The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux Camélias)

La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias) is an 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. Dumas himself adapted it as a stage play shortly thereafter. In 1853 it became the basis for Verdi's opera La traviata. Both the novel and play were highly successful.

Dumas was the son of the immensely popular and famous Alexandre Dumas. The younger Dumas went on to become a major figure in the French literary world.

He was just twenty-three when he wrote The Lady of the Camellias. It is a semi-autobiographical account of his affair with Marie Duplessis, one of the most famous (and expensive) of all 19th century courtesans. Marie Duplessis died of tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of twenty-three. The heroine of the novel is renamed Marguerite Gautier.

Given that Dumas’ liaison with Marie Duplessis was well known in Parisian society and that readers of the novel were well aware of Marie’s death in 1847 the author’s decision to begin the novel with her death was probably an unavoidable one, and of course it serves to highlight the tragedy. We know the heroine is doomed, and that the love between these two people is doomed.

A young man named Armand Duval becomes infatuated with the celebrated courtesan Marguerite Gautier.

The problem is that he cannot possibly afford her. Armand is by no means poor but he is far from being a rich man. And only a very rich man indeed could afford a woman like Marguerite.

The complication is that they fall genuinely in love. Marguerite does not mind that Armand has very little money, as long as he is prepared to accept that she is being kept by a wealthy duke and that she is accepting money from other men for her sexual favours. Armand struggles to come to terms with all this. He struggles to understand Marguerite.

Both Armand and Marguerite try to find a solution that will be mutually satisfactory.

Dumas had an assortment of mistresses and kept women. The world of decadent excess, of high-class prostitutes, the world of the demi-monde, was his world. His attitude towards prostitutes was extremely sympathetic. That is not to say that he entirely approved of prostitution. His attitudes to this question were complicated and perhaps contradictory. On the other hand he did not believe that such women should be condemned. Marguerite Gautier is a very sympathetic heroine. Dumas does not sentimentalise her. Marguerite is quite mercenary. She has found that the wages of sin are very generous and she is addicted to a life of luxury and excess. She loves Armand but she doesn’t see any reason to be faithful to him.

Marguerite has her flaws, but her love for Armand is genuine.

The novel can be described as a fictionalised account of the life of Marie Duplessis. Just how fictionalised Dumas’ account is remains uncertain.

Dumas was a big name in France but his plays were considered much too shocking to be performed in England. Reading the novel it is certainly evident that there was a reason that French novels were considered scandalous by respectable opinion in England. The novel makes not the slightest attempt to disguise the fact that its heroine is a prostitute and that the relationship between the two main characters is a sexual one. Nor does it disguise the fact that while living as a kept woman Marguerite turns tricks on the side. Dumas avoids moral judgments. Armand has a mistress before he meets Marguerite and during the course of the story he sleeps with other women. He is not the most admirable of men - he fails to trust Marguerite at a time when she needed him to do so. He lets her down.

The Lady of the Camellias offers an extraordinary glimpse into the world of the demi-monde, written by an insider. It can be considered to be a priceless artifact of social history. It is also a great love story. Highly recommended.

It has been filmed countless times,  the most notable adaptations being the 1921 Camille starring Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino, the 1936 Camille starring Greta Garbo and the 1969 Camille 2000.

The Blazing Affair - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

Michael Avallone's The Blazing Affair was the second original novel based on the 1966-67 The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. TV series.

It's a competent spy thriller that is most likely to appeal to fans of the series.

It's yet another 60s spy story about yet another attempt to revive the Third Reich. It's set in South Africa so diamonds are of course also involved.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Vampirella Archives, volume 4

Vampirella Archives volume 4 collects issues 22 to 28 of the Vampirella magazine. These issues were published in 1973. As usual each issue contains a Vampirella story and usually four other stories.

Esteban Maroto’s Tomb of the Gods: Orpheus is a retelling of Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld in search of Eurydice. In The Sentence we find that even the cleverest burglars do not escape justice. Cry of the Dhampir is a reasonably good tale of vampires and those who hunt them. Minra is silly hippie-dippie nonsense about the nature of evil.

Cobra Queen is an OK jungle adventure tale which needed to be developed a bit more. Call It Companionship is about a woman whose boyfriend problems are solved by her cat. You can’t trust men but you can trust your cat. The Accursed concerns a man who seeks revenge on an already dead sorcerer. In Witch’s Promise the daughter of a woman hanged for witchcraft is seduced by a handsome rake, an army officer who uses women for his pleasure. She vows to have her revenge. In Won’t Eddie Ever Learn? a drifter thinks that robbing an old farmer and his blind daughter will be easy.

