ALFRED BESTER – Who He? Dial Press, hardcover, 1953. Berkley G-19, paperback, as The Rat Race, February 1956.

   
   If you haven’t pieced it together yet, Who He? is a live television show in the Golden Age of Television, and the frontier town in question is New York, “…we fight, love and adventure on all levels and never bother to distinguish reality from illusion because both are equally living and dangerous.”

   Who He? is both a suspense novel, a dark screwball apocalyptic comedy, a detective story, a savage satire, and a noirish psychological novel worthy of Cornell Woolrich or Patrica Highsmith if they wrote Madmen, as taut as a Hitchcock film, cynical tough and clipped as Howard Hawks, and mad as the Marx Brothers. It is also an affecting romance, a profound comment on the war between the sexes, 1950’s style, and has some of the best dialogue since Raymond Chandler collaborated with Billy Wilder.

   It’s the story of Jacob Lennox, writer for Who He?, a game show that morphed into a popular variety show starring a ventriloquist and one week in Lennox life where he rises, plunges, and rises again from the ashes starting with getting black out drunk on Christmas Eve and stumbling into work the next day to find his precious show has been receiving concerning hate male.

   Jake is a tough guy who grew up on the wrong side of the streets. He is handsome, glamorous, elegant, and meaner than a junk yard dog when he needs be; his only soft spot for his two Siamese cats and Sam Cooper, the actor who shares an apartment with him.

   At first Jake doesn’t think much of the letters, just crank male, but then he begins to believe the threat may be real and someone may well be murdered the next performance of Who He?. Delving into that mystery introduces him to Gabby Valentine, the ex-wife of network honcho Roy Audibon as vicious as he is ignorant and crass, who Jake falls hard for, and in due course Inspector Fink who Jake takes the letters to.

   With Gabby and Sam, he starts to try and put together the puzzle eventually recalling from his black out meeting a mysterious Mr. Knott, who he believes wrote the letters leading to a wild riotous night across Manhattan as he retraces his step and a revelation of who the letters are aimed at.

   Alfred Bester was one of the legends of Science Fiction, best known for his novels The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, both classics of the field that set the genre on its ear and inspired later generations of writers. He also wrote in radio and early television, as well as comic books and two mainstream novels that have both been called Hitchcockian. Judging by Who He? I will have to track the other book down, because this one is a corker.

   Jake Lennox’s week carries him from the pinnacle to the gutter as it spins out of control, Audibon threatening to cancel Who He? to get his wife back, red baiting sponsors boycotting, Jake wheeling and dealing, his whirlwind love affair revealing far more than he or Gabby would like to acknowledge about themselves, and the threat of violence growing ever closer with the most terrible revelation saved for last in a twist worthy of Woolrich, Christie, or Hitchcock.

   I really can’t praise this book enough. It rollicks along at an incredible pace with hardly a pause for a lag. The writing is by turns insightful, savage, biting, gut busting funny, and nerve wracking, while every revelation comes like a cliffhanger in a serial.

   The novel may throw you a bit because it is narrated by a writer friend of Lennox who is off stage for much of the book but telling the story he pieced together from all the participants. It’s a little distracting, but it works, and that’s all that matters and by the end of the book you will understand why it was the best way to tell this story. Just trust Bester. You could not be in better hands..

   Sadly the book is long out of print though I found an ebook copy of it on the Luminist Society site. It more than deserves a new edition if only as a brilliant slice of life portrait of early live television easily comparable if not surpassing Max Erlich’s The Glass Web.

DARK PASSAGE. Warner Bros., 1947. Humphrey Bogar, Lauren Bacall, Bruce Bennett, Agnes Moorehead, Tom D’Andrea. Screenplay by Delmer Daves, based on a novel by David Goodis. Director: Delmer Daves.

   A girl with money unaccountably helps a convict escape San Quentin, then gives him shelter while he is recovering from plastic surgery. Although he was convicted of killing his wife, she is convinced he got a raw deal.

   What a team Bogart and Bacall made! When she looks at him in that special way she had, the screen nearly melts. The story here doesn’t match the magnitude of the stars, but it’s no slouch, especially when Bogart’s *evidence* goes tumbling out the window.

