Sat 10 Dec 2022
Reviewed by David Vineyard: BERKELEY GRAY – Miss Dynamite.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
BERKELEY GRAY – Miss Dynamite. Norman Conquest #3. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1939. Collins White Circle Pocket Novel #85. paperback, 1945. No US edition.
“Norman Conquest Again!â€, proclaims the blurb inside the title page and then proceeds to give away the entire plot about as blatantly as you can:
Talk about giving the game away.
To be fair, no one picking this book up could imagine Norman Conquest wouldn’t get the best of any villain and collect the boodle.
Berkeley Gray’s first entry in the Conquest series just missed winning a thousand pound prize for best new thriller. John Creasey won the contest with Meet The Baron.
Still, Gray got a contract.
Miss Dynamite was the third entry in Berkeley Gray (E.S. Brooks) long running (1938-1968) series about Norman Conquest, 1066, the Gay Desperado (Mister Mortimer Gets the Jitters and Vultures Ltd., also 1938, proceeded this one) who made his debut in the pages of the Thriller magazine that had given birth to Leslie Charteris the Saint, John Creasey’s the Toff, Barry Perowne’s Raffles revival, and many more of the gentlemen adventurers gracing British popular fiction of the era.
Six foot of gray-eyed nitro, Conquest was the Saint or the Toff in high drive, his adventures driven by his creator, who was one of Fleetway’s chief staff writers in penning the adventures of Sexton Blake, Nelson Lee, and Gray’s own popular creation Waldo the Wonderman (very much a forerunner of Conquest). Hitting the ground running is hardly adequate to describe Conquest.
For sheer enthusiasm, high spirits (no one enjoyed cornering a bad guy and explaining how he had outsmarted them more than Conquest), gadgets (his cigarette lighter was a likely to blow down a wall as light a cigarette), and gusto, even the Saint might seem melancholy. Norman Conquest loved being a desperado. He practically reaches off the page and grabs the reader by the lapels he’s so eager to drag us into the action.
The Saint and the Toff were primarily urban crime fighters with forays to criminal hideouts in the country, but Norman is often found traveling to a rural or village setting where he uncovers danger. He gets abroad more often in that era than most of his competitors.
Unlike most gentleman adventurers Conquest had a steady girl from the start, Joy Everard, aka Pixie, eventually Mrs. Norman Conquest (another variation from the other nom de guerre boys). True, the Saint had Patrica Holm, but she wasn’t around that long, and Simon, while faithful, eventually just forgot about her. Joy was there from the start and stayed there for the entire run of the series.
And Joy, unlike say Phyllis Drummond or Felicity Dawlish, wasn’t just there to be kidnapped. More likely Joy would show up and pull Conquest’s ashes from the flames before he was terminally singed, because when it came to women Norman Conquest was more a mooning schoolboy than Gay Desperado.
He never met a blonde he didn’t like.
Primrose Trevor is certainly near the top of that group (Says Joy: “Primrose my foot! Her name’s Poison Ivy!â€).
It is hard to imagine Simon Templar, Richard Rollinson, or John Mannering (the Baron) being led down the garden path as often or as near fatally as Conquest. Granted Richard Verrill, Blackshirt, had the mysterious voice of the woman on the phone blackmailing him enticingly to turn his criminal activities to crime fighting, but he recognized a bad girl when he saw her. For Norman Conquest every blonde was a goddess even if she turned out to be a she devil like Primrose Trevor.
That’s all it takes and even Norman is wondering why he is spinning tales to her about writing thrillers and doing research when what he is there to do is relieve her crooked father, Sir Hastings of his ill gotten gains with his gang of international jewel thieves in the fine tradition of not quite outlaw gentlemen adventurers everywhere. But when she “presses her quivering body against Norman and gave him the works,†our boy was lost.
Conquest practically cornered the market on femme fatales in this sub-genre, and fell for every one of them.