Middle Am is silly moralising nonsense. Homo Superior is science fiction. A member of a top-secret research assistant has discovered something disturbing - a member of the team is not human at all but could perhaps intend to replace humans. A reasonably good story. The Choice offers an encounter between a werewolf and a vampire, with some twists. Not a bad story. Changes follows an ordinary morning in the life of an ordinary man. The only interesting thing that happens on this morning is that his wife is murdered. It’s at most mildly disturbing, a minor disruption. We soon discover that this is a world in which people are murdered regularly and it’s no big deal. It’s not as if he is actually losing his wife. An odd, unsettling and very good story.

The Haunted Child is the tale of a husband-and-wife team of psychic researchers and a house haunted by the ghost of a child. An OK story. Cold Calculations takes lace in the frozen wastes of Alaska. Could there really be a yeti in Alaska? Another OK story. Nimrod is about poachers in Africa who stumble upon a strange creature who rescues freaks. A disappointing story ruined even further by a clumsy moral message. Dead Howl at Midnight borrows elements from both The Body Snatchers and Frankenstein. A passable story.

Moonspawn is an intriguing attempt at a science fiction explanation for werewolves. Not a bad story. In Fringe Benefits a murderer thinks that a lucky accident has allowed him to escape justice. An OK story. Demon Child tells of an ageing occult investigator who has dark suspicions about his granddaughter. Another moderately entertaining story. Blood Brothers is the tale of two revolutionaries, a secret hoard of gold and a strange cult. This one is pretty good.

Clash of the Leviathans is a tale of dinosaurs, of one dinosaur in particular whose battle with a strange enemy will have momentous consequences. A clever story. Blind Man’s Guide tells of a boy who was once a guide for an old man. Now the boy is blind and has a dog to guide him. For the boy history will repeat itself. Not too bad a story. The Power and the Glory is the story of a wicked Englishman in colonial times. His rich father protects him from the consequences of his crimes. Nothing can touch the young man. A fairly decent story.

Eye Don’t Want To Die tells of an old tailor with a glass eye. He is reputed to be a rich old miser. There are those who covet his supposed riches. A pretty good story. The Other Side of Heaven is about a fisherman who meets God. Well, maybe not the God but certainly a god. A rather Cthulhu-like god. An interesting story. Old Texas Road shows what can happen when you run out of petrol on a deserted road. A nasty but effective little chiller.

The Vampirella stories

Hell From on High takes Vampirella and the Van Helsings to the Rocky Mountains where they encounter a kindly priest. They also discover that they now face a formidable new threat, the Darkling Disciples.

The Blood Queen of Bayou Parish takes Vampirella and her friends into swamp country, a setting I always love. And the men discover that finding the woman of your dreams is not necessarily a good thing.

In Into the Inferno and What Price Love Vampirella’s friend Pendragon, a broken-down stage magician, has to confront his past and there are gangsters to deal with as well. Vampirella learns to kill, under the influence of drugs. This is a horrifying experience for her. No matter how strong her craving for blood she has always in the past avoided killing.

In Demons in the Fog Vampirella needs blood. Not for herself. For another reason entirely. Pendragon’s efforts to help backfire, as they so often do, and Vampirella has to battle old enemies, but very deadly enemies.

In Return Trip Vampirella faces a new menace - a man who can control her dreams. He can give dreams of happiness, and force her to do evil.

The Curse of the MacDaemons begins with Vampirella and Pengragon holidaying in Scotland. Vampirella meets a handsome young Scottish laird but Vampirella is not going to get to enjoy the joys of love. There’s an interesting twist to a popular legend and a decidedly perverse atmosphere to this excellent story.

Final Thoughts

These Vampirella Archive reprints really are a must for comic-book enthusiasts. Vampirella is one of the great comic-book heroines and while the non-Vampirella stories are a mixed bag some are very interesting indeed. Highly recommended.

Robert Sheckley's The 10th Victim

The 10th Victim is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Robert Sheckley (1928-2005). Bear with me because the story behind the novel is a bit complicated.

