JOHN JAKES – When the Star Kings Die. Dragonard #1. Ace G-656, paperback original, 1967. Cover by Jack Gaughan. Second printing, 1978.

   When Max Dragonard, ex-Regulator, is broken out of prison by his old commander, he is assigned to investigate the revolutionary organization called Heart Flag. The Lords of the Exchange, rulers of II Galaxy and previously immortal, are dying, and no one seems to know why. Dragonard is captured by the High Commander of the Regulators and betrays his friend.

   At the command of Lord Mishubi II, he is sentenced to die. Escape to the Heart Flag movement reveals to him the secret of immortality which has been kept from the ordinary people of the galaxy.

   Quite better than expected, the story improves as it continues. One can hardly help but think of the old Planet Stories tradition, but it would seem that there is more complexity and development in this novel than the usual stereotyped space-adventure.

   Dragonard’s own mental defect, correction of which was denied him, helps persuade him of the Lords’ treachery, a nice touch. The girl he loves is killed under bitter circumstances, but there is another who is waiting for his love. And Jeremy’s dream of life for all must be destroyed, but only temporarily, to free the galaxy from one man’s control.

Rating: ***½

         The Dragonard series –

1 When the Star Kings Die (1967)
2 The Planet Wizard (1969)
3 Tonight We Steal the Stars (1969)

ERLE STANLEY GARDNER – The Case of the Bigamous Spouse.  Perry Mason #65. Morrow, hardcover, 1961. Pocket, paperback, 1963. Many later printings and editions exist.

   Here is one of the smoothest Masons of ESG’s last years, with a beautifully mounted plot, tremendous pace and a variety of sharp comments on everything from sales technique and modern marriage to police lawlessness and the· undertaking business.

   Mason’s client is a gorgeous book saleswoman who has accidentally discovered that her best friend’s husband is a bigamist — and that he’s ready to kill her to keep his secret. When the bigamist is murdered instead, all hell breaks loose.

   There are a few tiny plot flaws, and the solution is rabbit-out-of-a-hat, but still and all it’s a gorgeous entertainment reminiscent of Gardner’s prime.

EARL EMERSON – Nervous Laughter. PI Thomas Black #3. Avon, paperback original, 1986, 1995 (shown). Fawcett, paperback, 1997.

   P.I. Thomas Black (not to be confused with PI novelist Thomas Black (read more here ) is a Seattle-based private detective working in the contemporary world.

   I like it when writers set their work contemporaneously. To me, it’s this world I’m struggling with — not the world of yesteryear. And by “I” I mean “me the reader.” So if I’m looking for answers: for how to live in this world with a modicum of self-respect; for how to make it thru the day — I want a book that is dealing with the ‘present’. Hopefully heroically. “I want you to show me the way” Peter Frampton, or whoever else happens to have a map.

   Plus I think it’s a cheat to steal a past that no living reader can possibly remember. If you’re talking 1930, say whatever you want. All I know is what I read in Hammett and see in the movies the same as you, dear author. So you copy Hammett’s setting and make a slightly new version. Big freaking deal.

   But you wanna talk 70’s to 2022? I know those times because I’ve lived thru them. So you’re going to have to be credible. You’re gonna have to be real — not Disneyfied.

   Black is hired by a gorgeous and flirty jilted wife to tag her hubbie, a dog food mogul, on a suspicion of adultery job. The target immediately kills himself and his lover in a murder suicide. Case closed.

   Or is it? Aye — and thar’s the rub.

   So how was the book? It’s just okay. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s real and it’s credible. It’s captivating and hard to put down. It makes sense and everything. But I’m struggling to remember even now, a couple days after shutting the covers. It’s disposable. (Except for getting rid of the bad guy by turning him into canned dog food — that I might remember, ironically: disposing of the disposable bad guy by literally canning him for sale on grocery store shelves).

   But the thing with these common, disposable potboilers is they give the listless reader a list. A teleology. A toward-which. An ending. A goal. A solution. A forward momentum towards which you move. Chapter to chapter. Impelled towards the final page with a trajectory of movement into the future.

   Books like this take the lost and wayward reader and plunks them down on one of those walking sidewalks at the airport. While you’re reading it, you’re no longer lost. You’ve got a specific place to go. Or at least a fear in back of you, scaring you into scurrying on ahead into the unknown but surely better than whatever fate is chasing you from behind.

