Thu 1 Jan 2015
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: BILL S. BALLINGER – The Chinese Mask.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[4] Comments
by Bill Pronzini
BILL S. BALLINGER – The Chinese Mask. Signet D2715, paperback original; 1st printing, June 1965.
Bill S. Ballinger wrote some thirty mystery, suspense, and espionage novels (as well as two films and over 150 teleplays) during his thirty-year career, many with unusual plots and construction. His first two novels feature private eye Barr Breed; his only other series character, hero of five paperback originals published during 1965 and 1966, is CIA agent Joaquin Hawks — multilingual, half Spanish and half Nez Perce Indian, and virile as they come.
All five of the Hawks novels are set in the exotic Far East, in such locales as Communist China, Bangkok, Saigon, Angkor Wat, Laos, and Indonesia. They are as much spirited adventure stories as espionage novels, with graphically depicted backgrounds and plenty of harrowing jungle chases and narrow escapes.
In The Chinese Mask, the first of the series, Hawks is assigned to rescue three Western scientists, all of whom have been working on a “psycho-gas that can paralyze the will and nerve of entire armies” and all of whom have been kidnapped from Berlin by the Red Chinese. Hawks crosses the Bamboo Curtain disguised as a member of a traveling Russian circus troop, infiltrates the headquarters of the Red Chinese Army in Peking, and eventually plucks the scientists out of an ” impenetrable” prison fortress and leads them to safety — all in clever and exciting fashion.
This and the other four Hawks novels — The Spy in Bangkok (1965), The Spy in the Jungle (1965), The Spy at Angkor Wat (1966), and The Spy in the Java Sea (1966) are enjoyable escapist reading and, in the bargain, offer accurate political, sociologic, and geographic portraits of their various locales in the mid-1960s.
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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.
January 1st, 2015 at 4:08 pm
I read most of this series as the books appeared. I don’t remember much about them, but reading this review makes me want to get one down and read it again.
January 1st, 2015 at 4:48 pm
There were quite a few spy and adventure series that came along just around this time, all hoping to ride the coattails of the James Bond phenomenon. This is one I was always on the verge of reading and I never quite did. I have them all, still stored away in the basement, so to read one, I’d have to go down and bring it up.
January 1st, 2015 at 5:19 pm
Actually this was one of the more inventive and entertaining additions to the Bond craze. Ballinger put some obvious effort into them, and Hawks was one of the better American entries in the craze.
In one book Hawks goes undercover as a bear handler in a Russian circus (his Native American features meant he could pass as a Slav). I would like to see Bond try that.
The Hawks books had something of the same milieu and feel of Simon Harvester’s Dorian Silk books, high praise because Harvester’s books were considered so accurate the KGB station chief in Ulan Bator had a standing order for them to forward to Moscow for the analysts to read.
Ironically just the other night I was watching WICKED AS THEY COME with Arlene Dahl and Phil Carey, the British adaptation of Ballinger’s PORTRAIT IN SMOKE, considered by many his best book. Not bad once you get past Sid James and Patrick Allen as American hoods.
The Hawks book were short, tight, fast, well plotted, with characters just deep enough to make them interesting. Hawks was one of the more memorable spies of the era in that sense.
January 2nd, 2015 at 7:57 am
I remember reading one of them, which I picked for the title: THE SPY AT ANGKOR WAT. I wish I had picked up the others at the time (1976) because I liked this one.