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).

Norman Lindsay’s Age of Consent (1938 novel)

Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) was the one truly great painter that Australia produced (and he was arguably the finest painter of erotic art of the 20th century). While his fame rests mainly on his painting he was also a very successful writer. His novel Age of Consent was published in 1938.

Age of Consent was filmed in 1969. It was an Anglo-Australian co-production directed by Michael Powell and it’s a movie that deserves a lot more recognition.

Both novel and movie deal with a meeting between a painter and a young woman. She becomes his model, and his muse. In the novel Bradly Mudgett is forty years old and he’s broke. He’s always broke. He ekes out a precarious existence as a painter. In the movie he becomes Bradley Morahan, a much older man and an internationally acclaimed artist who decides to turn his back on the New York art world and return to his home country, Australia.

In the book Bradly rents a shack at a place called Margoola Beach. It’s primitive but it’s cheap and it’s isolated. Bradly does not like the company of people. He has his dog, Edmund. Edmund is more than enough company. The shack is surrounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by a lagoon. It’s not quite an island, but almost.

Bradly is slowly coming to realise that he’s reached a crisis in his career. He has never achieved anything approaching real success. He is afraid to take risks. He knows how to produce paintings that will sell for a few pounds. He has found a safe formula which is at least enough to keep starvation at bay.

Then he sees the girl. At first he’s horrified that there are other people in the vicinity of his hideaway. Then something about the girl strikes him. In the past he’s done nothing but landscapes. He hasn’t done figure work since he was a student. But now he thinks he wants to paint the girl. She seems to be the missing ingredient that will bring his paintings to life. She agrees to pose for him.

The girl is Cora. She’s almost feral. She lives with her foul-tempered gin-sodden grandmother. Cora is not exactly socialised. Like Bradly she doesn’t know how to deal with people. She is however a perfect model.

And he makes an amazing discovery. He is now painting pictures that are better than anything he’s ever done before. Much better. He is finally finding himself as a painter. And he’s starting to consider taking a few risks. He’s done a painting of Cora and he decides he’ll ask twenty pounds for this one. He’s not just doing good work. He’s doing work that he suspects will be saleable, at decent prices.

Then the first disaster strikes. Young Hodson shows up. Bradly had met him, briefly, in Jillabong. Now Hodson expects to be greeted like an old friend and he expects Bradly to put him up. Which is a problem. Bradly has just enough money to last him for a few months, precious months to spend painting. Now he has to feed Hodson as well. He can’t turn Hodson out. The police are after him. Bradly doesn’t have many principles but he dislikes the police and would never turn a man over to them. Not even an annoying pest like Hodson.

A bigger problem is Cora’s grandmother. She’s convinced that Cora is whoring herself out to Bradly. Cora is under-age. That gives the grandmother a lever with which to blackmail Bradly. In fact Bradly hasn’t laid a finger on the girl. She just poses for him. But Bradly is terrified of the grandmother’s threats.

This is of course (like the movie) a coming-of-age story. Cora is just becoming aware of herself as a woman. It’s all very confusing for her.

It’s also, in a way, a coming-of-age story for Bradly Mudgett. At the age of forty he knows nothing of women. His experiences with women have been confined to a few encounters with prostitutes. But Cora is getting under his skin. He thinks it’s just because she’s such a good model but unwittingly he’s getting used to having her around and he’s growing fond of her.

It’s also a story of an artist belatedly coming of age as an artist, slowly learning that maybe he is a real artist after all.

This is a very lighthearted semi-comic novel. It’s charming and throughly enjoyable and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed Michel Powell's very good movie adaptation here - Age of Consent (1969).

Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet

Poul Anderson’s science fiction novel Virgin Planet was published in 1959.

Poul Anderson (1926- 2001) was an incredibly prolific writer. He is of course best remembered for his science fiction but he wrote some superb fantasy (such as The Broken Sword) and in the early 50s produced some rather wonderful sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet stories.

