Desmond Cory’s Hammerhead

Hammerhead (published in the United States as Shockwave) was the thirteenth of Desmond Cory’s sixteen Johnny Fedora spy thrillers. It was published in 1963. Hammerhead forms parts of a five-novel cycle dealing with Johnny Fedora’s battles with a top Soviet spymaster named Feramontov.

Shaun Lloyd McCarthy (1928-2001) was an English academic who was also a successful thriller writer. He was best-known for the Johnny Fedora books.

Johnny Fedora is half Spanish and half Irish. He is an agent for the British Secret Service and it’s understood that if he feels it necessary to kill in the line of duty than that’s quite acceptable. A series of thrillers about a British spy with a licence to kill is obviously going to sound like a rip-off of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels but in fact Cory got there first. The first Johnny Fedora novel was published in 1951, a year before the first of the Bond novels. I don’t think it’s a case of one writer influencing the other. In the postwar period readers’ tastes had changed and it was obvious that the spy thriller was going to become more violent and action-oriented. Desmond Cory and Ian Fleming simply happened to realise that before other writers did.

And Cory certainly knew how to deliver violence and action. Johnny Fedora is pretty ruthless. He’s quite happy to use torture to extract information and in this story he kills a man, chops him up into little pieces and stuffs the dismembered body parts into a suitcase. It’s not a good idea to get Johnny upset.

Hammerhead takes place in Franco’s Spain. begins with Johnny receiving a request for help from the glamorous Marisa de Camba. She wants him to investigate the death of actress Sofia Domecq. Sofia had gone to a journalist named Delgado with some startling allegations about a very rich very powerful man named Chaval. The whole story seems odd, which interests Johnny. The British Secret Service is also interested. Those allegations involves drug-smuggling but more to the point there’s the suggestion that American military personnel are mixed up in it. The sort of military personnel who fly nuclear-armed bombers.

Johnny decides he’ll have to infiltrate Chaval’s social circles. He wants to attend one of Chaval’s parties. He’ll need some help. He gets that help from Sofia Domecq’s sister Carlota, a very high-priced prostitute. Chaval’s parties are the sorts of parties at which high-class hookers are welcome.

When Johnny finds out just what Operation Hammerhead really is he realises he’s stumbled onto something very big indeed. Nobody is going to believe him without evidence. He has the evidence, but whether he can hold on top it is another matter.

The plot twists and turns in a satisfying manner. This is a spy thriller and spies can never be sure whom to trust. Even the bad guys can’t be sure about that.

This story is perhaps just a bit more violet than the Bond novels, but with less emphasis on sex. There is Carlota, and she qualifies as the kind of sexy dangerous female you hope for in a spy novel.

There’s a race against time aspect, always good for adding a bit more tension. And it’s not just that Johnny is running out of time to find the key to the problem. He doesn’t even know what it is he’s looking for and he has no idea where to look. All he knows is that he has to find it, fast. There’s a very effective nail-biting climax.

Johnny Fedora is a bit Bond-like but he’s less of a womaniser and he’s much more ruthless. In fact he’s closer to the Matt Helm of Donald Hamilton’s novels than he is to Bond. The overall tone is also very close to that of the Matt Helm books, although Cory is not as successful as Hamilton in showing us the personal consequences of immersion in the vicious world of espionage.

This is a classic Cold War spy thriller with a straightforward Good Guys vs Bad Guys theme. It is extremely well executed and it offers more than sufficient quantities thrills and suspense. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the previous Johnny Fedora book, Undertow. It’s also very much worth reading.

The Avengers - Dead Duck

Dead Duck is an original novel published in 1966 and based on the television series The Avengers. 

It was credited to Patrick Macnee although it seems to have been written by Peter Leslie (who wrote some very decent TV tie-in novels).

It’s an engagingly offbeat story with a fine crazy finale. It captures the feel of the series reasonably well. Fans of the TV series should enjoy this novel.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Loring Brent's The City of Stolen Lives

The City of Stolen Lives is Altus Press’s first collection of Peter the Brazen stories by Loring Brent. Brent was actually George F. Worts (1892-1967) who wrote pulp fiction under several pen-names and later wrote for slick magazines as well. This collection includes three Peter the Brazen stories originally published in the pulp magazine Argosy late in 1918.

