Secret Service Operator #5 - The Masked Invasion

Operator #5 (later renamed Secret Service Operator #5) was a pulp magazine of which 48 issues were published from 1934 to 1939. Initially each issue contained a standalone novel although later in the run The Purple Invasion was a connected cycle of thirteen novels. Frederick C. Davis wrote the first twenty issues. Later issues were written by Emile C. Tepperman and Wayne Rogers but all the novels were credited to Curtis Steele. The first novel was The Masked Invasion.

The hero of the series was a young man named Jimmy Christopher, who poses as a fashionable photographer named Carleton Victor but who is in fact Operator #5 of the United States Intelligence Service. He gets some invaluable assistance from a young Irish lad named Tim Donovan (Having the hero assisted by a brave teenaged boy was obviously a good way to appeal to the likely readership of pulps). Jimmy also gets occasional help from his identical twin sister Nan (yes I know that if they’re brother and sister they can’t be identical twins but hey it’s only a story). Jimmy’s dad, an ex-Secret Service man, also pitches in at times.

The Masked Invasion begins with a blackout in New York City but it’s more than a blackout. Everything stops working, including cars and even devices powered by batteries. There have been a series of these blackouts, each longer and covering a larger area than the previous one. There’s some dastardly plan behind all this, probably connected with the sinister Loo Kong (the Yellow Peril theme would be explored more fully in later issues) although Loo Kong is not the mastermind behind it.

The blackouts are caused by a Negative Ray machine invented by a brilliant but eccentric scientist. Obviously the Negative Ray machine will have to be tucked down but in the meantime other precautions must be taken. Fortunately only petrol engines are affected by the ray so the U.S. Government takes immediate steps to have powerful diesel-engined cars built. And diesel-engined aircraft, and even a couple of diesel-engined blimps. There’s only a cursory attempt to explain the Negative Ray machine - something to do with capturing and magnifying cosmic rays - but there’s no need for detailed explanations in a pulp story.

As soon as Nan is introduced into the story you just know that she’s going to get herself captured and held as a hostage in order to put pressure on Jimmy. This is pulp fiction and this story follows the pulp conventions to the letter.

Jimmy Christopher is your standard square-jawed action hero, heroic and noble and patriotic. The villains are totally evil and villainous.

As far as the chief villain is concerned there are two choices in this type of tale. His identity can be kept secret until the end, which has advantages from a dramatic point of view. Or his identity can be revealed immediately in which case there’s more opportunity to develop the full flavour of his particular evilness and the motivations which drove him to evil. The second option is probably the wiser choice. In this story, when the villain is unmasked, we can’t help feeling that we have no idea why he chose villainy as a career.

The mastermind has assistants that represent every source of paranoia that could be conceived in 1934 - there’s the wily Asiatic Loo Kong, there are communists, anarchists and even Czarists!

The plot is fast-moving and filled to the brim with action. The central idea is a good one and of course out means the stakes are high. The survival of the nation is in peril. It’s not just the Negative Ray and the Darkness. The conspirators have also employed pirates to seize dozens of ships which are now on their way to the United States filled with a vast army of armed cut-throats, and they’re foreigners to boot.

The style is pure pulp. There are no shades of grey. The armed blimp attack is fun and the body count is off the scale. The violence is plentiful but never graphic. There is of course zero sex. It’s all good clean fun. And it works. There were better science fiction/action pulps (such as Dusty Ayres And His Battle Birds or Dr Yen Sin or Doc Savage) but The Masked Invasion gets the job done with efficiency and energy. Recommended.

Edgar Wallace’s The Daffodil Mystery

Edgar Wallace’s The Daffodil Mystery was published in 1920. While Wallace was best known for his thrillers he wrote straight murder mysteries as well and The Daffodil Mystery falls into the latter category. It also appeared under the alternative title The Daffodil Murder.

Mr Thornton Lyne is a very rich young man. He owns a very lucrative business which he inherited from his father, his own contribution to the business being negligible. He has enjoyed every advantage in life. He fancies himself as a poet although those who have have read his one small published volume of verse are inclined to disagree. He is a poseur. He is also a very unpleasant young man and he has been making himself particularly offensive to one of his female employees, a Miss Odette Rider. She has rejected his advances and since spitefulness is another of his unattractive qualities he is determined to revenge himself upon her. His idea is to engage the well-known private detective Jack Tarling to help him frame Odette for an imaginary crime. Tarling indignantly refuses.

