Death’s Lovely Mask by John Flagg

Death’s Lovely Mask is a 1958 John Flagg thriller. Between 1950 and 1961 American writer John Gearon wrote eight espionage/crime thrillers, most of them published under the pseudonym John Flagg. All were published as Fawcett Gold Medal editions.

Quite a few, including Death’s Lovely Mask, feature private eye Hart Muldoon. Muldoon is a former CIA agent who still does occasional jobs for the Agency. Some of the Hart Muldoon books are spy thrillers and some are crime thrillers but the latter always have some suggestion of international intrigue. All have exotic European locations and all have a similar feel. And all of them are excellent.

Muldoon is a bit on the cynical side. Mostly he just wants to get enough money to retire to a cabin in Maine. He’s tired of being mixed up with spies and crooks.

In this book he’s roped into doing a job for the US Government but it’s the sort of job that needs to be handled discreetly. It doesn’t take too long for Muldoon to wonder if there are important things he hasn’t been told about.

A young Arab prince wants to marry a pretty young Israeli girl. That’s obviously going to create tension in the prince’s tiny but oil-rich desert state. It’s that oil that concerns the State Department. Lots of groups including the intelligence agencies of several countries and at least one international corporation are interested in this proposed wedding. Some want the marriage to go ahead while others want it stopped at all costs. Some of these groups would like to eliminate the young prince altogether.

The US Government just wants the oil to keep flowing and they don’t want the whole situation to explode into a major international crisis.

Muldoon has been in Naples having a rather pleasant sexual dalliance with a married woman, Linda Pawlings. He might even be in danger of falling in love with her. Linda is mixed up in the plots concerned the prince’s wedding but Muldoon can’t figure out why and how she’s involved. What he has to do is to follow her to Venice which seems likely to be the setting for whatever dramas might unfold.

There are some very unsavoury characters involved. Rich elderly American widows, Italian movie starlets, whores, gigolos and men with exotic erotic tastes. There’s an overwhelming atmosphere of corruption, decadence and sleaze. This is something that John Flagg did extremely well.

Muldoon is no prude and he’s no Boy Scout but even he is a bit shocked. On the other hand there are some luscious very available women and Muldoon is fond of the ladies.

Things get complicated when the Egyptian falls into the canal and drowns. No-one is sure where he came from. He probably wasn’t who he claimed to be. And maybe he didn’t fall. Maybe he was pushed.

Things get really exciting at the Masked Ball. Masked balls are always fun in thrillers and Flagg knew how to use such plot devices.

Muldoon wants to keep the prince and his intended bride alive. He also wants to keep Linda alive even if she now hates him and he wants to keep Nina alive even if he can’t trust her.

The plot has plenty of nice twists but the author is equally concerned with creating an atmosphere of decadence, danger and treachery (which he does expertly) and with the effects of treachery on the people who embrace lives of deception and violence.

Death’s Lovely Mask is a superior thriller by a rather neglected master of the genre. Highly recommended.

I’ve read lots of John Flagg’s thrillers and they have all been thoroughly enjoyable. The good news is that all the John Flagg thrillers are currently in print from Stark House.

His two earlier Hart Muldoon books, Woman of Cairo and Dear, Deadly Beloved, are both excellent. I also very much liked his non-Hart Muldoon thrillers The Persian Cat, Death and the Naked Lady and The Lady and the Cheetah.

John Flagg's Murder in Monaco

Murder in Monaco is a 1957 John Flagg thriller. American writer John Gearon wrote eight espionage/crime thrillers between 1950 and 1961 mostly using the pseudonym John Flagg. All were published as Fawcett Gold Medal editions.

Murder in Monaco is one of several that feature ex-CIA agent Hart Muldoon. The somewhat cynical and slightly embittered Muldoon now works as a freelancer and private detective, mostly in Europe, mostly in glamorous locales. The locales may be glamorous but his cases tend to be sordid. He has a knack for getting mixed up in with very powerful, very ruthless, very corrupt criminals.

This time Muldoon is offered a lot of money for a job but is given no details. That’s how he meets Nancy Trippe, in Monaco. And becomes aware of The National Alert, published by Charles Pless. The National Alert is a scandal sheet and it’s a glossy high-profile very profitable scandal sheet. Some threats have been made but the nature of the threats is obscure.

Of course there’s a murder. Blackmail might be an obvious motive but revenge is a definite possibility as well The National Alert has ruined reputations and destroyed lives. And there are so many emotional and sexual intrigues among the circle of possible suspects. Love and lust must be considered as motives. And one must never forget greed.

There are four women, they’re all suspects and they all have motives and they’re all dangerous in very different ways. Alva is a very successful middle-aged writer with some scandals in her past and a taste for handsome young men. Nancy Trippe is a nymphomaniac and an obvious femme fatale type. Myra is a timid little mouse. They’re always dangerous - all those repressed passions. And Amy is sweet and innocent. Muldoon has been a private eye for a long time. He knows you never trust sweet and innocent.

There are quite a few men with motives as well. Harold is a gigolo and he hasn’t been loyal to the woman who assumes that she owns him. There’s ex-Governor Thorne, a politician whose sister has a scandalous past. There’s Black. He’s a private eye, he’s ex-FBI, and he’s very shady. Plus the crazy unstable American named Cooladge. And Marius, who has wide-ranging business interests, none of then legal.

Nobody wants the cops involved. They all have sound reasons for wanting his whole affair handled discreetly.

Muldoon doesn’t actually have a client yet but he’s confident that if he sticks around he’ll get one, and it’s likely to be a big payday for him.

This is not noir fiction but there is plenty of corruption and plenty of sleaze and decadence. There are ruthless rich people, and ruthless poor people who to become rich people. Almost all the characters have at some stage jumped into bed with someone they should have kept away from.

There’s not much action but there is decent suspense.

Muldoon is a fine hero. He’s at best moderately honest. He’s ethically flexible. He’s mildly interested in seeing justice done but he’s very interested in getting paid. He’s by no means a bad guy. He’s no anti-hero and he’s definitely no thug. But he does have to pay the rent. A man has to prioritise. He likes women and if they’re available he won’t say no. He certainly isn’t going to say no to the cute little Hungarian blonde. She looks very appealing in her scanty bikini. She looks even more appealing out of it.

Murder in Monaco is fine entertaining stuff. Highly recommended.