   Alone among those oft-cited Berkley Highland editions, the cover artist for H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) is unidentified; the remainder—except the aforementioned The Time Machine (1895)—were all the work of Paul Lehr. I never owned that, because back in the old grade-school book-fair days I bought a long-gone, oversized, unidentified trade paperback, and now have a 1984 Signet edition coincidentally containing both novels.

   In his introduction, John Calvin Batchelor notes that they “were written while Wells still felt the anxiety of his early life of grubbing and false starts, and represent excellent examples of a man still very shaky about this new venture, fiction writing. Both were written in a fever by a man fleeing his past and intimidated by his future,” one of unforeseen success.

   Wells’s third novel was his first using a third-person narrative:

   
   Bringing the mustard for his lunch, Mrs. Hall is surprised to see him covering the lower part of his face with a serviette, and white bandages hiding his forehead and ears, with only his bright, “pink, peaked nose” exposed.

   Later replacing the serviette with a silk muffler, he refuses to be drawn out on the subject of bandaged injuries, disappointed that his luggage cannot be picked up that day from the Bramblehurst railway station. Later caught unawares before he can raise the muffler, he appears to have “an enormous mouth…that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face.” Describing himself as “an experimental investigator [whose] baggage contains apparatus and appliances,” he seeks solitude and has suffered an accident necessitating “a certain retirement,” sometimes shutting himself up in the dark because his eyes are “weak and painful…[while] the slightest disturbance…is a source of excruciating annoyance…”

   His boxes, cases, crates, and trunks contain books, test tubes, a balance, and every type of glass bottles, packed in straw, with which the stranger is soon locked away for his “really very urgent and necessary investigations,” speaking cryptically to himself, smoothing any irregularities away with “bills settled punctual.” Speculation is rampant among the “quiet Sussex villagers”—who dub him the “Bogey Man”—especially after medico Cuss reports that the stranger, while lamenting the accidental burning of a five-ingredient prescription, displayed a seemingly empty sleeve, nonetheless held up and open. He tells Bunting, the vicar, “Something [invisible]—exactly like a finger and thumb it felt—nipped my nose.”

   In June, funds exhausted, the stranger burglarizes the vicarage, unseen but heard sneezing there and at the inn, where his scattered garments and animated furniture baffle the Halls. Later, confronted by Mrs. Hall over his bill, he unveils—at last referred to by the title—and eludes Constable Bobby Jaffers’s attempt to execute a warrant; he then enlists the aid of tramp Thomas Marvel, “an out-cast like myself…. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power.” He covers Marvel’s exit from Iping, with a bundle of clothes stolen from Bunting and Cuss and the diaries they sought to decipher, but refuses to accept Marvel’s “resignation” while forcing him to travel to Port Burdock.

   Spiriting money from tills, he puts it in the pockets of Marvel, who finally takes refuge in the Jolly Cricketers; wounded in a scuffle there, the Invisible Man visits old acquaintance Dr. Kemp, identifying himself as Griffin of University College. Before telling his story, he demands to eat and sleep while Kemp peruses the papers and concludes, “it reads like rage growing to mania! The things he may do!,” writing a note to Colonel Adye. Griffin reveals finding “a general principle of pigments and refraction,—a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions….to lower the refractive index of a substance…to that of air,” betrayed by blood, which “[g]ets visible as it coagulates,” or undigested food.

   Playing for time while awaiting the police, Kemp hears Griffin relate experimenting on a cat in London, financed by funds stolen from his father; firing his lodging-house to cover his tracks; realizing that snow, rain, fog, or dirt can give him away; stealing his garb from a Drury Lane costume shop; and hiding out in Iping, seeking a way to reverse the process at will, for which he needs his diaries.

   He wants Kemp as a confederate, and has murder on his mind. “Not wanton killing, but a judicious slaying…. [The] invisible man…must now establish a reign of terror…. And all who disobey his orders he must kill, and kill all who would defend them,” yet he is interrupted by police chief Adye, and flees the house.

   Amid a carefully planned (invisible) manhunt, he smashes the head of Wicksteed with an iron rod, then writes to threaten that Kemp’s execution will mark “day one of year one of the new…Epoch of…Invisible Man the First.” Adye and the Invisible Man are injured in the siege of Kemp’s house; as he makes a break for town, the locals surround and beat his pursuer, who becomes visible after death. “First came the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess, and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Presently they could see his crushed chest…his shoulders, and the dim outline of his drawn and battered features.”

