Charles Burgess's The Other Woman

The Other Woman is a 1960 crime novel by Charles Burgess. He’s a seriously obscure writer who seems to have written only one other novel. He also wrote some true crime stuff in the late 40s.


The Other Woman was originally published by Beacon so you might be expecting this to be crime with a healthy dash of sleaze. It isn’t really, but there is some moderately steamy sex. This is not a particularly hardboiled story but it does have some noir flavouring.

Early on the set-up seems to be suggesting that we’re in for yet another riff on Double Indemnity but that’s not how it plays out. In Double Indemnity we know the identity of the murderers right from the start. The Other Woman is more of an old-fashioned murder mystery. There is a murder but we don’t know the killer’s identity. The murder method is not as straightforward as it appears to be and alibis are important. There is a puzzle to be unravelled.

It begins in a small town in Florida. John Royal wants real estate agent Neil Cowen to arrange the purchase of a property which will be the site of a major housing development. Royal is an old man and very very rich. Royal’s wife Emmaline is thirty years his junior, blonde and gorgeous. And almost certainly dangerous. The kind of gal who is likely to turn out to be a femme fatale.

Neil has a successful business. He’s a respected member of the community. He’s happily married with a kid. He would be crazy even to think of getting mixed up with Emmaline Royal. But by the next day he and Emmaline are getting it on in the back seat of Neil’s car.

Neil can’t stop himself. He has never met a woman as hot and as gorgeous as Emmaline.

Then something happens that causes Neil to have second thoughts although by now it may be way too late.

Of course there is a murder. There is one odd detail at the murder scene that worries Lieutenant Gainey just a little. It seems somehow wrong but he can’t figure out how it could possibly be significant.

There’s one obvious suspect but Lieutenant Gainey is well aware that there is no real evidence.

A regular guy led astray by an uncontrollable lust for a woman is certainly classic noir stuff. Neil really is a totally decent guy and he never does figure out how he succumbed to temptation. The fact that Emmaline might be the kind of gal who knows exactly how to persuade the most reluctant man to fall for her charms, and that he might just be the latest in a string of men who have danced to her siren song, doesn’t occur to him. He thinks that a smokin’ hot classy rich dame is just waiting for the chance to jump into bed with a second-rate small town real estate agent.

Of course while we know that Emmaline is a temptress that doesn’t mean she’s a murderess. There are other suspects. There are quite a few suspicious characters lurking about. There’s a mystery woman.

As a noir novel it works reasonably well.

As a straightforward murder mystery it’s also reasonably successful.

The Other Woman is routine stuff but it’s enjoyable. A harmless time killer.

The Trigan Empire

The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire was a 1960s British comic-strip written by Mike Butterworth and drawn by Don Lawrence. I’ve just finished reading the first volume of the recent reprint which includes the first thirteen stories in the series.

Don Lawrence (1928-2003) was an English comic book artist and author.

The Trigan Empire was originally published in the weekly papers Ranger and Look and Learn from 1965 to 1982. Lawrence did the artwork from 1965 to 1976. Lawrence later went on to the Storm series about a time-travelling astronaut. He also did the naughty lighthearted Carrie strip for the men’s magazine Mayfair. Carrie is a nice girl but she just can’t keep her clothes on.

The Trigan Empire is a science fiction epic set on a distant Earth-like planet, Elekton. There are quite a few different cultures, some much more technologically advanced than others. Trigo and his brothers rule a very technologically backward warrior society. Trigo can see the writing on the wall. They will inevitably be conquered by their more advanced neighbours.

Trigo is determined to transform his primitive kingdom into a modern major power. The first step is to build a city. A great city. It will be the nucleus of a great empire.

Trigo pursues his objectives through numerous wars. He makes allies. He suffers betrayals. He has narrows escapes from disaster. But his belief in the future never wavers.

All of this provides an excuse for non-stop action.

This was clearly aimed at a younger readership. There’s no hint of sex or nudity. You can be confident that the bad guys will be vanquished. But it still manages to deal with some grown-up themes (ambition, divided loyalties, betrayal). It’s more than just a kids’ comic strip. I suppose that today it would be seen as being aimed at a Young Adult market.

Trigo is an interesting hero. He’s brave of course and he’s a fine charismatic energetic leader, but his judgment in personal matters is often very poor.

One of Trigo’s brothers is smart but treacherous while the other is loyal and brave but not outstandingly bright.

Although it concerns a galactic empire it takes a long long time before the action movies to outer space. In fact it takes a long time before the Trigan Empire even gets as far as the Moon.

I think the slow build-up works. Mighty empires start small. Trigo’s petty kingdom is initially totally insignificant. It’s not going to become a global power, or on an interstellar power, overnight. In this case it happens because Trigo (despite occasional errors of judgment) has vision, determination and charisma.

He also has a very realistic understanding of power. He would have been quite happy for his little principality to be left alone but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. You either dominate or you get dominated. You either conquer your neighbours or they will conquer you.

This first volume ends with the Trigan Empire on the verge of making the major move beyond its home planet.

Don Lawrence’s artwork is lively and pretty cool.

This is entertaining stuff and I’m certainly tempted to get hold of the later volumes in the series. Recommended for space opera aficionados.

Michael Crichton's Scratch One

Michael Crichton is best remembered for his novels in the science fiction/techno-thriller genres but early in his career he wrote quite a few straightforward thrillers using the pseudonym John Lange. Scratch One, published in 1967, was his second novel.

The basic concept, a poor innocent schmuck who gets drawn into a web of espionage and has no idea what is going on, has been used often but here it’s done with real style and energy. In this case it begins with a case of mistaken identity.

Roger Carr is an American lawyer who is in Nice to buy a villa for a client. He really is just a lawyer. And he really is in France to be a villa. Unfortunately he looks just enough like Morgan to be mistaken for him by someone making an identification solely from a photograph. And he’s arrived on the plane on which Morgan was expected to be travelling. Who is Morgan? Morgan is an assassin employed by the US Government. By the CIA in fact.

Morgan had been assigned by the CIA to kill every member of an Arab organisation known as the Associates. The five members of the Associates have found out about an arms deal involving Israel. It’s an arms deal that the Americans wanted kept secret. There were various options for dealing with the Associates but in order to avoid embarrassing publicity the CIA felt the best method was simply to kill them all.

The Associates know about Morgan. They want him dealt with and they have mistaken Roger Carr for the assassin. The local CIA people are also under the impression that Roger Carr is Morgan.

Roger Carr isn’t a great lawyer but he’s rather a success with the ladies. And then Anne comes along. Anne is an Australian model. He really likes her and he starts to fall for her, hard.

Anne gets captured. Poor old Roger gets captured and tortured by the Associates. He gets arrested by the French cops as well. And interrogated by the CIA. Nobody believes anything he says. This is the world of espionage. There are endless layers of deception. He could be a simple lawyer pretending to be an assassin pretending o be a regular lawyer. Everyone assumes that everyone else is lying. The most confusing thing you can do is tell the truth. If you genuinely seem to be telling the truth then you must be lying.

Roger is a bumbling amateur. But the truth is that the Associates are bumbling amateurs as well. They make a mess of even the simplest assassinations. And the CIA guys are bunglers as well. The guys who take all this espionage stuff most seriously and think of themselves as professionals are the worst bunglers of all. Roger really is a compete amateur but he’s not as foolish and incompetent as the professionals.

The French cops actually do know what they’re doing but they’re hamstrung by their reluctance to get embroiled in a major CIA fiasco.

The Associates are the bad guys but the whole CIA operation is sleazy and immoral. There aren’t really any straightforward bad guys. The arms deal is essentially a MacGuffin. Crichton isn’t interested in the politics. He’s interested in the amount of mayhem that can be caused by spy agencies and spy rings who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, and he’s interested in the duplicity of the entire word of espionage. He handles this subject with style and wit.