And then Thornton Lyne gets himself murdered. His body is found, minus coat and waistcoat and wearing slippers. Most curiously a bunch of daffodils has been placed on his chest.

Scotland Yard calls on Tarling help in this case because of a curious note, written in Chinese, found on the body. Tarling had been a very successful police detective in Shanghai and he has a Chinese assistant, Ling Chu. Ling Chu is most emphatically not a servant but a colleague and is a formidable detective in his own right.

The evidence all points towards Odette’s guilt but Tarling finds her to be a charming young woman and while nothing will deflect him from the path of duty he finds himself hoping that Odette will prove to be innocent.

The plot has some of the outrageousness you expect from Wallace but in spite of its convolutions the solution is simple and makes sense. As you might expect from Ling Chu’s presence the events of the present day have links to events in the past in China.

In 1920 the idea of the fair-play mystery has not yet been formalised. Insofar as writers played fair with their readers they did so by avoiding impossibilities in the plotting and by providing a puzzle that the detective could plausibly solve based on the clues available to him, clues that were not necessarily revealed to the reader until the ending. In spite of this there is one definite clue that does point very clearly to the identity of the criminal. Unless of course (like me) you manage to miss its significance! There are multiple suspects and they’re all quite plausible. And there is an unbreakable alibi as well.

Of course being a Wallace novel it has more action than the average detective novel.

The golden age of detective fiction had scarcely even begun when The Daffodil Mystery appeared but the idea of a murderer adding some bizarre touch to the victim’s body (in this case the daffodils) was one that would be used quite often by golden age writers, notably John Dickson Carr in the wonderful The Mad Hatter Mystery and Ellery Queen in The Chinese Orange Mystery (and the latter of course has a China connection as well).

Ling Chu is quite an interesting character. He is honest, but sometimes he is honest in a misleading way. He takes care of the investigation of most of the vital physical clues including some very puzzling footprints. He’s not quite an early anticipation of Charlie Chan. He’s a lot more ruthless for one thing - he has his own ideas about the way to interrogate suspects and they’re not for the faint-hearted. Sometimes bad men try to lie to detectives but they don’t lie to Ling Chu.

Tarling also has a certain nostalgia for his earlier career in Shanghai when the rules under which policemen operated were much more flexible. Working for Scotland Yard can be a bit restrictive.

It's perhaps worth pointing out that despite the China connection and the slightly lurid cover this is not by any stretch of the imagination a Yellow Peril novel.

The Daffodil Mystery represents the slightly less outlandish side to Edgar Wallace but it’s still thoroughly enjoyable. Recommended.

Larry Niven's Neutron Star

Neutron Star is a 1968 short story collection which contains some of Larry Niven’s earliest Known Space Stories.

Neutron Star introduces us to the Puppeteers, the alien race that plays such an important part in the Known Space stories. A small spaceship recently came to grief in the vicinity of a neutron star. Something managed to get through the General Products hull to kill the crew. Which is of course impossible. Nothing can penetrate a General Products hull. The Puppeteers (who own General Products) hire Beowulf Shaeffer to make the same trip to the neutron star to find out what happened. In the unlikely event he survives he will be paid a great deal of money.

It’s a story that serves as a good introduction to the Known Space tales. There’s a strong hard science fiction element, there are touches of humour and there’s danger and adventure.

A Relic of the Empire concerns Dr Richard Schultz-Mann who is on a rather inhospitable planet looking for plant from the era of the Slaver Empire which ended billions of years ago. He’s found some and rather odd plants they are. At the moment he has other concerns - space pirates have just arrived on the planet. This is a bad thing, but Dr Mann thinks he may be able to turn it into a good thing. There is one thing that really frightens Dr Mann, but it’s not space pirates. There are some interesting twists in this story.

In At the Core the puppeteers hire Beowulf Shaeffer to plot an experimental spacecraft on an unprecedented voyage to the centre of the galaxy. It’s a publicity stunt. It’s also a voyage almost unimaginably longer than any previous voyage of space exploration by any species. At the core he finds something he would have preferred not to find. It certainly has a dramatic effect on the puppeteeers. It’s an OK story.

In The Soft Weapon a spacefaring couple make an exciting discovery - a stasis box from the time of the Slaver Empire, a billion and a half years ago. Unfortunately a Kzin warcraft is on the scene. The Kzin are hoping the stasis box will contain some kind of super-weapon. What it does contain is pretty startling. A good story.

