THE PULPMEISTER REVIEWS 1

by Terry Walker

Sampling a century of sensational fiction

2012

Contents

Introduction

1915: The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan

1920: Bulldog Drummond, by "Sapper"

1922: Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini

1924: The Green Hat by Michael Arlen

1931: The Jade of Destiny, by Jeffery Farnol

1933: Lost Horizon, by James Hilton

1935: Regency Buck, by Georgette Heyer

1938: The Colossus of Arcadia, by E Phillips Oppenheim

1940: The Return of Nighthawk by Sydney Horler

1943: The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

1956: Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious

1959: Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming

1976: Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler

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Introduction

FROM TIME to time, when reading a book, I’ve been overcome with an urge to write about it. These pieces were written from the mid 1990s on, and have been assembled from nearly forgotten files on my computers, and in a few instances scanned back into digital format from re-discovered computer printouts. There are 13 pieces here, and Volume 2 when I finally get around to it will probably contain another 12 or 13.

One piece which I know I wrote seems lost— my take on a splendid early Hammond Innes novel entitled Wreckers Must Breathe. There's a book you must have, just on the strength of the title. If this turns up, it will feature in Volume 2.

They were all written for my own amusement. None have ever been published before.

2012

___________

1915: The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan

Contrary to general belief, I was not a murderer; but I had become an unholy liar, a shameless imposter, and a highwayman with a marked taste for expensive motor cars.

____________

FOR MANY of us, The Thirty-nine Steps means Alfred Hitchcock's famous 1935 movie, with Robert Donat and the beautiful Madeleine Carroll handcuffed together and fleeing across the Scottish moors with police and enemy agents in hot pursuit. Or perhaps it means the not-so-good 1959 remake, with Kenneth More and the beautiful Taina Elg handcuffed together and fleeing across the self-same moors.

Then again, for others of us it means John Buchan's original short novel of 1915, which hasn’t been out of print since it was first published. Buchan (1875-1940) must have been pleasantly surprised by the durability of his little foray into pulp literature. In the dedication he describes The Thirty-nine Steps as "that elementary type of tale the Americans call the 'dime novel' and which we know as the 'shocker' – the romance where the incidents defy the probabilities and march just inside the borders of the possible."

Many incidents in this elementary tale certainly defy probability, and whether they march just inside the borders of the possible is open to lively debate. There's at least one incident which, for me at least, is downright incredible. Fortunately, Buchan's zestful writing and the helter-skelter adventures of the hero Richard Hannay carry us right through the improbabilities, impossibilities and even incredibilities.

The end of the world as we know it.

IT IS A STORY of the most profound simplicity, the tale of a race between the hero and two sets of pursuers (the police and the enemy spies), and what is at stake is nothing less than The End of the World As We Know It.

It is 1914. Richard Hannay is a mining engineer who made a pile in Rhodesia, and who has come back to the mother country to retire, despite being a mere thirty-seven years old. He had vaguely visualised the good life: the theatres, clubland, and the cozy flat in Portland Place near Regent's Park. There is no mention of such eccentricities as getting married, however. This is a Boys Own adventure.

Within three months Hannay is bored rigid and thinking about returning to Rhodesia. Happily, he encounters the extraordinary Mr. Scudder, who lives in Apartment 15 upstairs in the same building.

Scudder is an American, as we can tell instantly from his opening dialogue: "Say, sir, I've been watching you, and I reckon you're a cool customer." British authors were for many years all but unanimous in the belief that Americans started every second sentence with "Say– ". They also thought that Americans’ first names were mostly Hiram, Elmer or Jerome; but Buchan is a little more original: Scudder’s first name is Franklin.

Scudder, Hannay learns, is in deep trouble, and the American spins the gullible colonial a very tall tale indeed.

There is a conspiracy afoot to set Russia and Germany at loggerheads, Scudder says. And why?

The anarchists, Scudder explains, think it will give them their chance. Everything will be in the melting pot, and they look to see a new world emerge. The capitalists will rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he goes on, has no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew is behind it, and the Jew hates Russia worse than hell. If you go into it deeply enough, Scudder burbles on, "ten to one you are brought up against a white-faced Jew in a bath chair with an eye like a rattlesnake."

I have never seen a bath chair with an eye like a rattlesnake, but I took Buchan's meaning. This flagrant anti-Semitism was quite common to English novelists (and perfectly acceptable to the English public) for many years, but it certainly jarred me when I read it. It doesn't seem to jar Hannay when he hears it, though. He listens carefully.

The world’s last best hope, Scudder goes on, is Constantine Karolides, a Greek statesman of the utmost honesty. While he lives, the conspiracy is stymied. But Karolides is coming to London on June 15th 1914 as a guest of the Foreign Office, and is marked for death by the baddies. Scudder, and only Scudder, can save Karolides and hence the world; but the evil baddies are on to him. He has bought time by faking his own suicide upstairs in Apartment 15, using a convenient corpse he has acquired from an unstated source (perhaps the meat counter at Fortnum & Mason). He needs to lie low until the 15th. Can he stay with Hannay?

Well of course, says Hannay, ever ready to believe anything anyone says. The thought never enters his head that Scudder may simply be a murderer on the run.

Exit Franklin Scudder

SCUDDER shaves off his mo and beard, reinvents himself as Captain Theophilus Digby, 40th Ghurkhas, complete with monocle and upper-class English accent, and settles in. This idyll lasts just three days, until Hannay comes home and finds Scudder dead, pinned to the parquetry by a knife through the chest.

There are many things Hannay could do at this point, the silliest of which is to take it on the lam. But that is precisely what he does. His truly daft scheme is to hide out in Scotland for three weeks, and then surface in London to tell the authorities the story that Scudder had told him. Clutching Scudder's precious little black book containing his encrypted notes about the crisis, Hannay takes it on his toes and fetches up in Galloway, where he hopes to lie low. It's the nearest piece of wild Scotland he can find.

An extremely large suntanned Colonial blundering about the wilds of Galloway startling the sheep and panicking the wild haggises would surely be very conspicuous, but Hannay is of the view that he can successfully pretend to be Scotch (Buchan's own word) and hence become invisible. He hasn’t seen Scotland since he was six years old, so this is a far-fetched belief indeed. However, Hannay makes it safely to an obscure railway station on the line between Dumfries and Stranraer, abandons the train, and legs it into the wilderness. The chase is on.

He must have left a trail was wide as six-lane highway behind him, because he is barely over the horizon when a small private aeroplane appears, scanning the moors for him. How the baddies found out where he was so quickly is a mystery. It is even less probable than Cary Grant being strafed by that plane in North by Northwest. Any keen student of the splendid Hitchcock movie can demonstrate that it was impossible for the baddies to know that Grant was going to stand near that cornfield, and even more impossible to prepare a machine-gun armed crop-dusting plane in time anyway.

Cairnsmore of Fleet

HOLED UP in a wayside inn under the shadow of the hill called Cairnsmore of Fleet, Hannay briskly decrypts Scudder's little black book. Soon inquisitive strangers, clearly The Enemy, are asking about him, but Hannay eludes them and steals their car. As he roars away from immediate danger, he reflects on the terrible tale told by that little black book.

Scudder's ripe yarn about the anarchist Jews, the statesman Karolides, etc, had been so much rubbish. What was really going to happen was a World War, and the likely defeat of England. The war had been planned, according to Scudder's notes, ever since February 1912. (Buchan had the advantage of hindsight, here; when he wrote this book the World War was already under way.)

The immediate problem was that German spies were going to steal the secret operational plans the Royal Navy would use in case of war, which were due to be discussed at a top level meeting on June 15th. If Germany gets them, the Royal Navy could be defeated; and the defeat of the Royal Navy means the defeat of England. Elsewhere, the little book uses the expression "the thirty-nine steps" several times, apparently a mnemonic for where the German spies are headquartered.

It’s truly amazing how many total strangers are more than happy to conceal Richard Hannay from police and German spies alike as he zigzags across western Scotland, notwithstanding widespread newspaper publicity associating him with the "Portland Place Murder". Lonely innkeepers, road menders, crofters, even campaigning politicians help him out as he tries to stay alive and free until the time is ripe to emerge in London.

After several near-misses and hairsbreadth escapes, he inevitably falls into the clutches of the German spies, who interrogate him unsuccessfully and then lock him in a stone farm storehouse while they decide his fate. Hannay soon discovers a cache of dynamite in the storehouse and blasts his way out, surprisingly without turning himself into puree in the process. He evades the spies and holes up for several days with a lonely road mender before it’s finally time to head south to blow the whistle on the plot.

By page 95 (I told you it was a short novel) the wild chase across the moors is already a fading memory. Hannay is in tranquil Berkshire, just outside London, being succoured by yet another obliging citizen. Rather conveniently, this one happens to be the Permanent Secretary to the Foreign Office.

Eyeball to Eyeball

IT'S ALMOST all over now, bar the eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Hannay and the Chief Bad Guy. This occurs on schedule at page 135, after Hannay successfully deduces what "the thirty-nine steps" means and beards the spies in their hideout.

What can I say?

Despite the casual racism of the period (in addition to the anti-Semitism already noted, Hannay refers to Karolides in passing as a Dago) the story has weathered surprisingly well. It's fast-moving and full of incident, and refreshingly short of four letter words, sex, gore and graphic violence.

Of course it could have been better plotted. The rigmarole of Hannay abandoning London to hide out in remote Galloway is very dubious. Buchan ought to have settled Hannay into a nice manor house on the edge of Galloway, and started the story there, with Hannay fleeing across the moors in the general direction of London. Still, that's a minor cavil. There is not much in the way of characterisation, which is not surprising given that the novel is barely 35,000 words in length. Even Richard Hannay has little discernible personality or character. The prose is smooth and free of outdated slang, and the dialogue is unforced, which gives the book a quite modern feel.

If the same story were written today it would doubtless have a body count in the hundreds, enormous explosions, jet fighters, hand-to-hand combat, sex scenes, and perhaps a torture scene reported in nauseating detail. It would also run to six hundred pages instead of a mere 135.

One interesting point is that this novel is a first-person narrative about an innocent bystander pitchforked into a desperate drama, which he deals with effectively due to his tough, resourceful nature (and, it must be said, a lot of co- operation from the author). It anticipates the style of the far more recent thrillers by such writers as Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean and Dick Francis. Perhaps this is what makes it feel surprisingly modern.

Credibility does wobble badly right at the very end when one of the German spies successfully makes himself up to look exactly like the First Sea Lord. This spy attends that secret conference about the Royal Navy and walks out with the operational plans without anyone noticing the imposture except Richard Hannay (who had never met him); no doubt Buchan thought that it marched "just inside the borders of the possible".

But what about that beautiful blonde who was handcuffed to Hannay as he fled across the moors?

There wasn’t one; Alfred Hitchcock invented her for his 1935 film.

_________

1920: Bulldog Drummond, by "Sapper"

"Demobilised officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential... "

___________

IN THE late 1950s I was a small, skinny stripling living in a dusty gold mining town in outback Western Australia. It was there that I first met Bulldog Drummond, that big, confident, pleasantly ugly, (and rich) ex-army officer with his luxurious flat at 60A Half Moon Street in Mayfair, his valet, his gold cigarette case ("Turkish on this side, Virginia on that") and his high-powered two-seater car. He was the hero of a book entitled Bulldog Drummond, first published in 1920. I was enchanted, and no wonder. You couldn’t have found a greater contrast.

More than forty years later I could still clearly remember the cover of that book. It was one of those gaudy and cheap-looking Hodder "yellow jacket" paperbacks which flourished in the '40s and '50s. The garish cover showed Drummond tied to a chair, while in the background a bad guy was hustling away a protesting girl.

