Sat 15 Nov 2014
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: PHILIP ATLEE – The Green Wound.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[7] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
PHILIP ATLEE – The Green Wound. Gold Medal k1321, paperback original, 1963. Reprinted later as The Green Wound Contract, Gold Medal, paperback, 1967.
Joseph Liam Gall’s first appearance in print was as a free-lance soldier of fortune embroiled in a Burmese civil war in Pagoda (1951), a hardcover adventure novel published under James Atlee Phillips’s full name. A dozen years later, writing as Philip Atlee, the author revived Gall, made him a disillusioned contract killer for the CIA, and put him through more than twenty paperback spy thrillers, of which the first and best was The Green Wound.
The crime writer with whom Phillips seems to have the most in common is Raymond Chandler. Both men use a cinematically vivid first-person style (although Phillips avoids the profusions of metaphor and simile that make Chandler so easy to parody) and eschew careful plotting in favor of strong individual scenes and memorable moments.
Almost all the Joe Gall novels suffer from near-chaotic structure, but Phillips’s finest scenes are so fresh and alive that, as Chandler said of Dashiell Hammett’s, they seem never to have been written before.
Phillips’s treatment of his main character is a brilliant study in schizophrenia. On one level Gall is the stoic code hero of the Hemingway tradition, and on another he stems from Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the professional killer for his government, the larger-than-life secret agent forever besting villains of the mythological-monster sort.
In the conventional patriotic thriller of this type, we are never allowed to doubt that whatever our side does is right because we are by definition the good guys. Phillips at his best subverts this nonsense and approaches the insight of John Le Carre that perhaps at bottom We and They are mirror images of each other.
Witness,for instance, the story line of The Green Wound. Gall is paid a huge sum by his former bosses at the CIA to come out of idyllic semi-retirement in an Ozark castle, infiltrate a quiet Texas community, and frustrate a plot to ruin the politically connected millionaire who runs the city. From his vantage point as manager of the local country club, Gall dispassionately observes the viciousness of the ruling class and the institutionalized racism that keeps the blacks in a shantytown on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.
In due course Gall learns that the blacks have secretly organized, with the help of federal civil-rights enforcers, to register to vote at the last possible minute and then oust the white politicians at the polls. On Election Day a bloody race war erupts, leaving the city in flames. Later Gall pursues the instigator of the revolt, a horribly disfigured black veteran who was used by army doctors as an experimental animal and is aching for revenge on the entire power structure.
The action swings from Mexico to Texas to New Orleans to the Caribbean and back again, but Phillips never resolves the tension between Gall the good soldier and Gall the man who knows he’s on the wrong side. This tension, rather than its considerable virtues as an action thriller, is what makes The Green Wound one of the finest spy novels ever written by an American.
In most of the later Galls, Phillips downplays or eliminates the structural schizophrenia, and the lesser exploits overstress local color and exotic settings — Sweden, Tahiti, Thailand, Haiti, British Columbia, Korea, and elsewhere — at the expense of story and action. But even the weaker Phillips novels are usually redeemed by several powerful individual scenes that stick in the memory long after the book as a whole is forgotten.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Note: Posted earlier on this blog was a comprehensive overview of the Joe Gall series by George Kelley, including a complete checklist. Check it out here.
Besides the large number of comments left in response to George’s article, additional replies by David Vineyard and Mark Lazenby appear in a later post of their own. You may find it here.
November 16th, 2014 at 4:56 pm
I’ll grant the good soldier premise, but I’m afraid I found Gall did his job all too well to the point that Atlee’s insistence on returning to this plot again and again and putting Gall in positions to either have to kill black villains or pose as a racist redneck began to feel a bit too easy for him and for Atlee. There is a really nasty bit in one book where he humiliates a black doctor at a motel in order to appear a racist that was really uncomfortable to read.
Granted I may be overly sensitive because I grew up in the south, well south Southwest, in the sixties and saw too much of this live in action. Though I recently reviewed a Charles Williams book, SHADOWS OF ECSTASY, that used a similar theme, it was written in the twenties and the heroes neither posed nor acted like racists.
