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.

IF SCIENCE FICTION. November 1967. Editor: Frederik Pohl. Cover artist: Vaughn Bodé (his first published SF cover art). Overall rating: ***½.

FRED SABERHAGEN “Brother Berserker.” Novelette. A continuation of the adventures of Darron Odegard, last heard from in the August issue (reviewed here). This time the berserker’s attack is a double one; first, a man who disputes the current religious beliefs in astronomy, and perhaps the major target, a religious leader. Can a saint produce life in an android? (4)

C. C. MacAPP “Mail Drop.” Novelette. The problems of a galactic post office when a “package” is claimed by both of two races, Features a double-page illo by Bodé. (4)

PHILIP JOSE FARMER “The Shadow of Space.” Novelette. The concept of “universes within universes” carried to its extreme. No comment on the symbolism involved with the rocket entering the dead man’s mouth. (5)

JAMES STEVENS “Thus Spake Marco Polo.” Playing a game with a crooked computer, a game of life or death. (3)

GARY WRIGHT “Dreamhouse.” Novelette. How a dream machine can catch potential violence before it rises to the surface, Goes on too long. (2)

PIERS ANTHONY “in the Jaws of Danger,” Novelette. More adventures of the captured dentist, Dr. Dillingham, previously in Analog, Novembe 1967 (reviewed here). This time about cavities in the teeth of an intelligent fish-like monster. Bodé’s illustrations make the story. (3)

HAL CLEMENT “Ocean on Top.” Serial, part 2 of 3. See report after the upcoming December issue.

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.

   From a longtime reader of the blog:

   “I’ve been trying to track down the author and title of a book I read a couple of decades ago. It’s about…humanoid killer giant river otters. Set in South America, main character maybe an Anglo who gets a job running a plantation, probably by a British author, from the 1950s-1970s. Kind of a weird thriller. Does it ring a bell? It seems like a novel John Blackburn would have written, but it doesn’t seem to be in his bibliography.”

   I will be spending a long weekend visiting my daughter and her husband in Illinois. While I’m away, I’ve decided not to try posting here until I’m home again, or next Monday at the earliest.

   It will be a long time away from my computer, but I think I can do it. (I will have my phone, so monitoring everything will be easy, if needed.)

   Back soon!

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.”

———
   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)

HENRY KANE – Death Is the Last Lover. Peter Chambers #10. Avon T-291; paperback original; 1st printing, 1959. Signet D2851, paperback, 1966.

   Until the end of his career, PI Peter Chambers was very much a traditional sort of one. In this case he helps a wealthy playboy out of a spot he has created for himself, keeping a secret hideaway under an assumed name and frequenting a dance club named Nirvana.

   Chambers also meets a lovely vision called Sophia Sierra, but even while going ga-ga over her, his mind stays on the case. The rhythm of Kane’s writing often hammers and sings like poetry, and I think his reputation should be higher than it is.