FFB: Cruel as a Cat - Kyle Hunt (aka John Creasey)

Dr. Emmanuel Cellini is one of the least known in John Creasey’s teeming crowd of series characters. The saga of Cellini begins with Cunning as a Fox (1965) and continues using a simile formula, with and without animals, for another ten titles. Cellini is another in a long line of fictional consulting psychiatrists/psychologists who work with the police. Based on the one entry I’ve read Dr. Cellini isn’t much of a psychologist or even a detective. In fact, he is hardly featured as a supporting player in this fourth entry in the series – Cruel as a Cat (1968).

The plot could’ve worked far better as a short story or novella. As a novel it is very short and very padded with much of the action reiterated and played over repeatedly over the course of its 170 pages. Essentially, it’s one of those “psycho lady holding a person captive” stories. You’ve probably seen a few of these books turned into movies like Die! Die! My Darling! (aka Fanatic), You’ll Like My Mother, and That Cold Day in the Park. Usually this plot formula is played out with a domineering, over-the-edge, middle-aged mother cast as the lunatic captor who is desperately trying to protect some dark family secret while the kidnapped victim is usually a young woman seen as an interloper.

In Creasey’s novel there is a slightly original twist. The loony is Midge Benison, a young woman and her captive is Jim Clayton, a handsome young man who she recognizes from newspaper and TV reports as an accused murderer on the run. Midge agrees to hide Jim and when he foolishly agrees he finds himself trapped in an attic with only one entry/exit that is locked every night. The novel basically tells us the story of Jim's attempts to escape his prison, the police investigation to locate his whereabouts, and the backstory of why Midge behaves the way she does.

Sadly, it’s not really very interesting. Creasey’s writing is matter of fact and sort of dull. The young woman is a cartoon cutout of a "schizophrenic" and we get all sorts of misinformation about that mental illness from the very unknowledgeable Dr. Cellini. What books did Creasey read to get his information? Or was he only drawing on bad movies of the past? It’s an insulting portrait of a mentally ill character and the supposedly psychological explanations for her behavior are reduced -- as expected for this era -- to nymphomania resulting from an abused childhood.

The only reason I kept reading was for the portrait of the landlady Ermyntrude Stern, who catches onto the young woman’s plotting. In fact, Midge -- who is Miss Stern's only lodger -- is so transparent in how she brings men into the landlady’s home for obvious sexual encounters it’s a wonder she wasn’t evicted within a few months. But Ermyntrude is the most human and fully realized character in the story; each time she appears the book truly comes alive. There is a sort of corny fantasized romance she dreams up when she meets Dr. Cellini. The two of them join forces in ferreting out the various hiding places where the young woman has hidden her captive. But Cellini does not really solve anything. It’s Miss Stern who is the real detective of the book.

This is not at all recommended even for the mildly curious. I doubt I’ll be checking out any of the other Dr. Cellini books. For the record the books are published under the pseudonym "Michael Halliday" in the UK and as "by Kyle Hunt" in the US. And of course reprints have Creasey’s names emblazoned across the cover as if he were the world’s leading bestseller writer. Apart from a few of the outlandish spy fantasies featuring Dr. Palfrey I have yet to find a Creasey mystery that I found either gripping or entertaining. They’re all sort of blah to me. This must be the price one pays for being such an outrageously prolific writing machine.

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: For Fear of Little Men

Ex-Nazis, terrorism via biologic tampering, Celtic folklore and legends, reincarnation, mind control, immortal beings -- all this in one book? All this and more, my friends! General Charles Kirk, Marcus Levin and his wife Tania (whose previous adventures are reviewed here and here) are all on hand once again battling possible supernatural beings and investigating microbiological terrors in John Blackburn's unique genre-blending thriller For Fear of Little Men (1972). The little men of the title come from an oft heard Celtic verse:

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen.

We dare not go a-hunting

For fear of little men.

There are no little men per se to fear in the context of the story. Professor Rushton, an archaeologist digging in the mountains of Wales, lectures the characters on local folklore and legends and alludes to that verse. He is hoping to unearth proof of the existence of an pre-Celtic race who were the forbearers of the fairies, leprechauns, pixies, and what have you of Irish and Scottish mythology. He proposes his theory that the "little people" are the genetically mutated descendants of a powerful superhuman race who had arcane powers connected to Earth's natural forces. Rushton's lecture though it appears early in the book will have startling ramifications as the story progresses.

Kirk has been enlisted by the government to investigate possible terrorist activity in the form of toxic pollution being purposely emptied into the water supply on the Welsh coast. The pollution has been traced to D.R. Products, an aerodynamic manufacturing company. On their staff is Hans Graebe, a known high ranking ex-Nazi who escaped punishment through a technicality during the war crimes trials. Kirk and his Home Office associates believe that Graebe is perhaps in league with a foreign government and has hatched an insidious plot to poison the marine life and kill the population dependent on the fishing industry in that part of the UK. Kirk sends Levin, a trained microbiologist, to gather samples of waste, run tests looking for identifiable toxins, and question Daniel Ryder, the head of D.R. Products, about the dangerous effluent being discharged in the waste water at his factory.