   I used to work in a bookstore where the staff was roiled by a manager who insisted upon referring to the books as ‘product’. The bibliophile wants to rescue the book from the world of commodities and make of it a fetish, free from this world of objects, existing solely in the soul. In ‘the life of the mind’ (to quote Barton Fink).

   But this type of book is surely a commodity. Kind of like crack or speed or anti-depressants. It’s a salve for what ails you. But temporary. And disposable.

   And as soon as you’re done you need another just like it. Forevermore. Til death do us part.

DAY KEENE – My Flesh Is Sweet. Lion #68, paperback original, September 1951. MacFadden-Bartell, paperback, 1969. Stark House Press, trade paperback, 2005, in a two-for-one combo with Framed in Guilt, another Day Keene novel.  Armchair Fiction, softcover, 2020.

   Mystery novels for which the setting involves either pulp writers or the pulp magazine industry are few and far between, and those which do ought to be well noted and documented, even if they’re not very good. As it so happens, this is one, and it’s actually a rather good one, indeed – not surprisingly, as it’s by one of the better paperback writers of the day, Day Keene.

   It begins in Mexico City, as pulp fiction writer Ad Connors witnesses an automobile accident involving a Mexican general and a beautiful American tourist, female. Who’s at fault? The general, of course, but who in Mexico would believe her, her word against his? Connors decides to intervene, which as you know if you’ve ever read a novel by Day Keene before, is rather a hasty (and regrettable) decision on his part.

   Connors has been in Mexico trying to write the great American novel. It hasn’t worked out. All he has to his name is a few pesos and his typewriter, and the latter is stolen as he manages to get Miss Elena Hayes out of the trouble she’s in. But not completely. Later that evening Connors has to intervene again, this time in Elena’s hotel room and in shall we say, compromising terms and with the general shot and presumably dead.

   Whether he is or not, Mexico City is no place to be found at a time such as this. Flight is their only choice. And as they head for a safe haven, Ad learns more about Elena and why she’s in Mexico. A lawyer there should be able to vouch for her birth, that her parents were married. Why is this important? She is about to be married back in the States, and to a very wealthy man.

   It perhaps need not be said that she does not love this man.

   The book thus falls into two parts. I found the first, as the two fugitives manage to stay just a few days ahead of the law, only to become involved in another murder, to be the more interesting. The second half, back in the USA, is another murder mystery to be solved, one involving the disappearance of Elena’s father when she was young back in the far distant past, and yet another murder.

   This is, of course, the key to the tale Keene is keen to tell, but what happens in the first half of the book is considerably more vivid and alive, or so it read to me. The cover of the Lion edition makes the story seem to be lurid and just a little sleazy, and maybe it was, back in 1951. Today, though, it’s quite tame in that regard, if not out-and-out tepid. The overall murder mystery is well done, though, and Keene makes the page fly by.

   Getting back to the pulp writing business, though, I should like to point out that to finance his and Elena’s escape from Mexico, Connors has to hammer out two stories in a week or so and get them sold. Not only that, but the two stories are closely related to the two halves of My Flesh Is Sweet itself, with only a few modifications. Which are important, too, and neatly so.

ARCHIE ROY – Devil in the Darkness. John Long, UK, hardcover, 1978. Valancourt Books, US, trade paperback, 2016.

   It’s cold and rather gloomy outside, and I find myself in the mood for an old fashioned haunted house thriller.

   Ardvreck House stands alone in Scotland, a house deserted as much by its bad reputation as by its lonely location. Paul and Carol Wilson are newlyweds caught in a sudden April snowstorm driving across the Ardnamurchan Peninsula toward the cottage they have rented for their honeymoon when the storm forces them off the road.

   Luckily for them there is a house nearby.

   Well, some would call it luck.

   Inside Ardvreck House they are greeted by nine disparate people who don’t immediately explain what it is they are doing in this dreary house without electric power. They welcome Paul and Carol though and provide them with a room to ride out the storm, but that night Paul is suddenly awakened.

   Paul can rest assured the individuals in Ardvreck House have permission to be there, but there is nothing reassuring about their legal reason for being there. The “army types” are demolitions experts who have been hired to bring down Ardvreck House, destroy it, and the others are paranormal investigators.

