Sax Rohmer's She Who Sleeps

There was much much more to Sax Rohmer than the Fu Manchu stories.

Stark House have issued two Sax Rohmer novels written at almost exactly the same time (the late 1920s) in a two-novel paperback. They give an idea of his ability to jump from genre to genre. Moon of Madness (published in 1927) is a straightforward spy thriller and I have to say that conventional spy tales were not his forte. She Who Sleeps (dating from 1928) is much more interesting and much more successful. He’s in more congenial territory here - this is both weird fiction and an occult thriller.

A rich young man named Barry Cumberland, lost in a storm, crashes his car after catching a glimpse of an Egyptian princess on a balcony. Of course she can’t be a real Egyptian princess, not in 1920s New York. He tries to find her but can’t. He can’t even find the place where his car accident occurred.

His fabulously wealthy father John Cumberland is a keen Egyptologist who has come into possession of a papyrus that concerns an Egyptian princess, Zalithea. It contains a formula and a ritual. Zalithea is She Who Sleeps. In fact she is She Who Sleeps and Will Awaken. She lies in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings but with the formula and the ritual she can be revived, after sleeping for 3,200 years.

John Cumberland is convinced that the papyrus is genuine. He was has consulted various experts. They agree that it really is 3,200 years old. Is it possible that Zalithea still lives?

John Cumberland naturally organises an expedition, with assistance from several Egyptologists including the slightly mysterious Danbazzar. The real purpose of the expedition will have to be kept secret. If all goes as planned they will have in their possession a living, breathing 3,200-year-old Egyptian princess which could cause all manner of complications with the authorities in Egypt.

Barry Cumberland has another obsession - that girl he saw on the balcony. He suspects that she is Zalithea’s double, or a vision of Zalithea, or Zalithea’s ghost. His ideas on this subject are muddled but he is sure there is a connection.

And of course when the sarcophagus is finally opened Barry does find himself gazing into the face of the same girl.

The tomb had escaped the notice of tomb robbers and had lain untouched and undiscovered for more than three millennia. Zalithea cannot possibly be awakened. Or can she?

Compared to Moon of Madness this is not only subject matter much more ideally suited for Rohmer it’s also the sort of strange mysterious uncanny story that seemed to make Rohmer’s writing suddenly become a lot more lively. And the sense of breathless excitement that Rohmer tried to aim for works more successfully.

This is an occult thriller but it’s also a love story, a love story with its roots in the distant past.

These are things that appeal to me and I love anything to do with ancient Egypt so this novel really is right up my alley. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed many of Sax Rohmer’s books. The Bride of Fu Manchu and The Mask of Fu Manchu are fine Fu Manchu books. The Dream Detective is a splendid collection of occult detective stories. The Leopard Couch and Brood of the Witch-Queen are typical of his excellent gothic horror fiction/weird fiction. The Sins of Sumuru introduces his final creation, the glamorous sexy female diabolical criminal mastermind Sumuru. Sumuru wants to eliminate violence from the world. She accepts that to do so will involve killing a lot of people.

Sax Rohmer's Moon of Madness

Moon of Madness is a 1927 Sax Rohmer thriller.

Sax Rohmer (1883-1959) is best known as the creator of Dr Fu Manchu but he wrote a lot of other books in a number of genres. He wrote some great gothic horror and some fine occult thrillers. He also wrote straightforward spy thrillers such as Moon of Madness.

I like the spy fiction of the 1920s and 1930s because it has a refreshingly different tone compared to the endless Cold War spy thrillers of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

In Moon of Madness the enemy is the communists, the Bolsheviks, but it still has that interwar period flavour. And like so many of the spy novels of that period it features an amateur spy. In fact there are three spies on the side of the good guys. One is a professional, war hero Major O’Shea. The second is the narrator, George Decies. The third is a cute frivolous high-spirited eighteen-year-old girl, Nanette. But they all, even the professional, have that delightful British “muddling through” spirit.

The setting is Madeira, a suitably exotic and neutral locale for a spy thriller. A smooth Portuguese ladies’ man named de Cunha has been romancing Nanette. She should exercise more caution in these matters but she’s young and she wants to have fun. She’s not in love with de Cunha. She has set her sights on Major O’Shea. O’Shea is attracted to Nanette but he’s a man who agonises over moral dilemmas and points of honour and he’s convinced himself that it would be dishonourable to declare his love for the girl. One also suspects that’s just a little given to indulging in noble self-sacrifice.

What’s at stake is a bundle of letters written by a certain royal personage. If they fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks governments could fall, it might even mean a war.

To be honest I don’t think the straightforward spy thriller was Rohmer’s forte. The plot is rather thin. He was at his best when his plots were enlivened by bizarre backgrounds and outlandish setups, such as ongoing struggles with evil geniuses or weird possibly supernatural elements.

The hero-worship towards Major O’Shea displayed by the narrator can get a mite embarrassing. Especially given that O’Shea really doesn’t come across as such a brilliant splendid chap. O’Shea thinks he’s being terribly noble by not declaring his love for Nanette when in fact he’s causing her totally unnecessary emotional pain. And the only reason for his reticence appears to be an over-developed obsession with being virtuous and self-sacrificing. The reader feels like screaming at him to just take the girl in his arms, kiss her and tell her that he loves her. If he’d done that at the beginning a lot of suffering could have been avoided.

O’Shea also seems far from being a super-spy. He makes some elementary mistakes.

Of course the fact that O’Shea doesn’t live up to the narrator’s inflated estimate of him does add a slightly interesting touch.

This is a competent but fairly routine spy thriller. Worth a look, but he wrote so many much better books. Sax Rohmer was a great writer whose work is very much worth seeking out but Moon of Madness is not the best place to start.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Sax Rohmer’s stuff. The Bride of Fu Manchu and The Mask of Fu Manchu are good mid-period Fu Manchu books. The Dream Detective is an excellent collection of occult detective stories. The Leopard Couch and Brood of the Witch-Queen are typical of his excellent gothic horror fiction/weird fiction. The Sins of Sumuru introduces his final creation, the glamorous female diabolical criminal mastermind Sumuru. Sumuru wants to eliminate violence from the world and she doesn’t care how many people she has to kill to achieve her objective.

Sax Rohmer's The Green Spider

There was a lot more to Sax Rohmer than the Fu Manchu books. He wrote detective stories many of which had supernatural elements, or at least suggestions of the supernatural. And he wrote some fine gothic horror. Black Dog Books have collected a varied assortment of his early stories in The Green Spider: and Other Forgotten Tales of Mystery and Suspense.

The Green Spider (written in 1904) begins with a college servant named Jamieson discovering what appears to be a horrific murder. Someone has broken into the laboratory of Professor Brayme-Skepley, wrecked everything and murdered the professor. The body however is not there. There is evidence that suggests that the professor was forcibly removed from the premises (either dead or alive) but there is other evidence that suggests that such a thing could not have happened. And there’s the matter of the giant green spider seen by the servant.

The Death of Cyrus Pettigrew involves the sudden death of a man on a train. The only other person in the compartment was Miss Pettigrew, his niece and ward. The doctor who examines the body has no doubt that Cyrus Pettigrew was poisoned but the means by which the poison was administered remains mysterious. This is an impossible crime story, and a pretty good one.

The Mystery of the Marsh Hole dates from 1905 and is a disappointing and contrived story of a disappearance in the marshes.

The Sedgley Abbey Tragedies from 1909 begins with an escape from a lunatic asylum. Soon afterwards a body is found in an abbey moat. The explanation is clear-cut and the case is closed and the drama is over. Except that more bodies turn up in the moat. A good story with some fine twists.

The Mysterious Mummy is an OK very early story (from 1903) about odd happenings in a museum. A mummy is there, and then it isn’t there.