It was much harder remembering what the book was about. I recalled vaguely that Drummond's deadly enemy was a villain with a Germanic name along the lines of von Stroheim or von Stahlhein, that Drummond had a sophisticated line in light-hearted banter, and that the book had been great fun.

It was with delight, then, that I recently found a sound copy of that very Hodder "yellow-jacket" paperback in a second-hand book store for $6. That's inflation for you; the cover price back in 1953 was 2 shillings (20 cents).

60A Half Moon Street

THAT EVOCATIVE ADDRESS, Half Moon Street, has lingered nostalgically in my mind ever since I read Bulldog Drummond back in the late '50s. It is a real street, and forty years later I ventured into leafy Mayfair, near London’s Green Park, to have a look at it. From its name I had imagined Half Moon Street to be a curved street, rather like elegant Royal Terrace in Bath. In fact, it is dead straight and just a single block long: a short, very narrow road between Piccadilly and Curzon Street. It is lined on both sides by luxury three-storey Georgian terrace houses, some of which now harbour very pricey restaurants or hotels.

The street numbers, in typically confusing London style, start at No. 1 on the east side of the street at the Piccadilly end, continue up the east side to Curzon Street to about No. 22, and then come back down the west side of the street towards Piccadilly. The highest number I could find was 42; 60A would have to be across Piccadilly, somewhere in Green Park.

This corner of Mayfair teemed with fictional heroes of the 1920s and 1930s, by the bye. The immortal Bertie Wooster lived in Half Moon Street (or was it around the corner in Park Lane?) with his man Jeeves. Dorothy L Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey lived close by at 110A Piccadilly. Margery Allingham's Albert Campion lived a few blocks east, in a flat above the police station in "Bottle" Street (real-life Vine Street), a tiny cul-de-sac off Piccadilly.

"Sapper"

BUT BACK to our yarn. Captain Hugh Drummond, DSO, MC, was the creation of "Sapper" (Lt-Col. H. C. MacNeile, MC, 1888-1937) and is said to be based on his friend Gerald Fairlie (1899-1983), a professional soldier and army heavy-weight boxing champion. Bulldog Drummond, MacNeile's second book, was published in 1920 and it has stayed in print ever since, no mean feat for a pulp thriller.

On re-reading it, I realised that it is the grand-daddy of all those novels starring gentlemen adventurers: Leslie Charteris's The Saint, John Creasey's The Baron and The Toff, Edgar Wallace's The Brigand and The Mixer, and so on.

After a prologue in set in 1918 in which a sinister plan is being hatched by a confederacy of villains not unlike Ian Fleming’s SPECTRE, the real action begins the following year with Captain Hugh Drummond, DSO, MC, late His Majesty’s Royal Loamshires, placing an advertisement in the classifieds:

"Demobilised officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential... "

This advertisement leads him to a 4 pm rendezvous with a beautiful young damsel in the West End, and it is instantly obvious that the author is utterly unconstrained by the laws of probability. Hugh Drummond drives up and parks his car directly outside the main entrance of the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket at exactly 4 pm, a wildly improbable feat even in 1919.

Here he meets the damsel in distress, the beautiful Phyllis Benton, and also coincidentally encounters the first and worst of the villains he will soon be combating, the sinister Henry Lakington.

We know right away that Lakington is a rat. Unlike Drummond, he did not take part in the recent War To End Wars. In addition he has cruel, thin lips and a slightly sinister line in repartee. Later, in one of those lines of dialogue which echo through many of the thrillers of the time, Phyllis tells Drummond that Lakington is "the second most dangerous man in England." He is into art theft and jewel theft on a grand scale, with side orders of murder.

"The Most Dangerous Man in England"

THE FIRST most dangerous man in England, we soon learn, is one Carl Petersen (not, after all, von Stroheim of silent films fame, nor von Stahlhein of Biggles fame; my memory was definitely faulty on that point). Master criminal Petersen is in cahoots with Lakington in the distinctly sub-rosa enterprise covered in the prologue, and is ably supported by his daughter Irma Petersen. Irma’s main function is to lie on a chaise-longue in a peignoir, look sexy, and offer highly amusing editorial remarks from time to time. As a boy I definitely fancied Irma. I suspected then, and I still do, that she was not really Carl Petersen’s daughter, but his girlfriend.

Much of the action centres around the otherwise blameless Surrey town of Godalming, where Phyllis lives with her father at The Larches, a substantial country house. Next door at The Elms we find the evil Lakington and the two Petersens in residence. As soon as Drummond motors down to Phyllis’s house in Godalming in his 30 hp two-seater, the game is afoot.

And what a game it is! Petersen’s scheme is to arrange a bolshevik style revolution in England, to be financed by an American cotton baron, a German oil baron, a German steel baron and an as yet unrecruited American shipping baron, to wit one Hiram C Potts. Without him the other three industrial barons will not go ahead. Petersen’s fee for organising this revolution is to be one million pounds, a mere bagatelle by today's standards but a huge fortune then, so he sets out to procure the co-operation of Potts.

Precisely how a team of zillionaires would profit from a bolshevik revolution in England was unclear, even after reading the elaborate explanation given in the text. Still, the mere threat was enough to send a chill up the spine of any 1920s reader, specially if he were well-heeled. We should remember that in 1919-20 the bloody Russian revolution was current headlines, not ancient history. There was a widespread and genuinely held (if mistaken) belief that the Bolshevik revolution was being financed by a network of conspiratorial international financiers for their personal gain.

Hiram C Potts is reluctant to join the scheme, even when kidnapped, drugged and tortured with a thumbscrew. Potts, we soon realise, is the unfortunate McGuffin. Drummond rescues Potts from the villains at The Elms; the villains kidnap him back again; Drummond rescues him again; and so on. The hapless Potts, who is catatonic most of the time, shuttlecocks back and forth between the opposing camps for much of the novel.

The villains fall into three types. There is the evil, vicious Lakington, with no redeeming features. There are Carl and Irma Petersen, both of whom are possessed of a sense of sporting fair play and a sense of humour and are hence "good" bad guys. And of course there are the cannon-fodder, the assorted dim-witted incompetent heavies whose job it is to be bamboozled, beaten up, and occasionally expunged by Bulldog Drummond in the course of the action.

The Duchess of Lampshire's Pearls

JUDGING BY his choice of incompetent and/or crazy associates, by the way, Carl Petersen is no great shakes as a master-criminal, and why he hooked up with Lakington beats me. (I think it beat "Sapper", too.) I was unable to see any sane reason for the connection. Lakington is running his own complex agenda, namely the heist of the Duchess of Lampshire’s pearls by a substitution scam. The scam’s so corny and so transparent that babes in arms could see through it, although the Lampshires don’t; and it ultimately causes Lakington's downfall.

The plot is porous, to put it mildly. It is very much in the immortal tradition of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu epics, not to mention the Perils-of-Pauline style silent movies. Modern day descendants are the episodic film thrillers of the James Bond type, or TV's insane but amusing The A-Team or Burn Notice. The villains have lots of opportunities to eliminate the interfering Drummond by simply shooting him. Instead, whenever they have him in their clutches they employ all the familiar apparatus of the cliff-hanger serial.

There is the heavy swinging club, activated by pressure on the fifth tread of the stairs at The Elms, which misses Drummond by millimetres. There is the 600 lb gorilla at loose in the stygian corridors, which Drummond nonchalantly defeats in unarmed combat. There is the cobra on his bed. There is the native South American blow-pipe assassin concealed on the top of the wardrobe in Drummond’s room, firing poison darts at our hero (and missing in the dark). There’s the secret knock-out gas introduced into Drummond's flat. And of course there is the deadly acid-bath Henry Lakington uses to dissolve inconvenient corpses, and which is earmarked to dissolve Bulldog Drummond later in the plot.

I don't know how either Petersen or Lakington came by this arcane gear. Did they ring Harrod's?

"I say Harrod old chap, could you deliver a 600 lb gorilla, a skilled Amazonian native blowpipe assassin complete with poison darts, a thousand cubic feet of secret knock-out gas, a cobra, and two hundred gallons of acid suitable for dissolving corpses? And do be a nice chap and send a tradesman to install a death-trap triggered by stepping on the fifth stair? Tomorrow? Thanks awfully."

Meet Jerome K Green

BULLDOG DRUMMOND does not fight the good fight alone. He recruits several of his rich upper-class ex-officer mates with names like Toby, Algy, Jerry, etc, who are otherwise idling about, and he is later aided and abetted by the most improbable American cop in the history of British pulp fiction. He is Jerome K Green, who introduces himself thusly to Drummond:

"See here, Captain," he says, suddenly displaying a badge hidden under his coat, "This’ll put you wise. It’s the badge of the police force of the United States of America; and that same force is humming some at the moment."

"Sapper", like so many British writers, hadn’t the faintest idea how Americans actually spoke. He evidently culled his Americanese from the numerous dime novel westerns which abounded at the time, with the result that Green, presented as a senior cop from New York City, sounds like a character out of a Ned Buntline western. E. Phillips Oppenheim was no better with Americans, nor was Agatha Christie. And come to think of it, Aggie had no excuse: her father was a card-carrying New Yorker.

At any rate, the egregious (and garrulous) Green assumes the "Watson" role, and for the rest of the novel we are subjected to his jarring jargon. It's rather curious that millionaire Hiram C Potts, also from New York, speaks standard English indistinguishable from Drummond's.

As I worked my way briskly through the novel I realised that I'd completely forgotten about the appalling Green, just as I'd forgotten about Lakington, Hiram C Potts, and even the gorilla. What I had not forgotten was the humour. Back in the 1950s it struck me as the acme of sophistication, but I now see that it’s rather sub-Wodehouse, public-school-boy, stiff-upper-lip stuff. Not hilarious, but not all that bad.

For example, Drummond, having rescued Potts from Carl Petersen’s grasp yet again (this time with the aid of a boozy demobbed private as a diversion) nonchalantly submits an itemised bill of expenses to the baffled Petersen:

TO Mr Petersen, The Elms, Godalming:

£/s/d

To hire of one demobilised solder:         5/0/0

To making him drunk                               5/0/0

(in this item present strength and cost

of said soldier’s capacity must be

allowed for)

To bottle of red ink:                                        1

To shock to system:                                10/0/0

TOTAL:                                                 £20/01/1

"Oh but my Hugh!" gurgles the irresistible Irma upon reading this, "Que vou etês adorable!"

H'm. Well, okay, now that I see it on the computer monitor it certainly doesn't read as well as it does on musty, browning pulp paper. The humour doesn't rise much above this example, but it is there throughout the book, and "Sapper" has the saving grace of not taking Drummond with the awe-struck, worshipful seriousness with which, say, Le Carre takes George Smiley.

The story rattles on for 200 fast-moving pages, without the intervention of the police despite murder, mayhem, kidnapping and jewel heists from Godalming to Piccadilly and back again. Most unsporting to call in the police, don't you know. Inevitably, Drummond and his ex-officer irregulars eventually gain the upper hand.

The Secret Laboratory

EQUALLY INEVITABLY, the action climaxes with a hand-to-hand fight to the death between Drummond and the evil Lakington in the secret laboratory containing that deadly acid-bath. I'm not giving away a surprise ending when I say that Drummond does not lose that battle. In the course of the struggle Lakington is turfed into his own acid bath. There follows an engagingly horrifying sequence in which Lakington leaps screaming out of the acid and, disintegrating before Bulldog Drummond’s appalled eyes, races up the stairs in agony, steps on that deadly fifth tread— and thump! Lakington dies, hoist by two of his own petards.

Then comes the showdown between Drummond and Carl Petersen. Due to the herculean efforts of Bulldog Drummond and his assorted cronies, Hiram C Potts will not join the conspiracy, and a number of Petersen’s dupes have abandoned him. The scheme dies a natural death as the police (at last!) are called in to tidy up the mess. The Duchess of Lampshire gets her pearls back. Carl and Irma Petersen conveniently escape to appear in several sequels, and Bulldog Drummond (much to my disappointment back in the 1950s) marries Phyllis Benton. In Drummond's trousers, I would have run away with Irma.

