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.

Honey West - Girl on the Prowl

Girl on the Prowl, published in 1959, was the fifth of G.G. Fickling’s Honey West private eye thrillers. G.G. Fickling was in fact a husband-and-wife writing team.

Honey West inherited a private detective agency from her murdered father. Honey handles all the cases herself. She’s cute and sexy but she’s a hard-nosed professional PI.

You know this is a real Honey West book because by the end of the second paragraph Honey is naked. It’s not her fault. She just has really bad luck with her clothes. They just keep falling off. In this case she is, or was, wearing a bikini but with her 38-inch bust Honey was just too much woman for her bathing suit. Poor Honey will lose her clothes on several further occasions. It’s just one of those things that a lady PI has to deal with.

Luckily a hunky guy, Kirk Tempest, comes to her rescue but when he takes her back to his house to find some clothes for her he starts to get fresh. They have a bit of an altercation, they both end up falling into the swimming pool and Kirk is now very dead. But that wasn’t Honey’s doing. He’s dead because he’s impaled on a spear from a spear-fishing gun. It’s a bizarre accident. It was an accident because there was no-one around. Except that maybe it wasn’t an accident.

There were two Tempest brothers and a sister. The sister Jewel, is a famous strip-tease artiste. Her gimmick is that she always a gold mask over her face. There may be a reason for this. She may have been disfigured in a fire. But everything about the Tempest siblings is mysterious. The relationship between them is very mysterious. Love, hate, jealousy and other assorted passions were involved.

Jewel’s other trademark is her gold G-string. And a gold G-string is now a vital piece of evidence;. This particular G-string may have been concealing something other than the thing that G-strings are designed to conceal. It might conceal valuable information.

There will be lots of women wearing gold masks in this story. How many women? Who can tell? They are after all wearing masks.

There’s more than one gold G-string as well. And somebody wants to get their hands on one or more of those G-strings.

Jewel Tempest is to be interviewed on a TV talk show. At this point the authors begin their campaign of deception. Whenever Jewel makes an appearance we can never be sure it is really her, and none of the other characters can ever be sure either. There’s doubt about the identities of all three siblings. And there’s a woman who may be masquerading as Jewel, and possibly there’s a woman masquerading as a woman masquerading as Jewel.

The Tempests are mixed up with various showbiz people. All of them are sleazy, dishonest, greedy and ambitious and they’re all entwined in a web of mostly perverse sexual betrayals and jealousies.

The Honey West novels are all fast-moving and fairly hardboiled and they’re all sleazy but mostly they’re sleazy in a fun good-natured way. Girl on the Prowl amps up the perversity factor quite a bit.

Honey is not quite a stereotypical modern kickass action heroine. The Honey West novels are not non-stop fistfights and gunplay and martial arts action. Honey can handle herself but mostly she relies on her wits. She’s a private eye, not a super-heroine. She’s very good at nosing around in things that are none of her business, and persuading people (through charm, sexual allure and cunning) to tell her things they’d rather not tell her. She just keeps plugging away a a case until she gets results and she doesn’t mind exposing herself to danger.

Girl on the Prowl boasts an outrageous plot but it’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West novels - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis.

A.S. Fleischman’s Venetian Blonde

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And there’s a quirky love story as well.

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

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

Nicholas Freeling’s Love in Amsterdam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Ralph Milne Farley’s The Hidden Universe

Roger Sherman Hoar (1887-1963) was an American politician who also wrote a considerable amount of rather interesting pulp science fiction under the name Ralph Milne Farley. His novel The Hidden Universe was published in 1939.

Cathcart is an engineer but times are tough so he’s working as a truck driver for a huge industrial conglomerate, Frain industries. Malcolm Frain has a reputation as a slightly eccentric charismatic billionaire with a genius for business.

Like so many Frain Industries employees Cathcart hopes for a chance of a job in one of Frain’s colonies. Cathcart has another motive as well - his brother landed a job in one of the colonies a while back and Cathcart hasn’t heard from his since. He’d like to make sure his brother is OK. Nobody knows exactly where these colonies are but it's reasonable to assume that they're scattered in far-flung corners of the globe.

To get a shot at a job in the colonies Cathcart has to go through an interview with Frain’s daughter Donna. Cathcart is fascinated by Donna from the start.

Cathcart gets his chance and as soon as he arrives in the colony he notices some odd things. Things that interest him as a man with scientific training. Things like the length of the days and the fact that no stars are visible at night.

He is employed as an assistant to Dr Freundlich, a good-natured scientific genius who is a big deal in the colony. Dr Freundlich has noticed other odd things about the colony.

