A. S. FLEISCHMAN – Counterspy Express. Stark House Press, trade paperback, December 2016; two-in-one edition with Shanghai Flame. Introduction by George Kelley. First appeared as Ace Double D-57, paperback original; 1st printing, 1954. Published back-to-back with Treachery in Trieste, by Charles L. Leonard. Film: Allied Artists, 1958, as Spy in the Sky!.

   One small complaint I have about this book is that so little of it takes place on a train, as the title would suggest — only the last ten or eleven pages of the forthcoming Stark House edition. But who really cares when those ten pages are filled with as much action, thrills and as many revelations as they are in this book?

   Or that all of the rest of the book, relating the adventures of American agent Victor Welles, alias Jim Cabot, as he tries to locate a Russian scientist who’s trying to defect from behind the Iron Curtain with some highly advanced formulas, is as cram-packed with chases, near escapes and double-dealing all across Europe as this one is?

   It’s hard not to enjoy a book for which you have the sense that the author had as much fun writing it as you are in reading it. Don’t expect great literature. Books like this one come straight from the days of the pulps, complete with femme fatales who do their best, deliberately or not, to distract Cabot from the task he has on hand — and nearly succeed.

   Cabot tells the story in first person, so it’s not easy to get a firm picture in mind as to what he looks like, but at length I settled on Robert Ryan. Night club singer and dancer Pia Brindisi could have been modeled on Gina Lollobrigida, and Cabot’s primary adversary Sydney Jardine sounded to me exactly like Sidney Greenstreet — far better choices on my part, I believe, than the ones who played the roles in the film that was actually made, to wit: Steve Brodie, Sandra Francis and Bob De Lange, respectively.