   Perhaps the only true stylist of Universal’s Golden Age (1930s-’40s) horror films, James Whale (1889-1957) directed Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—which along with The Invisible Man (1933) established two of their franchises—and The Old Dark House (1932). Reunited on Frankenstein, Whale and rising star Colin Clive had been brought to New York to film Journey’s End (1930), re-creating their 1929 stage success by R.C. Sherriff on London’s West End. Whale, who had also directed the Broadway production, recruited Sherriff to adapt The Invisible Man; he considered Clive for the lead, but ultimately cast relative unknown Claude Rains when Karloff bowed out.

   With cinematic scoring then still in its infancy, revolutionized that year by Max Steiner in King Kong (1933), music was rare in these films, notably an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1877) played over the opening credits for Dracula (1931). However, Heinz Roemheld’s uncredited score for The Invisible Man, heard sparingly at the beginning and end of the film, would be widely recycled and ultimately ubiquitous in Universal’s Buster Crabbe serials Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck Rogers (1939). Sherriff gives Griffin and Kemp (William Harrigan) first names, respectively Jack and Arthur, and opens faithfully (Wells had script approval) with Griffin’s arrival in Iping at what is now the Lion’s Head.

   Clearly, Whale shared what Batchelor called Wells’s “heartfelt affection for the English yeoman class and its nosy ways, with a list of colorful village types who hover around the [inn] spying on the stranger….[i]n their eccentric and most unsinister way…”

   Indelible as Jenny Hall is Una O’Connor, so memorably reunited with Whale as terrified servant Minnie in Bride, and later the beloved nursemaid Bess in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Joining her is a “who’s who” of other venerable character actors, e.g., Forrester Harvey as her innkeeper husband Herbert; Holmes Herbert as the Chief of Police; Bride’s Burgomaster, E.E. Clive, as Constable Jaffers; and Dudley Digges as the Chief Detective.

   According to Paul M. Jensen’s The Men Who Made the Monsters, the film was the result of an almost two-year process incorporating “at least nine treatments and eleven scripts, prepared by twelve different writers,” e.g., John Huston, Preston Sturges, and Universal mainstays Garrett Fort—also uncredited on Paramount’s Wells-based Island of Lost Souls (1932)—and John L. Balderston. Envisioned as a Karloff vehicle, the project had another round-robin of potential directors attached, including Robert Florey, supplanted by Whale on Frankenstein. The studio also purchased the rights to, and considered using elements from, The Murderer Invisible (1931), a novel by fellow Lost Souls alumnus Philip Wylie.

   Sherriff added a love interest in fiancée Flora (Gloria Stuart), whose father, Dr. Cranley (Henry Travers), employed Griffin and Kemp, the latter—here a romantic rival—saying, “He meddled in things men should leave alone,” after Griffin disappeared to pursue his experiments in private. John P. Fulton’s effects remain impressive almost a century later, particularly when Rains gradually disrobes; he and a special set were covered with black velvet, so that only the clothing registered, later combined with other footage. He earned Oscar nominations for three sequels, later winning for Wonder Man (1945) and The Ten Commandments (1956), but the Best Special Effects category was not created until 1939.

   A list of chemicals found in Griffin’s old lab includes monocane, “a terrible drug…made from a flower…grown in India. It draws color from everything it touches” and, perhaps unknown to him, drove a canine test subject “raving mad.”

   Griffin explains his “reign of terror” to unwilling partner Kemp (“a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction”) and wrecks a train, knocking out the signalman and killing 100 people. Marvel is eliminated, his function of helping to retrieve the notebooks from the inn being delegated to the unflatteringly portrayed Kemp; Whale, unlike Wells, later allows Griffin to follow through on his threatened “execution.”

   Flora persuades Cranley, summoned by Kemp, that she can reason with Griffin, who says that as “a poor, struggling chemist,” he sought wealth and fame for her, then lapses into a rant about “power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet,” scoffing that Cranley has “the brain of…a maggot…” Dismissing her warning about monocane, he slips through a police cordon and memorably skips away in stolen pants, singing, “Here we go gathering nuts in May…”

   Uncredited players include Dwight Frye, John Carradine (both of whom offer the police suggestions, and later appeared in Bride), and Walter Brennan as the man whose bicycle Griffin steals; Harry Stubbs is skeptical Inspector Bird, casually murdered.