The colony is, superficially at least, a utopia. Everybody has a good well-paid job. Good housing is available to everyone. There is prosperity and security. Of course there will always be trouble-makers and there’s a faction known as the Populists constantly trying to create unrest.

Both Dr Freundlich and Cathcart become more and more determined to find an explanation for the increasing number of puzzling things they keep noticing. They’re subtle things which most people would not be aware of but to scientists they are very disturbing indeed. There is something about the light. And the way it rains. The explanation they eventually come up with is crazy and impossible but they’re convinced that it’s true.

That explanation has momentous consequences for those hoping one day to return to their old lives and their old homes.

There are some wildly inventive and imaginative ideas in this novel. They might be scientific nonsense but they are undeniably clever and there’s lots of deliriously loopy technobabble. The world in which Cathcart finds himself is very strange indeed but I don’t propose to spoil things by giving you any hints as to the bizarre nature of that world.

There’s also political intrigue as Cathcart reluctantly gets mixed up with the Populists. There are others who suspect that there’s something odd about this colony but Cathcart is not at all sure if he can trust them. He’s also not sure that he can trust Donna although he’d very much like to.

The novel offers adventure and action and romance and a great deal of wild craziness. It’s fast-paced and pulpy and fun.

The pulp science fiction of the 1920s and 30s is well worth exploring. Science fiction was not yet totally dominated by spaceships and death rays. There weren’t really any rigid genre conventions. There were plenty of wildly entertaining offbeat stories such as this. If wildly entertaining and offbeat are concepts that appeal to you then The Hidden Universe is highly recommended.

This novel is published in an Armchair Fiction two-novel paperback edition, paired with Frederik Pohl’s Danger Moon.

I’ve also reviewed Ralph Milne Farley’s 1924 novel The Radio Man and it’s very much worth checking out.

John Flagg’s Woman of Cairo

John Flagg’s Woman of Cairo is a 1953 spy thriller.

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

This is pre-James Bond spy fiction but don’t jump to the conclusion that that means it’s dull. It isn’t. While it’s more a suspense thriller than an action thriller there is a perfectly adequate supply of action. The sex and violence are more muted than in the Bond novels, but both those elements are definitely present.

As in most spy fiction from the late 40s and early 50s the Second World War casts its shadow over this tale. Spy fiction had not yet become dominated by the Cold War. There are communist agitators in this story but they do not take centre stage. The Soviets play no part whatsoever in this story.

The setting is of course Egypt. The situation is very unsettled, and could become chaotic at any time. The regime of King Farouk is by no means stable. There are many factions jockeying for power behind the scenes. The British are nervous.They are horrified by the prospect of losing control of the Suez Canal (a fear which would lead to the Suez débâcle in 1956 which proved to be the end of Britain as a Great Power) and losing a reliable client state.

Hart Muldoon is an American intelligence agent, now retired. He no longer wants any part of the spy business but since he’s just had some very bad luck at the gambling tables the British are able to persuade him to take on a job for them. They’ve lost one of their bombers. With a full load of bombs aboard. They’d like it back.

A shady character named Jeremiah Grant may be involved, as well as a German named von Bruckner. The idea is for Muldoon to seduce von Bruckner’s mistress Gina. His first contact however is a pretty blonde named Sigried McCarthy.

Muldoon falls for Gina, which was not part of the plan. He also sleeps with pretty young French chanteuse Marianne Courbet.

Finding a lead on that missing British bomber turns out to be frustratingly difficult. A man with possible information is murdered in front of Muldoon’s eyes. He knows the bomber is near an oasis, but he has no idea where the oasis is.

Muldoon finds himself embroiled with three women, all of whom could fall into the dangerous dames category. Gina’s brother Guido seems pretty shifty, and there’s a handsome charming young Frenchman named Armand Trouvier who hangs around the women a bit too much. King Farouk’s security chief is taking an uncomfortably close interest in his activities.

While Muldoon is juggling his women Egypt moves closer to an explosion. It could end in revolution, an Islamic takeover or a military coup. Or Farouk might regain control. One of the many factions stirring up trouble is the Sons of Mecca. They’re religious fanatics but they appear to have surprising links to either Jeremiah Grant or von Bruckner, or both. Muldoon is puzzled by this. Most of all he’s puzzled why anyone should think that the possession of a single British bomber is important. It’s not carrying nuclear weapons.

