Clifton Adams' Whom Gods Destroy

Clifton Adams (1919-71) was a successful and prolific writer of westerns but he also wrote several noir novels, the first being Whom Gods Destroy in 1953.

Roy Foley is working in a cheap diner when he hears of his father’s death. He’ll have to go back to his home town, Big Prairie. That means he’ll see Lola again. He knows that seeing her again is the worst thing he could do, but he knows that he will.

Roy had been born on the wrong side of the tracks. The rich kids looked down on him. Especially Lola. Lola was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Roy had tried to make something of himself. He became a football star. He figured that now Lola would go out with him. But she laughed in his face.

Fourteen years later Roy can still hear her laughter. His hate just seems to keep getting stronger.

In fact Roy really is a loser. But in Big Prairie he has an idea. Bootlegging is a thing of the past, except in Oklahoma. They still have Prohibition in Oklahoma. The bootleggers spend a lot of money buying politicians to make sure Prohibition stays in place. Prohibition is good for business. They also make sure that prostitution remains illegal. That makes it a profitable sideline.

Roy decides he wants to be a bootlegger. He had dreams of being a doctor or a lawyer, but he wasn’t smart enough. At some level Roy understands that he’s not very smart enough. But you don’t have to be smart to be a successful bootlegger. You just need to be hungry. His old pal Sid is a bootlegger and will teach him the ropes.

Roy soon has bigger plans. Roy comes up with reasonably good plans but he never thinks them through properly. When they blow up in his face he’s always surprised. But he keeps trying. You have to give him credit for that - every time a plan fails he immediately comes up with a new one, just as ingenious and just as flawed. He’s not very bright but he is cunning.

He’s a fairly typical noir fiction protagonist, although not a very sympathetic one. Lola was right to laugh at him. He really is a dumb thug. He’s too vicious and too stupid to make the reader care very much about him. On the other hand we feel some sympathy since we figure that really really bad things are bound to happen to him.

There are two women. One is Lola. The other is Sid’s wife Vida. One or both could turn out to be a femme fatale.

Roy hates Lola but maybe he has never stopped loving her. It’s not clear whether he loves Vida. He doesn’t know himself if he loves her. He certainly desires her.

There’s no ideological grandstanding although the book certainly paints moral reformers in very unfavourable colours. The moral reformers are organised crime’s biggest asset. There’s plenty of cynicism here. There’s not a single politician or public official who isn’t corrupt.

To be honest there’s not a single character who isn’t corrupt in some way. Corrupted by greed, ambition, revenge, the thirst for power, lust or just seething hatred.

Whom Gods Destroy has a nasty edge to it and a stifling atmosphere of hopelessness. Which is what noir fiction is all about. This is a fine entry in the genre and it’s highly recommended.

The Stark House Noir paperback edition also includes another excellent Adams noir novel, Death’s Sweet Song, which I reviewed here a while back. Adams doesn’t have a huge profile as a writer of noir fiction but perhaps he should.

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

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

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

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

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Kingsley Amis's Colonel Sun

Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (using the name Robert Markham) in 1968. This was the first of the many James Bond continuation novels. I have always avoided these novels because I don’t really approve of other writers carrying on the adventures of characters created by deceased writers. I have however made an exception in the case of Colonel Sun.

Kingsley Amis really was qualified to write a Bond novel. He was not that much younger than Ian Fleming. The world of postwar austerity, of ever-declining British power, of Britain becoming a subservient satellite of the United States, of that vague sense of dissatisfaction that Britain had won the war and was now much worse off than before, the loss of optimism and national self-confidence - these things formed the historical background of Fleming’s Bond novels and they explain much of the character of James Bond and of the novels. Amis was as familiar with this world as was Fleming. He may not have agreed with all of Fleming’s views but he certainly understood where Fleming was coming from, which meant that he understood where Bond was coming from. He knew what made Bond tick.

Amis had written what is still the best non-fiction book on Bond, The Bond Dossier. He understood the Bond novels.

Colonel Sun opens with an attempt to kidnap both M and Bond. Bond escapes. He then realises that the only way to crack the case is to get himself captured. The kidnappers have set an obvious trap for him in Greece but he’ll have to walk right into it.

MI6 have no idea of the identity of those behind this sinister plot. The answer turns out to be rather complicated. The potential for betrayals and double-crosses and misunderstandings and divided loyalties is enormous.

There is a girl of course. A Greek girl named Ariadne. Maybe Bond should not trust her but it soon transpires that he’s fresh out of reliable allies so he’ll have to take a chance on her. Ariadne is very much a Bond Girl, a worthy successor to the Bond girls created by Fleming.

The plot is complex but it feels reasonably Bondian. The only departure from the Bond novels is that suddenly Red China is a major threat, which by 1968 was becoming a standard feature of spy fiction. This is a Cold War thriller, which was not something that Ian Fleming was really into. Fleming felt that too much obsession wth the Cold War would have dated his books and of course he was right. But this is a Cold War thriller with a difference. I can’t explain the difference without revealing spoilers so I won’t.

Colonel Sun himself is a typical Bond villain in some ways, although less colourful than Fleming’s Bond villains. He does have the sadistic tendencies of a Bond villain. Colonel Sun is an enthusiastic disciple of the Marquis de Sade and a believer in de Sade’s philosophies.

Fleming’s interest in sadomasochism has been exaggerated but it was real and Amis puts quite a bit of emphasis on it.

This is a Bond who is still recovering, physically and emotionally, from the traumatic events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Amis maintains the continuity from that book. This is also a Bond very much in tune with the Bond of the later Fleming novels and short stories. He’s lost some of his sense of certainty. He has developed a few moral qualms about the job. This is quite consistent with the way Fleming was developing the character in stories like For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights. You’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of Colonel Sun if you’re familiar with Fleming’s Bond stories.

There’s some sex, but no more than you get in a Fleming Bond novel. The fact that Bond gets emotionally involved with Ariadne is also perfectly consistent with Fleming’s Bond - Bond is a man who cannot have a sexual relationship with a woman without becoming emotionally entangled.

Amis’s style is close enough to Fleming’s to feel authentically Bondian.

It’s a fine exciting spy thriller tale. Highly recommended.

Philip Atlee's The Irish Beauty Contract

The Irish Beauty Contract is a 1966 Joe Gall spy thriller by Philip Atlee.

Atlee wrote twenty-three Joe Gall spy thrillers between 1951 and 1976. It should be noted that there was a twelve-year gap between the first book, Pagoda, and the second book. It seems that Pagoda was not a true spy thriller but when Atlee decided to write a spy thriller series he revived the hero of that first novel.

Philip Atlee was actually Texas-born James Atlee Phillips (1915-1991). Fascinatingly his brother was a senior CIA operative responsible for a number of CIA fiascos and played a major part in bringing about the Bay of Pigs disaster. This might explain why Joe Gall has a slightly cynical attitude towards the CIA and is exceptionally bitter about the Bay of Pigs. Joe Gall had been a CIA agent until he was fired for suggesting that the Bay of Pigs operation was going to end in humiliating failure. Which might explain why he has little respect for anyone in the U.S. intelligence establishment.

He now does a few jobs for the CIA as a freelancer. He is an assassin. Essentially he is a hitman for the US Government.