   Easily penetrating an elaborate dragnet, Griffin avenges his betrayal just at the appointed hour, laughingly maniacally as he sends the trussed and screaming Kemp over a cliff in his car to a fiery death. Undone when a farmer reports, “There’s breathing in my barn,” he is burned out, forced into a snowstorm that makes his footprints visible, and shot, his dying words to Flora echoing Kemp’s aphorism. His star-making performance more impressive without the use of the facial features seen only in death, Rains excelled as Prince John in Robin Hood and Captain Renault in Casablanca (1942), the latter and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) earning him two of his four Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations.

   Universal belatedly followed the film with an erratic “series” stretching the definition of a sequel, including not one but two encounters with their other resident cash cows, first with a cameo (non-)appearance by Vincent Price at the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), and then the inevitable …Meet the Invisible Man (1951). Price had starred in The Invisible Man Returns (1940), clearing himself of a murder charge with the serum from Jack’s brother, Frank (John Sutton). That same year, eccentric inventor John Barrymore turned Virginia Bruce into The Invisible Woman with an invisibility device in a screwball comedy featuring Charlie Ruggles, Margaret Hamilton, and Shemp Howard.

   As with Sherlock Holmes, Universal drafted the character for the war effort with Invisible Agent (1942), pitting Jack’s grandson, Frank (Jon Hall), against Axis spies Peter Lorre, in his Japanese Mr. Moto-mode, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the culprit in Returns. And, just to maximize the confusion, Hall, uhm, returned in The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) as apparently unrelated Robert Griffin, the escaped psycho whose crime spree is enabled by mad scientist John Carradine. But perhaps the true revenge is his immortality in various media, including a nominal 2020 remake, innumerable rip-offs, multiple eponymous TV series, Rankin-Bass’s Mad Monster Party? (1967), comic books, and on radio and stage.

Up next: The War of the Worlds

      Edition cited/works consulted:

Batchelor, John Calvin, introduction to The Time Machine and The Invisible Man (New York: Signet Classic, 1984), pp. v-xxiii.

Baxter, John, Science Fiction in the Cinema: 1895-1970 (The International Film Guide Series; New York: A.S. Barnes, 1970).

Brosnan, John, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978).

Brunas, Michael, John Brunas, and Tom Weaver, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990).

Gunn, James, editor, The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988).

Hardy, Phil, editor, The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction (Woodstock, NY:Overlook, 1995).

Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Jensen, Paul M., The Men Who Made the Monsters (New York: Twayne, 1996).

Kinnard, Roy, Tony Crnkovich, and R.J. Vitone, The Flash Gordon Serials, 1936-1940: A Heavily Illustrated Guide (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008).

Wells, H.G., The Invisible Man, in The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, pp. 105-278.

Wikipedia

      Online source:

https://archive.org/details/the-invisible-man-1933_202105.

JOHN GARDNER – License Renewed. James Bond #16 (but the first by Gardner). Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1981. Richard Marek, US, hardcover, 1981. Berkley, US, paperback, 1982.

   After the death of Ian Fleming, the holders of the James Bpnd copyright bestowed upon John Gardner the honor and responsibility of moving the British master spy, along with his galaxy of gadgets and arch-villains, into the l 980s. This established thriller writer has responded admirably.

   Here Bond is assigned to infiltrate the castle of the Laird of Murcaldy, a renowned nuclear scientist who has had meetings with an international terrorist known as Franco. Bond manages to deftly extract an invitation to Gold Cup Day at Ascot. Very English. He is off to the castle in the highlands, where he meets people with names like Mary Jane Mashkins and Lavender Peacock and affects the courses of nations with names like England, France, and America.

   If this novel isn’t a Fleming original, it is still great fun.

   Everything Bond fans would expect is here: the eccentric, larger-than-life villain with his sexy and thoroughly evil female companion and preternaturally tough henchman; the seductive and seduced beautiful woman of questionable allegiance; the slyly sexual double entendre; the infusion of ultramodern technology; and the name-dropping of expensive quality brands of everything from perfume to hand-guns.

   So artfully has Gardner penetrated and captured Fleming’s style that one can only wonder if Bond’s old nemesis, SPECTER, might somehow be involved. No doubt Bond’s boss, the enigmatic M, could tell us; but, as usual, he is tight-lipped.

   Another recommended title in the new Bond series by Gardner is Role of Honor (1984).

———
   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.

