Norman Lindsay's The Cousin from Fiji

The Cousin from Fiji is a 1945 humorous novel by Norman Lindsay.

Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) was the one genuinely great painter that Australia produced, and he was arguably the finest painter of erotic art of the 20th century. He was also a successful novelist. For my money there were three truly great 20th century humorous novelists - P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Norman Lindsay.

In 1892 Cecilia Belairs and her 18-year-old daughter Ella arrive in Ballarat, a fairly substantial provincial city northwest of Melbourne. They have just retuned to Australia from Fiji where Cecilia owns a sugar plantation. They move in with Cecilia’s brother George, her sister Sarah, Sarah’s daughter Florence and Grandma. It’s a decidedly odd household.

Cecilia is scatterbrained and has always been very fond of men. Sarah disapproves of what she regards as Ella’s lax upbringing. She is certain that Ella is a wicked girl.

At this point I should explain that Norman Lindsay spent his life battling the wowsers, this being an Australia slang term for moral busybodies and self-appointed guardians of public morality. Many of Lindsay’s novels were banned in Australia. His paintings were controversial. In 1940 sixteen crates of his paintings were burned by U.S. authorities.

In all of his novels he has fun at the expense of the wowsers. The Cousin from Fiji could be described as a cheerfully bawdy novel. There’s no graphic content but all of the characters’ motivations have a great deal to do with sex.

Ballarat is a very respectable little city. The inhabitants attend church regularly. They lead morally upright lives - publicly at least. In private Ballarat is a seething hotbed of frustrated erotic desire. Nobody talks about sex because it isn’t nice, but they think about it constantly.

Ella is desperately keen to experience The Great Mystery - sex. Her biggest worry is that her breasts are too small. She fears this may affect her chances of attracting a man. She makes various attempts to experience The Great Mystery.

The next-door neighbour, solicitor Hilary, is middle-aged but has also yet to experience The Great Mystery. He has high hopes that he can persuade Cecilia to help him to remedy this.

The characters are eccentric, outlandish and absurd but Lindsay isn’t really gratuitously cruel. The unsympathetic characters are not evil. They have failed to embrace life and the sensual joys it offers and as a result they have become sex-starved, love-starved, lonely and bitter. The sympathetic characters are the ones who are trying their best to avoid this fate.

Bicycles play a major part in the story. The 1890s was the high point of the bicycle craze and it’s easy to forget the huge social impact of the bicycle. It offered young men and young women unprecedented freedom and adventure, and a means of escaping family supervision. Bicycles were also remarkably useful for arranging assignations of an amorous nature.

And it’s amusing that Melbourne was the place to go for those seeking sin and debauchery. If Lindsay is to be believed the city was knee-deep in whores.

This is an outrageous and extremely funny novel and while the humour can be quite pointed it’s generally very good-natured. Lindsay never allowed his battles with the wowsers to affect his fundamentally cheerful and optimistic nature.

The Cousin from Fiji is an absolute joy. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two more of Norman Lindsay’s comic novels - A Curate in Bohemia (published in 1913) and Age of Consent (published in 1938). They’re both terrific.

The Malignant Metaphysical Menace - The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. 6

Published in 1968, The Malignant Metaphysical Menace was the sixth of Mallory T. Knight’s The Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. sexy spy thrillers. I believe there were nine books in the series.

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

I had previously read the first book in the series, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy. That one came out in 1967. By 1968 the Flower Children were big news and the hippie thing was gathering steam, and The Malignant Metaphysical Menace reflects this. This is a far-out psychedelic freak-out of a spy thriller, if you can dig it.

Tim O’Shane is an ace agent for T.O.M.C.A.T., a super-secret U.S. spy agency. He is also an agent for a super-secret Soviet spy agency, but his real loyalty is to T.O.M.C.A.T.