The McVillin (from 1905) concerns a well-born but impoverished Irish officer, Colonel McVillin. In fact he’s now a penniless rogue and adventurer. He finds himself involved in an affair of honour although he has no idea what it is all about. Something about a young lady being forced into a marriage against her will. McVillin will have to fight the duel anyway. A delightfully quirky mix of cynicism, romanticism and mystery. Splendid stuff.

Who Was the Rajah? dates from 1906. A masked ball onboard a steamer ends in piracy on the high seas. A very clever and witty caper story.

The Secret of Holm Peel, published in 1912, takes place on the Isle of Man. There’s a castle that once belonged to the king and a family secret that must be kept. There are secret passageways and phantom dogs. Good fun.

The Dyke Grange Mystery, from 1922, is a puzzle-plot mystery with some exotic touches. Private detective Paul Harley and Inspector Wessex are investigating the murder of a dissipated nobleman. An unusual dagger of Egyptian origin sees to be an important clue. Along with an assortment of cigarette stubs. An entertaining tale.

The Haunting of Low Fennel dates from 1920 and is an unusual and excellent haunted house tale. Major Dale would like to sell Low Fennel, an old house that has been in the family for centuries and has always had an evil reputation. He turns to ghost-hunter Addison for help. I’m not going to risk even the mildest spoiler but this is definitely not a run-of-the-mill haunted house story.

The Blue Monkey was published in 1920. A man is on his way home, on a lonely path through the moors. He is carrying a parcel - a blue porcelain monkey he has just purchased. The man is found dead. He has been strangled. No mystery there, but the only tracks leading from the crime scene seem to belong to a small child. A good solid mystery.

The Zayat Kiss was written in 1912. It’s extremely important since it arks the first appearance of Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu.

The Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom dates from 1915 and is an excerpt from The Return of Fu Manchu.

The Green Spider is a fine collection and is highly recommended.

More of Rohmer’s early short stories can be found in another Black Dog Books volume, The Leopard Couch and Other Stories of the Fantastic and Supernatural, which is also recommended. Also very worth getting hold of is The Dream Detective, a very fine collection of occult detective tales. And there’s some great fiendish occult wickedness in Brood of the Witch-Queen.

Peter Rabe's Journey Into Terror

Journey Into Terror is a 1957 crime novel by Peter Rabe.

It opens with a killing. A senseless killing. Two criminal outfits shooting it out in Truesdell Square and a girl named Ann just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up with a bullet hole in her forehead.

Ann was John Bunting’s girl. They were to be married the following day. Now that his girl is dead Bunting is just an empty shell. He gets drunk. He gets drunk again. He keeps getting drunk. Then he hears another drunk, a guy known as Mooch, talking about all the people who have done him wrong over the years and how one day he will have his revenge.

And suddenly Bunting knows what he has to do. He has to kill the guy who killed Ann.

He doesn’t know where to start. All he has a name. Saltenberg. Saltenberg may have some connection with the events in Truesdell Square. Bunting has also heard that a whore named Joyce might know something. Joyce doesn’t know anything her sister Linda does. Linda isn’t a whore. She’s a widow. Since her husband died she’s been dead inside. Just the way Bunting has been dead inside.

Linda has some vague connection with Saltenberg. Saltenberg is a businessman but he’s not exactly an honest businessman.

The answer may lie in Florida, in a town named Manitoba. Bunting heads for Florida. Maybe Bunting is finally doing something positive, but maybe he’s being manoeuvred into it. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Linda tags along with him. She doesn’t care about Bunting or Florida and she doesn’t care about herself but Joyce has kicked her out and she has to go somewhere.

Bunting and Linda don’t get along. There is no whirlwind romance. There’s nothing between them. They don’t exactly hate each other. They don’t care enough to hate each other. But maybe in their own broken ways they have made some some kind of connection. At least Bunting is now vaguely aware of the existence of another human being even if he doesn’t like her. And for Linda it’s much the same.

Bunting finds out that Ann’s killer had to be one of four men. The four men are Tarpin and his associates. They’re decidedly shady businessmen. In fact they’re small-time gangsters. Bunting has found a way to infiltrate Tarpin’s gang. It’s not clear how he intends to find out which one of them was the killer. He just assumes that he’ll find a way. His objective is clear but he hasn’t given much thought to the methods necessary to achieve it. He’s an obsessive but not a very clear-headed one.

So this is a murder mystery as well as a revenge story. Neither Bunting nor the reader has any idea of the identity of the killer.

The real focus is on the two central characters, Bunting and Linda. They’re both severely broken people and they have a lot in common. They’re both dead inside. The question is whether there is any hope for them, whether they can find a way to put themselves back together. Maybe they’ll just destroy themselves, or destroy each other. Maybe they can give each other a reason not to destroy themselves.

They’re not exactly sympathetic characters. They have entirely shut down their emotions and they have also shut down their entire personalities. They’re zombies.

The four men who might have killed Ann have a bit more depth than you might expect. They’re not very nice men but they have their own vulnerabilities and fears.

This is a psychological crime novel with perhaps a slight noir feel, if you’re prepared to define noir very loosely.

Like the other Peter Rabe books I’ve read this is an odd but strangely fascinating tale. Highly recommended.

By the same author I have also reviewed Stop This Man! and The Box and they’re both odd books as well.

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur

The Voyeur, published in 1955, was Alain Robbe-Grillet’s third novel.

Robbe-Grillet was a leading light in the Nouveau Roman ( 'new novel') movement which emerged in France in the 1950s. Whether this can be considered a modernist or a postmodernist movement depends on how you define postmodernism, and nobody has ever been able to define postmodernism satisfactorily.

The Nouveau Roman writers were uninterested in conventional narratives. The Voyeur has a narrative, but it’s almost accidental. It’s as if the protagonist, Matthias, collects bits and pieces of evidence drawn from his observations and memories and it is possible from these elements to construct a narrative but there is no way to be sure that is is the correct one. In fact there is no way to be sure that there is any story at all. The story told by these items of evidence might be illusory, merely a result of the innate human desire to see events as forming patterns. Sometimes the patterns are real. Sometimes they’re just random observations.

Matthias is a watch salesman. He arrives on a small island, hoping for a successful sales trip. He was born on this island and has various memories connected with it, although we have to consider the possibility that he has never been there before.

Memories are triggered but Matthias knows that memories can be misleading or false. He meets an old school friend but he has no actual recollection of having ever set eyes on this fellow before.

While Matthias is on the island a terrible event occurs. It may be a shocking crime. A young girl is found dead. It may have been murder but for various reasons the evidence pointing to murder has to be regarded by the reader as very ambiguous. It is entirely possible that the girl fell from the cliff accidentally.

Matthias tries to reconstruct the events, and his own actions, from his memories of that fateful day. These memories may be mixed up with memories from his past, of things that may have happened to him years earlier. It is possible that those things really happened to him, but it is also possible that they never happened. Some of his memories seem to be constructed from stories he has heard about other people. Matthias seems to have difficulty separating other people’s experiences from his own. We might well suspect that Matthias is the sort of guy who reads detective stories and true crime stories. The newspaper cutting he carries around with him might be about a crime he committed, or it might simply be a story of a crime committed by someone else.

You could argue that in this novel Matthias may be playing the role of the detective, or the role of the perpetrator of a crime. If there was a crime.

Matthias’s memories are disturbing but at the same time he regards them with detachment. There are perhaps some existentialist elements to this novel. Matthias is an observer (hence the title). Is he a participant as well, or just an observer?

