W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thoroughly enjoyed The Magician. Highly recommended.

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

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

William P. McGivern’s The Mad Robot

William P. McGivern’s science fiction novella The Mad Robot was published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in January 1944.

William P. McGivern (1918-1982) achieved considerable success as a crime writer but early in his career he wrote a lot of science fiction stories for the pulps.

The fact that The Mad Robot is a story about robots written in 1944 is significant. At that time robots did no exist in even the crudest form. Computers were being experimented with but a truly practical general-purpose computer did not exist. The earliest computers were enormous. Transistors, integrated circuits, microchips all lay in the future. It was difficult to imagine that a computer small enough to allow a robot to act independently could ever be built. So in this story the robot have human brains. Or rather they have organic artificial brains constructed from human brain tissue.

Which actually makes the story a bit more interesting today, at a time when machine artificial intelligences seem to have certain serious and possibly insoluble limitations. Maybe organic artificial intelligences will eventually have more potential.

Space pilot Rick Weston is sent to Jupiter to check up on the experimental robot plant there. There’s no reason to think that anything untoward is happening there but it is felt that it would be advisable to send someone to do a bit of investigating.

A scientist named Farrel is in charge of the robot project, working closely with Martian scientist Ho Agar. The robots seem impressive. Rick is puzzled that Farrel seems so defensive and even paranoid.

Of course it turns out that there are problems. The robot brains suffer from certain very human weaknesses. Occasionally they go mad.

Naturally Dr Farrel has a beautiful young daughter, Rita. Rick thinks she’s pretty cute.

At first it appears that the robot project has been a huge success, but when a robot tries to kill him Rick starts to have his doubts.

McGivern was only twenty-five when he wrote this novella so you have to cut the guy some slack. It is rough around the edges and it does occasionally veer towards silliness. It is very very pulpy. On the other hand the basic idea is pretty good. McGivern just wasn’t quite experienced enough to carry it off.

It is also only a novella so he didn’t the scope to flesh out the ideas or to engage in any ambitious world-building. It’s mentioned in passing that the experimental plant on Jupiter is contained within a bubble with an artificial atmosphere and artificial Earth gravity but the setting comes across as being rather generic. There’s a Martian character but there’s no attempt to make him seem truly non-human.

Rick is your standard pulp hero.

The plot has a couple of reasonably effective twists and we are kept in some doubt as to what is really going on. There are interesting echoes of Frankenstein.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with J. Hunter Holly’s 1963 novel The Running Man.

The Mad Robot is not great but it’s worth a look if you like robot tales that are slightly out of the ordinary.

I’ve also reviewed McGivern’s 1953 noirish crime classic The Big Heat.

John D. MacDonald’s The Deep Blue Good-By

The Deep Blue Good-By was the first of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. It was published in 1964.

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) had already written several dozen novels but it was the Travis McGee novels that really put him on the map.

Travis McGee is not a private eye. Not exactly. He’s such a maverick and loner and general outsider that even getting a private investigator’s licence and working as a regular PI would threaten his fierce sense of independence. He is a kind of freelance investigator-troubleshooter of a very special sort. If someone has stolen something from you and it’s the kind of case the police either won’t or can’t take on, or if you have a good reason not to want cops involved, and if the case is so risky and so speculative and the chances of failure are so high that no regular PI would take it on then you go to Travis McGee. He will recover your property, and take a fifty percent cut.

That makes McGee sound greedy but he isn’t. If he doesn’t recover the property he gets nothing, not even his expenses. And if you thought you had no chance of ever getting any of your property back then you’re going to be happy to accept his terms. Half is a whole lot better than nothing.

McGee’s lady friend Chookie (yes, Chookie) has advised her friend Cathy to talk to McGee. Cathy’s father came back from the war with a great deal of money. He died in prison, with the money still hidden somewhere. A smooth-talking sleazeball known as Junior Allen seduced Cathy and he now has that money. Losing the money was bad enough but Cathy had her heart dragged through the dirt as well.

Doing a bit of digging on the subject of Junior Allen leads McGee to a woman named Lois. She was another of Allen’s victims. A picture is starting to emerge. Allen is not just a thief. He enjoys psychologically and emotionally (and sometimes physically) brutalising women.

Lois is a mess. So much of a mess that if McGee hadn’t found her she might have succeeded in starving and drinking herself to death. McGee becomes a full-time nurse to her.

Which brings us to Travis McGee’s fascinating attitude towards women. He likes women, but not just as bed partners. He’s no Boy Scout. He likes sex. But he really likes women as people. He doesn’t owe Lois anything but she needs him so he’ll be there for her. He’s just the kind of guy who could never walk away from a woman in need of help.

Slowly McGee puts the pieces of the puzzle together - where that money came from originally, why it was hidden, how Allen got his hands on it. And he finds out that Allen has further plans. Nasty plans. It’s none of McGee’s business but he intends to wreck those plans.

There’s plenty of action, and some moderately graphic violence. Much of the action happens at sea. Allen is a tough guy and he’s plenty mean. But Travis McGee is a tough guy as well and he’s willing to play dirty when necessary.

The plotting is clever. McDonald’s writes very entertaining prose with some cynicism and quite a bit of passion - Travis McGee is a man of very strong views. McGee does not really approve of the modern world. He doesn’t approve of rules and regulations. He also doesn’t approve of progress. He loves south Florida. He likes it just the way it is. He doesn’t think it needs more resort hotels and shopping malls and condos and highways.

There’s some sex but there’s also an atmosphere of twisted cruel perverted sexuality. Junior Allen has some major issues with women.

McGee is far from being a perfect hero. He can be extraordinarily ruthless and he has only a limited respect for the law. He doesn’t have too much in the way of ethical standards. What he does have is a certain basic decency. And an old-fashioned attitude towards women. Old-fashioned in a good way.

This book is huge amounts of fun, with a hardboiled feel and some noir fiction touches. It’s just different enough from standard PI stories, and Travis McGee is just different enough from standard PI heroes, to give it a flavour of its own. Highly recommended.

Charles Eric Maine’s Wall of Fire

Charles Eric Maine’s science fiction novel Wall of Fire was published in Satellite Science Fiction in June 1958. I believe it was also published as Crisis 2000.

Charles Eric Maine (1921-1981) was an English science fiction and crime writer.

Wall of Fire begins in the fairly near future.

The Festival of Earth is about to begin. It’s a kind of World’s Fair. This is another of those well-intentioned attempts to bring all the nations of the world together in peace.

U.S. Senator Drabin has broadcast a message welcoming everyone on the planet to attend. As a kind of feeble joke he adds that visitors from other planets are welcome as well. When the flying saucer lands in the middle of the Festival Stadium it appears that aliens from another planet have taken him at his word.

There’s much consternation. In this future interplanetary space travel is still a dream. No evidence has ever been found of life elsewhere in the Universe. No-one had any reason to believe that aliens existed. But here they are.

The weird thing is, they all look vaguely like Senator Drabin.