Flatlander is another extraordinary voyage for Beowulf Shaeffer, in company with a rich man named Elephant. Elephant wants to visit the most peculiar planet in Known Space it seems like a good idea to ask the Outsiders (one of the more bizarre alien races in the Known Space stories). The Outsiders sell information and although their prices are high they have a reputation for scrupulous honesty. The Outsiders provide the necessary information although Beowulf Shaeffer can’t help feeling that it would have been worth paying the extra money the Outsiders asked for one more piece of information - the exact nature of the peculiarity of this particular planet. They set off for the planet anyway and Elephant learns something that Beowulf Shaeffer has alway known. A fairly clever story.

The Ethics of Madness is about a paranoiac. He’s not an actual paranoiac, but a potential one. As long as he gets his meds he’ll be OK but while regular checks by automated doctors might seem a foolproof way of ensuring that his brain chemistry remains stable no invention is ever entirely foolproof. When he does go mad it sets off a vendetta on a truly galactic scale. The twist is not unexpected but it’s still effective and it’s a fine story. And it’s an example of Niven’s interesting perspective on ethics.

The Handicapped is the story of some very peculiar aliens. The Grog are blind and deaf and entirely sedentary and they have no means of communication whatsoever but they have very large brains. Large enough to suggest that they are intelligent, and possibly very intelligent. But it’s impossible to imagine a creature with less use for intelligence. It just doesn’t make sense. Garvey is in the business of providing artificial aids for sentient beings with no hands but the Grog are a real challenge - there seems to be no way of finding out whether they really are sentient or not. Garvey has a strange feeling about these creatures but the truth is even stranger than he could have imagined. Another story involving ethical dilemmas, and a very good one.

Grendel gives Beowulf Shaeffer a chance to play the hero and he’s very unhappy about it. He’s on a spacecraft which is attacked by pirates. An alien is kidnapped. This could have serious repercussions for relations between humans and the aliens in question. In company with another human, a rather adventurous one from Jinx, Shaeffer reluctantly sets out to effect a rescue. He has a theory about how the kidnapping was done. There’s perhaps more emphasis on action rather than hard SF elements in this story but it’s entertaining.

On the whole Neutron Star is old-fashioned high-concept hard SF but with plenty of characteristic Larry Niven touches. Enjoyable stuff. Highly recommended.

Alan Melville’s Quick Curtain

Alan Melville’s Quick Curtain was published in 1934. William Melville Caverhill (1910-1983) had along and colourful career in the theatre, radio and television as an actor, producer, playwright and presenter. In the 30s he wrote a handful of successful detective novels under the name Alan Melville.

It all starts, fittingly, on opening night In this case the London opening night of a musical comedy spectacular from producer-impresario Douglas B. Douglas. In Act Two a brigand is supposed to threaten the hero with a revolver and then fire a single shot. The hero will suffer a slight flesh wound. It’s a dramatic moment but on this opening night it’s even more dramas that it was intended to be. Brandon Baker, playing the hero, suffers more than a flesh wound. The actor is shot dead on stage in front of two thousand people. Shortly thereafter the actor who fired the fatal shot, Hilary Foster, is found in his dressing room. He has hanged himself.

Luckily the opening audience includes Inspector Wilson of Scotland Yard. Also in the audience is Wilson’s son, a newspaper reporter, who will function as Wilson’s sidekick.

Inspector Wilson has a theory about the gun. He also has a theory about the bullet fired from the gun. Unfortunately his theory is not quite compatible with the medical evidence presented at the inquest.

One odd thing about the inquest is that Brandon Baker’s widow was there. Brandon Baker’s widow was also at his funeral. But they were two different women.

There’s also the matter of the word written on the wallpaper in the leading lady’s flat.

Some of the action takes place in the theatre but much of it takes place in a small village in Buckinghamshire.

This is a comic detective novel. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. The problem is that it tries too hard to be funny, and it tries to be funny all the time. Sometimes it is funny but sometimes the humour is a bit forced. And sometimes it’s a bit wearying.

Still, there are plenty of things to like about theatrical murder mysteries. The idea of theatre people slaughtering each other is very appealing. And there’s the potential for interesting and offbeat murder methods. The first murder in this book has some potentially interesting angles although they’re not developed very much.

