Fri 18 Jul 2014
Reviewed by David Vineyard: THREE THRILLERS FROM THE BRITISH PULPS.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reviews[8] Comments
— The Thriller Library #538: Rough House: A Norman Conquest Story, by Berkeley Gray. 27 May 1939.
— Dixon Hawke Library #549: The Purple Doom of Doctor Krantz, [Anonymous]. 14 December 1940.
— The Sexton Blake Library S3 234: The Green Caravan, by Rex Hardinge. February 1951.
The British pulps came out of a similar tradition as those in America, and like the American brand walked a schizophrenic tightrope between adult and juvenile fiction. Sexton Blake, Nelson Lee, Dixon Hawke, all came from the boys’ papers popular at the turn of the century and well beyond.
Edgar Wallace, Leslie Charteris, John Creasey, Berkeley Gray all came from a slightly more sophisticated branch, though Creasey and Gray (Edwy Sealey Brooks) both wrote adventures of Sexton Blake.
Brooks wrote well over six million words of Blake material, creating Waldo the Wonder Man, who threatened to overwhelm Blake in his own book, before he was forced out because of age, at which point he created Norman Conquest and Inspector Ironside and became even more popular, writing well into the nineteen sixties, at least one Conquest adventure completed by his wife and son.
The British pulp The Thriller, edited by Monty Haydon, who discovered Charteris and Creasey, featured not only the more adult writers, but serials from the American pulp The Shadow, Sax Rohmer, and the dean of the British pulp creations Sexton Blake. Peter Cheyney came out of The Thriller, and a long list of familiar names with him, some of who saw their careers fade and returned in the 1950‘s to penning Sexton Blake adventures like Rex Hardinge and Hugh Clevely (Maxwell Archer, who got one film outing, and the Gang Smasher, who was unique because his assistant was a Jewish pawnshop owner).
It seems as if you can’t elude Sexton Blake in fiction or fact.
All of these short tales run some sixty or so pages, coming in around thirty five thousand words. All appeared in inexpensive paper editions, either in The Thriller, or digest size paperbacks.
They are reviewed in order of publication from the 1930‘s to the 1950‘s.
Norman Conquest, 1066, the Gay Desperado (before the word Gay was made impossible to use in any but a sexual sense) at one time ran with a fast crowd, the Saint, Blackshirt, the Toff, and the Baron, and in the United Kingdom he ran very close though he never quite made it to American shores.
In The Durable Desperadoes William Butler Vivian wrote fondly of Conquest, and I have to agree. His adventures have energy, speed, violence, a hint of sex in perpetual virtual live in girlfriend Joy ‘Pixie’ Everard (think Simon Templar’s Patricia Holm but Norman eventually marries his).
Gangsters, mad scientists, master criminals, spies, fifth columnists, just about all fell to Conquest’s outlaw ways. He even made it to the screen in the person of Tom Conway for one late but half decent film outing.
In Rough House Conquest is at his toughest, in a Saintly mode with more than a hint of Bulldog Drummond at the edges.
What Conquest wants is to warn Lord Chalston that a criminal in a rubber mask one Toowoomobo Dick wants Lord Chalston dead, and Conquest suspects it’s because Toowoomobo Dick under that rubber mask is:
To be fair to Gray, he does at least make a case that Dick might have some reason to feel cheated out of what is rightfully his just because his mother had a distant grandfather with black skin and it showed up on her baby, but that doesn’t excuse murder or the wax effigies he makes of his victims. Dick is more than a little insane.
Racial stereotypes hung on in British popular fiction much longer and were much more of an issue than in American popular fiction, largely because the English were much less homogenous than their American cousins and foreign much more noticeable. Being a class based society didn’t help. As late as the 1950‘s a character in a Sexton Blake adventure (The Voyage of Fear by Rex Hardinge) is an Italian described as “touched by a tar brush.â€
Norman naturally goes a little ballistic when Joy/Pixie is kidnapped right under his nose and as usual charges right in, with less than spectacular results. In fact Joy has to rescue him:
“Norman,†cried Joy chokingly.
Even Norvell Page never entombed Richard Wentworth in wax. Of course she saves Norman, and he does for Lord Chalston in his own inimitable 1066 (get it, the Norman conquest) Gay Desperado way no doubt putting yet another gray hair in the head of Sweet William, his long suffering friend and adversary at Scotland Yard.