Virgin Planet is set on a planet inhabited entirely by women. They are obviously human women. It appears that the original colonists were supposed to arrive in two spaceships, one carrying the men and one carrying the women. Only the ship carrying the women arrived. This happened a long time ago and the colonisation has become encrusted with legend. The women still believe that one day the Men will arrive. They look forward to that day is a kind of religious way, but with some uneasiness. They have only the vaguest idea of what a man is.

When a spacecraft is seen to land the women think that it might be the Men at last, but it could be Monsters. They also have fairly vague ideas about the Monsters but they know that the Monsters come from the stars and have dealings, sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, with Men.

Corporal Maiden Barbara Whitley is the one who finds the spaceship. There’s only one crew member. She figures he’s a Monster, but a friendly one. He can’t be a Man. Everyone knows that Men are wise and noble and dazzlingly beautiful. This creature just seems weird and misshapen.

The women of Freetoon are not quite sure what to do with this creature. His arrival turns out to be a disaster - it sets off a war with a neighbouring town. The creature from space and three of the surviving women from Freetoon make their escape. They’re not sure where to head for. Maybe they should head for the Ship of the Father. The Doctors may have an answer. The Doctors know everything, they even know how to work the parthenogenesis machine which allows the women of Atlantis to have children.

The creature is of course no monster. He’s very much a human and a man. He’s David Bertram and he’s on a kind of freelance survey mission.

Davis slowly pieces together what is going on. He’s on a planet named Atlantis. Technically it’s not a planet. It’s the size of Earth and it’s fairly Earth-like but it’s a satellite of a gas giant called Minos.

By this time humans have colonised countless planets but Atlantis was previously unknown, being inaccessible due to the presence of a vortex in space-time. Human civilisation is highly advanced, with faster-than-light travel and other advanced technologies. The inhabitants of Atlantis are all women, on the way to join their men when their spaceship was swept hundreds of light-years off course by the vortex. There were originally five hundred women. There are now possibly a quarter of a million, but all are clones of those original five hundred colonists. A caste system has developed, with each caste being made up of a single genotype.

Society on Atlantis has regressed quite a bit. That original spacecraft was not carrying the necessary equipment to support an advanced technological society. There’s no nuclear power, no automobiles, no electricity. It’s now a rather primitive agrarian society.

There are in fact a number of subtly different cultures on Atlantis and Anderson has fun speculating on the way in which such societies could evolve. Societies made up of clones, with no men.

Naturally once the women discover that Davis Bertram is a Man they’re fascinated. All the animals on Atlantis are birds. The women of Atlantis are not only unfamiliar with the idea of human sex, they’re unfamiliar with mammalian sex. But they’re eager to learn. The complication for Davis is that some of these women are also starting to discover the concept of love. Both Barbara and her clone sister/twin Valeria have fallen in love with him.

This sounds like a recipe for a sleaze novel but that’s not how Anderson plays it. This is a serious science fiction novel although there’s also some humour and quite a bit of adventure. And there’s no sex at all.

Davis Bertram is an engaging hero because he isn’t a square-jawed action hero. He’s by no means helpless but he’s no warrior. He’s not a coward but he’s only moderately brave. He’s not stupid but he’s not a genius. He’s a spoilt rich man’s son and his solo survey mission is just an adventure to him. He’s always been rather irresponsible. On the other hand he’s good-natured and kind-hearted.

Barbara and Valeria are of course mirror images of each other. They’re warriors who believe in shooting first (with their repeating crossbows) and asking questions afterwards. But they’re gorgeous and they’re smart and underneath a slightly intimidating exterior they’re likeable.

The paperback edition includes an afterword from the author in which he explains that the only respect in which he’s played fast and loose with science is the faster-than-light travel. Other than that everything is based on solid science. This is very much hard science fiction, but it’s hard SF combined with a rollicking adventure plot and some clever speculations about the ways in which societies evolve.