Matthias obsesses about time (it’s probably no coincidence that he makes his living selling wristwatches). Everything he does have to fit a timetable. He has only six hours on the island before he has to catch the steamer back to the mainland. He has to sell 89 wristwatches in that time. He needs to know how long each sale will take. If sales are slow early on he has to recalculate his timetable.

He has to know exactly how long it will take him to get back to the pier. That timetable has to be constantly revised as well.

Matthias is obsessed by numbers. He needs to know exactly how many wristwatches he needs to sell, and the wristwatches come in different styles with different prices. He does the calculations in his head again and again.

Matthias is constantly trying to piece together the story of his day on the island. Possibly not the story, but a story. A narrative. Memories and observations can be pieced together in different ways to make stories that are not necessarily the same story or the real story. He is doing what a novelist does - piecing together various plot elements in order to construct a narrative but the plot elements do not necessarily have to be put together in just one way. They can make different narratives. A novelist’s narrative does not have to be true. A novelist deals with stories but perhaps not with truth or reality. Perhaps there is no true narrative. A novelist’s narrative does however have to make sense on its own terms and it has to suit the novelist’s purpose.

Matthias is trying to construct a narrative that will suit his purpose. He is having a lot of difficulty doing this. He has to make a lot of revisions. A lot of recalculations.

It all sounds very dry and intellectual and very arty but in fact it’s very entertaining. There was always a playfulness about Robbe-Grillet’s work. And he hoped the reader (or the viewer in the case of his film) would enjoy the games as well. The Voyeur is highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Robbe-Grillet’s delightfully playful 1965 novel La Maison de rendez-vous. He was also a brilliant film director. I’ve reviewed many of his movies - the hypnotic L’immortelle (1963), his superb exercise in surrealism La Belle Captive (1983), the wildly strange and erotic Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974) and the enticingly puzzling Playing with Fire (1975).

Happily the English translation of The Voyeur is easy to find.

Victor Rousseau's Eric of the Strong Heart

Victor Rousseau (1879-1960) was an English British writer who wrote science fiction and other assorted pulp fiction works.

His lost world novel Eric of the Strong Heart was serialised in four parts in Railroad Man's Magazine in November and December 1918.

Eric Silverstein is what would later be called a geek. He lives in New York, he’s wealthy and he’s a history buff. Everything changes for him when he cores across a sideshow attraction featuring a mysterious princess from an exotic land. Much to the amusement of the crowd she speaks in gibberish. Eric notices two things. Firstly her costume is Saxon from around a thousand years earlier and it’s totally authentic. Secondly she isn’t speaking gibberish - she is speaking Old English. Being a history fanatic Eric understands the language. The princess (whose name is Editha) is very indignant. She was expecting an audience with the king of this land.

There is a disturbance and the princess, aided by Eric, makes her escape. She just wants to return to her longship. It turns out she really does have a longship. Then something very odd happens - the princess suddenly becomes a knife-wielding maniac. Her two attendants make apologies for her and it is suggested that it would be safer for Eric to forget all about her. Editha sails off, to return to her own land.

Eric cannot forget her. Oddly enough, even though she is very beautiful, he does not have fantasies of marrying her. He thinks his friend Ralph would be a perfect husband for her.

Eric is intelligent but he has a few huge blind spots. He also underestimates himself. He has never been handsome or athletic. He does not see himself as the stuff that heroes are made of, while he thinks of Ralph as being very much hero material.

Eric knows his history and his geography. He thinks he knows where Editha’s land is. It is in the frozen Arctic, north of Spitzbergen. He buys himself a yacht and with two companions sets off to find Editha’s homeland. His two companions are Ralph and a fisherman named Bjorn.

This is a classic lost world story. Editha’s land has been cut off from the rest of humanity for a millennium. People there live as they did a thousand years ago. There are in fact two peoples there, one (the rulers) descended from the Dames and one (the slaves) descended from the Angles. There are two kings, but the Danish king rules. Editha is the daughter of the Anglian king.

In fact there are three people on this remote island, the third being a race of Trolls.

There are of course power struggles. The Angles have never been entirely reconciled to their subordinate status. The Danes are determined to maintain their superior position. Having two kings complicates things. There has been intermarriage. There are conspiracies aplenty. The arrival of outsiders increases the tension levels, especially when one of the outsiders puts himself forward as a candidate for the kingship.

There is also a sword with a legend attached to it. The man who draws the sword out of its rocky scabbard will be king.

There are conflicted loyalties and betrayals, not just among the islanders but among the three outsiders as well. Bjorn seem to have his own agenda.

There are people who feel they are chosen by destiny, and they can be thereby tempted to do desperate things.

This is a complex lost world. The story offers a lot of action and adventure but with some psychological twists. Eric is a man who is intelligent and resourceful but he has made a very serious error of judgment which could have momentous consequences. There is magic, although the exact nature of the magic is ambiguous.

The ending holds a few surprises.

This is an above-average lost world tale and it’s highly recommended.

Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr Goodbar

Judith Rossner’s novel Looking for Mr Goodbar was published in 1975 and was a huge bestseller. The 1977 film adaptation was a major hit. Both the novel and the film have since disappeared into obscurity. They deal with grown-up subject matter that is now more or less off-limits. Today you’d have to add lots of trigger warnings and even then the novel probably would not get published today and for several reasons the movie certainly could not be made today.

The novel was inspired by a real-life case of a young female schoolteacher who lived a double life, cruising the singles bars at night looking for pick-ups.

The novel reveals the ending right at the very beginning. The movie doesn’t quite do this but the novel was so notorious that viewers at the time probably knew how the movie was going to end. Nonetheless I don’t want to reveal what might be considered spoilers for the movie so I’m going to be very vague about certain plot details.

I often find that when I watch a movie and read the source novel shortly afterwards I find myself dissatisfied with the movie. This however is an interesting case - both the novel and the movie are seriously flawed but extremely interesting and they’re flawed and interesting in quite different ways.

In this review I’ll be devoting quite a bit of attention to the difference between the novel and the film because those differences are so intriguing.

It’s significant that the movie was made in 1977 and the key events of the story clearly take place in the mid-70s. It’s a very 70s movie. The key events of the novel all take place in the mid to late 60s. It’s very much a 60s novel.

Theresa Dunn is a college student having an affair with her professor. The affair lasts four years but it’s far from smooth sailing and then Theresa finds herself dumped. She graduates and becomes a teacher. She likes teaching small children. Her attitudes towards children are as contradictory as her attitudes towards most things.

Her childhood was difficult. She suffered serious illness which left her with a slight limp and a large scar on her back. Her Catholic upbringing caused her problems as well. The movie deals with her childhood very economically but very effectively. We learn everything we need to know in a few brief scenes. The book explores her childhood in painstaking and obsessively unnecessary detail.

Theresa’s relationships with men are turbulent and mostly disastrous, complicated by her sexual problems. She picks up men in bars. She becomes involved with men who are clearly trouble. She pushes away any man who falls in love with her. She becomes involved in the drug scene. She gets mixed up in the swinger lifestyle. She becomes, briefly, a hooker (mostly for the thrill of rebellion rather than the money). She becomes trapped in a potentially dangerous spiral of risk-taking behaviour.

In the movie she’s a woman looking for love in all the wrong places. In the novel she’s a woman looking for sex in all the wrong places. In the novel it is quite clear that Theresa likes rough dangerous sex. The rougher and more dangerous the better. The movie does offer hints of her sexual obsessions but they’re downplayed. Even in 1977 and even with an X rating there was no way a major studio was going to allow sadomasochism to be dealt with openly and honestly. Theresa’s sexual kinks are the core of her story and since the movie sidesteps that side of her sexuality Theresa’s motivations in the film end up being unclear and most of the story’s impact is lost. In that respect the movie compares very unfavourably with the novel.

