Tue 20 Feb 2018
DUNCAN TYLER – Red Curtain. Beacon 205, paperback original; 1st printing, 1959. Award A202F, paperback reprint, 1966.
Obscure books, especially those that are either detective or mystery fiction, have always been favorites of mine, and here is one so obscure that [as of the time this review was first written], Al Hubin had not yet heard of it. What’s even more interesting is that the copyright is in the name of Don Smith, who was soon to become the author of a long series of “Secret Mission” espionage thrillers. While I own about half of them, I’ve never read any, but I’ve always assumed that the Phil Sherman starring in them was some kind of super-agent in the James Bond mode.
Why I am bringing this all out is that there is a Philip Sherman in this book as well, but he’s not a super-agent of any kind, at least not yet. He is an American business man working in Europe who naively gets suckered into some shady business transactions with the Russians, and when things go badly, he naively (again) attempts to break his partner out of a Russian labor prison. This in a country where he doesn’t even speak the language.
If you were to see the front cover [of the Award edition], you would also know there is a woman involved, but not nearly as much as the back cover would have you believe. The last few chapters make the rest of the book worth reading, but if a lot of action is what you might be looking for, the early going is awfully sluggish and slow. It seems to be an accurate peek at life behind the Iron Curtain for its time, however, and maybe that’s the greatest value it ever had.
February 20th, 2018 at 5:36 pm
I still have not read any of the official Secret Mission books, I’m sorry to say. There were 21 of them over the years, from 1968 to 1978, but if they were any better than the Nick Carter “Killmaster” books, for example, I’ve never heard anyone say so.
February 20th, 2018 at 7:46 pm
I found the SECRET MISSION books dry and generic, never as much fun as Nick Carter. Smith did write a coupe of good books though.
February 23rd, 2018 at 12:12 pm
The interesting thing is that it seems to be a case similar to “Pagoda” by Philip Atlee, a solitary book that later resulted in a series of spy novels.
February 23rd, 2018 at 12:45 pm
The comparison hadn’t quite dawned on me, Johny, so thanks for pointing it out. Are there others? I have a feeling that series begin as one-shot’s more often than we realize.
A couple than occur to me are the Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters (I’m sure I’ve read that she didn’t think of Cadfael as a continuing series character until after the first book did so well) and The Name of the Game Is Death, the first of Dan Marlowe’s Earl Drake series.
For more on the latter, follow the link:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=517
February 23rd, 2018 at 5:14 pm
So is. Another series of this type is John Farris’s The Fury, with an initial novel in 1976, and late continuations in 2001, 2003 and 2008.
April 13th, 2018 at 11:00 am
Donald Hamilton wrote “Death of a Citizen†as a stand-alone. The commercial and critical success of the book launched the Matt Helm series without delay.
I’m reading Secret Mission 8: North Korea. So far, it’s pretty excellent.