Mon 19 Jul 2021
A 1001 Midnights Review: JOHN CREASEY – The Insulators.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[8] Comments
by Karol Kay Hope
JOHN CREASEY – The Insulators. Dr. Palfrey #30. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1972, Walker, US, hardcover, 1973. Manor 12311, US, paperback, 1975.
One could speculate that John Creasey was really a trademark for some kind of bizarre writing machine secreted away in the English countryside. In reality, he was an individual who produced some 560 books under more than twenty pseudonyms over a forty-year period. Some writers are prolific. Creasey was incredibly so. No other mystery writer can boast of such an output.
On the other hand, if you are writing to a rigid formula, as Creasey did, you can probably put a plot together during a TV commercial. Your characters are set and good; all you have to do is imagine a catastrophe that is suitable to the talents and circumstances of one of your heroes, and off you go. That is, if you have a mind with the inventive bent of Creasey’s — and more ideas per minute than most people entertain in a lifetime. That was Creasey’s real forte — the number and variety of his ideas.
Under his own name-he also wrote under such pseudonyms as Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday, J. J. Marric, and Jeremy York. Creasey created four basic heroes. Two — Richard Rollison (“the Toff”) and Superintendent Roger West — are involved with domestic crime, bringing to justice or disgrace bad boys and girls within the British borders. The other two — Dr, Palfrey and Gordon Cragie — are world travelers; they worry about international villains, the kind that alone or, usually, in gangs lust for world domination.
The Insulators features Dr. Palfrey and the men of Department Z5. From the start we know the good guys are going to win. If they don’t, the world is going to blow up, and Creasey was the kind of writer who would never let that happen. He takes us to the brink, however, showing us the kind of absolute evil that exists in the world.
The “insulators” of this title are a gang of mad scientists/power mongers who have discovered a magic gas that can insulate humans against atomic radiation. With that as a tool, along with the requisite bombs, they try to blackmail every world government into total capitulation.
Department Z5, the good guys, is a gang of international policemen headed by our hero, Dr. Palfrey — sort of a cross-cultural crime-fighting organization that pools its resources and its talents in times of world crisis. They come together in a fantastic effort to keep these scientists from erasing human misery through enslaving the world’s population.
There are too many weaknesses in this plot, although it is entertaining. How many of us can believe that the bad guys could build underground nuclear arsenals all over the world without anybody noticing? And it’s also hard to believe in Z5; Creasey’s good guys are just too good.
Other titles about the men of Z5 include Traitors’ Doom (1970), The Legion of the Lost (1974), The Voiceless Ones (1974), and The Mists of Fear (1977).
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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.
July 19th, 2021 at 5:44 pm
Coming up soon on this blog is a 1001M review of one of Creasey’s stories involving Department Z, headed up by ultra-cranky Scotsman Gordon Cragie. I’m glad of that, too, because I never could keep the two groups straight, Z5 vs Department Z.
July 19th, 2021 at 8:14 pm
Palfrey starts out as a high ranking agent of Z5 a UN style Allied Intelligence organization (Dept. Z is strictly British Secret Service) formed in the last years of the war before graduating to be the leader of the group. In every book I’ve read his agents tend to question his motives and methods (he seldom shares his plans and plays his cards close to the vest), and often the book ends with Palfrey having to act in a ruthless manner (in THE DEPTHS he condemns two of his own agents to death to save the world) which isolates him even more from what little humanity he is still in touch with. Only a handful of agents appear from book to book as close allies and even they question him at times.
While the series is borderline SF, at least in the sense of John Blackburn’s General Kirk books, it differs from SF in that there is little or no continuity from disaster to disaster. In MISTS OF FEAR for instance there is only life on Earth above the tree-line by the time Z5 defeats the enemy and yet as the next book opens up the world is pretty much back as it was and ready for its next threat. Never-the-less his plots are very much in the tradition of cozy British disaster writers like John Wyndham, John Christopher, and Charles Eric Maine.
The early books only differed from Gordon Craigie in that rather than being British Z5 was international battling crime all over the world and not just in England like most Department Z books. Nazi war criminals with world ruling ideas and cults tended to be the villains in early books, then as Creasey became more interested in politics the books pivoted to pseudo SF with Palfrey and his team battling mad scientists threatening the world with fire, flood, famine, impotence, and just about any world destroying disaster you can think of.