Most of all Virgin Planet is extremely entertaining. Highly recommended.

Milo Manara's Click! And Other Stories

Click! And Other Stories is a collection of erotic comics by Milo Manara.

Milo Manara (born Maurilio Manara in 1945) is perhaps the most famous living European comics artist and writer.

I’ve never had any interest in comics but recently I have developed an obsession with European comics, an obsession kicked off by Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella and solidified by my discovery of Guido Crepax. It seemed logical enough to move on to Milo Manara. I have to say that I think that compared to Forest and Crepax Manara is a lesser talent.

The comics in this volume are all overtly erotic. I have no problems with eroticism in comics, if done well. The eroticism in Barbarella is playful and witty. The eroticism in Crepax’s comics is much more strange and complex and sometimes disturbing but it’s done very stylishly, Crepax is always classy, even when he gets dark and disturbing. In this volume of Manara’s work he is too often merely crudely sexual. It feels a bit grubby. And it’s too obvious.

Il Gioco (Click or Le Déclic) dates from 1985 and is one of Manara’s best-known erotic comics and was followed by several sequels. Or perhaps it’s more a series of four linked stories.

Click is a one-idea story, although it’s an amusing idea. A sex therapist has developed a micro-machine that can be implanted in the brain. It’s controlled by a small transmitter about the size of a cigarette pack. The device is claimed to be a surefire cure for impotence. Another unscrupulous therapist, Dr Fez, steals the device and decides to find out if it will work on women as well. He wants to try it out on Mrs Claudia Christiani, a woman notorious for her lack of interest in sex.

The device works spectacularly well on Claudia, leading her into all manner of embarrassing situations. That’s pretty much it for the plot. Then there’s lots of explicit sex.

Click! 2 rehashes the plot of the first comic. The only difference is that Manara introduces some environmentalist themes which seem to be tacked on for no particular reason. There’s lots of explicit sex.

Claudia is a crusading TV journalist and she’s a particularly annoying member of a particularly annoying breed.

She becomes even more annoying in Click! 3. There’s a plot strand about forcing a girl (by very unpleasant means) to use psychic power to find diamonds. There’s a crazy guru in the jungle. And lots of explicit sex.

Click! 4 is even more stridently political with Claudia lawyer husband defending an evil chemical corporation. As usual Dr Fez shows up with his transmitter to send Claudia into more sexual frenzies.

The other story in this volume is Rendezvous in B-flat. One again there’s a political subtext, and once again it doesn’t amount to much more than telling us that politics is crooked and corrupt which I think most of us kinda already knew. It’s the story of a would-be politician who gets into debt with a loan shark. His wife has to repay the debt, in a very unpleasant way. It’s a pretty nasty story.

I don’t find the eroticism in these stories to be genuinely erotic at all. To be interesting eroticism has to be more than a succession of explicit sex acts. Manara just goes straight to crude sex. And it’s pretty crude and pretty nasty. It’s also relentless and it gets a bit tedious.

I’m not usually sensitive to such things (I’m not the sort of person who reads books looking for things to be offended by) but the level of sexual violence directed at women is a bit hair-raising.

I found these comics to be lacking in style and wit and I didn’t really enjoy them at all. Your mileage may vary of course.

I’ve enjoyed some of Manara’s later comics quite a bit so I’m not writing him off by any means.

Jean-Claude Forest and Guido Crepax are more to my taste. I highly recommend Forest's Barbarella and Crepax's Evil Spells.

A.S. Fleischman's Danger in Paradise

Danger in Paradise is a 1953 spy thriller by A.S. Fleischman (1920-2010).

Fleischman had been an American professional magician in vaudeville, until vaudeville died. He then turned to writing fiction. Between 1951 and 1954 he turned out half a dozen paperback original spy thrillers, most of them published by Fawcett Gold Medal. He then tuned to writing screenplays and finally to writing children’s books. He was fairly successful in all these fields.