Well yes, it is a load of tommy-rot. But is hugely entertaining tommy-rot even today, largely because Bulldog Drummond, though not overly burdened with brains, is a likeable bloke. Furthermore, the writing is smooth and reasonably literate, the action is nonstop, and the book is amusing throughout.

Latter-day critics are prone to dismiss Drummond (and indeed "Sapper") as fascist largely because he was anti-communist. Anti-communism was an attitude immensely unfashionable with the British intelligentsia from the '30s to the '90s. In this book at least (I don't know about the later ones, I haven't read them), Drummond is simply an Englishman who thinks that England would be much the better for not having a bolshevik revolution in the Russian manner. Specially one run and financed by a bunch of self-serving crooks. On the whole this is as sensible a view today as it was in 1920.

The Gentleman Adventurer

THE ACTION THRILLER has moved with the times. To start with, the villains and the conspiracies are a little more plausible (not a lot; just a little). So too are the heroes. The wealthy gentleman adventurer with the flat in Half Moon Street, the valet, and the gold cigarette case ("Turkish on this side, Virginia on that") is at one with the snows of yesteryear. He has given way to official adventurers such as secret agents or undercover cops, or to ordinary (but resourceful) citizens caught up in violent action, the sort of hero found in the early Alistair MacLean and recent Dick Francis thrillers.

Regrettably, most of the light hearted humour has also vanished. Today’s good guys and villains alike use obscenities rather than indulge in exchanges of airy persiflage. And the villains, instead of being public-school-educated gentlemen wrong-'uns with a talent for feline backchat, tend to be thuggish psychopaths.

This probably helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable: how a thriller as dated and corny as Bulldog Drummond can continue to survive into the new Millennium.

Because it’s such good fun.

_______________

1922: Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini

"My name," he said, "is Peter Blood. The Spaniards know me for Don Pedro Sangre, and a Frenchman may call me Le Sang if he pleases."

_________

LONG, LONG AGO ago there was a military practice whereby parading soldiers would slap (or swash) their naked swords against their shields (or bucklers). It made a lovely din, and gave rise to the word "swashbuckler". (True.)

Today, books and movies about fighting swordsmen are known as swashbucklers, but they seem to be a dying breed. You are more likely to find swashbuckling adventure in historical bodice-ripper romances than straight historical novels; and even more likely to find it in the swords-and-sorcery or heroic fantasy novels that choke the bookshelves in every bookstore. When did you last see a nice new pirate novel, for instance? (Yes, I know all about George MacDonald Fraser's hilarious Pyrates, but let's be serious ...)

In their heyday swashbuckling adventure stories were great (and deserved) favourites of the public, and some are so well known they’re practically folklore. You would have had to have lived all your life on Mars not to have heard of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, two of the all-time great swashbuckling adventures and both filmed many times. And if you are an old movie buff, you can't have missed truly great swashbuckling movies such as Captain Blood (1935), and Scaramouche (1952), both based on best-selling novels by Rafael Sabatini. The first starred the incomparable Errol Flynn in the title role, while Stewart Grainger starred in Scaramouche.

Sabatini (1875-1950) was Italian born, but spent most of his life in England, and from 1904 onwards wrote more than 40 action-filled historical adventure novels noted for their historical accuracy as well as for their sheer verve and energy. Since his novels were short on sex and strong on adventure they were considered suitable for older kids, and my High School library fiction section had several Sabatini books on the shelves. I read one of them, I can't remember which, when I was about 16. I recall there was a vast amount of authentic-sounding lore about the names, firepower, use and range of the various different cannons on square-rigged Naval ships of the line.

My recently acquired copy of Captain Blood is a 1961 Pan paperback somewhat patched with Scotch tape, but still worth the $4.50. The cover art shows a very Errol Flynn-like Captain Blood, with a cutlass in one hand and a glamorous redhead in the other; in the background, a galleon is exploding in a ball of fire. On the back cover is the very model of the blurb-writer's art:

Captain Blood – one of the greatest names in historical fiction: a masterpiece of drama and romance –

Sabatini’s classic story of one man’s fight against injustice – of a doctor turned pirate who stamps his own code of honour upon the Spanish Main, of a beautiful girl torn in two by her love for him and her horror for his ruthless profession.

A crowded, stirring tale of England at the time of the Monmouth rebellion, of the slave farms of Jamaica, of towering Spanish galleons flaming in a tropic sea, of a man prepared to sacrifice any glittering prize for the love of proud Arabella.

Yes sir, that's it all right. I could scarcely have put it better myself. The only flaw is that the particular slave farms in question were on Barbados, spelled Barbardoes throughout the book, but let’s not be picky.

Peter Blood, somewhere in his 30s, is a Dublin-born doctor turned soldier turned doctor again, who is minding his own business in England when he is innocently caught up in the backwash of the Monmouth Rebellion against King James II. By page 21, he is under arrest; a few pages later he is being tried by Hanging Judge Jeffreys at the Bloody Assizes, where he is sentenced to death by being hanged, drawn and quartered; another few pages later the sentence is commuted to transportation and slavery in the West Indies. (Yes, slavery; not all slaves were black.)

Barbados Slave Market

IN THE BARBADOS slave market he is sold for ten quid to brutal slave owner Colonel Bishop. On page 43 he meets the novel's love interest, Arabella Bishop, the 27-year-old niece of said brutal Colonel Bishop. The novel certainly does seem to conform to H G Wells’ celebrated dictum that there is no money to be made out of a book that cannot bring a woman in within the first few thousand words.

The tale to this point has moved at breakneck speed, but on reading it you feel no sense of rush; the narrative flows smoothly and seamlessly. Colonel Bishop realises that Blood, a skilled doctor, can earn him more money by doctoring than by labouring in the plantation, so Blood is more or less at large, tending to locals as high as the Governor Steed of Barbados (gout) and his wife (the megrims).

Blood has that Irish lilt and that easy blarney manner, not to mention good looks and a gentleman's education, so Arabella Bishop is greatly intrigued by this unusual slave. They meet briefly a few times in the next months, and come to understand each other well. Blood is attracted to the small, forthright, unsophisticated colonial girl whose nature is diametrically opposite that of her uncle, Colonel Bishop.

But time and tide, and specially pirates, wait for no man. Peter Blood is about to be flogged by the sadistic Colonel Bishop for some infraction or another when Spanish pirates sail right into the harbour in the galleon Cinco Llagos, eager for plunder and rapine. They blast the fort to pieces and obliterate the small squad of militia commanded by the incompetent Bishop. In no time the pirate leader, Don Diego de Espinoza, has Governor Steed and Colonel Bishop at his mercy in Government House while he talks silkily of ransom. And in the streets, the marauding pirates rape and plunder. Mind you, Sabatini would never use the word rape; you are left to assume it.

In the confusion, Blood manages to grab a sword and hustles to Bishop’s house to protect Arabella, pausing on the way to skewer a Spaniard who is about to leap on a fleeing teenage girl Mary Traill, a friend of Arabella's. With Arabella and Co safely on the way into the inland where the pirates won't go, Blood returns to the slave stockade and his comrades. Here he realises he has a really great opportunity. The galleon is guarded by just a handful of Spaniards, since the Barbados militia is utterly defeated and practically everyone else except the slaves have fled for the hills. With twenty fellow "slaves-rebels", Blood sneaks aboard the Cinco Llagos in the dark and quietly seizes it. And not long after, when the triumphant Don Diego returns to his ship with his chests of plunder, he too is seized. The coup is complete when the exhausted, sated pirate crew, rowing their longboats back to the galleon, are blasted out of the water by Blood's men, using the galleon's guns. It is a great victory.

We are now only at page 91. There was enough material in those 91 pages for a full-size novel in hands of writers less expert and more prolix, but for Sabatini the fun has just begun. The final wash-up of this encounter is that Blood and his slaves-rebels, disdained by the Governor and the near-psychotic Bishop despite their marvellous feat, take the ship and the plunder, and stand out to sea. They are pirates themselves, now. But they are free.

The Slaves-Rebels

THE REST of the book is taken up with the complex and hair-raising adventures of Captain Blood and his band of slaves-rebels: "The fame of Captain Peter Blood had run like ripples before the breeze across the face of the Caribbean sea."

Blood, a natural naval tactician, has soon assembled a modest pirate fleet, and has renamed the Cinco Llagos the Arabella. He attacks only the Spanish, and deals with defeated foes with a kind of foolhardy honour rather than the usual sadistic brutality. In this part of the book we learn a lot about the economics and practicalities of piracy, how pirate crews are recruited and paid, how raids are planned, and how these wooden ships are maneouvred in sea battles. This background information is deftly integrated into the action, where in lesser hands it might have been presented in indigestible blocks.

Blood himself is well realised, and is more complex and more human than many an action hero. He is certainly brave, very clever and a natural leader. But he is also given to bitterness, and even sarcasm; he has moments of self-doubt and misery, and once in despair he lapses into a period of alcoholism. When he is in good form, though, he is very much the goods.

In between looting the Spaniards he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time rescuing people. He rescues the scapegrace daughter of his good friend the Governor of Tortuga from another band of pirates, killing the lecherous pirate captain in the process and saving her from a Fate Worse Than Death. He rescues Arabella Bishop herself from the Spanish Navy along with one Lord Julian, an emissary from London, and returns them to Jamaica. Here the appalling Colonel Bishop (who hates him fiercely) is now Governor. Blood subsequently rescues Lord Willoughby, the Governor of the whole of the West Indies, from the Spaniards, too.

The relationship between Blood and his beloved Arabella Bishop is very rocky. Arabella is more inclined to believe the rumours and sensational dockside yarns about Blood than rely on her own experience; even when rescued by him, she disdains him. "I do not number thieves and pirates among my acquaintances," she tells him haughtily, a rejection that crushes Blood's spirits. Arabella had heard of the earlier rescue of the Governor's daughter, but interpreted it as an inter-pirate fight over a trollop rather than a noble rescue.

The story, and the ever-changing political situation (at one stage France and England are allies; shortly afterwards they are at war), plunges ahead, with much more derring-do and a final, bruising battle against a French fleet besieging Port Royal in Jamaica. The small pirate fleet defeats the French, but Blood's beloved ship Arabella is sunk, which leaves the battered but victorious Captain Blood in tears.

In England, James II has been overthrown and has fled to Spain; William of Orange and his wife Mary are King and Queen of England. The crimes of the Monmouth rebels against James II are forgiven; Blood and his few surviving slaves-rebels a free men in good standing again.

Lord Willoughby appoints Peter Blood the Governor of Jamaica, sacking the incompetent Bishop who is still somewhere on the high seas with his fleet. Instead of guarding Port Royal, Bishop had set off on a personal mission to kill or capture Peter Blood, and in his and the fleet’s absence the French had attacked. And at last Blood and Arabella are reconciled and become engaged, ending what amounted to a stormy long- distance three year courtship. And not a moment too soon; Arabella is now thirty, and Blood must surely be pushing forty.

When the irate and frustrated Colonel Bishop eventually returns to Jamaica with his fleet, he is stunned to be arrested for abandoning his post, and further told he is sacked as Governor. He is then immediately marched under guard to stand before the new Governor, whose name he was not told:

At the table sat a man of whom nothing was visible but the top of a carefully curled black head. Then his head was raised, and a pair of blue eyes solemnly regarded the prisoner. Colonel Bishop made a noise in his throat, and paralysed by amazement, stared into the face of His Excellency the Governor of Jamaica, which was the face of the man he had been hunting in Tortuga to his present undoing.