The aliens come from Saturn. In 1958 readers would still buy the idea of intelligent life elsewhere in the Solar System. Within a few years such an idea would stretch credibility too much and aliens in science fiction would originate in distant star systems.

No-one knows if the aliens are friendly or hostile. The aliens have erected a force barrier around their spaceship. The general consensus is that this is probably a hostile invasion, although Senator Drabin and scientist Lynn Farrow strongly disagree.

The actions of the aliens are somewhat ambiguous. Some contact has been made with the aliens but it’s still impossible to guess their intentions.

The trick to writing an interesting first contact story is to make the aliens truly alien - both physically and culturally. This novel manages that extremely well. If possible the cultural alienness has to be a logical consequence of the physical alienness and Maine manages that as well. Apart from being inherently more interesting it also makes the ambiguity of the actions of the aliens more convincing - their actions might appear to be potentially hostile simply because they’re so culturally different. On the other hand any apparently friendly move on their part has to be viewed sceptically as well.

In this book it’s not just the actions of the aliens that are ambiguous - the response of the various American officials are just as ambiguous so the aliens may well be as confused as the humans. And there are major differences within American officialdom as to the appropriate response - should they try to make peaceful contact or simply nuke the aliens just in case.

Maine is no great prose stylist but this is ideas-driven science fiction so that’s no great problem. This is genuine science fiction but the science is too fanciful to qualify it was hard science fiction. It might be fanciful, but the speculations here are interesting and at least somewhat provocative.

Wall of Fire is reasonably enjoyable. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with Gerald Vance’s Too Many Worlds in a two-novel edition.

I’ve reviewed another of the author’s science fiction novels, Spaceways, which I liked a lot.

Stephen Marlowe's Blonde Bait

Blonde Bait is a 1959 pulp crime thriller, with definite claims to being noir fiction, by Stephen Marlowe.

Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was born Milton Lesser in New York and wrote some good science fiction under that name. He later legally changed his name to Stephen Marlowe and wrote quite a bit of pulp crime fiction under that name.

Chuck Odlum is the ski instructor at the Whiteface Lake Hotel and he also owns the hotel. Well, almost. His wife Inez owns the hotel. It’s at best a moderately successful marriage. Chuck feels that his wife treats him like an irresponsible kid. Which she does, and perhaps she’s right to do so. Either way it irks Chuck a bit. On the other hand things are great between them in the bedroom. It’s the kind of marriage that could easily last, unless some outside factor intervenes.

The outside factor in this case is a blonde. Her name is Bunny. She’s married. Maybe everything would have been OK if only Chuck had been able to forget those extraordinary blue eyes of hers, and the way her posterior looks in tight ski pants. Bunny is very young, very pretty and very blonde. Perhaps inevitably one of her ski lessons ends with the two of them tearing each other’s clothes off.

This in itself was not necessarily going to lead to disaster, but there are two complicating factors - a dead body and a Gladstone bag containing a huge amount of money.

Chuck is a fairly typical noir protagonist. He’s not a bad guy really. Having a weakness for cute blue eyes and shapely female posteriors doesn’t make him a bad guy, it just makes him human. His nagging feeling that his wife has no great respect for him does make him vulnerable to the lure of easy money. He could buy his own ski resort. Then he would be somebody. We do eventually realise why his wife has never trusted him to make important decisions. His judgment is not always sound and he has a knack for finding justifications for his errors of judgment. He’s not stupid but he’s not overly smart; he’s not wicked but he’s not overly virtuous. He’s an ideal noir protagonist. We like him enough to care what happens to him but we figure he’s likely to get himself into real trouble.

Bunny is a femme fatale of sorts but she’s one of that interesting variety who might turn out to be a devious spider woman or might just as easily turn out to be a kind of female noir protagonist, led to do questionable things by certain character flaws. She’s a bad girl but we like her anyway.

There are murders in this tale, but they’re not straightforward murders. There’s some degree of ambiguity about them. They’re the kinds of murders a person could commit and still be able to believe that they weren’t really murder.

There’s a solid noir plot. The protagonists make small mistakes but they’re mistakes they could get away with if they just got one or two lucky breaks. We do get a feeling of noirish impending doom, or at the very least a feeling that these people are not likely to come out of this unscathed.

There is a slight hardboiled edge to Marlowe’s prose.

The sleaze factor is fairly mild but Chuck is definitely a protagonist driven by lust. Maybe there’s love as well, but lust is where it all begins.

This is a very satisfying work of noir fiction by a somewhat underrated writer. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of the science fiction novels written by this author as Milton Lesser - Somewhere I’ll Find You from 1947 and Slaves to the Metal Horde from 1954. They’re both quite decent stories. I’ve also reviewed his very good 1955 hardboiled crime novel, written as Stephen Marlowe, Model for Murder.

F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Sulu Sea Murders

The Sulu Sea Murders was the seventh of F. Van Wyck Mason’s thirty-one Hugh North spy thrillers. It was published in 1933. While these novels are usually considered to be spy fiction it should be pointed out that many of the early books in this series are as much murder mysteries as spy thrillers, and quite a few are in fact pure murder mysteries. Such is the case with The Sulu Sea Murders. It’s a murder mystery but the exotic setting adds interest.

Hugh North is an officer in the US Army’s intelligence division, G-2, but in the early books he works for the Department of Criminal Investigations. He is essentially a military policeman. He holds the rank of captain (by the time the series ended in 1968 he had been promoted to colonel).

The Sulu Sea Murders opens with the murder of a pearl diver in the Philippines. All that is known of the murderer is that he is a member of the American garrison on the nearby island of Sanga Sanga. Hugh North is sent to Sanga Sanga to investigate.

The American garrison is quartered in Fort Winfield, a very old castle built by the Spanish. It’s a rabbit warren. There are parts of the castle that the Americans have never even attempted to explore - it would to be too easy to become hopelessly lost.

There’s one thing North is pretty sure of - pearls are involved somewhere in this case. It soon becomes obvious that the atmosphere at Fort Winfield is not merely tense, it’s explosive. There are professional jealousies among the officers. The commanding officer, Major Flood, is hated by all.

There are three women each of whom seems to be at the centre of romantic and sexual intrigues. One is Flood’s French-born wife. Theirs is clearly not a happy marriage. Then there’s Captain O’Hare’s wife, universally referred to as Anytime Annie. There’s also Manuela, the beautiful young daughter of the local Spanish grandee. All three women are engaged in flirtations or affairs.

Those pearls also suggest that greed is going to play a part in this tale.

There are countless motives for murder, and there are several murders in quick succession. In two cases the identity of the killer seems obvious but Hugh North is not satisfied. He doesn’t like jumping to obvious conclusions.

Hugh North is very much a scientific detective. Forensic science provides some of the vital clues that will eventually lead to a solution of the case. North doesn’t rely too much on flashes of intuition. He is patient and methodical.