Not that Norman still isn’t the most ruthless of the desperadoes of the era. He is closer to James Bond in that and his penchant for gadgets. Conquest even faces death by pore suffocation by being painted gold in one adventure.
Edwy Searles Brooks was fifty years old in 1938 when Fleetway Publications decided they needed new blood. After some six million estimated words over a career that lasted back to 1918, some 20,000 words a week for twenty years, Brooks was out of gainful employment, sidelined as too old for his schoolboy audience.
There was a flame that burned in Brooks chest though, and with hardly a moment to breathe he turned to a new pseudonym, and a new character, Berkeley Gray and Norman Conquest, and had an instant hit. Then just to prove he could do it again he began writing as Victor Gunn about Inspector Bill “Ironsides†Cromwell and again struck black gold, the ink and not the petroleum kind.
Popular over most of the English speaking world (they never really cracked the American market, but then Creasey didn’t until the Sixties successfully), the books were reprinted in multiple languages, there was a Norman Conquest movie (with Tom Conway) and in Germany an Ironsides krimi film.
Neither series reads as if it was written by a washed up tired fifty year old man who had burned out after writing six million words for boys.
As always, the long suffering Pixie stands by her man though the “Hullo Pixie Hullo Desperado†business is a bit more curtailed than usual in this one. Even when Conquest is fooling around with blondes, Joy remains his partner, but she doesn’t have to like it with or without the wedding ring..
How shocked would poor Conquest be to hear his lovely Primrose talking to her father when he fears Conquest is onto the gang: “You cringing, weak kneed, spine-less rabbit!â€
Sweet William, Inspector Williams of the Yard is on hand too, Conquest’s long suffering friendly rival at the Yard, ten steps behind his man, with a few nips at his heel for suspense before getting dust in his eye once more as the Gay Desperado laughs himself out of trouble. The gentlemen adventurers were a cheerful lot, which must have been doubly annoying to the Sweet Williams, Bill Grice’s, and Claude Eustace Teal’s left in their wake.
It should be made clear the Conquest stories are as different from Charteris and the Saint as Creasey’s Toff stories are. Norman, of the “Laughing Conquestsâ€, is his own man with his own unique voice.
All the flaws of this literature in this era apply, readers need to understand that going in. Even Charteris slips in a place or two. John Creasey is possibly the only thriller writer of the era who mostly avoided the kind of easy assumptions that mar popular literature for modern readers. That said, in this one its more the class conscious assumptions than anything else that might bother a modern reader.
Norman ties it all up with a little help from Mandeville Livingstone, the poacher he supped with in the above blurb (“… an honest-to-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool buccaneer…â€), and with Joy and he both taking a bullet, “…his eyes, at this minute, were blinded with tears.†A little lead is nothing though compared with returning millions in stolen jewelry to Scotland Yard, realizing Joy is the true love of his life (again), and lifting £100,000 in the bad guys cash.
“Hullo Desperado,†indeed.
December 10th, 2022 at 10:38 pm
Of the two series Berkeley Gray was responsible for, there were 51 of the Norman Conquest books, and as Victor Gunn, 43 more about “Ironsides” Cromwell.
Not as prolific as John Creasey perhaps, but my goodness.
And as David says, all of the very few Conquest books I’ve read have been a lot of fun to read. I’m not sure that this was one of them, but it might have been. That first cover image looks awfully familiar.
December 11th, 2022 at 12:19 am
Gray even took time out in the fifties to write a book on the conquest of Everest as Bruce Graeme wrote true crime, Leslie Charteris wrote a biography of a bullfighter, and John Creasey created his own political party. These writers were made of stern stuff.
Gray came out of the Boys Own Papers tradition which was equivalent to the Dime Novels and early pulps here only aimed at a younger audience, and writers like Frederick Dey in this country who churned out words seemingly in their sleep.
Margery Allingham’s entire family wrote or were artists for the Fleetway publications as were others who penned adventures of Sexton Blake, Nelson Lee, Falcon Swift, Dixon Hawke, and the like. Those books were as much an industry as a literary effort.