A noise in his throat? It's a wonder that the poor bugger didn’t drop dead of a heart attack.

It is very well-written book and first rate entertainment. Sabatini packs an awful lot of good things into 320 pages of fast-flowing colourful action, including the complex and memorable Captain Blood and the very understated off-and-on romance between him and Arabella. It was deservedly a best seller in its heyday, and it's a great shame historical swashbucklers have gone out of fashion or it would still be a solid seller today.

Now, where can I find a copy of Scaramouche?

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1924: The Green Hat by Michael Arlen

Downwards to my door I looked, and there was a green hat before my door. The light from the one lamp in Sheep Street fell about it, and that was how I saw it was a green hat, of a sort of felt, and bravely worn; being, no doubt, one of those that women who have many hats affect pour le sport.

______________

THIS NOVEL has haunted me for years; not because I had read it, but because I hadn't, and I kept stumbling over references to it or its author, or quotes from it, in all sorts of improbable contexts— including in a solemn book about vintage cars. It crops up in Brideshead Revisited, for example, and in one of the A Dance to the Music of Time sequence of novels.

I understood vaguely that the book was about low jinks in high society, and I further understood that it was written in very high style. I also knew it was so huge a seller as to be a legend in its own time.

About a year or so ago, finally overcome by curiosity, I started combing second hand bookshops for a nice cheap paperback copy. It proved to be as elusive as the mythical snark, and I have never yet seen a single Arlen paperback, although I have seen a few by his son Michael J Arlen. It's doubtful if any Arlen book made it into paperback at all, so I was forced willy-nilly into the more serious, and infinitely more expensive, antiquarian book stores, where I eventually tracked down a hard cover edition (seventeenth printing, August 1926) of this elusive tome. I blenched a little at the $20 price tag, but what could I do? It was probably the only copy in town.

The book is rather an interesting physical object in its own right. It is bound in dark brown cloth, with the title and author gold-blocked on the front cover in a stylish script. The dust jacket is missing, which is a pity, because the cover painting was interesting. It depicted a green ...

No, you're wrong. A green FAN.

It was sold with the pages uncut, a once-prestigious format. On the title page THE GREEN HAT is printed boldly in red, and at the top of the contents page is a very 1920s art-deco-ish line drawing of a very 1920s flapper in cloche hat, black mask and rope of pearls. Downright quaint.

This fabulously overwrought melodrama roared off the presses at a dazzling rate in the 1920s and helped make British author Michael Arlen (Dikran Kouyoumdjian, 1895-1956) a millionaire. The original British hard cover edition went through thirteen reprints in just twelve months. By the end of 1926 sales in hard cover of the five books Arlen published between 1922 and late 1926 exceeded 450,000 copies, an astounding figure.

In 1926, in a spasm of excitement, publishers William Collins even offered a special deluxe set of leather bound editions of his major works, which were "Piracy", The Green Hat, The Romantic Lady, These Charming People and May Fair, for 7/6d a pop.

Yet by 1940 Michael Arlen's writing career was over; his books were already as outmoded as the spats, cloche hats, and shingled hairstyles that decorate them, not to mention the ornate prose in which they were written. The collapse didn’t faze Arlen. Still very rich, he hung up his quill, moved to New York and lived in luxurious retirement for the rest of his life. Not bad going for an Armenian who fled to England from Bulgaria as a lad, one jump ahead of the notorious massacre of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.

Baroque Prose

TO DESCRIBE Michael Arlen's prose as "ornate" is perhaps an understatement. It is downright baroque. He seems incapable of writing a simple declarative sentence. Consider, for instance, his description of a parked car:

This car charmed the eye. Like a huge yellow insect that bad dropped to earth from a butterfly civilisation, this car, gallant and suave, rested in the lowly silence of the Shepherd's Market night. Open as a yacht, it wore a great shining bonnet, and flying over the crest of this great bonnet, as though in proud flight over the heads of scores of phantom horses, was that silver stork by which the gentle may be pleased to know that they have just escaped death beneath the wheels of a Hispano-Suiza, as supplied to His Most Catholic Majesty.

Translation: it was a large yellow Hispano Suiza tourer with a polished bonnet and a stork mascot on the radiator; and I would have said "an" Hispano-Suiza. (I saw this specific quote years ago in a book on vintage Hispano Suiza cars).

The characters are all lethally infected by the inimitable Arlen style, as a character’s dying words show:

"Avoid dreams," he said, "Never stop to listen to the clouds passing overhead. You will be run over. Never sympathise with the moon when you bear it, cold and lonely and blind, crooning to itself like a corpse singing a hymn. You will catch pneumonia. Never dream of a world in which men are men and women are women. You will go mad…"

Clouds you can hear, blind moons that croon, singing corpses... Arlen has an inexhaustible supply of ormolu metaphors and rococo similes. Even the sun can’t come up in a simple sentence:

I drew my eyes from her eyes to see that the dawn had slyly thrown a grey handkerchief over the window. It was but the shape of the dawn creeping out into the night, it was but a ghostly breath of the night but it was the dawn.

The whole book is written in this high-flown style. It was soon clear to me that Michael Arlen was one of those writers whose vast success depended upon lavish over-writing, the sort of thing Victorian novelist "Ouida" did so floridly in her numerous three-volume romances of the high life, and James Gould Cozzens essayed in the 1950s in his bizarre By Love Possessed. If the high style suits the times perfectly, success is assured; but when tastes change, the author is doomed. Ouida, Arlen, and Cozzens are all out of print, and it’s no coincidence. Once the very last word in high style, they are now objects only of curiosity, amusing examples of high camp.

Skinny-dipping in the Thames

TAKE AWAY the dense encrustation of decorative style and the story itself is remarkably thin; and is told almost entirely indirectly, not to mention obscurely. Although there are three suicides and a murder in the book, none of them happen on-stage, so to speak. Even a skinny-dipping sequence is offstage in the sense that it occurs at night in total darkness, and we have to infer what’s happening from the dialogue. I'm not absolutely sure they really were skinny dipping, although I think that’s the sense of the scene. I am sure they were all very brave, though: they were skinny-dipping in the Thames.

The novel opens in 1922 and is about the last year or so in the life of beautiful, doomed Iris Storm, a twice-married socialite with a tragic past. The narrator, an author not unlike Michael Arlen, meets Iris Storm late at night in his dingy apartment building in Shepherd's Market, then a very downmarket area of London's otherwise upmarket West End. They discuss her drunken sot of a twin brother Gerald March, the narrator's upstairs neighbour. Gerald is endlessly mourning the death of his idol, one of those upper class golden youths of virtuous saintliness prevalent in 1920s English novels. They also talk about any number of other things, from contemporary pulp literature to pseudo-philosophy, in incredibly elevated prose. It is possible, and at least one academic commentator on Arlen thinks so, that the narrator and Iris Storm also had sex at this stage. If they did, the act was very thoroughly concealed under thickets of very dense prose. I've re-read that section a couple of times I'm still not convinced.

A day or so later the narrator bumps into Iris’s dipso brother Gerald, who is briefly in between bouts of drunkenness, and they talk about Iris. Then we meet the narrator's acquaintances Hilary Townshend and Guy de Travest and further information about Iris seeps into the reader's consciousness. After a while we gain a faint inkling of Iris's past.

Boy Fenwick

IN 1913, at the age of 19, Iris married Boy Fenwick, the aforesaid upper class golden youth. It is one of the world's shortest-lived marriages. In the light of dawn after the wedding night, the dead body of Boy Fenwick is found in the courtyard of their French honeymoon hotel, three stories down. He died of a broken collarbone (well, that's what it says). The cops decide he fell over the balcony while half stunned on champagne, but in order to preserve his golden image amongst his worshipping acolytes (comprising her brother Gerald, plus Hilary Townshend and Guy de Travest, as far as I can work out), Iris tells them later that he "died for purity".

What this phrase is supposed to mean is incredibly obliquely presented. I had to tilt the book to 45 degrees and squint my eyes before concluding (rather uncertainly) that Fenwick had discovered that his bride was not a virgin and was hence impure, and had turfed himself out of the window in his chagrin. True to form, Michael Arlen tells you about the suicide not by having us watch it in a flashback, but by having his characters gossip about it a decade later.

For the life of me I couldn’t see how Iris’s false explanation ("for purity") could protect Fenwick’s memory any better than the official police version (accident). Surely a newlywed husband, fresh from the joys of his wedding-night marriage bed, could be forgiven by even the most censorious of his acolytes for getting mildly plotzed on Dom Perignon. His "oops—aaaaaargh!" header over the balcony is surely a case of legitimate human error and all too understandable. But apparently Boy Fenwick's adoring acolytes would be shattered by that sort of seamy revelation. Fenwick drunk? Oh shame oh horror! Say it ain't so!

In due course, we learn, widowed Iris married Hector Storm VC, who finished up dead in a ditch in Ireland with five bullets in him, courtesy Sinn Fein. This murder, which happened about two years before the story opened, is also a matter of reminiscence in Arlen's unbearably elevated prose. Hector Storm, one gathers through the thick fog of metaphor, is another victim of Iris’s loose living. He volunteered for duty in Ireland after overhearing Iris whispering another man’s name in her sleep, which he takes as proof that Iris has a lover. The man whose name was whispered might have been (a) an ex-boyfriend, (b) imaginary, (c) a character in a Mills and Boon novel she had just read, or (d) a movie actor Iris dreamed about; but these are possibilities that never seemed to have entered the poor deluded man's head.

Exit Gerald

SHORTLY AFTERWARDS the narrator and various friends visit a nightclub where they meet Napier Harpenden, a childhood friend of Iris. Unexpectedly, Iris Storm arrives too, on the arm of an elderly rake, but she and Napier are soon talking over old times. Then Iris's dipso brother Gerald kills himself: once again we are not there to see it happen; we turn up at the flat shortly after the event, and the reader has to guess that he blew his brains out, something which is only confirmed several pages later.

Soon Iris Storm retreats to her usual base, France, intending never to return to England. There she is hospitalised with one of those languishing illnesses found in movies and romance novels, where the heroine hovers attractively on the edge of death without actually dying. It may, or may not be, the result of an abortion; the text is so opaque that you can only guess. If that’s true, then it may be the narrator’s child, but since there is no sign of the narrator knowing, what chance has the reader got? The narrator visits her, and so does Napier Harpenden, recently wedded to a delectable sweetmeat named Venice Pollen (sic).

It now begins to emerge, with glacial slowness and through a dense purple smokescreen, that Iris and Napier have loved each other desperately since they were in their teens. They were separated at the orders of Sir Maurice Harpenden, who opined that Iris came "from rotten stock". Sir Mo visualised a bright future in the Foreign Office for his son, with a much more suitable marriage arranged further down the track. Napier has been moping miserably after Iris ever since, but has kept the vow he made to his father as a teenager not to see Iris again.

The accidental meeting at the nightclub more than a decade later, and the reunion at the French hospital between romantically ailing Iris and just-married Napier brings the whole pot to the boil. Napier announces his intention of divorcing his adoring bride Venice and abandoning his hated FO career so that he can marry his life-long love, Iris March Fenwick Storm. His father hits the ceiling.

Showdown at Sutton Marle

THE CLIMAX comes when Iris, recovered and back in England, motors down to Sutton Marle, the estate of Sir Maurice Harpenden, to sort Sir Mo out about Napier and herself. The subsequent scene is extraordinary, with everyone prosing away at each other in the usual elevated flapdoodle with little being achieved. Then Napier himself turns up with still-adoring Venice in tow. When Sir Maurice in an unwary moment suggests that Iris murdered Boy Fenwick, the bitterly aggrieved Napier reveals the last secret: the truth about Boy Fenwick’s death.