MARK DERBY – Womanhunt. Viking, hardcover, 1959. Ace D-458, paperback, 1960. First published in the UK as Tigress (Collins, 1959).

   
   Dickson was tired and ready to retire from intelligence, but he had one more job to do in Malaya. It might even be pleasant, get a little tiger hunting in along the way. All he had to do was determine if Anna, a fellow agent and the woman he loved, was a traitor, and if she was kill her and her contact. For added pleasure he could take on a clever and dangerous Communist insurgent and save Malaya from falling into the Soviet orbit.

   An “easy one. Just keeping an eye,” Landsdowne, his boss said, but it meant reconnecting with British publicist and writer Charlton Lang who Dix loathed, it meant looking at Anna as if she were a spy — and just maybe killing her and Lang too if it came to it, and it meant trailing far more dangerous prey than a man-eating tiger in the steamy jungles and more dangerous cities.

   Mark Derby was one of the British thriller writers from the Golden Age of adventure fiction (roughly 1939 to 1980), the era that produced Hammond Innes, Geoffrey Household, Victor Canning, Alistair MacLean, Gavin Lyall, Jack Higgins, Desmond Bagley, and many more (all covered in Mike Ripley’s history of that period Kiss Kiss Bang Bang).

   Derby, a former policeman and intelligence agent in the Far East was a lesser name in his native land, but sold extremely well in this country with books like The Sunlit Ambush, The Sun in the Hunter’s Eyes, and Afraid in the Dark doing well as book club picks and in paperback. He also did well with serializations and short stories in the Slicks, a far more lucrative market than hardcovers or paperbacks.

   In the basics Derby most resembles Victor Canning though there is no imitation as such since almost all Derby’s work is set in his stomping grounds of the Far East. Like Canning his protagonists are often professional agents, though also like Canning, tend to come from the gentleman farmer class, countrymen familiar with rough country, well educated middle class Brits, clubbable, unlike say James Bond, but a bit rougher hewn and tougher than the upper classes. Like Canning’s heroes they believe in their work, but they are well aware of the bitter, cynical, and sometime ruthless nature and they have consciences that bother them (Canning himself changed with time coming to question if the “Game” needed to be played quiet as ruthlessly as it was).

   In Derby’s case his history as a Colonial policeman and intelligence officer colors his view of the world, but in fairness it was the prevailing view of his time, and he does not write Yellow Peril or hysterical Colonialist fantasy. His Brits and his Asian characters are sympathetic or villain both, and he isn’t above sympathy for the devil so to speak. We’re a long way from Sapper and Sax Rohmer here, and simple assumptions about race and the “whiteman’s burden”.

   Dickson has his hands full trying to determine which side Anne is on, negotiating the troubled politics of Malaya, hunting a tiger (this one literal) that proves more dangerous than he thought, and battling his own ethical and moral dilemmas before he brings his prey to ground in a fast moving and satisfying adventure thriller.

   Of course the form has changed, and modern readers used to the hyperbolic widescreen style of Cussler, Berry, McNabb, or Rollins might find the more literary pleasures of the Golden Age writers a bit slow with their time out for local color, history, atmosphere, and culture and more complex heroes who tend not to wear their heroics on their chest and don’t always behave like overgrown Boy Scouts. Heroes. Villains in these tend to owe a debt to Eric Ambler and Graham Greene and the complexities of Robert Louis Stevenson’s heroes more than Doc Savage and Dime Novels.

   Curious how a simpler and less aware time produced far more complex popular fiction asking far more serious questions than much of the genre today dares ask or even suggests.

ROBERT CAMPBELL – Plugged Nickel. Jake Hatch #1. Pocket Books, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1988.

   Two halves of a body are found along the tracks of a train heading from Chicago to Denver, but railroad detective Jake Hatch suspects foul play more than just an unfortunate accident, His primary clue: a plugged nickel. Primary suspect: the local coroner.

   The problem with this is this: the nickel is not exactly plugged, nor is it exactly a nickel. The current day railroad background – a last link to a vanishing era – is nicely sketched in, but in retrospect the detective work is forced, and plagued with coincidence.

   
UPDATE: This adventure of Jake Hatch was followed by Red Cent (Pocket, 1989), but that was the last of his cases on record.

MERLDA MACE – Blondes Don’t Cry. Christine Andersen #2. Julian Messner, hardcover, 1945. Black Cat Detective #28, digest paperback, 1946.