Peter Moore, who becomes known as Peter the Brazen, is a wireless operator on a ship. Worts himself had worked in such a capacity and it seemed like an interesting and promising occupation for the hero of a series of adventure tales set in the East. In 1918 radio was still a new and exciting technology.

Princess of Static, published in Argosy in October 1918, is the first of the Peter the Brazen stories.

Peter Moore has decided to give up his position as a ship’s radio operator. He changes his mind after a strange encounter in Chinatown. A woman’s face glimpsed in a window and a scrawled message lead him to think that something odd is going on and that a woman may be in danger.

He sets sail on the Vandalia, bound for Shanghai. Two women come aboard at the last moment. Moore picks up some odd wireless signals and some unexpected static. Static is never unexpected, but this seems different somehow. And then there’s the matter of stateroom 44. It’s empty, but he knows it can’t be.

The plot, as it is gradually revealed, is very simple and straightforward but it’s enough for an adventure short story. There’s a reasonably effective atmosphere of menace and mystery. And radio does play a key part in the story.

The novella The City of Stolen Lives, dating from late 1918, is a follow-up to Princess of Static. As a result of the events in that story Peter Moore has acquired a mission in life, and a deadly enemy. The enemy is a man known as the Grey Dragon.

After meeting, quite by accident, a young American woman named Amy Vost, Peter takes a job as radio operator on a river steamer. The skipper is an old friend, Bobbie MacLaurin. Bobbie is hopelessly in love with Amy Vost. Peter is enchanted by Amy but his heart belongs to another.

Amy is one of two passengers on the river steamer Hankow.

Once again radio plays a key rôle. Peter picks up a message on a wavelength that nobody ever uses, if fact in normal circumstances nobody can use it. But for some odd reason the Hankow has the equipment to receive such a signal. The messages are cryptic, to say the least. They do however seem to be decidedly sinister.

Again the author doesn’t go in for excessively complicated plotting. He keeps the action moving along and ensures that Peter Moore will have countless dangers to face in the fulfilment of his quest.

The novella Bitter Fountain seems a bit more ambitious. Peter gets involved with two more women and they might perhaps be of the femme fatale type. Romola Borria claims to be in need of help, which may be true. Or there might be more to it. She might be an unwitting pawn of the Grey Dragon. She might be an all-too-willing servant of that mysterious sinister figure. She might be a clever schemer with her own agenda. Or she might really be an innocent damsel in distress. Peter is fairly hopeless when it comes to pretty women. He’s always wanting to rescue them.

Having mysterious possibly dangerous female characters makes this a much stronger story. There’s also more of a sense in this story that Peter really could have embroiled himself in something truly nasty that he doesn’t fully understand.

Once again much of the action takes place at sea and having the protagonist a radio expert is still important.

These stories are not quite in the same league as Theodore Roscoe’s Far East adventure tales but they move along at a brisk clip, there’s plenty of action and there’s a suitably sinister villain. I believe that Peter Moore’s battles with the Grey Dragon continued in several further stories. The three stories in this collection are so closely linked that they can be regarded more as a long episodic novel.

Peter is a likeable enough hero and he’s no superhero. He makes a few mistakes. He’s impetuous. His judgment is terrible when it comes to women. He’s brave and determined but we worry about his fate because we know he’s far from invulnerable. Romola Borria is glamorous and nicely ambiguous.

There’s some fine use of the shipboard settings. On the whole this is a collection that should please fans of pulp adventure fiction. There are better such stories but these offer a good deal of enjoyment. Recommended.

Noël Calef’s Frantic (Ascenseur pour ‘échafaud)

Noël Calef’s Frantic (original French title Ascenseur pour ’échafaud) was published in 1956. Frantic was the title given to the English translation. Louis Malle’s 1958 film adaptation (called Elevator to the Gallows in the US and Lift to the Scaffold in Britain) is better known than Calef’s original novel.