I would have to question the idea of four basic heroes in Creasey. That fails to mention the Baron, a gentleman cracksman almost completely different than the Toff, Gideon a cop nothing like Roger West or Craigie or Palfrey, Patrick Dawlish Creasey’s version of Bulldog Drummond before he became an international cop, Bruce Murdoch yet another Drummond type in a wartime setting at least one of his adventures narrated in first person by the villain the Withered Man a Clubfoot clone, Mark Kilby a suave insurance investigator operating almost exclusively in the US and wielding a sword stick, Dr. Emmanuel Cellini and a pair of twin private eyes (both as Michael Halliday), Sexton Blake, and even a few one offs like DANGER WOMAN as Abel Mann about a female assassin.
In fact one of the qualities that marks Creasey as a writer aside from inventive plots is that within the restrictions of series format there is no danger of mistaking the Toff for the Baron, Roger West for George Gideon, Craigie for Palfrey, or Dawlish for Murdoch. His deftly drawn characters however cardboard are fully realized and easily identified fairly quickly. No Toff novel reads like a Baron outing and so on, and that is unique for a writer as prolific as Creasey who in addition to all above also churned out Westerns and Romance novels.
The Palfrey books were very much an expression of Creasey’s growing political conscience after the War (at one point he created his own party and ran for office). To some extent the plots, many early environmental warnings, exist in part to express that blossoming political interest.
July 19th, 2021 at 10:57 pm
Yes, I agree that limiting Creasey’s heroes to only four types is very misguiding. There’s not a lot of depth to most of them, but Creasey got better at that as time went on. I think he had to, or he’d have never cracked the American market. Some of his books I’ve read were incredibly sloppy, but you can count that up to the fact that he wrote so many books.
I’ve never gotten very far into any of the Palfrey books. Most of them are borderline science fiction and not very good science fiction at that. I’ve done better with the Department Z books, especially the earlier ones, which were very pulpy. (The first one came out in 1932.)
July 20th, 2021 at 8:52 am
I’ve got a bunch of Toff and Baron books. I’ve also just got the first Toff from the library.
July 20th, 2021 at 9:17 am
David, If you and I got together and decided to split up and read all of Creasey’s books, I don’t think we’d ever finish. He wrote over 600 of them.
July 20th, 2021 at 10:14 am
I’m a John Creasey fan and have probably read about one-fifth of his output, much of which (his juveniles, westerns, and romances, for instance) are unavailable. By coincidence, this week I read five of his Dr. Palfrey novels and am amazed how someone so ruthlessly cold-blooded could inspire such loyalty from his agents. The plots are completely unbelievable, the death tolls average in the thousands, the villains tend to be dictatorial wannabes or mad scientists with unlimited resources (enough to build large, sophisticated undersea cities, underground cities, or space satellites — all under the world’s radar, and to amass a large group of loyal followers willing to die for whatever “cause” the villain has). As such, the Palfrey books are merely a twist on the old superhero pulps and should be read as such — for pure, uncritical enjoyment. I find after reading one of Creasey’s books, that I immediately have to read at least four more. They are addictive.
July 20th, 2021 at 11:01 am
You’re very persuasive, Jerry. Maybe I ought to try one of the Palfrey books again sometime soon. And you’re quite right. The books are indeed a throwback to the pulp days of mad wanna-be rulers of the world.
July 20th, 2021 at 8:44 pm
When Palfrey made his debut in American paperbacks from Berkeley Books they were packaged very much as a sort of Doc Savage clone. In addition to the pulps though Palfrey is also a throwback to early SF, not just some of Jules Verne’s meglomaniac hero/villains, but books like George Griffith’s OLGA ROMANOFF, and George Allan England’s THE FLYING LEGION.
Despite the melodramatic conspiracies and super villains Creasey’s natural disasters are very much in what I call the British Gothic SF style of Wyndham, Christopher, Quatermass, and Dr. Who. He isn’t that far off the kind of early eco disaster novels of J. G. Ballard in that sense.
In British SF in books and films this was the era of Triffids, the earth cracked open, the atmosphere on fire, the earth flooded, the post nuclear horror of ON THE BEACH, forever winter, and England wracked by earthquakes (Christopher’s THE RAGGED EDGE). There is also a little touch of The Golden Amazon in some of the plots.
And where this differs from say Doc Savage or even the Shadow in that Palfrey is extremely human in his fallibility and all too aware of how cold and ruthless he is, and in his view needed. Nothing is ever done about it, but there is a darkness to Palfrey that makes him almost as alien as Dr. Who and different than almost all of Creasey’s heroes, who no matter how dangerous in action are basically nice guys.