SAPPER [H. C. McNEILE] – Knock-Out. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1933. US title: Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. Doubleday Doran/Crime Club, hardcover, 1933. Reprints: Grosset & Dunlap, hc, 1934; Triangle, hc, 1943; House of Stratus, UK, trade paperback, 2001.

Films: United Artists, 1934, as Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (Ronald Colman, Loretta Young; director: Roy del Ruth). Also: Columbia, 1947, again as Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (Ron Randell, Gloria Henry; director: Frank McDonald).

   English thriller writer Sapper (pen name of Herman Cyril McNeile) is a much maligned figure of late decades, his famous hero Captain Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond now being seen as less a “clubland hero” than an arch-conservative, racist, public-schooled bully.

   This perception is fueled especially by offensive racial comments made by Captain Drummond in some of the 1920s novels, like The Black Gang (1922) and The Female of the Species (1928). Eric Ambler represented the views of many in dismissing Sapper’s books as essentially fascist.

   By 1933, however, Hitler was consolidating his power in Germany and shocking much of the civilized world with his bellicose, frequently anti-Semitic, rhetoric and behavior. Sapper continued publishing thrillers up until his premature death in 1937. What was the tenor of his later works?

   My conclusion from reading Knock-Out (1933) is that if you are offended by it, you are pretty easily offended.

   Knock-Out opens with Ronald Standish (familiar to Sapper readers from the Sherlock Holmes inspired pastiches he appeared in throughout the 1930s — they should have been collected under the title Knock-Off) and his friend Bill in Ronald’s flat discussing a vital matter — golf — when a phone call from Ronald’s friend Sanderson comes through asking Ronald to come over to his place immediately.

   But the line goes dead! Ronald and Bill head over to Sanderson’s place, only to discover Sanderson dead, stabbed — or shot? — through the eye.

   They then encounter Hugh Drummond and his friend Peter. The mighty Hugh is about to pound Ronald and Bill into the floor when Peter stops him with an important piece of information: “It’s Ronald Standish. I’ve played cricket with him.”

   Ronald’s bona fides as a sportsman established, the four good fellows are able to come together on a plan over what to do about Sanderson’s murder. It seems that Sanderson was on the trail of some sort of BIG criminal conspiracy.

   Of course, letting the police or intelligence service in on the “show” in any big way is unthinkable — this is a job for impetuous, sporting, public-schooled amateurs!

   Soon Hugh, Ronald and pals are on the hunt for the conspirators, who include a noted society doctor, a sadistic American film actress and, worst of all, a cross-dressing, bald-headed Greek man with lacquered fingernails.

   A number of elements from earlier tales are recycled. Hugh again indulges his odd penchant for disguise, his Wodehouseian pal Algy is made to take notes of Hugh’s deep thoughts (to what purpose is not evident), there is a loyal “old nurse” of one of the the fellahs on hand when needed and, of course, a pretty, plucky nice girl (Daphne Frensham — “an absolute fizzer”) shows up to help out the lads, as well as to engage in some light romantic banter with Peter (Hugh’s wife presumably is out shopping during this one).

   The heroes’ headstrong assault on the villains’ country house headquarters also will seem familiar, as will the fact that it is defended by a fearsome beast (here, a mastiff “the size of a donkey” — young apes were not available this season, evidently).

   Hugh also goes into one of his patented berserk rages, splitting open one filthy swine’s head and throwing another off a railway embankment, but they really were rather rotters, I will stipulate (they had committed an act of what we would call terrorism today and were in the process of attempting another one).

   Yet not all is pure action. The presence of the relatively cerebral Ronald Standish gives Sapper an excuse to indulge a little in the exercise of a bit of brain power. There is much speculation over exactly how Sanderson was killed and there is a cipher that plays a major role in the tale.

   However, during the course of the action Standish is drugged, kidnapped, kidnapped yet again and concussed by a bomb, so let us just say that his brains are not always fully operational throughout the tale.