And he gives some fine action and suspense and thrills as well.

This may seem odd but this book reminds me a bit of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War, a great novel (probably le Carré’s finest) about a hopelessly bungled British intelligence operation. Both le Carré’s novel and Scratch One have more than a touch of absurdism. The le Carré book is darker but both have touches of black comedy.

I enjoyed Scratch One so much that I’m now anxious to read all of Crichton’s early thrillers. Highly recommended.

Malko 4: Malko versus the CIA

Malko 4: Malko versus the CIA is one of the handful of Malko spy thrillers by Gerard de Villiers that have been translated into English. It was originally published in French in 1965 as S.A.S. contre C.I.A. and the English translation dates from 1974.

His Serene Highness Prince Malko Ligne, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Knight of the Black Eagle, Knight of the Order of Landgrave Seraphim of Kletgaus, Knight of the Order of Malta works on a semi-official basis for the C.I.A. - semi-official so that the C.I.A. can plausibly deny everything afterwards. They trust Malko because he’s reliably anti-communist. Malko has no great interest in causes and he regards the C.I.A. with a certain amount of European aristocratic disdain but they pay well and he needs the money to repair his crumbling ancestral castle. He also likes women, the sorts of women who cost as much to maintain as a decaying castle.

French spy fiction of this period is interesting because the C.I.A. are not automatically the good guys and the Soviets are not automatically the bad guys. In this book the Russians are more or less good guys but mostly they just want to avoid getting mixed up in a mess that the Americans have created.

The mess is in Iran. This novel was written in 1965, years before the Islamic Revolution. Iran is under the control of the Shah, who was installed in power by the C.I.A. some years before. The Shah is little more than Washington’s puppet.

In this novel Malko is working for the C.I.A. to foil a plot by - the C.I.A. More specifically they have information that the C.I.A.’s Iranian bureau chief General Schalberg has hatched a plan to overthrow the government of Iran, on his own initiative. Given that Iran is a reliable U.S. puppet state this information is very upsetting. The worst thing is that the C.I.A. really don’t know exactly what is going on. General Schalberg might be the instigator of the crazy plot. The head of the Iranian secret police, General Khadjar, might be involved. The Russians might have fed the Americans phoney information about this plot. The Iranian communists are probably not involved since the Shah has had almost all of them killed.

The plot might involve the assassination of the Shah. And revolution. Revolutions are easy to set off but not so easy to control.

It doesn’t matter who originated the plot, it must be stopped. If Malko needs to do some killing that’s OK. That’s why the C.I.A. gives him these jobs - dirty jobs are his specialty. If he has to kill the rogue C.I.A. guy that’s OK as well.

Of course you know that Malko is going to get mixed up wth beautiful dangerous women. Beautiful Iranian women can be very dangerous - they tend to have husbands, fathers or brothers who don’t approve of decadent European aristocrats bedding their women. But you know Malko won’t be able to help himself.

There’s plenty of action including a wild aerial climax. There’s a full-scale gun battle. There is mayhem in the streets. Malko has narrow escapes. He is up against people for whom torture is not just a policy but an absorbing hobby.

In this adventure Malko doesn’t have to worry too much about the morality of any of the people or factions involved. They’re all equally amoral. It doesn’t matter if revolution against the Shah is justified or not - if the country explodes it will be a disaster for everybody. All Malko has to worry about is preventing that explosion.

I’m becoming a major fan of the Malko thrillers. They feature a hero who’s a bit morally ambiguous and somewhat ruthless but charming and deadly. Plenty of thrills. Some sexiness. Exotic settings. Interesting historical backgrounds. Morally complex stories. What’s not to love? Malko versus the CIA is an above-average spy thriller and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed three other Malko novels - West of Jerusalem, The Man from Kabul and Angel of Vengeance.

Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain

During the 1960s Michael Crichton had written several thrillers under pseudonyms. The Andromeda Strain, which appeared in 1969, was his first novel published under his own name and was his first foray into science fiction. It is perhaps better considered as a techno-thriller since the technology in the story is cutting-edge present-day tech rather than futuristic tech.

The Andromeda Strain was made into an excellent 1971 movie.

It all begins when the Scoop VII satellite returns to Earth. There is something important about that Scoop satellite which is revealed early in the novel but is kept under wraps until very late in the movie. It doesn’t come down where it was supposed to. It comes down near Piedmont which is a tiny town, more a hamlet really, in Arizona. A couple of Air Force guys are sent to retrieve it. They don’t come back, but they do transmit a disturbing message. Everybody in the town is dead. A flyover by a reconnaissance jet confirms that disaster has struck Piedmont. There are bodies everywhere. Including the bodies of the two Air Force guys.

This means a Wildfire Alert has to be activated.

Project Wildfire was set up to deal with the possibility that a spacecraft might one day return to Earth carrying an extraterrestrial organism. This is most likely to be a micro-organism. The possibility that such an organism could be dangerous has been considered. Wildfire can deal with this. They have an incredibly well-equipped underground laboratory in Nevada with layer upon layer of security. There is no chance at all of a micro-organism getting loose once it’s been isolated at the Wildfire lab. When a Wildfire Alert is called a team of five crack scientists will be assembled at the Wildfire lab. If these guys can’t figure out what makes an extraterrestrial organism tick and how to deal with the possible dangers then no-one can.

And there’s one final absolutely foolproof safeguard. If something goes wrong the lab will self-destruct. There’s a nuclear warhead there to take care of this. And of course if a spaceship returns to Earth carrying alien organisms the landing site will be nuked.

If there’s a theme to this book it’s that no matter how much thought you put into preparing for possible disaster, no matter how many levels of security you have, some minor unpredictable thing will always go wrong. And even the most brilliant scientists can make very simple mistakes.

There’s obviously a deadly micro-organism. It is given the name the Andromeda Strain. But it seems to work in bizarre ways. It kills with breathtaking speed. Except when it doesn’t. Then it kills slowly. And there were two survivors. They seem totally unaffected. But they have nothing in common.

And then there’s the crash of the Phantom jet. Something very very strange caused that crash. Something that cannot be connected to the extraterrestrial organism. And yet it must be connected. The Phantom crashed immediately after flying over Piedmont.

Crichton goes to great lengths to give the impression that this is some kind of semi-official account. He gives us printouts of scientific test results. We’e not expected to read them. They’re there to make it seem like the author had access to official documents. The style is very brisk and matter-of-fact. It all works. We feel like this could all have really happened.

Crichton doesn’t get distracted by character stuff. That would ruin the illusion that this is an historical account of real events. And science fiction doesn’t need characterisation. It gets in the way. Crichton keeps his story moving along very briskly. We don’t want the book slowed down by the internal emotional agonising of the characters. We just want the facts.

There’s an intriguing scientific mystery to be solved and there’s plenty of suspense. The reader knows things that the Wildfire scientists don’t know, and we know that this really is a race against time.

The Andromeda Strain is top-notch stuff. Highly recommended.

The Million Missing Maidens (The Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. 2)

The Million Missing Maidens is the second in Mallory T. Knight’s The Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. series of sexy spy thrillers. It was published as a paperback original in 1967.

Tim O’Shane is an ace agent for T.O.M.C.A.T., a super-secret American spy agency. He also works for the Soviets. He is a double agent but his loyalty is to America. Interestingly in the three novels in this series that I’ve read the Russians are not particularly the bad guys. The bad guys are usually international fiendish supervillains and diabolical criminal masterminds, somewhat along the lines of SPECTRE.