Ian Fleming’s Bond novels upped the ante as far as sex and violence were concerned and added hints of sadism. Perhaps surprisingly Woman of Cairo has some moderately shocking violence, it has lots of sex (although not described graphically) and it has hints of just about everything that in 1953 would have been considered sexual deviation. And to be honest not just hints. It’s pretty blatant about it. This is a pretty sleazy book.

Hart Muldoon is also a surprising pre-Bond spy hero. He tries to seduce every woman he encounters (and succeeds with most of them). He gives one of the women a fairly savage beating without even knowing if she’s on the side of the good guys or the bad guys. And he commits two murders. In 1940s/early 50s spy thrillers it was acceptable for the hero to kill people but it had to be in self-defence, to save the life of someone else or it had to be absolutely essential to the mission and to national security. But Muldoon’s kills are cold-blooded murder, they’re not the least bit essential to the mission and they’re motivated by personal feelings of revenge and sexual jealousy. Hart Muldoon is very close to being an authentic anti-hero.

The women all have some depth to them. There are lots of characters (including several European expatriates gone bad) who have become morally compromised but there are understandable reasons for their moral corruption.

The plot is rather clever.

The historical background is fascinating and the exotic setting is used extremely well. There’s an atmosphere of corruption and paranoia. In fact this novel has just about everything you could want in a spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed three other John Flagg spy thrillers - The Lady and the Cheetah, Death and the Naked Lady and The Persian Cat. They’re very good and I highly recommend all three. And they're all in print!

Stark House have paired this one in a two-novel paperback with another Hank Muldoon thriller, Dear, Deadly Beloved.

Fletcher Flora’s Park Avenue Tramp

Fletcher Flora’s Park Avenue Tramp was published in 1958.

Charity is a pretty blonde with a problem. She doesn’t know where she is or how she got there. That’s not an unusual event in Charity’s life so she isn’t particularly worried. If a girl worried every time she had a blackout she’d spend her whole life worrying. She imagines she’s been to a night-club. Possibly several night-clubs. Possibly with Milton. She knows she was with Milton earlier in the evening but he was being tiresome. He wanted to sleep with her but she doesn’t like him very much. She left the night-club and everything after that is just a blank space.

She figures she needs to talk to someone wise about her problem. In her experience the wisest people in the world are bartenders. She finds a bar and as luck would have it the bartender is a very wise man indeed.

There’s a piano player there, named Joe Doyle. He’s battered and ugly and seedy-looking but Charity thinks he’s the most beautiful man she’s ever seen. She decides she wants to sleep with him. Which she does.

The next morning she has another problem. She will have to explain to her husband Oliver why she didn’t come home the previous night. Her husband is very rich (which is good) but he can be tiresome about such things (which is bad).

Charity has had lots of one night stands with no unpleasant consequences. She has had a couple of actual affairs and in each case the man ended up getting a very severe beating. It has crossed Charity’s mind that her husband might have had something to do with this but that thought was too disturbing so she instantly dismissed it from her mind.

Oliver Farnese lives his life to a rigid schedule. His father left him a vast fortune but ensured that Oliver would never have to make a single business decision. The truth is that Oliver is incapable of doing anything useful. He goes to the office every day and does no work at all. His entire life is a series of empty rituals.

There’s more to Oliver Farnese than this. There’s something very dark inside him, something cruel and twisted.

The fourth character in this drama is private eye Bertram Sweeney. Even by private eye standards Sweeney is seedy and sleazy. Sweeney dislikes everybody but he especially dislikes Bertram Sweeney. He dislikes Oliver Farnese intensely. He has fantasies about Charity Farnese.

These four people are all, in their different ways, twisted up inside. These are not normal healthy people. They’re either self-destructive or destructive of others or both. Not one of them could be considered to be totally in touch with reality. And not one of them could be considered to be in control of his or her life. They all do things with no clear understanding of the own motives.

They are all players in a game but they’re not necessarily all playing the same game.

Joe Doyle isn’t stupid. He knows he should have nothing to do with Charity but he can’t help himself and in any case it doesn’t really matter. He has a very bad heart condition and has maybe a year to live. He has nothing to lose. His affair with Charity becomes more serious.

You can see where this plot setup is likely to go, and you can see where other writers would have taken it. Flora takes it in a slightly less expected direction. But more interesting than the plot twists are the character twists. If you’re a reader of noir fiction you will have decided roughly where these characters should go as noir fiction characters. In fact they don’t do quite what you expect them to do. At the same time you end up realising that their actions are entirely consistent with everything we’ve learnt about them. They behave in the kinds of irrational frustrating ways that real people behave, rather than in the ways that genre fiction types usually behave. They don’t do things just because those things would be convenient in plot terms.