Joe is in the tiny South American republic of New Granada. His job is to keep a close watch on an American named Bonner, but not to kill him. There is a great deal of concern about a shipment of explosives which may be intended for South American revolutionaries.

Joe is having an affair with a married woman. Kathleen is a fabulously rich Irish noblewoman.

There are disturbances in New Granada, there is a mysterious American named Stripling who may be involved in nefarious activities and there is more to Bonner than meets the eye. Bonner and Stripling may or may not have some connection with that shipment of explosives. There’s also a guy named Macedo who seems to have his own private principality within New Granada. Whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy depends on your point of view. He’s a bandit chieftain on a large scale. He is however a powerful man who cannot be ignored.

Very early on Joe manages to get himself shot twice and knifed twice. For a crack intelligence agent he seems to be a bit accident-prone.

The part of the story dealing with Macedo’s private kingdom is quite interesting. There’s quite a bit of political intrigue in New Granada with several strongmen whose real agendas are not always clear.

The setting for the action finale is good but the action scenes themselves are rather uninspired.

The final revelation is very silly and also incorporates a plot device that was ludicrously overused in spy fiction of this era.

Joe Gall acts as first-person narrator and right from the start he possesses crucial information which he conceals from the reader. How you feel about such a narrative technique is a matter of taste. It can be used effectively. Alistair MacLean used it more than once, but MacLean was a far better writer than Atlee and used that technique with a lot more finesse.

The Irish Beauty Contract never really develops a huge amount of energy or excitement.

Overall it’s a routine spy thriller.

Poul Anderson’s Sargasso of Lost Starships

Poul Anderson’s novella Sargasso of Lost Starships appeared in Planet Stories in January 1952.

Anderson wrote a lot of fine sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-planet tales early in his career. The Sargasso of Lost Starships seems at first to be space opera, and in fact it is space opera, but as the story develops it becomes more and more of a sword-and-planet story.

This is a clash of cultures story but it involves three rather than just two very different cultures. It’s also a story of civilisation pitted against barbarism but with ambiguities as to which culture represents the good guys and which represents the bad guys. Maybe all cultures have both good and bad in them. And maybe heroes and villains are not clearcut either. This is an exciting pulp space adventure but with some added subtleties and some complexity. At no stage in his career could Anderson be dismissed as a mere hack.

The hero, Basil Donovan, is a hereditary ruler on the planet Ansa. The people of Ansa are human, descendants of colonists from Earth. For centuries, after Earth’s interstellar empire collapsed, they have been independent. Fiercely independent. Ansa is now a backwater, a kind of feudal agrarian society but with high technology as well. They are still spacefarers in a small way. Basil is a proud stubborn aristocrat but a just and humane leader.

Everything was fine until the Terrans created a new interstellar empire, the Solar Empire. Ansa wanted no part of the Solar Empire but was not given a choice. It is now merely a province of that empire. The Terrans are human and enlightened masters but they are still the masters and the Ansans bitterly resent this. Basil resents it very bitterly indeed. He had participated in the great space battles in which the Ansans fought, unsuccessfully, to maintain their independence.

Basil now lives on booze and dreams of past glories. Until he receives an Imperial summons. The Empire has need of his services. It involves the Black Nebula. Basil is unusual, indeed unique. He has been to the Black Nebula and come back alive and sane. Well, mostly sane.

Basil is to be guide and advisor to Captain Helena Jansky, commander of the Terran starship Ganymede. The Black Nebula has become a problem that needs to be confronted. Captain Jansky needs Basil’s knowledge of the Black Nebula. He is prepared to share that knowledge, but the suspicion remains that he is concealing a great deal of what he knows. Basil and Helena do not trust one another.

When the Ganymede reaches the Black Nebula it becomes obvious that there is a very great deal indeed that Basil has not revealed. He had not mentioned the voices. The voices that are reducing the Ganymede’s crew to madness. The voices seem to come from nowhere. Basil had also failed to mention Valduma. Valduma is a woman but she is definitely not human. Perhaps Basil loves her, perhaps he hates her.

To add to the complications Basil is no longer sure that he hates Helena. Perhaps he loves her. There’s a bizarre romantic triangle here. Basil must choose between these two women and his choice will have momentous consequences.

This is an exciting tale of high adventure and action and it’s a twisted love story. It’s also a story of rising civilisations and dying civilisations. It’s also a story about freedom and servitude both of which turn out to be complex and ambiguous. And it’s a story about a man torn by conflicting loyalties and conflicting loves.

There’s no magic and there are no wizards but there are technologies so advanced and so strange and so incomprehensible that they might as well be magic. They serve the same purpose that magic would serve in a sword-and-sorcery story.

Sargasso of Lost Starships is superior-grade pulp fiction that manages to deal with complex issues whilst still offering plenty of old-fashioned entertainment. Very highly recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Don Wilcox’s excellent The Ice Queen in one of their two-novel paperbacks. The combination of two very good titles makes this a very worthwhile purchase.

I’ve also reviewed DMR Press’s Swordsmen from the Stars which contains three excellent Poul Anderson sword-and-planet novellas. Anderson’s Virgin Planet also has some slight affinities to the sword-and-planet genre and it’s very much worth reading as well.

Poul Anderson's The Golden Slave

The Golden Slave is a 1960 historical novel by Poul Anderson.

Anderson had a formidable reputation as a science fiction writer but my own preference is for his work in the fantasy, historical fiction and sword-and-sorcery genres. Anderson knew his history and his mythology and he had a genuine feel for those subjects. This comes through strongly in his Hrolf Kraki's Saga and his fantasy masterpiece The Broken Sword.

The story takes place around the year 100BC. A number of barbarian tribes are attempting to conquer Rome. Among these tribes are the Cimbrians, hailing originally from Denmark. Eodan is the son of the tribal war chief. The Cimbrians have won several battles against the Romans, and as a result Eodan has obtained a Roman slave named Flavius. Flavius was a rich and important man. The destinies of Eodan and Flavius will become inextricably entangled.The Cimbrians are about to face the Roman army of Marius in battle. The result is disaster for the Cimbrians. Now Eodan is Flavius’s slave.

Eodan knows that his little son is dead. He saw his wife Hwicca dash the child’s brains out rather than allow him to fall into the hands of the Romans. He does not blame her for this. He would have done the same. He believes Hwicca was killed in the slaughter after the battle.

Eodan is not quite a broken man but there is now an emptiness within him. When Flavius’s wife Cordelia chooses him as her latest bed partner he does not complain. With Hwicca dead nothing really matters. An uneasy friendship develops between Eodan and Cordelia’s Greek slave-girl Phryne. They do not sleep together but their destinies also become intertwined.

Eodan makes some startling discoveries which give him new hope. But first he must escape. With Phryne’s help he does so, and she accompanies him in his flight. He does not understand why. Women are a bit of a mystery to Eodan.

The escape is the beginning of a series of wild adventures on land and at sea. These include a brief interlude as a pirate. He will end up at the court of King Mithradates the Great of Pontus, a kingdom on the Black Sea that is about to challenge Rome for control of Asia. Flavius will play a somewhat sinister part in these adventures.

In his early 1950s sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-planet tales Anderson had already demonstrated his ability to tell exciting action-packed stories so it’s no surprise that The Golden Slave is a roller-coaster ride of battles, narrow escapes, betrayals and sudden changes in fortune.