The old Spanish fortress plays a major role in the story. As does a shipwreck. There’s also the curious and colourful profession practised by one of the chief murder suspects before he enlisted in the army. There are conflicted loyalties and there are double-crosses.

The climate becomes almost a character in the story. The stifling heat raises tensions ever higher and there’s a hurricane on the way. The approaching hurricane plays a key role in the plot, adding a crucial time element.

This book is very much in the vein of the puzzle-plot mysteries of the golden age of detective fiction and I think it qualifies as a fair-play mystery. This one has a pleasingly intricate plot that comes together neatly at the end.

I am personally a huge fan of mysteries, thrillers, horror tales and melodramas in tropical settings. You get that feel of overheated passions and the loosening of moral restraints which always leads to entertaining emotional mayhem. It always works for me and it works in this book.

The Sulu Sea Murders is thoroughly enjoyable and is highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several of F. Van Wyck Mason’s other Hugh North novels - The Shanghai Bund Murders, The Fort Terror Murders, The Singapore Exile Murders, The Branded Spy Murders and The Budapest Parade Murders.

I’ve also reviewed his The Castle Island Case which doesn’t feature Hugh North but is a fascinating illustrated murder mystery with photographic clues.

W. Somerset Maugham’s Miss Thompson (Rain)

Rain is one of the best known short stories by W. Somerset Maugham (one of the grandmasters of the art of short story writing). It was originally published as Miss Thompson in the American magazine The Smart Set in April 1921. Maugham claims to have written the story in 1920. It’s a longish short story, long enough to be regarded in some genres as a novelette.

The story was adapted into an astonishingly successful stage play, Rain, by John Colton and Clemence Randolph. The success of the play was presumably the reason the title of the story was changed to Rain.

The story was made into a silent film in 1928, with Gloria Swanson starring and with the title Sadie Thompson. 

A few years later it was made into a talkie, Rain (1932), with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston. That movie was a commercial flop, for reasons I have never been able to fathom. It has since built a substantial cult following.

In 1953 it was filmed again as Miss Sadie Thompson with Rita Hayworth. This was a sanitised squeaky clean version and a waste of Miss Hayworth’s considerable talents.

This is the story of a battle of wills between a prostitute and a preacher.

The 1920s and early 30s were a period of rebellion against the moralising and social rigidity of the late Victorian era. It was also a period in which at least some sections of society were embracing sexual freedom. The flapper became a symbol of rebellion, and so too did the prostitute. Books and movies not only dealt with prostitutes sympathetically but even admiringly. They were seen as women determined to live their own lives even if it meant flaunting social conventions.

Of course the spirit of rebellion was fairly thoroughly crushed by the Depression, by a resurgence in religious moralism and by the Second World War which trained the population to accept a high degree of social control.

The story begins with the arrival of a steamer at Pago Pago. The passengers include a Dr Macphail and his wife. They also include fanatical puritan missionary Mr Davidson and his malevolent wife. The passengers also include Sadie Thompson. It is to be a very brief stopover. The passengers will soon be departing for other destinations, but an outbreak of measles strands them in Pago Pago for two weeks. The only accomodation on offer is provided by a half-European trader. The passengers are not pleased, and the relentless rain adds to their discomfort.

Davidson and his wife are scandalised by Sadie’s behaviour. She entertains men in her room. They listen to records and they dance. Davidson fears they do other things. He is convinced that Sadie had been working in Honolulu’s notorious red-light district. He is convinced she is a prostitute. Which she almost certainly has been. Whether she is plying her trade in Pago Pago is left obscure, but Davidson sees her very existence as a threat to morality. 

Davidson has proudly told Dr Macphail of his campaign to eradicate sin on the small island where his mission is located. To Macphail it sounds like Davidson and his wife are brutal merciless unscrupulous tyrants who have instituted a reign of misery on the island but Davidson has no doubt he is doing the Lord’s work. Both Dr Macphail and the reader will suspect that Davidson is motivated by an intense pleasure in exercising power over the lives of others. 

And Davidson has no intention of permitting the existence of sinners like Sadie. He is going to save her soul. If that fails she must of course be destroyed. And Davidson has found a way to destroy her - if he has her sent back to San Francisco she will go straight to prison.

The odds seem to be in Davidson’s favour. And it appears that Sadie, utterly defeated, will agree to whatever fate Davidson decrees for her.

But there are some major plot twists to come.

And some slight differences to the 1932 film version. The endings are very very similar with the ending of the story having a slightly harsher edge to it, but to my mind both endings work.

Maugham was a fine writer who was especially adept at the short story format. He seems to be out of fashion these days which is a great pity. This is a superb novelette with plenty of overheated tropical atmosphere and some nice touches of sleaze, hypocrisy, repression, sin and guilt. Very highly recommended.

Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man

Dan J. Marlowe’s The Vengeance Man was published in 1966.

Dan J. Marlowe (1917-1986) was an American writer of noir-inflected pulp crime fiction.

Jim Wilson has decided to murder his wife Mona. He also intends to get away with it. There are various ways to go about getting away wth murder. Jim intends simply to shoot her, with plenty of witnesses. If he plays it right no jury will convict him.

He has some personal resentment towards Mona but that’s not why he wants to kill her. It has more to do with her father, Judge Harrington. Judge Harrington runs the town of Moline in South Carolina and in fact most of the county. He hates Jim and has made things difficult for Jim’s construction company. Jim wants revenge, but he wants more than that. He wants to replace Harrington. He wants to be the guy who runs things in Moline. And he has a pretty good plan to bring this about.

The plan is elaborate and it involves Ludmilla Pierson, with whom he went to high school. It involves blackmail, but he’s interested in influence, not money.

Jim Wilson’s plot to oust Harrington slowly matures. Harrington is old and his health is failing but he’s still powerful. Jim has to cover every angle.

He also discovers that while he’d always considered Judge Harrington a big shot there are much bigger much more powerful players in this game. Jim is moving into the big leagues.

These people are not exactly gangsters and this is not exactly a gangster story. They’re businessmen and politicians, they’re thoroughly corrupt, but they don’t deal in rackets like narcotics and gambling. They deal in rackets like construction. It’s all about carving up a territory and then making sure the right people get the right contracts from city and county and state officials. It’s crooked but respectable. These people don’t have rivals gunned down by machine-guns, but they do play hardball and if someone needs to be taken out of the picture they get the cops to do it. They own the cops.

Jim Wilson is a hard ruthless man and he’s smart, but he’s playing in a league with other smart hard ruthless players with more experience. Jim’s rise to the top seems unstoppable but the elaborate nature of his plans does mean that things could go wrong. He just needs to make one mistake. Trust one person he shouldn’t trust. Make one wrong assumption. Jim is learning, but is he learning fast enough?

There’s also the woman problem. Jim’s relationships with women are difficult. When he married Mona it didn’t take him long to realise he’d made a mistake. He doesn’t intend to make mistakes with Ludmilla or Veronica, but when sexual desire and emotional jealousies enter the picture any man can make a mistake.