Charity is difficult to predict because she’s not a conventional victim or a villainess or a conventional noir protagonist or a standard femme fatale. She’s a woman who has found her own way of dealing with her situation and it’s not a very good way to deal with it but it’s the only way she knows, it makes sense to her, and it makes sense in terms of everything we know about her. Much the same could be said about the other characters. They do what they feel compelled to do.

The ending is entirely right and entirely satisfactory but it still manages to be not quite what we expected.

Fletcher Flora achieved no more than modest success during his lifetime and after his death he was largely forgotten. He is still to achieve the recognition he deserved.

In its own low-key unobtrusive way Park Avenue Tramp ignores the accepted genre conventions. This is an offbeat neglected gem. Very highly recommended.

This novel is one of three in the Stark House Noir Classics paperback A Trio of Gold Medals, along with Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man and Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed. All were originally Fawcett Gold Medal paperback originals.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other Fletcher Flora titles - Leave Her To Hell and Killing Cousins.

G.G. Fickling's Dig a Dead Doll

Before Cathy Gale, before Emma Peel, before Modesty Blaise, there was Honey West. Honey West was the original tough cookie action heroine. She made her debut in 1957 and featured in eleven novels by the husband and wife writing team Gloria and Forest Fickling, writing under the name G.G. Fickling. Dig a Dead Doll, published in 1960, is the seventh of the Honey West private eye thrillers.

Honey West’s father was a private eye, until a case went wrong and he was murdered. Honey took over the running of the West Detective Agency. That doesn’t mean she took over the business side. She is the Honey West Detective Agency. She handles the cases herself. Her father taught her the ropes. She has a private investigator’s licence. She has a gun and she knows how to use it. She has been taught how to handle herself in unarmed combat. Honey is tough, resourceful and very stubborn. She’s a good PI.

Honey is also all woman. She is young, blonde, very pretty and very feminine.

The Honey West private eye thrillers are hardboiled, with touches of humour, they’re fairly violent and quite sleazy. In other words they’re everything that PI thrillers should be.

The book begins with a very large very mean guy trying to kill Honey. He has something else in mind for her before he kills her. Honey is half-naked and fighting for her life and her virtue. Things are looking grim, until she remembers the bull. Thank goodness for the bull. The guy attacking her is big and mean but he’s not as big and mean as that bull.

Honey is in a bullfighting arena in Mexico. It all started with a telephone call from Pete. Honey and Pete had been childhood sweethearts. Then Pete moved away. He moved to Mexico, to pursue his dream of becoming a matador. Now he wants Honey’s help. When the first boy who kissed you asks for help you don’t hesitate. Honey heads for Tijuana.

It looks like that dream might have cost Pete his life. Honey saw him gored by the bull. No-one could survive that. But there are things that don’t add up.

The bull-fighting business in Tijuana involves more than just bull-fighting. Drugs, for instance. And then there’s Vicaro, the impresario. He has a reputation for taking quite an interest in handsome young matadors. An interest that is not strictly professional.

Honey also discovers some of the more colourful night spots, where pretty girls dance. The dancing involves a lot of high kicks. The girls don’t bother with panties. It’s a night spot that caters for those with exotic sexual tastes.

As I said earlier the Honey West books are very sleazy. Honey is a nice girl but she has a lot of bad luck with clothing. Her clothes just seem to come off at the most opportune moments. She is also not a great believer in brassieres, which is rather daring for a girl with a 38-inch bust. In this adventure her clothes come off a lot. A girl does feel undignified hanging naked upside-down from a tree, but it’s all in a day’s work for a lady PI.

Honey has reason to believe that a man known as Zingo is the leader of some kind of criminal conspiracy but while everyone knows of Zingo no-one knows his identity. The conspiracy may concern drugs but it may also involve corrupt practices in the bull-fighting arena. Mexico’s leading matador, Rafael, may know something. Pete’s young protégé Carlos may know something. Quite a few people may know certain things but Honey has no idea which of them she can trust. And she has people in aeroplanes firing machine-guns at her. In fact she has machine-guns fired at her from all directions.

There’s plenty of action, not always involving guns. Action at sea and in seedy night-clubs and in the bull ring. Honey loses her clothing on several further occasions.

The plot is solid with some decent twists although it does at one point make use of a certain plot device that I have always found unconvincing. That’s a minor nit-pick. On the whole the plot works just fine.

