A REVIEW BY DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


DESMOND CORY – Timelock. Frederick Muller, UK, hardcover, 1967. Walker, US, hc, 1967. US paperback reprints: Award A343S, 1968; Walker, 1984.

DESMOND CORY

   When Johnny Fedora wakes up in a Spanish hospital with no memory of how he got there and registered under the name John Fox there are certain things he knows:

    What’s your name?

   It isn’t John Fox. I’m Johnny Fedora. I work in Madrid all right, but not as a technical translator. Or not entirely. I work for a firm called Eminex, and I’m on loan to British Intelligence. Securance. Cartwright’s outfit. And I’ve come to Spain to kill a man named Feramontov.

   Johnny Fedora is the creation of British writer Desmond Cory (Shaun McCarthy), an ex-Royal Marine Commando who had an actual license to kill issued by none other than Winston Churchill as part of a group that hunted down war criminals that might escape post war justice in the final days of the war.

   In 1948 he penned the first novel featuring his British “free agent” with Spanish blood who “kills the people who kill other people.”

   Timelock from 1967 is part of a series within a series featuring Johnny’s running battle with the cold-blooded cat-like Russian agent, Feramontov, his personal Moriarity.

DESMOND CORY

   Johnny and Feramontov had previously crossed swords in Undertow and Shockwave, and in Timelock Johnny’s prior successes against the Russian have left Feramontov out of favor with the new boys in Moscow and working for an unknown traitor high up in the Spanish government.

   All Johnny knows is that he remembers something about Cell 11, and nothing at all about Laura, the woman who informs him she is his wife.

    “I know a man,” Laura said, “who knows a man.”

    “With the power of hoodoo.”

    “No, not exactly.”

    “You’re supposed to say “Who do?’ and I say ‘You do,’ and you say… Never mind.” Fedora gave up.

    “Scrub around it.”

    “Yes, I think I will. The thing is I rang him up last night.”

    “Rang who? … There I go again.”

    “The man,” Laura said. “The man with the power.”

    “What power?”

    “He shrinks heads.”

    “He shrinks heads. That,” Fedora said, “is hoodoo.”

    “You do.”

    “No I say you do. You say who do. Let’s start again.”

    “To hell with it,” Laura said.

DESMOND CORY

   Caught between Spanish intelligence, who is using him as a stalking horse, and Feramontov, who is plotting something to do with the Santa Ana dam that provides much of the power for the country, Johnny fights to regain his memory and to uncover Feramontov’s latest plan.

   With Laura in tow, Johnny tries to piece together the missing weeks in his life, but finds himself distracted by his beautiful new wife and on the run from the Spanish military, controlled by Feramontov’s high-placed Spanish boss.

   Cory was a superior writer of this type of thriller, highly praised by Anthony Boucher (writing about Undertow, “finesse, economy,humor, and full inventive plotting”), and with a dry subversive sense of humor that elevated Johnny above many of his Bondian competitors.

   In this one, the relation between Johnny and Laura adds a Hitchcockian note of romance and humor and the byplay with Feramontov, when he is captured and tortured, make for superior fare. Part of the pleasure of the Fedora books is the sometimes black humor that informs them:

    “Charming,” Laura said. “You send fifteen thousand volts up me near as a toucher and then you… Who do you think I am? Eskimo Nell?”

   Fermontov is particularly well drawn, a monster, but one that is both human and still frightening. He is a well rounded character:

    “This is one thing we learned from the DST (French Intelligence unit responsible for torture in Algeria). No waste of time, no waste of personnel. All we have to leave is the subject alone with Monichev’s ingenious device (an electric torture device) and a tape recorder. And get on with our jobs.”

    “Leave the subject alone … for how long?”

    “Until he’s dead,” Feramontov said, “Or until he no longer has any mind to change.”

DESMOND CORY

   Johnny and Laura escape Feramontov and end up high on the Santa Ana dam pinned down by an army of Spanish soldiers under the orders of the high-placed traitor in the Spanish State Department.

    It was annoying to see the hills beyond the lake. The sage scented hill and the oak trees. Because seeing them, you wished you were back there. Steep slopes, nagging brambles, and all. It had been good there last night. Almost worth the rest of it.

    “… Not,” he said, “that I’m gone for this for-whom the bells toll stuff either. I’ve had about enough of it.”

   But Johnny survives, trumps Feramontov again and uncovers the secrets of his memory loss and marriage in a suspenseful, down-to-the-wire last-minute finale, one of Cory’s trademarks in the Fedora books.

   Cory ended the Fedora series when he felt they were becoming too popular (his excuse, not mine) and took up a series of excellent suspense novels and a series of mysteries with amateur John Dobie.

   Among the non-series books Night Hawk, A Bit of a Shunt Up the River, and Bennett are outstanding. Bennett in particular may be a masterpiece.

   His novel Deadfall was a film with Michael Caine and Eric Portmann, about a jewel thief caught up in the psycho-sexual drama of a mysterious older man and younger woman who become his partners. The book is a stunner, the film not so much, though worth seeing.

DESMOND CORY

   There is an attractive site for Cory that shows many of the covers for the series and features a PDF biography of the author and his creations which you can download.

   Cory never received the respect he deserved, nor Johnny the popularity he deserved.

   Some of the early Fedora books are little known here and he is too often mistakenly identified as just another Bond clone, despite the fact that like Jean Bruce’s “OSS 117” Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, he beat 007 into print by six years.

   Johnny Fedora is something a bit different from the spy craze and Cory one of the more literate writers skilled at both suspense and a wry humor. He’s well worth getting to know.

   The Johnny Fedora series is marked by good writing, taut suspense, black humor, and sometimes stunning violence, you won’t be sorry you made the effort to meet him.

Editorial Comment: A complete bibliography for Desmond Cory, under all of his pen names, appeared here on this blog in 2007, around the time his passing in 2001 was made known.