Sat 6 Jul 2019
A Thriller Review by David Vineyard: JOHN CREASEY – Sons of Satan.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
JOHN CREASEY – Sons of Satan. Dr. Palfrey #11 (*). John Long, UK, hardcover, 1947. Arrow, UK, 1963, as Palfrey versus Sons of Satan (on cover). House of Stratus Ltd, UK, softcover, 2015, as The Sons of Satan. No US edition.
For nearly a year now Palfrey had devoted himself solely to working for Brett. Moscow had sent Stefan for the same task, and held others in reserve; Bruton was there with authority from Washington, for most of the nations of the world still subscribed to this world-wide Secret Service.
The mission statement for Dr. Septimus Palfrey and Z5, the worldwide secret service he will soon command, as stated in one of Palfrey’s earliest adventures. The Sons of Satan is the eleventh novel in the thirty-four volume series that is notable for expressing Creasey’s Post-War political views and being his deepest venture into science fiction, if only the kind found in thrillers.
This one opens with Bruce Mallen, an expatriate Brit returning from South America encountering the beautiful Lady Veronica Howell, who slips a strange object into his luggage to be smuggled into England. Soon Mallen has encountered the mysterious and wealthy Colonel George Wray who is tied to Lady Veronica and finds himself a suspected agent of something and someone called Abba and is soon confronted by Z5 agent Stefan Andromovich and Dr. “Sap†(Septimus Alexander) Palfrey himself.
As in the earlier Gordon Craigie series, the Palfrey series often introduces an “innocent†protagonist or one of Palfrey’s agents who only appear in the single book. Here, Mallen, who proves a capable protagonist, finds himself over his head caught between Z5 and the dangerous Abba.
Abba had been a code-word first discovered when a little group of reactionaries had been found in Haifa a few months earlier – neither Jews nor Arabs, but fostering unrest among the races. By devious means they had discovered that Abba was a code-word used elsewhere also; in Trieste for a while, in Milan, in Warsaw and in Prague. Agents had sent their reports in, and so Abba had become to them as Brett and Palfrey were to the world at large – a legendary figure. Who he was, exactly what he was trying to do, they did not yet know. They did know that he worked mostly through religious factions, creating fanaticism out of fervour and madness out of piety.
These megalomaniacal madmen willing to kill millions to achieve their goals remain a staple of the Palfrey adventures rather than spies or agents of other nations. In Dark Harvest, the tenth book in the series, Palfrey and his agents had defeated a madman trying to starve the world through famine. That apocalyptic tone would continue and come to dominate the series with Palfrey battling deadly fogs, world wide forest fires, drought, flood, famine again, infertility, and even alien invasion, surely influencing wirters like John Christopher and J.G. Ballard and possibly even Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass.
Read today in light of the current concerns of climate change the series seems more contemporary than when it was written.
This is the last book to feature the Marquis of Brett as Palfrey’s boss, with Sap soon replacing him as head of Z5, an obvious decision, one that it seems curious it took Creasey eleven books to reach.
Palfrey is a ruthless chief, and agents often sacrifice themselves to the greater good, sometimes at Palfrey’s reluctant but certain order.
Palfrey, Mallen, and Lady Veronica track Abba to his lair in San Palino in Spain, in the Monastery of Azzen where Abba and his Golden Friars spread their religion of hate.
The Palfrey books are formulaic, so you would not want to read many in a row. There is a mystery that gradually grows more horrible in its implications, the embattled agents of Z5 seem outnumbered and powerless, Palfrey doubts himself and almost gives up, and then at the last moment saves himself and the world, but not without consequence to his agents, the world, and his own conscience.
Readers tend to either love or hate the Palfrey series, and admittedly they can show the best and the worst of Creasey as a writer with Palfrey far less attractive than the Baron, the Toff, Roger West, or George Gideon, but I have a soft place for this very pulp-like series and I suppose a taste for apocalypse, at least fictional ones.
Sons of Satan is an early example of Palfrey at his best.
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(*) Editor’s Note: Different sources count this as either #9 pr #10, as well as #11.
July 6th, 2019 at 6:34 pm
When I get a chance, I’ll look further into the correct chronology of the Palfrey books. Many sources have the date of this one as 1948, but looking through the offerings on abebooks, all the sellers who have copies for sale say 1947, so that seems solid.
Other sources call an earlier book, DANGEROUS QUEST (1944) part of the Department Z (Gordon Craigie) series, others refer to it as a Palfrey book. I’ll look into it. (I confess that I’ve always gotten them mixed up with Palfrey’s Z-5 group myself.)
Back at the time, I read some of the Palfrey series from the 1960s and thought they were dreadful. David, do you think I ought to go back in time and speak to my younger self about this?
I suspect that the ones from the 1940s like this one might have a lot more zip and/or verve to them.
July 6th, 2019 at 10:29 pm
The Berkeley titles trying to capitalize on a nonexistant tie to Doc Savage tended to be from late in the series, and like THE DEPTHS not the best examples. Most of the Lancer titles, while better packaged, followed from the same era.
I’m not really sure American publishers knew what to make of Palfrey since they weren’t strictly one thing or the other and the SF content was higher than say in a Bond style novel though closer to Jules Verne or Wells than modern American SF. In fact they are in the tradition of the disaster style SF popular in British magazines when Creasey was a child along the lines of Doyle’s THE POISON BELT.
The fiction far outweighed the science. Fred White, William Le Queux, and several others often indulged in these, plus they had ties to the Yellow Peril novels and the Future War genres.
The early ones do have more verve and are closer to the Edgar Wallace/Bulldog Drummond influenced Craigie books, though my money is on the mid to early fifties titles like MISTS OF FEAR. Of the early ones HOUSE OF THE BEARS and DARK HARVEST are quite readable, before Palfrey’s rather bloodless streak set in (Palfry, not the books being bloodless — Creasey wiped out millions over the years in Palfrey’s disasters).
The early Palfrey’s also seem to owe a bit to Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richelieu titles. Another series American publishers struggled to categorize.
There is a tie between the Craigie books and the Palfrey series though I’m not sure Creasey intended Z5 as a continuation of Department Z. I think rather Creasey simply modeled Z5 and Palfrey on the model of Craigie and Peter Cheyney’s DARK series with Secret Service chief Peter Quayle, but rather than writing himself into a corner with the older M type character as the lead he made Palfrey merely chief agent so he could take part in the action and then found the Marquis of Brett superfluous after a while, and certainly dated being the mysterious aristocrat type. Even in the titles with Brett Palfrey is very much in charge.
Eventually the Palfrey books carried too heavy a burden of Creasey’s political view, and story to some extent became a polemic, the same plot with different disasters and villains, but all the same old same old really. How personal Creasey took Palfrey shows in his grandson Richard continuing the Palfrey series about Thomas Palfrey SAP’s descendant.
But as I mentioned some Creasey fans love the Palfrey books and some loathe them. They pretty much stand outside the norm of anything else he wrote. You’d have to dig up one of his Westerns or Romance novels to be this far afield from the majority of his work including his standalone novels. For some reason quite a few women Creasey fans love the Palfrey series and SAP, perhaps because of his somewhat romantic status as a widower.
July 12th, 2019 at 9:30 pm
I read a few of the Palfrey books back in the 1960s. As David said, very pulpy. I moved on to Creasey’s other series–The Toff, The Baron, etc. Now I’m tempted to read some of the Palfrey books that have been on my shelves for decades waiting to be read.
July 12th, 2019 at 9:37 pm
John Creasey wrote more books than I’ll ever read of his — not that that’s amy slight meant toward him. He wrote more than 600 books!