There are some major plot twists which are pretty obvious and you have to wonder how a smart guy like Jim didn’t see them coming. But then what makes Jim an interesting anti-hero is that he’s smart but maybe the people he thinks he’s manipulating are actually just a bit smarter than he is.

This is noir fiction, if you’re prepared to define noir very broadly and very loosely. It has a noir kind of plot. There’s more than one femme fatale. But Jim Wilson isn’t quite a textbook noir protagonist. He doesn’t get corrupted. He’s corrupt from the start.

The Vengeance Man isn’t particularly violent. There’s some sleaze, but not a great deal. It is hardboiled, there is an overwhelming atmosphere of corruption and there’s as much paranoia as you could want. It’s reasonably entertaining and it’s recommended.

This novel is one of three in the Stark House Noir Classics paperback A Trio of Gold Medals, along with Fletcher Flora’s Park Avenue Tramp and Charles Runyon’s The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed. All were originally Fawcett Gold Medal paperback originals.

Thorp McClusky’s Loot of the Vampire

Thorp McClusky’s short novel Loot of the Vampire was published in two parts in Weird Tales in 1936. It’s a vampire story in a contemporary big-city American setting.

Thorp McClusky (1906-1975) is a rather obscure American writer whose works appeared in pulp magazines in the 1930s.

It begins with a jewel robbery. The jeweller has been discussing the sale of a very valuable string of pearls to a European nobleman. The jeweller is found dead and the pearls are gone. The strange thing is that there’s no obvious way the killer could have made his escape.

Even more curious is the fact that the jeweller seemed to be suffering from a very serious case of anaemia. It’s almost as if there’s no blood at all in the body.

Then on the following day the dead jeweller turns up at the jewellery story, very much alive. The police commissioner and Detective-Lieutenant Peters are both puzzled and alarmed.

They do have a suspect, a Count Woertz. The count is about to hold a mind-reading session at a swank charity party. Lieutenant Peters poses as a guy wanting to have his mind read and discovers, to his consternation, that the count really can read minds.

Peters has an interest in the occult and he wonders if possibly they’re dealing with a vampire.

There’s no solid evidence against the count and the police commissioner has another problem. He’s in love with a sweet girl named Mary. They’re going to be married. The count has threatened to steal Mary away from the commissioner and the big worry is that he may be able to do just that by using some form of mind control.

There’s not much more than this to the plot. There are a couple of slightly creepy moments. There’s no action to speak of. There’s no reign of terror carried out by the vampire.

And to be honest there’s not much suspense. We don’t get enough of a sense that Mary is in real danger, and we don’t get enough of the feeling that the natural order is being threatened and that’s something I consider to be an essential element in supernatural horror.

The sea chase is the highlight and it’s not too badly done.

The vampire in this tale conforms to some of the rules of established vampire lore as it stood at the time, but not all. This vampire cannot tolerate sunlight but on the other hand he’s totally indifferent to garlic. The mirror stuff is an interesting variation on the usual idea. I like vampire stories that vary the rules a bit.

Loot of the Vampire is OK but it doesn’t quite deliver the goods. It’s recommended purely for its historical interest and its curiosity value.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with The Man Who Made Maniacs in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions.

This story seems to belong to a very short-lived 1930s genre, the weird detective story. These were basically hardboiled detective stories with some supernatural and horror elements added for extra spice. That’s actually a promising combination.

If the weird detective story genre attracts you then you should check out Off-Trail Publications’ volume Cult of the Corpses which includes two novellas of this type by Maxwell Hawkins and they’re both far superior to Loot of the Vampire.

Emmett McDowell's Citadel of the Green Death

Citadel of the Green Death is a short novel by Emmett McDowell originally published in the fall 1948 issue of Planet Stories.

Emmett McDowell (1914-1975) was a very obscure American science fiction writer.

The novel is set several thousand years in the future. Joel Hakkyt has been convicted on manslaughter and maladjustment. He is to be sent to the Experimental Station where the maladjusted are used as guinea pigs in scientific research. No-one ever leaves the Experimental Station alive. Joel is however offered an alternative. Selected convicts are sent to Asgard, a planet in the Centauri system, rather the Experimental Station. Slave labour is desperately needed for the colony on Asgard.

Joel is puzzled by a cryptic message given to him by a guard.

Asgard is a jungle planet and it’s rather hostile. The plants can move about and some are carnivorous. It is believed that there are human-like creatures on Asgard. Their villages have been found. Curiously the creatures themselves have never been seen.

Joel makes a deadly enemy on the voyage to Asgard but he also meets a pretty slave girl named Tamis. There’s a certain immediate attraction between Joel and Tamis.

Joel will find out that he has already met one of the human-like inhabitants of Asgard. They are the Ganelons. Physically them seem very human indeed but in other ways they have evolved very differently. Joel will also find himself mixed up in a simmering revolt.

He has also attracted the attention of Priscilla Cameron, the notoriously wicked daughter of the governor of Asgard. Priscilla decides to buy Joel as her personal slave. She’s had a good look at his body and she likes what she sees.

There’s also something strange about Joel. He’s not just maladjusted.

And there isn’t just one revolt in the offing on Asgard. There are plots and counter-plots and conspiracies within conspiracies.

This novel deals with one of those “utopia gone wrong” futures. Human civilisation seems to be thriving but anyone who doesn’t fit in is ruthlessly weeded out. Humanity has already wiped out the human-like civilisations of Mars and Venus. There’s a subtle but definite edge of totalitarianism to this future human civilisation. It’s a society that seems to be run by doctors and scientists but it’s far from being a humane society, and aliens who encounter humans can look forward to extinction or exploitation. The scientists believe in rational scientific breeding and have eliminated useless outdated concepts like love.


The novel explores evolutionary alternatives. The Ganelons have primitive technology but they have developed some remarkable powers over their own bodies. They have some telepathic powers (an incredibly popular theme in science fiction from the 40s to the 70s). They also have other abilities which explain why the colonists on Asgard have never seen them.

Their society is based on coöperation rather than exploitation.

McDowell isn’t a great prose stylist and this novel is a bit rough around the edges. It’s typical of quite a bit of pulp science fiction of its era, a pulp action-adventure tale that also tries to deal with some science fiction Big Ideas. That’s one of the things that makes the pulp science fiction of that era so fascinating. In this case the Big Ideas are ideas that other writers were addressing as well. McDowell does a reasonable job grappling with ideas about the future of the species whilst still providing plenty of romance and mayhem. And yes, it includes space opera staples such as battles with ray guns.

Citadel of the Green Death is fast-paced and entertaining and manages to deal with potentially silly concepts quite skilfully. Highly recommended.

This novel is paired with Dwight D. Swain’s Drummers of Daugovo in one of Armchair Fiction’s excellent two-novel paperback editions.

Fred MacIsaac’s Balata

Fred MacIsaac’s adventure novel Balata originally appeared in serial form in six issues of Argosy magazine in 1930 and 1931.

