Sat 7 Feb 2015
VICTOR ARMSTRONG – The Free-Lance Spy. Major Book 3051, paperback original; 1st printing, 1976.
Every once in a while I try to dive into my latest stack of obscure paperback originals by unknown writers, hoping to find a nugget or two. Sometimes I do. More often I don’t. Here is such an example.
This is the only book by Victor Armstrong in Al Hubin’s all-inclusive Crime Fiction IV, and there is no information there about the author. I suspect that Victor Armstrong is only a pen name, but if so, I have no idea who he might otherwise be.
It reads as though it might be the first in a series, but if so, it never came to be. The primary protagonists are Eric Walden and his constant companion Sachi Lee. Walden is a professor of English at Columbia University, working on a paper “tracing the etymology of four-letter Anglo-Saxon dirty words,” but he also has an extensive background in cards, dice and other forms of gambling, with hints of secret undercover activities preceding this particular venture.
As for Sachi, you need to know little more than that she is exotically beautiful and that she never “wore a bra — nor needed one.”
In Free-Lance Spy Professor Walden is hired to investigative an immensely wealthy and ultra-ultra-conservative self-styled General Dobbs, who owns an entire county in Arizona immediately adjoining the Mexican border. Making the case urgent is that Dobbs is buying all of the gold and silver available on the free market. What are his intentions? Taking over the US by economic means? Walden fears he is in over his head. Sachi is only along for the ride.
The book is inoffensive fun for a while, otherwise I would never have finished it. Armstrong often writes in short fragmentary sentences, sometimes with neither subject nor verb, and sometimes the witty byplay is almost witty.
Unfortunately the book ends with the good guys parachuting into Dobbs’ isolated and well-guarded compound, and taking over with no casualties nor even any sweat upon their assorted brows, including the always well-composed Sachi’s. After over 160 pages of buildup, you’d think there’d be a lot more resistance than this. Maybe 176 pages were all there was budget for.
February 7th, 2015 at 5:22 pm
Another left-wing paranoid thriller.
February 7th, 2015 at 6:10 pm
Now that’s an aspect of this book that hadn’t occurred to me at all.
February 7th, 2015 at 6:49 pm
Well, if the heroes are protecting the world from ultra right wing conspiracies originating in Arizona and …
February 7th, 2015 at 8:07 pm
As opposed to right wing paranoid thrillers?
Paranoid thriller is almost an oxymoron since by their nature most thrillers are paranoid whatever their politics. Hitchcock’s whole oveure is based on paranoia (especially his own about the police and false imprisonment).
Even when the bad guys are bad as they are painted paranoia is the key factor in the genre whether the villain is the Tzarist Secret Police, Jesuit cabals, Napoleonic apologists, French revolutionists, Jewish cabals, Imperial Germany, Bolshies, Industrialists, Monarchists, Nazis, Soviets, Fifth Columnists, PLO, SLA, Bader Meinhof, Red Brigade, China, small town Rednecks, the KKK, you name it. Almost anyone can be a bad guy in a thriller from our own government (a horse that has been beaten to death by left and right) to Mother (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE).
Actually, in general conservative writers write better thrillers, not because their paranoia is based in reality, but because they buy into it more deeply and that shows. Buchan, Sapper, Fleming, Spillane are all deeply conservative writers. Most of the Buchan school of writers were politically and economically conservative but not always socially so.
It’s not really until the Ambler/Greene school that you get more liberal thrillers largely in reaction to the political realities of the thirties and forties. In Ambler’s world at least you couldn’t really trust your allies, that’s true paranoia.
Of course there are left wing thriller writers like Greene, Deighton, and LeCarre as well. The British thriller writers from the left tend to be very good, the Americans vary much more. Conservative’s do well with horror as well, conservative economist Russell Kirk a good example. Though horror is a bit more even handed than the thriller in that.
However the wealthy criminal conspiracy ironically comes out of the politically conservative but socially libertine ’20’s. It was a wide held belief from the turn of the century on (and earlier) that wars were engendered by wealthy men trying to make profit from them or impose their own idea of order on society (see Jules Verne’s books about the Baltimore Gun Club). Not that it isn’t a liberal idea in some books and may be here, but many a conservative thriller has the wealthy monomaniacal villain unless someone thinks Clive Cussler, James Rollins, Ted Bell, or Preston and Childs are particularly liberal writers.