There is however a bit more depth to this novel. Eodan, Hwicca and Phryne (and even to a lesser extent Flavius) have complex contradictory motivations and are driven by desires and emotions which they do not always understand and cannot always control. Despite the non-stop action this is a rather character-driven story.

These are also genuinely people from a different culture, very much inclined to see themselves as driven inexorably by a fate they cannot escape. Their attitudes towards honour, duty, pride, sexual propriety and loyalty reflect a totally different cultural mindset.

This is real historical fiction, rather than the fake kind that is so common these days that features 21st century characters with 21st century attitudes being involved in 21st century dramas whilst wearing historical costumes.

It’s only at the end that we find out what Anderson was really up to in this tale, and the revelation links this novel to some of his other historical/fantasy work. This is a fine adventure story but it’s more than just that. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed some of Poul Anderson’s excellent sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet stories from the collection Swordsmen from the Stars (which I also highly recommend).

Adolphe Alhaiza's Cybele

Cybele is an 1891 science fiction novel by Adolphe Alhaiza, or perhaps it’s better described by the then-popular term scientific romance.

Jean-Adolphe Alhaiza (1839-1922) was a follower of the utopian socialist philosophy of Charles Fourier, but he was not exactly an orthodox follower. Alhaiza had some intriguing scientific beliefs, some of which had some very slight plausibility at the time. He believed in a 20,000 year cycle in which firstly one of the polar regions became progressively colder while the other became warmer and then the process reversed itself. The result would be regular climatic cataclysms. This idea plays an important role in the novel. This is a novel of ideas, and the ideas are wonderfully eccentric.

It’s a kind of time travel story. The hero, Marius, travels through space and time by means of a form of astral projection. He finds himself on Earth but it’s not the same Earth. It’s a planet named Cybele which is identical to Earth in every respect except that history has progressed by another 6,000 years. On both planets history follows an absolutely identical course. Everything that has happened on Cybele in the preceding 6,000 years will happen on Earth. Every event will be repeated, precisely. Cybele is Earth’s future.

Marius becomes a kind of celebrity lecturer, offering the people of the future a glimpse into the past. He finds that his own life seems to be repeating itself, an aspect of the story that didn’t make much sense to me.

As a novel Cybele fails spectacularly. Every single mistake that a science fiction writer could possibly make is found here. Most of the book is an interminable series of clumsy infodumps. We’re treated to a detailed political history of the next few centuries but that’s the problem - we just don’t need so much detail.

The plot is almost non-existent. There’s nothing to engage our interest or to make us care about this future world or about Marius.

The resolution of the plot is extraordinarily clumsy and makes us feel that we have wasted our time reading the story.

There are some very good ideas here. The 20,000 year polar cycle is interesting and does actually drive the plot, such as it is.

Other good ideas are just thrown in for no apparent reason. The sleepers are a cool idea but they play no part in the story. The problem of interplanetary communication is handled very cleverly, but again it plays no part in the story. Both of these ideas could have been developed in fascinating ways, but they’re not developed at all.

I honestly don’t think the author had the slightest interest in writing a novel. He wanted to write a religio-scientific-political-philosophical treatise. The book does offer an intriguing insight into the utopian mindset. Those who create fantasy utopias always seem to overlook the inconvenient fact that a utopian society will be made up of people, and people never behave the way utopian thinkers want them to. Alhaiza was a man with big ideas but I don’t think he understood people at all.

Alhaiza also lacks technological imagination. There’s no “sense of wonder” here. The most advanced technology in the book is represented by airships that might have seemed high-tech in the days leading up to the First World War but as examples of the ultra-advanced technologies that might be available 6,000 years from now they’re a bit sad.

Cybele does offer some insights into the kinds of things that late 19th century intellectuals were interested in. Things like hypnotism, which gets mentioned a number of times.

Cybele, translated by Brian Stableford, is available in paperback from Black Coat Press. I don’t honestly think I can recommend this book. Black Coat Press however published translations of a lot of late 19th century and early 20th century French science fiction that is worth reading.

The Navigators of Space by J.-H. Rosny Aîné and George le Faure’s The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System are entertaining and the two anthologies News from the Moon and The Germans on Venus are worth checking out. Gustave Le Rouge’s Vampires of Mars is wild crazy stuff.

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.

Clifton Adams, Death’s Sweet Song

Clifton Adams (1919-71) had a very successful and prolific career as a writer of westerns but he also wrote a handful of noir novels, including Death’s Sweet Song in 1955.

Joe Hooper runs a fleabag motel in Creston, Oklahoma and he’s a loser who clings to the idea that one day he’ll be a winner. He knows that you don’t need talent or hard work to succeed. You just have to wait for that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come along and have the guts to grab it. When that happens for Joe he’s going to have real money and he’s going to get the hell out of Creston, Oklahoma.

That opportunity seems to have arrived when the Sheldons rent Cabin Number 2. Joe knows there’s something odd about them because Karl Sheldon is driving a new Buick. No-one who can afford a new car would stay in a dump like Joe’s motel. Sheldon also has an obviously phoney story about car trouble.

What really catches Joe’s attention is Sheldon’s wife Paula. She’s a gorgeous blonde. Joe wants a woman like that almost as much as he wants money. Maybe more.

Joe’s lucky break comes when he overhears a conversation in the Sheldons’ cabin. They are planning a payroll robbery. They’re going to rob the Provo Box company, Creston’s biggest employer. The payroll has to amount to at least thirty grand.

Joe doesn’t have any real criminal intentions until he has sex with Paula Sheldon. Then a plan starts to take shape in his mind. He’s going to force Karl Sheldon to cut him in on the robbery. After that Joe figures that somehow or other he and Paula will find a way to leave Karl out in the cold and they’ll go off together. Paula has already told him that she doesn’t love her husband. Joe will have everything he has ever wanted.

Joe is cunning but his grasp on reality is a bit tenuous. He should have realised right at the start that this blonde was going to be trouble. There were plenty of warning signs. It was obvious that there were things she wasn’t telling him about herself and about Karl. But Joe is so obsessed by Paula that he misses every single one of those warning signs.

The robbery is an attractive proposition. It will be a pushover. Of course in the world of noir fiction robberies that seem too easy never quite turn out that way. This time there’s a slight hitch, which means there’s a body to dispose of. Another hitch happens later.

Joe still thinks that everything will be OK and soon he’ll have Paula Sheldon.

Joe Hooper is the kind of guy who relies a lot on wishful thinking and he doesn’t think things through. And with Paula’s willing body to think about it he really isn’t thinking about anything else. He’s one of those guys who isn’t really evil but he’s weak and he’s greedy and he’s a sucker for glamorous blondes.

Paula is a classic femme fatale and poor Joe just can’t see that she’s a woman who uses sex ruthlessly to get what she wants. There’s also a slightly more complicated side to her. She isn’t completely rotten and corrupt. Things might have been easier had that been that case. She has more complex motivations which Joe just can’t fathom.

This is rural noir, with typical noir passions running amok in a small town. Small towns in which everybody knows everybody else can turn into nightmare noir worlds just as easily as the mean streets of the meanest big city. The desperation of dead-end life in a dead-end town is palpable.