The style is lively (Honey acts as first-person narrator) and there’s lots of fairly hardboiled dialogue. The pacing is pleasingly frenetic.

Honey is a delightful heroine. She’s not an unrealistic wish-fulfilment super-woman. She’s just quick-thinking and very determined and she keeps her head in a crisis and people like to help her because she’s cute and bubbly.

The Honey West books are enormous amounts of stylish sleazy action-packed fun. They’re essential reading for anyone who loves sexy lady private eyes, and what right-thinking doesn’t? Dig a Dead Doll is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed other Honey West novels - This Girl For Hire, Girl on the Loose, A Gun for Honey, Honey in the Flesh and Kiss for a Killer.

I’ve also reviewed the excellent 1965-66 Honey West TV series that starred Anne Francis.

Gardner Francis Fox's Silverfinger

Gardner Francis Fox (1911-1986) was a prolific author of pulp fiction in numerous genres as well as a hugely prolific writer of comics.

Silverfinger, published in 1973, was the third of his Cherry Delight sexy crime thrillers written under the pseudonym Glen Chase. These novels were sometimes marketed as the Sexecutioner series and they have some vague affinity with the Mafia thrillers that were popular at the time.

Cherise Dellissio, better known as Cherry Delight, is an ace agent for the top-secret agency N.Y.M.P.H.O. (New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organisation). She’s part of the elite Femme Fatale squad, highly trained in both combat and bedroom skills (both of which are equally useful in her line of work).

The Mafia is trying to take over the Italian shipping empire of the della Fanzio family. There are three della Fanzios, two brothers and a sister. Their father built the business and he was a hard man but his three children are not so tough. They’re frightened and they’re inclined to cave in to all the Mafia demands. Cherry has been sent to Calabria to put some backbone into the della Fanzios and to foil the Mafia’s plans.

Her first task is the keep the della Fanzios alive.

She also needs to infiltrate the Mafia operation, and specifically to get close to the local Mafia kingpin, a man known as Silverfinger. His mane of silver hair earned him his nickname but he likes it and he drives a silver-plated Mercedes-Benz 300 SL.

Somewhat to her surprise Cherry also finds herself dealing with devil-worshippers. In this part of Italy the old pagan beliefs and superstitions have survived and gradually morphed into Satanism. Cherry has to attend a Black Mass and while she’s horrified she’s also rather excited the sight of so many naked bodies. Sex is something that is never far from Cherry’s mind.

There’s plenty of action and plenty of sleaze, Cherry has some narrow escapes, she has an epic cat-fight with Silverfinger’s now discarded mistress, there’s a very high body count. It has to be said that Cherry does most of the killing, quite a bit of it with her bare hands.

Cherry is a ruthless and efficient agent although there are times when perhaps she should concentrate more on the job in hand and less on satisfying her sexual urges. She’s a feisty likeable heroine.

Fox’s prose style is pure pulp but with plenty of energy.

The plot is pretty straightforward. It’s mostly an excuse for the action scenes (which are very good) and the sex scenes (which are quite explicit). But that’s the sort of book this is. It’s a violent sleazy sexy action thriller and it’s not trying to be the least bit literary or the least bit subtle. There’s no message and the characterisations are basic. We don’t get any profound insights into Cherry’s personality or motivations. We know that she’s tough and resourceful and dedicated and she likes to get laid as often as possible. We really don’t need to know any more about her than that.

If this is your thing then Silverfinger delivers the goods. I enjoyed it. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Gardner Francis Fox’s books including the first two Cherry Delight thrillers (the excellent The Italian Connection and Tong in Cheek), several of his Lady from L.U.S.T. sexy spy thrillers (Lay Me Odds, To Russia With Lust and Lust, Be a Lady Tonight) and one of the Coxeman sleazy spy thrillers, The Best Laid Plans. And I’ve reviewed his superb sword and sorcery/occult thriller The Druid Stone which shows what he could do when he tried to be a bit more ambitious. He’s always entertaining.

Ogden Fox’s Hamburg After Dark

In the 60s McFadden books put out a whole series of non-fiction sex and sin exposés focusing on the raunchy night-life of various European cities. This was their After Dark series and it included Ogden Fox’s Hamburg After Dark, published in 1968.

Of course with such books there is no way of knowing how much was fiction and how much (if any) was fact. It is however quite true that Hamburg was rather notorious for its sleazy night-life in the 60s. So while there’s undoubtedly a fair amount of gossip and rumour (and completely made-up stuff or wishful thinking) there’s a possibility that quite a bit of it was true, or at least had a basis in fact.