I’ve read a whole bunch of John Flagg’s thrillers and I’ve enjoyed all of them. I’ve read a whole bunch of John Flagg’s thrillers and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Some are spy thrillers and some, such as Murder in Monaco, are more in the PI thriller mould but the exotic settings will give them appeal for spy fans.  His two earlier Hart Muldoon books, Woman of Cairo and Dear, Deadly Beloved, are both excellent. I also very much liked his non-Hart Muldoon thrillers The Persian Cat, Death and the Naked Lady and The Lady and the Cheetah.

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.

Ira Levin's Sliver

Sliver is a 1991 suspense thriller by Ira Levin. I think you could argue that it also qualifies as a techno-thriller. There was a 1993 film adaptation staring Sharon Stone.

Ira Levin (1929-2007) was an immensely successful American writer who tended to jump around from genre to genre. He gained initial success with the noirish crime thriller A Kiss Before Dying. He wrote horror (Rosemary’s Baby) and science fiction (The Stepford Wives) as well as thrillers such as The Boys from Brazil.

Sliver takes place in a high-rise apartment building in Manhattan. It’s a fairly high-tech building but the residents don’t know just how high-tech it is.

Kay Norris has just moved in. She’s a 39-year-old book editor, still very attractive but starting to become aware that she’s not as young as she was. When she catches herself having rather lustful thoughts about one of the other tenants she is a bit shocked by herself. The guy is cute but he couldn’t be more than 27 or so.

There are some interesting connections between some of the tenants, connections that go back many years, connections which will become important later.

What the reader knows but Kay doesn’t is that she is being watched. All the tenants are being watched. They have no idea that the building boasts an incredibly sophisticated surveillance system. They are being monitored by hundreds of cameras. Only one person knows about this - the person who installed the surveillance system. It was installed in absolute secrecy. This person lives in the building. He owns the building.

Kay eventually finds all this out, at which point the story takes some really interesting twists. Not just plot twists but psychological twists.

This is not a conventional study of an abnormal personality. It is that, but it becomes a study of abnormal relationships as well.

This is clearly a story about voyeurism but it’s not primarily about voyeurism as a sexual kink. The sexual kink element is a fairly minor aspect of the novel. The movie adaptation puts a bit more emphasis on the sexual aspect and it can be described as an erotic thriller. I would not however call the novel an erotic thriller. There is a scene in the book in which the voyeur watches Kay masturbating and masturbates while watching her but perhaps surprisingly that is the only such incident in the novel. It is not what really drives this particular voyeur.

It’s interesting to compare it to Hitchcock’s classic voyeurism movie Rear Window. There are intriguing similarities and intriguing differences.

In Rear Window the voyeur/protagonist Jeff (James Stewart) does enjoy watching the pretty dancer he refers to as Miss Torso getting undressed but that’s merely added spice. What really fascinates Jeff is seeing into other people’s lives and discovering their secrets. And that’s the drawcard for Sliver’s voyeur. He is excited by the idea of discovering other people’s secrets, and excited by the fact that they don’t know he is watching them.

The chief difference compared to Hitchcock’s film is that in Rear Window the voyeur/protagonist Jeff (James Stewart) only has partial information - he only knows what he can see through the curtains that happen to be open. Rear Window has a strong mystery element so this works in the movie’s favour. Jeff has to solve the mystery based on partial information. In Sliver the Voyeur can see and hear everything. There is no mystery in Sliver. We know the identity of the killer from the start.

And interestingly the voyeur in Sliver does not seem to be interested in the power that knowing those secrets could offer him. To make use of those secrets in such a way would be to risk exposure. His motivation is simply the joy of knowing these secrets and knowing that his targets have no idea that their secrets are no longer secrets.

What makes Sliver interesting is the suggestion that a woman can enjoy this kind of voyeurism. And it’s believable. Women are fascinated by secrets. The voyeur’s addiction could be shared by a woman. It could become a shared obsession.

An interesting moment comes when the voyeur reveals that he is using the same equipment that the FBI uses to spy on us. That’s really what the novel is all about. We’re living in a society in which we are being constantly watched, whether we like it or no. Even in 1991 Levin could see that privacy was becoming a thing of the past. We are becoming a society in which we are all subject to high-tech voyeurism.

While Sliver plays around with a few observations on the direction in which society is heading it doesn’t have a particular ideological axe to grind. It does deal with voyeurism in a reasonably complex way but mostly it’s a fine intelligent suspense thriller/techno-thriller and it’s highly recommended.

I reviewed the movie Sliver (1993) not too long ago. A lot of people hate this movie but I like it rather a lot.

W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

The villain of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician was inspired by Aleister Crowley although the story itself is pure fiction.

Maugham had met Crowley and while he disapproved of him and considered him to be a charlatan he was strangely fascinated by the notorious occultist. And while many of the extraordinary tales Crowley told about himself were untrue Maugham had to admit that they were not all untrue. Crowley was a remarkable man. It was obvious to Maugham that he was a perfect subject for a novel.

Maugham’s novel begins with a brilliant young surgeon who is engaged to be married to the beautiful Margaret, who had been his ward. In Paris they encounter the notorious occultist and magician Oliver Haddo. Haddo is wildly eccentric and slightly sinister but he is charismatic and fascinating.

Haddo seems to be intent on seducing Margaret. Is he simply making use of standard techniques of hypnotism (aided by his charismatic personality) or does he possess actual occult powers?

And is he intent on mere seduction? There is a possibility that he has something much stranger and much more shocking in mind.

Maugham did not believe that Crowley possessed any real magical powers but had to admit that he certainly had the ability to convince people that he did. Oliver Haddo might well have obtained such powers.

The story of Maugham’s novel of course has no connection whatsoever to any events in the life of Aleister Crowley. Crowley simply served as a jumping-off point. And of course in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were many occult practitioners so Haddo is perhaps more representative of a breed than of an individual.

Either way Oliver Haddo is a wonderful and memorable larger-than-life character. He entirely dominates the story.

This was a period of intense interest in the occult so in commercial terms the idea was a winner. It was very much in tune with the cultural obsessions of the day. The reading public had an inexhaustible appetite for thrillers with an occult flavouring.

The novel is an unashamed potboiler (and I have no problems with that). It can be regarded as an occult thriller, a melodrama, a romance and even as gothic horror. It’s not what you expect from Maugham, excepting that being a Maugham novel it’s extremely well-written. He has some fine suspense, some genuine chills and thrills and a perverse love story. And the love story is quite powerful.

This is a very early example of the occult thriller genre which would reach its full flowering in the works of Dennis Wheatley.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Magician. Highly recommended.

Rex Ingram’s The Magician (1926) is a superb movie adaptation of the novel.

Crowley was himself a talented writer. His Simon Iff Stories are splendid occult detective stories, Crowley’s most famous novel, Moonchild, does touch on some of the occult practices described in Maugham’s novel. So it is possible to get both sides of the story.