Fred MacIsaac (1886-1940) was an American who turned to writing fiction after a varied career in journalism and concert management.

Balata is the story of a small group of men searching for a balata forest deep in the Amazon rainforest. The Brazilian rubber industry, once thriving, is now languishing due to competition from British plantations in Malaya. But somewhere in the Amazon basin there is a much greater prize than rubber - balata. What is balata? According to the story it’s a kind of super-rubber, and much more valuable than rubber. It is harvested like rubber and the balata tree grows nowhere else in the world.

American explorer Felix Dexter has found the world’s biggest balata forest. He needs money to exploit his discovery and that’s where millionaire Les Gorman comes in. Gorman has an adventurous spirit and is prepared to back the project but first he wants to see that balata forest for himself. An expedition is organised. Gorman invites his old college buddy Peter Holcomb, now fallen on hard times, to join the expedition. Gorman’s sister Louise invites herself along, despite the protests of the men who feel that it is much too dangerous. Gorman recruits a dozen other ill-assorted Europeans and some native porters. The expedition will begin on a river steamboat.

Other people want that balata. And they will stop at nothing, not even murder, to get it. The most dangerous of these men is Brazilian rubber baron Carlos Aguedarno, a very ruthless man indeed.

To complicate things Peter Holcomb, Felix Dexter and Ageudarno all want to marry Louise Gorman. Louise wants nothing to do with Aguedarno but the rubber baron is prepared to use whatever methods may be necessary in order to persuade her. So there are going to be major romantic dramas.

The expedition seems to be ill-fated from the start. There are cut-throats lying in wait as well as hostile tribes, all stirred up by Aguedarno’s money.

You can anticipate a lot of the obstacles and dangers these adventurers are going to face but MacIsaac throws in a few neat plot twists and turns, and even the more clichéd action scenes are handled with energy and style. And there really is as much action and danger as any reasonable reader could hope for.

And it is a neat plot. On more than one occasion the adventurers seem to be in hopeless predicaments but MacIsaac finds interesting ways to extricate them. The ending is nicely suspenseful and satisfying.

Most of the characters are standard types but there are some colourful villains. Both Pete Holcomb and Felix Dexter are a bit more than standard square-jawed action heroes. Pete has been a failure at everything he has attempted and he’s really just drifting through life. The expedition is his chance to make something of himself. It might be his last chance. And he may find out something about himself. Felix Dexter is on the surface the perfect heroic man of action but as the adventure proceeds some of the expedition members develop nagging doubts about him, and the reader will share those doubts. Perhaps in some ways this is Dexter’s last chance as well.

We remain uncertain until the end just how the characters arcs of these two men will resolve themselves.

The style is pure pulp, which is perfectly fine by me. It’s lively and the story powers along at a pleasingly brisk pace.

Balata is a very fine tale of jungle adventure and it’s highly recommended.

Balata has been reprinted in paperback in Altus Press’s Argosy Library series. It’s also available in those ebook formats of which I disapprove so strongly.

S.P. Meek's The Drums of Tapajos

The Drums of Tapajos was serialised in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in December 1930 and January 1931. All I know about the author, S.P. Meek (1894-1972) is that he was American and had served in the military in the First World War, and that he was for a brief period quite prolific.

This novel has been re-issued in paperback by Armchair Fiction in their excellent Lost World-Lost Race series.

The book begins with three American servicemen who joined up too late to see action in the First World War. Action is what they now want. They’re bored by the peacetime army. They consider heading to South America in the hope of getting mixed up in a revolution. Thy have no political beliefs, but a revolution sounds like it might be exciting. Then Willis, a friend of theirs, tells them an odd story about an adventure he had in the wilds of Brazil. A strange old man suddenly appeared and gave him a knife and a map, and then promptly died. Willis lost the map but he thinks he remembers the main details.

The knife is interesting - very very old indeed. Willis has had the blade analysed but no-one can identify the allow from which it was made. Willis suggests that the four of them set off into the Amazon rainforest to find the source of that knife. They may not find anything worthwhile but it will be a grand adventure, and there’s always the slim chance of finding treasure. That knife was clearly manufactured by an advanced civilisation, and that certainly suggests the possibility of finding the ruins of a lost civilisation. And where there are ruins there may be treasure.

They set off down the Rio Tapajos. The locals warn them that they are headed into forbidden territory. If they hear the drums their fate is sealed.

The journey down the river provides plenty of danger and excitement - alligators, tribesmen shooting poisoned arrows at them, strange bloodcurdling screams from the forest, and tracks that are hard to interpret as being the tracks of any living animals.

Of course they do find a city, but it’s no ruin. The city of Troyana is run by people who appear to be Freemasons, of a sort. Or perhaps they follow a system that was to some extent the origin of Freemasonry. The city has been there for six thousand years.

It’s not Atlantis, but some of the inhabitants were originally from Atlantis.

It’s a utopia of sorts. Perhaps you could call it a flawed utopia. It has a definite dark side.

They are welcomed by a guy named Nahum. He happens to have three very beautiful granddaughters, a fact of keen interest to the young Americans.

Are the four Americans prisoners or guests? They’re not certain. Do the rulers of Troyana have friendly or unfriendly intentions? That is also uncertain.

For the scientifically inclined narrator, Lieutenant Duncan, there is much of interest. We get a certain amount of technobabble, reflecting the technological obsessions of 1930 - radio, a kind of television, unlocking the power of the atom. The city is largely automated, but there is an underclass who may no slaves but they certainly appear to live in conditions of forced servitude. Those who rule the city are enlightened, in some ways.

The Americans witness a religious ritual which reminds them of rituals of the ancient world, and that ritual is where the trouble starts.

It’s an entertaining story with some decent world-building. Perhaps some of the action scenes could have been a bit more exciting.

The most interesting aspect of the novel is a certain ambiguity in the way this lost city is described, and in the view of the young adventurers towards this lost civilisation. And some ambiguity on the part of the city-dwellers towards these outsiders. There’s also some ambiguity about the intentions of our four heroes. Do they seek merely to enrich themselves?

The ending leaves some questions unanswered. It suggests that Meek was keeping his options open in case he decided to write a sequel, and in fact in 1932 he did just that. It’s called Troyana and if I ever come across a copy I’ll probably pick it up.

The Drums of Tapajos isn’t one of the great lost civilisation tales but it’s a solid adventure. Recommended, especially if (like me) you just can’t get enough of the lost world genre.

Paul S. Meskil’s Sin Pit

Sin Pit is a noir novel published by Lion Books in 1954. It was a veteran newspaper reporter Paul S. Meskil’s only novel. And it’s quite something. When he was persuaded to write the novel he was told that the publisher didn’t want it set in New York or LA or Chicago. That had been done too often. Since East St Louis was one of his old stomping grounds as a crime reporter he decided to use it as the setting.