Over Iris's anguished protests Napier explains that Boy Fenwick, that apostle and symbol of moral and sexual purity, was a phony and a fraud. He was syphilitic, and knew it. The ugly realisation of what consummating the marriage may have done to his virgin bride Iris, whom he loved, was too much even for Fenwick. He confessed to her, and then defenestrated himself in anguish and remorse. This was the truth that Iris was shielding from Boy Fenwick's acolytes. It was the only lie she ever told in her life. Iris is absolutely aghast when the truth comes out, even though it jolts the pompous Sir Mo out of his smug complacency (if only for a few minutes).

"You have taken from me the only gracious thing I ever did in my life," Iris says to Napier in heartbroken tones. A few pages later Iris Storm is dead, having deliberately driven the Hispano flat-out into a tree. And, true to Arlen form, this is not only offstage but in total darkness to boot. It is also the tear-jerking grand finale, with the narrator left standing sadly in the darkness holding Iris’s crumpled green hat.

Sir Mo, who had finally been showing faint signs of recognising what tragedy he wrought back in 1916, immediately reverts to character, trying to conceal the fact of Iris's suicide from his son Napier and his young wife Venice by pretending it was all an accident. This would seem utterly futile; it had to be blindingly obvious it was suicide. The reason why she killed herself remains a complete mystery, making exactly as little sense as the behaviour of anyone else in the book.

Well, a demon has at last been exorcised. I know all about The Green Hat at last. And I know enough to know not to buy any more Michael Arlen novels.

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1931: The Jade of Destiny, by Jeffery Farnol

“In fine, sir, you are a mere bravo open to hire.”

“Madam, your mistake, if allowable, is infinite. I am Dinwiddie!”

________________

WHEN I FIRST went to high school in the big city, after a childhood in the Australian outback, I gleefully discovered the school library and its shelves of novels. Naturally it was stuff suitable for innocent pubescents in the equally innocent nineteen-fifties: Sabatini, Biggles, P. C. Wren, Richmal Crompton’s William books, and so on. (The school library’s fiction shelves were segregated into Boys' and Girls' sections, so I have no idea what the girls got to read: Enid Blyton, anyone?)

The library stocked several books by two confusingly similar sounding writers: Jeffery Farnol and J. Jefferson Farjeon. I’m sure I read one by Farjeon, which, I dimly remember, was a spy adventure set in a purely mythical Balkan country (Yugolatia?). Even at the age of 14 I knew the country was imaginary, and felt vaguely cheated. Then as now I preferred my fiction to be set in real locations, so I read only one of Farjeon’s books. And confusing Farjeon and Farnol, I read none of Farnol’s books at all.

Farnol

THAT WAS perhaps unfortunate, because Jeffery Farnol (1878-1952) was a sort of sub-Sabatini historical romance-adventure writer, whose target audience was fourteen-year-old boys of all ages. In his career he knocked out forty-plus sentimental, romantic swashbucklers starting with My Lady Caprice in 1907, and as a kid I didn’t mind the occasional swashbuckler. I was also of the age to accept a modest dose of sentimental romance along with all that swashbuckling.

I would never have given Farnol another thought if it hadn’t been for a scathing Clive James review of Erica Jong’s historical novel Fanny, which he rather unfavourably compared with Farnol’s pulp masterpiece The Jade of Destiny. This brought Farnol to my attention again. Some time later I spotted a second-hand hardback copy of that self-same Farnol "masterpiece" for a dizzy $2.50, and, intrigued, I shelled out the shekels and took it home.

There was no publication date on the copyright page. My copy was obviously a reprint, probably from the late 1940s, because the list of Farnol’s other titles includes much later books, but there's no reprint number or date either. Worse, the long list of Farnol’s other titles is entirely random, being in neither alphabetical nor chronological order.

Now that’s something which really ticks me off. Sampson Low were not the only publishers to leave out publication dates; P G Wodehouse's hard-back publisher Herbert Jenkins was equally, infuriatingly, guilty of that sort of negligence. And publishers who list their authors’ other titles in any order except chronological make me go Aaaargh!

Jocelyn Dinwiddie, soldier of fortune

The Jade of Destiny is set in the reign of Good Queen Bess. The background is that Mary Queen of Scots is in captivity; die-hard Catholics are conspiring to overthrow the heretical, protestant Virgin Queen, put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, and restore the Old Religion.

In the opening sentence we are introduced to the hero, Captain Jocelyn Dinwiddie, a flamboyant, gentle-born but down-at-heel soldier of fortune:

The Captain gave his battered hat the true swashbuckling cock, cast his ragged cloak about him with superb, braggadocio flourish, clashed his rusty spurs, and bowed.

And we're off and running. Farnol wasted no time on elaborate descriptions of his settings, nor detailed ruminations about his characters. On page 1 the egocentric but highly entertaining Dinwiddie, a battle-scarred veteran of the war against Spain in the Low Countries, is hired by the beauteous young Ione (Joan, actually), Lady Fane to rescue her younger brother Richard, just nineteen, from the clutches of wicked friends in the Big City. On page 13 Dinwiddie and his travelling buddy Florian are engaged in rescuing a pretty young damsel from four lewd and drunken upper-class lechers at Ye Peck O’ Malt Inn, with a vigorous snicker-snack of vorpal swordplay. By page 20 the steel is clashing yet again as the resourceful Dinwiddie catches Ione, Lady Fane’s younger brother’s "good friends" shamelessly cheating the lad with loaded dice and marked cards; and by page 25 the remorseful Richard is back home in Sussex.

"And so," said my lady, holding morsel of bread daintily above the lily pond where plump fish swam, "so you succeeded in this desperate emprise I set you."

"Madam,"answered the Captain, eyes furtively a'twinkle, "I am Dinwiddie!"

"I am Dinwiddie!" is the engaging Captain's invariable response to any suggestion of doubt about his capabilities in any field of endeavour whatsoever:

"These be notorious for deadly duellists all three, and you are but one!"

"Yet this same one is – Dinwiddie, madam!"

The beautiful Ione soon catches on:

"Indeed madam, for I am –"

"Oh, verily sir, you are Dinwiddie. I become aware o' this."

Of course, the rescue of young Richard is just the beginning. There follows a complicated story involving murder, spies, treason, the planned assassination of Queen Elizabeth, and a sinister, complex and devious plot against Ione, Lady Fane and her brother Richard. There are secret meetings in dungeons; ambushes; spies in the woodwork; Elizabeth's spymaster Walsingham shuffling human pawns; and Papist rebels lurking behind every tree.

In the end, of course, the magniloquent Dinwiddie brings it all off: he frustrates the assassination attempt, kills off assorted bad guys, discovers the identity of the murderer of Ione, Lady Fane's father ten years before and brings him to belated justice, terminates the plot against the Fanes, and even rescues Ione (a Catholic) from the wrath of the Queen. Good Queen Bess, much pleased by Dinwiddie's resourcefulness, gives the penniless gentleman adventurer a knighthood and an important (and doubtless well-paid) military job as Warden of the South Coast. And Dinwiddie, of course, wins the adorable Ione’s hand.

It’s all a great romp, with a complicated but lively plot, plenty of good humour, any amount of swashbuckling action and last minute rescues, and some very vivid, lively and memorable characters. What more could you ask?

Gadzooks, i'faith, prithee!

THE ONLY DRAWBACK is the dialogue.

Farnol belonged to the "Gadzooks, prithee, i'Faith!" school of writing, and the characters talk to each other, often at length, in near incomprehensible mock-Tudor. Totally forgotten usages, such as "an" in the sense of "if", and the long extinct -eth inflection (cometh, killeth, sayeth, doeth), coupled with antiquated word order and a plethora of thees and thous, makes ploughing through the dialogue a considerable chore. It partly accounts for the lack of interest in Farnol these days. I mean, who really wants 200 pages of this, a sample chosen at random:

"Peace, boy!" said the Captain, refolding the letter and setting it back in his bosom. "Bleat not, thou poor shorn lamb, nor let tender gull, his pinions plucked so futile flap and flutter! In a word, lad, repine not thy squandered gold, count it but payment for experience shall make haply o’ thee wiser youth nobler gentleman and kinder brother..."

It's rarely a good idea for novelists to write dialogue in heavy period dialect; the heavier it is, the harder it is to read, and it impedes the narrative. And the further you go back in time, the trickier it gets.

Take Robin Hood, for example. The 1990s Kevin Costner film of the ageless legend copped a lot of shrapnel from critics who complained, inter alia, that Robin Hood shouldn’t have an American accent, and surely the word "twit" wasn’t current in Robin’s day. More recently Russell Crowe copped similar flak.

The fact is, though, that authentic dialogue would have needed sub-titles.

Robin, traditionally a Saxon Englishman who flourished c.1150 AD, couldn’t speak English at all, because the English language as we know it didn’t exist then. The "English" of the time, while misleadingly known by linguists as Old English, was still very close to north-west German. Nor did Evil King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham speak English, either, modern or otherwise: they spoke Norman French.

Here is a short piece of genuine Old English dialogue from the Robin Hood period, and I'll bet you can't understand it:

"Leofre is us beon beswungen for laere thaenne his ne cunnan; ac we witten the bilewitne wesan, and nellan onbelaeden swingcla us, buto thu bi tongenydd fram us."

I wouldn't want to read a novelisation of Robin Hood stuffed full of dialogue like that, thank you very much; and I don’t want to strain my eyeballs on thousand of words of mock-Tudor dialogue in Elizabethan-period novels either. The better historical novelists, like Georgette Heyer and Rafael Sabatini, got it about right: modern English but avoiding obvious 20th century slang; and with just sufficient of the more self-evident period slang and idiom to suggest the whole.

For all that, The Jade of Destiny is good fun, and I have since read it again, finding that the awful dialogue is a bit easier to cope with second time around.

I have also dug up a few more Farnol novels, and was not surprised to discover that Clive James got it right when he described this book as Farnol’s "masterpiece". Farnol had a powerful tendency to really saccharine sentimentality, laid on with a shovel. The Jade of Destiny is relatively free of it, so you don’t get that slightly queasy, cross-Channel-ferry-in-a-storm stomach which is the usual symptom of reading a Farnol these days.

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1933: Lost Horizon, by James Hilton

To be quite frank, it reminds me very slightly of Oxford, where I used to lecture. The scenery there is not so good, but the subjects of study are often just as impractical, and though even the oldest of the dons is not quite so old, they appear to age in a somewhat similar way.

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READING James Hilton’s two consecutive best-sellers of the 1930s (Lost Horizon and Goodbye Mr Chips) makes it instantly obvious that the author went to an English public school and then Oxford. It's also obvious that those were the best years of his life.

Lost Horizon (1933) is a nostalgic novel, written in six weeks, about an Oxbridge-like monastery buried in a concealed valley deep in the Himalayas. Goodbye Mr Chips (1934) is a weepy and sentimental novella, written in four days, about a much-loved boarding school teacher (reputedly based on Hilton’s father, although Hilton denied it). Both were filmed twice. The 1930s black-and-white Hollywood versions are infinitely better than the more modern Technicolor versions, which were made, for no apparent reason, as horrible Hollywood musicals.

My battered, 40 cent copy of Lost Horizon is a movie tie-in with the 1973 musical, which starred Peter Finch as Conway, John Gielgud as Chang and the divine Olivia Hussey as Lo Tsen. I read the book for the first time in 1998, about a decade after I saw the 1973 movie on TV's Late, Late, Late Show. I recall squirming at the Hal David-Burt Bacharach songs and the Hermes Pan choreography; the film was an almighty flop, and deservedly so.

