Mon 11 Mar 2019
Reviewed by David Vineyard: FRANCIS BEEDING – The Seven Sleepers.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[8] Comments
FRANCIS BEEDING – The Seven Sleepers. Professor Kreutzemark #1. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1925. Little Brown, US, hardcover, 1925.
“International agents!” I exclaimed. “But this is real life. I’ve got a British passport and I’m Thomas Preston of Jebbutt and Jebbutt.”
“Don’t make any mistake,” said Beatrice. “My chief has told me a good deal about these things. He used to be in the French Intelligence Department.”
“I don’t see how on earth it can possibly concern me,” I objected.
Thomas Preston is a British traveling man in Post WWI Europe (a Europe that has just received the first awakening call of what is to come with Mussolini) who finds himself in Geneva, home of the League of Nations (which features prominently in most of Beeding’s thrillers since the two men who wrote under that name both worked there), when his luggage takes a side trip. Not that he is averse to visiting Geneva where the beautiful Beatrice Harvel is working for the League, and as it turns out, for Henri Laval who Preston knew from the war.
Even before calling on Beatrice, Tom’s visit has been an interesting one, beginning with a strange little man approaching him as if he knew him, shoving a document in his hands, and then promptly being arrested, and then a letter from someone claiming to be Tom’s grandmother setting forth a meeting the next day. These are the things Beatrice doesn’t like and with good reason.
But no Englishman in the fiction of the between-the-war period, and few since the days of Anthony Hope and the Play-Actor, ever manages to ignore such intriguing mysteries, and in the shadow of John Buchan and Richard Hannay, it would seem practically treasonous. Somehow even when the saner, less adventurous heroes of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene came along, they still somehow never quite managed to ignore that siren song no matter how hard they tried.
Hero or feckless coward it seems impossible to avoid adventure in a British thriller.
The Seven Sinners is the work of Francis Beeding (John Leslie Palmer and Hilary Aidan St. George Saunders), best remembered today for the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes, filmed as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and a fine mystery suspense serial killer novel Death Walks in Eastrepps.
In their lifetime, though, they were known as one of the most popular and purveyors of the novel of adventure and international intrigue. Along with the likes of Valentine Williams, they were authors of many stand alone novels (The Norwich Victims, The 2 Undertakers, Eleven Were Brave, The Five Flamboys, The Six Walkers, The Twelve Disguises, The Three Fishers, Nine Waxed Faces — if you note a theme here …) as well as the Colonel Alistair Granby series.
This is the first novel in the shorter Professor Kreutzemark series, and a good introduction to the pleasures of Beeding in thriller mode. Like their rival Valentine Williams, the team has some decided skills as a writers of this sort of thing, an eye for drama (keep in mind the plot devices that seem so familiar now were still pretty fresh then), and they probably knew the European scene as well as any British writers until Eric Ambler, especially Switzerland and the international environs around Geneva.
In short order Tom finds himself calling on his ‘grandmother’ who proves to be a a German Professor (He had a fine silky beard, neatly trimmed and of a bright gold, a broad forehead and well-set eyes, a straight nose, and a complexion almost feminine in its delicacy. At the first view he suggested an intelligent and sensitive philanthropist, reclusive in temperament.), and two other Germans (Uncle Ulrich and Uncle Fritz), and has killed a man in self defense.
It’s clear the three have mistaken Tom for someone else, and equally clear they are up to something shady involving German resurgence after the war and with the mysterious Seven Sleepers of the title financing their scheme.
Escapes and hurried journeys, near run things, dual identities, trusted allies (a refreshingly international lot in this case), betrayal, sudden set-backs, and a plot to attack London and Paris with the Professor’s nasty X-3 gas that could “…destroy all forms of vegetable or animal life within a radius of 400 square kilometres†are all the elements expertly handled by Beeding.
(As Richard Usborne points out in his study of popular fiction between the wars The Clubland Heroes, a good paper could be written on the use of deadly gas in the post War era, so great were the memories of its horrors, Bulldog Drummond and the Saint both encountering the nasty stuff along with just about every other hero.)
Old fashioned, true (…that fate should have permitted me to assist in foiling the powers of malice and disorder which in every age must be encountered and freshly overcome if men are to keep and to increase their inheritance), but half the fun lies in the familiar elements in these books and the skills with which the writer deploys them.