The violence is very low-key. There’s lots of sexual tension and there’s lots of paranoid atmosphere and desperation.

It’s a classic noir plot but it’s nicely constructed and the very effective very noir ending hinges on something that Joe could never have anticipated.

The relationship between Joe and Paula is full of deceptions and contradictions. Joe can’t figure out if he loves her or hates her. Joe is a mess. His feelings about almost everything are confused. All three main characters are a bit more than just noir fiction stereotypes. They’re complicated people who don’t always fully understand why they do the things they do.

This is a fine noir novel and it’s highly recommended.

The Stark House Noir paperback edition also includes Adams’ first noir novel, Whom Gods Destroy.

Clyde Allison's Have Nude, Will Travel

The sleaze fiction of the 50s and 60s embraced everything from grim noirish tales to romance to comedy. Of those who wrote comic sleaze fiction the best by far was William Knoles (1926-1970).

Have Nude, Will Travel, published in 1962 under the pseudonym Clyde Allison, is typical of his crazy sexy comic romps.

Jake O’Day is a pilot with a knack for getting himself into absurd and embarrassing predicaments. The most embarrassing was the time he thought he was transporting forty-eight harem girls belonging to an important shiekh. The girls turned out not to be girls at all but soldiers employed by the sheikh to stage a coup. Since they were covered from head to foot poor Jake had no way of knowing these were not harem girls. Jake ended up making a forced landing in a neighbouring Middle Eastern country and spending three months behind bars.

As a result of this misadventure Jake earned a totally underserved reputation as a ruthless mercenary leader.

And that’s what led oil tycoon Mr Tamerlane to employ his services. Tamerlane has had his prospective new employee thoroughly investigated and he is well aware that Jake’s reputation as a glamorous soldier of fortune is totally phoney. It turns out that what Tamerlane wants is a phoney soldier of fortune. Tamerlane’s 18-year-old son Sam is neurotic and lives in a dream world. He has decided he wants to be a soldier of fortune. Tamerlane’s plan is to employ Jake to get Sam into some mercenary adventures but what Jake has to do is to make sure these adventures are entirely fake and entirely safe. Tamerlane Sr hopes that this will get all that soldier of fortune daydream nonsense out of Sam’s system and the young man will then be content to go into Daddy’s oil business.

Jake think it’s a crazy idea but Tamerlane offers him an enormous amount of money, so he accepts the offer.

The problem is that Jake knows nothing whatever about being a soldier of fortune and has no idea how to provide Sam with a safe fake adventure. Then Jake gets a brainwave. Why not hire a scriptwriter to come up with some ideas? He can easily persuade Tamerlane to pay the writer lots of money. His friend Barnaby was a writer on a TV series about mercenaries and he likes money so he agrees.

Jake and Sam then become in effect characters in Barnaby’s story. Barnaby sends them off to exotic places and hires actors to play the parts of the kinds of dangerous shady characters that soldiers of fortune would be likely to encounter. Sam is enjoying himself but Jake worries a little. He’s not keen on being shot at, even if he knows it’s only actors shooting at him.

The idea seems to be working but then the plot twists kick in.

There’s plenty of sleaze. Sam takes being a soldier of fortune very seriously and avoids smoking, liquor and sex but Jake is happy to entertain himself with the various women Barnaby provides to play the parts of ex-crazed femmes fatales. Jake has a lot of fun with the twins. They teach him quite a few new tricks.

Jake also has fun with Sugar. She’s a cute blonde girl whom Barnaby keeps as a sort of pet. She doesn’t speak but she giggles a lot and she proves to be very affectionate. So affectionate that she almost exhausts poor Jake.

The sex is moderately steamy by 1962 standards. There’s very little violence. There is a great deal of humour and the novel is genuinely funny.

The basic plot idea is clever and it’s developed with skill and wit.

Incidentally the cover suggests that this is going to be a private eye spoof but there are no private eyes in the story at all.

Have Nude, Will Travel is lots of fun. Highly recommended.

I highly recommend all of William Knoles/Clyde Alison’s sleaze novels. They're all rather ingenious. I’ve reviewed a number of them including Shame Market (very funny), Sexperiment and one of his Agent 0008 spy sleaze/spy spoof books, Gamefinger (which is terrific).

Lost in Space by Dave van Arnam and Ron Archer

Lost in Space by Dave van Arnam and Ron Archer, published in 1967, is as its name suggests a TV tie-in novel inspired by the classic TV series.

And it's radically different from the TV version. Different in just about every way you could imagine.

It's not that it's a bad science fiction novel. It just isn't a Lost in Space novel.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Edward S. Aarons' Gang Rumble

Gang Rumble is a 1958 juvenile delinquent potboiler written by Edward S. Aarons, using the pseudonym Edward Ronns.

American Edward S. Aarons (1916-1975) is best-remembered for his long-running series of Sam Durell spy thrillers. He wrote around 80 novels in total between 1936 and 1975.

Johnny Broom belongs to a gang, the Lancers. He’s their warlord. He’s ambitious. He has organised a rumble, with the victims being a rival gang. But for Johnny the rumble is just a diversion for a robbery. His accomplices with be a fellow Lancer, Stitch, and a weird kid named Mike. Mike doesn’t quite belong. He’s educated and middle class. Why is he hanging around with punks like Johnny? The answer to that question is the driving force of the plot.

Johnny’s nemesis is a tough crooked drunken cop named Vallera. Vallera hates punks like Johnny. Vallera and his partner have been tipped off about the rumble but Vallera is suspicious. Why would a crook like Comber give him such a tip-off?

Also mixed up in this story is a well-meaning do-gooder who wants to save these juvenile delinquents from themselves.

The robbery naturally doesn’t play out the way Johnny had wanted it to, but it plays out the way Mike had hoped. Johnny has a gun with him, which may have been a bad idea.

There’s plenty of typical 1950s angst about juvenile delinquency and there’s another classic 50s ingredient - an attempt to get inside the head of a dangerous thug.

Johnny is your classic loser, a teenager with ambitions and no brains. Mike is something different. He has some issues. Some of these issues involve women, and involve his relationship with his mother. Yes, this was the 50s so we get hints of pseudo-Freudianism.

It’s a fairly violent story. Out-of-control teenage punks carrying guns will inevitably lead to violence. Both Johnny and Mike are dangerous, but they’re dangerous in different ways. What they have in common is a tendency towards delusions of grandeur. They’re both time bombs waiting to go off.

It’s also a novel that addresses the behaviour of the police. Vallera is in some ways just as dangerous as the teenage punks he hates so much.

This is exciting action-packed pulp fiction but the author also makes a fairly serious attempt to grapple with difficult issues, such as the ways that society tries (and fails) to deal with people who refuse to fit in. Which is an issue that quite a bit of the pulp crime fiction of this era tries to address.

Is it noir fiction? It definitely contains some noir fiction elements. And the ending has a nice noir kind of twist.

The plot works quite effectively, with the tension building as the two young punks get closer and closer to the edge of insanity. Mike and Johnny live in fantasy worlds of their own creation. They’re losers but they think they’re superior.

While Aarons tries to understand the motivations of juvenile delinquents he doesn’t fall for the temptation of sentimentalising them. Maybe it’s a tragedy that kids like this end up the way they do, but they’re still vicious thugs.