Tim is on leave in Miami. He is sharing a house with two friendly airline stewardesses, Justine and Juliette. You don’t quite expect a de Sade reference in a book like this but there it is. His idea of a holiday is chasing skirt and he’s chasing a lot of it, and catching plenty. Tim likes girls a lot. But now he has a new assignment. It’s about all those missing virgins. Thousands of them. It’s not that they’ve ceased to be virgins. They have simply vanished.

It probably has something to do with a new religious cult called Systemology. When Tim is seduced by a female cult member he discovers something odd. She introduces him to sensual and erotic delights he had never even imagined but by the next morning she is still a virgin. That’s not Tim’s fault. He tried his best.

Of course Tim has to infiltrate the cult. The cult is popular because it promises its adherents wealth, pleasure and immortality.

There’s also a missing Russian ballerina. This allows Tim to make use of his Soviet contacts.

Tim starts to get an inkling of why the cult is so interested in virgins. It’s part of a totally crazy master plan, but behind that is another equally crazy master plan.

Tim’s own plans hit a few snags and he finds himself a prisoner on a ship.

He gets to know two of the Systemologist girls, Gisela and Raven. Gisela is quite a piece of work. She’s a bit of a surgeon but her operations are unlikely to win the approval of any reputable medical association. She performs the operations not on the virgins, but on men. Tim is very anxious to ensure that she doesn’t get anywhere near him with a scalpel.

These two girls are very very dangerous (and Gisela is clearly insane) but Tim may be able to make use of Raven thanks to one of the gadgets T.O.M.C.A.T. provides to its agents. It allows him to take hypnotic control of a subject (in 1967 hypnosis and brainwashing were hot topics). The monkeys might come in handy as well. There are five hundred of them aboard the ship. You’d be surprised how useful five hundred monkeys can be in the hands of a well-trained secret agent.

Knight had a knack for wildly improbable but rather nifty spy plots and while it’s very tongue-in-cheek there is a fairly exciting spy thriller plot here and there’s plenty of action.

There’s a decent villain and a superbly wicked sadistic villainess.

There’s plenty of sex as well but it’s not the slightest bit graphic.

It all has a very 60s vibe - crazy, outlandish, surreal, amusing, sexy in a good-natured way. Very Pop Art. Very Swinging 60s. And of course whacked-out religious cults were already a popular subject in crime/spy TV, movies and novels. The cults invariably involve lots of sex-crazed young ladies.

Affordable copies of the Man from T.O.M.C.A.T. books are not too difficult to find.

I thought The Million Missing Maidens was quite a bit of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two more books in this series, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy and The Malignant Metaphysical Menace.

Jimmy Sangster's private i (Spy Killer)

Jimmy Sangster was much better known as a screenwriter but he wrote a lot of novels. In the late 60s he wrote four spy thrillers, two featuring glamorous lady spy Katy Touchfeather and two featuring a spy named John Smith. A man whose real name really is John Smith. The first of the John Smith spy novels, private i, was published in 1967. It was later reissued with the much less interesting title Spy Killer.

The novel opens with John Smith in a lunatic asylum. He isn’t mad, but there seems no escape. We then flash back to the events that led him to such an unpleasant place.

John Smith works as a private enquiry agent (the British name for a private detective). He’s broke so he’s pleased to have a new client, a Mrs Dunning. The case should be straightforward. It’s a routine divorce case. The one very slight complication is that Mrs Dunning is John Smith’s ex-wife Danielle. Perhaps he should have realised that with Danielle involved the case probably wasn’t going to be straightforward after all.

Finding himself suspected of a murder is rather disturbing.

Smith gets really worried when Max shows up. Max had been his boss when he was in the Secret Service. The last thing Smith wants is to get mixed up in the sleazy world of espionage again. But that’s what’s happened.

And if Max is involved then Smith really wants nothing to do with any of it. He doesn’t have a choice. There is that murder charge hanging over his head.

Max wants the notebook. Smith doesn’t know anything about a notebook. But now he figures that if he doesn’t find the notebook Max will throw him to the wolves.

This was a time when spy fiction, and especially British spy fiction, was becoming very dark and cynical. This novel dials the cynicism up to the max. Smith quit the Secret Service after being ordered to take part in a massacre of poor dumb deluded young people who had been manipulated by various intelligence agencies. Smith particularly disliked having to blow a young girl’s face off with a shotgun. That’s when Smith decided he wasn’t cut out to be a spy.

And he knows Max’s methods. If someone is even a minor threat, or even just a minor inconvenience, Max has that person killed. They don’t have to be enemy agents. The British Secret Service is like a more amoral version of Murder Inc.

Smith wants to get rid of that notebook but he knows that as soon as he does he can look forward to a bullet in the back of the head.

Max wants the notebook. A foreign power wants the notebook. Smith has to hand it over or they’ll kill him. But he can’t hand it over because it’s his insurance policy. If he no longer has the notebook they’ll definitely kill him. It’s a tricky problem.

You expect double-crosses in a spy thriller but in this one it’s not just the bad guys but the good guys and even the hero planning double-crosses. And double-crosses piled on top of double-crosses.

The notebook seems to be a kind of McGuffin but the contents gradually become more significant. The contents also present Smith with more of a moral problem. He doesn’t have much in the way of ethics (his days as a British agent knocked all the idealism out of his system) but he does have some morals. He may however have to choose between mortality and survival.

This is a novel that relies more on paranoia and atmosphere than on action but there are some good action moments.

Smith is a fascinating character - he’s overweight and balding but that doesn’t mean that he’s not dangerous. Max is one of the nastiest villains in spy fiction and he’s one of the good guys. Although whether the British Secret Service in this novel can be described as good guys is very very debatable.

There are two women involved and at least one could turn out to be a femme fatale figure. Sangster is however a very fine writer and his plotting is very solid so jumping to conclusions can be a mistake.

An excellent story. Very dark, very cynical, very paranoid. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Touchfeather, the first of Sangster’s Katy Touchfeather novels, and it’s excellent.

A.S. Fleischman’s Venetian Blonde

A.S. Fleischman’s thriller Venetian Blonde was published in 1963. You couldn’t really come up with a cooler title for a thriller.

A.S. Fleischman (1920-2010) had been a professional magician. He wrote some excellent spy thrillers in the early 50s. Venetian Blonde came later and it’s a crime thriller rather than a spy thriller. Fleischman later had a hugely successful career as a writer of children’s books.

Venetian Blonde is moderately hardboiled with perhaps some hints of noir.

Skelly has just arrived in Venice California. He is a professional cardsharp. He is very good at it. Or at least he was. Now he’s lost his nerve. The skill is still there but to be successful as a cardsharp you need nerve as well. His big problem is that he owes 125 grand to a guy who can get quite unpleasant about such things. If Skelly is really lucky he’ll just have both his legs broken but it’s more likely he’ll be found floating face down in a canal. He can avoid all this unpleasantness by paying back the 125 grand. The trouble is that his personal fortune at this amount amounts to $31.45.

He meets two women. One is the psychic and mystic Evangeline Darrow. Her real name is Maggie. She’s married to a con artist buddy of Skelly’s. Maggie is working on a long con and the payoff could be huge. She needs Skelly. Skelly isn’t interested but then he thinks about the prospect of being found floating face down in that canal and figures maybe he will join Maggie in the con.

The other woman is Viola. She’s a cute blonde and she’s a crazy beatnik chick and she keeps following Skelly around like a puppy. This annoys Skelly, until he realises he’s fallen in love with her.

The con Maggie is working on involves a very very rich old lady, Mrs Marenbach. Maggie figures that if she can put the old dame in touch with her deceased nephew Jamie it could be good for a cool million. Mrs Marenbach is no fool and she’s very suspicious but Maggie has an angle that she’s confident will work.

Skelly gradually starts to suspect that something doesn’t add up. There’s something Maggie hasn’t told him. He isn’t even sure who else is on this deal. Maggie claims her husband is in Mexico, but maybe he’s much closer to hand. He’s also a bit concerned by Porter, the sleazy private eye.