The novel Lost Horizon opens in Berlin in about 1933. An assortment of British aviators and public school Old Boys, who have just dined at the British Embassy, are reminiscing about their good old school days. In particular they are recalling another Old Boy, the noted explorer Hugh Conway. War hero, intrepid explorer, all-purpose golden boy, and lately H M Consular official in the Mysterious East, Hugh "Glory" Conway is one of those nobly heroic but world- weary protagonists who infested the literature of the 1920s and 1930s like cockroaches in cheap hotels. Flying out of a trouble spot in the East a year or so before, Conway, his three fellow passengers, and the aeroplane itself, had all vanished without trace. Later Conway re-surfaces, memory gone and very sick, in a hospital in Chung-Kiang. Over the port and cigars at the Embassy, one of the chaps who helped Conway regain his health relates Conway's strange story as he understood it.

Escape from Baskul

ALL OF THIS was a 20-page prologue intended to give verisimilitude to what is a thin and unconvincing narrative. The story proper now begins, flashing back to a 1930 evacuation flight from strife-torn Baskul somewhere in Afghanistan or rather, as the book nostalgically has it, the North-West Frontier. The four passengers on a hastily obtained cabin monoplane are Miss Brinklow, a devout spinster missionary; Henry Barnard, a brash American (a brash American? how original) ; Captain Charles Mallison, H M Vice-consul to Baskul; and Mallison’s boss the aforesaid "Glory" Conway, His Majesty’s Consul to Baskul. I couldn’t find Baskul or anything like it on a very detailed map of the area, so it is probably a light disguise for Kabul.

To the consternation of the passengers the plane doesn't head southeast to Peshawar, its intended destination, but east into unknown territory. The pilot is not their expected RAF type, but an oriental, who has hijacked the plane. A refuelling stop in Pathan territory, where they are surrounded by rifle-waving Afghans, is followed by a flight still further east, deep into the Karakorum range. It’s a bit tricky, because there weren’t many (if any) planes available in 1930 which could fly anything like high enough to tackle that territory.

The plane eventually crash lands in a snowdrift deep in the precipitous, snow-clad mountains, killing the oriental pilot but leaving the four passengers conveniently unscathed, if shaken. They are rescued by a cultivated oriental gentleman travelling on a bamboo sedan-chair carried by four peasants. He is Chang, who speaks graceful Oxford English in the manner of Wodehouse’s Jeeves. He leads them into a deep, concealed valley under the shadow of a mountain called Karakul, where a small green paradise survives: Shangri-La, somewhere in Tibet.

Shangri-La

THERE IS NOTHING to show, by the way, that Hilton had ever been to Tibet, ever met a single Tibetan, or knew even the least thing about the Tibet and Tibetans. This is not surprising; in the early 1930s very few Westerners had ever managed to get there.

The monastery at Shangri-La, we discover, evolved out of a decaying Tibetan lamasery, and was the brain-child of a French Jesuit missionary who stumbled into the valley in the late 1700s and stayed put. Despite the fact that the founder was French, in this modern-day lamasery the people all speak English. Furthermore, it has modern plumbing and central heating, a library of between twenty and thirty thousand volumes, and ritual High Tea.

A fair amount of the story consists of a guided tour of the place, during which its purpose is gradually revealed. Shangri-La is uncannily like an English University College. Imagine Oxford’s Balliol plunked down in an oriental valley. The inhabitants of the monastery comprise a bunch of upper-class, mostly European, academics involved in the leisurely pursuit of pseudo-intellectual enlightenment. The non-European exception appears to be Lo-Tsen, a petite, beautiful young woman of aristocratic Manchu origins whose field of endeavour is classical western (not oriental) music. Meanwhile, down in the valley the native Tibetans, the lower orders, do the hard yakka of producing food to feed the upper crust, as well as dig the gold that enables the upper classes to buy all those (Western, not Tibetan) books for their library.

Of the four new arrivals, one (world-weary Conway) is deeply sympathetic to the setup. Another, Barnard, is content to stay for a while because, it is now revealed, he is a notorious swindler and fugitive from justice travelling under an alias. Miss Brinklow wants to stay in the hope of converting the heathen to her own particular beliefs. Mallison, who is not only deeply suspicious but who has a fiancee waiting for him in England, is eager to get the hell out of the place, a.s.a.p.

The reason their plane was hijacked, we eventually learn, was because the dead oriental pilot was on a recruiting expedition. The number of suitable European pseudo-intellectuals dropping into Shangri-La by accident is small, and presumably the native Tibetans in the valley are far too inferior (or more likely far too sensible) to be suitable for the monastery's academic life. Furthermore, the High Lama is dying and they need a replacement. Chang, presumably because he is Chinese, will not suffice. Conway, it seems, is the High Lama’s chosen successor. The High Lama sees evil times ahead, and hidden Shangri-La will be the last tiny pocket of civilisation left in the world. It needs an intrepid but world-weary Oxford-educated Englishman and pillar of the Empah to take it through the coming troubles.

Escape from Shangri-La

COMPLICATIONS ARISE. Vice-consul Mallison has fallen in love with the beautiful Lo Tsen, who equally loves him; he desperately wants out, and so does Lo Tsen. It is now revealed that the ancient High Lama is in fact the original Frenchman who founded the place over 200 years ago. Living in Shangri-La and shuffling through mouldy books has, it seems, a dramatically beneficial effect on lifespan. Now his time has finally come, and Conway shall succeed as High Lama. But Conway, as Mallison’s superior in the Consular Service, feels honour-bound to help his junior officer return home; and so a compact party, comprising Mallison, Lo Tsen, Conway and two Tibetan guides, sets out on foot through the Karakorums looking for civilisation.

There the main body of the narrative ends. We return to those pukka chaps chewing over the yarn in 1933, and we learn that Conway, helped by a very old Chinese lady now dead, was the only known survivor of the vanished aircraft. The old lady, we are left to infer, was Lo-Tsen, whose physical appearance had swiftly reverted to her chronological age of 80 after leaving the valley. This is a gimmick straight out of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The valley preserves you unchanged, like a fly in amber, for many many years, but once away from the valley’s influence you rapidly revert to your real age.

Recovered, Conway sets out in search of Shangri-La. Whether he finds it is anybody’s guess, although in the 1937 movie a tailpiece shows Ronald Colman, in furs and on snowshoes, cresting a pass and seeing Shangri-La spread out below as the end-titles roll and the sound track music swells triumphantly.

The first time I read the book I thought it was ludicrous, an obvious nominee for the definitive list of the Fifty Worst Novels of the 20th Century. On re-reading it some time afterwards, I remained convinced that it is ludicrous. The underlying theme, that somehow a bunch of geriatric, dreamy academics in a pseudo-Oxbridge college, gently recycling the west’s classics century after century can save the world from barbarism, failed to convince me. It was done later, and much better, in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. But Asimov’s fictional Encyclopedia Foundation was a hoax and a cover for something rather more practical, while Shangri-La is taken with aching seriousness by the author.

I suppose it must say something about the state of the world in the early 1930s that this teddibly British novel was on the American best seller list for two solid years.

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1935: Regency Buck, by Georgette Heyer

"I was hearing she was an excessively delightful girl. Eighty thousand pounds I believe."

LOVE, we are told, makes the world go around, or at least makes the earth move. Story-tellers have been right across this idea ever since Homer glamourised a minor war fought over Helen of Troy, who was no better than she ought to have been anyway.

It's amazing how pervasive romance romance is in fiction. Even those tough, masculine, hardboiled heroes who leap, supercharged with testosterone, from the pages of Dashiell Hammet, John D. MacDonald, Alistair MacLean, Clive Cussler and Co., feel their hearts soften at the sight of a well-turned ankle (or rather more, these days).

Jane Austen's beautifully observed descriptions of the mating rituals of the upper-middle and upper classes in Regency England ultimately begat Harlequin Mills and Boon, not to mention all those fat paperbacks with pink and violet covers often featuring a bare-chested Fabio clutching a damsel in, or party out of, crinolines. Practically every romance novel since the advent of pulp paper has freely plagiarised the seminal plot of her brilliant Pride and Prejudice (1813): boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.

Mr Darcy, we remember, was an immensely proud young man who had a snobbishly low opinion of of Elizabeth Bennett's rambling family, and Elizabeth was deeply prejudiced against the immensely proud Darcy. It took quite a bit of stylish manoeuvring on the part of the author before the couple could send out those deckle-edged invitations.

Pride and Prejudice created a genre that shows no sign of dying out, the Regency romance. For many years the undisputed queen of Regency romance was Georgette Heyer (1902-1974).

In truth, Georgette Heyer didn't specialise quite that narrowly. Her fifty-six novels (published between 1921 and 1975, and all but a handful still in print) include some romances set in other historical periods, eleven entertaining romantic whodunits set in modern times, and surprisingly the rather grim tragedy Penhallow. But the brief, golden Regency period (1811-1820) was her special beat.

Regency Buck is a good example of the ouvre, and is practically irresistible on the strength of the title alone. I found my 1975 Pan edition in an untidy pile of Heyer paperbacks in a second hand bookshop. It set me back just $2, which only goes to prove you can still buy something of value with a single coin.

The Taverners

THE TALL, spirited, beautiful and very rich heiress Judith Taverner, 20, is en route from Yorkshire to London with her younger brother Peregrine. On page 18, she meets by accident—and instantly dislikes—a tall, dark, handsome, aristocratic and supercilious stranger who, at a second encounter on page 31 enrages her by stealing a kiss and dubbing her "Clorinda".

Surely an in-joke. Clorinda was the name of the ill-fated Saracen girl in Tasso's famous epic 16 C. Italian poem about the Crusades, which Judith Taverner may be taken to have read. Clorinda was also the name of the insufferable heroine of one of the worst novels in the history of purple prose, Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1896 best-seller A Lady of Quality, which, it is just possible, Heyer may have read. And of course there is a certain tradition in the romance genre of the heroine being awarded a pet name by the hero fairly early in the novel. Recently I found another example of the practice in a 1950s romantic thriller by M M Kaye.

Judith Taverner has a fortune of £80,000, a fact much discussed by potential suitors: "I was hearing she was an excessively delightful girl. Eighty thousand pounds I believe." Her younger brother Sir Peregrine Taverner, Bart, 19, has considerably more money, giving him an income of £12,000 per year.

Using the Postage Stamp Deflator (which I just invented) we can readily convert this into today's funny money. England's universal penny-post began in 1830, about 17 years after the date of the novel. An ordinary letter cost one penny then, and about 35 new pence, or 85 old pennies, today. Multiply by 85 for modern English quids, or by roughly 200 for modern Australian dollars. Judith is worth about $A16,000,000, while Peregrine as some $A65,000,000, yielding $A2.4 million a year pocket money. Let's face it: these kids are not doing it tough.

All this sordid calculation is highly relevant. by the way, and not just the product of an agonising spasm of sheer envy (well, all right, there was an agonising spasm of sheer envy).

The snag is that both these millionaires are minors, and their lately deceased Yorkshire father has left them as wards of his elderly London crony, the Earl of Worth.

Meet Lord Worth...

IN LONDON Judith and her brother are appalled to discover that their guardian is not that elderly gentleman, but is none other than the supercilious young stranger who kissed Judith on page 31. Old Lord Worth had died, and his son Julian St John Audley had successed to the title. (He has a secretary named Blackader, with one "d"; I thought you might like to know.)

The two youngsters, reluctantly under the control of the equally reluctant Lord Worth, enter into the ton. The feckless Peregrine falls in with the cock-fighting, boxing, gaming and boozing set. The beautiful, impetuous, headstrong Judith is given the imprimatur of that famous arbiter of Regency taste and style, Beau Brummell, and she proceeds to cut a swathe through the Season.

A triangle forms. As we watch the bare-knuckle boxing matches, cockfights, duels, snuff-taking, balls and routs so dear to the hearts of the Regency uppercrust, we suspect that Lord Worth rather fancies Judith. He has a strong rival in Judith's London-based cousin, and now good friend, Bernard Taverner, an elegant man-about-town who is so much more amiable than the stern, stubborn Worth. Judith, unable to forget the humiliation of that unwanted kiss on page 31, despises Worth as an ill-mannered autocratic dandy.