The movie gives us Theresa’s story, with just a couple of unnecessary and undeveloped sub-plots. In the novel those sub-plots are still unnecessary and poorly developed but they’re a much more annoying distraction. In the novel my impression is that Rossner wanted to combine Theresa’s story with a sociological-political-cultural history of the 60s. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that but it makes the novel much more unfocussed and rambling than the movie. So in that respect the movie is superior. Incidentally Rossner hated the movie.

The novel has major problems but at least it tries to grapple with confronting and uncomfortable subjects. I think both novel and film are worth checking out but neither is totally satisfactory. I’m still recommending the novel.

I’ve also reviewed the movie.

Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed

Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed was published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1965.

Charles Runyon (1928-2015) was born in Missouri and wrote science fiction as well as crime fiction.

This could be described as a serial killer story and that’s probably my least favourite literary genre but this is a very unconventional and interesting serial killer story, both thematically and structurally.

I’m going to be more vague than usual about the plot since I don’t want to risk giving away even the mildest of spoilers.

The novel uses first person narration but with more than one narrator. At first the switch in point of view may seem puzzling but if you stick with it you will find out why Runyon chose such an approach.

The novel begins with a man telling us how he murdered a woman after manipulating her into an affair. She is not the first woman he has murdered. Not by a long way. He tries to explain his odd motivations. It has something to do with playing a game. Games are an essential part of this story. Sometimes people know they are playing a game and sometimes they don’t.

Then the point of view switches to Velda. We already know that Velda was important to the killer but we don’t know why.

There was a murder many years earlier. A man was convicted. He may or may not have been guilty.

A man returns to a small town called Sherman, for somewhat enigmatic reasons connected with that murder.

There have been several murders. Possibly many murders. There is no way of knowing how many. There have been many violent deaths, some of which may have been murders but some of which may have been accidents or suicides. It’s possible that most of these deaths really were accidents or suicides. It’s also possible that they were all murders.

There is madness here, but the identity of the mad person is uncertain. At times we have reason to doubt the sanity of a number of characters. We certainly have cause to be suspicious of the motivations of a number of characters. There is plenty of paranoia and suspicion.

It will of course occur to us that we may be dealing with an unreliable narrator, or even two unreliable narrators. We can’t be sure. We can’t be sure if any of the characters knows what’s going on. We can’t be sure how many of the characters understand their own motivations. This applies not just to individuals. The paranoia and suspicion infects the whole town. Groups of people as well as individuals can go mad.

There are three, or possibly four, people who are cast in the role of investigators. There is no shortage of evidence, but all the evidence is hopelessly ambiguous. There are witnesses to certain events, but those witnesses may be lying or deluded or confused or stupid. They may have failed to mention crucial details.

These investigations are all conducted by amateurs. There is a sheriff, but his investigations are of no significance. His only interest is in being re-elected sheriff.

Runyon really does take an intriguingly unconventional approach and the result is a novel that initially doesn’t seem all that interesting but that becomes more and more fascinating as the reader is drawn into the author’s clever and devious game. Highly recommended.

This is one of three novels in the Stark House Noir Classics volume A Trio of Gold Medals, along with Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man and Fletcher Flora’s Park Avenue Tramp.

Peter Rabe’s The Box

Peter Rabe’s The Box is a 1962 hardboiled crime novel with a tropical setting and maybe a dash of noir.

Peter Rabe (1921-1990) was an American pulp crime writer who deserves to be better remembered.

The Box begins with a man in a box. It’s a packing crate to be precise. His name is Quinn. He’s a lawyer and a racketeer. The box is a punishment. The idea is you put a guy in a packing crate in New York. The crate is put on a freighter. The guy has plenty of food and water but he’s in the box in complete darkness lying in his own filth. After going right around the world the crate arrives back in New York. By that time the guy has learnt his lesson and he’ll be a good boy in future.

Quinn only gets as far as a small city in North Africa, a city named Okar. Someone has noticed that the box doesn’t smell so good so it gets opened. And there’s Quinn. Alive, but not very happy.

Quinn recovers but he has two problems. He has no papers, and he has no money.

Okar is run by Remal. Remal is the mayor and controls every other public office. This is his town. He has some nice rackets going, small-time smuggling mostly but profitable. He doesn’t want anyone around who might make waves. He likes Quinn and he has no wish to do him any harm. He just wants him to leave.

Leaving would be sensible but Quinn is stubborn, and then there’s Beatrice. She’s Remal’s woman but there’s a definite attraction between Quinn and Beatrice. If Quinn stays he’ll need to earn a living and the only way he knows how to make a living is dishonestly. That means muscling in on Remal’s rackets. That could cause problems, and it does.

While there’s a good plot here the main focus is on Quinn’s psychology. When he got out of the box he found he’d lost his touch. His edge. All the habits that had made him such a smoother operator. He wants to get those things back, so he can go back to being the man he was. But there’s a niggling doubt. Maybe the man he was wasn’t so great. Maybe he’d been in a box his whole life, a box of his own making. Maybe he needs to get out of that box.

It’s important to note that Quinn has choices. Unlike most noir protagonists he is not trapped. What he has to do is to decide which choices to make.

There are no clear-cut heroes and villains. Quinn is a gangster but he’s not such a bad guy and he prefers to avoid violence. Remal is equally amoral but he’s a likeable rogue. Even the Sicilian gangsters who get involved at one stage are quite pleasant. Sure, they have to have guys rubbed out sometimes but it’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Whitfield, the shipping clerk who plays a key role in Okar and in the story, just wants to avoid anything unpleasant. He just goes with the flow. He’s the kind of character who would have been played by Wilfred Hyde-White had this story been filmed in the 60s.

There’s a nice atmosphere of tropical sleaze. There’s the quiet desperation and moral corruption of expatriates gone to seed.

Every character in the novel is corrupt but not evil. They’ve made easy soft choices.

There’s not much action but there is a little and there’s some decent suspense at the end.

Is it noir fiction? Perhaps, if you define noir fiction broadly enough. I’d prefer to think of it as hardboiled crime. Either way it’s a very good entertaining read. Highly recommended.

Stark House have paired this one with Rabe’s 1957 novel Journey Into Terror in a two-novel paperback edition.

I’ve also reviewed Peter Rabe’s excellent 1955 hardboiled thriller Stop This Man!

Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Maison de rendez-vous

La Maison de rendez-vous is a 1965 novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008). Robbe-Grillet received great acclaim in his native France as a novelist, belonging to the so-called New Novel (Nouveau Roman) school. This was one of the many variants of modernism with perhaps some touches of what would later become known as postmodernism. Writers such as Robbe-Grillet were not notably concerned with traditional approaches to narrative and characterisation.

Robbe-Grillet also achieve both fame and notoriety as a filmmaker. His movies play around with conventional narrative and include some very marked surrealist influences. He is best-known in the English-speaking as the screenwriter of the superb and influential 1961 movie Last Year at Marienbad (which was directed by Alain Resnais but feels much more like an Alain Robbe-Grillet movie).

La Maison de rendez-vous concerns certain events connected with the Blue Villa in Hong Kong. This is a kind of salon presided over by Lady Ava. Or perhaps it’s more of a high-class brothel. There are two murders although one might be suicide. There is a mysterious man known as Sir Ralph but he is also known as The American even though he might not be an American.

There is a beautiful Eurasian servant girl with a large dog on a leash. Her name is Kim. She keeps popping up. It might not necessarily always be the same servant girl. Sometimes it might be her sister, if she has a sister. Her sister’s name might be Kim.

There is a young Japanese prostitute named Kito. There is drug-smuggling going on. There might be espionage as well. There are subtle hints of sadomasochism, and possibly vampirism, and possibly human sacrifice.