The con itself is clever enough and Fleischman throws in some neat plot twists.

Fleischman’s background in stage magic and vaudeville and his obvious familiarity with the mindset of carnies gives the book an authentic flavour. Fleischman clearly understood the tricks used by phoney mediums.

And there’s nothing better than noir fiction that involves phoney spiritualists, illusionism and con artists.

Skelly isn’t a bad guy. He’s dishonest but there are limits to his dishonesty. He’s a crook with ethics, of a sort. He’s not as cynical as he thinks he is.

Maggie is every bit as cynical as she thinks she is. She’s beautiful and sexy and that makes her dangerous. Skelly’s problem is that he’s not sure just how cynical and dangerous she might be.

There’s some nice hardboiled dialogue liberally sprinkled with carnival and criminal argot.

There’s not much violence but the threat of murder hovers in the background.

And there’s a quirky love story as well.

Venetian Blonde is a very enjoyable read. Highly recommended. It’s been reissued by Stark House in a double-header edition paired with Fleischman’s Look Behind You, Lady.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Fleischman’s spy thrillers. They’re all set in exotic locations and they’re all excellent - Malay Woman, Danger in Paradise, Counterspy Express and Shanghai Flame.

Paul Tabori's The Green Rain

The Green Rain is a 1951 science fiction novel by Paul Tabori.

Paul Tabori (1908- 1974) was a prolific Hungarian-born British writer who also occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Peter Stafford.

The Green Rain is a wild ride. This is humorous science fiction with a definite satirical edge.

Everything goes wrong when the first C-Rocket is launched. The destination is the Moon. The C-Rocket is the brainchild of a brilliant but seriously eccentric scientist. It carries a kind of proto-chlorophyll with rather extraordinary properties. Within a few months the Moon will be a living planet, with an atmosphere and abundant life.

The only problem is that the C-Rocket malfunctions and deposits its cargo on Earth. With unexpected results. When mixed with rainwater it turns people green. Permanently green, all over. Anyone caught out in the rain at the time of the disaster is now green. They don’t suffer any other ill-effects but the political and social consequences are profound. The newly green people are considered by some to be a superior race. Others regard them as inferior mutants.

As you might expect the author indulges in a lot of political satire. That’s usually a bad thing but this book’s saving grace is that Tabori makes fun of absolutely everybody. Whites, blacks and Asians. Christians, Jews and Muslims. Communists and capitalists. Republicans and Democrats. The Americans, the Russians, the British, the French, Africans, the Irish, even Norwegians and Poles. Everybody is fair game. By being offensive to everybody the books ends up being, in my view, offensive to nobody. It’s just totally nuts and fun.

A crazy crooked communist and a crazy crooked anti-communist get together to take advantage of the situation by establishing a new religion. They make use of middle-aged lady evangelist Gloriana and glamorous movie star Madge McMamie. They come up with a cool stunt - Gloriana will die and be reborn.

The objective is not just to start a new religion but to gain political power as well. The reborn Gloriana will run for President.

And then the book changes gears in an interesting way. It suddenly becomes a whole lot darker. The world becomes green, but in a different way. A nightmarish way.

The ending is not what you might be expecting.

I’ve now read three of Tabori’s novels and he really is an intriguing writer. Wildly original and crazy and definitely full of surprises. None of the books of his that I’ve read can be easily slotted into a particular genre. He’s also inclined to mix humour and darkness in interesting ways.

The Green Rain is a fun ride and it’s best to just allow yourself to be swept along with it. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed his bizarre but brilliant and lurid Demons of Sandorra and his sexy horror witchcraft romp The Wild White Witch (written as Peter Stafford).

Jimmy Sangster’s Touchfeather, Too

Touchfeather, Too dates from 1968 and was the second of Jimmy Sangster’s two spy thrillers featuring sexy lady spy Katy Touchfeather. And I do so love spy thrillers featuring glamorous sexy lady spies.

Jimmy Sangster (1927-2011) had an immensely successful career as a screenwriter. He wrote a lot of movies for Hammer, including most of their best early movies. Unfortunately his career as a novelist tends to get overlooked. He wrote a number of fine spy novels.

Katy Touchfeather is an airline stewardess. She’s beautiful, sexy and charming so that definitely makes her an airline stewardess rather than a flight attendant. This is however merely her cover. She is actually a British counter-espionage agent.

Her latest mission involves a Greek shipping tycoon named Galipolodopolo. He doesn’t make his real money from shipping but from gold. Katy understands just enough about international finance to understand that Mr Galipolodopolo’s dealings in gold are highly illegal. The British Government wants to put an end to his gold dealings.

Katy’s immediate target is handsome young bullfighter Antonio. She discovers that his athletic prowess in the bedroom is as impressive as his prowess in the bullring. Antonio appears to be working as a courier for Mr Galipolodopolo. Katy has to find out how Antonio is involved and if necessary to kill him. Katy doesn’t particularly like killing people, but sometimes murder is part of the job. Although it does seem a pity to have to kill such an impressive bedroom athlete.

Katy has managed to get herself invited as a guest on Galipolodopolo’s luxury yacht. That’s where her trysts with Antonio take place. The mission does not go according to plan. It does end with a corpse but Katy didn’t do the killing. And she didn’t get the evidence. Mr Blaser is very annoyed with her. But he gives her another chance.

As a result Katy ends up in the African nation of Borami. She ends up on board Borami’s presidential jet. And she also finds herself in a Dakota desperately short of fuel trying to find somewhere to land in the middle of a desert.

More disturbingly, she ends up back on Galipolodopolo’s yacht but as a prisoner rather than a guest. She she gets to meet Lucia. Lucia is very beautiful and very glamorous, and very evil. She is Galipolodopolo’s chief torturer. Katy does not like Lucia. The odds are heavily stacked against her but Katy is resourceful and deadly.

Katy’s employers do not supply her with any gadgets. Sangster was clearly trying to avoid the obsession with gadgetry in 60s spy fiction and spy movies. Katy doesn’t really need gadgets. You can leave Katy alone in a room and within five minutes she will have collected an assortment of small inoffensive household items and turned them into a small but deadly armoury. Very low-tech, but Katy is a great improviser and she knows an astonishing number of methods for killing people.

There is a certain amount of 60s Deighton-esque cynicism here. Mr Blaser tells Katy that the British Government plans to confiscate Galipolodopolo’s gold. When Katy suggests that it sounds like the British Government intends to steal the gold Mr Blaser has to admit that this is indeed the intention. But of course when governments steal things they don’t call it stealing.

The government of Borami is corrupt. The Americans, Chinese, Soviets and British are all heavily involved in Borami and their motives are entirely cynical. International politics is a dirty game.

Katy is fairly ruthless. She doesn’t like having to kill people in the line of duty. If she has to do so it can keep her awake at nights. For a couple of nights. Then she forgets about it. No point crying over spilt milk.

This is a sexy spy thriller but the sexiness is very mild. The plot is solid.

The book’s main asset is Katy Touchfeather. She’s not infallible. She makes mistakes but she has an amazing ability to get herself out of the messes she gets herself into. And she does so in very clever very entertaining ways. She’s a very cool action heroine even if her ethics are just the tiniest bit dubious.

This is a hugely enjoyable spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first book in the series, Touchfeather, and it’s very good indeed.

Carter Brown's The Bump and Grind Murders

The Bump and Grind Murders is a 1964 Carter Brown crime thriller.

The phenomenally popular and prolific English-born Australian pulp writer Carter Brown created a dozen or so series characters, one of the lesser-known being female private eye Mavis Seidlitz who featured in a dozen books between 1955 and 1974.