A.S. Fleischman’s Look Behind You, Lady

A.S. Fleischman’s spy thriller Look Behind You, Lady was published by Fawcett Gold Medal as a paperback original in 1952.

New York-born A.S. ‘Sid’ Fleischman (1920-2010) had three careers. Initially he was a professional magician working in vaudeville. From 1948 to 1963 he was a moderately successful writer of paperback originals, mostly thrillers and mostly spy-themed. He then embarked on his third career as a very successful writer of children’s books.

During his wartime naval service he got to know the Asia-Pacific region reasonably well. Not surprisingly his thrillers tend to have exotic settings.

This one is set in Macau and it would be hard to imagine a better setting for a spy story. This was Macau when it was still a Portuguese colony and it was one of the most exciting, dangerous and glamorous places on the planet. If you were interested in gambling or women or both it was the place to be. The gambling was for high stakes. The women were beautiful, stylish and expensive. They played for high stakes as well.

There is nothing I love more than thrillers (both books and movies) set in the tropics or Asia in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. It’s a world that is now long gone. You can approve or disapprove of that vanished world but it was exciting, perilous and sexy. An overheated steamy world of intrigue and forbidden sex. Fleischman had a knack for bringing that world to life.

Fittingly the hero of Look Behind You, Lady is a professional magician. Bruce Flemish is having a successful run at the China Seas Hotel in Macau. Then he meets the girl. Her name is Donna. Or her name might be Donna. Flemish doesn’t want to get involved, but he does like the way her hips move. He likes it a lot. Other parts of her anatomy seem very satisfactory as well. She gives him her room number but he has no intention of doing anything about it.

Then the owner of the hotel pays him to do a very simple job. All he has to do is slip a roll of banknotes into the pocket of some guy, an importer. A very simple task for a magician.

Flemish starts to go cold on the idea when he sees the woman sitting at the table with the importer. It’s Donna.

This is just before someone tries to garrotte Flemish. Flemish is not much of a tough guy but he takes exception to attempts to kill him. He figures it might be worthwhile to meet Donna after all.

Donna has a proposition for him as well. She’s a spy, of sorts. Strictly an amateur. Flemish has no desire whatever to get involved in espionage. But Donna seems frightened, and she does move her hips nicely.

Flemish is caught up in a dangerous game. He doesn’t know what the game is. He doesn’t know who the players are, or which of them are working with each other or against each other. He has no idea which are the good guys. Maybe they’re all bad guys. He doesn’t know if he can trust Donna.

The double-crosses start early and they keep coming. Maybe everyone is deceiving everyone else. Maybe they’re not all lying. But they might be.

Flemish is not a bad guy and he’s not totally dumb but he’s way out of his depth. He would be better off sticking to his magic tricks. It’s too late for that. He’s fallen for this dame and there’s nothing he can do about it.

There’s good suspense and a fair helping of action. There’s a touch of sexiness. There’s superb atmosphere.

This is a top-rank thriller by a very underrated writer. Highly recommended.

Look Behind You, Lady has been paired with Venetian Blonde in a Stark House two-novel edition.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Fleischman’s thrillers and they’re all good - Malay Woman, Danger in Paradise, Counterspy Express and Shanghai Flame.

Victor Canning's The House of the Seven Flies

Victor Canning (1911-1986) was a very popular English thriller writer who had a 50-year career. His thriller The House of the Seven Flies was published in 1952.

After leaving the army Furse had bought a boat. He earns his living from it. Mostly legally, but not always. A Dutchman mamed Sluiter offers him fifty pounds for a cruise along the English east coast but Sluiter changes his mind. He wants Furst to take him to the Netherlands. It’s an odd way to return to his own country but money is money so Furse is happy enough to oblige.

This short sea voyage has momentous consequences. The corpse is not likely to cause much trouble with the Dutch authorities. A death from natural causes - a small amount of paperwork. Of course it turns out not to be so simple. It was an ingenious murder.

The other consequence is that Furse now has a clue that could lead him to a quarter of a millions pounds’ worth of diamonds. Diamonds that were originally obtained by methods not strictly legal. In fact not even slightly legal.

The clue unfortunately is exasperating elusive. The Seven Flies - what on earth could this mean? There does not appear to be a single village, house, restaurant or anything else of that name in the entire country.

Furse has a couple of things to worry about. First, other people are interested in those diamonds. Rohner is very interested. Rohner isn’t a major crime lord but his criminal activities are extensive and varied. Secondly, there’s also a Dutch cop, Molenaar. He knows about the diamonds as well. He’s not a brilliant cop, but he’s competent and thorough. He’s an honest cop, although of course where a huge amount of money is at stake it’s unwise to assume that anyone is entirely honest.

The situation for Furse is complicated by Constanta. She’s not involved in anything criminal. She’s just a very pretty and charming young woman who happened to know Sluiter. She owns and runs a struggling tugboat operation. She’s a lovely girl, Furse has become very fond of her and she seems to have a definite romantic interest in him. Furse doesn’t want to become involved with her because he doesn’t want her dragged into anything illegal. But he is aware that he is falling in love with her.

There are other people mixed up in this business as well. There’s Rohner’s wife Elsa, who turns out to be his mistress rather than his wife. Elsa is attractive and seductive but she’s the sort of woman who double-cross her own mother. There’s Rohner’s henchman, Dekker, who might consider double-crossing his boss.There’s an old Dutch farmer and his wife, who may know more about the diamonds than they should. And there’s Furse’s pal Charlie, a very likeable crook.

Canning does a fine job of keeping us uncertain as to the exact parts these people are going to play in the game that is unfolding, and exactly which way they might jump.

Furse is an extremely interesting protagonist. He doesn’t think of himself as a criminal, but he’s a smuggler so the authorities would certainly consider him to be a crook. He has managed to rationalise his smuggling. When times are tough it isn’t really wrong to step outside the law, is it? And he has rationalised his plan to steal those diamonds. They were stolen during the war but they were insured and the insurance claim was paid. So if he finds and keeps the diamonds, it’s not really stealing is it? It’s not like anybody will be hurt. He thinks of himself as a decent law-abiding citizen who just happens to get drawn into crime by financial necessity. His rationalisations have been only partly successful. He isn’t entirely happy with himself.

In fact most of the characters in this story have the same kinds of flexible moral standards. They have all founds way to justify their actions. This is spite of the fact that the saga of the diamonds has already led to murder.

The cop Molenaar is interesting. His attitude towards the law is just slightly unconventional, in ways that would upset his superiors if they knew what he was actually up to.