The entertainment at the Blue Villa includes theatrical performances. The star is Lauren, or her name might be Loraine. Sir Ralph is obsessed by her and wants to buy her, if he can raise the cash.

There are interesting groups of erotic statuary surrounding the Blue Villa. The theatrical performances sometimes mimic the statuary.

The events surrounding the Blue Villa are recounted many times and they never turn out exactly the same way twice. The characters are somewhat malleable as well. Their names change slightly. It’s not entirely certain Kito exists. Or she may have been killed.

The narrative is unstable and fragmented and non-linear and it is impossible to know which events really happened. There are point of view shifts and occasionally there’s a first-person narrator. The characters are unstable.

There are certainly some surrealist influences, as there are in Robbe-Grillet’s movies. Maybe we’re in the world of dream, or maybe we’re in the world of books which are not necessarily the same as real life. There are no concessions to conventional realism. The characters are not real people, they’re characters in a story. Or maybe that’s what real life is.

There’s an atmosphere of slightly off-kilter eroticism, just as in his movies.

What really links this novel to Robbe-Grillet’s movies is its playfulness. In his movies Robbe-Grillet plays games with the viewer but the viewer is welcome to participate and Robbe-Grillet wants the viewer to have as much fun as he’s having. This novel takes more or less the same approach. With Robbe-Grillet you don’t want to agonise too much about meanings or waste time looking for messages. It’s more enjoyable to go with the flow and enjoy the ride.

If you’ve seen Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Robbe-Grillet’s own films such as Trans-Europ-Express (1966) and La Belle Captive (1983) and the wonderful L’immortelle (1963) then you know what to expect from this novel. If you enjoyed those movies you’ll enjoy this novel just as much. I love his movies and I loved La Maison de rendez-vous. It's quite easy to find in an English translation.

Theodore Roscoe's The Tower of Death

The Tower of Death is a collection of stories by Theodore Roscoe published in the pulp magazine Argosy in 1932. These are tales of the American curio hunter Peter Scarlet and the naturalist Bradshaw. They are tales of adventure in wild and exotic places, adventures laced with considerable dashes of horror.

Theodore Roscoe was one of the great pulp writers, best known perhaps for his Foreign Legion stories but everything he wrote is worth reading.

Bradshaw narrates the first story, The Last Battle. It concerns the final battle of the First World War, a very strange battle indeed fought on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The story begins in 1920, when an expedition sets out to collect specimens for museums. They encounter a small British outpost, entirely abandoned. This is strange and disturbing. They decide to strike out for a nearby Belgian outpost and it’s abandoned as well. Now things are getting really disturbing but the strangeness has only just begun. A fine story.

In Yankee Beware! Peter Scarlet is on a mouldering steamer on the Caspian Sea, skippered by a giant crazy scoundrel of a Russian named Rachmaninoff. The steamer is carrying a Moslem holy man and a group of Moslem pilgrims. The holy man tells a story Scarlet has heard many times before, the tale of Genghis Khan’s ghost and his fabulous lost emerald crown. Many have set out to find that emerald crown. None have returned. But thanks to some strange twists of fate the holy man promises Peter Scarlet that he will see Genghis Khan’s emerald crown.

As a result of the holy man’s promise Peter Scarlet will certainly see strange sights and be plunged into a wild and murderous adventure. A superb rousing tale of adventure, madness and horror.

It’s hard to imagine a greater horror than the one that faces Peter Scarlet in Tower of Death. The tower in question is a Parsee burial tower. The dead are exposed at the top of the tower where they are feasted upon by vultures.

It all starts in Turkestan when Scarlet wants to buy some pearls from a trader named Maqboul, a trader with an evil reputation. Maqboul and his henchman, the hunchback Hamid, have many deaths on their consciences, or they would if they had consciences. There is a suspicion that Maqboul was responsible for the disappearance of a British policeman named Smith. Scarlet and Smith had been very old friends and Scarlet would very much like to bring Smith’s killer to justice.

What Scarlet doesn’t know is that Maqboul has already marked him down for death. Maqboul intends to make no mistake. A reasonable enough plot but it’s the atmosphere of terror that makes it a very good story.

In The Killer of Kelantan Bradshaw the naturalist is in Malaya trying to capture a white elephant. A huge bad-tempered bull white elephant. After capturing him he will have to get the beast on board the ship. Dealing with the elephant is bad enough but Bradshaw soon has other more urgent things to worry about. This story has some terror but a slightly whimsical feel as well. It has the feel of a tall tale told to newcomers by old jungle hands. To some limited extent all of the Scarlet and Bradshaw stories have that feel but it’s much more overt in this tale. It’s a lot of fun.

The Emperor of Doom has shipboard setting. In Sumatra Peter Scarlet had received a threatening letter and had a shot fired at him, apparently an attempt to frighten him into giving up a jewel he had purchased. But Peter Scarlet doesn’t frighten easily, the jewel has been safely deposited in a bank and now he’s on a ship at sea and he feels he is quite safe. And he has his old friend Schneider, a fat Dutch planter, with him.

The voyage becomes a whirlwind of action, intrigue and murder. The murder was carried out by a black-bearded Moslem priest who promptly vanishes. The action just doesn’t let up in this story and Peter Scarlet finds himself in a very awkward situation. He has a puzzle to solve and if he doesn’t solve it his life won’t be worth two cents.

Roscoe uses the shipboard setting with great skill. A fast-paced clever and very exciting story.

The Scarlet and Bradshaw stories are absolute must-reads for all adventure fiction and pulp fiction fans. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Roscoe’s wonderful zombie mystery novel Z is For Zombie, his short story collection The Emperor of Doom as well as two earlier Scarlet and Bradshaw collections, Blood Ritual and The Ruby of Suratan Singh. I warmly recommend all these books.

Kenneth Royce’s The XYY Man

Kenneth Royce’s 1970 spy novel The XYY Man has an interesting psychiatric twist to it, which we’ll get to later.

Kenneth Royce Gandley (1920–1997) wrote a series of novels featuring cat burglar Spider Scott (the XYY Man) and other novels featuring Detective Sergeant George Bulman, a character who first made his appearance in The XYY Man.

Spider Scott has just been released from prison after serving a five-year stretch. At the age of 34 he is determined never to go back inside again.

During his time inside the prison doctors discovered that he has a chromosomal abnormality. Instead of an X and a a Y chromosome he has an X and two YY chromosomes. The doctors believe this is the reason for his criminality. They also believe it’s the reason he only ever commits crimes against property, never against persons. Their theory is that XXY men are highly inclined to criminality but very non-violent.

Back in 1970 the idea that behaviour is influenced by chromosomal abnormalities was quite fashionable in medical circles and the idea of XXY men being inclined to crime was exciting a lot of criminologists.

Spider finds that going straight isn’t so easy. Detective Sergeant Bulman is trying to frame him for a series of burglaries. Spider’s kid brother is a cop (and a real straight arrow) and it seems like someone is trying to wreck his career. Spider gets the feeling that someone is really out to get get him and he doesn’t know why but eventually he will find out.

Then Spider is made an offer he can’t refuse. He wants to refuse it, he is sure it’s a bad idea, but he really has no choice. The offer is made by a man named Fairfax, a man who seems very much part of the Establishment. Fairfax wants Spider to carry out a burglary, but in the best interests of Queen and Country. All Spider has to do is break into the Chinese Legation. One look at the place convinces him that the idea is madness but he’s been well and truly trapped into doing this job, and he is almost convinced that it really is his patriotic duty.

When Spider finds out what it is that he’s been sent to steal things suddenly become very clear to him. And he realises just what a horrible mess he’s in.