Brown could be described as a Hardboiled Lite writer with a slightly tongue-in-cheek approach. On the basis of The Bump and Grind Murders I’d say that the Mavis Seidlitz novels were among his most lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek. And also among the sleaziest.

While all fictional lady PIs owe a debt to Honey West I’d have to say that Mavis Seidlitz bears very very little resemblance to Honey West. Honey is tough, resourceful, brave and competent and she’s a smart cookie. Mavis isn’t very tough, she’s accident-prone, she’s ditzy and she’s staggeringly incompetent. The Honey West novels combine solid PI action with touches of humour and a huge dash of sexiness. The Bump and Grind Murders has a reasonably solid plot but it’s played mostly for laughs.

Mavis makes every mistake a PI could make and invents some brand new mistakes that nobody else had ever thought of.

The only thing Mavis and Honey West have in common is an extraordinary tendency to end up without any clothes on.

Mavis is a partner in a detective agency with Johnny Rio. The agency is hired by a nerdy guy named Hatchik to protect his girlfriend. The girlfriend, Irma, is a stripper at the Club Berlin. Hatchik has tried to persuade Irma to give up her stripping job but Irma takes her art very seriously. The Club Berlin’s gimmick is that everything is German-themed and the strippers use German-sounding stage names. Irma is Irma Der Bosen, which apparently means Irma the Bosom. Once Mavis gets a look at Irma’s superstructure she decides that the name is extraordinarily appropriate.

Mavis will of course go undercover at the club, as a stripper. Her act involves having her clothes fall off accidentally. She has a partner, a guy called Casey, who helps to ensure that her clothes fall off.

There is tension between the girls at the club. The manager is slightly sinister and there’s a really sinister guy with a scar hanging around. Then of course there’s a murder, but Irma is not the victim.

The plot gets a bit crazy and that’s partly due to Mavis’s amazing ability to misunderstand everything that is going on. She discovers that the club is being used as a front by a spy ring and that there’s an undercover CIA agent working there.

The strip club setting works well, adding some seedy glamour.

Brown perhaps makes Mavis (who is the first-person narrator) just a bit too ditzy but this does the advantage that we’re dealing with a kind of unreliable narrator -if it’s possible to misunderstand something and leap to the wrong conclusions Mavis will do just that. That makes the plot a bit more fun. And Mavis can be amusing at times.

Towards the end Brown throws in a bunch of plot twists and the fact that the narrator doesn’t have a clue what’s going on around her does increase the surprise factor a little.

Classical strip-tease was of course all about the tease and the sleaze factor in this book is a bit like that - it isn’t anywhere near as sleazy as we expect to to be, even when Mavis gets naked.

Carter Brown had zero literary pretensions. His books were pure entertainment, a bit trashy, but always fun. The Bump and Grind Murders is recommended.

J. Hunter Holly’s The Running Man

J. Hunter Holly’s The Running Man is a 1963 science fiction novel published as a paperback original by Monarch Books. It falls at least loosely into the category of science fiction paranoia fiction.

College professor Jeff Munro becomes involved, quite by accident, with a group known as Heralds for Peace (HFP). They’re a mysterious group regarded with suspicion by many. They appear to be a cult but whether they’re a religious or a political cult is uncertain. Jeff Munro violently disapproves of them.

Munro encounters an angry mob about to kill a woman. She is a member of HFP and the mob is convinced that HFP is some kind of sinister threat to society.

Then he encounters a strange very frightened man (Munro thinks of him as the Running Man) who is convinced that the HFP are out to kill him. And It appears that they really are out to kill him.

Munro is puzzled. He has seen evidence of irrational hatred directed at HFP but also evidence that they might indeed be a sinister organisation. He is intrigued enough to start poking about the cult’s vast headquarters compound hidden away deep in the woods. He sees a couple of things that lead him to wonder if this really is an ordinary cult or whether there might be strange and powerful forces at work, forces that might be unnatural or other-worldly in origin. He expects cult members to be fanatics, but these cultists are disturbingly zombie-like.

Infiltrating the HFP seems like a good idea at the time but Munro may have landed himself in the middle of something more dangerous than he can handle.

And also more perplexing. There may be bad guys behind the cult, or possibly several different groups involved behind the scenes. All of them may be planning to double-cross each other. There may be multiple levels of double-crosses. The nature of the bad guys is a mystery - there does seem to be something unnatural going on.

Munro needs to find somebody he can trust but he might be better off not trusting anybody.

In 1963 brainwashing was becoming a cultural obsession. Not just brainwashing of prisoners-of-war but more subtle forms of brainwashing employed by the advertising industry and governments - there were plenty of different kinds of brainwashing about which to be paranoid and this novel certainly taps into that cultural obsession.

Munro is an interesting hero. He’s a college professor so he’s not exactly open-minded. He led a campaign to deprive the HFP of the right to speak on campus. He has a bit of an authoritarian steak although at the time the author may have seen that as a good thing. It certainly makes Munro a valuable potential recruit for the HFP - this is a man who has a yearning for power.

There’s plenty of paranoia here. Poor Munro seems to be hopelessly out of his depth. He starts to understand some of what is going on, but not all of it, and that could lead him into making mistakes. And he’s just an ordinary college professor, not a secret agent.

There is some genuine science fiction content although it takes a while to emerge. The science fiction elements are moderately interesting.

It’s a fairly entertaining tale if you enjoy science fiction paranoia and you don’t set your expectations too high. Worth a look.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with William P. McGivern’s The Mad Robot in a two-novel paperback edition.

The Spy and the Pirate Queen

The Spy and the Pirate Queen was published in 1967. American former newspaper reporter Hal D. Steward wrote two sexy spy thrillers in 1967, both featuring CIA agent Nails Fenian.

Both were published as paperback originals by a small obscure outfit specialising mostly in sleaze fiction. And The Spy and the Pirate Queen straddles both the spy fiction and sleaze fiction genres.

These two books were I believe Steward’s only forays into the world of spy fiction.

Nailan Fenian, nicknamed Nails, is a philosophy professor, which is a useful enough cover for a spy.

Nails is in Singapore, on the trail of a Chinese lady pirate. Yes, piracy was in fact common in the South China Sea in the 1950s and 60s. Madame Wong is a very successful and ruthless pirate who operates on a large scale. Nails’ job is to terminate her activities which means killing her if necessary.

Within hours of his arrival in Singapore Nails knows that his cover has been blown. Several attempts have been made on his life. An informer has been murdered. More murders will follow. Madame Wong does not take kindly to people who pry into her affairs.

Nails gets involved with a beautiful half-Chinese girl, Lung Mai, who works as a freelance spy. She may be the femme fatale here but that is by no means certain. Nails hopes she’s innocent. She’s amazingly good in bed. He would hate to have to kill a woman with such impressive bedroom skills.

Madame Wong has never been photographed and has kept her true identity a secret. One day she intends to retire, as a respectable citizen. If there is a chance that a person might, deliberately or inadvertently, reveal her true identity her policy is to have that person quietly disposed of. It seems that both Nails and his buddy Underwood at the US Embassy are now in the category of people to be eliminated.

The plot is fairly straightforward, perhaps too straightforward for a spy novel, with the main interest being provided by the possibility that Lung Mai will try to double-cross Nails or double-cross Madame Wong. She might even try to double-cross both of them.

When you read a lot of paperback originals it’s noticeable that most are quite competently written even when they’re trashy. It’s therefore a slight surprise to come across one that is rather poorly structured and that features rather clunky prose. That unfortunately is the case here. Steward also has a bit of a tin ear for dialogue.

There are some fairly graphic sex scenes although they come across as workmanlike rather than passionate.

Nails Fenian is just a little too perfect a hero. A hero needs some flaws, or at least some quirks, to make him interesting. Fenian is just a by-the-numbers action hero.