As in The Young Man from Lima there is a substantial portion of the story devoted to a scientific explanation for the poison that has been tainting locally fished shellfish. Levin runs a series of experiments and discovers that the toxic waste, rather than being created or biologically engineered contains an accidentally mutated bacillus that seems to have evolved from the polluted waste water. Interspersed with this scientific thriller plot we get a variety of intriguing incidents like the archeology project in the mountains determined to reveal the existence of the mythic home of Daran, legendary immortal leader of a Celtic race; the mysterious death by falling of Daniel Ryder, an expert mountaineer; and the frequent test flights of a newly designed airplane threatening havoc.

And what of those hippies Ryder invited to camp out on his land? Why are they still there after his horrible death? Do they figure in the story at all? Frequent references to them seem arbitrary. Yet nothing in this story that seems to be made up of haphazard incidents is ever random or inconsequential. All the seemingly unconnected threads will all tie together to form the fabric of a wicked plot. The eyebrow raising finale is suitably nightmarish enough for a Hammer horror movie.

Blackburn was perhaps the earliest genre writer who saw the nightmarish possibilities of eco-terrors. He was joined by John Creasey, whose Dr. Palfrey novels also mined this area. Together they were true pioneers in the burgeoning, yet to be formulaic, techno-thriller we have today. The X-Files, The Andromeda Strain, and other similar thrillers dealing with biological horrors owe a lot, whether conscious or not, to Blackburn.

The Young Man From Lima - John Blackburn

In the opening pages of The Young Man from Lima William Raven, the Secretary for External Affairs, is assassinated by a snowman. It is yet another in a series of assassinations of government officials throughout the world who happen to be tied to a mythical South American country called Nueva Leon. This is not a fantastical thriller with supernatural beings in the cast as in other Blackburn books. The snowman turns out to be a man covered in snow. Frosty the Hitman, however, is far from your typical hired gun. In fact he is far from being human as we think of humans. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Marcus Levin, a bacteriologist who appears in several other Blackburn books, is called in to consult on an autopsy. A strange life form has been found in the blood stream of the corpse that seems to be living even after the host body is long dead. Also there were elevated levels of serotonin in the body. It is pointed out that elevated serotonin is often seen in addicts who are partial to hallucinogenic drugs. Furthermore a vial of tablets found on the corpse proves to contain enough of a lichen like plant to cause hallucinations similar to those of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. The corpse it turns out is Frosty the Hitman. There is a fear that someone has created an army of assassins whose minds are being manipulated by mind altering drugs. Shades of Sax Rohmer and a bit of The Manchurian Candidate.  But what about that strange microorganism?  Could that be playing a part as well?

Though this Blackburn book is lacking in supernatural content it still has much to raise it out of the realm of your ordinary espionage thriller and into the world of the weird and strange. It has a decidedly X-Files feel to it with a microorganism not unlike the one that caused the black oil in that cult TV series. I was also reminded of the many pathogen thrillers that range from The Andromeda Strain (a contemporary thriller for the time this was published) to a fairly recent book, Dead of Night by Randy Wayne White, that has a remarkably similar and equally gruesome parasite in the role of the vermicidal villain. There's even a bit of the 1950s monster movie thrown in when in the jungles of Nueva Leon our intrepid heroes must do battle with hordes of soldier ants. These are particularly gruesome scenes.

Overall, the story is one that holds your interest and keeps the pages turning at a rapid pace. There are long stretches of didactic dialog (another X Files trait) but it's probably the most interesting choice in delivering the necessary scientific information to educate the reader on the unusual monster of the piece. The politics of the story is another thing altogether. There are only so many Communist threat tales I can stomach these days. Thankfully, all the paranoia is kept to a minimum. When the true villains behind all the bioterrorism are revealed we are back in Sax Rohmer territory for their motives have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with megalomaniacal world domination.

It's a ripping yarn well worth reading if you want an example of what the eco-thriller was like back in the 1960s. Blackburn like John Creasey had a devilish imagination and could dream up the worst possible scenarios based on current ecological dilemmas. You can discover the many other undeservedly forgotten books that have been gloriously revived by Top Notch Thrillers and Ostara Publishing by clicking here. The series is edited by crime fiction writer Mike Ripley who has done a bang-up job in selecting some great titles that have languished in Out-of-Printdom for far too long. Check them out and read them. Or else.

NEGLECTED DETECTIVES: Dr. Palfrey

The term detective here is used rather loosely. Dr. Palfrey is not really a detective, he is more of a secret agent, although there are elements of the detective novel in the books that feature this early creation of the astoundingly prolific John Creasey. Dr. Palfrey and the agents of Z5 were part of a series of over 30 books Creasey wrote under his own name before he turned to his arsenal of pseudonyms. Palfrey is also one of his earliest creations. The first Dr. Palfrey adventure was Traitor's Doom (John Long, 1942) and the books continued into the 1970s ending with The Whirlwind (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979).