He and his pal and fellow agent Ellis are now in the television production business although that is of course only their cover. They are investigating rumours that a charitable foundation set up by a child TV star named Corky Lovemore is involved in some secret research. She’s the star of a TV series, The Kids from K.I.S.S., and she has the reputation of being so wholesome and loveable that it’s nauseating. Her charitable foundation is the Corky Lovemore Institute To Originate Reforms In Science. I’ll let you figure out the acronym there. Mallory T. Knight just loves naughty acronyms!

The people making the TV series have a sideline - making blue movies.

What bothers Tim is that he has stumbled into some seriously freaky spook stuff - mediums, Chinese psychics, astral travelling and lots of psychedelic chemicals. There seems to be a connection to Corky Lovemore’s foundation. Tim’s psychic contacts (Tim himself is somewhat into this kind of scene) lead him to believe that what is really happening in so bizarre as to defy belief. But it involves aliens. Tim starts to feel that reality is a rug that has just been pulled out from under him.

The zombies are rather worrying as well.

More disturbing of all is that Corky Lovemore turns out to be not at all the cute adorable poppet she seems to be.

As you might have gathered this is very tongue-in-cheek stuff but the author pulls it off surprisingly well. There’s some genuinely inspired craziness, there’s some action, there’s murder and the plot moves along like an express train.

It gets crazier and crazier. While there are mind-altering substances involved it’s clear that seriously weird stuff involving the occult really is happening. This novel abandons the world of reality very early on. It’s a wild tongue-in-cheek romp. It is amusing and it really is fun in a very 1968 way.

There’s also a lot of sex. This is a sleazy spy thriller rather than merely a sexy spy thriller. With some science fiction and horror elements. It’s a book that gleefully rides roughshod over genre boundaries.

If you just let yourself be carried along by the zaniness there’s a lot good-natured enjoyment to be had in The Malignant Metaphysical Menace. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first Man From T.O.M.C.A.T. book, The Dozen Deadly Dragons Of Joy.

Clyde Allison's Have Nude, Will Travel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat

Harry Harrison’s science fiction novel The Stainless Steel Rat was published in 1961, although it drew on two earlier novelettes, The Stainless Steel Rat (1957) and The Misplaced Battleship (1960), which had appeared in the pulp magazine Astounding. A sequel would appear in 1970, to be followed by another ten books in the series.

James Bolivar diGriz is a criminal in a far-future world in which crime is extremely rare. It’s a world that could be described as a flawed utopia. There is law and order and stability and prosperity throughout the far-flung league of planets but these benefits have been purchased at the cost of an oppressive regime of surveillance and social control. But it’s soft oppression. Nobody really minds. Well, almost nobody.

There are a few misfits like James Bolivar diGriz. They turn to crime as an escape from the boredom of an excessively organised society. They crave challenge and adventure. The challenge is what seems to appeal most to diGriz. He likes outwitting the system.

He is a loner. That’s another part of his motivation. He just doesn’t like being told what to do. He hates to be a cog in anyone’s machine. He wants to make his own choices, even if they’re bad choices. He sometimes thinks of himself as a kind of rat, existing in the dark corners of society.

As the story opens he is regretfully shutting down a very successful illegal operation. It is time to move on, in fact it’s time to head for another planet. He finds a suitable planet and soon he has another criminal scheme lined up. But his luck has run out.

Being caught is bad enough, but he is to suffer a fate much more unpleasant than prison. He is informed that he is now a member of the Special Corps, an elite interstellar police squad recruited entirely from former criminals. To his horror he is now a cop.

It’s as boring as he thought it would be, until he discovers something very odd and interesting in the computer files. It’s the blueprint of a space freighter under construction. But to diGriz it doesn’t look like a freighter. It looks uncannily like a space battleship from a thousand years earlier, a time when space battleships were built that were infinitely more powerful than anything known in the present day. He manages to get himself sent on a mission to find out what is going on, and that’s the beginning of a series of wild adventures.