In 1953 Sheckley wrote a short story, Seventh Victim, for Galaxy Science Fiction magazine. It was adapted for radio in 1957. The excellent 1965 Italian science fiction movie The 10th Victim was based on Sheckley’s short story. The movie was scripted by Tonino Guerra, Giorgio Salvioni, Ennio Flaiano and Elio Petri and directed by Elio Petri. Sheckley wrote a novelisation of the movie, with the title The 10th Victim, which was published in 1965. Sheckley later wrote two sequels, Victim Prime and Hunter/Victim.

All of these works deal with the theme of murder as sport and entertainment. This became a very popular them in science fiction movies in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Obvious and notable examples are Rollerball and The Running Man.

In this review I will be dealing with both Sheckley’s 1953 short story and his 1965 novelisation.

Sheckley’s short story Seventh Victim is set at some unspecified time in the future. Murder is now entirely legal, but tightly regulated by the government.

This is not quite a post-apocalyptic or a dystopian future although it has some affinities with such futures. War had become so destructive that it was outlawed completely. The government however realised that not only would it be impossible to eliminate the desire for violence, it would also be harmful. To eliminate violence would be to risk eliminating all kinds of socially necessary qualities such as courage and resourcefulness. It would produce a bland conformist society lacking in creativity. And life in such a society would be unsatisfying.

It is important to note that in this story murder is a purely voluntary activity. It is essentially an extreme sport. Both the murderer (the “Hunter”) and the Victim are volunteers. Participants, if they live long enough, alternate between playing the Hunter and Victim roles. A Hunt always ends with a kill but sometimes it is the Victim who is killed and sometimes it’s the Hunter.

Frelaine, the protagonist, has participated in six successful Hunts as both Hunter and Victim. Apart from his enthusiasm for this lethal sport he is a perfectly ordinary well-adjusted citizen. His seventh Hunt as Hunter does not turn out as he expected. To say anything more about the plot would give away spoilers. This is an excellent story with a nice twist and very good very economical world-building - we are told just enough about this future world to get us interested.

Sheckley’s novel The 10th Victim is not just a very expanded version of the short story. It is very much based on the movie, so it’s Sheckley taking his own ideas from his short story and ideas from the writers of the screenplay of the movie. The movie retained all the core ideas of the short story but added a lot of extra touches and some extra characters. The movie changed the names of the two main characters and changed the setting from New York to Rome. The novelisation uses the character names from the movie (Frelaine becomes Marcello Polletti and his adversary in the Hunt becomes Catherine Meredith) and the extra characters from the movie. It is very much a novelisation of the movie, but since the movie was generally faithful to the core idea of the original story the novelisation can be seen as both Sheckley’s creation and the creation of the screenwriters.

In the novel Catherine has completed nine successful Hunts. If she completes her tenth Hunt successfully she becomes a Ten. No-one can compete in more than ten Hunts, but once you become a Ten you gain immense financial, political and social status. For her tenth Hunt she is the Hunter. Marcello is the Victim. This is only his fourth Hunt.

Catherine has a media job so her tenth Hunt is turned into a major media event. As in the short story both the Hunter and the Victim come to have slightly ambivalent feelings about the Hunt since they have both made the mistake of developing some kind of personal connection.

It’s a very witty novel (and that’s true of the film as well). There’s quite a bit of black humour. What’s really interesting is that the novel has no political axe to grind. There is no suggestion whatsoever that this is a totalitarian society. It is neither a purely socialist nor a purely capitalist society. There’s some mockery of big business and the media but there’s mockery of bureaucracy as well. The novel takes no overt stance on the morality of the Hunt. It is not presented as being overtly evil or overtly good. Participation in the Hunts is entirely voluntary. The Hunts do serve a social purpose. Whether that purpose is sufficient to provide a moral justification is left for the reader to decide.

The tone is more absurdist than anything else. The target is not any particular political system but the absurdities of human nature, and of human civilisation. Turning murder into a sport is not a capitalist conspiracy or a socialist conspiracy. It’s just the way people are. We enjoy violence. It satisfies a deep human need. You can create any kind of political utopia but you will never be able to escape from the deep primal needs that drive human behaviour. We want sex, we want love, we want violence, we want money, we want status. We want to dominate and we want to be dominated. We’re an absurd species but it’s our absurdities that make us human.

An excellent amusing eccentric clever novel. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the excellent movie adaptation The 10th Victim (1965) and several of the other movies that deal with the same theme, or variation on the theme, including Joe D’Amato’s Endgame (1983) and Lucio Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072 (1984).