Barney Black is a cop so he’s used to seeing dead bodies. The sight of the corpse of the unidentified young blonde doesn’t upset him too much. He wants to find the killer, because it’s his job. Apart from that he doesn’t care much. Barney has never cared much about women anyway. For Barney women just fulfil a physical need. At the age of thirty-two he has never been in love. He intends to keep it that way. His mother had been a tramp and he assumes that a woman will always be trouble for a man.

There was something about the dead girl that bothered him. Eventually he figures it out. He had seen her before. She had worked briefly as a barmaid in one of the dives that he frequents. So now the cops have a name for the girl. Randy.

Randy had been shot. She hadn’t been raped but her clothes were all torn up. The most notable thing about her was that she had been whipped. And obviously she’d been whipped on more than one occasion.

Barney follows up a few leads, finds out that Randy worked as a whore, and the trail leads him to Grace Trudo. It’s a fateful meeting. Barney can see that Grace is no good. She’s a tramp, and she’s dangerous. She oozes sex. He hates her instinctively. And he wants her. He wants her more than he’s ever wanted any woman.

Barney thinks of himself as an honest cop. Which means he’s not as corrupt as some of the other cops on the force. Barney just takes corruption for granted. It’s no big deal. Following the rules is no big deal either. It’s only a problem if you’re careless. His superiors also take it for granted that rules like remaining within your own jurisdiction or respecting suspect’s rights are only important if the press decides to make a song and dance about them.

Barney also understands that if you want information from suspects, or even witnesses, sometimes you have to beat it out of them. Barney is just a regular cop. He thinks of himself as a good cop. Every good cop keeps a rubber hose in his desk drawer.

So it’s not surprising that Barney bends a few rules in the course of his investigation.

He is however a competent enough investigator and soon he has a theory about the crime. The theory explains the other murders pretty well as well, because Randy’s murder does indeed lead to other killings.

Of course Barney gets involved with Grace. They can’t keep their hands off each other. She’s married, but that’s not a problem for either of them. And now he realises he had Grace all wrong at the beginning. Now he figures he knows all about her, and all about her marriage.

In fact there’s a lot he doesn’t know about her marriage. It’s a slightly unusual marriage, to say the least.

And Barney is drawn into the noir nightmare world, where things go on that even a hardened cop could scarcely have imagined.

And for the reader there are some weird plot twists, which lead to a very surprising ending.

This is a seriously hardboiled novel, it’s most definitely noir and it’s pretty sleazy. This is the seamy underside of 1950s America. It’s highly recommended.

Stark House have issued Sin Pit in a three-novel paperback edition, Lion Trio 3: Femmes Fatale, along with Dark the Summer Dies by Walter Untermeyer Jr and The Devil's Daughter by Peter Marsh.

The Avengers - Dead Duck

Dead Duck is an original novel published in 1966 and based on the television series The Avengers. 

It was credited to Patrick Macnee although it seems to have been written by Peter Leslie (who wrote some very decent TV tie-in novels).

It’s an engagingly offbeat story with a fine crazy finale. It captures the feel of the series reasonably well. Fans of the TV series should enjoy this novel.

My full review can be found at Cult TV Lounge.

Laurence Manning's World of the Mist

Laurence Manning (1899-1972) was a Canadian writer of science fiction. He wrote stories for pulp magazines from 1928 to 1935 after which he devoted himself to his nursery business although he produced one or two later stories. His short novel World of the Mist, published in two parts by Wonder Stories in 1935, was one of his last science fiction stories.

You have to bear in mind the historical background to this novel. In 1935 people were just starting to get excited by the latest advances in physics. People still didn’t know what to make of quantum mechanics but Einstein’s theories had captured the public imagination. People were starting to get the idea that the universe might be a very strange place indeed. And they’d started on all sorts of speculations on the implications of Einstein’s theories. Some of these speculations were totally and completely nuts but they were often highly entertaining as the basis for science fiction stories.

There was also a growing obsession with the idea of other dimensions - the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, maybe lots of dimensions. Maybe whole alternative realities. World of the Mist taps into these growing obsessions in a really major way.

Three guys are discussing the possibilities of other dimensions. They reason that humans can only exist in three dimensions, but maybe we exist in the first, second and third dimensions and perhaps humans could exist in the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions. They come up with the idea that the only way to access such dimensions would be by using gravity. But what you’d need would be something nice and compact in size but with the enormous mass necessary to generate an incredibly powerful gravitational field.

They figure that the right material would be debris from an exploded star. They further speculate that there are thousands of meteorites orbiting Earth and some of those meteorites might be composed of exploded star stuff. Of course you’d have to get into orbit to find those meteorites so you’d need a spaceship. By a stroke of good fortune two of the guys, Wadsley and Cogger, have the necessary know-how. And the third guy, Trench (the narrator of the story), has the money. He has pots of money.

They build their spaceship and they find a meteorite that looks really promising. They decide to investigate it up close.

And that’s where the story starts to get seriously weird. I’m not going to spoil things by telling you anything about the weirdness other than the fact that what they find is even stranger than their wild theories.

This is definitely an attempt to do what would later be called hard science fiction (even if the science it’s based on is wildly and outrageously speculative and crazy). But the emphasis is on the scientific stuff. This is not space opera. You won’t find any space battles or ray guns in this story.

There is however plenty of danger and excitement. And while our spacefarers have discovered a whole new universe they face one big problem - how are they ever going to get back to our reality?

Manning really does come up with some intriguingly mind-bending off-the-wall stuff. This is wildly imaginative writing.

There’s also just a trace of philosophical and maybe even religious or quasi-religious speculation. Wadsley is a bit obsessed by ghosts and the afterlife.

Structurally the book follows a pattern that was very popular at the time. It’s a story told by someone to someone else. The narrator of what might be called the framing story is a lighthouse keeper named Jellicoe who has picked up some strange radio messages which he has transcribed. The bulk of the book is the story as set down by Jellicoe, a story narrated by Trench.

Finding a workable ending for the story would have been a challenge but Manning manages it rather well.

World of the Mist is thoroughly enjoyable science fiction that attempts to probe the fringes of human knowledge of how the universe works, as that knowledge stood in 1935. Highly recommended.

Johnston McCulley’s King of Chaos

Steeger Press have reprinted five Johnston McCulley novels in a mammoth omnibus edition, King of Chaos. It’s a great chance to discover just how interesting a writer McCulley was.

American writer Johnston McCulley (1883-1958) is an important figure in the history of adventure fiction and pulp fiction who is now sadly neglected. He is remembered mainly as the creator of Zorro but while the various Zorro movies and the 1960s TV series have kept Zorro alive as a pop culture icon McCulley’s original Zorro novels and stories are all but forgotten.

McCulley wrote several Zorro novels and numerous short stories but they were only a part of his vast output. He created a number of memorable pulp heroes, most notably The Black Star, The Spider and The Crimson Clown.