The mission will also bring into into contact with Angelina. Angelina is a lady super-villain. She is a merciless killer, cruel and vindictive and totally lacking in any redeeming qualities. He is horrified by her. She is an evil woman who must be hunted down. At the same time he has to admit that he is strongly attracted to her. She is evil but fascinating. He can see the similarities between Angelina and himself - they’re both both misfits and rebels. He isn’t evil, in fact in all his criminal endeavours he has never actually killed anyone. But the similarities are there. Angelina is like his dark mirror image.

This is a semi-comic adventure romp. Don’t expect the science and technology to be even remotely plausible. Harrison clearly has no interest in such things. He doesn’t even resort to technobabble to try to explain things like faster-than-light travel. He just assumes it’s possible because it’s necessary to the story. 

This is superficially a science fiction novel but Harrison could just as easily have set the story in a world of magic.

The story is what matters, and the high adventure, and most of all the characters. Angelina is a wonderful character. Like diGriz we can’t feel being both repelled and fascinated by her. She might be a bad girl on an epic scale but she lives her life to the full and she loves the risks involved in her lifestyle and she loves the thrills. She’s an adventure junkie.

And diGriz is just as intriguing. He lacks Angelina’s ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness but he has a cheerfully amoral attitude and he’s just as much of an adrenalin junkie. He’s totally dishonest. He will cheat a cabdriver for the sheer pleasure of outwitting him, and will then leave an enormous tip.

Angelina and diGriz are drunk on life.

The Stainless Steel Rat is fine space opera but mostly it’s just superb entertainment. Highly recommended.

Clyde Allison's Gamefinger (Man From Sadisto 6)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

John Gardner's The Liquidator

The Liquidator, published in 1964, was the first of the Boysie Oakes spy thrillers. It was in fact the first work of fiction by Englishman John Gardner (1926-2007) who is perhaps now better remembered for having written more James Bond novels than Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming earned some notoriety among disapproving critics with his habit of dropping brand names of luxury goods into the Bond novels. Within the first couple of pages of The Liquidator Gardner has dropped more brand name than Fleming would in an entire novel. Gardner does it so often that we immediately suspect that he’s having fun with us. That impression is confirmed when we discover that his spy hero, Boysie Oakes, is also a British secret agent with a licence to kill. Bond had one minor weakness - a fear of flying. Sure enough Boysie is afraid of flying as well.

And as the novel opens Boysie (his actual name is Brian Oakes but nobody calls him anything but Boysie) is off to the Riviera for a weekend of fun and sex with his boss’s secretary Iris, so he’s a womaniser as well. In fact a more shameless womaniser than Bond.

While Bond is routinely described as being good-looking but with a rather cruel mouth Boysie is good-looking but with rather cruel eyes.

Gardner is indeed having fun with us, and will have a great deal of fun turning the Bond formula on its head.

Bond does indeed have a licence to kill and he is prepared to do so if it’s necessary. He does not enjoy killing. There are times in the Bond stories when he dislikes it very much. Bond is a killer, but not a conscienceless killer. Boysie on the other hand thoroughly enjoys killing. He has no conscience at all. Mostyn realised this the first time he encountered Boysie, during the war. He saw Boysie kill two men. It was in the line of duty but Mostyn knew there could be no mistaking the positive joy in Boysie’s eyes.

Some years later, in 1956 in fact, Mostyn was a senior member of one of Britain’s intelligence agencies. A major espionage scandal had just erupted. The two spies involved had been suspected but there had been no evidence against them until it was too late. Mostyn’s superior decided that the best way to avoid such unpleasant situations in the future was to forget all this sentimental nonsense about rules of evidence and presumption of innocence and the rule of law. The best thing to do would be simply to liquidate suspected spies. Of course the Prime Minister and the Cabinet and the public might not approve, so it would all have to be done secretly. Mostyn is given the job of setting up a kind of government version of Murder Inc. Of course finding suitable personnel could be tricky. You’d need someone with no conscience whatsoever, someone who genuinely enjoyed killing people. And then Mostyn remembers Boysie. He does some digging around and is convinced that Boysie has committed several murders. The important thing is that he’s never been caught. He’s obviously clever as well as ruthless. Boysie becomes the British Government’s unofficial hitman.