   Ardvreck House is one of the most notorious haunted houses in the United Kingdom and has been for almost a century. People have died in Ardvreck House.

   Archie Roy must seem an unlikely candidate to be writing supernatural thrillers. To begin he is that Archie Roy, Professor Archie Roy of the University of Glasgow, the astronomer who calculated the orbital trajectory of objects in space for NASA in the Sixties including the 1969 moon landing. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Society of Astronomers as well as the British Interplanetary Society with an asteroid named after him in 1986.

   He was also the author of three previous scientific thrillers in the Buchan vein.

   But those weren’t his qualifications here. Far more important here is the fact he was his membership in both the London and Scottish Societies for Phychical Research and as author of A Sense of Something Strange, Archives of the Mind and Eaters of the Dead, and his reputation as the “Glasgow Ghostbuster” (unlike other psychical investigators with scientific reputations Roy did not abandon the Scientific Method when looking into the uncanny, the paranormal was always his last resort) he was more than qualified to take on the paranormal.

   And that rigorous mind is part of what he brings to Devil in the Darkness as his team of innocents, psychical researchers, and hard headed demolition experts confront the horrors of Ardvreck House while the blizzard outside traps them and the madness inside the walls of the house tries to stop its secrets from being uncovered. Unlike most horror novels that rely on their chills from the credulity and often stupid behavior of their characters Roy seeks every rational explanation before turning to the paranormal and his characters behave as logically as policemen in their investigation.

   The result is the real chills are greater and more disturbing than the artificial kind when some lady in a filmy negligee and high heels armed only with a candle goes exploring in the basement after midnight because she heard strange noises.

   The stakes are higher here, the threat more real.

   â€œDon’t open the doors,” good advice in any supernatural thriller, and hope they don’t open themselves. While Devil in the Darkness isn’t in a class with Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, it could sit comfortably on the shelf with it, Richard Matheson’s Hell House, Russell Kirk’s The Old Dark House of Fear, Dorothy MacCardle’s The Univited, Stephen King’s The Shining, and J. B. Priestley’s Benighted (filmed as The Old Dark House), and that’s as fine a collection of damned and doomed architecture as you can hope to find.

   Something to savor on a cold stormy night beneath a warm throw with a medicinal cat in your lap and a good dog at your feet, and the beverage of your choice, fortified or not, at your hand.

   And whatever you do when the cat suddenly arches her spine and hackles rise on the dog as he growls menacingly, don’t open the door…

UNDER THE RED ROBE. 20th Century Fox, UK/US, 1937. Conrad Veidt, Annabella, Raymond Massey, Romney Brent, Sophie Stewart, Wyndham Goldie. Based on the 1894 novel by Stanley J. Weyman. Director: Victor Seastrom.

   Everyone remembers Conrad Veidt as the Nasty Nazi in Casablanca; a few recall him as the baddie in Thief of Baghdad, and, at a stretch, might recollect his forays into Warner Brothers villainy in A Woman’s Face or All Through the Night.

   There was a time, though, when Veidt was a Big Star in the early German Cinema, starting in Cabinet of Caligari,  and on through Student of Prague  and Hands of Orlac,  and when he and his Jewish wife exiled themselves from Germany in the 30s, there was a serious attempt to translate his stardom to English-speaking moviegoers.

   He even became something of a cause celebre when he visited Germany just prior to World War II and was “detained” by the Nazis for “health reasons”, eventually being rescued by a team of British doctors.

   Red Robe is one of the films they were making in England when they thought Veidt would be a Big Star, but weren’t quite sure what to do with him. He plays a 17th century swashbuckler in the sometimes-employ of Cardinal Richelieu (Raymond Massey) who is sent to the Spanish border to capture a rebellious nobleman and ends up enamoured of his target’s sister (Annabella).

   Not a very exciting film, but not a bad one either. Victor Seastrom directs with an eye for Pomp and Tapestry, Veidt plays the lethal swordsman in the jaded style of a William S. Hart gunfighter, and there’s a charming turn by Romney Brent as Veidt’s watchdog. With a cast like that, Under the Red Robe has barely enough star-power to illuminate even a tiny TV screen, so it’s not apt to turn up at video stores or on television, but it’s worth catching.

