous Labour MP.

This is in many ways typical Edwardian spy fiction, but told with Buchan’s inimitable style and verve. Sir Edward Leithen is an unconventional spy fiction hero, certainly not an action  hero like Richard Hannay, but that’s part of the charm of this short novel. Highly recommended.

Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible

A spacecraft lands on a distant planet, in search of answers to the mysterious disappearance of an earlier spacecraft and its crew.  At first the planet seems relatively benign.  They soon notice a few puzzling things, but nothing that seems likely to be really threatening.  But the puzzling things become more puzzling, and they start to realise they’re in the presence of something very alien indeed.

Stanislaw Lem’s The Invincible, published in 1964, explores similar themes to Lem’s better-known novel Solaris. Lem had a gift for creating aliens that are truly alien, so alien that we’re not even sure that they’re actually alive in the sense that we understand the word. They are so alien that any kind of communication with them is virtually impossible. They appear to be intelligent, but it is intelligence of a kind that we can never hope to understand. Their intelligence is not necessarily superior to ours, it's simply different in the most profound way.

It’s a gripping read, very disturbing. This is superb ideas-based science fiction.

H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau

I think this novel by H. G. Wells, published in 1896, holds up remarkably well, probably better than his other SF novels, and it’s still relevant.  Wells tackles the issue of what it is that makes us human with skill and subtlety.  It’s also one of those “warnings against the misuse of science” novels, but then science has been misused and will no doubt be misused again. 

A man is shipwrecked and finds himself on an island where strange things are going on. The mysterious Dr Moreau has a laboratory there but he’s rather secretive about his work. In fact he’s working on transforming animals into people by means of surgery and conditioning. The beast-men he has created are caught between two worlds, the world of animals and the world of men. The results are tragic.

Many of Wells’ novels and stories are ruined by his rather silly political beliefs but fortunately that is not the case with this book.

It’s also a rather moving story – you can’t help feeling sympathy for the unfortunate beast-men.  Are we not men?

Star, or Psi Cassiopea

Star, or Psi Cassiopea may not be the first science fiction novel (Cyrano de Bergerac’s Journey to the Moon, published in 1657, has the best claim to that honour) but it is surely a strong candidate for the title of the first space opera. C. I. Defontenay wrote this extraordinary book in 1854.

It certainly has an epic sweep to it. It opens with a Himalayan explorer witnessing an asteroid crashing into the mountains, killing his companion. But this is no asteroid. It is part of a spaceship, propelled by a catastrophic explosion to the far side of the galaxy. The explorer finds an amazing manuscript in the wreckage. After much effort he deciphers the document. It is nothing less than the history of an alien civilisation, a civilisation from the star Psi Cassiopea.

These aliens referred to their planet, rather confusingly, as Star. There were actually two intelligent races on this planet, one species very like ours and another inferior species more like an ape but with close to human intelligence.

The civilisation of Star had more than its share of ups and downs. At one point a plague followed by a suicidal mania almost entirely destroyed the superior species. The few survivors took refuge in gigantic spaceship called abares. These were more like artificial asteroids than anything we think of as a spacecraft. The lesser species, the repleu, then dominated the planet for centuries, spending most of their time slaughtering each other and indulging in drunkenness and debauchery. The superior species, the Starians, meanwhile colonised the satellites of Star.

The descriptions of the strange cultures of these strange satellite worlds comprises the most interesting part of the novel. And Defontenay certainly did not lack imagination. One of these satellites is a transparent world, inhabited by transparent creatures.

Science fiction often has more to say about the era in which it was written than about the future and this novel certainly reflects the author’s thoughts on subjects like the rising tide of socialism, colonialism and fears of the decay of civilised values.

While it has to be admitted that Defontenay had remarkable powers of invention and a fund of interesting ideas the sad truth is that this is a rather dull novel. And I say this as someone who is a huge fan of 19th century French science fiction.

There are two main problems with this book. The first is the author’s habit of including large samples on Starian literature. Apart from a wealth of poetry there are several complete short plays! While this is an impressive example of world-building it does not make for easy reading.

The second problem is even more serious. This is more of an imaginary history than a novel. There is no central character with whom we can identify and no narrative drive. While an imaginary history spanning thousands of years is an awesome achievement, the result is more than somewhat turgid.

Of course those readers who value world-building more highly than I do may find all this more entertaining than I did.

Star, or Psi Cassiopea remains an important early step in the development of the science fiction genre but it cannot be recommended as an entertaining read.

Mr Denning Drives North

Mr Denning Drives North is an unjustly forgotten classic of British crime fiction. Written by Alec Coppel in 1951, it can be seen as a variation on the inverted detective story.  We know right from the start who the murderer is. What we don’t know is what his fate will be.

None of what I am about to tell you constitutes a spoiler. This is all just the set-up and it all happens very early in the book. The suspense will come later, and there will be plenty of it, and many many ingenious plot twists.

Tom Denning is a very successful businessman. He is an aircraft designer who owns his own aircraft factory. He is happily married and has a daughter with whom he gets on well. Tom has everything a man could want. So why does he deliberately try to crash his plane into the ground?

The answer to that is that he is haunted by a murder he committed. Not that he feels any regret for the murder itself. He believes the man he killed deserved to die. And it was not even murder, not really. He didn’t mean to actually kill the man, although he’s glad that he did. What haunts Tom Denning is the wait for the knock on the door from the police. What haunts him even more is that the body has not been found, even though he went to elaborate lengths to ensure that it would be found. He put great care into staging a mock accident, believing he had been careful enough to make it look convincing. But what Tom Denning was relying on was that the body would quickly be found, the coroner would bring in a verdict of accidental death, and he could then get on with his life.

It all seemed so easy. But every day he scans the newspapers, and there is no mention of any body being found. Finally he can’t stand it any longer. He returns to the scene of the “accident” but the body has gone. But if the body has gone, how to explain the fact that nobody has discovered it?

Weeks go by, and nothing happens, while Tom goes slowly mad. Of course eventually something does happen but the subsequent course of events is unexpected as Coppel spins a series of clever plot twists that keeps the tension building right up to the very last page. Tom will try to unravel the mystery, so we have an amateur detective who is in fact trying to find the solution to a murder he himself committed. As he tries to solve the puzzle his nightmare just keeps finding new ways to torture him.

There is plenty of irony in this tale. Tom is in fact guilty of nothing more than manslaughter and given his previously unblemished character and various extenuating circumstances the worst he could have expected was a short prison term. But Tom had to act to protect his daughter, and in trying to make the killing look like an accident he has only succeeded in making it look like cold-blooded premeditated murder. Now if he is caught he will hang. Tom is caught in a trap of his own devising. And not knowing if he will eventually be caught  or not adds an exquisite touch of torture to the whole situation.

The plotting is masterful but this novel has more than clever plotting going for it. We have a murderer who is the hero of the book and he’s a sympathetic character. We can’t help hoping he gets away with it, but we won’t know until the final page whether he does or not. It’s a fascinating character study of a man under extreme stress. Coppel’s style is pleasing and this really is a delightfully wicked and clever crime story.

Coppel adapted his own novel for a 1952 film version starring Sir John Mills, and the movie is well worth tracking down as well. The novel and the movie are sufficiently different to make both well worth the effort of finding them.