   In this, her second and final detective murder case (after Headlong for Murder, Messner, 1943), a young working girl moves to wartime Washington DC, where she finds housing to be as difficult as she was warned it would be. Her new boss comes to the rescue, however, and offers her a small apartment in a building he owns on the outskirts of town.

   The previous tenant seems to have disappeared, with a small mystery attached to that statement, as she had told no one she was leaving. Christie has no reason to worry about that. She is only happy to have a place to live. And what’s more, all of the other residents are friendly, including a neighborhood cop named Shamus O’Reilly. And even though Christine has a boy friend fighting the war overseas, the relationship between herself and this new neighbor becomes closer and closer as time goes on.

   Nothing at all naughty, I hasten to add. This was still only 1945.

   But when Christine finds the body of a woman in her dumbwaiter, she finds the presence of the other man in her life most reassuring — especially when, feeling the steely eyes of the policeman investigating the case directly upon her, she decides she had best be doing some work in that regard herself.

   In an apartment building jammed with tenants, there are lots of suspects in the case, but not much headway can be made when the identity of the dead woman is – and remains – unknown for most the length of the book. I know the story takes place 80 years ago, but to me this is a flaw in the telling that’s extremely difficult to swallow. I just didn’t believe it.

   And yet, otherwise, the aforementioned telling is pleasant enough, with lots of background into what life was like in our nation’s capital during a time of war. It’s not enough to make the book anything of a success, however, but it does have a kind of cozy charm to it that may keep you reading onward (slogging) through a detective case that should have been solved in a few hours, not a full week.

   Not to mention the fact that there was not a third book in the series that might have resolved the dilemma Christine finds herself in at book’s end.

WHITE ZOMBIE. United Artists, 1932. Bela Lugosi, Madge Bellamy, Joseph Cawthorn, Robert Frazer. Story by Garnett Weston; based on the novel The Magic Island by William B. Seabrook. Director: Victor Halperin.

   To break up the impending marriage of the girl he loves to another, a Haitian plantation owner makes a fiendish deal with a master of the living dead. (There is no doubt as to which of these characters is played by Bela Lugosi, is there?)

   While the atmosphere is magnificently eerie, the pace is achingly slow. And there is no denying it, Lugosi is simply a wonderment. Either this movie will chill your bones to the marrow – or, depending on the mood you’re in, you’ll laugh your head off.

MARK O’NEILL – To Catch a Spy. Poisoned Pen Press, softcover, 2025.

   We open on the Riviera, John Robie, the Cat, is pursuing a man who just fired at him across the roof of the Hotel Carlton:

   One year has passed and once again John Robie, le Chat, the famed jewel thief and Resistance hero is back on a roof pursuing a fugitive, this time for his aristocratic friend Paul Du Pre who Robie had asked to help him reconnect with Francine “Francie” Stevens, the American heiress who had helped him clear his name of a series of crimes on the Riviera and then mysteriously left as their romance heated up.

   As a favor John agreed to break into a room in the Hotel Carlton and check on a man, and now the man has fired at him and fled across the roof falling to his death.

   To make manners worse the policeman called in is Le Pic, the officer who thought a year earlier he finally had a noose around the neck of the infamous Cat only to be humiliated when Robie broke a criminal ring of jewel thieves copying Robie’s pre war exploits.

   Le Pic would like to arrest Robie, but De Pre is not only wealthy and an aristocrat, he is also tied to counter-intelligence and the man who just fell to his death may be an enemy agent.

   To Catch a Spy is the Estate Approved sequel to the novel To Catch a Thief by David Dodge and the film by Alfred Hitchcock with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

   The film is a classic and hardly needs to be mentioned, but the novel it is based upon needs a bit more introduction. Author David Dodge was a noted travel writer who brought a fresh perspective to his works with his photographic skills and because he traveled his post war haunts with his wife and family in tow.

   In addition to his travel books he was a mystery writer of some note, writing the hard-boiled CPA series about Ira Whitney (Death and Taxes), tales of American Private Eye and relic hunter Al Colby in Central America (Plunder in the Sun), tough Secret Service agent John Lincoln (Hooligan), and stand-alone thrillers like La Carambola and his most famous work, To Catch a Thief.