The book purports to be written by an American, fluent in German, who lives in Hamburg and spends his free time sampling the erotic delights the city has to offer. The book is presented as a kind of guided tour of the city’s sexual night-life. What it has to say about Hamburg’s red light district is consistent with other accounts I’ve read so I’m inclined to give the publishers the benefit of the doubt and accept that the author has at least visited the city.

The author gives us some supposedly factual background on various aspects of Hamburg’s night-life interspersed with his reminiscences of his own sexual adventures there. One assumes that these personal reminiscences are largely or possibly entirely fictional. This was of course 1968, with the Sexual Revolution in full swing, and the book deals with a very large sophisticated European city rather than small-town America, so these reminiscences would have sounded quite plausible and there may even be some genuine adventures mixed in with the fantasies.

At this time there was a whole sleaze sub-genre of books masquerading as serious sociological/sexological non-fiction claiming to have been written by eminent psychiatrists. These books were in fact pure fiction churned out by various sleaze novelists. McFadden’s After Dark books would seem to be representative of a closely related sub-genre, with the difference that Hamburg After Dark presents itself as having been written by an amateur aficionado rather than a psychiatrist or sociologist.

Since the author’s sexual interests are confined to the female of the species (both prostitutes and non-prostitutes) he adds some stories told to him by others with differing sexual interests. These provide the material for the accounts of call-boy rings and bars catering to girls who like girls.

Firstly we’re introduced to the Widows’ Club. This is a bit like an internet hook-up site but done entirely with good old-fashioned analog telephones. Gentlemen and ladies who want a sex partner for the night can arrange a meet. If the man and the woman like the looks of each other they spend the night together. No questions are asked, no money changes hands. They never see each other again.

We’re taken to the red light district in the St Pauli district. To the Herbertstrasse, where the prostitutes display themselves in windows (as they apparently still do to this day). And to the Reeperbahn. In the dance cafes professional and amateur prostitutes contact prospective clients by means of telephones connecting the tables.

There’s also the street that within a single city block boasts no less than nineteen strip clubs.

We are also treated to accounts of the wild sex lives of the young women of Hamburg. Some of whom apparently indulge in kinks I had never heard of before (the girl with the kink that involves watching television is a new one on me).

The author finds out what a kinki session entails (it entails whips) and that such sessions are available for ladies as well as gentlemen. He also samples a few blue movies and watches one being filmed. And discovers that lonely ladies in Hamburg in need of male company (either in the bedroom or out of it) need only pick up a telephone to have their requirements fully satisfied.

While the various anecdotes thrown in by the author are doubtless pure fiction much of the essential background is probably fairly accurate. While there might be plenty of fiction mixed into this book it is a fascinating glimpse into the free-and-easy mindset of the heyday of the Sexual Revolution.

And it is definitely entertaining. Highly recommended for those seeking to explore the more intriguing corners of the world of 60s literary sleaze.

Fletcher Flora's Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is a slightly noirish murder mystery by Fletcher Flora. It was published by Avon Books in 1958.

Fletcher Flora (1914-1969) was an American pulp writer who wrote twenty-one rather varied novels including some noir fiction.

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is the story of three men who have sex with a young woman (we will later discover her name is Avis Pisano) at an isolated resort hotel. The three are all roughly the same age and curiously enough all are known by the nickname Curly. They have other things in common. All live in the neighbouring town of Rutherford. All three intend to marry Lauren Haig, a pretty heiress. One of the three murders Avis.

They all have motives, since in all three cases their chances of marrying Lauren might be prejudiced if it became known that they’d slept with a young woman of Avis’s dubious reputation.

The three men are all rather unpleasant and they all have issues with women but their issues are quite different and they’re unpleasant in different ways.

There was a witness, or at least an almost-witness.

Avis was killed soon after arriving in Rutherford by train. At the train station was Purvy Stubbs. Purvy is a nice enough fellow but he’s a bit of a misfit and he’s obsessed by trains. He watches all the trains come in. He saw Avis leave the train. He saw something else - a glimpse of a man. He cannot identify the man but that man might be, in fact probably is, the killer. Purvy’s evidence is not worth much to the sheriff, but if Purvy ever remembers a bit more about the incident his evidence might be crucial.

Mostly the book gives us a reasonable character sketch of each suspect. We realise that any one of the three might have been capable of murder but we still have no idea which of them is actually guilty.

We also learn a little about Avis. Her reputation for sleeping with lots of men was well deserved but she was really just a sad lonely girl looking for love in all the wrong places.