Madame Wong is at least a reasonably interesting villainess and lady pirates are of course inherently cool, and the piracy in the mid-20th century concept is cool as well. Lung Mai is also a reasonably effective seductive ambiguous dangerous woman.

The Spy and the Pirate Queen is not a great spy thriller. If you’re a fan of sexy spy thrillers it’s maybe worth a look but there are much better books in this genre.

Nicholas Freeling’s Love in Amsterdam

The first of Nicholas Freeling’s Van der Valk mysteries, Love in Amsterdam (AKA Death in Amsterdam), was published in 1962. Van der Valk is a Dutch police detective and these mysteries are set in Amsterdam.

It begins with a man named Martin in police custody. A woman named Elsa has been murdered. Martin knew Elsa very well over a long period of time and had obviously been her lover. He was in the vicinity of the murder scene at the time of the killing.

Inspector Van der Valk does not have enough evidence to charge him and is in fact inclined to believe that Martin was not the killer. He does however intend to keep Martin in custody for questioning. He is sure that Martin is lying about something important and he is convinced that that something is the key to solving the case.

Van der Valk makes it clear from the start that he has no interest in nonsense such as taking casts of footprints or looking for cigar ash or lipstick traces on cigarette butts or fingerprints. Van der Valk’s methods are psychological.

He is convinced that the secret to identifying the murderer is to find out why Elsa was killed. It’s the motive that interests Van der Valk. In fact the motive is the sole focus of his investigation. Van der Valk is also not interested in giving Martin the third degree or intimidating him. He believes that if he can get Martin to talk about Elsa and think clearly about the events of the fatal night and the events that led up to it then eventually Martin will want to tell him the truth. Van der Valk does not believe that he will get anything useful out of Martin unless Martin gives the information voluntarily. Van der Valk is prepared to manipulate Martin but he does so openly - he tells Martin exactly what he is doing.

It’s made clear that Van der Valk is not hoping for a confession. He genuinely does not believe Martin is a murderer. Martin is not a murderer but he is the key to catching a murderer.

Van der Valk is a man with a somewhat earthy sense of humour and he is perhaps a bit of a rough diamond but he’s an affable sort of chap and he and Martin get along quite well. Martin is more of a semi-willing collaborator in the investigation than a suspect. The fact that Martin is now happily married to Sophia may be part of the reason he is holding things back but it’s also likely that there are things Martin does not want to admit to himself.

Slowly the complicated and sordid truth about the relationship between Martin and Elsa is brought to life. They had a passionate, obsessive but unhealthy relationship. Elsa was promiscuous and she was manipulative and selfish. Elsa used men. Sex plays a major role in the story since it played a major role in Elsa’s life but for Elsa sex was always a weapon. There’s some kinkiness in this tale but it rings true given what we find out about the people involved.

It has to be said that if you’re hoping for anything resembling a traditional fair-play puzzle-plot mystery you’ll be very disappointed (and the plot most definitely does not play fair). The mystery plot is pretty feeble. But clearly Freeling had no intention of writing a mystery of that type. He doesn’t care about the plot at all. This is a psychological crime novel.

Generally speaking I dislike psychological crime novel. Too many of them try to put the reader inside the mind of a serial killer or a psycho killer of some kind and I have no desire to be put inside the mind of such a person. But Love in Amsterdam is different. Firstly, while there’s a killer there is no serial killer or psycho killer. Secondly and more importantly (and more interestingly) in this book Freeling is trying to put us inside the head of the victim rather than the killer. And since the victim is dead he can’t do that directly. The only way the reader (and Van der Valk) can get inside Elsa’s mind is indirectly, through Martin. This is a genuinely intriguing approach.

Of course we also get to know Martin very well. He’s quite fascinating. He’s not quite a loser but he’s made a lot of mistakes and he has taken an awfully long time to grow up. He has indulged in very self-destructive behaviour. But he’s not a total loser. He’s trying his best.

Elsa isn’t quite a monster, but she’s close. She’s the kind of woman who might not set out to destroy men’s lives but she will do so anyway. She is bad news, but fascinating in the way that Bad Girls always are fascinating.

If there’s a slight weakness here it’s the motive which I felt needed to be fleshed out just a little.

Overall a psychological crime novel with a genuinely interesting approach. Recommended.

Modesty Blaise: Uncle Happy

Uncle Happy collects two Modesty Blaise comic-strip adventures, Uncle Happy from 1965 and Bad Suki from 1968.

Uncle Happy represented an interesting step for Peter O’Donnell, the creator and writer of the comic strip. His concept for the character was a woman who underwent horrific experiences in childhood but survived and came out much stronger. She put herself back together again. A crucial aspect of the character is that despite those traumatic experiences she is a fully functional woman. She is perfectly capable of having normal emotional relationships with men, and she is perfectly capable of having normal sexual relationships with men.

It was therefore important to make it clear that Modesty has a sex life. In the early strips this was implied. In Uncle Happy it’s made quite explicit. Modesty has found a new man. They have moved in together and they are most definitely sleeping together. This was quite daring in 1965, for a comic strip published in daily newspapers.

Uncle Happy is also interesting for being set partly in Las Vegas, and for the fact that there is clearly a kinky sexual element to the nastiness of the chief villainess. It also demonstrates that Peter O’Donnell was quite comfortable dealing with female evil as well as male evil.

On a skin-diving holiday Modesty meets underwater photographer Steve. Pretty soon they’re shacked up together. Everything is going great until he gets kidnapped. Modesty rescues him but he won’t call the cops. Modesty suspects he’s mixed up in something criminal. They’re both keeping secrets from each other and their love affair fizzles out.

Then Willie Garvin shows up unexpectedly. He’s investigating the possible murder of an old girlfriend but there’s an odd link with Steve - the people who kidnapped him are the very people Willie is investigating. These people are a rich philanthropist and his wife. The philanthropist has earned the nickname Uncle Happy for providing disadvantaged kids with an island playground.

There’s plenty of action in this adventure and a couple of memorable twisted villains including a very nasty lady villain with a taste for sadism. A fine adventure.

Bad Suki is interesting for other reasons. O’Donnell preferred to avoid topical subject matter and in fact he preferred to avoid anything that would make his comic strips date. Modesty’s clothes (when she’s not on a mission) are stylish and elegant but in the 60s you’ll never see her wearing the latest Carnaby Street fashions. Her look is timeless.

Bad Suki was an exception to all of these rules. It deals with a subject very topical at the time - drugs. And it deals with the emerging hippie subculture. It’s an experiment that works reasonably well, but it was an experiment that O’Donnell did not care to repeat.

Willie rescues a hippie girl having a bad acid trip. Willie is no fool. He knows you can’t help people who don’t want to be helped. But he and Modesty feel sorry for the girl. They figure if they can’t help her directly they can deal with the drug pushers.

This is yet another Modesty Blaise adventure featuring underwater action. I’m not complaining. I love underwater action scenes.

It’s also a story that displays a ruthless side to Modesty that you don’t see in most of her adventures. In general Modesty hates killing and does so only when strictly necessary. But this time she intends to kill and she intends to enjoy it. This is another experiment that O’Donnell was reluctant to repeat.

So while Bad Suki can be a bit cringe-inducing at times when dealing with the far-out groovy hippie world it is an intriguingly atypical Modesty Blaise story.

So, two comic-strip adventures, one extremely good and one flawed but interesting. Which makes this volume a worthwhile purchase.

Both adventures feature Jim Holdaway’s art.

I’ve reviewed three other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up, Warlords of Phoenix and The Black Pearl, as well as the first three novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth and I, Lucifer.

Curt Siodmak's Hauser’s Memory

Hauser’s Memory is a 1968 science fiction espionage novel by Curt Siodmak.