The main problem here is that the author is not interested in writing a detective novel. He’s interested in writing a witty satire, mostly a satire on the commercial theatre but also a satire on detective novels. His main interest in detective fiction is in making fun of it. That’s a generous explanation for the sketchiness and dullness of the plot. A less generous explanation would have been the common one of a writer from outside the genre thinking that writing detective novels is incredibly easy and then failing when it they try to write one.

It’s always irritating when you get to the end and the author pulls a rabbit out of a hat. In this case the author pulls a whole troop of rabbits out of a hat. And does so in a way that suggests a kind of sneering contempt for fans of detective fiction.

As a detective novel it’s a washout. As a theatrical satire it might have been amusing at the time but the people it’s satirising are now long dead and the kind of theatre it’s satirising is also long dead.

The fact that the British Library Crime Classics collection now includes no less than three Alan Melville novels can only be described as bizarre.

Quick Curtain is quite simply a waste of time. Avoid this one.

Thea von Harbou's The Indian Tomb

Thea von Harbou (1888-1954) was a German novelist and screenwriter. She was married for a time to Fritz Lang. She wrote the screenplays for all his films from 1920 to 1933, which include some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of all time so she has some claims to being Germany’s most important screenwriter. She was also a popular novelist and she wrote novelisations of some of the screenplays she wrote for Lang, including Metropolis. She was very much influenced by Karl May, a German writer of adventure stories (including an immense number of westerns). She was a popular commercial writer but judging by this book and by the only other book of hers that I’ve read, Metropolis, she’s a very underrated and under-appreciated writer.

The Indian Tomb was written in 1918 and was a major success. It has been filmed three times, including a late 1950s version by Fritz Lang. It’s only comparatively recently that it’s been made available in an English translation.

The Indian Tomb is the story of a German architect recently recovered from a near-fatal illness who receives an unusual commission. He is told that he must leave immediately for India, he must in fact leave that very night. He knows nothing of the man who has offered him the commission other than the fact that he is immensely wealthy and he wants a tomb for his recent deceased wife. The tomb must be not merely beautiful, it must surpass even the Taj Mahal. The architect is offered a fabulous sum of money but it is the challenge and the opportunity that causes him to accept the commission. This is a chance to build something greater than he has ever built before, something grate than he could ever have imagined building.

He arrives at the prince’s palace, and meets the prince. At first it all seems a bit bewildering but he expected that. And then he finds that the situation is not all what he expected and the job is not what he expected. He cannot do, but he may have no choice. He’s entered a strange nightmare world. The palace is a wonderful creation, a combination of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary horror, filled with wonders and terrors. It’s more like city than a palace, or perhaps a vast prison. If only his beloved wife were there with him. He has heard her voice but of course the was a dream. She is back home in Germany.

The palace is built on an island in a lake. In fact it is the island. The lake has some peculiar properties. Many men have tried to swim the lake. None survived.

There is a very entertaining interlude in the home of the jeweller Mohammed ben Hassan. His home is more like an amazing fortress, filled with unimaginable riches.

If you’re familiar with Metropolis then you’ll know that von Harbou was fascinated by imaginary cities and by strange and sometimes sinister architecture. It’s no accident that the hero of the novel is an architect - perhaps only an architect could survive the prince’s palace, although of course an architect might be particularly susceptible to the madness of the place.

The prince’s motives are mysterious. He offers explanations but Fürbringer has no way of being sure what these explanations mean. They almost certainly don’t mean what they appear to mean.

One of the best things about the book is that von Harbou was fascinated by India but never set foot there. This is an India of the imagination. It’s an amalgam of traveler’s tales, the Arabian Nights, fairy tales and pure fancy. It’s a bit like the Arabian Nights retold by Kafka.

Fürbringer has entered a world in which he knows none of the rules. That’s the main obstacle to escape - where would he escape to? He is in an alien world and he doesn’t even know what to be afraid of.

And once he thinks he’s figured things out he still doesn’t really understand why is going on.

There’s a lot to admire in this book. Unfortunately it has one flaw and it’s a near-fatal flaw. I can’t tell you what it is because it would be a huge spoiler. Interestingly, the ending has similarities to the ending of one of Fritz Lang’s American films, not written by Thea von Harbou.

Despite the flaw it’s an interesting book with lots of exoticism and some great weird sinister atmosphere (the horses are a nice touch but I’m not going to tell you what’s so delightfully and creepily strange about them). So I’d still recommend this book. Metropolis on the other hand is a great book.

Fritz Lang's 1959 movie version of The Indian Tomb, the two-part film known as the Indian Epic, is excellent.