Blood and Honey - Honey West

Blood and Honey was the eighth of the Honey West mystery novels. The husband and wife writing team of Gloria and Forest Fickling, writing as G.G. Fickling, wrote eleven Honey West novels between 1957 and 1971. They more or less invented the sexy girl private eye genre and Honey West also has claims to being fiction’s first kickass action heroine.

Honey West’s father was a private eye, until he got murdered on a case. Honey now runs the West Detective Agency. In fact she is the Honey West Detective Agency. She handles all the cases herself. Her father taught her the job. She has a PI’s licence. She has a gun and she knows how to use it (for emergencies she carries a .22 in a garter holster). She can handle herself in unarmed combat. Honey is tough, resourceful and very stubborn. She’s a good PI. Honey’s measurements are 38-22-36. In other words she has everything a woman should have, in all the right places. She is young, blonde, cute and very female.

Blood and Honey starts with Honey running down a dark alley in New York wearing a negligee and high heels. She’s running from a man with a gun. When she made her exit through her bedroom window she was only wearing the high heels. She grabbed the negligee on the way out. So we knows she sleeps nude. We also know immediately that this is a real Honey West novel. Poor Honey is a nice girl but she has an amazing knack for being caught without her clothes on.

Honey is in New York at the request of an old friend, Broadway producer Vic Kendall. His latest production has run into troubles. Several attempted murders certainly counts as trouble. Honey has just arrived in the Big Apple and already somebody has tried to kill her. It seems that somebody doesn’t like Vic’s new show. New York critics can be tough but they don’t usually try to literally kill you.

There are all sorts of emotional, romantic and sexual dramas associated with this show. There are other dramas as well, such as questionable business dealings. There are people with scores to settle.

I love showbiz mysteries and thrillers. There’s always a touch of decadence and sin. There’s plenty of both here. And sexual jealousies get even more overheated than usual in this world.

There are some dangerous women. Vic’s ex-showgirl wife Tina. Tina wants love. Lots of it. There’s the star of the show, Pepper Parker. She’s blonde and she’s built and she and Tina hate each other. There’s Pepper’s friend Evy. There are rumours that Evy and Pepper like to play games together, games that involve dressing in cowboy boots and paper doilies and nothing else. Yes, I know, paper doilies are a kink I’d never heard of either.

The movie world is involved as well. Movie producer Anthony Troy has bought an ocean liner. He intends to sink it. For his new movie. He’s mixed up with some of the people in Vic’s new show. There are gangsters as well. And Pepper has a story about being tied to a bed, a special bed with leather straps. She doesn’t like to think about what happened to her next.

Yes, there’s plenty of sleaze here. What I love about the Honey West books is that they’re sleazy but in a kind of playful way. Honey isn’t shocked by any of this. All her cases seem to involve such things. When a girl is a PI she sees all sorts of things. She’s used to it.

This is moderately hardboiled fiction, but again with a playful touch. The authors are aiming for slightly naughty entertainment rather than wallowing in misery. This is hardboiled but it’s not noir fiction.

There’s plenty of action as well.

Honey is a wonderful heroine, with or without her clothes. Once she’s on a case she doesn’t give up.

Blood and Honey is a typical Honey West novel which means it’s loads of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West books - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer. And I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis in the title role.

Bernard C. Gilford’s The Liquid Man

Bernard C. Gilford’s novel The Liquid Man appeared in Fantastic Adventures in September 1941.

Bernard C. Gilford (1920-2010) was an American writer, mostly in the suspense genre. The Liquid Man seems to have been his only novel (and it’s really not much more than a novella).

The Liquid Man begins with a murder. There’s a witness. It’s a dark night and it’s raining but somehow the killer doesn’t look quite human - more of a vague human-like shape with a disturbing liquid quality.

There’s another murder soon afterwards.

To the police it seems straightforward. A man named Ferdinand Silva thought his girl was two-timing him. He killed the faithless girl and the other man. A very ordinary murder, apart from the odd description of the suspect.

Juan worked in a laboratory, doing routine research on cleaning wax. It appears he was also working on some mysterious project of his own.

There are other murders, and all the witnesses insist that the killer seemed more like a man made out of liquid than an ordinary man. It’s ridiculous of course, but Lieutenant Quante starts to think that there really is something strange about these murders.

Of course tracking down and capturing a man in liquid form would present certain challenges. There’s also the possibility that such a man would be rather difficult to kill.