Noël Calef (1907-1968) was born Nissim Calef in Bulgaria. He spent his writing career in France, enjoying some success. Several of his novels and stories were filmed, including his short story Rodolphe et le Revolver which was the basis of the superb 1959 British thriller Tiger Bay starring Hayley Mills.

The book could perhaps with some justice be described as an inverted detective story. We start with a murder and the reader knows the identity of the victim and the identity of the killer. Inverted detective stories focus on the way in which the detective solves the murder but this novel has some other twists that make it classic noir fiction as well.

Frantic can reasonably be described as noir fiction with some added existentialist tinges.

It starts with the perfect crime. A perfect murder is quite possible but alas there is no such thing as a perfect murderer. No matter how clever a plan the murderer comes up with, when it comes to putting it into practice he or she will invariably make a mistake. In this case the plan comes undone partly due to such a mistake. The murderer knows that all traces of the crime have to be removed but leaves one trace behind due to forgetfulness under stress. The plan also goes awry partly through bad luck. It was that damned elevator. If the power to the elevator hadn’t been shut off when the janitor locked up the building for the night all would have been well.

There are several other crimes in this book that are from perfect. A murderer who thinks he’s a superior man but turns out to be an amateur and a bungler. And a man who thinks he has the answer to his marital problems but doesn’t consider the possibility that his wife has already figured out what he’s up to.

There are as many doomed characters as any noir fiction fan could ask for. There’s Julien Courvois, the crooked businessman who decides to take a drastic step to get himself out of a jam but makes a mess of his plans. There’s Fred. He’s a kind of proto-beatnik. He thinks he’s a genius who is going to show the hated bourgeoisie a thing or two but he’s a loser who blames society for his own inadequacies. And there’s Pedro, the Brazilian whose wife has become an inconvenience. None of these men could be described as tragic. They’re responsible for all their own troubles. And none of them could be described as sympathetic.

Each of the men has a woman and the women are perhaps less responsible for the mess their lives have become. There’s Julien’s wife Geneviève, Fred’s girlfriend Theresa and Pedro’s French wife Germaine. Geneviève and Theresa are guilty of very poor judgment when it comes to choosing men. They don’t really deserve to be destroyed for that reason. Maybe the women won’t be destroyed by their men seem hopelessly doomed.

So these are characters doomed by a combination of their own inherent character flaws and the inexorable workings of fate.

The plot is full of nasty little pieces of misfortune. Pedro picked the wrong hotel. Fred picked the wrong car to steal. Julien left it just a few minutes too late to go back to his offie to remove the piece of evidence he’s overlooked earlier. A few minutes earlier and he could have escaped scot-free.

It’s an intricate plot and it’s extremely well executed. The major twist (which I’m certainly not going to reveal) has been used before but in this case it’s done very neatly and very nastily.

If the novel has a weakness it’s the fact that it’s very difficult to care what happens to these people. Even the victim characters are not sympathetic. Theresa isn’t a bad person but she’s such a fool that the reader is likely to lose patience with her. As far as most of these people are concerned the reader is likely to feel that they’re getting what was coming to them.

On the plus side Frantic has a great deal of noirness, there’s fine suspense, a powerful sense of impending doom and the plot is a good one. Noir and mystery fans should both enjoy this one. Highly recommended.

Frantic has been reprinted in paperback by Stark House in their excellent Black Gat Books imprint.

Murray Leinster's The Invaders

The Invaders is a 1953 novella (at a stretch you could call it a short novel) by Murray Leinster (1896-1975). Leinster is a science fiction writer who deserves a lot more attention.

The Invaders is (obviously) an alien invasion story. This was 1953, with the UFO craze getting into top gear, and the saucer-shaped alien spacecraft are clearly an attempt to cash in on this. It’s also a story with obvious resemblances to Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Heinlein’s novel was published in 1951 and Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers appeared in 1954. The aliens in The Invaders look just like us. They’re totally non-human but they can make themselves look thoroughly human.

The Invaders, like Heinlein’s and Finney’s novels, has something of a Cold War atmosphere.