   Perhaps most interestingly, Sapper takes time to present, in a quite sympathetic manner, a Jewish shopkeeper named Samuel Aaronstein, alone with his wife and son. If Knock-Out ever was reprinted in Nazi Germany — and we know Hitler liked Edgar Wallace thrillers — this section of the book would not have found favor.

   It should be noted as well that the sadistic American film actress who is aroused by seeing men being tortured to death is not exactly a cozy concoction. I could never quite figure out why she was necessary to the success of the conspiracy, but she certainly added a frisson of wicked decadence.

   So, while Knock-Out is not perhaps the most original of Sapper’s thrillers, it is as smoothly competent as any of the author’s books, and it is not as offensive as people will tell you Sapper works invariably are.

   Sure, the lower class characters all speak exaggerated cockney-ish dialect, the street boy with the message for our heroes is invariably referred to by them as “the urchin” (I was half expecting “ragamuffin”) and the head villain is a creepy hermaphrodite (or something like). But, honestly, you must have read more obnoxious books than this one from the period.

   I suspect part of the animus against Sapper has to do with the fact that the academics who write much of the mystery criticism today are precisely the eggheads who would have been made to eat dirt three times a day in public school by a young Bulldog (and don’t we know it). Though, admittedly, I too find some of the earlier books distasteful in parts.

   Interestingly, Sapper’s father, Captain Malcolm McNeile (1843-1901), was a naval officer and prison warden described as “a ‘rod-of-iron’ officer from the old school” and “a disciplinarian of the meanest type.” And Sapper’s paternal grandfather, Reverend Hugh McNeile (1795-1879) [FOOTNOTE], was an evangelical Anglican minister considered “unquestionably the greatest preacher and speaker in the Church of England” in the nineteenth century.

   With this background, it’s probably no wonder that the Sapper books are as conservative (and sometimes bullying) as they are. Whether they are “fascist” — with all that that ideology entails — is to my mind open to question, however.

   Conservative and fascist are not synonymous terms. Sapper’s clubland heroes may be vigilantes doing what they do “for the good of England” (which usually seems to mean people earning income off invested capital), but they often seem to find it unnecessary to inform the State what they are doing.

   Fascist dictators might have found them a little too anarchic and individualistic in that respect.

FOOTNOTE: Reverend Hugh McNeile obtained his first living in 1822 from the wealthy banker and politician Henry Drummond. Put those names together and I think that we surely have the inspiration for the name of Sapper’s greatest hero.

       Previously reviewed on this blog:

The Black Gang (by David L. Vineyard)
Bulldog Drummond (by Steve Lewis)

DANIEL BOYD – ’Nada.   Casperian Books, trade paperback, 2010.

   I have a semi-formal, strictly unwritten and not always enforced policy against reviewing books written by authors I know personally. But that shouldn’t stop me from telling you about them, now should it? No, I didn’t think so.

   Case in point. ’Nada has yet to be published – I believe it’s scheduled for some time early this fall – and when it is, I’ll tell you about it again. The author’s name on the title page is Daniel Boyd, but that’s a pen name of one of the regular contributors to this blog’s pages. (Whispering so no one else can hear: Dan Stumpf.)

   I don’t think he’ll mind my telling you that, but if it’s a secret, I’ll delete that last previous sentence and you’ll have to find out in some other fashion later on.

   It’s a book that takes place in Mexico, in and around an all-but-abandoned silver mine watched over by one man, the one who tells the story, Vernon Culley, a mining engineer from Kansas City. We know that much about him that right away, but not much else. Bit by bit, though, other pieces of his background get filled in as the story goes along.

   The year is 1936, right in the middle of the Great Depression, and Mexico, feeling the ailment as well as up in US, if not worse, is filled with banditos of all makes and models, which is how the story begins: with an old ambulance and the two men in it entering Culley’s small domain while fleeing a gang of ornery local outlaws headed by a fellow named Paco Serrano.

   Right about now – and this is about all I’m going to tell you about the plot – you should maybe know whether this is a book for you or not. But if you’re still uncertain, let me warn you that this is not a book for most “cozy” lovers, nor should you expect a locked room mystery to suddenly pop up and take over the tale.