Curt Siodmak (1902-2000) enjoyed success as a novelist and a screenwriter, and occasional film director. He is best-known for his screenplay for the Universal horror classic The Wolf Man and for his best-selling science fiction novel Donovan’s Brain. He was the younger brother of the great film director Robert Siodmak.

Dr Cory is a rather emotionally detached scientist working in the field of memory. He believes that memories are encoded in RNA and that by injecting RNA from one animal into another the memories of the first animal can be transferred to the second. Cory has done some experiments that seem to indicate that this really is possible. It should be possible to do it with humans as well but of course performing such an experiment on people would be ethically dubious.

Then Cory is approached by the CIA - they have in their hands a defector named Hauser and they want the secrets locked in that defector’s brain. Unfortunately Hauser was shot. He is now in a coma and is not expected to survive the night and is not expected to regain consciousness. Hauser was a German who ended up in the Soviet Union after the war. He had been doing top-secret military research for them.

The CIA (an organisation never troubled by ethical considerations) wants Cory to transplant Hauser’s RNA, and therefore his memories, into the brain of a volunteer. Of course this will probably kill both Hauser and the volunteer but the CIA is prepared to take the risk.

The experiment is eventually performed, due to a series of misadventures, on Cory’s young assistant Dr Hillel Mondoro. Whether the experiment has been a complete success or not is uncertain but Mondoro now knows things he couldn’t possibly know. Suddenly he speaks fluent German. He has memories that are not his own. He is Hauser, but he is still Mondoro. The two personalities come and go. Sometimes he is Hauser but on some level he knows that he isn’t really, and sometimes he is entirely Hauser.

Cory and Mondoro are just scientists. They have no interest in politics. It would all be nothing but an exciting scientific breakthrough but for two things. Firstly, Mondoro’s memories include vital Russian defence secrets. The Russians think those memories belong to them. Secondly, the CIA thinks Hauser’s memories belong to them. Of course Hauser’s memories and scientific knowledge are now locked up in Mondoro’s brain. So the CIA and the Russians both want Mondoro.

An added complication is that Mondoro now not only has Hauser’s memories, he has Hauser’s will. There were important things of a personal nature that Hauser intended to do. The Hauser personality is still determined to do those things. The Hauser personality has its own agenda that has nothing to do with the agendas of the CIA and the Russians. Under the influence of the Hauser personality Mondoro suddenly hops on a plane to Copenhagen, and then goes to Berlin. With Cory trailing after him hoping to keep him safe, and with both the CIA and the Soviet intelligence people after him as well.

The science in this story may seen fairly screwy but this was 1968. RNA and DNA were all the rage. They were thought to be the secret to everything. It’s also worth noting that human behaviour is still very poorly understood. We don’t know how much of our behaviour is innate and how much is learned. Siodmak’s ideas might be bold and speculative but in 1968 they would have seemed plausible. And Siodmak develops his ideas skilfully and subtly, and with as much emphasis on the ethical problems as on the scientific implications. This is clever intelligent science fiction.

This is also clever intelligent spy fiction. There are so many layers of ambiguity and betrayal and duplicity, and so many complex motivations on the part of both the individual characters and the spy agencies on both sides. There’s ambiguity right from the start. Did Hauser really want to defect? It seems that he had certain plans of a personal nature that led him to want to leave Russia but it’s by no means certain that he really wanted to defect. It’s possible he was simply snatched by the CIA. There’s also some uncertainty as to how he got shot.

Hauser was a complicated man with a complicated past. He may or may not have been guilty of more than one act of political betrayal, and more than one act of personal betrayal. But in these cases was he really the villain or the victim? Poor Mondoro has to try these things out, on the basis of confused and fragmentary memories. This is a rather cerebral spy story but with plenty of suspense and some action as well.

Siodmak’s novel manages to work exceptionally well as both unconventional science fiction and an unconventional spy thriller with some moral depth as well. Very highly recommended.

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls

Glenn Canary’s Trailer Park Girls was published by Monarch Books 1962. It has more recently been reprinted by Black Gat Books. It appears that it may also been published as Trailer Park Trash.

I know very little about Glenn Canary (1934-2008) other than the fact that he started as a newspaperman and he wrote a handful of novels and short stories.

The title obviously suggests that this is going to be sleaze fiction but that needs to be qualified. In the 50s and early 60s there was a lot of crossover between sleaze fiction and hardboiled/noir crime fiction, both of which were popular pulp genres. There were a lot of sleaze novels that had crime fiction plots and there were crime novels that were quite sleazy. Many authors wrote in both genres.

There was in the late 50s and early 60s a curious craze for trailer park sleaze. For a lot of people the American Dream wasn’t quite the world of TV series like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. Home ownership was hopelessly out of the reach of many people, either permanently or temporarily. The best they could aspire to was life in a trailer park. There was much clucking of tongues over the immorality that supposedly flourished in trailer parks. This was mostly media hysteria but there was some truth to it. They did attract transients and drifters and undoubtedly there was a fair amount of illicit sex.

Not surprisingly this made trailer parks a splendid setting for sleaze novels.

Trailer Park Girls fall into the category of hardboiled crime/noir spiced up with sex. This is the tale of three guys who live in a trailer camp, and three girls who live in the same camp.

Three young guys who met in the army share a trailer. Burt Stone is the one who comes up with the idea for the robbery. He was all set to be a doctor. He’s finished his undergraduate studies and now he’s ready for medical school. That won’t be a problem. He has ten thousand dollars set aside, enough to support him until he qualifies as a doctor. Only he doesn’t have that money after all. His brother stole it. But has a plan to rob a department store with his two buddies. That should net him the ten grand he needs.

Al Needs is a tough guy with a nasty streak. Jack Cannon is a huge good-natured bear of a man. They could both use some money. These three guys are not really hopeless losers, they’re just not as smart or as hard as they think they are and they’ve convinced themselves the robbery will be child’s play and they haven’t considered the possibility that it could all go wrong.

They get mixed up with the three girls. Sally pairs off with Al. Fran pairs off with Jack. Burt doesn’t want any emotional entanglements but he just drifts into an affair with Marianne and before he knows what’s happening they’re in love.

Of course one of the girls finds out about the robbery and she wants in. The other two girls don’t want to be mixed up in it but they are whether they like it or not.

The robbery does not take place until very late in the story but this is not a classic heist story in which the focus is on the preparations for the robbery and the detailed mechanics of pulling it off. This is a character-driven story rather than a plot-driven story. Canary is much more concerned with the character motivations and interactions, especially the growing tension between Burt and Al and the complicated relationship between Burt and Marianne.

Right from the start Burt wanted the trio of robbers to have nothing to do with women until after the robbery. He was sure that any involvement with women would sow dissension and and pose dangers. He was right. But he couldn’t stop it from happening and he couldn’t stop himself from getting deeply involved with Marianne. She presents him with a choice - back out of the robbery or lose her. But he doesn’t see any way that he can back out.

The main focus is on Burt and Marianne. Especially Burt. He’s a typical noir protagonist. He’s basically a very decent guy. In the normal course of events he’d have become a doctor and led a blameless life. But having that money stolen by his brother has distorted his thinking and embittered him. And now events are moving out of his control. This is all classic noir fiction stuff.

There is a femme fatale of sorts but it’s not Burt’s girlfriend, it’s Sally. She’s the most reckless of the three girls.

There are no real villains here, just people who make mistakes. Maybe some will lean from their mistakes and maybe some of them won’t.

There’s some violence and a lot of sex. The sex isn’t very graphic but it does have an edge of noir desperation to it. People who need love but don’t realise it and sometimes don’t recognise it when it’s there.

As to how noir this novel is, that depends on how you read the ending but it does have a noirish atmosphere.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy by Mallory T. Knight

The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy was the first of Mallory T. Knight’s The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. sexy spy thrillers. It was published in 1967.