The most interesting aspect of this series of books which started out as straight espionage thrillers is that they grew to be more and more bizarre. Using the tropes of the pulp magazines Creasey was able to explore ecological and political threats that were making news headlines by creating mad scientists and criminal masterminds who were at war with the forces of good. By the 1970s there was renewed interest in pulp writers and their heroes and paperback publishers were re-issuing the adventures of The Shadow, The Spider and Doc Savage. Berkeley Medallion decided to join in by re-issuing the weirder books in the Dr. Palfrey series and market them as neo-pulps. "If you like Doc Savage, you'll love Dr. Palfrey!" the cover of each book proclaimed.

The first book I read in the series, The House of Bears (1946),  was not as strange as I hoped it would be. Palfrey has temporarily left Z5, a secret "peace promoting" organization run by the mysterious Marquis of Brett, to pursue his private practice and attempt to enjoy married life with his wife Drusilla. They are called to the home, an imposing Gothic structure decorated with stonework bears, a bear door knocker and bearskin rugs in nearly every room hence the title.  The think they are going to a see a patient being cared for by their friend Dr. Halsted.  Instead they find they have arrived only minutes after a near fatal accident. A young woman has fallen from a balcony and is severely injured.

Despite his claim that he is not a detective ("There is a big difference between spying and detecting.") Palfrey cannot help but turn Sherlock Holmes. What happened to Dr. Halsted? Where is the patient they were meant to consult on? The young woman, Loretta, apparently has been the victim of a series of near fatal accidents - is someone trying to kill her? An investigation of the woodwork on the balcony proves that it had been tampered with and the fall was an attempted murder. The missing patient turns out to be Loretta's fiance, Garth, a physicist who had been working on a secret project. The various mysteries will prove to be be linked to Garth and his work.

This is basically a straightforward adventure thriller with a few detective story elements in the first part. The second half of the story tells of Palfrey's return to Z5 and his assignment to locate and rescue Garth. There are many set pieces of the spy thriller - Drusilla is kidnapped and chloroformed on a rocky cliff side, Palfrey is tossed over the balcony when looking for a secret compartment in one of the carved bears on the railing, a bomb is thrown into a police conference room, and there is a chase into a cavern with a group of schoolchildren on tour. It's loaded with action, but the weirdness I was hoping for is absent.

Reflecting the thawing of the Cold War, the lessening paranoia of the communist threat Creasey turned his attentions away from the cloak and dagger action thriller to the neo-pulp adventure. As mentioned earlier he looked to the news headlines for inspiration. In the 1970s especially, when the ecology movement was in its infancy, he found his plots among the increasing problems besetting Mother Nature. Yet even as he added the bizarre and the weirder aspects to the Dr. Palfrey series many of the stories seem to be re-writes and spin-offs of each other.



In Dark Harvest (1947) a criminal mastermind demands a huge ransom or he will begin destroying farmlands with a deadly chemical. This idea is recycled twenty years later in The Famine about bizarre rabbit-like creatures that ravenously consume crops and plants. They also attack and kill any human trying to stop them. There's an element of Monty Python & the Holy Grail in this, but it is an effective pulp yarn with some terrifying moments.

A virus carried by mosquitoes renders people immovable and unable to speak in The Plague of Silence (1958). Silence and immobility is revisited in three other books: The Sleep (1964) is a coma-like state created by a mad scientist bent on controlling humanity, The Insulators (1972) tells of a machine that can remove sound and create lasting silence, and The Voiceless Ones (1973) features prominent government figures who mysteriously lose the power of speech (something that I wish would befall several American senators these days).

Ecological cataclysms are featured in The Smog (pollution clouds descend upon cities suffocating and killing the population), The Blight (an alien disease decimates the world's timber supply), The Whirlwind (machine can create tornadoes and destructive windstorms) and in The Drought Creasey sees the effects of nuclear testing causing a nightmarishly fast global warming as rivers dry up and the polar ice caps evaporate.

While it is easy to dismiss these impressively imaginative stories as potboiler entertainments there is something more substantial that might be overlooked. Creasey seemed to be writing cleverly subversive books. Each of his Dr. Palfrey books from the later period (about the mid 1950s to the final book in 1979) incorporated discussions of topical events. Much like the way Rod Serling circumvented the CBS censors in his "Twilight Zone" episodes by using fantasy and science fiction treatments to write about McCarthyism, racism and other intolerances, Creasey also exploited the pulp adventure format to talk about environmental hazards, political abuses and social apathy. He was one of the earliest crime writers to use the genre as a form of consciousness raising in his readers. For that alone he deserves some commendation as a pioneer in early 20th century crime writing.