This is old school British thriller fiction. No graphic violence, no sex, but excellent plotting and suspense and characters who are genuinely intriguing and a solid romance sub-plot. A fine intelligent thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Canning’s excellent 1948 thriller Panther’s Moon.

John Flagg's Dear, Deadly Beloved

Dear, Deadly Beloved is a 1954 spy thriller by John Flagg.

Between 1950 and 1961 American John Gearon wrote eight espionage/crime novels under the pseudonym John Flagg. All were published as Fawcett Gold Medal editions.

Hart Muldoon wakes up in his room at the Villa Rosa in Venzola. Venzola is an Italian resort island that is beginning to challenge the popularity of Capri among the rich and famous. Muldoon has two problems and they’re related. The first is a hangover. The second is a dead guy on the floor of his room. He’s pretty sure he didn’t kill the guy, but as a result of the bender that caused the hangover the presence of the corpse is a total mystery to him.

It’s annoying because he has a date with Elsa Planquet, wife of a famous French film director, at 9.30. Muldoon has been laying siege to Elsa’s virtue for some time and he feels he is close to storming the citadel. It’s not the first time this particular citadel has been stormed but it is a very attractive citadel.

From Yvonne, the cute little French prostitute in Room 26, he finds out the dead guy’s name (Georges Hertzy) and something disturbing. Yvonne saw Hertzy and Elsa together.

Muldoon is a former spook who still does unofficial intelligence jobs. Now he’s been hired by a wealthy American industrialist named Adams. And he’s starting to figure out that the puzzle with which he has been presented has all kinds of interesting and worrying connections. Hertzy’s wife is Elsa’s sister. The broken-down ex-movie star he spotted in the bar downstairs was supposed to star in a movie directed by Elsa’s husband, but that was before Planquet met the cute redhead who is now his constant companion.

Count Cassi is mixed up in all this. That suggests that politics might be involved.

The local police chief will be a problem as well - he’s a man that Muldoon certainly does not trust.

Muldoon is not at all sure whether he has become embroiled in murky international political intrigue or a criminal conspiracy, or possibly both. The various players in this game are not necessarily all playing the same game.

Other players in the game include a topless trapeze dancer turned actress, a rich American woman with a taste for other women and a lovesick young man with a weakness for pretty young French prostitutes.

Sex is definitely involved in the game, and Muldoon is personally involved in this side of it.

Hart Muldoon made his first appearance in Woman of Cairo in 1953 and featured in four subsequent novels. John Flagg made his debut as a writer of spy thrillers in 1950, not long before the first of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels appeared. Fleming is sometimes seen as doing for spy fiction what Mickey Spillane had done for the private eye thriller. Fleming certainly upped the ante as far as sex and violence in spy fiction were concerned and it’s interesting that John Flagg had already started moving tentatively in that direction.

Hart Muldoon began his career as a fictional spy almost as an anti-hero. In Woman of Cairo he is far more ruthless than Bond and there’s a touch of Mike Hammer to the character as well. Muldoon kills when it’s necessary to do so, and sometimes he kills for purely personal reasons. Dear, Deadly Beloved was the second of the Muldoon thrillers and the character has been softened a little but he still has an edge to him. Flagg’s fictional espionage world is more cynical and brutal and morally ambiguous than Fleming’s.

Perhaps that’s why Flagg did not achieve the same success as Fleming. Hart Muldoon is cast in a less heroic mould. He’s far from being an idealist. Flagg was perhaps a little ahead of his time.

One thing all the John Flagg spy thrillers have in common is an atmosphere of sexual perversity. It’s not just the particular sexual tastes of the people involved but also their generally morbid and unhealthy approach to sex. And their willingness to use sex as a weapon.

There’s a perfectly decent plot here. There’s a fairly colourful hero. There’s an assortment of ruthless misfits. There are dangerous sexy women. There are sudden eruptions of violence. There’s a fair amount of sleaze. If you think that all that should provide an entertaining cocktail then you’re spot on. This is a very enjoyable read and it’s highly recommended.

Stark House has paired this one with another John Flagg thriller, Woman of Cairo, in a two-novel re-issue edition.

I’ve reviewed other John Flagg spy thrillers - The Lady and the Cheetah, Death and the Naked Lady and The Persian Cat. They’re excellent and I highly recommend all of them.

Victor Canning's The Golden Salamander

Victor Canning (1911-1986) was a very popular English thriller writer who had a 50-year career. His thriller The Golden Salamander was published in 1949.

David Redfern is one of those Englishmen left somewhat adrift after wartime military service although in David’s case it was the death of his wife Julie after his return from the war that hit him harder. He blames himself (wrongly) for her death.

Now he’s in a little town named Kabarta, in Algeria, doing a job for an English university at which he was once a fellow. The job is to take charge of a huge shipment of Etruscan antiquities and arrange their shipping to England. What are Etruscan antiquities doing in Algeria? They were sent there for safekeeping during the war. They belonged to a wealthy Frenchman. He has now bequeathed them to David’s university. The man, a rich guy named Serafis, in whose house they are being stored is anxious to see them gone.

Etruscan civilisation is one of David’s subjects so he’s the ideal man for this job.

On his way to Kabarta he encounters a mudslide and has to abandon his rented car and finish his journey on foot. He comes across a lorry that has been stranded. He is curious enough to look inside one of the crates that has fallen from the lorry. It contains guns. He realises he has stumbled across a gun-running operation. He isn’t interested. It’s not his business. The war left him with a total lack of interest in causes and patriotic duty.

He meets a likeable American named Joe. Joe is an artist. He knows there’s something missing in his painting. He came to Kabarta in the hopes of finding it. There’s also a young Frenchman named Max. His paintings have what Joe’s lack but Max is looking for something else that’s missing in his life.

This is true of many of the characters in this book. They’re looking for something. David is certainly looking for something. Maybe he had it once. Maybe he never had it. But he needs to find it.

He meets a girl. Her name is Anna. He had no intention of falling in love again but it seems like it’s going to happen anyway. Maybe he loves her the way he was never able to love Julie. That could be one of things he’s looking for. But he’s looking for something else as well. Perhaps it’s a sense of purpose. Or perhaps it’s a moral strength. He has stumbled upon something illegal and wicked but he does nothing. That will have consequences. In this novel actions have consequences. David will learn this and it’s a hard lesson.

Despite his determination not to get involved in doing anything about the gun-running he does become involved. The problem is that he doesn’t understand the situation. He thinks he’s a world-weary cynic but there’s a touch of naïvete to him. He’s basically a good man and he doesn’t understand evil or corruption. David is a complex and interesting character. He is very much a flawed hero.