Christopher St John Sprigg's Death of an Airman

Death of an Airman was the fourth of seven detective novels written by Englishman Christopher St John Sprigg (1907-37). It was published in 1934 and it was well received by critics including Dorothy L. Sayers.

At around the time this novel was published Sprigg was developing what would soon become an all-consuming interest in Marxism. He wrote voluminously on Marxism and in 1936 went off to fight for the cause of communism in the Spanish Civil War. Within a very short space of time at the front he was killed in action.

There isn’t much indication of Sprigg’s growing political convictions in Death of an Airman. He was a man who evidently took his political beliefs very very seriously but the tone of the novel is light and breezy. The central character of the novel is a bishop which is interesting. Sprigg was raised as a Catholic. It was not unusual in those day for devout Catholics to transform themselves into devout Marxists. You might suspect that Spring chose a clergyman as protagonist in order to mock a belief system that he was in the process of abandoning but I can’t find much in the book to support such a notion. The bishop gives the impression of being a decent sort of chap, quite sincere in his religious beliefs, fairly easy-going, quite intelligent and very perceptive. It was not uncommon for doctrinaire Marxists to be doctrinaire atheists as well but I can’t see any evidence here of such sentiments.

The only thing that makes Dr Marriott, Bishop of Cootamundra (he’s an Australian bishop and he’s an Anglican), even slightly unusual is his passion for flying. He has joined the Boston Aero Club to learn to fly. His instructor was to be George Furnace, the club’s chief instructor. Furnace is a very experienced pilot and generally well liked. On the day on which he is to have his first lesson the bishop arrives early. Furnace has taken his aircraft up for a spin, apparently something he often does to clear the mental cobwebs. Much to the horror of those watching from the ground, including the bishop, Furnace’s plane goes into a spin from which it does not recover. Furnace’s body is cut out of the wreck. He was apparently killed instantly. The cause of death is perfectly obvious and there is no need for a post-mortem.

It’s all a bit odd. The aeroplane was regularly serviced and had recently been overhauled and inspected and all the control cables had been renewed. It seems very unlikely that the controls could have jammed. Furnace was such an experienced and cautious pilot that it seems hardly credible that he would have been unable to regain control. And he had recently had a medical examination and was in perfect health so it also seems unlikely that he could have blacked out. Of course there is one possible explanation but Furnace was well liked and no-one wants to consider the possibility of suicide. The inquest naturally brings in a verdict of death by misadventure.

Dr Marriott is however puzzled and a little disturbed. If you’re a clergyman in a remote part of Australia it is useful to have some medical knowledge as well and as part of his preparation for missionary work Dr Marriott undertook a three-year medical course at university. He may not be a qualified physician but he has a pretty fair acquaintance with cases of sudden death and there’s something he noticed when he saw the body not long after the crash. Something that didn’t seem quite right.

This is in fact an impossible crime story, but you won’t know that until you’re well into the book. At first it’s a puzzling death. As more and more evidence comes to light it becomes apparent that George Furnace’s death was quite impossible. The police can come up with no explanation that is consistent with the evidence. The worry with impossible crimes is always that the eventual solution will be a let-down but in this case the solution is both satisfactory and clever.

There are three detectives in this story. Inspector Creighton is the local man in charge but when it becomes apparent that the case has wider ramifications Inspector Bernard Bray of Scotland Yard (one of Sprigg’s regular characters) is called in to assist. And then there’s the bishop, without whose amateur sleuthing none of the facts would have come to light.

There are a lot of lady pilots in this story. Of course if you’re going to do a murder mystery centred on a flying club you’re going to have to find a way to work some female characters into the story so making them aviatrices is logical enough. And in the 1930s lady flyers were quite a big thing. They provided good copy for the newspapers and had definite celebrity status. And aviation provides a glamorous and exciting setting for the story (it helps that Sprigg had an aviation background so he knew his stuff). Sprigg may have been on the road to becoming an ardent communist but in 1934 he certainly had the right commercial instincts when it came to writing his detective novels.

Sprigg’s style is sly and witty and very appealing. There is a great deal of amusement to be had here but he does not allow it to get out of hand. This is primarily a mystery and he certainly does not neglect plotting. The howdunit angle is perhaps more important than the whodunit aspect and it’s fairly clued and nicely devious.