World War II posed a problem for rogues and gentleman adventurers. It wasn’t all that glamorous flitting about England in the blitz. Peter Cheyney managed all right with Slim Callaghan and Ettienne McGregor and turned to his best work in spy novels, but the Saint had to sail for the states to fight saboteurs (can you imagine the Saint in uniform?).
The Toff served in intelligence but all his adventures were home based affairs battling things like black marketeers, Norman Conquest fought Nazis at home when not ignoring the war completely, and the Baron was a sergeant manning a telephone for the RAF in a note typical for that grounded series. But Sexton Blake was in it tooth and nail, and where Blake went Dixon Hawke was sure to follow.
The most important thing to note about Dixon Hawke is that young Kenneth Millar, Ross Macdonald, was a fan, and the Hawke books are fun, but they are much closer to the comics than even the hero pulps.
The Purple Doom of Doctor Krantz has Hawke penetrating the Nazi high command as said Doctor Krantz. The opening sets the tone.
By which remark Herr Gustav Stonberg revealed his utter lack of a sense of humour, for, as one of the leading members of the German Secret Police, the dreaded Gestapo, he had been responsible for building some of the worst concentration camps in Germany.
At least you know where you are. This is wartime England and subtle was not needed in the pulps. Never fear though, Dixon Hawke outwits Himmler himself, makes a daring escape with his friend Clavering, and gets shot down in a German plane by the RAF before he is rescued with the goods. “Good old Dixon Hawke …†as his boy pal Tommy (since Sexton Blake’s Tinker every hero needed a youthful assistant) says.
The Purple Doom of Doctor Krantz reads the way a good B wartime programmer plays, it even resembles the Raoul Walsh Errol Flynn flag waver Desperate Journey a bit with a touch of John Buchan’s Greenmantle thrown in (the bit where Hannay is in WWI Germany in disguise), as well as Manning Coles’ Tommy Hambledon in A Toast to Tomorrow and Drink To Yesterday. It’s closer to a Big Little Book or a juvenile than the pulps, but it is still fun, if not for the same reasons as slightly more mature fare.
Who doesn’t like to figuratively flip the bird to Hitler and Himmler?
The Green Caravan by Rex Hardinge is a Sexton Blake post-war adventure, and it is not for little boys. Philip Neal wants to marry beautiful English rose Mary Young, but the tormented Neal, who had a bad war in a ‘Nazi horror camp,’ was drawn to the gypsy woman Belle Hampton, she of the bulging bosom and flashing eyes, for darker needs. Now he can’t get rid of her, and the best solution seems to be murder.
Not the sanest of people this Philip Neal, and the bodies start falling like flies, random victims killed by three bullets from three guns without warning. Mary Young is scared and turns to Neal’s rival Ben Rorke. Ben survives a trap, and now Neal must be rid of him before he figures out who the killer is. So why not blow up the entire end of the hospital Ben is in?
He misses Ben again, but suspecting the second attack on Ben was not coincidence Sexton Blake, called in on the case with Inspector Coutts of the Yard, has the word spread that Ben is dead and moves him to London. Blake is convinced the murders are not the work of ‘what the Americans call a psycho.†He sees a ‘deliberate plan†behind the crimes.
Ben leads to Mary who leads to Belle with whom she had a violent confrontation, which leads to Philip Neal who has the means and the brains to rig the clever traps the killer uses, but there has to be a motive. Even with evidence and motive they couldn’t charge Neal or convince a jury (unusual for the detective to bother with details like juries in any mystery), and the obvious victim, Belle Hampton, is as yet untouched.
If you don’t smell a trap coming, you haven’t been paying attention reading these and watching television and movies all these years.
Though one would imagine John Mortimer’s Rumpole, John Dickson Carr’s Patrick Butler, or Sara Woods’ Antony Maitland could get him off on an insanity plea pretty easy with say the help of solicitor Arthur Crook or Joshua Clunk. He’s obviously loony.
The Blake books from this era and into the sixties are often very good with writers like W.A. Ballinger, Rex Hardinge, Hugh Clevely, Jack Trevor Story (The Trouble with Harry), and other relatively familiar names penning them.