Mostyn is not happy at all to discover that Boysie and Iris have gone away for a dirty weekend together. It has major security implications.

Boysie is looking forward to a weekend of bedroom bliss but it doesn’t turn out that way. Things start to go wrong when he leaves the hotel to buy cigarettes and meets a gorgeous blonde named Coral. The next thing he knows he’s getting hit over the head and knocked unconscious. He wakes up to find that he’s a prisoner (along with his blonde lady friend). He has no idea who was kidnapped him or why but he soon figures out that this is going to be a very unpleasant experience. That proves to be the case, although he does at least get to have sex with the blonde.

Things get worse. Having escaped from imminent death he finds that he’s been activated. He has an assignment. And he’s really not in the mood for it. He’s been beaten up and terrorised and he’s badly shaken and rather frightened and very confused. There are very nasty people trying to kill him. He’s so upset that he’s not even sure if he will be able to perform in the bedroom with Iris.

The fact is that Boysie is not a super secret agent. He’s a good shot and he’s had some training but he’s not a superb fighting machine. His one qualification for the job is his willingness to kill anyone he’s been told to kill. His job is to kill people whom Mostyn considers to be security risks (some of whom might well be innocent of any actual wrongdoing). Boysie’s victims are invariably unarmed and they have no idea that they’ve been targeted for liquidation. Boysie kills efficiently and he’s good at making his kills appear to be accidents or suicides but he’s effective because his victims don’t know what’s coming and are totally unprepared to fight back.

While Bond is an old-fashioned patriot Boysie took the job because it paid well and had attractive fringe benefits. He doesn’t kill for Queen and Country. He’s in it for the money. And the women.

Boysie isn’t particular brave. He doesn’t like the idea of being shot at himself. He doesn’t like that idea one little bit.

So he’s very much an anti-hero. He’s an absolutely deplorable human being. But we can’t help liking him. He’s a bit like Flashman. We know he’s a rotter, we know he’s a wrong ’un, but he provides us with a great deal of amusement. And, as is the case with Flashman, his total shamelessness and his unapologetic acceptance of his outrageous character flaws is oddly appealing. We like Boysie because he know he’s no hero.

And then we get halfway through the book and there’s a major revelation and we find that we’ve been cleverly and wittily deceived. Things are not at all as they appeared to be and we have to revise our assumptions. Boysie is indeed a scoundrel, but he’s not the type of scoundrel we thought he was.

The Liquidator could I suppose he described as a spy spoof but it doesn’t have the tone normally associated with spy spoof. It’s a very amusing book but it tends more towards black comedy rather than high camp. Gardner doesn’t try too hard to go for laughs. He lets the humour develop naturally out of the desperate situations in which Boysie lands himself. It’s more a wickedly sly satire that has fun twisting the conventions of spy fiction, rather than an outrageous campfest. Don’t be misled by that cover that describes it as zany. Zany is not the word I’d use. This is not Carry On Spying. The humour is rather more sophisticated than that.

It really does remind me a great deal of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books. It does for the James Bond-style of spy fiction what the Flashman books did for Victorian tales of adventure and military glory. And It’s worth pointing out that The Liquidator was published five years before the first of the Flashman books. Both The Liquidator and Flashman tapped into the sceptical cynical zeitgeist of the 60s.

The Liquidator is really rather clever in the way it cheerfully and wittily mocks the spy genre, while demonstrating a sound understanding of the conventions of that genre. Highly recommended.

Gardner eventually wrote eight Boysie Oakes books and I’m now rather keen to find out what else Boysie gets up to.

Desmond Skirrow’s I’m Trying To Give It Up

I’m Trying To Give It Up, published in 1968, is the third of Desmond Skirrow’s John Brock thrillers. This particular novel is not quite a spy thriller but since it deals with industrial espionage it’s obviously very closely related to the spy fiction genre.