The novel does of course reflect the late 1950s small town attitude towards sex. That attitude is that sex is just wrong unless you’re married. Having sex outside of marriage makes a woman a tramp. Avis is not the only woman in the book who is condemned for her sexual misbehaviour. Phyllis Bagley is not only regarded as a tramp but as a whore, even though she is certainly not a whore. She does however have an active sex life and that’s enough to give her a bad reputation.

There’s quite a bit to admire in this novel. We get to know the three suspects pretty well and the identity of the murderer is skilfully concealed until the past page.

There is one major weakness. In a murder mystery I like to feel at the end that the solution feels right. That the murderer really is the person who would have been most likely to commit such a crime. In this case I felt the solution was a bit random. There was no real reason why he should been the killer rather than one of the other two suspects. And since this is not a true fair-play puzzle-plot mystery I was left feeling unsatisfied. There was no evidence to convince me of the killer’s guilt and no psychological reason to believe that he and only he could have killed Avis Pisano.

On the other hand you need to wonder what exactly the author’s intentions were. It seems quite likely that Flora didn’t particularly care about the identity of the murderer. He was more interested in the sexual tensions that drive the characters. All of the major characters are motivated directly or indirectly by sex or by anxiety about sex. And Flora handles this kind of material rather skilfully.

This novel is hardboiled but it would be a bit of a stretch to call it noir, although it does have a certain sordid squalid quality to it which might qualify it as marginally noir.

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is quite entertaining with at least some suspense but it misses out on greatness and it’s the weakest of the Fletcher Flora novels I’ve read so far. At least it’s the weakest considered as noir fiction. Considered as a psychological and sexual melodrama it’s much more successful. So I’m going to recommend it and it might even sneak into the highly recommended category if psychosexual melodrama is your thing.

I’ve read a couple of Fetcher Flora’s other novels. Leave Her To Hell is a fine slightly hardboiled private eye murder mystery. Killing Cousins is a witty lighthearted murder mystery with dashes of whimsy and black comedy and it’s excellent. So he’s a rather varied writer.

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is part of a stark House Noir triple-novel paperback edition along with two other Fletcher Flora novels, Leave Her To Hell and Take Me Home.

Darwin Teilhet’s Take Me As I Am

Darwin Teilhet’s Take Me As I Am was published by Gold Medal in 1952.

Darwin Teilhet (1904-1964) was an American novelist and screenwriter, writing under his own name and several pseudonyms. Take Me As I Am was one of several novels he wrote using the William H. Fielding pseudonym. It falls into the “couple on the run” sub-genre.

The novel starts with a guy named Monk and two other hoods carrying out an armoured car holdup. With a bazooka, which is a nice touch. Their boss, a guy known as Gramma (short for Grammelini), planned the heist and with half a million dollars in that armoured car Monk’s share will see him set up for life. The robbery goes horribly wrong, and worst of all there’s only a hundred grand in that truck. The police will be closing in at any moment. Monk was supposed by be picked up by his girl Alma and they would take the money to a specified drop-off point. Now there’s just one chance. Monk will lie low and maybe Alma can bluff her way through the roadblocks. She’s a cute blonde and cute blondes can bluff their way out of tight corners.

Then fate intervenes as it tends to do in noir fiction (and we’re definitely in noir territory in this story). Alma picks up a hitchhiker. His name is Bill and he’s eighteen, four years younger than Alma. Alma figures that if she can persuade Bill to pretend he’s her kid brother they can get through the roadblocks. The coppers are not going to be looking for a young brother and sister. And Bill is naïve enough to agree. He thinks Alma is such a nice girl that it never occurs to him that she could be in trouble.

Bill possibly should have noticed that the story Alma tells him is a bit odd, and she has a tendency to change her story. A couple of odd things happen, involving other blondes. Bill becomes slightly uneasy but he’s falling in love with Alma and he puts his doubts aside. And really they’re only tiny niggling doubts and he’s only eighteen.

More odd things happen. Bill has entered a nightmare world but he doesn’t know it yet. There doesn’t seem to be any possible connection between the odd events.

Gradually Bill starts to see a pattern, but it’s a constantly shifting pattern. The reader sees almost everything from Bill’s point of view. The seasoned crime reader will certainly be a step ahead of Bill in connecting the dots but there are still plenty of twists to come.

Then the real nightmare kicks in and the story becomes a desperate chase.

This is definitely noir, but it avoids overly obsessive clichés. Bill really is a true innocent. He just wants to believe that he really has met a nice girl.