They are still pulp, still series pulp at that, and hardly up to the level of most American paperback and digest fiction of the era, but they follow a long tradition and there is nothing to be ashamed of here. They have colorful covers, they are well plotted, there is variety, and they are well written.
No wonder they were still doing Sexton Blake movies and television series well into the 1960‘s.
So, three British pulps from three different eras, all fun to read, all fluff, but good fluff, and all uniquely British in style and outlook. Fans won’t let Sexton Blake die and there are sites devoted to him. You can find actual e-books of Thriller, Blake, and a few Dixon Hawke books on line along with Nelson Lee, Falcon Swift, and Waldo the Wonderman, and the covers are still attractive to look at and worth collecting. (Steve Holland at Bear Alley has done a couple of handsome Blake anthologies.)
The past never really dies, somebody just collects it.
Note: All three of these stories (and many others) can be downloaded and read online at Comic Book Plus.
July 19th, 2014 at 8:45 am
Wonderful stuff and thank you for posting, David. I’ve long enjoyed (and been fascinated by) Peter Cheyney, John Creasey and Sax Rohmer. I’m hoping that in the future you’ll post more about British pulp and those who wrote it.
July 19th, 2014 at 9:23 am
THE DURABLE DESPERADOES, to use the title of W-V Butler’s excellent book, managed to survive quite a long time, with Simon Templar carrying on because of his TV exposure. The ones who stayed the course, did so because they were able to adapt to the changing times. I have some early Blake stories, and they are undoubtedly kids adventure stories. I also have some of the last ones, and they are much more obviously pitched toward the adult market. Blake himself changed from the Sherlock knock-off to a more urbane, modern figure. His old rogues gallery was also pensioned off in the attempt to make him more ‘real’. The BBC radio series starring William Franklyn was very much based on this later figure, although the two TV Blake series of the 60s/70s returned to the 20s setting, probably due to the increase in nostalgia for those times.
Norman Conquest always reminds me of someone who has just drunk 27 coffees, gulped down fifty ‘uppers’ and is about to start climbing up the wall. He seems so over the top that it goes beyond the high spirits and is shading into hysteria. If you were a doctor you’d probably be prescribing tranquilisers. I suspect that he was the hardest to bring into the modern day, as he seems very much of his times. I always felt that Brooks kept one foot in the juvenile camp with Conquest. The last books still feel like they belong to another time, whereas Creasey, Charteris and the rest did attempt to keep up to date.
The racial sterotyping thing is true, although rather complicated. British boys comics were still showing WWII Japanese soldiers as malformed dwarfs right up into the mid-70s, and some adult thriller writers of that period still said stuff that would cause a sharp intake of breath from any modern reader. A friend of mine told me that he saw ‘No Blacks or Irish’ signs in the windows of London boarding houses in the early 60s. However, nearby to me, there were Indian doctors and clergymen who had successful careers in Britain in the early part of the 20th century. I’ve also seen a British movie from the early 50s called POOL OF LONDON, where one of the two leads is a Jamaican. He is treated sympathetically, and the racism that he is shown is seen as wrong. It all varies from book to book, film to film. Some of the stuff is unbelievably racist, whilst others are quite progressive. When race relations laws were passed in the late 60s, it seems that publishers became more aware of the problem, and steps began to be taken. Racial slights in Agatha Christie have been removed for some time, and recent reprints of Dennis Wheatley have also been careful about which bits they leave out of the reprints. The change seems to have come over time, with very little said, and no real complaints from the reader.
July 19th, 2014 at 9:38 am
Being pedantic it is Hugh Clevely (not Cleverly) and the MacLean who wrote Sexton Blake was Arthur Maclean. The editor of The Thriller was Percy Montague “Monty” Haydon – who Charteris based his character Monty Hayward on. Peter Cheyney only made two appearances in The Thriller both the year after his first Lemmy Caution book was published – G-Man at the Yard (issue 438 26 June 1937)and a serialization of Dames Don’t Care (issue 443-450 31 July-18 September 1937)
July 19th, 2014 at 1:44 pm
Thanks, Jamie. I’ve made the corrections where appropriate and eliminated the reference to Alistair MacLean.