Desmond Skirrow (1923-1976) was a British advertising executive who turned to writing. He wrote three John Brock novels between 1966 and 1968. He also worked as an illustrator.

John Brock works for an advertising agency. Their biggest client is Tommy Tranter, a tycoon with a finger in every pie. In this novel Brock’s troubles begin with a woman. It’s always the way, isn’t it? The woman is young, petite, cute and blonde. She’s driving a very large white luxury motorcar which she’s just parked and she’s about to get a parking ticket. John Brock firmly believes that a cute blonde should never be subjected to the indignity of a parking ticket. He takes it upon himself to move her car. This causes a misunderstanding and Brock is summoned to Tommy Tranter’s office (which is entirely staffed by gorgeous blondes). He fully expects to be fired.

But he isn’t fired. He’s offered an assignment. It’s a kind of industrial espionage (or in this case counter-espionage) case. Tranter knows that Brock has in the past done cloak-and-dagger work for the Fat Man.

The case involves a man named Weiss who is costing Tranter a lot of money. It has to do with the Product Development department. Which is a bit like MI6, but more efficient.

Brock starts nosing around and gets coshed for his terrible. In fact each time he follows a lead he seems to end up getting hit over the head. He also gets arrested. There’s a London gangster mixed up in the affair. Brock is not sure what part Browning in Product Development plays in the tale. He’s also not sure where Miss Pringle fits in. Miss Pringle is Tranter’s secretary and mistress and she’s a lot of woman, six feet tall and built like an amazon. She has everything a woman should have, only she has more of it than most women.

There’s also a dead body. The man was murdered, more than once.

This is very much an outrageous romp. The plot is impossibly complicated. The characters are all bizarre. The pace is frenetic. It’s not quite an out-and-out spoof but it is very amusing and very tongue-in-cheek. Despite its complexity the plot is quite clever. There are a few far-fetched elements but they remain just within the limits of plausibility.

Brock is the narrator and he’s both cynical and amused. Brock is a tough guy, and ruthless at times. He never wanted to be involved in this case and he keeps telling himself that it’s nothing to do with him. On the other hands he hates his job in advertising so even if the undercover stuff gets him beaten up regularly at least it’s more rewarding than finding ways to persuade people to buy dog food.

Another reason that Brock prefers the cloak-and-dagger stuff is that you meet more dangerous blondes that way. Brock is a bit of a skirt-chaser.

Apart from the spy elements this is a book which mercilessly mocks the world of advertising, and in fact it mocks a great many features of the society of 1968 which thoroughly deserved to be mocked. He gives psychologists a particularly hard time, and does so in a most delightful manner.

There are plenty of wisecracks and there’s some nice mock hardboiled dialogue. “She fell into my arms like a ball into a socket.” Skirrow’s prose has a nicely off-kilter zing to it. Some of the gags are obvious but many are not. He certainly had his own distinctive voice as a spy writer.

Tongue-in-cheek spy novels proliferated during the 60s but this one has a distinctive tone which makes it seem fresh and original. It’s both whimsical and slightly kinky (in a good-natured sort of way). It captures the zeitgeist of the 60s in a particularly vivid manner.

I’m Trying To Give It Up really is fast-moving stylish, slightly sexy, very amusing, very clever fun. If you like your spy thrillers lighthearted and funny then it’s very highly recommended.

William Knoles' Shame Market

Shame Market is a 1964 sleaze novel written by William Knoles (1926-1970) under the name Clyde Allison. And this is sleaze with the emphasis on fun.

Private eye Brannigan has just set off to meet a new client, Magnus V. Dumbarton. Dumbarton is very old (he’s ninety-seven) and fabulously, almost unimaginably, rich. And almost unimaginably eccentric. He suffers from a medical condition which requires him to spend his while life in a room heated to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Dumbarton figures if he has to live in a virtual hothouse he might as well do it in style, so he’s had a gigantic airship hangar converted into a hothouse. That’s where he lives. And if you’re gong to live in a hothouse you might as well do it properly, so the hangar is filled with exotic plants and animals. You know the sort of thing you’d fill a hothouse with - colourful parrots and naked Polynesian girls.