This book has been reissued in paperback in Stark House’s Black Gat Books imprint.

I’ve reviewed a couple of the author’s Sam Durell spy novels, Assignment…Suicide and Assignment - Karachi. They’re both worth reading if you’re a spy fiction fan.

Nick Quarry's The Girl With No Place To Hide

Marvin H. Albert (1924-1996) was an American writer of pulp crime and adventure novels, some written under his own name and others under a host of pseudonyms. The Girl With No Place To Hide, published in 1959, was the second of his six Jake Barrow private eye thrillers written under the name Nick Quarry.

Hardbitten PI Jake Barrow sees a girl being beaten up and rescues her. She wants somewhere to hide out and thinks that Jake’s apartment would be a good place. The girl is Angela and she tells Jake that a couple of guys are trying to kill her and that they’ve already killed some guy named Ernie. Jake gets a call and he has to go out to attend to a case. He tells Angela to stay put.

Jake discovers he’s been decoyed out of the apartment. By the time he gets back Angela has gone. Maybe she just took a powder and maybe somebody snatched her.

Jake has no idea who this Ernie character is but the next day he finds out that a guy named Ernie really did turn up dead in an alleyway. Jake figures the matter is worth looking into. He did after all promise to protect Angela.

The trail leads Jake into the worlds of high fashion and photography and the murky world of high-stakes gambling. He also uncovers some juicy domestic dramas that might be motives for murder. And there might be a connection to another much earlier murder.

There are quite a few dames mixed up in this case. One of the dames, Lavinia, is a knife-thrower. That’s her profession. She worked a knife-throwing act in a carny. Another woman who seems to be mixed up in the case is Nel. She had been Ernie’s secretary and now someone is trying to kill her but she claims to know nothing that would cause someone to want to bump her off.

Of more immediate concern to Jake is the fact that someone is trying to bump him off.

There’s a decent well worked-out plot here with plenty of suspects and plenty of possible motives.

There’s also plenty of action with some moderately graphic (by 1959 standards) violence. And there’s as much sleazy paranoid noir atmosphere as anyone could reasonably demand. And you get quite a bit of hardboiled dialogue.

In this type of fiction the key was to get a good balance between plot and atmosphere and the author manages that very effectively in this instance.

Jake is definitely a tough guy PI. He most definitely does not like to be pushed around. He’s a pretty good guy overall and he doesn’t have much liking for people who go around terrorising, and murdering, women. In fact he doesn’t have much time for murderers. He’s not a Boy Scout. He’s not an outrageous womaniser but if a woman is willing then he won’t say no.

He likes money, he likes it a lot, but he likes to earn it honestly. He’s not self-righteous about it but he does have ethics. He does the right thing but he doesn’t make a song and dance about it.

Jake is a likeable enough and reasonably colourful hero.

Most of the women have the potential to turn out to be either innocent victims, innocent bystanders or scheming femmes fatales and Quarry keeps us guessing about every one of them.

It’s not exactly ground-breaking but overall this is a well-crafted noirish private eye thriller which provides very solid entertainment. Highly recommended. It's been reprinted by Black Gat Books.

I’ve reviewed another of the Jake Barrow PI novels, No Chance in Hell (which is also very good), and also one of the thrillers he wrote as Ian McAlister, Driscoll’s Diamonds (a terrific book).

Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet

Poul Anderson’s science fiction novel Virgin Planet was published in 1959.

Poul Anderson (1926- 2001) was an incredibly prolific writer. He is of course best remembered for his science fiction but he wrote some superb fantasy (such as The Broken Sword) and in the early 50s produced some rather wonderful sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet stories.

Virgin Planet is set on a planet inhabited entirely by women. They are obviously human women. It appears that the original colonists were supposed to arrive in two spaceships, one carrying the men and one carrying the women. Only the ship carrying the women arrived. This happened a long time ago and the colonisation has become encrusted with legend. The women still believe that one day the Men will arrive. They look forward to that day is a kind of religious way, but with some uneasiness. They have only the vaguest idea of what a man is.

When a spacecraft is seen to land the women think that it might be the Men at last, but it could be Monsters. They also have fairly vague ideas about the Monsters but they know that the Monsters come from the stars and have dealings, sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile, with Men.

Corporal Maiden Barbara Whitley is the one who finds the spaceship. There’s only one crew member. She figures he’s a Monster, but a friendly one. He can’t be a Man. Everyone knows that Men are wise and noble and dazzlingly beautiful. This creature just seems weird and misshapen.

The women of Freetoon are not quite sure what to do with this creature. His arrival turns out to be a disaster - it sets off a war with a neighbouring town. The creature from space and three of the surviving women from Freetoon make their escape. They’re not sure where to head for. Maybe they should head for the Ship of the Father. The Doctors may have an answer. The Doctors know everything, they even know how to work the parthenogenesis machine which allows the women of Atlantis to have children.

The creature is of course no monster. He’s very much a human and a man. He’s David Bertram and he’s on a kind of freelance survey mission.

Davis slowly pieces together what is going on. He’s on a planet named Atlantis. Technically it’s not a planet. It’s the size of Earth and it’s fairly Earth-like but it’s a satellite of a gas giant called Minos.

By this time humans have colonised countless planets but Atlantis was previously unknown, being inaccessible due to the presence of a vortex in space-time. Human civilisation is highly advanced, with faster-than-light travel and other advanced technologies. The inhabitants of Atlantis are all women, on the way to join their men when their spaceship was swept hundreds of light-years off course by the vortex. There were originally five hundred women. There are now possibly a quarter of a million, but all are clones of those original five hundred colonists. A caste system has developed, with each caste being made up of a single genotype.

Society on Atlantis has regressed quite a bit. That original spacecraft was not carrying the necessary equipment to support an advanced technological society. There’s no nuclear power, no automobiles, no electricity. It’s now a rather primitive agrarian society.

There are in fact a number of subtly different cultures on Atlantis and Anderson has fun speculating on the way in which such societies could evolve. Societies made up of clones, with no men.

Naturally once the women discover that Davis Bertram is a Man they’re fascinated. All the animals on Atlantis are birds. The women of Atlantis are not only unfamiliar with the idea of human sex, they’re unfamiliar with mammalian sex. But they’re eager to learn. The complication for Davis is that some of these women are also starting to discover the concept of love. Both Barbara and her clone sister/twin Valeria have fallen in love with him.

This sounds like a recipe for a sleaze novel but that’s not how Anderson plays it. This is a serious science fiction novel although there’s also some humour and quite a bit of adventure. And there’s no sex at all.

Davis Bertram is an engaging hero because he isn’t a square-jawed action hero. He’s by no means helpless but he’s no warrior. He’s not a coward but he’s only moderately brave. He’s not stupid but he’s not a genius. He’s a spoilt rich man’s son and his solo survey mission is just an adventure to him. He’s always been rather irresponsible. On the other hand he’s good-natured and kind-hearted.

Barbara and Valeria are of course mirror images of each other. They’re warriors who believe in shooting first (with their repeating crossbows) and asking questions afterwards. But they’re gorgeous and they’re smart and underneath a slightly intimidating exterior they’re likeable.

The paperback edition includes an afterword from the author in which he explains that the only respect in which he’s played fast and loose with science is the faster-than-light travel. Other than that everything is based on solid science. This is very much hard science fiction, but it’s hard SF combined with a rollicking adventure plot and some clever speculations about the ways in which societies evolve.