The Invaders begins in Greece. Coburn is an American. He witnesses a Bulgarian raid into Greek territory. It’s not a full-scale invasion but it’s a large-scale raid intended to provoke the Greeks. Coburn runs into a British reporter named Dillon and a pretty American girl named Janice. What Coburn witnesses is extremely puzzling. In fact it just doesn’t seem possible.

Coburn finds that he can draw only one conclusion. There are alien invaders on Earth. Aliens from outer space. But is it likely that anyone will believe him?

This is of course a setup that has been used countless times. The hero knows the truth but can’t get anyone to listen to him. This book does however throw in a twist. It’s not Coburn’s veracity that comes under question, but his motivations.

The question of course is the intention of the aliens. Coburn has no doubts about this. They want to take over the Earth.

The aliens have other advantages aside from their ability to look human. They have highly advanced technology. The latest American fighter jets are helpless against therm. The latest guided missiles are of no use.

Coburn has one factor on his side. He has figured out a way to recognise the aliens.

It all sounds like a thoroughly conventional alien invasion story but Leinster wasn’t interested in just churning out completely predictable pulp science fiction. He has some plot twists up his sleeve. The motivations of the aliens remain nicely mysterious. The outcome of the confrontation between Earth and an alien civilisation remains in doubt until the very end.

There’s some action, and it doesn’t always play out predictably.

The Cold War angle adds further complications.

This might not be one of the great alien invasion stories but it holds a fair bit of interest and it captures some of the mood of the time, when people first started seriously considering the possibility of extraterrestrial life and were starting to speculate about the forms such life might take, and the potentially momentous consequences of contact with alien cultures. Plenty of alien invasion stories had been written before this time but the early 50s was the time that aliens started to seem like maybe they might be more than science fiction.

Not quite a neglected classic, but worth a look.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Laurence Manning’s World of the Mist (which is quite good) in one of their two-novel paperback editions.

The Del Rey paperback collection The Best of Murray Leinster includes most of his notable short stories and is very much worth getting hold of.

Ian MacAlister's Valley of the Assassins

Valley of the Assassins from 1975 was the last of the four thrillers written by Marvin Albert under the name Ian MacAlister and published by Fawcett Gold Medal.

Marvin Albert (1924-1996) was an American who wrote both adventure and crime thrillers.

Rick Larson is heading through the Persian Gulf in his cabin cruiser when he comes across three dead men on a reef. Except that one of them isn’t dead. Larson is no philanthropist but he is a sailor. He can’t leave the guy there so he rescues him. The guy is a Persian. And he has a map. The map ends up in Larson’s possession. It’s a strange map. It will need interpreting.

Larson has a friend who’s a scholar and his interpretation of the map is extraordinary. That map holds the key to the lost treasure of the Assassins. The assassins being a combination of religious cultists and murderous gangsters. The order was founded in 1072 and brutally suppressed a few centuries later. The order no longer exists. At least it’s believed that it no longer exists.

Much of the treasure accumulated by the Assassins in their mountain lair at Alamut was hidden somewhere in the Arabian desert. There’s no way of finding it unless you have a map. Larson has a map. But you have to know how to make sense of the map. Larson thinks he can do just that.

He has a number of people helping him in his search for the treasure, and most of them are people he doesn’t want as partners and doesn’t trust. Men like the renegade Iraqi secret policeman Hammid and an arms dealer named Ivo. He does trust Church. He’s an old friend. He thinks he can trust Darra, maybe, up to a point. She’s a Kurdish guerrilla. The Kurds want the treasure to buy arms. He doesn’t really trust Jamil, another Kurdish guerrilla. But Larson doesn’t trust most people. That’s why he’s survived so long in such a dangerous part of the world.

What worries Rick Larson is that he isn’t being followed. It doesn’t make sense. He should have bad guys shadowing him, but they aren’t there. It’s very strange, especially since early on someone did try to kill him. A young man with a strange tattoo and a poisoned dagger.

The search for the treasure will take Larson to Alamut, and it will take these six people to the most remote and forbidding desert in the world. The desert itself will be a formidable enemy. There’s also the cheering news that Bedouin bandits have been active in the area recently and they can be very dangerous indeed.