Dumbarton’s daughter has gone missing and he wants Brannigan to find her. Given that Dumbarton is ninety-seven Brannigan naturally assumes that he’s going to be looking for an old lady in her seventies who has wandered away from the old folks’ home. In fact Dumbarton’s daughter Juliet is a gorgeous twenty-year-old.

Juliet is actually Juliet V. Dumbarton, the V standing for Verne, and she prefers to call herself Juliet Verne. Juliet already has a colourful past, such as the time she captured an entire Boy Scout troop and forced the poor lads to pleasure her. All of them. Juliet has perpetrated lots of similar harmless girlish pranks.

The only clue to Juliet’s whereabouts is that she is being held captive somewhere in a town on the 15th Parallel. It could be 15 North or 15 South. So Brannigan decides to check out every town of significant size along those lines of latitude. His chances of success might seem small but he’s getting two hundred bucks a day plus expenses so he’s not complaining.

Brannigan’s search for Juliet leads him from one woman’s bed to another. The novel is a series of sexual encounters but at least the author manages to bring these encounters about in interesting and amusing ways. When you find a woman, naked except for black stockings and black gloves, rifling your suitcase in your hotel room you’re naturally surprised. You’re even more surprised to discover she’s a CIA agent. And you’re more surprised still when she explains why she carries out her intelligence duties almost stark naked. Celia, the nude CIA agent, is a graduate of the CIA’s Seduction and Slaughter course and she knows all sorts of ways in which naked girls can kill people. British spies with a Double 0 number are licensed to kill. Celia has a XX number - she’s licensed to do other things as well. Which she does with enthusiasm.

Brannigan’s meeting with the murder-inclined Scarlett Butler (yes Knoles likes jokey names) also comes about in an unexpected way.

The sex is frequent and steamy but non-graphic. This is titillation rather than porn.

While some pulp sleaze novels could be quite dark this one is light-hearted and engagingly silly. It’s played mainly for laughs. Knoles also wrote a series of spy spoof novels and Shame Market, with its exotic settings, has something of that kind of feel. It’s a private eye spoof novel, with some spy spoof motifs and with lots of sex.

Brannigan is very hardboiled and very cynical, and very unscrupulous. He’s not a bad guy but he looks out for number one and he’s not going to risk his neck to do heroic things, like rescuing damsels in distress. That’s not to say he won’t rescue a damsel in distress - he will do so if there’s no risk and if there’s something in it for him. If the damsel is likely to show her gratitude, either in the form of cash or in bed, then he’ll consider it. This could be a recipe for noir fiction but in this case it’s played for amusement, with perhaps an attempt to add an edge of black comedy.

Brannigan is like a cross between Mike Hammer and Matt Helm (the Matt Helm of the movies not the novels), but without a trace of chivalry.

Brannigan is cynical and the book itself is pretty cynical as well, albeit in an obviously  tongue-in-cheek manner. The women are there to take their clothes off and jump into bed, which they do with alacrity.

In its own way it’s amusing sleazy (very sleazy) fun and it’s recommended.

Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana was published in 1958, providing another example of Greene’s ability to set his stories in places that were just about to hit the headlines (in 1959 Castro came to power).

Our Man in Havana is a spy story. It is the cynical, humorous and absurd tale of Jim Wormold, not exactly one of the shining lights of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Mr Wormold lives in Havana. He sells vacuum cleaners. He is moderately successful but unfortunately he has a daughter. That’s not unfortunate in itself but the daughter, Milly, is at the age at which daughters become very very expensive. Even worse, Milly has now conceived a passion for horses. She must have one. There is simply no way Mr Wormold can afford the upkeep on a horse as well as a daughter.

