Thu 3 Dec 2020
KEITH CAMPBELL – Goodbye Gorgeous. Mike Brett #1. Macdonald, UK, hardcover, 1947. Reprint edition, 1952. No US publication.
If you’re a detective story writer, there are some obvious commercial advantages in having created an established series character to help you sell your books. Not that, for example, either Keith Campbell or his hard-nosed hero, intelligence agent Mike Brett, are exactly what you might call well-known on this side of the Atlantic, but according to Hubin this was the first of at least four of his adventures that have seen print. [UPDATE: There were six in all. See below.]
I’m wandering from the point. There are some disadvantages to working with a series hero as well. This one begins – considering the chances you have of reading it, I trust I’m not giving too much away – with Brett working incognito as a postwar Canadian ex-Nazi collaborator. Not knowing Brett from Aloysius Dimfuddy, I didn’t know. I thought he was. He could have fooled me – and he did. Since this was his first appearance when the book came out, and without a dust jacket to give the whole story away (myself, I never read ’em), I’m sure that I wasn’t the only reader who swallowed his story completely.
So here’s the point. Campbell/Brett could never pull the same stunt off again, or not nearly as well. As an author, you just don’t get a chance like this twice. (Unless you have a hero with a Holmesian penchant for disguises, hmmm?)
To the story. Brett is trying to unravel a plot that may or may not involve a treasure trove hidden by one Joseph Goebbels somewhere in England. There are a couple of women involved (did you doubt it?), and Brett falls for one of them. (And what a surprising lot goes on between the lines!)
The puzzle is an intriguing one for a while, but it fades badly. No surprises. It winds up with a lot of shooting.
Rating: C
The Mike Brett series –
Goodbye Gorgeous. Macdonald 1947
Listen, Lovely. Macdonald 1949
Darling, Don’t. Macdonald 1950
Born Beautiful. Macdonald 1951
That Was No Lady. Macdonald 1952
Pardon My Gun. Macdonald 1954
December 3rd, 2020 at 9:12 pm
Sounds like the usual sub Peter Cheyney stuff of the period. Some of it was pretty good and still worth a read. This might be the same.
December 3rd, 2020 at 9:22 pm
The similarity hadn’t occurred to me, then or now, but I think you’re right.
December 4th, 2020 at 9:10 pm
Cheyney had a huge indluence on the British thriller genre from the late thirties on his more American style especially popular after the war reflected in books like this.
To some extent Ian Fleming and James Bond were products of the Cheyney effect.