Most of all Virgin Planet is extremely entertaining. Highly recommended.

Edward S. Aarons' Assignment Helene

Assignment Helene, published in 1959, is the tenth of the Sam Durell spy thrillers written by Edward S. Aarons (six more were published after Aarons’ death credited to his brother Will but in fact ghost-written by Lawrence Hall).

CIA agent Sam Durell has been sent to the (mythical) newly created island republic of Sarangap in South-East Asia to investigate the murder of the US consul in the old city of Sarangap. The new nation is highly unstable. There’s a rebel army in the hills trying to overthrow the government. The US doesn’t want that to happen but they don’t want to get officially involved. The rebels might be bank-rolled by the Chinese or by Taiwan but either way it is known that an American is involved in running guns to those rebels and that has the potential to cause embarrassment. The deceased consul, Hansen, had presumably been close to finding out the identity of that American.

Durell arrives in Sarangap accompanied by Hansen’s widow, a glamorous movie star. She had been estranged from her husband and it’s odd that she now seems to so keen to go to Sarangap to collect his body.

The first thing Durell discovers is that his cover has been blown. He also discovers that there was a romantic triangle involving Hansen, Hansen’s wife and the Vice-Consul, an arrogant Ivy League pup named Twill.

Sam is eager to interview the three Americans whom Hansen suspected of gun-running but one (a peace activist) has disappeared and one is probably going to be too drunk to provide much useful information. And of course it soon becomes evident that somebody is prepared to disrupt Durell’s investigation by having him killed.

Durell finds himself in the jungle with two beautiful women, neither of whom he can trust, a possibly equally untrustworthy American diplomat and a broken-down American ex-intelligence agent. They fall into the hands of the dangerous rebel leader Trang. What all of these people have in common is that it seems that would all like to see Sam Durell dead.

Sam Durell isn’t quite a stereotypical square-jawed all-American hero. He has just a bit of psychological complexity. He’s not very ideologically driven. In a vague way he believes in freedom and democracy and all that stuff and he’s loyal to his country but he’s capable of understanding that people in the Third World often have very valid reasons for disliking and resenting America and he’s capable of admitting that US foreign policy is sometimes disturbingly wrong-headed and selfish. 

The Sam Durell spy thrillers do not belong to the cynical pessimistic school of spy fiction typified by Greene, le Carre and Deighton but they’re also not quite simplistic exercises in flag-waving.

In this book Durell faces some genuine moral dilemmas and while he’s keen to do the right thing he has to admit that he has no idea what the morally correct decision might be. He knows where his duty as a CIA agent lies but it might not be consistent with his duty as a human being. And Durell isn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of merely following orders like an automaton. He’s aware that people sometimes do bad things for good reasons.

The two women are Hansen’s wife and Hélène, part Sarangapese and part European and all dangerous. Either woman could turn out to be the femme fatale of the story and just about any of the main characters could be the murderer. Durell wants the murderer.

This is therefore part spy fiction and part murder mystery and the mystery angle is handled pretty well with some decent misdirection.

There’s no shortage of action either.

Maybe Aarons wasn’t quite in the premier league as far as spy fiction writers are concerned but he wasn’t far out of that league. Among American spy writers of the same era Donald Hamilton was better but Aarons is very much worth reading. He’s definitely a cut above the average pulp spy writer.  Assignment Helene is highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed a couple of other Sam Durell spy novels, Assignment…Suicide and Assignment - Karachi.

Clyde Allison's Gamefinger (Man From Sadisto 6)

William Knoles (1926-1970) wrote sleaze fiction under his own name and also using the pseudonym Clyde Allison. He enjoyed his greatest success, as Clyde Allison, with his Agent 0008 sexy spy spoof novels. Gamefinger, published in 1966, was the sixth book in the series.

What made Knowles so special among sleaze writers is that his books are not just sleazy, they’re also extremely funny. He was a very gifted comic writer. He also had a knack for coming up with truly outrageous plots.

His Man From SADISTO spy novels featuring Agent 0008 may be his best-known works but sadly they are now exceptionally difficult to find and used copies are astronomically expensive. I would love to collect all twenty books and as soon as I have a spare five thousand dollars that’s exactly what I’ll do.

One single title in the series has been brought back into print and that novel is Gamefinger. It appears to have fallen into the public domain which is the reason it’s the only one to be currently in print.

It certainly starts with a bang. Of sorts. Actually it’s a long steamy reasonably graphic sex scene. Ace SADISTO agent Trevor Anderson (who acts as narrator) is holidaying in Maine, using the cover name Rex Kingston. He’s staying in a log cabin so remote that it can only be reached by floatplane. He hasn’t heard a floatplane land so he is rather surprised when he sees a naked girl floating in the lake. She isn’t dead. He soon discovers that she’s very much alive. She is six feet tall and blonde and looks like every man’s fantasy of a naked amazon. She’s also very friendly. After they’ve had a long hot lovemaking session they decide that introductions might be in order. Her name is Karni. Then suddenly Agent 0008 receives a staggering karate blow and he doesn’t know anything until consciousness returns some considerable time later.

He regains consciousness in SADISTO headquarters. SADISTO is a top-secret US Government intelligence agency. Its mission is to protect the Free World. Protecting the Free World involves killing people and SADISTO’s elite triple-zero agents are licensed to kill. They’re not just licensed to kill, they’re expecting to keep in practise. Preferably by killing people who deserve to be killed (a category that includes anyone of whom SADISTO disapproves). Their ethical standards would shock the average Mob hitman. But it’s OK, they’re killing for freedom.

Agent 0008’s latest mission is his most important yet. The Free World is in deadly peril. A dangerous madman code-named Gamefinger has hatched a plot of such terrifying and sinister evil that it almost takes one’s breath away. Gamefinger intends to end war. This of course would be disastrous. Apart from anything else it would be bad for business and there’s no more profitable business than war. Gamefinger must be stopped.

Gamefinger’s scheme is ingenious. He wants to revive the Roman gladiatorial games in order to provide an outlet for human violence. His new gladiatorial games will be much more brutal than the Roman version, they will involve lots of nude girls and they will be televised live to the entire world. The games will cost hundreds of lives but could save millions of lives if Gamefinger is right. Agent 0008 has to grudgingly admit that it’s a genuine ethical dilemma and that maybe Gamefinger has logic on his side. But 0008 still has a job to do, and his job is to stop Gamefinger.

SADISTO’s plan is to infiltrate 0008 into Gamefinger’s organisation.

There’s plenty of pointed political satire in this book. SADISTO are the good guys but they’re more immoral than the bad guys. SADISTO’s agents are on the side of freedom but they’re sadistic bloodthirsty killers. It’s clever political satire because the author really does raise some pertinent questions about whether the good guys really are the good guys.

There’s also a great deal of black comedy, and the book is at times outrageously funny.

And there’s a lot sex. The sex is described in fairly explicit terms but manages not to come across as crude schoolboy stuff. This is well-crafted erotica.

