HENRY WILSON ALLEN – Genesis Five. William Morrow, hardcover, 1968. Pyramid T-2162, paperback, 1970.

   
   When I realized who Henry Wilson Allen was (and I’ll reveal that as this review progresses for anyone as ignorant as I was) I knew I had to read this 1968 near future Science Fiction/Horror Thriller somewhat in the Michael Crichton tradition, but with far deeper pulp roots.

   I’ll say this, for all its flaws as scientific speculation or true SF, it is delightful barn=burner of a novel full of enough sturm n drang for a dozen longer books, and oddly looks forward to the kind of not quite SF speculative thrillers that often top today’s bestseller lists from James Rollins, Clive Cussler, and Andy McDermott.

   It is well written, playful, and if closer to SF movies or the kind of “Monster” thriller from television thrillers by Nigel Kneale or episodes of Doctor Who, and Outer Limits, it is still for all that great fun. The “monster” here is a good one.

   It is not Helnlein or Asimov and John Campbell wouldn’t recognize it, but it is a slam bang thriller.

   As we are told the book is taken from The Suntar Papers found at the crash site of a Russian ship and recounts in the words of the papers author, Yuri Suntar, the events surrounding the The Siberian Center for Genetic Studies, known by its code name Genesis Five.

   Whether this controversial journal is authentic or the bizarre creation of some deranged hoaxer must remain the subject of another time.

   That rather Victorian disclaimer aside we plunge right in, and there is hardly time to catch a breath beyond that point.

   Yuri Suntar, our narrator, is the half Mongol son of an American spy and a Soviet citizen, a blonde blue eyed Mongol distrusted all his life and always in the shadow of his brother Yang, Olympic athlete, physical giant, and perfect specimen of Mongol manhood. As the novel opens the security services have shown up at Yuri’s doorstep and he is none too sure whether he is under arrest or being offered a job.

   Whisked off across country Yuri is soon introduced to the exotic and beautiful Chandra Maringa, the lilac-eyed daughter of a Chinese woman and a Masai scientist, and the granddaughter of the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist the pure Mandarin genius Dr. Ho Wu Chen.

   Entranced by Chandra (who has little use for him), frightened and impressed by Dr. Ho, and by no means certain of himself Yuri discovers that the doctor runs a vast underground scientific research station beneath Okatrai Island in the Arctic wastes where Yang, his brother, has been given the job of master of the savage wolves used for experiment at the facility. Yang asked for Yuri, and Yang gets what he wants.

   Arriving at the bizarre underground base Yuri soon encounters Yang and his wolves, and they are not the three little pig kind. What they are is what some Cockney in every British horror movie ever made inevitably calls “an ’orror, Guv’nor, It were an ’orror!”

   A hybrid of man and wolf with insect larva that allows Dr. Ho to bind them together they are strong, fast, smart, and murderous of fang claw and fatal stinger.

   In short, “It were an ’orror!”

   Yuri wants out of the madhouse naturally. And to that end he discovers Ho has secrets of his own including having stored Chandra’s father in hyper-sleep and telling her he is dead. With Joseph Maringa’s help, and few allies, and Chandra won over to his cause Yuri sets out to let the world know what Dr. Ho plans, but things don’t go smoothly…

   And thereby hangs a tale, as they used to say.

   
   Shades of Jules Verne.

   You will have noted by now it is a “Yellow Peril” novel in many ways, with Dr. Ho in the Fu Manchu mold, but canny enough to do so with mixed race hero and heroine and a cast of good and bad Chinese and Russians. The author also shows he did his research in his study of Mongol culture and Yuri is both believable and admirable, but then the author has a pretty good history of writing sympathetically about races other than his own with insight and significant research.

   I’ll tease a bit first, because readers of this blog know who Henry Wilson Allen is on multiple levels. First you know him because for ten years he worked at MGM animation studios as a gag man under the name of Hec Allen, and wrote almost all of the classic Tex Avery cartoons between 1944 and 1954 that have become the stuff of animation legend. He’s that Henry Wilson Allen.

   Still, that would not explain his gift for research and writing about other races. He earned those spurs literally writing under two other better known names as my favorite Western writer of all time, Will Henry and Clay Fisher.

   You know, McKenna’s Gold, Who Rides With Wyatt, Yellowstone Kelly, Pillars of the Sky, The Tall Men, Santa Fe Passage, I Tom Horn, From Where the Sun Now Stands, No Survivors, North Star, those Westerns, many of which were also movies.

   I won’t pretend Genesis Five is politically correct in any way, but it is entertaining and well written, and for its time closer to Richard Condon teasing old pulp traditions (the villains in Whisper of the Axe are the PRC sponsoring terrorism and the villain and hero both ethnic minorities) than the last legs of the Sax Rohmer style Yellow Peril threat to the Western White world plots of old.

   In 1968 Nixon had yet to go to China, and China was on the way to replacing the Soviets as the favorite villain of thriller fiction. Its no excuse, but you can see Allen trying to have it both ways, and almost getting away with it by making Yuri and Chandra attractive near superhuman heroes struggling against not just Ho’s madness, but a society and government who would employ him.

   Read in context he succeeded, though not so much from a more modern view.

   Knowing that, accepting its limitations, it makes for an interesting side light on the better known careers of Hec Allen, Will Henry, and Clay Fisher. There are stylistic touches, and moments when he gets in Yuri’s head that will remind you of some of his Western novels, and whatever else it is a rip roaring thriller.

KURT STEEL – Judas, Incorporated. Hank Hyer #6. Little Brown, hardcover, 1936. Dell 244, paperback, mapback edition, 1948.

