Mon 23 Aug 2021
Reviewed by David Vineyard: DONALD STOKES – Captive in the Night.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[10] Comments
DONALD STOKES – Captive in the Night. Coward-McCann, hardcover, 1951. Signet 1006, paperback, 1953; cover by James Meese. Crest #126, paperback, March 1956. Wildside Press, trade paperback, 2020.
Hansen is Blair Hansen, and here is Algeria. Eight years earlier he was there with the American Army in intelligence. Now he is back, contracted by the fat shady man named Kuhn (think Sidney Greenstreet crossed with Peter Lorre and maybe Eric Pohlman) he first encountered earlier, to get the ore from Kuhn’s iron mine out of a Berber valley under the control of the rebels led by Messali Haji and his men against the French colonizers.
Blair is there too because of Mari, a woman he knew eight years earlier who betrayed him.
Even before he can see Kuhn, a woman tries to trap him and Hansen has to deal with two Arabs sent to see why he is there. He doesn’t get along much better with the police, the Brigade. In the best tradition he has walked into a hornet’s nest, one part Warner Brothers movie, a little Beau Geste, and more than a little Mickey Spillane thrown in with a touch of Post War realpolitik and cynicism.
The local color is well done if laid on a bit thickly, and the tough guy stuff rings true with our “hero†tough as a rusty nail and just about as toxic.
If you like your action tough and relentless, your heroes unsentimental sociopaths, the action unrelenting, and no one particularly innocent, this is the book for you. Reading it you can just about cast the movie in your head.
It’s not always pleasant, but it is vividly written, tough minded, and for all the romance of exotic settings and high adventure as hardboiled as anything you are likely to read:
He laughed, and the deep sound had a ragged edge to it. “You’re about as helpless as a rattlesnake,†he said. Against his drawn skin, his teeth showed startlingly white and sharp, especially the incisors.
It’s all basic Hollywood action movie 101, but not bad for that. The action moves at a pace, the dramas of several characters weave in and out of the plot including Mari’s adult daughter Celeste and her husband George, and our hero gets by on toughness and an unwillingness to die.
The cover of the paperback edition from Fawcett Crest is a doozy too, the perfect evocation of the novel.
August 23rd, 2021 at 9:41 pm
You’re right about the Crest cover, the lower one down, but I kind of like the one from Signet even a bit more.
August 23rd, 2021 at 9:50 pm
I’ve been looking for information about the author of this book, without much luck so far. He has one other book included in Hubin, that being APPOINTMENT WITH FEAR (Coward, 1951).
I did learn that CAPTIVE IN THE NIGHT was one of quite a few books banned by the Illinois State Library circa 1953:
https://www.cyberdriveillinois.com/departments/library/heritage_project/home/chapters/years-of-transition-the-1950s/partial-list-of-books-banned-by-the-illinois-state-library/
Take a look. It’s in good company.
August 23rd, 2021 at 10:31 pm
And that company will only increase as censorship returns. One reason why I am a staunch fan of printed books.
(beg pardon, I know this a political comment)
p.s. swell review
August 24th, 2021 at 1:15 am
Steve, the author is an odd duck, which may explain your lack of luck finding out details on him. He’s British.
From an article in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, Nov 1 1959:
Members and guests of Santa Rosa Branch, American Association of University Women, will meet for dessert at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Saturday Afternoon Clubhouse to hear Donald Stokes, head of the British Information Services in San Francisco.
Mr. Stokes’ subject will be The Coming Showdown with The Reds.
Mr Stokes was a foreign correspondent. author and Royal Navy veteran before joining the service of the British Government in 1943.
Novels Published
He has had several novels published in this country. The latest, Captive in the Night, has sold more than 400,000 copies. His book, Men Behind Victory, was translated into 13 languages, serialized for newspapers and broadcast by British Broadcasting Company in dramatized form in over 30 languages throughout the world.
Before the war. Mr Stokes was foreign correspondent for the largest British newspaper group, interviewing such famous persons as Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw and Somerset Maugham.