Among the Etruscan antiquities he discovers something not listed in the catalogue. It is a golden Etruscan salamander. Something about it haunts David. It’s as if it’s a symbol but he has to figure out what it symbolises for him.

It all builds to a very tense and exciting extended action finale. It’s a kind of hunt, with David as the hunted.

The Golden Salamander is a fine suspense thriller with a bit more substance and psychological depth than you generally expect in this genre. Canning is a writer deserving of rediscovery. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the movie adaptation of this novel, The Golden Salamander (1950), as well as Canning’s excellent 1948 thriller Panther’s Moon.

Edgar Wallace's The Frightened Lady

The Frightened Lady is a 1933 Edgar Wallace thriller.

Fairly typically the setting is a country house in England. Marks Priory is the estate of the young Lord Lebanon but he is definitely not in charge. He is entirely under the thumb of his mother. He doesn’t like it but every attempt at rebellion on his part has failed. Lady Lebanon is a formidable woman. She has intense family pride. An expert in heraldry, she is obsessed by the family’s history. She is not not just a Lebanon by marriage but by birth as well. She married her cousin. It is a very ancient family.

Young Lord Lebanon has other problems, specifically the rather sinister Dr Amersham. The relationship between his mother and Dr Amersham is obscure but it does appear that the doctor has some kind of hold over her. The servants detest Dr Amersham, probably with good reason.

Chief Inspector Bill Tanner of Scotland Yard becomes involved with this ancient family when the chauffeur is murdered. Tanner was in fact more or less on the scene at the time. He was in the village, Marks Thornton, investigating a case of counterfeiting.

There are all kinds of tensions at Marks Priory. The gamekeeper Tillings suspects his wife of being unfaithful, possibly with the chauffeur. There are two hardboiled American footmen which is very strange. One has to wonder how on earth they came to be in the service of such an old and distinguished family. Lord Lebanon has tried to dismiss them but has been overruled by his mother. Lady Lebanon’s secretary Ilsa Crane is terrified but nobody knows why. Every member of the family and every member of the staff seems anxious, unhappy and secretive.

And more murders will follow.

There are secrets here, possibly from the past. There might also be a question of money, the Lebanon family being extremely rich. There are sexual tensions. There are jealousies. There could be all sorts of motives for murder here.

Tanner is an efficient cop with an impressive record. His two off-siders are perhaps less formidable. Detective Sergeant Ferraby is young but very keen. Tanner regards Detective Sergeant Totty as the worst detective he has ever encountered, with a tendency to indulge in fanciful speculation. Totty is however almost a genius when it comes to spotting physical clues.

Ferraby gets himself personally involved when he takes a shine to Ilsa Crane.

There are plenty of suspects in the sense that there are plenty of people here with things to hide. Coming up with a plausible explanation for the crimes is a challenge even for a man as experienced as Bill Tanner, and he is unable to connect all the pieces of the puzzle until the very end. Despite his experience he has made a couple of false assumptions.

Wallace invites the reader to make false assumptions as well. He plays fair with the reader but like any good detective story writer he uses misdirection quite skilfully. He allows us to mislead ourselves.

The construction of Marks Priory began in 1160. It has been modified and extended and rebuilt several times. You won’t be at all surprised to learn that it is suspected that the house may contain secret passageways - this is an Edgar Wallace thriller after all.

This is closer to being a straightforward country house murder mystery than the more outrageous type of thriller for which Wallace was known, although there are a few outrageous touches and a few familiar Wallace trademarks.

The Frightened Lady is fine entertainment and is recommended.

The novel was filmed in 1940 as The Case of the Frightened Lady.

Victor Canning's Castle Minerva

Victor Canning (1911-1986) was an English writer whose first novel was published in 1934, his last in 1985. He wrote historical fiction, children’s books, private eye thrillers and spy fiction. He was very successful but sadly is now largely forgotten. His spy thriller Castle Minerva appeared in 1955.

David Fraser had done espionage work during the war but has settled down into a contented life as a schoolmaster. On a climbing holiday in Wales he runs into his old commanding officer, Colonel Drexel. Drexel saved David’s life during the war so when Drexel asks him to take on a cloak-and-dagger job he cannot refuse.

It seems simple. He has to babysit a young Arab prince named Jamal, in a villa in the south of France near the Spanish border.

David has a bit of a thing for aquariums and in the local aquarium he spots a pretty young woman. Being an ex-spy David knows when he’s under surveillance and this girl definitely seems to be watching him. Then she drops her handbag, and it’s obvious that she has done this deliberately. She is trying to attract his attention. She certainly has no trouble doing that. They meet again later. Her name is Sophie. David is hopelessly in love with her.

By this time alarm bells should be ringing in David’s head. It’s not just the meeting with the girl. It’s also her two male friends, very unsavoury types to be friends of such a nice girl. And there’s the missing key. And the ’phone call about the motor launch. And the dogs that don’t bark when they should. Those alarms bells don’t ring because David is too busy daydreaming about his future life with Sophie. They will of course get married. He’s not sure how many children they will have. Sophie certainly reciprocates his romantic feelings.

David has also made the acquaintance of Dunwoody, a genial eccentric middle-aged Englishman who always just happens to be on hand when something interesting happens.

Then David’s world collapses about his ears. The job he’s doing for Drexel goes very wrong. Jamal is gone. David is under police suspicion. He realises that Drexel thinks his protégé has turned traitor. David is held prisoner, but not by the police. He knows that Sophie cannot be involved in anything underhand. She is after all the girl he’s going to marry. But David is in a lot of trouble and things just keep getting worse.

There has been betrayal but there are quite a few suspects.

An interesting aspect to this novel is Canning’s brutally realistic, even cynical, view of the worlds of espionage and government. The background to David’s adventure is a power struggle in the tiny Arab principality of Ramaut. There are several players in this power struggle, one of them being the British Government. The British Government isn’t interested in freedom and democracy, or high moral principles, or the welfare of the people of Ramaut or even for that matter the welfare of the British people. Ramaut has zero strategic importance. But there is oil in Ramaut. The British Government is serving the commercial interests of a British oil company. The only consideration is money.

There is plenty of moral murkiness in this story. The bad guys don’t do bad things because they’re evil. They’re not actually evil. They do bad things for comprehensible motives. The good guys aren’t exactly paragons of virtue. Even David is no knight in shining armour. He doesn’t give a damn about freedom and democracy or Queen and Country or the people of Ramaut. His motivations are entirely personal. He doesn’t like being betrayed, he wants revenge for wrongs he has suffered and he wants the girl. He is a decent man and a likeable hero but he’s no saint.