So it seems like a stroke of good luck when Mr Wormold is approached by Hawthorne. Hawthorne works for MI6 and he’s in the process of setting up an espionage network in Cuba. Hawthorne believe that a vacuum cleaner salesman is the perfect cover for a spy. Mr Wormold knows nothing of the world of espionage and has no interest in politics but the $150 a month plus expenses that Hawthorne offers him interests him quite a bit. So Mr Wormold becomes MI6’s man in Havana.

Initially Wormold is a bit worried by the fact that he nothing about the world of spies and knows nothing about recruiting agents but then he realises that it doesn’t matter. The network of agents he’s supposed to recruit don’t have to actually exist. The information he sends back to London doesn’t have to be real. It just needs to sound convincing. Pretty soon he has a whole network of imaginary agents and he’s sending off detailed reports to London with lots of disturbing information, none of it rel. He’s even sent them drawings of high-tech weaponry at a new top-secret military installation. The fact that these sophisticated weapons look a bit like parts of a vacuum cleaner somehow gets overlooked in all the excitement.

The head of MI6, C, is convinced that Wormold is  the most valuable agent they’ve ever had. The more fanciful his intelligence reports become the more certain C is that they must be true.

Things are going very nicely for Mr Wormold. Until somebody starts trying to kill his agents. Which is very disturbing since those agents don’t actually exist. Fiction is becoming reality.

Graham Greene of course had been a real-life spy for the British. He knew the incompetence and stupidity of MI6 at first hand. He knew that much of the intelligence provided by spies was simply fantasies concocted by the spies. The more intelligence you provide the more likely it is that the intelligence agency for which you work will continue to pay you. The intelligence doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be the sort of thing that the intelligence agency wants to hear.

Greene had converted to Catholicism in 1926. After the Second World War, and probably not coincidentally after his stint with MI6, Greene’s politics became steadily more leftist although it’s important to keep in mind that he was an old school leftist with nothing in common with the leftism of today. And while his Catholicisjm seems to recede into the background a little it’s also important to remember that he saw no conflict whatsoever between left-wing politics and Catholicism.

When he wrote this novel Greene seems to have been going through one of his upbeat phases (he was prone to frequent bouts of extreme depression). Wormold is more sympathetic than most Greene protagonists (you can’t really call any of Greene’s protagonists heroes). He’s a timid little man but he’s not a hopeless alcoholic and he hasn’t given in to despair or nihilism. He knows little about raising children but he’s managed to be a reasonably good father. He’s a nice guy. He isn’t very honest but he has no wish to do any harm to anybody. He thinks the espionage stuff is all very silly but if MI6 are foolish enough to pay him money he’ll take it. Even when he gets himself into deep trouble he doesn’t give in to despair. Whether he can extricate himself from the mess might be extremely doubtful but at least he’s going to try.

Despite the fact that Wormold never does any actual spying Our Man in Havana manages to be an enjoyable and exciting spy thriller. It’s also superb satire, and very funny. Greene’s contempt for spies is palpable and as in The Quiet American there’s an awareness of how much harm can be done by bungling intelligence agencies but it’s combined with genuine amusement.

A wonderful book. Very highly recommended.

The Code of the Woosters

The Code of the Woosters, which appeared in 1938, was the third of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. It continues the saga of Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Bassett which began in Right Ho, Jeeves.

The prospective marriage between Gussie and Madeline is starting to look like not such a sure thing after all. This is alarming to say the least since it means that, for various comlicated reasons, Bertie Wooster may have to marry her instead. And if there’s one thing Bertie intends to avoid at all costs it is marrying Madeline Bassett. The problem, as ever, is that while Gussie is a wizard with newts he’s pretty much hopeless at dealing with people.

The situation is made more dangerous by the fact that Madeline’s father Sir Watkyn, a magistrate, had fined Bertie five quid for stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race night.  As a result Sir Watkyn is convinced that Bertie is a hardened criminal who really should be behind bars. To make things worse Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia wants him to go to Totleigh Towers, Sir Watkyn’s country seat, to steal a silver cow creamer. 