The title story, King of Chaos, was originally published in Argosy in 1912. This novel belongs more to the tradition of late Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction than to what we would normally think of as the pulp tradition. It has a definite Ruritanian flavour. In fact the theme of a man playing a royal role to which he may or may not be entitled is fairly obviously going to remind readers of Anthony Hope’s 1894 adventure classic The Prisoner of Zenda. And the tone is also not dissimilar.

Carl Henderson is twenty-one years old and he’s an obscure clerk in a brokerage office in Seattle. He’s rather surprised to find himself kidnapped. He awakes on board a steam yacht heading out to sea. He does not awaken in a filthy hold or a cell. He awakens in a luxuriously appointed stateroom. And everyone keeps referring to him as Your Majesty.

A certain Lord Bellan claims to be Carl’s prime minister. He assures Carl that the young man is in fact a king, but he cannot tell him where his realm is. The yacht’s secret destination is Carl’s kingdom.

Being a king turns out to be a rather difficult and wearisome task. There are two factions on board the yacht. One faction follows Lord Bellan. The other follows the yacht’s master, Captain Barrington. There is bad blood between Bellan and Barrington. The reason for this is Lady Elizabeth Bellan, Lord Bellan’s sister. There’s a romantic triangle in which Carl has become unwittingly involved but Lord Bellan’s ambitions play a part as well. An experienced king would have trouble keeping the peace between these two factions. Carl does his best, with some assistance from the ship’s doctor (who is also the court physician), an Irishman named Michael Murphy. Carl also gets some unexpected aid from Lady Elizabeth Bellan’s charming younger sister Grace.

While the two factions are constantly at each other’s throats Lord Bellan still refuses to tell anyone what is actually going on, where the yacht is headed and how a humble clerk like Carl Henderson could possibly be a king.

Bellan eventually does have to reveal the truth, and it’s the kind of outrageous story you expect in a late Victorian/Edwardian adventure tale. Carl had a suspicion there might be pirates involved (there was a rumour in his family that his great grandfather had been a pirate), and that turns out to be correct.

When the royal yacht arrives at Carl’s kingdom there is more trouble for the young king to sort out.

His kingdom is perhaps not quite the kingdom he might have hoped for.

And being a king is not all fun and games. In fact Carl finds it to be a nightmare. He makes mistakes but the subsequent disasters are by no means all his fault. He learns about betrayal, and he learns to be a bit more wary about trusting people. He does learn about kingship along the way.

Anyone who has read McCulley’s original novel of Zorro is aware that McCulley disliked injustice and he particularly disliked abuse of power. These themes surface in King of Chaos as well.

The obvious influences on this tale would be Anthony Hope’s great Ruritanian adventure romances The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and Rupert of Hentzau (1898), both of which I’ve reviewed here. There’s also a certain kinship with Rudyard Kipling’s magnificent 1888 short story The Man Who Would Be King.

I’ve also reviewed McCulley’s most famous book, The Mark of Zorro (1924, originally serialised as The Curse of Capistrano in 1919).

It’s a rather outlandish tale and it’s best not to think about the plausibility of the plot. King of Chaos is however quite entertaining and it’s recommended.

Charles F. Meyers' No Time for Toffee

I know nothing at all about Charles F. Meyers apart from the fact that he wrote a series of humorous science fiction novels about a girl named Toffee. One of these was No Time for Toffee, published in 1952. The fact that he wrote several Toffee books would seem to indicate that they enjoyed some popularity.

The hero of the novel is advertising guru Marc Pillsworth. He’s been shot and is possibly dying. That’s bad news for the High Council. It means that George Pillsworth will be returning to Earth. George Pillsworth is a kind of ghost. He’s the spiritual emanation of Marc Pillsworth. George of course looks exactly like Marc. George can’t stay on Earth permanently until Marc is dead. This annoys him because there are so many things he likes about Earth. There are so many opportunities for dishonesty. There’s good booze. And of course there are women. For a spiritual entity George’s nature may seem to be not very spiritual.

As for Toffee, she’s a smokin’ hot redhead. She’d be the ideal woman if only she actually existed. But she doesn’t. Or maybe she does.

Marc’s immediate problem is that he’s going to have emergency surgery performed on him. The doctors don’t know it but the surgery will certainly kill him. Marc knows this because Toffee told him.

We then get a zany frenetic parade of craziness as Marc tries to avoid the surgeon’s knife, Toffee tries out her new dematerialisation gadget on him, Marc and Toffee try to keep George under control and a crooked congressman tries to have Marc murdered.

This is not science fiction but I guess it qualifies as a comic fantasy novel. The problem with comic novels is that the authors sometimes try too hard for zaniness and this is at times a problem here. It does however have some amusing moments and some moments of inspired lunacy.

It also has some fairly clever ideas. George Pillsworth is a ghost but he’s a totally different and original kind of ghost. He also has the ability to assume genuinely corporeal form. At least he’s corporeal enough to drink whiskey and apparently have physical relations with women. He’s definitely not your everyday ghost.

Toffee is a figment of Marc’s imagination but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist. Marc can see her and when she takes on corporeal form other people can see her. When she slugs a bad guy with a whiskey bottle he reacts the way a guy would react if he had been slugged with a whiskey bottle. She can drive a car. She also drinks whiskey (with some enthusiasm). She’s a flesh-and-blood woman but she isn’t real. It’s a cute idea.

By 1952 standards this would also qualify as a slightly risqué tale. There’s some definite sexual humour. Toffee might or might not be real but she’s certainly sexy. She wears very little clothing. In fact her idea of getting dressed for the day is to slip on nothing but an almost transparent négligée and then she’s ready to face the world.

As a character Toffee has a certain charm. She’s cute and feisty and she’s fun when she’s got a few drinks in her.

Whether you’ll enjoy this book or not depends on how you feel about zany screwball humour. If that’s your thing you’ll probably like the book, if it’s not your thing you may find it irritating.

No Time for Toffee is definitely an oddball novel. If you enjoy humorous science fiction/fantasy romps and you’re in the mood for something very light indeed you might enjoy this one.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with Kris Neville’s Special Delivery in one of their two-novel paperback editions.

Robert Martin's Little Sister

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

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

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

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

And then somebody drugs Brice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sixth Glacier by Marius

The Sixth Glacier is a 1929 end-of-the-world science fiction novel written by an author who called himself Marius. Marius was a pseudonym used by Steve Benedict, about whom I know nothing. The novel was originally published, in two instalments, in Amazing Stories.

A young reporter from Science News is sent to interview a transportation tycoon named Dunraven. It seems that Dunraven has zero interest in transportation. He’s a rich old man and he can devote himself to his hobby. His hobby is palaeontology. He believes he has discovered the ruins of an ancient city in Mexico. A city 100,000 years old, dating from before the last Ice Age. And in this city he has found evidence to believe that another Ice Age is imminent.

The old man is right. The new Ice Age is on its way. Dunraven dismisses the various theories that were current at the time regarding the causes of the succession of ice ages. He has a theory of his own, and within a short time there is evidence which appears to confirm his theory. The solar system is about to drift through a vast frigid nebula, something that happens every hundred thousand years or so. Soon much of the world will be covered by vast ice sheets.