Danger in Paradise follows the standard Fleischman formula - crime and international intrigue in exotic locations, mostly in the Far East.

Fleischman was not a writer who planned his books in intricate fashion. He didn’t bother with outlines. He just started with a very vague idea and sat down to write, having no idea how the plot was going to develop. It was a method that worked for him.

With Danger in Paradise his original idea was to have beautiful young American woman in Bali. A beautiful bare-breasted young American woman.

This American woman is not the central character but much of the plot revolves around her and she’s certainly the most colourful character in the book.

The narrator of the story is an American oil geologist, Jeff Cape. He made a lot of money in places like Indonesia. He managed to spend almost all the money but he had fun and he has no regrets. Now his ship is about to sail. He’s heading back to the States.

Or at least that’s where he was intending to head, until he ran into Nicole Balashov in a waterfront bar. She wants him to take a package with him. She won’t tell him the contents but it’s terribly important. Jeff figures that Nicole is trouble and he wants no part of it, but she seems rather sincere and she’s very pretty so of course he agrees.

Pretty soon Jeff has guys trailing him and he’s pretty sure they mean to do him harm. He suspects they intend to do Nicole harm as well. All his instincts tell him to just get out of the situation and get on the ship and leave Bali far behind him. But Nicole might really be in danger, those men who are after her might even mean to kill her, and even though he thinks it’s her own fault for getting mixed up in dangerous games he just can’t leave her to her fate.

Then he discovers that Nicole is dead. It’s right there in the newspaper. Russian girl killed by terrorists. With a picture of the dead girl. And it’s Nicole. But that isn’t possible. He was talking to her the day after she was killed.

Those guys are still after Jeff. There’s Apollo Fry, the fat man who might be mixed up in gunrunning. Fry is definitely up to no good and he’s ruthless. There’s also Mr Chu, the polite Chinese gentleman with the bird (the bird will be important later). And the man with the Malacca cane. Jeff has no idea where these guys fit into the picture.

And he meets Regina Williams when he takes refuge in her house. She’s a stunning American blonde. He notices her. It’s hard not to notice her, given that she’s naked from the waist up. Regina always goes topless. She’s adopted a lot of local customs. Having her breasts bare at all time is the most noticeable of these customs. Regina also informs Jeff that she is always interested in sex. Another of Regina’s habits is to take her showers in the open. When she’s not half-naked she’s totally naked. Jeff is maybe not quite the archetypal clean-cut all-American boy (he’s spent several years in exotic and often exciting places) but Regina does make him just a tad uncomfortable. When she starts dancing for him he’s even more uncomfortable. Regina’s dance is the sort of dance that gets a man’s attention. He then commits what Regina considers to be a major social faux pas. He turns down her offer of sex.

Jeff can’t really decide which of the two women, Regina and Nicole, is the more dangerous to his peace of mind. They both seem likely to slot into the femme fatale category.

The package Nicole handed to Jeff early on is effectively a McGuffin. All that matters is that everybody seems to want that package.

There’s no graphic violence but there’s a great deal of action and the pacing is relentless. The plot twists and turns in a pleasing way. Jeff is a rather hapless hero. He’s not stupid and he can handle himself in a fight but he’s hapless because he doesn’t have a clue what’s going on. His efforts to take control of the situation leave him more confused than ever. But he’s likeable, he doesn’t lack courage and he tries his best.

Fleishman’s prose style is lively. There’s plenty of the atmosphere of the Mysterious Orient that was so hugely popular in pop culture at that time.

There’s no actual sex but there’s plenty of sexiness, which is often more fun.

Danger in Paradise offers excitement, intrigue, dangerous sexy women (often with bare breasts), romance and a very solid plot. Very enjoyable, and highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Fleischman’s Counterspy Express and Shanghai Flame. They’re both excellent.