Sophie is complicated as well. There are things about her that David needs to know but doesn’t. She could of course be the femme fatale here but she could just as easily be a victim or an innocent bystander.

This is very much a psychological spy novel. It’s more in the gritty realist tradition of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and (later) Len Deighton than in the action-adventure Bond tradition. There is plenty of moral complexity. But it’s also very entertaining. The plotting is tight and clever, Canning pulls off some superb suspense sequences and some fine action scenes. There’s nothing dull about this novel.

Castle Minerva is superb spy fiction. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Canning’s excellent 1948 spy thriller Panther’s Moon (which really does involve panthers and oddly enough there are real tigers involved in Castle Minerva).

Edgar Wallace's The Door with Seven Locks

The Door with Seven Locks is a 1926 Edgar Wallace thriller.

Dick Martin is a young Scotland Yard sub-inspector about to retire because he’s come into money, although now he’s wondering what on earth he’s going to do with himself. Being a cop was his life.

He’s just handled on odd case. He was to arrest a professional burglar named Pheeney but the man has an unusual alibi. At the time he was picking locks, in a totally lawful manner. He had been hired to break into a tomb.

Perhaps as a joke his superintendent assigns Dick to one last case - involving a stolen library book. That case will have surprising consequences. One of the consequence is that he meets an adorable girl named Sybil. The other consequences are more sinister - he meets a doctor named Stalletti. Stalletti occupies his time with some rather startling experiments.

Although Dick doesn’t want to become a private detective his superintendent also suggests he might like to take on a case, on a one-off basis, for a lawyer named Havelock. It involves keeping tabs on the young, unstable, eccentric, world-wandering Lord Selford. Dick is at a loose end and dreads boredom so he accepts.

These three plot strands will soon begin to intersect.

Dick is a bit surprised when someone tries to kill him, and even more surprised that his assailant doesn’t seem to be quite human.

There are also some keys which seem to be important. Sybil has one of these keys. Someone else is very keen to get hold of it.

In fact there are seven keys, and all seven are needed to unlock a door with seven locks. Nobody knows what is behind that door. The door is in the Selford Tombs, a burial complex built into a hillside by one of the current Lord Selford’s distant ancestors. That ancestor was notoriously wicked. The father of the present Lord Selford also had a reputation for wickedness.

There are quite a few shady characters mixed up in this case. Some turn out to be more sinister than initial appearances suggest while others might be fairly harmless common-and-garden crooks.

There are clearly all kinds of secrets associated with the Selford family. Sybil is distantly related to Lord Selford and indeed appears to be his only living relative.

There is a rumour that Selford Manor contains hidden rooms. There are kidnappings. Innocent people are drugged. Telephone lines get cut. There are what appear to be monstrous creatures. There are murders. There are gunfights. There are ancient sins.

Dick Martin naturally falls in love with Sybil, giving him a personal stake in the case. He’s a good detective but he’s dealing with fantastic crimes that are totally outside all his past experience.

Wallace as usual provides plenty of breathless excitement and a delightfully outrageous plot that positively races along. Wallace had a knack for making such plots finally come together in a surprisingly satisfying manner.

And as so often in Wallace’s books there are hints of gothic creepiness. Hugely entertaining and highly recommended

The Door with the Seven Locks was adapted for film in 1962 as an entry in the prolific cycle of German Edgar Wallace krimis (the German name for crime films) made by Rialto. I’ve reviewed that movie as well.

Malko: West of Jerusalem

SAS à l'ouest de Jérusalem was the ninth of the Malko secret agent thrillers written by French former newspaper reporter Gérard de Villiers (1929-2013). It was published in 1967 and was translated into English as Malko: West of Jerusalem in 1969.

The Malko series ran to 200 novels and was hugely popular.

The hero is Malko Linge, an Austrian prince. He does jobs for the CIA but he isn’t actually employed by them. His motivation is money. The family castle needs to be restored and he needs a lot of money. Despite this he has a reputation for honesty and reliability.

The book opens with the Director of the CIA, Foster Hillman, jumping out of a window to his death. This causes a major crisis. He had no health or money problems and no entanglements with women. Is it possible he killed himself because he had turned traitor and was about to be exposed? This seems impossible. Hillman was an all-American patriot and all-round great guy. But it would be a plausible explanation for his suicide. There’s also the possibility he was being blackmailed.

The CIA decides to keep his death a secret and Malko is given the job of impersonating Hillman on the telephone, using a high-tech gizmo that can copy anybody’s speech patterns exactly.

After receiving a mysterious phone call from a woman Malko sets up a meeting with her but it all goes horribly wrong. He does however now have a lead, a lead that points to the Middle East. Soon there’s another lead - a woman’s amputated finger. There’s been a kidnapping and it is connected in some way with Foster Hillman.

Malko ends up in Sardinia, infiltrating the vast estate owned by a lecherous Middle Eastern emir. Malko knows he’s on to something when somebody tries to kill him.

It was 1964 when de Villiers started writing the Malko novels so there’s an obvious Bond influence. There are exotic settings and rich powerful men with evil plans, there are glamorous women.There’s that slight hint of sadism that is often associated with Bond. There’s also plenty of sex.

It takes a while for the action to kick in but when it does it’s pretty good. There are speedboat chases and helicopters, the occasional explosion and an abundance of gunplay.

There’s a cool scene with crocodiles.

There are also some rather dark and even grim moments.

The decadence of the Jet Set plays a major part in the story and there’s even an orgy.

Malko is a standard Bond-style secret agent hero - he’s debonair, always exquisitely dressed, he’s sophisticated and he’s tough. He definitely has an eye for the ladies and they find him very attractive.

Mercifully de Villiers doesn’t get heavily into politics. The Middle Eastern background adds an air of mystery and intrigue and an excuse for a solid espionage plot. That plot isn’t overly complex but it works.

There are clear-cut bad guys and they’re suitably sinister and vicious. And colourful.

Reading a book in translation obviously makes it impossible to say anything about the prose. It is however obvious that de Villiers knew how to handle action and suspense.

This is a very competent spy thriller and definitely belongs to the high adventure school of spy fiction rather than the dark and gritty and cynical school. 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.

M.G. Braun’s Apostles of Violence

Apostles of Violence is one of M.G. Braun’s Al Glenne spy thrillers. It was published in French in 1962 as Apôtres De La Violence. The English translation dates from 1966.