Brooks created gentleman crook Waldo the Wonderman who appeared originally as a villain in a Blake and Nelson Lee crossover. Waldo, who is a lot like Norman in many ways (so much so some Conquest books in the Forties are rewritten Waldo adventures), soon threatened to kick Blake out of his own books and eventually reformed to become a crime fighter. He had to have been in Brooks mind when he came up with Conquest, he may even have been in Charteris mind when he created the Saint.
Like you I don’t think I ever read a Conquest adventure I didn’t enjoy though admittedly nothing really stands out among them. The Gunn books are very much in the Edgar Wallace/Creasey Roger West tradition.
W.Vivian Butler who wrote the essential volume on the gentleman adventurers, THE DURABLE DESPERADOS, was a great defender of Gray and Norman Conquest as belonging in the same rank as Creasey and Charteris though I might rank Bruce Graeme’s Blackshirt up there too (certainly his son’s continuation of the series after the War).
In the company of the Perowne Raffles, Frank King’s the Doremouse, Cassell’s Picaroon, Atkeys Smiler Bunn, Edgar Wallace’s the Mixer amd the Brigand, Denise Robins the Rat (created for silent films played by Ivor Novello), Brandon’s the Wall-flower, Cheyney’s Alonzo Mactavish, Bedford-Jones Riley Dillon, Martin’s Anthony Trent, Gregg’s Henry Prince, and Cleveley’s Maxwell Archer and the Crime Smasher, Gray and Conquest are at the top of the heap.
Both the Norman Conquest film, based on DAREDEVIL CONQUEST, PARK PLAZA 505 aka NORMAN CONQUEST (1958) with Tom Conway (with British comic actor Sid James as Sweet William) and the Victor Gunn Krimi film THE INN ON DARTMOOR (DIE WIRSTHAUS VON DARTMOOR 1964) are in the public domain and available on YouTube.
Incidentally the poacher and tramp Mandeville Livingston from MISS DYNAMITE becomes Norman’s assistant and Man Friday somewhere between the Toff’s Jolly and the Saint’s Happy Uniatz.
December 11th, 2022 at 12:58 am
I’m assuming ‘Berkeley’ was pronounced the British way, sounding like ‘Bark-lee’?
December 11th, 2022 at 5:59 am
“20,000 words a week for twenty years” isn’t that astonishing a feat. A few years earlier Anthony Trollope managed to produce a similar amount – 3,000 words in three hours, starting at 6 a.m. before breakfast – and spent the rest of the day running the Post Office and going hunting three days a week.
December 11th, 2022 at 9:12 pm
Twenty thousand words a day for twenty years was the start, he then wrote another ninety-four books in the two series alone and is believed to have ghosted at least one Saint story by some.
At that he hardly equals Creasey, Wallace, or Simenon either, but all added together his lifetime word count is likely over twelve million words so around 240,000 words a year over a fifty-year writing career.
I recognize others wrote more or equaled that, but it’s still an impressive wordage. My longest work was some 600K and took me five months of research and five months of writing for the first draft.
Nowadays it takes me three days to finish an 8,000 word story. I’m always impressed by these workhorse writers who still produce readable prose.
December 12th, 2022 at 6:08 am
Impressed, yes, David Vineyard, astonished, no. Someone who runs a four-minute mile is impressive – very impressive. Someone who runs a three-minute mile would be astonishing.
Frank Richards (creator of Billy Bunter) was another candidate. In Simenon’s case he wrote in explosive fits in a few days, often more than ten thousand words a day, though I wouldn’t like to guess if that was more or less impressive than others’ steady trudge. They all make Flaubert spending the morning inserting a comma and the afternoon taking it out again look like a fuss-pot.
In many cases we aren’t comparing like with like – Gardner or Edgar Wallace dictating, Trollope or Balzac with steel dip-pens or quills faced different physical as well as narrative difficulties.