Though hardly in a class with Buchan or Yates, Beeding is still an entertaining read with a moment or two of the kind of ‘fine writing’ John Buchan’s literate thrillers instilled in the genre, with only an occasional need to wince at attitudes of another age, and superior plot spinning and settings. The boys knew their Europe both geographically and politically. (*)
Professor Kreutzemark, the silky bearded one, of course lives to scheme another day, and indeed Thomas Preston and he cross swords again in The Hidden Kingdom for the last time. No really good villain should be expected to give up the ghost that easy, and there isn’t much doubt that Beeding had a success as great as Valentine Williams Adolph Von Grundt, Clubfoot, in mind even if it eluded him for the Professor, only to find it with the clever and heroic Colonel Granby. Too bad, because Kreutzemark had his moments as mad German professors go, and a bit of style is appreciated in any field, perhaps especially villainy.
(*) One has to wonder that any reader of popular British thriller fiction was at all taken by surprise by the rise of Hitler and the rebirth of a dangerous Germany. The fiction of the era barely let the poison gas clear from the trenches before imagining fellows in Prussian haircuts, mad doctors, armaments dealers, and shady fellows in high finance plotting the next war, certainly after the mid twenties when Mussolini raised his ugly shaved head.
Granted, most writers were more subtle with Germany never quite spelled out, and Russia and the Reds came in for no small amount of plotting themselves (Sapper was about evenly divided between Germans and Russians sometimes rather remarkably managing to have both working together, but then politics was not his strong point), but it does seem at times as if anyone who bothered to crack a book would have been well advised to invest in a bomb shelter or leave the continent.
March 11th, 2019 at 3:50 pm
I’ve read one of the Colonel Granby books, but I don’t remember which one. If I said it ha a number in the title, that wouldn’t narrow it down much, would it? It may have been THE NINE WAXED FACES. Even if it was a later book than SLEEPERS — it came out in 1936 — the style was definitely old-fashioned, but it still made for more than acceptable reading.
March 11th, 2019 at 6:16 pm
Beeding was popular enough a few of the Granby books made it into paperback in the early days.
March 11th, 2019 at 6:30 pm
Yes, you’re right. Three or four of them were published by Popular Library in the 40s and early 50s, and I’m sure I’ve owned them all at one time or another.
March 15th, 2019 at 2:14 pm
In tribute to Colonel Granby I named my bookselling entity after his pet phrase “Pretty sinister!” And of course my blog now retains the name. I loved this book when I first read it ages ago and many of the others in the series. Side note trivia: the Granby novels start with The Seven Sleepers and descend in numerical order from Seven to One Sane Man (1934) and then ascend starting with Eight Crooked Trenches (1936) ending at The Twelve Disguises (1942). Too many uninformed booksellers and crime fiction websites purport that the series starts at ONE and goes in numerical order to TWELVE. This used to bother the heck out of me until, like Dr. Strangelove, I finally learned to stopped caring and love the mess.
March 15th, 2019 at 3:12 pm
I confess that I never took the time to figure out the pattern. Now I know. Thanks, John!
March 15th, 2019 at 11:47 pm
According to the FantasticFiction bibliography the Granby series starts with THE SIX PROUD WALKERS, not THE SEVEN SLEEPERS and ends with THERE ARE THIRTEEN, by which point Granby has become a General. Some of the books don’t have a number component to the title, such as THE ERRING UNDER-SECRETARY.
March 15th, 2019 at 11:57 pm
THE SEVEN SLEEPERS was not a Granby book, so John, your comment is incorrect on that point. Here’s the list of Granby books I have in chronological order (unless two books came out the same year, in which case they are alphabetical and more research needs to be done)
The Six Proud Walkers (n.) Hodder 1928 [Italy]
The Five Flamboys (n.) Hodder 1929 [England]
Pretty Sinister (n.) Hodder 1929 [England]
The Four Armourers (n.) Hodder 1930 [Spain]
The League of Discontent (n.) Hodder 1930 [France]
Take It Crooked (n.) Hodder 1932 [France]
The Two Undertakers (n.) Hodder 1933
The One Sane Man (n.) Hodder 1934 [England]
The Eight Crooked Trenches (n.) Hodder 1936 [England]
The Nine Waxed Faces (n.) Hodder 1936 [Austria]
The Erring Under-Secretary (nv) Hodder 1937 [England]
Hell Let Loose (n.) Hodder 1937 [Spain]
The Black Arrows (n.) Hodder 1938 [Italy]
The Ten Holy Horrors (n.) Hodder 1939 [England]
Eleven Were Brave (n.) Hodder 1940 [France]
Not a Bad Show (n.) Hodder 1940 [Germany]
The Twelve Disguises (n.) Hodder 1942 [France]
There Are Thirteen (n.) Hodder 1946 [England; France]
March 19th, 2019 at 2:09 pm
I got this one mixed up with The Six Proud Walkers which I know I read. Thanks to Ron and Steve for clearing up my cluttered mind and my failing memory and getting the order right. Thanks too for providing the full list of Granby books. Completely forgot about There Are Thirteen even though I own a copy. I’ve never managed to read every single one of the Granby books…yet.