   For a book of action, which of course is what this is in part, told by a strong authorial voice as if the teller of the tale were in the same room with you – one I could hear all the way through – I think the strongest parts were not the sections with the gunplay, which at one point is fast and furious indeed, but rather the quieter more reflective ones.

   Such as when Culley and his newly found friend Ray (one of the two men in the ambulance) are making their way across the desert to a town called Quenada (hence the title, making the apostrophe important if not essential) talking about life and death and men on the borderline between the two — and promises that have been made to them.

   It’s also a novel about gold, and the allure it has to men. It’s also a story told by a man who reads both Black Mask and “Hamlet,” and knows what the essentials are of each. If you were to ask me, I’d say that I think you should read it, but if you’ve read this non-review this far, you already know that, don’t you?

[UPDATE] 07-15-10. From the Casperian webpage I’ve discovered that ’Nada will be published on September 1st, and if you’d like to read the first chapter, it’s online there also.

   We’ve had to install a new WordPress interface here. All seems to have gone well — no posts lost! — but if you go back a few weeks you’ll see that strange symbols have replaced some (not all) apostrophes, dashes and stray quotation marks.

   I’ve edited them out of the most recent posts, I hope, but it will be a while before they disappear altogether. All part and parcel of doing business in the age of the future — constant upgrades — this time because of security concerns — but not always perfectly!

DAVID GOODIS – Of Tender Sin. Gold Medal #226, paperback original; 1st printing, 1952; Gold Medal 616, 2nd printing, 1956.

   David Goodis is one of those bleak, lost figures of pulp literature, legendary now but neglected in his day, who churned out millions of words in his youth for the pulps, and in the 50s and 60s produced some unforgettable classics in paperback.

   Of Tender Sin features some of Goodis’s best writing and lousiest plotting, starting for no apparent reason as hero Alan Darby, a middle-class office worker with a house and wife in the suburbs, suddenly becomes “unstuck from himself” and begins wandering the seedy streets of Philadelphia’s tenderloin in the middle of a harsh winter.

   It ends for the same no-reason, apparently when Goodis got tired of writing it. But along the way, we get drugs, kinky sex, beatings, incest, robbery and murder, all put across with some of the most incredibly vivid prose I’ve ever read.

   Goodis conveys Philly like Camus did Algiers in The Stranger: when he writes, you feel the cold snow seep into your boots, taste the cheap, satisfying greasy-spoon chow, feel the impact of a sudden punch, this is writing for its own sake, and to find it between the covers of a two-bit paperback is one of the delights that come only to collectors like us.

EXIT SMILING. MGM, 1926. Beatrice Lillie, Jack Pickford, Doris Lloyd, DeWitt Jennings, Harry Myers, Franklin Pangborn. Story: Marc Connelly; scenario: Sam Taylor & Tim Whelan. Director: Sam Taylor. Shown at Cinecon 27, Hollywood CA, September 1993.

   After the discovery of Jessie Matthews [in First a Girl, reviewed here ], Beatrice Lillie was the rediscovery of the convention for me.

   Lillie is the maid for a touring theatrical company, and also plays small roles like “Nothing” in “Much Ado About Nothing” (as the intertitles put it), while pining to show the company that she can play leading roles.

   The film is filled with inspired bits of tomfoolery that make you wonder why Lillie was not one of the great comic stars of the silent screen. In any event, a marvelous showcase for her talents, and for those of actors like Franklin Pangborn and Doris Lloyd.

   There’s a tug at the heartstrings at the end, and I exited smiling and treading on air.

Editorial Comment:   This movie is available on DVD from the Warner Archives website.

JOHN SHERWOOD – Creeping Jenny. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1993. Celia Grant #9. No US paperback edition. Macmillan, UK, hardcover, 1993.

   Celia Grant is a horticulturist, and owner of Archerscroft Nurseries, which specializes in the rarer and more rarely seen varieties. She also finds time to become embroiled in various forms of shady doings.