M.G. Braun was the pseudonym used by Maurice Gabriel Édouard Brault (1912-1984), a very successful and prolific French writer of detective and spy fiction. Between 1954 and 1978 he wrote an immense number of Al Glenne spy novels. Sadly only four were translated into English.

The cover blurb naturally tells us that Al Glenne is the French James Bond. Personally I thought this novel was much closer in feel to an Alistair MacLean thriller. It uses the same technique of putting a first person narrator hero into an incredibly hostile environment, an environment that becomes as much of a threat as the bad guys. The hero is also more like an Alistair MacLean hero than a James Bond. It resembles MacLean’s thrillers in another way but I can’t say more since that might give away a spoiler.

This is a spy action thriller but it is also a kind of murder mystery. The book puts a group of people into an isolated situation and one of them is a killer.

French secret service agent Al Glenne is sent to Venezuela to retrieve a satellite. He will be working under a more senior French agent, a man named Théo. The satellite came down in the middle of the jungle. The French secret service people are excited because they think they have a lead that will get them to the satellite before their rivals (which includes the Russians, the Americans and the British). The French and the British don’t know if the satellite is American or Russian. What they do know is that there is a super-advanced laser on board and they want that laser. At the moment the French are lagging behind the Russians and the Americans in this technology but if they can get hold of this laser they will catch up overnight.

Al Glenne and Théo parachute into the jungle. Everything goes smoothly at first. They now have the laser. Then everything goes wrong. They find themselves with three enemies to deal with - a very hostile local tribe plus an American and a British secret service team.

There is now a party comprising about a dozen assorted spies from rival powers all thrown together and nobody trusts anybody. With good reason. It’s not long before one of the British spies is murdered, by an unknown killer. The killer must be a member of this ill-assorted party.

An added complication is their local guide, Innocencia. Innocencia is young, very female, very pretty and absurdly over-sexed. As you might imagine this adds considerably to the uneasy atmosphere.

And other members of the party turn up dead. Murdered.

The only way out of this nightmare is a long long trek through the jungle to reach a seaplane that (they hope) is waiting for them. They have no radio. And the rains are about to arrive.

As much as anything else this is a saga of survival, with plenty of paranoia thrown in.

The plot is quite solid with plenty of twists. There are some clues scattered through the novel that make the final twist at the end plausible.

Although there’s a high body count this is more of a mystery/suspense thriller than an action thriller. And both the mystery and the suspense are handled effectively. Innocencia’s presence adds plenty of sexual tension - all the men want her.

All in all this is an enjoyable spy thriller and having a French spy as the hero adds interest. Highly recommended.

Edgar Wallace's The India-Rubber Men

The India-Rubber Men is a 1929 Edgar Wallace thriller.

London has been hit by a series of daring robberies carried out by men in rubber gas masks, armed with gas bombs. They have become known as the India-Rubber Men.

Inspector John Wade of the river police is interested in the goings-on at the Mecca, a kind of riverfront boarding house for ship’s officers. Not a very reputable establishment. It’s run by Mum Oaks, a very disreputable middle-aged woman. Her niece lives there as well. Lila is a timid but attractive young woman and Inspector Wade has grown rather fond of her.

Wade starts to see some connecting threads but they’re rather puzzling. There’s a penniless lord who isn’t penniless any more. There’s a mysterious sea captain. There’s a mysterious man who takes young Lila out to dinner once a year. There’s a woman who tries to drown herself, and she’s clutching a photograph of Lila. There are numerous attempts on John Wade’s life. There are abductions and a woman is drugged. There are break-ins in which nothing is stolen. There are fast motor launches that appear and disappear. There are suspects who should be thousands of miles away, but they aren’t. There’s a lawyer who knows something. There are links to events in the past. There’s an inheritance.

This is pretty classic Edgar Wallace stuff. Apart from the India-Rubber Men there are small-time river thieves. There are jewel thefts. There are hidden rooms. There’s gunplay (with machine-guns). And Chicago gangsters.

There’s also a policeman in love.

A good deal of the action takes place on the river or at sea. There’s a definite nautical flavour to the activities of the bad guys (and I do love nautical mysteries and thrillers). Naturally there are various sea-going and river-going vessels that seem innocent, even when they’ve been thoroughly searched. But in reality they are far from innocent.

There’s quite a collection of bad guys and it’s not until late in the story that we start to suspect the identity of the most dangerous of the villains. There are quite a few characters who are not at all what they appear to be.

Wallace liked convoluted plots but he was always able to resolve them satisfactorily and this story is no exception.

Wallace also liked to build an atmosphere of breathless excitement and he does that here. There’s suspense, action and last-minute escapes. There’s a very high body count. Wallace was interesting among British writers of that era. He didn’t stint on the murder and mayhem and his villains were violent and ruthless. In some of his books in the 1920s he seemed to be trying to inject a slight American flavour. Not a bad idea since Chicago gangsters were big news at the time.

There’s some romance as well.

Inspector Wade is a likeable enough hero. He bends a few rules, but not too much. He’s also inclined to rely on bluffs, which don’t always come off.

Wallace seemed to be incapable of writing a dull book. He knew his market, he knew the right ingredients to include and he delivered the goods.

This is a fine Edgar Wallace thriller and it’s highly recommended.

Don Smith’s Secret Mission: Tibet

Secret Mission: Tibet is a fairly early (1971) entry in Don Smith’s Secret Mission spy novel series. At that time there was a huge market for action-oriented spy thrillers. If you were at least a halfway competent writer and could turn out such books fairly quickly they might not make you rich but you’d certainly be able to pay the rent.

The hero of this novel is Phil Sherman (I believe he also features in some or all of the other books in this series). He’s not a professional secret agent. He’s an international businessman although not an overly successful one. He is persuaded to take on an espionage mission, not for the CIA or any of the usual suspects but for NASA. They’ve lost a couple of satellites. What worries them is that they’ve been talking to the Soviets and the Soviets have lost some satellites as well. All these satellites suddenly stopped transmitting while passing over a certain point in central Asia. It looks like foul play was involved.

A top NASA space scientist named Newton wants to find out what happened to those satellites but he wants the investigation to be secret. He’s afraid that if word gets out the US Government will get nervous and suspend the space program. He can’t ask the CIA for help - he certainly doesn’t trust those guys to carry out a discreet secret investigation. So he persuades his old pal Phil Sherman to help. Phil is sceptical but he is assured that all he has to do is get air-dropped into Tibet, place two radio direction finders, and then get air-lifted out. There’s no risk at all.

Phil Sherman has cause to regret his naïvete when he ends up imprisoned by the communist Chinese in an ancient Tibetan monastery. That’s what happens when you offer to help out an old buddy.