Agent 0008 is an intriguing hero. He’s very much an anti-hero. He has no morals whatsoever. He doesn’t claim to have any morals. Killing is not just an integral part of his job, it is for 0008 a very pleasant part of the job. He can’t think of anything more enjoyable than killing and torturing people because he’s doing it for the Free World. He can feel virtuous about it. He’s the most chillingly nasty of all fictional spies but he’s brutally honest about himself. He’s a complete rogue but vaguely likeable in his cheerful amorality. He doesn't have any morals but he does understand morality.

The idea of televised deadly gladiatorial-style games being used for purposes of mind control became a very common trope in the 70s and 80s, especially in post-apocalyptic science fiction movies. But William Knoles/Clyde Allison came up with the idea way back in 1966. It’s an idea that may have been used in science fiction stories prior to that time but offhand I can’t think of any examples. Either way it was certainly an idea that would have seemed fresh and startling in 1966.

Gamefinger is basically a sleaze novel (although it is at least very skilfully written sleaze) with a spy plot tacked on but it’s an intriguing spy plot

It’s intended to be sexy and funny and satirical and it succeeds on all counts. Gamefinger is good dirty fun. Highly recommended.

William Knoles' Sexperiment

William Knoles (1926-1970) wrote a lot of sleaze novels during the 60s, mostly using the pseudonym Clyde Allison. Sexperiment was published in 1966.

Dr John Whitman is a medical researcher. As the book opens he has some explaining to do to the authorities. He has to explain all those dead people. He tells the story in an extended flashback.

As his story begins he has a cosy post which gives him the freedom to explore new frontiers in medical research, along with his three young graduate students. Dr Whitman and his students have found a field of research which offers exciting possibilities - sex. They’re not interested in studying rats or monkeys. They want to study people. The problem with a research project of this kind is finding volunteers to participate but they realise that really isn’t a problem at all. Their four-person team consists of two men and two women. They will be the research subjects.

Of course this means that they’ll have to have lots of sex with each other but that’s a sacrifice they’re prepared to make for the sake of science.

Sadly the projects ends prematurely. The University thinks the project is just an excuse for a series of orgies so they fire Dr Whitman. His career is in ruins.

Or so it seems. Then he gets an offer he can’t refuse. An offer from the Mandrake Foundation, a very secretive foundation dedicated entirely to sex research and funded by an ageing eccentric sex-crazed billionaire.

Dr Whitman enjoys the challenges of his new position. It involves having lots of sex with eager female volunteers and he enjoys that as well.

The Mandrake Foundation employs a large number of medical scientists. They have several things in common. They’ve all lost their licence to practise medicine, all have disreputable backgrounds and all are basically mad scientists. One of these scientists, Dr Krieghund, has made a major breakthrough. He’s discovered a chemical that inflames female sexual desire. It’s an aphrodisiac that actually works. The trouble is that it works a bit too well. It doesn’t just make women amorous, it makes them terrifying.

And that’s the effect the stuff has when it’s incredibly diluted. If people ever got exposed to the undiluted chemical the results would be catastrophic. But these are serious scientists. They would never allow an accident like that to happen.

There’s an enormous amount of sex but none of it is described graphically.

The author is clearly aiming for comedy. At times almost slapstick comedy. There’s an incredible amount of mayhem as well but again you have to remember that you’re not meant to take this seriously at all. And it’s all so clearly absurd that I don’t think anyone would take it seriously. This is cartoon violence.

There’s also an element of satire, making fun of the pretensions of science and scientists and taking a few swipes at authority. This was the 60s after all.

No-one is going to mistake this for great literature but it’s lively and often genuinely amusing. In the 1960s sex was still something you could make jokes about.

Ferox Publications have re-issued this book in paperback paired with another William Knoles sleaze novel, Shame Market. Shame Market is very amusing very sleazy fun.

And that’s a pretty good way to describe Sexperiment. Shame Market is the better, funnier novel but both are enjoyable. Recommended.

Fantômas: A Nest of Spies (L'Agent Secret)

Fantômas: A Nest of Spies (originally published in 1911 as L'Agent Secret) is the fourth of the original series of Fantômas novels.

Fantômas is a diabolical criminal mastermind created by French writers Marcel Allain (1885–1969) and Pierre Souvestre (1874–1914). They wrote thirty-two Fantômas novels between 1911 and 1913. Allain wrote several more Fantômas novels in the 1920s. There have been Fantômas movies and Fantômas comics.

Fantômas is to French popular culture what Dr Mabuse is to German pop culture, or what Professor Moriarty is to British pop culture.

Fantômas has two deadly enemies - Inspector Juve and crusading journalist Jérôme Fandor. Juve and Fandor have devoted years of their lives to the project of bringing Fantômas to justice. But Fantômas is like Dr Fu Manchu. Nayland Smith can foil Fu Manchu’s plans and destroy his criminal operations but we know that he will never succeed in destroying Fu Manchu or bringing him to justice. Fu Manchu will always slip away, and he will always rebuild his organisation. And, in the same way, Fantômas will always manage to escape Juve’s clutches.

When this fourth novel opens Fantômas has been quiet for a while. Perhaps he has left France. Perhaps he is dead. Perhaps, after suffering defeat at the hands of Juve and Fandor, he has decided to retire from crime.

This fourth novel begins with a French artillery captain who has fallen hard for a very pretty girl, known to her friends as Bobinette. Captain Brocq has in his keeping certain top secret documents, vital to national security and all that stuff, and he finds to his dismay that one of the documents seems to have vanished. It was there a moment ago, just before Bobinette gathered up some letters of hers that Brocq had been, indiscreetly, keeping. Could Bobinette have gathered up the secret document by mistake along with the letters? That must be the explanation. The other explanation, that Bobinette stole the document, is unthinkable. A sweet young girl like Bobinette could not possibly be a spy. Either way Captain Brocq has to get that document back so he sets off in pursuit of his pretty mistress. And the hapless captain then loses his life in bizarre circumstances.

Inspector Juve is called in to investigate.

Journalist Jérôme Fandor is also taking an interesting in the case. He and Juve are old friends, their friendship being strengthened by their past shared struggles against the arch-criminal Fantômas. Juve sees the hand of Fantômas in the murder of Captain Brocq and it’s true that the bizarre murder method is the sort of thing that would appeal to Fantômas. Fandor however believes it’s just a simple case of espionage, although of course espionage is rarely simple.

There certainly is a vast espionage plot at the back of Captain Brocq’s murder. A number of young French officers have been ensnared by pretty but unscrupulous women. They are drawn into the web of espionage gradually. At first the information they’re selling seems so trivial as to be completely harmless. But soon they are being called upon to sell vital secrets.

Juve and Fandor conduct parallel investigations and at times it has to be said that they find themselves at cross purposes. In addition to the police involvement the military intelligence services (the Second Bureau) are investigating the case. The police and the military intelligence people dislike and distrust one another and are constantly getting in each other’s way. Juve doesn’t like the Second Bureau anyway but in this case he suspects that they’ve been infiltrated by foreign spies or possibly even infiltrated by Fantômas’s organisation.

One of the conventions of pre-First World War crime and spy fiction is that you can’t be a proper great detective or a proper great villain unless you are a master of disguise. The detectives and the villains assume a bewildering range of disguises and nobody ever manages to penetrate those disguises. It’s a convention that some modern readers find off-putting, while others find that it adds a certain period charm. In this novel Allain and Souvestre have their characters assuming so many disguises that one can’t help suspecting that at times they’re being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

The disguises are however vital to the story. It is essential that the relevant authorities should be totally bewildered and it’s essential that even Juve and Fandor should become hopelessly confused. And even Fantômas occasionally gets taken in by disguises assumed by the good guys.