It is axiomatic in romance novels that characters who despise each other on page 31 are certain to be embracing by page 331, but three hundred pages of star-crossed lovers pouting at one another would be very thin gruel indeed. There has to be a boy-loses-girl scene, and it occurs around page 254 when Judith and Worth collide over one of Judith’s high-spirited but socially disastrous whims, and their slowly warming relationship becomes one of icy hostility. Heyer further interweaves this, and the minutiae of a full Regency society season, with a whodunit sub-plot whereby a series of murderous attempts is made on young Peregrine's life.

The Murder Plot Thickens

WHO WANTS to rub out the feckless teenager, and why? It’s not until page 298 that the truth is exposed at last: if Peregrine dies before he marries, his fortune passes to his sister Judith. She will then be worth about $A80 million, an awe-inspiring $1.3 million per delectable kilogram. Cousin Bernard, secretly in dire financial straits, has been desperately, if ineffectually, trying to kill Peregrine so he can marry Judith for the aforesaid vast fortune. He’d marry Judith for that amount of money even if she had three heads, all with moustaches; that she’s gorgeous is a fabulous bonus. But Judith has already rejected his offer of marriage.

Confident that his latest Byzantine plot to dispose of Peregrine is being carried out successfully by his henchmen, Bernard lures Judith to a remote house in Kent and reveals his true self at last. Here Judith faces a Fate Worse Than Death, after which she would be so socially disgraced she would have to marry Bernard, who would then, of course, take her money.

However, Lord Worth, working behind the scenes, has successfully frustrated every murder attempt, including the latest. He hunts down Bernard Taverner and rescues Judith at the eleventh hour, furiously decking the villain with a single blow (and subsequently, we infer with approval, beating him to a pulp).

Two days later Judith Taverner turns twenty-one and Worth's year of her guardianship is over. So long as she was his ward, Worth tells her, he could not, with honour, reveal that he had been in love with her since page 18; hence his stern demeanour, and his frequent conflicts with her. And Judith has finally realised that she has really loved him ever since that stolen kiss on page 31. As they embrace passionately, you hear the ghostly sound of a church organ clearing its throat and tentatively sounding the opening notes of The Wedding March.

When you're on a good thing—

IT WAS ALL good clean fun and worth the $2, but I couldn’t help feeling that it seemed a little familiar. Then the penny dropped. Almost exactly the same romantic setup is found in Georgette Heyer's enjoyable whodunit Behold, Here’s Poison (1936), which I had read some time before.

It is 1935. The peppery heroine is Stella, with a weak brother; the Worth part is taken by her rich, supercilious cousin Randall Matthews, whom Stella cordially despises but who secretly loves her; and she has a boyfriend who proves to be a fortune-hunter with feet of clay. The romance is moved into the background to make room for a most ingenious murder mystery, ultimately solved by Randall Matthews. He also wins Stella's love, much to her surprise.

"But I don't even like your type!" she wails between passionate kisses.

A clever whodunit, and a typical Heyer romance; two for the price of one.

Somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed Regency Buck, I have since read several of Heyer’s other historical romances and all of her whodunits, and found them to be immensely enjoyable. The romances frequently have a strong action element. The Quiet Gentleman (1951) includes a murder mystery; The Reluctant Widow (1946) has a spy story embedded in it (and was made into a very mediocre movie with too many unnecessary changes); and The Unknown Ajax (1958) deals with smugglers. Others are played more for comedy: The Grand Sophy (1950) bubbles with fun.

Heyer's good-humoured and light-hearted romantic novels, which are definitely not bodice rippers by the way, haven't aged a bit; and the butterfly lives of her wealthy unemployables are as entertaining today as ever they were.

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1938: The Colossus of Arcadia, by E Phillips Oppenheim

"What has become of the papers your master took from the man he shot in Marseilles harbour?"

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DURING THE twenty years between the two World Wars the name E. Phillips Oppenheim was synonymous with best-selling spy thrillers of the tuxedo-and-title variety. He was the Ian Fleming of his day.

Oppy (1866-1946) published his first book in 1901 and his last in 1943, but he didn’t really hit his stride until about 1920, after which he never looked back. Yet today you are hard pressed to find a new copy of any of his one hundred and twenty or so best-selling novels; not even his masterpiece, The Great Impersonation. The descent from best seller to non-seller was swift. By the late 1950s, at about the time I deserted Richmal Crompton and Capt W E Johns in favour of Leslie Charteris, Hammond Innes and Arthur C Clarke, Oppenheim novels had all but vanished from the bookshops.

I had heard of him, though. The name conjured up images of the Orient Express, glamorous resorts sizzling with international intrigue, clattering roulette wheels, monocled aristocrats in tuxedos, and haggardly beautiful ladies with Zsa Zsa Gabor accents smoking Balkan Sobranie cigarettes in long cigarette holders.

Until 1997 I had never actually seen an Oppenheim novel in the flesh, so to speak. Then I bumped into one lurking furtively on the bottom shelf of a second-hand book shop, and the lingering Oppenheim glamour prodded me into shelling out $8 for it. It was The Colossus of Arcadia, a Hodder & Stoughton hardback published in 1938, and a first edition, no less. The title, more evocative of ancient Greece than Sobranies in long cigarette holders, gave absolutely no hint of the book’s content.

Glancing at the long list of Oppenheim’s other books opposite the title page, I suddenly understood at least part of the reason for his sales decline. The poor old boy didn’t have a clue when it came to inventing exciting, evocative titles for his novels. What ever possessed him to offer such up eye-glazing titles as Curious Happenings to the Rooke Legatees, or The Terrible Hobby of Sir Joseph Londe, Bart.? Other equally prolix, not to say soporific, titles included Mr Billingham, the Marquis and Madelon (one book, not three), and General Besserley’s Second Puzzle Box.

Tuxedo and Title

DESPITE THIS CLEAR HINT of literary ineptitude, I sat back in an armchair with my feet up, a cold drink and a bowl of salted peanuts at hand, opened the book, and prepared to be entertained. I enjoyed it enormously; but not quite the way Oppenheim intended.

In his later years the author had a comfortable routine for working up his spy novels. He would choose a suitably glamorous city, select its most colourful locations, visit its plushest hotels and chat with their maitre's d and chefs, and assemble an elegant cast of wealthy and titled characters. Then he would dream up several vivid action set-pieces to set the tale in motion, after which he more or less made the rest up as he went along. He was also one of those novelists (like Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Wallace, and even Henry James later in his career) who dictated their books to secretaries or into dictating machines, rather than writing them by hand or typing them.

International thrillers, of course, pre-suppose at least a modest working knowledge of international politics on the part of the author. Oppy, I soon discovered as I buried myself in The Colossus of Arcadia, was as ignorant of international politics and diplomacy as was Agatha Christie at her daffiest. His allegedly well-informed protagonists discuss their behind-the-scenes knowledge of high-level politics at about the "Pete and Dud" level. To make matters worse, his characters were cut from the thinnest possible cardboard, his dialogue was as wooden as a Sheraton sideboard but less elegant, and as for his style— Despite over thirty years experience as a novelist, at the end of his career Oppy was even klutzier a writer than he was the day he started.

A good deal of plot exposition is carried out by that most time-worn of devices, characters laboriously telling each other what they already know, so that we can overhear them. Here, for example, two sinister bad guys discuss their quest for a McGuffin thought to be concealed on the luxury steam yacht they are in the process of burgling:

"... what has become of the papers your master took from the man he shot in Marseilles harbour? We all know that amongst them was an account of the meeting of the secret session of the Cercle Rouge and a copy of the resolutions passed by the secret committee of the sixth division of the frontier army."

And here’s a second example of pure, unadulterated klutz. One of the characters, an allegedly famous 1930s international jet-setter, or rather international steam-yacht-setter, purportedly as much a household name in his time as Bill Gates or Brad Pitt in ours, is formally introduced to a group of fellow members of the steam-yacht set:

"My young friend here you know by name, I expect—Rudolph Sagastrada—famous polo player, owner of the most successful racing stable at Chantilly and what counts for much these days, alas, a world renowned banker and a great industrialist."

Dammit all, if he's world renowned, then the people he’s being introduced to already know all about him. This sort of stilted, unnatural speech is pretty standard in Oppy's books. As a master of dialogue, he was no George V Higgins or Elmore Leonard. He wasn’t even Carter Brown.

Oppy doubtless wrote his novels with a well-thumbed Roget’s Thesaurus open beside him. His characters seldom "said" anything. They declared, assured, acknowledged, begged, insisted, and exclaimed; they pointed out, observed, pleaded, remarked, admitted, reflected and whispered; they directed, scoffed, murmured, inquired, muttered, enjoined and complained; and they laughed, cried, offered and sighed. And that is a mere sample of dialogue tags culled from just ten pages chosen at random.

These writing tics give the narrative an engaging period clunkiness, a clunkiness greatly enhanced by the eccentricities and inanities of the plot and action.

Glittering Cast

OPPENHEIM opens The Colossus of Arcadia by gathering the glittering cast of characters together in sunny Monte Carlo and its French Riviera environs, and he establishes some local colour by means of a brief opening travelogue and a blizzard of italicised French.

Reading from the O.P. to the Prompt side, the glittering cast comprised the enigmatic Stephen Ardrossen, toting a sinister steel satchel and manifestly a spy; Miss Joan Haskell, a beautiful young American lady with Washington connections and obviously destined to be the love interest; Sir Philip Townleyes, a baronet apparently in the British Foreign Office; Baron Domiloff, a bigwig in Monaco politics; Lord Henry Maitland Lancaster, "son of a genuine Duke", who appears to be an ornamental extra; Foxley Brent, who begins sentences with "Say—", regularly exclaims "Gee!" and is obviously meant to be an American; Prince Leon de Hochpierre de Martelle, an aristocratic idler accompanied by his American- born missus, Lucille (both destined to be decorative extras); and finally that incredibly good looking (and famous) polo player, banker, etc., Rudolph Sagastrada, who is currently on the run from "his country" and staying in a hotel at Beaulieu, a resort on the French Riviera a few miles from Monte Carlo.

Oppy is very coy, by the way, about Sagastrada’s country, which is never named. Without exception, it is referred to by circumlocutions such as "his country", or "my country", and once by the jaw-breaking formula, "that country of which Rudolph Sagastrada is a citizen." This is something of a handicap to the narrative, since Sagastrada"s country is central to the plot.

A close reading of the text in conjunction with an atlas makes it clear that "his country" is Germany; and since there is a passing mention of the then-current Spanish Civil War in the text, it is obviously Hitler's Germany. Sagastrada, we learn, is persona non grata because he financed an anti-government magazine, and he and the dissident editor, one Herr Rothman, have fled their country one jump ahead of, presumably, the Gestapo.

Baron Domiloff and a few cronies are busily concluding a peaceful Fascist takeover of Monaco, with the Grimaldi dynasty to give up power and retire to the Palace. The takeover is not yet formally concluded, and the enabling Charter, agreed between the French Government, the Société des Bains de Mer, and the Domiloff set, seems to be the novel's principal McGuffin (although this is far from clear; the book has more McGuffins than a Hitchcock film festival). The enigmatic Ardrossen, a freelance secret agent, has been commissioned to get his mitts on a copy of this charter to further some as-yet unrevealed but clearly nefarious plot.

Following hard on Sagastrada and Rothman's heels come two sinister assassins from Sagastrada's country’s secret police, assigned the task of rubbing them both out. The killers successfully knife Rothman to death in his Beaulieu hotel and then set off in pursuit of Sagastrada. Domiloff organises passage for the beseiged Sagastrada, by disguising him as a tourist and shipping him out on a tourist ship standing in the harbour.