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION, April 1967. Editor: John W. Campbell. Cover art by John Schoenherr. Overall rating: **½ stars.

JAMES BLISH & NORMAN L. KNIGHT “To Love Another.” #4 in the authors’ “A Torrent of Faces” series. [The four stories were expanded and combined as A Torrent Of Faces (Doubleday, 1967).] Novelette. A love story between a human woman and tectogenetically created Triton. Too extreme in its contrasts from the depths of the Pacific to the overcrowded city of Philadelphia. The unexpected result that their marriage would produce keeps the story from a lower rating. (2)

MACK REYNOLDS “Enemy Within.” A small child locks himself in a flying saucer. (1)

JOSEPH P. MARTINO “To Change Their Ways.” Novelette. Wilm Kirsten, Sector Supervisor, has to help convince settlers to use new grains to prevent famines. Analogous to problem of India, but one easier to solve. (3)

HARRY HARRISON “The Time-Machines Saga.” Serial; part 2 of 3. [Reprinted in book form as The Technicolor® Time Machine (Doubleday, 1967).] Review of full novel to be posted later.

COLIN KAPP “Ambassador to Verdammt.” The inhabitants of Verdammt, totally alien to alien minds, can control their environment at will. Somewhat the effects of LSD? (4)

Note: Reprinted in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1968, edited by Terry Carr & Donald Wollheim (Ace, paperback, 1968).

RICHARD CLAPPERTON – The Sentimental Kill. Peter Fleck #3. Constable, UK, hardcover, 1976. No US edition.

   The author’s third novel comes with a dust wrapper blurb which includes review extracts likening his first book to Chandler and his second to Deighton. I couldn’t, frankly, discern such similarity, but I did nevertheless quite enjoy this novel in which Scottish born, Australia based private eye, Peter Fleck, begins the case by acting as protector to former girly magazine publisher, Willie Ansbacher, but spends most of the book trying to locate missing author Temple Wilde.

   The connection is that Wilde, now a literary figure of some note, started his career writing Dick Dexter special agent adventures for one of Ansbacher’s early magazines. One particular file copy (of a banned issue) is missing, and perhaps the solution it contained to the then current Dick Dexter adventure could throw light on some more recent real life skullduggery?

   Lots of nice twists and turns, and all reasonably logical. Characters interesting, but murderer guessable. I enjoyed it but Chandler or Deighton it isn’t.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY – To Have and Have Not. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1937. The initial seed for the novel was the short story “One Trip Across,” published in Cosmopolitan, April 1934, and which introduced the character of Harry Morgan. A second portion was published in Esquire, February 1936, as “The Tradesman’s Return.” Reprinted many times. Filmed in 1944, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

   To Have or Have Not remains the best of the tough novels of its decade and perhaps the best yet written in America”—Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, ed. David Madden (1968).

   Alright. I guess that means I have to read it then, eh? But perhaps, Professor, you can suggest why you think it’s so great?

   â€œThe world Hemingway portrays in To Have or Have Not is…the essential milieu of all tough novels, a society so dominated by crime and injustice that law and order have become viciously hypocritical terms. Only power, money, and indomitable individual action make for survival, and if one must survive at the expense of others, so be it. Consequently…a man must sometimes act as a ‘criminal’ in order to win decency and dignity as a man….His toughness is both necessitated and justified by the social jungle he inhabits.” (Madden).

   Okay. Well, anyway, the book has nothing to do with the movie. Forget you ever saw the movie — it will only confuse you. Yeah there’s a boat. But that’s about where the similarity stops.

   Harry Morgan has a fishing boat that he charters and captains for wealthy tourists in Key West.

   What turns everything to shit is that Harry is approaching the end of tourist season and he’s banking on his current big-city client to get him enough dough to make it to next Spring. But the customer ‘dines and dashes’, leaving Harry in the lurch.

   So he reluctantly agrees to be wheelman (can you be wheelman on a boat?) in a Key West bank robbery for some Cuban revolutionaries. “[H]e heard a noise like a motor backfiring. He looked down the street and saw a man come out of the bank. He had a gun in his hand and he came running. Then he was out of sight. Two more men came out carrying leather briefcases and guns in their hands and ran in the same direction….The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holding a Thompson gun in front of him, and as he backed out of the door the siren in the bank rose in a long breath-holding shriek and Harry saw the gun muzzle jump-jump-jump-jump and heard the bop-bop=bop-bop, small and hollow sounding in the wail of the siren.”