Even worse, such a man could find unexpected places to hide.

This liquid man seems intent on continuing his murderous rampage, so Lieutenant Quante is under plenty of pressure.

There’s also Priscilla. She is the only one of the liquid man’s victims who escaped, and Lieutenant Quante has fallen for her. There’s a possibility the monster may strike at her again.

The liquid man is a monster, but monsters have feelings too. They need love just like everybody else.

This is a straightforward monster terror tale with a science fictional gloss to it. The difficulties presented by such an unconventional manhunt are handled reasonably well by the author, with the police displaying considerable ingenuity and facing continual frustration.

The story does at least have the virtue of originality.

It’s a very pulpy tale, but that’s all it was ever intended to be. It’s a bit like a 1950s monster movie, but written more than a decade before such movies became popular.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Fritz Leiber’s short novel You're All Alone in of their terrific two-novel paperback editions.

This is not a neglected gem. It’s really not very good, but if you’re going to buy the book for the Fritz Leiber novel (and you should) then The Liquid Man might provide some mild entertainment if you’re in the right mood.

John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8

BUtterfield 8 was John O’Hara’s second novel, appearing in 1935. It was an immediate bestseller.

John O’Hara (1905-1970) is now almost entirely forgotten but he was quite a big deal on the American literary scene at one time. Even during his heyday he had his detractors as well as his admirers.

BUtterfield 8 was based on the notorious real-life case of a flapper named Starr Faithfull.

This is a Depression novel in the sense that the Great Depression is mentioned constantly but while the characters complain about how hard the Depression has hit them these are people for whom extreme poverty means having to cope with fewer servants. These are very rich people having to deal with the trauma of suddenly finding themselves only moderately rich.

The novel concerns an affair between a young woman named Gloria and a married man named Weston Liggett.

After spending the night having sex with Liggett in his apartment (in the marital bed) Gloria leaves, taking with her Liggett’s wife’s mink coat. That mink coat becomes an obsession with Liggett. Or rather, he becomes obsessed by the difficulty of explaining its absence to his wife.

Gloria is eighteen but she has had a lot of men. She feels plenty of guilt and existential despair. Liggett is torn between guilt, his cowardice about coming clean to his wife and his feelings for Gloria. Eventually the illicit relationship between Gloria and Liggett reaches a crisis.

There are also numerous sub-plots involving other couples but they go nowhere and serve no apparent purpose. Perhaps O’Hara saw this novel as a kind of social document on American middle-class life in the 1930s but the result is a novel that feels badly unfocussed. Or perhaps social documents are just not to my taste.

The book’s success at the time is understandable. It was based on a widely publicised real-life scandal and the plot revolves entirely around sex. In 1935 this novel would have been considered racy.

What’s curious is the total lack of any sense of erotic or emotional heat. When characters in this novel have sex they do so with as much enthusiasm, passion, desperation and madness as they would experience when deciding whether or not to have a second cup of coffee at breakfast. When one of the male characters tells one of the female characters that he has to have her, or when one of the female characters tells one of the male characters that she loves him, we just don’t buy it. We’re just not convinced that these people feel anything.

The characters are totally lifeless and uninteresting. It’s easy to get the various characters confused because they don’t have any real individuality.

The climax comes as more of an anti-climax.

Maybe O’Hara was trying to say something profound about the emptiness of modern life. Or maybe he just couldn’t write interesting prose or create living characters. Maybe he thought he was writing an honest hard-hitting realist novel but the fact that the characters are not believable is still a problem.

The novel gives us exhaustive backstories on even minor characters. It gives us a detailed explanation of how Gloria came to be such a wicked girl. This aspect of the story was handled much more economically, much more effectively and much more convincingly in the 1960 movie.

This is one of the cases of a movie adaptation being vastly superior to the source novel. The screenwriters of the 1960 movie, Charles Schnee and John Michael Hayes, wisely dumped most of O’Hara’s story and replaced it with a much more interesting story. They also retooled the story as melodrama, but very superior and very entertaining melodrama. The movie also has the advantage that Elizabeth Taylor brings Gloria to life on the screen in a way that O’Hara totally failed to do on the printed page.

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say that BUtterfield 8 is a bad book but it’s most definitely not to my taste and I can’t recommend it.

I can however very strongly recommend the movie which I reviewed here - BUtterfield 8 (1960).