Spider needs to find somebody he can trust, but those he thinks he can trust turn out to be not trustworthy at all. He has possession of something that is political dynamite but he has to figure out a way of using it, and he’s a rank beginner at the grubby game of espionage.

This book falls into the sub-genre of spy thrillers about reluctant spies but it’s even more paranoid than most such tales. He’s being manipulated by the intelligence agencies of at least four different countries and while he knows the nature of the documents he stole he doesn’t know the use to which these various agencies intend to put those documents. In some cases they don’t know that themselves, because they don’t know what is in those documents. They just know that they have to have them, because all those other countries are so keen to have them.

Spider is a sympathetic hero. He really does sincerely want to go straight and despite his larcenous history he has a perverse honest side to him. He likes to steal but he doesn’t like cheating people or lying to them. If he’s going to survive in the world of espionage he’s going to have to learn to be a lot more dishonest and a lot more devious. And a lot more ruthless. It doesn’t come naturally to him, but he wants to survive.

The novel’s view of the world of spies is extremely bleak and cynical. It’s not a world of adventure, honour or glamour. It’s vicious and sordid. In 1970 spy fiction (and spy TV series) was becoming steadily more cynical and paranoid and The XYY Man is very much in tune with the mood of the late 60s/early 70s.\

There’s plenty of action and plenty of violence, and the violence is fairly brutal at times.

The psychiatric angle isn’t developed to any great extent, although we do get the sense that Spider is basically a decent guy with an overwhelming urge to steal things.

The XYY Man is gritty and action-packed with a bit of a serious edge to it and it’s thoroughly entertaining. Highly recommended.

The XYY Man was was made into a British spy TV series by Granada in 1976, which I reviewed here a few years back. I wasn’t entirely sold on the TV series but having now read the book I’m tempted to give the TV series another look.

Theodore Roscoe's Z Is For Zombie

Theodore Roscoe (1906-1992) was an American pulp writer and also a distinguished naval historian. Like most pulp writers he worked in a number of different genres. If you wanted to make a decent living as a pulp writer it was desirable to be able to sell stories to as many different pulp magazines as possible which meant you pretty much had to write in multiple genres. Roscoe wrote excellent adventure tales and dabbled in fantasy and horror and he also wrote murder mysteries. Z Is For Zombie, published in serial form in Argosy in 1937, spans at least three and possibly four different genres. It’s a blend of horror (with voodoo elements of course), adventure in the tropics, spy thriller and murder mystery. And the murder mystery involves an impossible crime.

The setting is Haiti (Roscoe had actually visited Haiti). Dr Jim Ranier is in a waterfront dive in a remote village in Haiti and he’s drunk. That’s not unusual. He spends a lot of time drunk. He had at one time been a very successful surgeon but he lost everything in the stock market crash and now he’s a ship doctor on a tramp steamer and when he’s not drunk he spends his time feeling sorry for himself. He had been married, until his wife broke the news to him that while she was delighted to be married to a rich successful surgeon she had no interest whatsoever in being married to a struggling small town doctor. So Ranier has some valid reasons to feel sorry for himself.

Ranier and a number of passengers from the steamer have gone ashore intending to drive along the coast (getting a look at the real Haiti) before picking up the ship again at Port-au-Prince.

Being drunk he gets into an argument with one of the passengers, a German named Haarman, and he gets slugged and thrown out into the street. He wanders back into the bar and finds himself a quiet corner in which to drink and brood. He notices that Haarman is awfully quiet now. Too quiet. In fact the guy seems dead. He’s not dead, but he’s dying. With a knife wound in the back. But that’s impossible. Nobody could have stabbed him. Someone would have seen it happen. And the knife is nowhere to be found.

Ranier is a drunk but he’s still a doctor and he has to try to save Haarman. There’s a small hospital nearby, run by a Dr Eberhardt. And now the weird fiction elements start to emerge. Dr Eberhardt is nowhere to be found. His laboratory has been wrecked. His nurse (and niece although we later discover she’s not really his niece), a German girl named Laïs Engles, is mystified. She reveals that Dr Eberhardt had been working on some very strange research, something to do with reanimating dead tissue. Maybe even reanimating dead people. And there are all those frogs. Hundreds of them. It’s all a bit strange. Things get even stranger when Haarman dies. It appears that after dying Haarman got up and left.

That’s not the end of the strangeness. Not by a long chalk. Laïs Engles recognises Haarman. The last time she saw him was fourteen years ago and he was dead at the time. Now he’s dead again. Maybe.

Laïs has a very strange story to tell. A story of wartime intrigue and top-secret missions and journeys through the Amazon jungles and shipwreck. The poor girl is clearly mad. But Ranier doesn’t think she is mad. He’s convinced she’s telling the truth. Or at least that she thinks she’s telling the truth. Some of it may actually be true. More worrying is the possibility that all of her story is true.

The book now becomes a crazy journey from graveyard to graveyard, with corpses that apparently not only get up and walk, they undertake cross-country travels.

To add to the fun the locals are convinced that they’re dealing with evil voodoo witch doctors and they know how to deal with people like that - you hunt them down and kill them or you burn them out if they’re hiding. There are also people running around with guns taking pot shots at each other and soon there are more corpses. These ones really are dead. Probably.

The really fun part is that because this is a story from an adventure pulp rather than a detective pulp the reader can’t be entirely sure there’s going to be a rational explanation, and indeed it’s hard to imagine a rational explanation that would make sense.

Roscoe knows what he’s doing. He brings all the crazy plot strands together and gives us a wholly satisfying resolution although naturally I’m not going to give you any hints about that resolution. Whether there’s any actual supernatural element involved is something else I’m not going to tell you. There is however a solid murder mystery plot here.

The impossible crime angle might disappoint those who love amazingly complex impossible crimes but this one at least has the virtue of being totally plausible.

The novel was originally serialised in six parts so at times Roscoe gives us brief recaps of previous events. The novel does not appear to have been edited in any way, which is a very good thing. Once you succumb to the temptation to do a bit of editing the danger is that you’ll start thinking your readers are over-sensitive children and you’ll start editing out all the politically incorrect stuff. Happily Steeger Books have reprinted Z Is For Zombie in all its politically incorrect glory.

You can enjoy this book as an outrageous but well-crafted murder mystery but it’s equally enjoyable as an adventure tale and a horror story. Whichever way you take it it’s superbly written (Roscoe’s prose is an absolute joy) and immensely entertaining. Very highly recommended.

I bought this book after reading the glowing review at Beneath the Stains of Time. There’s another fine review at The Invisible Event.

I’ve reviewed a couple of collections of Rocoe’s short stories - The Emperor of Doom and Blood Ritual. They’re both well worth a look.

Theodore Roscoe's The Ruby of Suratan Singh

The Ruby of Suratan Singh is a collection of adventure tales by the great pulp writer Theodore Roscoe. These stories were originally published in various pulp magazines such as Argosy, Far East Adventure Stories and Action Stories in 1929 and 1930. This is the second collection of stories featuring either the American curio hunter Peter Scarlet or the naturalist Bradshaw.

These are tales of adventure in the Mysterious East, in jungles and exotic seaports and anywhere that fortunes can be made without too much concern for ethics of any kind.

These stories are fairly outrageous. They’re really the kinds of tales you’d hear told in a bar and they might be true or they might be just tall tales. That’s what makes them so enjoyable. You just can’t be sure whether to believe them or not.

While these stories are described as the Scarlet and Bradshaw stories it should be pointed out that some feature Scarlet, some feature Bradshaw and some feature both men. In this particular collection Scarlet only appears once (although it’s a memorable appearance). It’s still quite reasonable to describe them as the Scarlet-Bradshaw stories. They all take place in the East at the same time period and they all have a similar feel, a feel of mysteries that may or may not have rational explanations.