This novel was written at the height of hysteria over Red China. The Chinese Communists had taken over from the Russians as the chief villains in spy novels, TV series and movies. In this case the Chinese have a super-laser.

Phil isn’t the only prisoner in the monastery. There’s another American, Bill Rogers, who built that super-laser. There’s a middle-aged German, von Kruger. And there’s von Kruger’s beautiful half-Chinese daughter Suwary. The prisoners are not tightly guarded, the assumption being that the surrounding countryside is totally impassable so only a lunatic would try to escape. But Phil knows something that makes escape essential.

He was hoping to take just Rogers and the girl with him. Rogers because he is the key to the secret of the super-laser, Suwary because Phil has already discovered that she makes an enthusiastic and skilful bed-partner. He eventually finds he has to take von Kruger as well.

Most of the novel is an epic chase through hostile terrain with the Chinese snapping at the heels of the fugitives. There’s plenty of action and excitement.

However most of the interest is provided by the webs of deceit and betrayal in which the four main characters are enmeshed. Phil Sherman cannot trust a single one of them. They cannot trust each other. Phil is pretty certain that all have lied about their backgrounds and motivations. Any one of them might at any moment betray one of the others. The author handles this aspect rather well. He builds up a nice atmosphere of paranoia.

There’s also a great deal of sexual tension. Phil doesn’t know if Suwary has slept with Rogers or not, but she might have. He doesn’t like that idea. Rogers is pretty sure Suwary has slept with Phil and he really isn’t happy about it. And Suwary may have slept with some of their captors.

This is a very solid novel of its type with suspense, well-handled action sequences and huge dollops of paranoia. I liked it enough to persuade me to look for further books in the series. Highly recommended.

Note: The cover features a girl in a skimpy fur costume wielding a very large sword. Tragically this cover illustration has zero connection with anything in the book. But hey, chicks with swords do help to sell books.

Marvin H. Albert's The Gargoyle Conspiracy

The Gargoyle Conspiracy is a 1975 thriller by Marvin H. Albert.

Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996) was a prolific American genre writer who wrote westerns, private eye thrillers and adventure thrillers under various pseudonyms from the early 50s to the mid-90s. The Gargoyle Conspiracy was one of the few books published under his own name. It’s a thriller about a terrorist plot, a very topical choice of subject matter in the mid-70s. Most of Albert’s books are pulp fiction, but very superior pulp fiction.

The Gargoyle Conspiracy is much more ambitious. This is Albert trying to do a Frederick Forsyth. There’s the same emphasis on meticulous research and on creating a very detailed and realistic background for the story.

The novel begins with a bungled terrorist attempt to blow up an airliner. The bomb explodes prematurely in the airport terminal, killing five people. A renegade Moroccan named Ahmed Bel Jahra planned the operation and its failure could mean the loss of Libyan support for his future plans. Those future plans involve the takeover of the Moroccan government. Bel Jahra knows his only chance is to come up with another operation so tempting that the Libyans will be unable to refuse to support him. Quite by accident he discovers a perfect opportunity. King Hussein of Jordan (hated by Arab guerrilla groups) and the American Secretary of State will be attending a party given by an ageing but famous artist on the Riviera. And Bel Jahra is confident that both these men can be assassinated. A lot of other people will have to be killed as well, but that doesn’t bother Bel Jahra.

Simon Hunter is a former cop now working for the State Department and he becomes obsessed with finding the man behind that attempt to blow up an airliner. Slowly Hunter becomes convinced that he has stumbled onto something really big.

The novel constantly intercuts between the two plot strands, Bel Jahra’s elaborate planning for that double assassination and Hunter’s patient painstaking efforts to prevent the terrorist coup.

Both plot strands are incredibly complex and detailed. Hunter has a few allies. There’s an ex-CIA man by the name of Shamsky, now fallen on hard times. And there are various unofficial contacts that Hunter has in various European police forces. As the evidence mounts that something big really really is in the wind he gets some assistance from other sources, such as the Israeli security service Mossad. But Hunter cannot rely on help from official channels in Europe. European governments totally reliant on Arab oil do not want to be seen as being openly opposed to Arab guerrilla groups.

Simon Hunter is a cop. He isn’t worried by the frustrations of routine police work. He knows that most of the leads he gets will turn out to dead ends but that’s something that a detective just has to accept. As each lead goes nowhere he turns to the next lead. He knows that if he follows up enough leads he must eventually get a break. His main problem is that he knows he doesn’t have much time but he has no way of knowing just how little time he might have. The evidence he has is tenuous but he is sure that a very major terrorist attack is on the way and he is fairly sure that the target is somewhere on the Riviera.

It all build to a satisfyingly nail-biting ending. Hunter still has nothing definite to go on and the clock is ticking.

Bel Jahra is breathtakingly ruthless. He is driven more by ambition than fanaticism. He wants power and terrorism is just a means to an end. He’s a character without any real depth but he does at least have plausible motivations.

Hunter is a man who has been without purpose since his wife’s tragic death a couple of years earlier. He’s a good cop doing his job but the reason for his obsession with this case (a reason he himself doesn’t fully understand) is that he needs to regain a sense of purpose in his life. He is acting most of the time without official sanction but he’s willing to risk his career. He has to crack this case. There’s nothing else in his life that matters. So there’s at least some complexity to his character.

The first few chapters drag a bit but that’s unavoidable. It’s not the kind of story that is going to draw the reader in unless a fair amount of background information is provided. As the novel progresses it picks up steam and the latter part of the story is fast-paced and effectively suspenseful. There are only a few action scenes but they’re expertly handled.

The book’s main strength is the slow accumulation by Hunter of an incredible number of tantalisingly vague clues which are like countless pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that he somehow needs to assemble into a picture that makes sense, with the added complication that a lot of those pieces end up meaning nothing. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that requires a hundred pieces but you find yourself with five hundred pieces and you have to figure which ones you actually need. If Hunter can’t put the right pieces together his career will be ruined and a lot of people will die. Albert handles this aspect of the story with consummate skill.

It really is very Frederick Forsyth-like and for once the cover blurb (comparing it to The Day of The Jackal) is accurate. Albert never did gain the immense success that Forsyth achieved but he had a long and very solid writing career.

The Gargoyle Conspiracy works extremely well. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two of the very good Jake Barrow private eye novels written by Albert under the name Nick Quarry, The Girl With No Place To Hide and No Chance in Hell as well as two of the excellent adventure thrillers he wrote under the name Ian MacAlister, Driscoll’s Diamonds and Valley of the Assassins.