In his introduction to the British Library edition Martin Edwards describes Death of an Airman as an unorthodox whodunit. I must confess that this puzzles me. It struck me as being absolutely orthodox. In fact that’s what makes it so thoroughly enjoyable - it’s an orthodox mystery but it’s executed with immense skill and style. Highly recommended.

John Sherwood's Ambush for Anatol

Ambush for Anatol was the third of John Sherwood’s five spy thrillers featuring Charles Blessington. It was published in 1952 (and in the United States the title was changed to Murder of a Mistress).

John Sherwood (1913-2002) was an amazingly obscure if moderately prolific writer. He wrote a series of cozy mysteries with a horticultural theme and he also wrote the five Mr Blessington espionage thrillers between 1949 and 1954. I assume he was English but I know so little about him that I cannot even be absolutely certain that the author of the Celia Grant cozy mysteries and the author of the Mr Blessington spy thrillers are one and the same man.

Ambush for Anatol begins with a fairly sizeable cast of characters spending Bank Holiday Monday on Hampstead Heath. Philip and Diana Abinger are slowly subsiding into genteel poverty. Philip was an RAF fighter pilot during the war but since then he has been unable to make a go of anything. Now he thinks his luck may have changed. He ran into a Polish count with whom he had served in the RAF. Count Jan Piatovsky has some mysterious financial scheme going and although Philip has his doubts as to whether it’s likely to be strictly legal he’s desperate enough to try anything. Piatovsky and his common law wife are also on the Heath on the fatal day. As is the formidable but unpleasant Lady Bernberg. Everyone seems to be there to meet Anatol. The result is a double murder.

As it happens Mr Blessington has already become aware of other aspects of this case. Mr Blessington is a treasury official and one of his jobs is to prevent evasions of the British Government’s extraordinarily strict foreign currency regulations. He suspects that someone has cooked up an entirely new and ingenious means of circumventing the regulations and he’s pretty sure that it’s connected with this double murder. He decides that it would be advisable to have a word with Inspector Lunt at Scotland Yard.

In fact there’s rather more to this case than evasion of currency regulations. In fact there’s something much more sinister going on. This is a spy thriller of sorts, although it takes quite a while for the espionage angle to kick in. The espionage angle here is actually fairly original.

What one really hopes for in a thriller of this vintage is a “murder and mayhem on a train” angle and if the train senes happen on the Continent that’s even better. Ambush for Anatol not only delivers this it also has a “danger in the skies” angle as well. The action moves from London to Paris and then the French Riviera.

One of the most interesting things about this novel is its depiction of the dreary and depressing world of Britain in the period of postwar austerity. Years after having supposedly won the war Britain feels more like a defeated nation, with rationing still in force and with an economy in ruins. It was a miserable world for the working class but it was also a demoralising world for the middle and upper middle classes. Philip and Diana Abinger were typical of countless middle class people who were just barely managing to keep their heads above water. It was obviously a world in which people could easily convince themselves that things like smuggling and financial crimes were not really crimes. While this novel does not descend into tedious social commentary there are some genuinely intriguing social elements. The people who have become involved in this conspiracy are people who would certainly never have involved themselves in such desperate adventures in pre-war days.

While it was published in the same year that the first of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels appeared Ambush for Anatol belongs to a more genteel era of spy fiction. It’s not wildly dissimilar in tone to Victor Canning’s Panther’s Moon. In this era of British spy fiction novels featuring professional spies were still slightly unusual. Ambush for Anatol is a bit of a hybrid. It has the innocents caught up in espionage angle but there’s a professional spy hero as well. Mr Blessington is not quite a professional spy in the James Bond mould and he’s certainly not a conventional action, he is a professional spy of sorts. It’s clear that his work for the Treasury is not confined to shuffling papers in an office.

Mr Blessington looks like a typical civil servant. He is middle aged, bespectacled and rather overweight. He is however more than a mere civil servant. His razor-sharp mind makes him extremely dangerous and he can be breathtakingly ruthless when the occasion demands it. He carries a gun and he’s quite prepared to use it. He may remind some readers a little of Edgar Wallace’s Mr J.G. Reeder, a man who also seemed extraordinarily inoffensive and even slightly ridiculous on the surface but was the terror of Britain’s underworld. All in all Mr Blessington is a rather engaging character.

I’m not going to try to convince you that Ambush for Anatol is an adrenaline-chaged roller-coaster ride of action and excitement but it does have a few reasonably thrilling moments and it’s rather enjoyable. I suppose you could describe it as a cozy spy thriller. Recommended.