I haven’t taken a good look around at the site where David came across these books online, and in fact, I’m somewhat leery of doing so. I think I could
wastespend a whole lot of time there!July 19th, 2014 at 4:45 pm
Steve, you missed one Cleverly. In my opinion, THE DURABLE DESPERADOES is one of the best critical studies of any type of crime fiction
July 19th, 2014 at 7:13 pm
Right you are, and I’ve fixed it. Thanks again!
And I agree with you about THE DURABLE DESPERADOES. Not only does it cover the ground thoroughly, it’s immensely readable.
July 21st, 2014 at 8:01 pm
THE DURABLE DESPERADOES remains one of my favorite such books as well. It is great fun to read and Vivian’s knowledge is encyclopedic. He even wrote a couple of Toff novels after Creasey’s death.
My @3%!!! spell checker corrected Clevely to Cleverly and I missed it. It can be as insistent as an old woman sometimes. He was actually a good writer, just not special. At least the first outing of the Gang Smasher was quite good.
There was a rumor about Alistair MacLean writing Sexton Blake for years though it was obviously Arthur. Not unlike the Nick Carter Killmaster books quite a few known writers penned Sexton Blake adventures. I don’t know that Margery Allingham herself wrote any, but her entire family wrote for the boys papers of her youth.
By the time I lived in London in the early seventies the racial thing was a little less obvious, but it hung on much longer than here with little or no embarrassment.
Norman Conquest was prone to hyper ventilate, but his popularity in England lasted near to the end of Gray/Brooks career. I’ve always thought of him as the Saint without the charm and sense of humor.
Vivian mentions his tendency to lord it over his villains when he wins and also that he was an early precursor of Bond with his gadgets. He is not in the class of Creasey and Charteris, but his sales were, and if there was a top three he was the third man. Whatever else the action scenes were usually well handled, and in England, at least, he was easily as recognizable as the Saint, the Toff, and the Baron.
The Tom Conway film NORMAN CONQUEST is available on the gray market though nothing special. Some of the later Conquest books weren’t bad though taken for what they were.
The Bond novels did for the British thriller what Spillane did for the American private eye, but the old model hung on for many years with Conquest, the Toff, the Baron, Blackshirt, and others lasting late in the game.
Thanks for the Monty Haydon correction, I knew better, but missed that in the edit.
And Steve, yes you can spend a lot of time on that site, especially with all those intriguing Sexton Blake books and covers.
And re the Saint, if you look on YouTube you should still find the promo for a new Saint series that has not been picked up in syndication yet as far as I know. It looks intriguing though and I hope the pilot at least gets aired. Moore and Ogilvy both appear in it.
True the Saint is largely the last of the desperados, but the breed is far from gone. LEVERAGE is not all that far from the Just Men or the Saint and SUITS might as well be Simon Templar and Inspector Fernack. They may no longer have those catchy monikers, but the breed is still with us in modern drag, John Reese from PERSONS OF INTEREST is as much the Saint or Norman Conquest as an updated Equalizer. Ryan O’Neal’s character on BONES is very much the rogue hero of old, just without the halo. The desperados are more durable than we might think.
October 20th, 2018 at 10:51 am
Enjoyablempiece. I knew Monty H and a few of the writers and was an assistant editor of Sexton Blake. I hought you were a bit hard on my old neighbour Edwy Searles Brooks, who rose well above the level of boys’ fiction in many of his Collins Crime Club stories while the levels of racism were considerably greater in the US pulps, especially where anti-Semitism was concerned (Brooks converted to Judaism to marry his Jewish wife). The language could be nasty but the characters ‘of colour’ were frequently drawn more sympathetically in the UK story papers, even in the comic versions of stories which originated in late Victorian times. Blake very rarely had stories anything like as horrible as Christie or Fleming, which I found unreadable due to their racism. I distinctly remember both Skene (ZENITH THE ALBINO) and G. H. Teed (Huxton Rymer, The Wallflower etc) containing little lectures about not judging peopleby their race or social position, unlike BUCHAN or WALLACE or, indeed, SAYERS whose snobbery and racism made them unreadable for me. Neither did they contain the racism and homophobia found in the great CHANDLER. Perhaps we need to see a book specifically on these issues. I’d definitely buy one!