In the 60s Alistair MacLean had established himself as the world’s foremost thriller writer. Naturally he had imitators. The best of the imitators was Gavin Lyall but Desmond Bagley was pretty good as well. It’s obvious (and his choice of pseudonym makes it even more obvious) that with his Ian McAlister novels Albert was setting himself up as yet another MacLean imitator. While he never achieved the reputation that Lyall and Bagley achieved I have to say that the Ian McAlister thrillers compare more than favourably with those writers.

He’s not as good as MacLean of course but he’s still very very good. Like MacLean he’s good with exotic and inhospitable settings which become almost characters in the books, and his plotting is very sound. The action sequences in Valley of the Assassins are excellent. The tension is built up very effectively.

Valley of the Assassins is quite simply an absolutely top-notch thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Driscoll’s Diamonds, the second of the Ian MacAlister adventure thrillers, and it’s excellent as well. And I’ve reviewed one of the Jake Barrow PI thrillers he wrote under the pseudonym Nick Quarry, No Chance in Hell, and it’s very good as well.

Nick Quarry's The Girl With No Place To Hide

Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996) was an American writer of pulp crime and adventure novels, some written under his own name and others under a host of pseudonyms. The Girl With No Place To Hide, published in 1959, was the second of his six Jake Barrow private eye thrillers written under the name Nick Quarry.

Hardbitten PI Jake Barrow sees a girl being beaten up and rescues her. She wants somewhere to hide out and thinks that Jake’s apartment would be a good place. The girl is Angela and she tells Jake that a couple of guys are trying to kill her and that they’ve already killed some guy named Ernie. Jake gets a call and he has to go out to attend to a case. He tells Angela to stay put.

Jake discovers he’s been decoyed out of the apartment. By the time he gets back Angela has gone. Maybe she just took a powder and maybe somebody snatched her.

Jake has no idea who this Ernie character is but the next day he finds out that a guy named Ernie really did turn up dead in an alleyway. Jake figures the matter is worth looking into. He did after all promise to protect Angela.

The trail leads Jake into the worlds of high fashion and photography and the murky world of high-stakes gambling. He also uncovers some juicy domestic dramas that might be motives for murder. And there might be a connection to another much earlier murder.

There are quite a few dames mixed up in this case. One of the dames, Lavinia, is a knife-thrower. That’s her profession. She worked a knife-throwing act in a carny. Another woman who seems to be mixed up in the case is Nel. She had been Ernie’s secretary and now someone is trying to kill her but she claims to know nothing that would cause someone to want to bump her off.

Of more immediate concern to Jake is the fact that someone is trying to bump him off.

There’s a decent well worked-out plot here with plenty of suspects and plenty of possible motives.

There’s also plenty of action with some moderately graphic (by 1959 standards) violence. And there’s as much sleazy paranoid noir atmosphere as anyone could reasonably demand. And you get quite a bit of hardboiled dialogue.

In this type of fiction the key was to get a good balance between plot and atmosphere and the author manages that very effectively in this instance.

Jake is definitely a tough guy PI. He most definitely does not like to be pushed around. He’s a pretty good guy overall and he doesn’t have much liking for people who go around terrorising, and murdering, women. In fact he doesn’t have much time for murderers. He’s not a Boy Scout. He’s not an outrageous womaniser but if a woman is willing then he won’t say no.

He likes money, he likes it a lot, but he likes to earn it honestly. He’s not self-righteous about it but he does have ethics. He does the right thing but he doesn’t make a song and dance about it.

Jake is a likeable enough and reasonably colourful hero.

Most of the women have the potential to turn out to be either innocent victims, innocent bystanders or scheming femmes fatales and Quarry keeps us guessing about every one of them.

It’s not exactly ground-breaking but overall this is a well-crafted noirish private eye thriller which provides very solid entertainment. Highly recommended. It's been reprinted by Black Gat Books.

I’ve reviewed another of the Jake Barrow PI novels, No Chance in Hell (which is also very good), and also one of the thrillers he wrote as Ian McAlister, Driscoll’s Diamonds (a terrific book).