   Once Harry gets them headed towards Cuba, however, it becomes obvious the revolutionaries aren’t planning on leaving any witnesses. So Harry has to do what he has to do to survive. “Crouching low, Harry watched him move until he was absolutely sure. Then he gave him a burst. The gun lighted him on hands and knees, and, as the flame and the bot-bot-bot-bot stopped, he heard him flopping heavily.”

   There’s no happy solutions to Harry’s situation, though (unlike Bogie and Bacall). “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance”. The only equalizer is “the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare”.

   It’s a good book. And it’s tough. Is it the best of the tough-guy novels? I dunno. I’m too uneducated to say. But it’s boiled a whole lot harder than the movie.

   Last thing I’ll say is that one thing the great writers do better than the rest is making the setting part of the story. I knew the book was over when I read the final lines even though more pages were left to turn on my Kindle. I knew it was over. Like the final still in a film. The sea and ship were as much a part of the story as the dialogue. But I didn’t know it until I read the final line. And chills crawled across my neck as I read:

   â€œThrough the window you could see the sea looking hard and new and blue in the winter light. A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.”

E. X. FERRARS – Last Will and Testament. Virginia & Felix Freer #1. Collins, UK, hardcover, 1978. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1978. Bantam, US, paperback, 1981. Felony & Mayhem Press, US, softcover, 2021.

   Virginia Freer has returned home after a long night at the bedside of her dying friend Mrs. Arliss, who passed with a stroke hours earlier, and who should she find stretched out on her sofa but her charming ex Felix who let himself into the house worried because Virginia was out of place.

   Virginia long ago saw through Felix and while not divorcing him has removed herself from his charming but inevitably criminous lifestyle (his latest scheme a racket involving selling dubious automobiles).

   
   Virginia only wants a bath and food and for Felix to go away. She has had a long night and has some unpleasant phone calls to make to Mrs. Arliss surviving relatives. It’s all a bit tiresome, but Felix does make good coffee, and comes bearing an unwelcome gift, that this time he seems to have bought and not pilfered.

   Virginia has a wary eye for Felix. She has her own money, comfortable but not wealthy, a home in the village where she grew up, and a career at a nearby clinic as a physiologist.

   Felix showing up just seems a minor annoyance, but whenever Felix is around… And sure enough it turns out the late Mrs. Arliss much coveted estate is gone and no one is inheriting anything. Felix is still hanging around preparing a meal for her when Virginia returns with Meg Randall, Mrs. Arliss companion who just revealed her employers money is gone, gambled or hidden away.

   Then during the funeral some valuable minatures go missing from the Arliss home and Virginia starts wondering why Felix showed up to see her in the first place at just that moment. Even if he didn’t take them, is he involved? It looks bad because he not only knows Mrs. Arliss’s former servants the Bodwells, they are at his flat in London when Virginia shows up there.

   Well, he’s Felix, of course he’s involved… Isn’t he?

   
   Elizabeth Ferrars whose editor suggested the E. X. pseudonym was a successful mystery writer whose novels were mostly non series mysteries in the classical mode though she had several series characters including Toby Dyke, and with Andrew Bassett, and the Freers late in her career. Her mysteries tend to be fast moving, smart, and well plotted with attractive characters and well plotted solutions. Her heroines tend to be intelligent and self sufficient and she downplays violence and bloodshed in favor of plot and wit.

   1978’s Last Will and Testament was the first Freers novel and a lively introduction to the two charming protagonists.

   Things take a darker turn when the miniatures are returned and one of the heirs in murdered. When the Bodwells are murdered too Felix decides to intervene and from there on it’s a straight murder mystery, just complex enough to keep things interesting and with more than enough charm and wit with Ferrar’s easy unobtrusive but slick style keeping us guessing and the action neatly moving until the crime is solved and Felix almost the hero of the day.

   The Freers continued to adventure in much the same manner from 1978 to 1992 in a series of light and well written adventures that managed to be quite modern while still echoing some of the fun of an earlier time. This was my first time encountering the pair, but I can assure you I will spend more time with Virginia and Felix, though in Felix’s case I may check my wallet afterward.