   I first bonded with my then writing partner Nicholas Boving, a fellow Seven League Booter, over our mutual appreciation of Dodge, who has not had the respect he deserves, though Plunder was reprinted by Hard Case Crime along with one last posthumous novel,, and To Catch a Thief has been reprinted numerous times since it first came out

   Dodge’s tongue’n-cheek approach to crime, adventure, and travel mixed with his easy gift for characterization and plot coming from it made him a perfect companion for travel and relaxing escapist reading, so it was with some trepidation I approached a sequel to his most famous work no matter how much it deserved one.

   Happily Mark O’Neill pulls it off, picking up one year after the events in the original, and like the original, plunging our hero into action and danger on page one. This time Robie must use his old skills to negotiate the treacherous world of spies, but also his troubled relationship with Francie Stevens, the American heiress who got cold feet and abandoned him a year earlier.

   Now Francie is returning to the Riviera with a fashion show and Alex, a new fiance, and before he can hope to reconnect with her Robie has to deal with the fact she is almost certainly a part of the spy ring he has found himself committed to breaking before they kill him.

   Relying on old allies and avoiding old enemies like Le Pic, Robie must uncover the leaders of the spy ring and hopefully clear Francie, if she is innocent, while on the run and unsure why Francie has turned on him.

   The good news is the book is a perfect balance between Dodge’s novel and the fairly faithful adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, screen writer John Michael Hayes and his team. For a first novel the writing is assured, pleasantly straight forward, and aware of the big shoes it is filling without being self conscious about it.

   Chances are if you love the movie or the book this will be a satisfying chance to spend time with the characters in a new adventure.

   The book isn’t perfect. It is a bit long at 345 pages, probably to be expected in today’s publishing world, and I don’t agree with every editorial choice made, but it is also remarkable in that it finds a balance between the novel and film (close as they are, there are major differences) without shorting either.

   “The public knows him as a burglar, but let me tell you, John Robie is one of a kind…” So were David Dodge and Alfred Hitchcock, and neither should be disappointed by this tribute to their accomplishments. Like the originals To Catch a Spy is froth and fun, and has just enough of an edge and just enough twists and turns to be perfect escapist reading with a mix of glamour, humor, romance, suspense, and thrills.

   It’s champagne, and pink champagne at that, a Brut, a dessert wine and not a vintage, but it tickles the nose and lightly intoxicates, and it makes a pleasant escape from grim reality and cozy domesticity.

JOHN GARDNER – The Garden of Weapons. Herbie Kruger #2 [See Comment #1.] Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1980 McGraw-Hill, US, hardcover, 1981.

   John Gardner is one of the most versatile British writers in the espionage genre. He gained early recognition for his Boysie Oakes series — The Liquidators (1946), Amber Nine (1966 ), and five others — which he created in the hope they would be an “amusing counter-irritant to the excesses” of James Bond; these were written in the black-humor style characteristic of the Sixties.

   In the Seventies, Gardner scored additional critical and sales triumphs with a much different type of series — one featuring Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy, Professor Moriarity, in The Return of Moriarity (1974) and The Revenge of Moriarity (1975). And in the Eighties, Gardner returned to the frantic world of Bondian spies — literally when he began a series of new 007 adventures.

   But Gardner’s best book to date is not one featuring a series character; it is the realistic espionage thriller The Garden of Weapons, which begins when a KGB defector walks into the British Consulate in West Berlin and demands to speak with Big Herbie Kruger, a legendary figure in intelligence circles.

   Kruger’s interrogation of the defector reveals that the greatest of Kruger’s intelligence coups — a group of six informants known as the Telegraph Boys — has been penetrated by a Soviet spy. Kruger decides to go undercover and eliminate the double agent himself, without the knowledge or consent of British Intelligence.

   Posing as an American tourist, Kruger enters East Berlin to carry out his deadly self-appointed mission. But the task is hardly a simple one: and Gardner’s plot is full of Byzantine twists and turns involving the East Germans, the KGB, and British Intelligence. Any reader who enjoys espionage fiction will find The Garden of Weapons a small masterpiece of its type.

   Another non-series Gardner thriller in the same vein is The Werewolf Trace (1977), which has been called “a compulsively readable thriller with delicately handled paranormal undertones and a bitter ending.”

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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.
   

      The Herbie Kruger series —

1. The Nostradamus Traitor (1979)
2. The Garden of Weapons (1980)
3. The Quiet Dogs (1982)
4. Maestro (1993)
5. Confessor (1995)