His experience in World War II included active service from 1939 in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as an officer in corvettes guarding North Atlantic convoys until he was wounded and invalided out in 1942. In 1943 he was named news editor of British Information Services in the United States and served seven years in that capacity in New York City.
During his stay in California he has spoken to many leading clubs and appeared frequently on television and radio. Mr Stokes lives in San Francisco with his American wife and seven-year-old daughter.
Later went on to work at Stanford.
Stokes joined the Stanford University News Service as an academic writer in 1978; prior to that he had served as British consul-information in San Francisco (1962-78). He was known as Stanford’s Boswell for the hundreds of news profiles he wrote on faculty and staff. He received his bachelor’s degree at the University of London in 1941 and served with the Royal Navy and the British Foreign Service before moving to San Francisco in 1960. He died in 1986.
Stanford has some of his papershere.
August 24th, 2021 at 9:05 am
Wow, and thanks, Sai. I obviously gave up Googling Mr. Stokes far too soon, something less than two pages of hits. That’s quite a resume for someone not so easy to find info about.
August 24th, 2021 at 6:35 am
I would have passed this one up, but it sounds like a lot of fun. Thanks, David.
August 24th, 2021 at 6:38 pm
From the background I guessed Stokes might be a foreign correspondent ala Frederick Forsyth since the local color works more like observation than research. Whatever flaws the book has you can smell the streets and back alleys, the gardens, the sex reek of the bedrooms, and the dank sweaty kif and date wine soaked crowded scents of the Arab quarter.
I didn’t quote it because it was too racy for here, but I was particularly struck by his description of an Arab club with two less than attractive belly dancers … I’ve see a few of those joints in the day and Stokes nails the sights and sounds and milieu of them perfectly in a way I haven’t even seen duplicated in movies.
I can see why it was banned too. Hansen is amoral, planning to sleep with his lovers daughter only hours after her mother is killed in his arms, musing that it was just as well she died as what they had together was basically used up once he slept with her again, and more interested in his own neck than any cause.
The sex scenes, ala Spillane, are fairly tame in modern terms, at least Seventies and Eighties terms, it’s almost like the Fifties today, but with quite a bit of description of everything leading up to and after the event, fairly shocking for the time in merely talking that much about largely amoral people going on about sex. There is a dirtiness to it, a feeling of sweaty amoral people using each other that lends itself to that feeling as well and to the banning.
That’s likely why the blurb pointed out the Spillane connection rather than the major adventure story writers of the period.
It reminded me a bit of James Rand’s THE STAKE, another tough amoral thriller by a foreign correspondent who went on to write tough amoral adventure novels about hunting like RUN FOR THE TREES, THE GREAT SKY AND SILENCE, and VIVA RAMIREZ!.
I enjoyed it, but it is a not quite, almost a better book than it is, not quite in control enough to work, not quite observed well enough to rate higher, not quite as good as it could or should be.
August 24th, 2021 at 9:52 pm
Agreed. ‘Racy clubs’ in foreign cities are a joke. Weak water. Strictly for tourists.
August 25th, 2021 at 8:16 am
It would be interesting for someone to write a history of amoral, nihilistic adventure and crime novels. Maybe it exists, but I don’t know it.
August 25th, 2021 at 8:37 pm
Lazy,
Agreed, but I wasn’t in tourist traps aimed at wealthy Europeans slumming for the night, but the kind of places where you sit with your back to the wall and buy the bottle so you can keep it in your possession exist, and while most of them in Moslem countries aren’t all that racy by European sex club standards they are dirty, and the performers not exactly what you would expect, especially sixty or more years ago when Western standards of attractiveness weren’t as pervasive as they are now.
Stokes writes from fairly keen observation of a world that still exists well below the surface of what most of us see, or would want to see. There were clubs where tourists and soldiers went to slum that were bad enough, but there were others where Europeans weren’t welcome.
My job sometimes involved extracting Americans from these situations when they had wanted to see the real face of whatever culture they were visiting and in the Seventies often as not trying to connect with the local drug culture where they weren’t welcome.
Seedy is real enough in most cultures, and often as not much less adventure and more degradation and danger than the places tourists go to have an adventure.