Some of the stories are amusing, some are quite dark and macabre. They’re an enticing blending of adventure fiction and weird fiction with occasional dashes of science fiction and horror. Roscoe’s plotting was always pretty solid. He had a knack for giving his stories a nice little sting in the tail, and for giving his stories just the right touches of ambiguity.

Scarlet and Bradshaw are not mere pulp fiction tough guys. That’s not to say that they aren’t tough, you don’t survive in the jungle very long without a certain amount of grit, but there’s more to them. They’re genuinely interesting offbeat characters.

Roscoe was also very adept at creating an atmosphere of dread and subtle uneasiness.

Roscoe was one of the grand masters of pulp fiction and these stories are among his greatest achievements.

The Stories

Moon Up is a very strange story indeed, a jungle adventure set in India but with a hefty dash of science fiction. Reven Staffard is staying in the jungle bungalow belonging to the naturalist Bradshaw. Staffard is supposedly hunting tigers but he hasn’t seen any tigers and he’s getting fed up. Then a bizarre old man wanders out of the jungle. His name, he declares, is Dr Gulick Habighorst. He has come to India for the moonlight. Apparently the moonlight in India is particularly suited to his experiments. Dr Habighorst has been conducting research on lunar rays and claims to have made an amazing discovery. He has discovered a means of using rays of moonlight as a kind of death ray. With a special lens he can use moonlight to reduce any object to its component atoms. Dr Habighorst’s lunar rays are the most potent destructive force ever discovered.

Staffard assumes the man is insane. Until Dr Habighorst demonstrates his invention.

Dr Habighorst wants Staffard to finance his further researches.

The crazy old scientist’s demonstration is impressive but there are eyes in the night watching. The eyes belong to men who want that death ray.

A very fine story with a nice twist to it.

The Blue Cat of Buddha is a treasure hunt story. Bradshaw is shipwrecked. An American singer who failed to find success in Tin Pan Alley rescues him. The singer, Johnny Ash, has gone to the East to make his fortune in order to win the love of his girl back home. The singer also saves a frail old Buddhist monk. The monk has a strange tale to tell.

The legend of the blue cat of Buddha, a giant carved cat that guards the entrance to a cavern which is a fabulous treasure trove, had attracted many a fortune-hunter. Maybe some of those fortune-hunters found that cavern. None survived to tell of it. But the old monk claims to know the secret that can unlock that treasure.

Bradshaw thinks that seeking the treasure is a terrible idea. He knows the East. He knows the quest can lead only to madness and death. But Johnny Ash is determined and Bradshaw owes him his life so he has to tag along. There are others seeking the treasure, six dangerous desperate men. A thoroughly enjoyable tale.

The Little Gold Dove of Gojjam finds Bradshaw in Abyssinia, lost in a forbidden valley with a young Englishman named Tupper. Bradshaw saves an Abyssinian from a lion. The Abyssinian, curiously enough, speaks English. He learnt the language in New York. He returned to Africa in search of a legend - the legend of Noah’s Ark. And he tells Bradshaw and his companion a part of the legend they had never heard before - the legend of Noah’s gold. The dying Abyssinian even tells them where to find the Ark. It’s in a hidden lake.

It’s all nonsense of course but something persuades Bradshaw and Tupper to search for the hidden lake. What they find is impossibly strange. Perhaps there is a rational explanation. Perhaps it was all just a legend after all. Perhaps. Another delightfully offbeat tale of adventure.

Claws features American curio hunter Peter Scarlet. He’s in one of the roughest sleaziest bars in the East which is the last place his friends Bradshaw and Schneider expect to find him. And why does he have his gun with him? Why does he want to listen to the crummy piano player? It’s the past that has drawn Scarlet to this bar in Penang. A terrible event in the past has drawn three men to this bar. A good story.

In The Ruby of Suratan Singh Bradshaw tells how he found the ruby in question. During the Indian Mutiny a nabob named Suratan Singh had fled from the vengeance of the British, taking with him the most valuable jewel in his possession. Bradshaw encounters an old woman who claims not only to know where the ruby is, she claims to have been there when Suratan Singh fled.

The quest for the ruby almost costs Bradshaw his life. And at the end we get the kind of nice little twist that Roscoe tends to throw in, the kind of twist that makes Roscoe not just a fun pulp writer but a superior pulp writer.

The Phantom Buddha is a kind of Oriental ghost story. The Malays engaged in building a railroad are being whipped into a frenzy by rumours that the phantom of the Buddha is about to appear to them in a small valley deep in the jungle. The young engineer Carter is well and truly spooked but his older colleague McInerny insists that it’s all hokum. Bradshaw isn’t certain. It may be a hoax but he is inclined to think that rather strange things do happen in the East. It’s an enjoyable little tale on the theme that seeing is believing, sometimes. A neat little story.

Final Thoughts

Pulp fiction doesn’t come much better than this. Roscoe gives us fine prose style, subtle weirdness, exoticism and adventure. Incredibly entertaining and very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed an earlier collection of Roscoe's Scarlet and Bradshaw stories, the excellent Blood Ritual, and another fine Roscoe short story collection, The Emperor of Doom.

Robert Martin's Little Sister

Robert Martin had a moderately successful career as a pulp writer in the 40s and writing paperback originals in the 50. His career unfortunately hit the skids in the early 60s. He wrote crime novels under his own name and using the pseudonym Lee Roberts. Little Sister was published in 1952, under the Lee Roberts name.

It opens in classic private eye novel style. A PI named Brice (who narrates the tale) arrives at Vivian Prosper’s house. She wants to hire him. Two things are immediately obvious. Firstly, these people are seriously rich. Secondly, Vivian Prosper is the most gorgeous hunk of woman Brice has ever laid eyes on. Vivian is worried about her seventeen-year-old sister Linda. Vivian wants to stop Linda from marrying. Or rather, she wants to hire Brice to find a way to prevent the marriage. It’s a dirty job but Brice is happy to do it.

There are however complications. Such as the dead guy in the trunk of Linda’s car. He’s not just dead, he’s been murdered. Linda arrived home very drunk, which was not unusual, but Brice could see that she wasn’t just drunk. She had been drugged.

Vivian had hoped to get rid of the body to avoid any unpleasantness with the police but the police become involved when a doctor has to be called. The doctor has to be called because Linda’s drug overdose almost proves fatal. Vivian still wants to hire Brice, but now she wants to hire him to prove that Linda had no connection with the murder.

And then somebody drugs Brice.

Brice has a few leads, but one of them leads to another corpse.

There are a number of possible motives. The Prospers’ financial situation is complex and there’s a lot of money involved and murder would be a convenient way for some family members to get their hands on that money. Non-family members might also benefit financially from a well-timed murder.

Then there’s jealousy. Vivian is jealous of Linda, and Linda is jealous of Vivian but for different reasons. And men are a major problem for both Prosper women.

Brice isn’t quite a conventional fictional PI. He’s not that much of a tough guy but you wouldn’t want to underestimate him. He takes being a private detective slightly more seriously than he’s prepared to admit. He’s no genius detective but he knows his job. He gets on very well with the police and he never withholds information from them. The PI with an uneasy or hostile relationship with the cops is such a cliché that it’s quite refreshing to come across one who goes out of his way to help them.

There’s a moderately hardboiled ambience to the story. There’s also some humour. There is a very funny scene in which a woman from whom Brice is trying to get information gets very very excited by the fact that she’s talking to a real private eye, just like in the movies. She practically begs him to seduce her.

There’s also some startling and unexpected cynicism. Brice is a fictional PI who is basically a decent regular guy and basically law-abiding, he’s no thug, but he’s also rather lacking in a sensitive side. He’s not quite your stereotypical tough guy with a warm sensitive caring side.