This reminded me of the kind of thing that can make Sidney Horler unreadable today and mars some of the Bulldog Drummond books, but written in the late fifties and sixties this is much more disturbing. It wasn’t a new theme, John Buchan used it in PRESTER JOHN and coined the unpleasant phrase “white man’s burden” but even there his black villain is a magnificent creation of great depth and the heroes relationship to him complex.
I don’t find the complexity in the Gall books that Mike does. I find Gall finds it all to easy to do the dirty work again and again rather in the manner of the still fresh (then) memory of “I was just following orders.”
At no point in the Bond saga does Fleming let 007 fall back on that.
I still recall in one book Gall and his superior discussing the ‘brown people of the world” rising up as a threat to the white status quo that whatever its intent was uncomfortable to read. Even if Atlee was making fun of Gall’s racist superior I honestly don’t think Atlee’s readers read it that way, and while writers are not responsible to readers interpretation of their work normally when they use a theme over and over knowing the majority of their readers are enjoying it for the wrong reason (and there is no way Atlee imagined the Gall books were being read by readers who understood Gall’s moral ambiguity), it becomes an unpleasant catering which is what the Gall books feel like to me. Atlee went out of his way to exploit this theme and what I suspect he knew were less than pleasant motives of many of his readers.
Making fun of your readers while exploiting their prejudice is every bit as bad as being prejudiced yourself, and that’s what I get from Atlee.
Atlee is vivid, which maybe why Gall could make me uncomfortable. Fleming’s attitudes may have been Imperial patriarchy toward black allies like Quarrel, but even his black villains in LIVE AND LET DIE and the “Chigros” (an actual ethnic minority in Jamaica) are Smersh agents or dupes). Mr. Big isn’t a political villain, but a dope dealing Smersh agent out to bring down the west, not white society, and even Dr. No has no Fu Manchu like racial agenda, he isn’t much fonder of the Chinese who hated him for being half German than the whites who hated him for being half Chinese.
George B. Mair did one similar to GREEN WOUND, and while not as good a writer as Atlee in terms of vivid prose, he was much less stereotyped.
Atlee came back to this theme too often. If he had done it once I would have shrugged it off, any writer can have a lapse of judgment, but he came back to this regularly, and I frankly can’t say I ever perceived Gall having very much depth to his ‘moral conscience’ it always seemed about as sincere as Red Skelton’s “I’m a mean widdle kid,” or Lou Costello’s “I’m a baaad boy.”
And I would argue that is a misinterpretation of Le Carre’s theme, since his early books argued instead that bad as we might be, flawed as the people involved were, and dark as the souls of those involved were, intelligence work was a necessary evil. He did say there were good people on their side and bad people on ours, but he was also always saying that ultimately it was a war that had to be won (just not by the Americans whom he loathed). Even now that he has decided that perhaps the intelligence services harm outweighs the good he still has little ambivalence over which side he hopes ultimately wins. Le Carre’s heroes too often turn out to be bad soldiers who choose their own moral judgment over their country. Le Carre may admire that but if you notice the ones who behave that way in the early books invariably lose in his novels if not die.
Besides, while he is a good writer, Le Carre’s insight into intelligence is all made up as is his tradecraft and secret language. C was never called Control and the term Circus was picked up from him. The truth is his intelligence experience was never more than running a low level post office drop for the embassy in Bonn. Almost all the major spy writers had more actual experience than Le Carre and at a higher level. He was popular among the upper echelon of British intelligence only because they were rather flattered to be thought that competently duplicitous in light of Burgess, MacLean, Burke, and Philby who had combined to make them look fools and done major damage to their ties with the CIA. Exaggerated and silly as it might be there is more insight in John Gardner’s THE LIQUIDATOR than Le Carre’s THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, about the attitudes of British intelligence in that era.
John Bingham, a much higher placed agent and I think better writer, who was the model for Le Carre’s Smiley, always said of that character that he was a traitor waiting to happen and that Le Carre’s insights were all the opposite of what was actually true. In Le Carre romantic patriots like Bond are invariably traitors where in the real world it was intellectuals like Le Carre and Smiley with a distaste for Americans who betrayed their country.