   Celia hires for the summer a painfully shy girl whom she doesn’t really take to, the Jenny of the title. She’s even less fond of her after she seduces Celia’s head gardener, and then is apparently kidnapped.

   The investigation leads to a radical environmental group who are threatening dire consequences to a local garden show, among other more serious things, and all this at a time when Celia is in the middle of a squabble between a local landowner and an industrialist new to the area.

   I like this series. Celia is an enjoyable character, and I think one of the better realized crop of British amateur sleuths. Sherwood writes well, and generally tells a good story, occasionally with a little edge.

   Though not really hardboiled, Celia isn’t Miss Marple. Some in the series have more depth than others, but they are usually peopled with interesting characters, and the plots are usually adequate.

   I don’t think this is one of the stronger entries, but it was certainly readable, and stopped short of being disappointing.

       The Celia Grant series —

1. Green Trigger Fingers (1984)
2. A Botanist at Bay (1985)
3. The Mantrap Garden (1986)

4. Flowers of Evil (1987)
5. Menacing Groves (1988)
6. A Bouquet of Thorns (1989)

7. The Sunflower Plot (1990)
8. The Hanging Garden (1992)
9. Creeping Jenny (1993)
10. Bones Gather No Moss (1994)
11. Shady Borders (1996)

   John Sherwood had a crime-writing career than spanned six decades. He was not uniformly prolific throughout that time, but he had two periods in which he was very active. Starting out in 1949 with a longish series of adventure and espionage novels, including several with a series character named Charles Blessington, he wrote only four in the 1960s and 70s. He might be best known for a book called Death at the BBC (as it was titled in the US) in 1982, then came the long run of Celia Grant books.

DERYN LAKE – The Mills of God. Severn House, UK, hardcover, 2010.

Genre:   Traditional mystery. Leading characters:  Rev. Nicholas Lawrence/DI Dominic Tennant; 1st in series. Setting:   England.

First Sentence:   It was, thought Nick, peering through the windscreen of his
somewhat battered red Peugeot, a very oddly shaped village.

    The Reverend Nick Lawrence arrives at his new perish in the village of Lakehurst. Awaiting him is an assortment of village characters, a 16th century vicarage, complete with ghost, and a serial murderer.

    DI Dominic Tennant, and his sergeant, Potter, come to catch a killer before the town’s small population is even further reduced.

    Ms. Lake is taking a new direction, moving away from her historical mysteries, which I love, into the contemporary. There are a few stumbles along the way but I’ve also learned that Ms. Lake had a serious issue which necessitated her writing the book much more quickly than normal.

    That, to me as a long-time reader of her work, does explain the weaknesses of this book which I am sure would have been corrected otherwise.

   The story is set in a very small village, and there are a lot of characters. This could be confusing except that each is very well defined through a nice, brief, comprehensive introduction. Most of the characters come through as stereotypes rather than eccentrics, and I did have an issue with a comment that a married man with a disagreeable wife could decide to go gay.

   However, there were some wonderful secondary characters as well and I look forward to seeing them again. I particularly appreciated that there were some relationships that, while confusing to some, worked well for those involved.

    The exceptions are our protagonists. Father Nick, the new vicar, is young at 28 and understandably focused, but a bit too much so, on the attractive women of his parish. He is modern and accepting of others. I also appreciated that he doesn’t go blinding off without protection and didn’t try to solve the murders, but rather provided assistance to the police.

   The police were well represented by DI Dominic Tennant, who gets tired and misses having a woman in his life, and his sergeant Potter. I very much like the relationship between the two men. These are characters I want to follow and about whom I want to know more.

    The sense of place and dialogue needed a bit of work. While some of the descriptions were wonderful, others left me wanted. In the first sentence, we told the village is very oddly shaped, but never in what way or why. The cover art on the hard cover shows deep snow, but snow is never mentioned in the text (I blame the cover artist), and other than a slight reference to cold, the weather and season are never really defined until almost the end.

    The dialogue at times flowed very well, but at other times, seemed awkward. What really saved the book was the very well structured plot and Ms. Lake’s ability to portray differing attitudes really well.