Most of the book is taken up by descriptions of the devastation that ensues. Marius is not one of those starry-eyed types who thinks that disasters bring out the best in people. In this novel the collapse of civilisation leads to wars, to lawlessness, mass murder and cannibalism.

Civilisation doesn’t quite end. The tropics are still habitable. The tropical zones are now filled with refugees from more northern latitudes.

It all seems hopeless until Dunraven hits on an idea. In the finest tradition of pulp fiction his idea sounds crazy but it just might work.

The reporter has some personal dramas to worry about as well. He’s in love with Dunraven’s daughter Clara. He knows he has a rival for her affections. He will discover that in fact he has two rivals.

Mostly the book is a kind of fairly dry documentary-style account of the disaster but Marius does throw in a few dramatic scenes as the reporter finds himself first at the mercy of the savage new tribes of igloo-dwellers and then a huge pack of wolves.

More interesting are Dunraven’s theories about the history of life on Earth. They are of course scientific nonsense but in 1929 they might have seemed more convincing. And they are entertaining. Dunraven believes that intelligent life has arisen on Earth many times, often in peculiar forms. Such as the spider-people.

The science might all be very dubious, basically silly pseudoscience, but it’s fun silly pseudoscience.

Apocalyptic novels had started to become a thing in the 1920s, presumably partly because of scientific and technological advances which made people more aware of the possibility of a civilisation-ending disaster. Mostly however it was undoubtedly due to the trauma of the First World War which made optimism seem like an increasingly unrealistic outlook. The most notable of 1920s post-apocalyptic science fiction novels was Nordenholt’s Million by Alfred Walter Stewart (who wrote under the name J.J. Connington and became a very successful detective fiction writer). Nordenholt’s Million was published in 1923 and deals in a remarkably detached and scientific way with the consequences of ecological catastrophe.

This was of course before nuclear weapons were even thought of but as both Connington and Marius demonstrated there were still plenty of plausible end-of-the-world scenarios. And the scenario described in The Sixth Glacier is certainly plausible even if the detailed scientific explanations he gives are mere pseudoscience.

Armchair Fiction have released this novel paired with Harl Vincent’s Before the Asteroids in a double-header paperback edition.

The Sixth Glacier is no masterpiece. Structurally it’s a bit clunky, the prose is less than exciting and there are no memorable characters with whom to empathise. Having said that, if you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic science fiction it does have historical interest.

F. Van Wyck Mason’s The Shanghai Bund Murders

The Shanghai Bund Murders, published in 1933, is the sixth of F. Van Wyck Mason’s Hugh North spy thrillers.

When Mason wrote the first of his twenty-five Hugh North novels in 1930 spy fiction had been around for quite a while but it was mostly a British affair. The big names of the genre - William Le Queux, E. Phillips OIppenheim, H.C. McNeile (“Sapper”) and John Buchan - were all British. Spies in American fiction were confined to pulp fiction and usually featured in outlandish tales incorporating elements of science fiction or the fantastic, or they were essentially wartime adventure stories. There wasn’t really an American school of true serious spy fiction. Mason was a pioneer.

The next important step in the history of American spy fiction would be the appearance of the first of John P. Marquand’s Mr Moto novels, Your Turn, Mr Moto, in 1936.

Having said all this, Mason’s early Hugh North books are hybrids of a sort - they’re murder mysteries with added espionage elements and espionage backgrounds. As the series progressed the books become more and more true spy stories. And Hugh North is a real spy. A professional spy. He’s a U.S. intelligence officer.

Mason loved exotic settings. In fact it’s hard to think of an exotic locale that North doesn’t visit at some stage during the course of his career.

When reading The Shanghai Bund Murders you have to bear in mind that this was still the Warlord Era in China. Powerful and ruthless warlords had divided the country. Some warlords were ideologically motivated but most were mere opportunists out for power and money. The country was in a constant chaos and wars were continually breaking out.

You also have to remember that this was 1933. The world was not yet divided into rival ideological blocs. In these early Hugh North stories you can’t assume that the Germans or the Japanese will be the bad guys. The bad guys might turn out to be the French. Or the Italians. Or in fact just about any great power.

The Shanghai Bund Murders opens on a British steamer in the Yangtze River. Two warlord armies are fighting it out. Hugh North is in China but at this stage he is not anticipating being involved in any kind of espionage drama or foreign intrigue of any kind.

Two of his fellow passengers attract his attention. One is Sam Steel, an unscrupulous American mercenary in the service of one of the warlords. Steel and North have crossed swords before. The other passenger of interest is Mrs Ruby Braunfeld, a very glamorous Austrian lady. Ruby Braunfeld is a “coaster” - a prostitute plying her trade on the Chinese seaboard. But Ruby Braunfeld is no common prostitute - she is a very high-class very expensive courtesan and she is as charming as she is beautiful. At least four of the men aboard the steamer have already fallen in love with her. She’s obviously going to be worth watching.

And then one of her admirers commits suicide. Only it’s no suicide. The man was murdered. The motive was not robbery. It could be a crime passionnel. Hugh North however knows something about the man that suggests the possibility that espionage or international intrigue could be involved. The murdered man was British and it’s a British steamer but Hugh North also has reason to believe that the interests of the United States could be involved.

North knows that there’s some plot afoot and that it has something to do with the power struggle between three warlords. Various great powers believe that is in their interests for one of the three to come out on top. North has to make sure that whichever warlord wins is going to be one friendly to American interests, and British interests. Britain and the U.S. are colonial rivals but in this case they have decided that they have sufficient interests in common to persuade them to coöperate.

If North is going to foil this nefarious plot he has to find out who is behind it and why. In order to do that he will have to discover who murdered the man on the steamer, so there’s both a murder mystery and a spy thriller plot strand and both plot strands are inextricably linked.

Sam Steel is a suspect, but so is Ruby Braunfeld and so is an enigmatic English tea merchant, and a Chinese gentleman named Chang, and a mysterious Frenchman. And they’re all equally plausible suspects, and there’s no way of knowing what kinds of powerful interest groups could be pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Hugh North is a combination of action hero and clever detective. He uses the standard investigative methods you’d expect from a great detective but he gets involved in lots of rough-and-tumble action as well.

I’ve previously reviewed several other Hugh North spy novels - The Fort Terror Murders, The Singapore Exile Murders, The Budapest Parade Murders and the truly excellent The Branded Spy Murders. I can’t recommend the early Hugh North thrillers too highly - they have a distinctive flavour of their own, Mason uses his exotic settings not just to provide colour but as integral parts of his plots, they’re fast-paced and exciting and they have just a bit more emotional depth than you might expect. He really was a very fine writer.

The Shanghai Bund Murders is intelligent and provocative and it works as both murder mystery and spy novel. It’s also great fun. Highly recommended.