Anyway if you are looking for actual insight into the mind of the British security services read William Haggard or Simon Harvester, not Le Carre, he frankly is making it all up. It’s Fleming, Haggard, and Harvester the Soviet’s bought at that little book shop in Ulan Bator where the KGB had standing orders for copies of British spy novels to study what was actually happening, not Le Carre.
November 16th, 2014 at 8:03 pm
I don’t remember buying the Joe Gall series when they first came out, and if I did, it was only hit or miss, perhaps picking them up in used book stories, rather than buying them new.
In any case, I remember buying the last of the first editions to complete a set just over two years ago. I promised myself I would start reading them in order, but guess what. I haven’t gotten around to it yet, not even the first one.
I have no idea whether I would like these books now or not. The consensus seems to be, of what little serious commentary I have found online is that the first books are the better ones, then Atlee started to coast a lot.
For a list of all of the books in the series, and a concise synopsis of each of them, you can’t go wrong with this website:
http://www.spyguysandgals.com/sgShowChar.asp?ScanName=gall_joe
I know there are lots of reasons why books don’t get reprinted, but I wonder whether Gall’s attitude toward blacks (I won’t say Atlee’s) is one of the reasons why the Gall books never have.
For anyone looking for copies, Amazon seems to have plenty for a dollar or less, often waaaay less. A penny, plus postage?
November 16th, 2014 at 11:31 pm
Now that I’ve seen a few of the covers I remember I used to buy these blindly because anything with *series* on it appealed to me. I don’t think I ever read one and I no longer have any of them.
November 16th, 2014 at 11:56 pm
They should be inexpensive, they were ubiquitous, and second hand bookstores would at times have full runs of them well into the early part of this century — perhaps not first editions, but full runs. That’s how I got mine, more by the pound or the sack full than by the book.
The early ones are the best written, the ones where the average reader might actually catch what Atlee was doing.
I’m willing to grant Atlee and Gall the benefit of the doubt as to whether either was actually racist, but that element of the books felt a bit exploitive to me and I’m willing to bet most of his audience did not see the irony or Gall’s ambiguity as Mike does and instead were reading them to confirm stereotypes and paranoia. In fact, sad to say, I know this for a fact from personal experience with Gall readers. That may have prejudiced me a bit against him too, but I saw pretty early what Mike is talking about, I just thought he was doing as much harm as good with it and all to easy to ignore his point or miss any hard satirical edge to Gall’s actions versus his actual higher feelings.
My feeling that was that while Atlee might well be commenting on the wickedness of government abusing power to suppress certain groups at the same time he was feeding a steady diet of paranoia to the types who thought all black people were going to rise up in some mass terrorist movement when militants were a minority in the real world Civil Rights movement. I grew up listening to that BS in life too often to put up with it in print.
Of course not every book is on this theme, but I must admit I found something to be a bit bothered by in every Gall book I read — a few I never got past tried to read.
It is curious no one has championed these on line. You can find Hamilton and Dan Marlowe as ebooks and Hamilton in print and some Prather. But then some good writers like Stephen Marlowe and the early Aarons aren’t around either. But I wonder if Gall’s attitudes don’t make him a tough sell today. I don’t recall a lot of collectors competing for them even in the eighties and nineties.
But my memory of the Gall books were slender rather nasty outings that left me feeling a bit soiled having read them too often to be really comfortable or enjoyable.
November 17th, 2014 at 12:02 am
By the way if you want to guess what was being pedaled take a good look at that cover, the half naked black man, the naked white woman, and the phallic black candle burning.
But then they were the Mandingo publisher too and knew part of their audience.
November 17th, 2014 at 11:15 am
I thought it was Kipling who coined the phrase “white man’s burden” in a poem he wrote after the U. S. took control of the Philippines after the Spanish American War.
November 17th, 2014 at 3:51 pm
Ray
It is originally Kipling, I was thinking of Buchan’s use of it quoted in le Carre’s THE LOOKING GLASS WAR. Remarkably, for all the Imperial nonsense, both Buchan and Kipling were far less prejudiced in general than most men of their age, though Buchan, like Chuchill, loathed Ghandi. Certainly they were more enlightened than Joe Gall sounds.