I’ll grant this one was likely a shot at Barry Goldwater (unfair because Goldwater was at least as much libertarian as conservative and certainly no threat to the republic) unless the author had no political motivation and just stole it from Deighton’s Texas billionaire in THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN — didn’t check the dates, but that seems more likely.
Assuming paperback originals have much more motivation than an advance is pretty sketchy country. Even pulp villains like Fu Manchu, Carl Peterson, Dr. Nikola, and Dracula are based on paranoia. You just about can’t write a thriller without it no matter what the politics.
My only problem is when the politics from either side get in the way of the plot and my enjoyment of the book or something truly offensive such as John Ringo’s pederast, stalker, would be rapist, sociopath, hero Ghost.
Steve,
I’m assuming didn’t need a bra does not mean she had nothing to put in one?
February 7th, 2015 at 9:02 pm
Let me quote further from the same paragraph: “Led by her magnificent mammaries with their slight jiggle, and followed by her beautiful buttocks with their slight sway, she generated a wave of baffled lust as she passed.”
February 7th, 2015 at 9:09 pm
The villain in the story has nothing to do with Barry Goldwater. “General” Dobbs is a out-and-out loony and nothing more than a one-dimensional stick figure beyond that. As David suggests, you can’t write spy novels without villains, and they come in all sizes and flavors. Who knows what Armstrong had in mind when he wrote the story, but if it was anything more than a paycheck, I sure didn’t see it.
February 7th, 2015 at 9:39 pm
I only mentioned Goldwater because of the Arizona setting and on the off chance this had an actual political agenda; the left was as paranoid about him as the right was Teddy Kennedy. Also the villain on the cover vaguely looks like Goldwater (and I suspect the cover is better than the book, rare for Manor).
I seriously doubt this has any political agenda, and frankly it sounds ‘borrowed’ to say the least.
William LeQueux, the grandfather of the spy thriller was paranoid about the Kaiser and Imperial Germany and the Tzarist secret police. Buchan predicts national socialism in 1910 (the ‘rational fanatic’), somehow Carl Peterson and others are making millions apparently working with the Reds to overthrow the English economy (not sure Sapper thought that one out). Despite being sent down from Oxford (you go down from Oxford no matter which direction you travel) for beating up a Bolshie student William Chandos and Jonah Mansel battle criminals and Rutitanian types threatening royal ladies and few political types though Mercer/Yates was a 18th century Tory . The Saint takes on Ruritainian conspirators, criminals, power mad rich men, gangsters, and whatever in a sort of apolitical general dislike of villains.
In the real world John Creasey started his own political party and ran for office on what could only be called a ‘one world’ ticket, but it only really plays a role in the Palfrey and some of the Dawlish books and even there it is general League of Nations, UN stuff and if you didn’t know about his politics it wouldn’t dawn on you.
As political as William F. Buckley was liberals including his friendly foe John Kenneth Galbraith praised and loved the Blackford Oakes books.
Don’t get me wrong, left and right inject politics into thrillers all the time for good and bad, but this sounds as if it has much worse problems than a political agenda. But wealthy bad guys and crazy generals have long been a staple of thrillers, and if there was any actual model here it was probably General Walker from the late fifties and sixties.
February 7th, 2015 at 9:49 pm
From The Manchurian Candidate through The Parallax View they are all left and paranoid. As for Hitchcock, no political motives just thrillers for entertainment. And, add just about all the ‘noir’ stuff on to the political left. Way on to that left side. (Although the definition of noir is about as clear as obscenity — so judgement must be exercised.)
February 7th, 2015 at 10:25 pm
Discussions of political leanings and views almost never go anywhere, especially in regard to simple little books with simple little stories with simple little characters, which is all this book was. It was a book that was fun to read until it came to the ending, which fell flatter than yesterday’s souffle. Obviously you have your own opinions, Barry, so I’ll give you the last word, but let’s let this be the end of it.