Bernhardt J. Hurwood (1926-1987) wrote a number of spy thrillers in the late 60s and on into the early 70s under the name Mallory T. Knight.

This being the first book in the series we start with a very very brief rundown of the hero’s backstory. Tim O’Shane was a Marine Corps captain just happily having an affair with a married woman in Paris. During one of their bedroom romps he discovers an odd capsule-shaped objected secreted about her person. The hiding place was unlikely to be found, except perhaps by a randy Marine Corps captain. Tim figures he should pass this discovery on to the intelligence guys.

The next thing he knows Tim has been recruited by T.O.M.C.A.T. (Tactical Operations Master Counterintelligence Assault Team), an international espionage and counter-espionage group. It’s run by an 83-year-old Scotsman with a prodigious appetite for tobacco, good whisky and beautiful women.

Tim’s latest case begins with another bedroom romp, with a Polish cryptographer. On this assignment he’ll be working for the Russians. Actually working for them, in their interests. He’ll be working for Soviet spymaster Pletnikov. In this story the Russians are the good guys. So are the Americans. This was 1967 and the fashionable enemy in spy fiction was no longer the Soviet Union but Red China. Tim has to prevent a Chinese plot involving stolen Soviet nukes but it involves something else as well - unleashing the Joy Dragons on an unsuspecting America.

The Joy Dragons are specially selected nymphomaniacs. Their mission is to sleep with as many American men as possible. The men will certainly get plenty of joy (these girls will make sure of that) but they’ll get an unexpected bonus - a virus. Not a killer virus, but maybe more devastating.

He’ll have to shake off the CIA agent tailing him. This mission will be difficult enough without those guys getting mixed up in it. One advantage Tim has is a diplomatic passport - he’s a special envoy for Satyria, a tiny independent state run by a crazy Greek billionaire who also happens to bankroll T.O.M.C.A.T. among other assorted business and political ventures.

Pletnikov has had a break. The Russians have located one of the Joy Dragons. She might lead Tim to Alexander Wang, the mysterious Chinese agent who cooked up the whole nefarious scheme. She does indirectly lead him to the glamorous but deadly Mona Kee.

This was 1967 so there is of course an attempt to inject some Swinging 60s flavour into the proceedings.

There are, naturally, lots of gadgets including a tricked-out Lamborghini 350GT. And a helicopter with a balloon attachment.

There’s a fair amount of action, including both martial arts fights and gunplay, some explosions and a fight with a tiger.

The trick with the sexy spy thriller genre is to get the balance right. There has to be enough sexiness to provide decent titillation without derailing the spy thriller plot. This book strikes just the right balance. Tim beds a whole succession of gorgeous women, there are naked women wandering about all over the place, but there is a genuine and quite decent spy thriller plot.

For this sub-genre the tone also has to be right. It needs to be amusing and lighthearted and the plot needs to be fairly outlandish and crazy but without becoming an out-and-out spoof.

A sexy spy thriller has to work equally well as sleaze fiction and spy fiction.

In this case the author manages these balancing acts pretty well. The result is a lightweight but very entertaining read. Highly recommended.

Other sexy spy thriller series worth checking out are Gardner Francis Fox’s Lady from L.U.S.T. books beginning with Lust, Be a Lady Tonight and Lay Me Odds, and James Eastwood’s Anna Zordan thrillers such as Seduce and Destroy. Clyde Allison’s Agent 0008 books such as Gamefinger are much more out-and-out spoofs and much sleazier but fun if you like that sort of thing. But the best of the sexy spy thriller genre is probably Jimmy Sangster's Touchfeather.

Robert Silverberg's The Hot Beat

The Hot Beat is a 1960 noir-inflected sleazy hardboiled crime thriller by Robert Silverberg.

Robert Silverberg (born 1935) is best-known as one of the grandmasters of science fiction. He had just started to establish himself in the genre when the science fiction market to which he was selling temporarily collapsed. He turned to other genres such as men’s adventure fiction, sleaze fiction and crime fiction and became a very prolific and very successful writer of pulp paperback originals. The Hot Beat was written (using the pseudonym Stan Vincent) for a short-lived paperback original publisher, Magnet Books.

Bob McKay is a band leader. He’s young and he has the world at his feet. He’s the toast of the town. And then he hits the skids. He’s been pushing himself too hard and when you make a living in nightclubs it’s all too easy to reach for the bottle when you need to relax. McKay reaches for that bottle way too often. He loses everything, including his girl Terry. Terry is a starlet whose career has so far gone nowhere but she’s a swell kid. She just can’t put up with McKay’s drunken unpredictability any longer.

McKay has reached rock bottom. And then things get worse. He’s arrested for the murder of B-girl Doris Blair. He knew Doris but he didn’t kill her. The cops, who in this novel behave like moronic thugs, don’t care. He’s a convenient suspect. They’re happy to railroad him all the way to the gas chamber. They intimidate witnesses into identifying McKay.

Newspaper columnist Ned Lowry covers the seamy side of life but he can’t stand thuggish cops and he can’t ignore such an obvious miscarriage of justice. He gets a hotshot lawyer interested in the case.

And along with Terry, the aforementioned starlet, he starts playing amateur private detective. They really are amateurs but they’re motivated and gradually they start to see a picture emerging that is sharply at variance with the cops’ version.

Silverberg’s knack for pulp fiction is much in evidence - an understanding of the necessity for breakneck pacing, the ability to sketch characters quickly and economically, the ability to capture the right atmosphere of seedy corrupted glamour. He also makes sure to have all the right ingredients - some action, some romance, some suspense, some sleaze.

McKay is a typical noir fiction loser. He’s not such a terrible guy but he has a genius for self-destruction. In most novels of this type he would have to set out to prove his own innocence. In this story McKay does practically nothing. The focus is entirely on the two amateur sleuths.

Terry is the most interesting character here. She’s no Girl Scout, she knows that making it in Hollywood will mean doing a certain amount of wallowing in the gutter, but she has limits. She has tried very hard not to be corrupted. She’s not sure how well she has succeeded. She hasn’t learned to hate herself but she’s also aware that at times she has behaved badly. She’s not a femme fatale, but also not quite a stock-standard Good Girl. To achieve stardom she is prepared to sleep her way to the top but at least she feels bad about it. She’s not a villainess in need of redemption, but she does need to take stock of her life.

There’s a solid enough mystery plot here and I always enjoy mysteries or thrillers with a seedy-glamorous showbiz background.

Hard Case Crime rescued this novel from obscurity in 2022. One thing I have to say about Hard Case Crime - they’re one of the very very few modern publishers who understand the importance of great stylish sexy book covers. The original painting by Claudia Caranfa for the cover of this one gets the tone just right.

To make this paperback edition even more enticing it also includes three late 50s crime short stories by Silverberg.

Drunken Sailor is rather a nothing story about a naïve young sailor on shore leave. It appeared in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in October 1958.

Naked in the Lake was published in Trapped Detective Story Magazine in February 1958. A married man decides it’s time to get rid of his inconvenient mistress but there are some nasty surprises in store for him. It’s an OK story.

Jailbait Girl appeared in Guilty Detective Story Magazine in September 1959. Now this is a terrific little story about a con artist and it has a delicious sting in the tail.

Having now read a couple of Silverberg’s noir novels I’m inclined to think that this genre was not quite his forte. He was better suited to sleaze fiction since he was good at dealing with human relationships and human motivations. He was one of the very best sleaze fiction writers. He doesn’t quite have the gift of a making a more straightforward crime novel come to life. The Hot Beat is still worth a look.

The inclusion of the three short stories, and especially Jailbait Girl, is enough to bump this Hard Case Crime paperback up into the recommended category.