And Fantômas doesn’t just adopt disguises - at times he wears a sinister mask and cloak.

The tone of the novel is one of breathless excitement with an endless succession of unlikely and bizarre events, impossibly narrow escapes and hopeless misunderstandings. Juve and Fandor both manage to get themselves arrested.

There are romantic complications as well. There are several romance sub-plots and naturally the course of true love is beset by endless misunderstandings and deceptions.

The plots of the Fantômas novels are ludicrously contrived. They’re incredibly pulpy. They’re much less sophisticated in a literary sense than Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. The Fantômas novels probably had more influence on the world of comics than on the world of pulp fiction. They were a definite influence on the adult-oriented comics that became popular in Europe in the early 1960s (such as the Italian fumetti Neri comics) and a definite indirect influence on 60s movies such as Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik. You could possibly even argue that they had an indirect influence on the Bond movies, especially as the Bond films moved further and further away from realism.

The Fantômas stories are among the foundational texts of modern pop culture. For that reason it is essential to read at lest a couple of them. And once you get into the swing of them they’re great fun.

I also very highly recommend the 1964 Fantômas movie.

Poul Anderson's Swordsmen from the Stars

Poul Anderson (1926-2001) became one of the most celebrated of American science fiction writers. Early in his career he wrote stories for the pulp magazines, including sword-and-sorcery and sword-and-planet tales. Swordsmen from the Stars collects three such novellas, all published in Planet Stories in 1951.

At this stage Anderson was clearly channelling Robert E. Howard and hadn’t quite found his own voice. By 1954, when he published his fantasy masterpiece The Broken Sword, he had most definitely found his own style. But the youthful Anderson was already a talented writer and these early sword-and-sorcery novellas are bursting with energy and imagination. They’re also perhaps just a little sexier than Howard’s stories.

These stories appear to be sword-and-sorcery but on closer examination they are really sword-and-planet stories. There’s magic, but it’s strongly suggested that all the magic has a rational scientific explanation. There are monstrous beasts but the first two stories clearly take place on other planets (a planet with two moons in the second story) so presumably they’re just the strange native fauna of those planets. The third novella takes place on Earth, in a very distant and very strange future, which explains the apparent alienness.


Witch of the Demon Seas

Witch of the Demon Seas is the story of Corun, a pirate whose career seems destined to end with death in the arena of the thalassocracy of Achaera. His one-man war against the Achaerans, against who he has a personal grudge, seems to have ended with his capture. It comes as quite a surprise when the old sorcerer Shorzon offers him a deal in exchange for his freedom. Khroman is king of Achaera but Shorzon is generally assumed to be the real power in the land, along with his granddaughter Chryseis. Shorzon and Chryseis need Corun to guide a ship to the Demon Sea, home of the dreaded amphibious reptile-men the Xanthi. They have some grand scheme in mind. Corun doesn’t trust them.

Chryseis is reputed to be a witch. Her sexual appetites are legendary. The rumour is that her lovers do not live long - she simply wears them out. She is dangerous and probably evil but she is astoundingly beautiful. Corun decides she’s his kind of woman.

Shorzun, Chryseis and Corun embark on a fast galley and head for the Demon Sea. Chryseis and Corun soon become lovers. The captain of the ship warns Corun that she may have bewitched him. Which is true enough, although given her beauty and rampant sexuality she may not have needed any supernatural powers to achieve this.

There are epic sea battles with the aquatic reptile-men, there is captivity in a gloomy castle, there is the revelation of the staggering scale of the plot that Shorzon and Chryseis have cooked up. There is action a plenty, and there is love and suspicion and betrayal.

Corun is your typical barbarian sword-and-sorcery hero, although perhaps more driven by sexual lusts than most. Shorzon is your typical sinister sorcerer although in this case we don’t at first know what he is planning or whether his plans are truly evil or not. It’s Chryseis who provides most of the interest. Women who are dangerous, possibly evil, incredibly beautiful and driven by sexual hunger do tend to provide plenty of interest.

The handling of magic in the story is interesting. Magic can unbalance a story if it’s made too powerful but Anderson solves that problem neatly.

A fast-moving action-filled tale with enough ambiguity in the romantic subplot to make things interesting. A very fine story.

The Virgin of Valkarion

Alfric is a barbarian warrior whose wanderings have brought him to the ancient imperial capital of Valkarion. He may stay for a while, if he can find someone willing to hire his sword. He finds an inn and is pleasantly surprised by the extremely low price he is asked to pay for a room for the night. Especially since the price includes breakfast in the morning and a whore for the night. He’s even more surprised when he sees the whore.

Freha is not just stunningly beautiful. She has class. She has an aristocratic bearing. She could almost be a great lady. But as he finds out that night she knows as much about the art of love as the most experienced whore in the land.

There is trouble brewing in Valkarion. The old emperor is dying. His son has a beautiful wife, Queen Hildaborg, but he has been unable to get her with child. There are rumours that the young queen has been forced to look elsewhere to satisfy her normal womanly physical desires. There has long been a power struggle between the throne and the priests of the temple.

Alfric cares little of all this. What he does care about is that on his way to Valkarion he was set upon by assassins. And now assassins have broken into the room in the inn to make another attempt on his life, just as he was having such a nice time with the very willing and very enthusiastic Freha. These assassins appear to be temple slaves. Alfric and Freha are forced to flee.

They find themselves caught up in a power struggle that could finally destroy the long-decaying empire of Valkarion but there are things that Alfric does not know. He does not know about the prophecy and that he is destined to play a part in it. As will Freha.

As in Witch of the Demon Seas there’s a strong interesting female character who is central to the plot but Freha is a woman very different from Chryseis. Anderson demonstrates his ability to create a variety of fascinating women characters.

Not quite as good as Witch of the Demon Seas but the action is non-stop and it’s still a very good story.

Swordsman of Lost Terra

Swordsman of Lost Terra takes place on Earth (as the title makes clear and as quickly becomes obvious). Things have changed. The Earth no longer rotates. One face is always presented to the sun. Half the world is in permanent night, the other half in permanent day, except for the Twilight Lands which are, obviously, parts of the planet in a perpetual twilight.

Barbarians from the north have been driven south by hunger. They encounter terrifying enemies from the Dark Lands, humans adapted to a world of moonlight and starlight. The barbarians make an uneasy alliance with the city of Ryvan, ruled by the young and beautiful Queen Sathi (another strong female character with whom the hero will of course become romantically involved). The hero is Kery, a young barbarian whose sorcerer father is the keeper of the pipes of the god. These appear to be bagpipes with terrifying magical powers. One day Kery will be keeper of the pipes.

There’s treachery and betrayal in Ryvan, there are epic battles and sieges, Kery and Queen Sathi fall into the hands of their enemies.

It’s an exciting tale but notable mostly for some very clever world-building.

Final Thoughts

The three novellas that comprise Swordsmen from the Stars are all hugely enjoyable tales of adventure and romance, with a bit of subtlety and some economical but interesting world-building. This collection, from DMR Press, is very highly recommended.