    You sense of frustration of the police and there is just the right level of menace. There is a small red herring, which I appreciated, and I was never able to anticipate the next move in the plot and certainly not the killer.

    I also very much liked the realism that while the “who” of the killer is identified; the “why” is left something of a question both to the characters and the readers.

    For its flaws, I enjoyed this book very much. I recommend one forgive the weaknesses — Ms. Lake is a good-enough author to correct them next time out — revel in the strengths, for there are many, and enjoy.

    There was definitely more good than bad about the book, as reflected by my immediate reaction of wondering when the next in this series will be available.

Rating:   Good Plus.

Editorial Comment:   The series of historical mysteries written by Deryn Lake that LJ refers to above currently consists of 13 adventures of 18th century apothecary John Rawlings, who teams up with Sir John Fielding, London’s famous blind Bow Street magistrate, in most if not all of them. Covers for these can be seen on the Fantastic Fiction website.

EMILY BRIGHTWELL – The Inspector and Mrs. Jeffries. Berkley, paperback original; 1st printing, February 1993.

   I haven’t seen it, but wasn’t there a movie in which Sherlock Holmes was a bumbling fool and Dr. Watson was secretly the brains of the pair? I don’t know, but that had to be the idea behind this new paperback series set in Victorian England.

   The inspector is Inspector Gerald Witherspoon of Scotland Yard. Mrs. Jeffries is his housekeeper, and she solves his cases for him. He is a nice man, but he is so bewildered he does not even suspect that she is doing all his work for him. His entire household staff is brought in on the secret in this case, and together they do 80% of the legwork, 90% of the questioning, and 100% of the thinking.

   The dead man is a doctor who has been poisoned. He also had a good many secrets and was universally disliked. (Put two and two together and see what you come up with.)

   Personally, I think that this is a good idea that gets awfully tired awfully fast. (Sort of like a TV series that after one or two episodes has no place else to go.) The book is fun to read, without requiring any major brainpower, perfect for late at night when you can’t fall asleep anyway.

   The characters are fine, except for the excessively dimbulb wit of the inspector, but just how long can the charade be kept up?

Note: The second of the series, Mrs. Jeffries Dusts for Clues, has just come out, and the third, The Ghost and Mrs. Jeffries, is scheduled for October. Does that answer my question?

[UPDATE] 07-11-10. I might have gotten tired of the idea after only one book, since I’m sure that this one is the only one I’ve read, but the target audience for the series surely hasn’t. There have been 27 in series, so far, and still counting. Some but not all have come out in hardcover.

   Obviously the “gimmick” in this case has had longer legs than I was willing to admit back in 1993, but do note my concluding Note at the time.

My brother from Canada is visiting this weekend. He arrived around five this afternoon. I think I’ll use the occasion to take a short vacation from the blog. I’ll be back around this same time on Sunday. See you then!

Steve:

Is there anyway you can enlist your army of mystery fans to help save the TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot?

This month, series X of Poirot will air on PBS. It may be the last despite there being only 6 Christie stories to be filmed.

Below is an excerpt from www.culturevulture.com with more info and how we can help save the show.

I have also started a Facebook group page called “Save Agatha Christie’s Poirot.”

Thank you!

Brian R. Sheridan

In early 2010, it was speculated the Poirot series might end before the last six stories (out of 71) are filmed. David Suchet said, “I’m pragmatic and accept that things get cancelled. Of course, there are cutbacks in TV drama and if it is not to be, it is not to be. I will have to be a big boy and accept it.” He added, “Of course I would be very sad if it didn’t get recommissioned.”

Suchet also stated in April 2010 that if the series were to return, but on a lower budget scale, he would not want to continue making the last episodes if they would compromise the quality of the program.

So now is the time for fans to let ITV know that we would like ITV to produce the last of the Hercule Poirot stories by emailing ITV at

viewerservices@itv.com.

Or snail mail:

Viewer Services ITV Plc
Gas Street
Birmingham B1 2JT UK