Further difficulties are caused by the romance between Sir Watkyn’s ward Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng and Bertie’s old school chum Harold “Stinker” Pinker, now an impoverished curate. There’s also the presence of Sir Watkyns’ chum Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts and would-be dictator.

As you would expect it all gets insanely complicated, Bertie’s efforts to avoid the hideous fate of marriage to Madeline make things worse and Jeeves will have his work cut out for him saving the situation. And even Jeeves, despite his enormous brain, proves to be no match for an enraged Aberdeen terrier.

Those who are only familiar with the ITV TV series Jeeves and Wooster may be surprised upon reading the original stories to discover that Bertie Wooster is not actually a congenital idiot. His judgments on people are usually sound and often quite shrewd and he certainly has a well-developed sense of self-preservation. He’s definitely an intellectual lightweight and he has an amazing ability to convert potentially awkward situations into full-scale disasters. The plans he comes up with to extricate himself from catastrophe are not always entirely stupid but they tend to be over-complicated, to rely too much on a finesse that he does not possess and most fatally they are based on the assumption that other people will react in the way he hopes they will. Jeeves by contrast lays his plans with military precision.

Bertie might not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but he’s a good-natured fellow and he’s quite impossible to dislike. 

Wodehouse uses similar plot devices in most of his stories. His genius lay in his ability to use these plot devices to create sublime comic set-pieces. And of course, most of all, it is his sparkling prose style that makes his tales so delightful. Bertie is the narrator of almost all the Jeeves-Wooster stories and much of the humour comes from his obliviousness to his own limitations.

Wodehouse’s reputation as the foremost comic writer of the 20th century is richly deserved. The Code of the Woosters is a delight from start to finish. Highly recommended.

Thank You, Jeeves

Having read all of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster short stories I’ve now moved on to the novels. And if Thank You, Jeeves (the first of the Jeeves and Wooster novels which appeared in 1934) is anything to go by they’re just as delightful.

This book opens with the unthinkable happening - Jeeves gives notice. He can cope with the never-ending disasters in which Bertie Wooster gets himself embroiled but Bertie’s playing of the banjolele is more than he can endure.

Bertie’s neighbours seem inclined to agree with Jeeves and he is forced to move. He takes a cottage in the country, a cottage owned by his pal Chuffy (actually the fifth Baron Chuffnell). To his dismay he once again crosses paths with the dreaded Sir Roderick Glossop, the eminent psychiatrist who is convinced that Bertie needs to be institutionalised for his own protection. There are other hazards to be encountered at Chuffnell Hall. There’s Chuffy’s appalling nephew Seabury for one, and there’s American heiress Pauline Stoker to whom Bertie was once engaged. He considers his avoidance of that marriage to be one of the luckiest escapes of his life.

Pauline and Chuffy are madly in love but the course of true love certainly does not run at all smoothly. Luckily for them, or possibly unluckily for them, Bertie is determined to help matters along. This eventually leads to his kidnapping by Pauline’s terrifying father.

Despite having given notice Jeeves naturally plays a key role in the story. Which is just as well as Bertie’s new man, Brinkley, proves to be a very dangerous and indeed homicidal lunatic. Bertie also finds himself once again in danger of getting married, and also finds himself persecuted by the local constabulary (who seem to share Sir Roderick Glossop’s views on Bertie’s sanity). Jeeves has his work cut out for him this time as Bertie gets into one scrape after another.

It’s all glorious fun. Wodehouse has no difficulty sustaining his blend of delightful humour over a full-length novel, and in fact the novel format allows him to involve Bertie in even more intricate escapades.

There may have been other writers equally as funny as Wodehouse (Evelyn Waugh in his pre-war novels being one) but I don’t think there’s ever been anyone who could better him. Wodehouse is uninterested in doing anything but entertain and he succeeds gloriously. Highly recommended.