   Homer Valliant invented a kind of electrical doodad that made him a small fortune by manufacturing it himself via Valliant Electrical Works. He made a factory town out of his hometown in upstate New York.

   When the Depression hit, he refused to cut wages and only laid off the most able bodied and youthful of his employees. He always hated unions — but he was a kindhearted boss. This kind of generosity didn’t sit well with the board of directors — so Valliant ended up losing control of his own company, getting bought out by a conglomerate (Ledco) and demoted to plant manager.

   Ledco was cutthroat towards labor. Wages were sliced, aging long time employees were canned, and working conditions were oppressive. To keep your job you had to work more hours for less pay and act happy about it.

   In reaction to worsening working conditions, the employees at Valliant Electrical decided to unionize. Homer Valliant, who’d always been a staunch opponent of unions, began to soften his stance when his pleas to new ownership went unheard.

   Homer Valliant’s beautiful daughter Madeline is married to the CEO of Ledco, Curtis Tower, and they began getting into vicious arguments about the state of labor strife at Valliant Electrical.

   Then Homer Valliant is shot dead in his office at the factory. The police arrested the two leaders of the union effort, and charged them with the murder.

   Homer Valliant’s daughter Madeline does not believe for a second that these two employees of her father who had worked hand in hand with him for years would murder him. It doesn’t make any sense. But local law enforcement is captured by Ledco interests, so there’s no way to get the police to investigate any other leads.

   This leads Madeline Valliant to the offices of our hero, private detective Henry Hyer of Manhattan. For $10,000 contingent on finding the real killers, Hank Hyer agrees to take the case.

   When Hyer gets to town, he immediately runs into two competing big private detective firms from NYC. One of the firms was hired to keep labor in check. The other was hired by the CEO, Curtis Tower, to keep tabs on the other firm.

   But this contract as the union-busting detective firm is worth an awful lot of dough. So it’s in the interest of each of the detective agencies to make the other look bad. While labor strife would cause one firm to lose their contract, it would cause the other to gain it. A zero sum game. So when Hyer shows up, the other two agencies figure he’s just another dog after the same bone: the big money of union busting.

   It’s all a bit complicated. But in the end of this 287 pager (in the Dell mapback edition), every page is needed as Hank Hyer navigates his way through the rough and rocky waterways of union leaders, labor spies, Pinkertons, and corrupt cops.

   Hyer does an excellent job of pitting all the forces against each other, getting the State Police and out of town media on his side, and doing fairly scientific detective work tracking down the bullet’s source, evaluating the typography of incriminating papers, bribing the right bribees, and punching out the rest with his pugilist fists.

   There’s even a funny bit where Hyer makes fun of the mediocre pulpster Kurt Steel who always exaggerates Hyer’s heroism in his novels. You can’t believe everything you read, he assures a hero-worshipper.

   All turns out well in the end. He gets the bad guys, Madeline Tower and the CEO part ways, and the beautiful, rich divorcee has the hots for Hyer. He’ll let her chase him back to NYC. He’s got no time for Hickville, with or without a beautiful rich divorcee.

   It’s a very enjoyable detective novel. Original, well done, with a likeable detective, some good witty patter, and a captivating story. It ended credibly, the many strings all tied up in a tidy bow. If you’re looking for another good 30’s detective novel after having read all the Hammetts and the Whitfields, you should check it out. Note that Chandler’s Big Sleep was also published in 1939  —  but while that is Marlowe’s first adventure, this appears to be Hyer’s sixth. More on Hank Hyer here at the Thrilling Detective website.
   

      The Hank Hyer series —

Murder of a Dead Man (n.) Bobbs 1935
Murder for What? (n.) Bobbs 1936
Murder Goes to College (n.) Bobbs 1936
Murder in G-Sharp (n.) Bobbs 1937
Crooked Shadow (n.) Little 1939
Judas, Incorporated (n.) Little 1939
Dead of Night (n.) Little 1940
Madman’s Buff (n.) Little 1941
Ambush House (n.) Harcourt 1943

BRUNO FISCHER – The Flesh Was Cold. Ben Helm #4, Signet $833; paperback, January 1951.  Previously published as The Angels Fell (Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1950).

   When Flagg finds the body of his ex-wife’s new husband in his closet, he doesn’t know if she’s trying to frame him or if she’s in even worse trouble. But what is troublesome is a missing briefcase, one important to too many people, including both gangsters and congressmen.

   Private eye Ben Helm has a bit part that almost steals the show, but it’s Flagg’s own perverse nature that most impresses. He hates ambitious women, but he may be falling in love with another. He refuses bribes, and refuses political pull in his behalf. Martha, his boss, loves him, and he tolerates it.

   A most· frustrating character and some unusual developments, to say the least, add immensely to an otherwise ordinary detective story.

Rating: B plus.

THE UNDYING MONSTER. 20th Century/Fox, 1942. James Ellison, Heather Angel, John Howard, Bramwell Fletcher, Heather Thatcher, Aubrey Mather. Based on the novel (1922) by Jessie Douglas Kerruish. Director: John Brahm.

   The Undying Monster offers that archetypal cowboy of the Hoppy films, Jimmy Ellison, as a Scotland Yard forensic investigator (!) assisted by Heather Thatcher as a distaff Watson, looking into the Mysterious Curse that haunts John Howard (a Ronald Colman look-alike who starred in Paramount’s Bulldog Drummond series) and his sister, Heather Angel.

   This is an oddity: A Werewolf movie almost totally lacking in excitement. It’s directed by John Brahm, a director who had his moments (Hangover Square, The Lodger, Guest in the House),  so it’s not without some atmosphere and plenty of nifty camerawork, but overall, there’s just too little going on to sustain it.