Alma is not quite a stereotypical femme fatale. To find out what actually makes her tick you’ll have to read the book.

Bill and Alma are both hopelessly out of their depth. They really have no idea what’s going on. Alma initially thought she knew what she was mixed up in but every one of her assumptions turned out to be mistaken Bill and Alma are both trapped. Bill is horrified to be involved, even indirectly, in crime. But he loves Alma. Alma is more complicated. Both Bill and the reader are left uncertain until the very end as to whether she’s a good girl or a bad girl. Maybe she’s a bit of both, but she’ll have to make a choice.

There’s plenty of suspense and excitement and quite a bit of action towards the end. There’s romance but it’s a twisted love story. It’s not just that Bill is out of his depth with a woman like Alma. He’d be out of his depth with any woman. He’s also very conflicted. He wants to have sex with Alma, he’s resentful when she won’t sleep with him but disappointed in her when she does. He’s an innocent farm boy who thinks nice girls don’t have sex. Alma wants to have sex with Bill but she’s sure he won’t respect her if she does. There’s plenty of tortured 1950s sexual guilt in this novel.

There’s a background of corruption. There are plenty of references to the moral decay of America and the ubiquity of organised crime.

This is a good solid noir novel that moves along briskly. Highly recommended.

Fletcher Flora's Leave Her To Hell

Leave Her To Hell is a private eye thriller by Fletcher Flora, published in 1958 by Avon. It’s an expanded version of a short story, Loose Ends, published that year in Manhunt magazine.

Fletcher Flora (1914-1968) is an often overlooked American pulp writer of the 50s and 60s. He wrote crime fiction, sleaze fiction and historical fiction. His output of short stories for various magazines was prodigious.

Percy Hand is a private detective with a reputation for being, by private detective standards, ethical. Faith Salem wants to hire him. Faith is the mistress of a rich man, Graham Markley, and she’s about to become his wife. Before she marries him she’d like to know what happened to his third wife, Constance. Faith and Constance had once shared an apartment but that’s not the reason for her interest. She knows the story of what happened to Constance and she’s not entirely satisfied with it.

Constance had been having an affair with a man named Regis Lawler. One evening Constance and Regis disappeared and neither has been heard from since. Of course it is assumed that they ran away together. Faith feels that the story leaves a few loose ends dangling and Percy Hand has to agree with her.

Regis Lawler’s brother Silas has a shady past and now he’s at best marginally respectable. He runs a gambling club and the games are reputed to be honest. He offers Percy five grand to drop the case, Percy refuses and gets beaten up. But he won’t drop the case.

Graham Markley also offers him money to drop the case, although this time the offer is not followed by a beating.

Percy gets some slightly interesting information from Silas’s mistress Robin. He gets a lot more from her than that. They spend a pleasant night together in bed.

He has picked up something that is not quite a lead but at least it’s the hint of a lead. There was a hit-run case shortly before Constance and Regis disappeared and someone was interested in that case and Percy wonders why. Most of all Percy wonders why a very disreputable private eye named Colly Alder is tailing him. Percy is even more puzzled when Colly asks him for a favour. It all seems quite innocent but it is very curious.

Percy decides to pay a visit to the nearby town of Amity. He has no idea whether he’ll find anything there but the name of that town just keeps popping up. He certainly finds something there.

Percy Hand is a likeable hero. He’s not a tough guy. He’s not lacking in guts but fistfights and gunfights are not his style at all. He’s more at home sitting and thinking things through than he is in a brawl.

This is only very very marginally noir fiction. It is moderately hardboiled. Essentially it’s just a murder mystery. You will probably find yourself being fairly convinced that a murder has taken place and you might have your suspicions as to the killer’s identity but while there has certainly been a crime it’s not quite the crime you expected it to be. And the interest here lies not in the crime itself or the identity of the criminal but in the reasons the crime was committed.

I would not call this a fair-play mystery but there are a few psychological clues.

My view is that when the solution to a murder mystery is revealed the most important thing is that that solution should be psychologically plausible. The reader should feel that the various players in the drama behaved in ways that were consistent with what we have been told about their personalities. That’s certainly the case with Leave Her To Hell. Despite one slightly far-fetched element the solution is entirely satisfying.

Flora’s prose is pleasing and witty and he has a good ear for dialogue.

Leave Her To Hell is a fine slightly hardboiled private eye murder mystery. Highly recommended.

Leave Her To Hell has been reprinted by Stark House in a Fletcher Flora triple-header paperback edition.

I’ve reviewed another Fetcher Flora novel, the lighthearted witty Killing Cousins.