As for sex, he’s not an outrageous womaniser but if sex is on offer he’ll take it.

The plot is pretty sound, with lots of suspects all of whom seem quite capable of being the killer. The climax, with the killer giving a long confession which fills in all the blank spots in the plot, is maybe a bit contrived but this was a technique that was quite common in traditional puzzle-plot mysteries and this book is structurally closer to the puzzle-plot mystery genre than to the typical American private eye thriller.

There’s certainly plenty of tension in the closing pages. It really does seem like the killer holds all the cards and must triumph. And of course in the noir private eye genre you can never be sure if you’re going to get a downbeat ending or a happy ending. This is a story which could end either way.

It might be a bit of a stretch to describe this book as noir fiction but it does have two femmes fatales. They’re both very sexy and very dangerous and either might well be capable of killing. And they’re both ambiguous enough that they could equally plausibly turn out to be guilty or innocent.

There’s nothing especially to mark this out as a great private eye thriller but it’s very competently executed and it’s a very entertaining read. Recommended.

Little Sister has been reprinted by Stark House under their Black Gat Books imprint.

John Rhode's Death in the Hop Fields (AKA The Harvest Murder)

Death in the Hop Fields is a 1937 Dr Priestley mystery by John Rhode, one of the pseudonyms used by English crime fiction writer Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964). It was published in the United States as The Harvest Murder.

It is the hop-picking season and that means major disruptions to the normal course of life in the small rural village of Culverden. Hop-picking requires a vast temporary labour force and in this community the hop-pickers are almost all Londoners, and interestingly enough almost entirely female.

It’s also a busier time than usual for Sergeant Wragge. Keeping the peace in Culverden is usually a very easy task for the sergeant and his two constables but in hop-picking season anything can happen. Even a spectacular burglary. Any kind of burglary would be big news in such a law-abiding place but in this case the thief or thieves made off with some very valuable jewels.

The good news is that it takes no time at all to establish the identity of the burglar. Sergeant Wragge is no fool. He sends the empty jewellery box off to Scotland Yard and they find a very nice set of fingerprints belonging to a known villain named Christopher Elver. Elver had served seven years for dope-smuggling. It’s an open-and-shut case, or it would be if Elver could be found. Detective Inspector Jimmy Waghorn of the Yard is sent to Culverden to lend a hand.

Culverden seems to be experiencing something of a crime wave. There’s a case of arson and since the cottage that was burnt out contained some very valuable antiques and objets d’art it’s also regarded as a fairly serious crime. And since Inspector Waghorn is on the scene he naturally takes an interest in this case as well. And the circumstances are quite puzzling. There’s a very obvious suspect but he has a cast-iron alibi. Waghorn thinks that this is just the sort of thing that would intrigue his friend Dr Priestley. Dr Priestley is sufficiently interested to leave London and travel down to Culverden (and anything that persuades Dr Priestley to leave his home in Westbourne Terrace has to be very interesting indeed.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with murder. Well I’m not going to tell you since even a hint might reveal a spoiler.

Street was known for coming up with ingenious methods of murder. There is definitely some ingenuity here although not necessarily relating directly to murder methods.

Dr Priestley is of the opinion that the solution to the case is perfectly logical and he’s right. The clues are all there. There are however enough false trails to lead poor Inspector Waghorn well and truly astray. Whether the reader will be similarly misled is another matter. I figured out the solution before Inspector Waghorn, but Dr Priestley was well ahead of me. To be brutally honest Jimmy Waghorn should have been transferred to traffic duty after this case. Even the broadest of hints from Dr Priestley don’t help him.

Structurally this book is quite interesting but again I can’t say any more since the structure is part of the puzzle.

I know there are those who find Street’s writing dull but I’m not one of them. I was actually quite interested by the detailed descriptions of the process of hop-picking and those details are relevant to the plot. For me the John Rhode novels are a kind of detective fiction comfort food. I find them to be reliably entertaining and I’m fond of the cantankerous Dr Priestley. As long as you don’t expect non-stop excitement Death in the Hop Fields is highly recommended.

E. and M.A. Radford's Murder Jigsaw

E. and M.A. Radford were an English husband-and-wife writing team. They wrote thirty-eight mysteries, beginning in 1944 and continuing until the early 70s. Most of their books featured Dr Manson who is both a policeman (a Chief-Inspector at Scotland Yard) and a scientist. He presides over the Yard’s scientific laboratory. He is in his early fifties and was apparently recruited by the Yard a few years earlier when they needed to lift their game in the forensic science area. One assumes that he was in effect parachuted into the Chief-Inspector’s position without having ever walked a beat. The intention of the authors was to create a scientific detective on the model of R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke but have him be a working policeman rather than just a consultant. Murder Jigsaw was the second of the Dr Manson mysteries, appearing in 1944.

The opening of the book provides yet another example of the folly of fictional detectives in thinking they can enjoy a peaceful holiday. You would think that by now they would realise that within a day or two of arriving at their chosen holiday destination they would be faced with murder. And you can guarantee it will be a murder that the local police will be entirely able to cope with so that the unfortunate vacationing detective will be forced to take over the case.

In this case Dr Manson has chosen Cornwall for his holiday. His choice in this matter never varies. He has a passion for fishing and there’s a particular spot in Cornwall where the fishing is very much to his liking. He always stays at the same hotel and is not only a frequent but also a very well-liked guest.

Not all of the guests are so well-liked. Colonel Donoughmore is very much disliked by all and sundry. And now he is dead, found floating in a rather treacherous part of the river. It is fortunate for the cause of justice that the police officer who just happens to be on the scene, Dr Manson, also happens to be a very experienced fly fisherman. A non-fisherman might well have dismissed the colonel’s death as an accident. But to a keen angler there are several things that seem quite wrong and quite inconsistent with the accident theory. There are certain things that a fisherman simply doesn’t do. It’s all fortunate that Dr Manson invites himself to the post-mortem examination. The local police surgeon has no specialised knowledge of pathology and manages to miss all the vital medical evidence. But Dr Manson does spot those medical clues. The accident theory just won’t do.

There’s an extremely strong focus on the scientific side of things. Dr Manson has with him his Box of Tricks, his suitcase which functions as a portable laboratory (very much like Dr Thorndyke’s portable laboratory). Everything that can possibly be viewed under a microscope gets viewed under Dr Manson’s microscope. There’s an enormous amount of scientific evidence and it’s remarkably clever stuff.

The Radfords do not however rely purely on scientific evidence. Dr Manson is a policeman as well as a scientist. There’s plenty of attention given to alibis. Not are motives neglected.

Dr Manson continually stresses that his method is based on elimination. And in fact that’s perfectly true. There are quite a few suspects and there are quite a few possible scenarios that would explain how the Colonel’s body came to be floating in the River Tamar. The process by which Manson eliminates those scenarios that do not quite fit the facts is nothing short of brilliant. The process by which he eliminates those suspects who could not have killed the Colonel is equally impressive.

And then we get to the ending. To say that the ending is a disappointment is putting it mildly. It is a bitter disappointment. The Radfords prided themselves on playing scrupulously fair. And they do play fair, in a narrow technical sense. There’s no actual cheating. It’s just that the reader is left feeling that somehow he has been cheated.

There is a great deal to admire in this novel. Dr Manson pulls off some dazzling pieces of logical reasoning. The scientific evidence is both clever and enthralling. There are also fascinating items of fishing lore. The setting is excellent. I also love the fact that there is absolutely no mention of the war - I detest wartime mysteries. Everything is done so well. Except for that ending.

Up until the final revelation I was expecting to be recommending Murder Jigsaw very highly indeed. As it is, it’s still recommended but with some serious reservations.