The Plot Thickens

THERE IS a feebly twitching blowfly stuck in the margarine of this slippery scheme. Sagastrada, a crashing snob, would infinitely prefer to be propped up against a wall and shot that mingle with the bourgeoisie on a (faugh!) tourist ship. The ever-resourceful Domiloff tries to sweeten this deal by giving Miss Joan Haskell to him as a mistress to entertain him on the voyage (I kid you not). La Haskell is deeply unimpressed and declines the honour with indignation. She is not that kind of girl. So Sagastrada is not on the ship when it sails.

Impasse.

Sagastrada’s country has failed to assassinate him directly, and has failed to force him home by threat of war; so now a certain Prince Anselm of Herm, reputedly the head of Sagastrada's country's Chancellor's personal bodyguard (let's hear you say that three times quickly), turns up and challenges Sagastrada to a duel. And still meanwhile Townleyes Bart. has flown off to some unspecified destination in a private plane (we really must check his travel expense claims), flown back again, jumped on his steam yacht, and sailed off over the horizon. Why? Who knows?

By this time the back cover is about 25 pages away, and nothing makes the slightest sense to anyone in the story, much less to the reader. Nor, one suspects, to the author. Oppy hastily rolls the whole ball of wax into an untidy lump with lots of loose ends hanging out.

Sagastrada fights the duel with the egregious Herm and wins, much to Herm’s (brief) surprise. He then decides to cut the Gordian knot by nobly returning to "his country" to face the music, or more probably the firing squad. It looks like curtains for Sagastrada. This leaves La Haskell, who has just discovered that she is in love with the wet dork, disconsolate. She sails back home to Boston, New York or wherever, her tiny cardboard heart breaking.

It is now revealed that the enigmatic Ardrossen was being paid by France (yes, France!) to start a war with Sagastrada's country, i.e., Hitler's Germany, as though Hitler’s Germany needed anybody’s help to start a war. How? By engineering an international brawl between Monaco, France, and Sagastrada’s country, using that convenient fugitive Sagastrada as casus belli. The McGuffin on Townleyes' steam yacht turned out to be the record of an agreement by a large part of the French army (all Cercle Rouge Commies, of course!) to let the troops of Sagastrada’s country roll over the Maginot Line unchallenged once the war starts. Then Townleyes Bart. is reported dead, his corpse having been fished from the harbour; and then he is discovered to be alive again, for no known reason or plot purpose. At this stage I was goggle-eyed with incredulity and holding the book at arms' length to avoid being splashed by flying flapdoodle.

A Limp Denouement

A YEAR PASSES. Domiloff, the de Hochpierres and the other titled and tuxedoed extras gather to meet the Blue Train, which is bearing Joan Haskell back to Monaco. She greets them bravely.

But soft! What light from yonder window breaks? It is Sagastrada no less, a graver, wiser man. His country, which had devoted a significant sum of money, several lives, and near-war to secure his extermination, simply prosecuted him for a misdemeanour, gave him six months in the bastille, and let him go. This has to be a very strong candidate for the "Most Footling Climax in Spy Literature" award.

Released, Sagstrada has returned to Monaco in his tuxedo and stiff shirt. He sweeps Joan Haskell, his one true love, into his arms. Violins up and over; roll end titles.

The Colossus

WHO, THEN, was the Colossus of Arcadia? Who, come to think of it, was the hero? Certainly not the snobbish and insipid Sagastrada, who was as passive as a post-hole throughout the novel, nor yet the ubiquitous Townleyes, Bart., who was inept to say the very least. And not Ardrossen, the spy who failed.

Could it have been...?

Yes, it was Paul Domiloff, the new Fascist dictator of Monaco, who was both the hero and the eponymous Colossus! Well, what do you expect from a 1930s spy novel by an upper-middle-class English author?

I have to say it. Compared with this admittedly random example of Oppy's ouvre, Agatha Christie's occasional hilarious forays into the international spy thriller look grittily realistic, and Ian Fleming's novels are literary works on the level of War and Peace.

My disillusionment was complete when I encountered a photograph of E Phillips Oppenheim in his later years. Forget the tall slim man in tuxedo and monocle. He looked exactly like Kenneth Graham's Toad of Toad Hall in The Wind in the Willows, as immortalised by illustrator E H Shepard.

To be fair, Oppy could do rather better than Colossus, and his best work was at the beginning of his career. The Great Impersonation (1920), set in early 1914, has a really nifty central idea. A dissolute English aristocrat in self-imposed exile in Africa has an identical double in the form of a fanatically patriotic German, who by incredible coincidence was actually at Eton with said dissolute aristocrat. The German forms the plan of bumping off the Englishman and impersonating him in England to promote pro-German thought in the English upper classes. In due course a fit, tanned, dynamic aristocrat arrives back in England, with an unobtrusive German "minder", and the story goes on from there. In the end of course, it turns out that the aristocrat really is the Englishman, who then impersonated the German impersonating himself!

For devotees of bad movies, by the way, Impersonation was made into a movie in the 1930s. Although the movie was explicitly set in 1914, the characters all wore smart 1930s fashions and drove around in sleek 1930s cars!

____________________

1940: The Return of Nighthawk by Sydney Horler

Before either of them could recover himself, they had all dropped downwards into a dark and seemingly bottomless space...

___________

HAVING BEEN thoroughly disillusioned by my encounter with E Phillips Oppenheim, I was in just the right mood to tackle a thriller-writer who was, I understood, even worse.

Sydney Horler, like Oppenheim, is one of those best-selling novelists no-one reads any more. He was a poor man’s Edgar Wallace, an immensely prolific writer of action-crime and occasionally of comedy-crime pulp novels which amply satisfied the immediate demands of his very uncritical audience before being retired to the attic as silverfish farms.

Horler (1888-1954) was utterly unabashed about being an Edgar Wallace clone. When Wallace died in 1932 Horler even went to the trouble of buying Wallace’s famous Dictaphone from the estate as a publicity gag.

Among Sydney Horler's better known regular heroes were Tiger Standish, Vivanti, Chipstead, and the Nighthawk. The Return of Nighthawk is the second entry in the "Nighthawk" saga, which consisted of some seven novels published between 1937 and 1954.

The Nighthawk bears a suspiciously close resemblance to the early Saint, being an upper-class free-lance do-gooder who smites the ungodly with the assistance of a handful of like-minded confederates. Like the Saint, the Nighthawk even leaves little signature-drawings behind to strike fear into the villains; and like the Saint he turns over much of the boodle to suitable charities. The major difference is that Leslie Charteris was a far, far better writer than Sydney Horler.

215 Swordswallower Alley

THE RETURN of Nighthawk opens with a clutch of villains assembling in an anonymous office at 215 Swordswallower Alley (which Horler describes as a lane leading off Moorgate, EC2) to report on progress with their latest scam. And with that address, Horler immediately succeeded in disrupting my willing suspension of disbelief.

One of the things that gripes me about a great many novels I read is unnecessarily slipshod location work. Moorgate is a short street running north from the Bank of England to Finsbury Pavement. Immediately to the west is the parallel Coleman Street, so close that the buildings in the two streets are back to back, and the alleys joining them run between blank walls. To the east there used to be quite a rabbit warren of short alleys in Horler’s time, before they were erased by the blitz. But even the longest of these only got up as far as number 20 or so. None was called Swordswallower Alley, but that’s not my complaint; an author is entitled to invent an imaginary street to avoid putting his villains at a genuine address. What annoyed me was that fantastically unreal number, 215. You don’t have to be a native Londoner to realise that the tangled streets of the City of London seldom result in high street numbers. Since Swordswallower Alley is imaginary anyway, why didn't Horler use a realistically low number, like 7, or 13?

While I'm whingeing about absurd street numbers, one of the characters has a flat at 997 Park Street, Mayfair. Park Street is only about one kilometre long, numbered northwards. The highest number I could find, which is where Park Street meets Oxford Street, is about 120. Number 997 would be miles north, possibly next to Karl Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery. Why couldn’t Horler simply take the train to nearby Marble Arch tube station, check out Park Street's highest number, and then add maybe 10 or 12 to be on the safe side? Why didn’t he just pick up a copy of a London Postal Directory and see what the real number range was like? Why, come to think of it, did he bother to give a street number at all? It wasn't in the least necessary.

The Gang's All Here

BUT ENOUGH of my griping and back to the gang, who are a suitably villainous and colourful crew.

Marius Abrahams, who describes himself as an agent, is in the chair; he is stout, fleshy, and grey-faced. His consigliere is the unfrocked lawyer Sebastian Yocksley, who looks exactly like a shyster lawyer. A close associate is Felix Goldman, con-man and bucket-shop swindler, obese, immaculately dressed and plausible. Another is Mackie Lanham, an American crook whose function is nosing out opportunities and greasing palms, and who conveys to suckers the impression of being an American business-man. (And here’s a miracle: Horler's American characters do not speak in the bizarre pseudo-American jargon inflicted on them by most British pulp writers of the time.) Hector Howes, a former Fleet Street reporter and a current unemployed slob, is the outfit's gopher on a £5 per week wage. Last but by no means least comes the unpronounceable Silas Schiervoigt, the South African multi-millionaire who is the money behind the operation. Schiervoigt looks like a dyspeptic vulture. These guys are so blatantly villainous that I could scarcely resist the urge to hiss and throw peanuts at the book whenever they appeared.

The good guys comprise Gerald Frost, a former reporter who is now Assistant Editor of the Evening Sun, and who is also the Nighthawk; his two offsiders Oliver Tryst (Oliver Tryst, fer cwyin’ out loud!) and Basil Fettisbury; and there is also his faithful manservant George Nottley, who is rather like Batman’s butler Alfred. These good guys pal around by rudely insulting each other and indulging in pillow fights as though they were still in Big Dorm at Saint Custard's boarding school. None of them has any more personality or character than a paperclip.

With Gerald Frost the author had gilded the lily more than just a tad. He is the son of an Earl, and the Earl happens to be the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (ie, Scotland Yard). This poses a plotting problem, since the Earl discovered in Volume One of the saga that his son Gerald Frost is the Nighthawk; so Horler has Dad removed to New Zealand for the duration. Furthermore, at the end of said Volume One Horler had made the mistake of marrying Gerald Frost to the beauteous heroine. To clear the decks for action, Frost’s gorgeous missus is therefore holidaying on the Riviera without her husband, which sounds a bit dubious to me.

The McGuffin

THE PLOT, hastily cobbled together out of bits of business left over from back issues of Chums and Boys' Own Paper, concerns the case of Dr Charles Vernon. Vernon has invented a very cheap substitute for petrol (oh no! Not that corny old McGuffin again!), and the Consolidated Petrol Company wants the formula. The Abrahams gang have been hired by Consolidated to induce Vernon to hand over his formula at a tiny fraction of its true worth. Vernon, realistically, wants oodles of cash up front, plus continuing royalties for every drop sold. The gang’s singularly wussy campaign consists so far of (a) a bungled kidnapping attempt and (b) sending anonymous letters containing threats of violence, signed "A Friend", to Vernon.

The villains around the table at Swordswallower Alley discuss the Vernon operation at length even though it’s obvious to the reader that they know all about it already. Having brought the readers bang up to date the gang disperses, with Abrahams and Schiervoigt remaining to advance the novel’s plot a little further. In comes Abrahams' wimpy office clerk with the news that there is something alarming on one of Abrahams’ Dictaphone rolls. In a moment we are listening to the following Dictaphone recording:

I am warning you, Marius Abrabams! I know you to be a crook, employing other crooks. I know that for years you have swindled innocent people and worked general havoc. I know that the title you so modestly give yourself as "Agent" is merely a cloak for audacious financial swindles. I know, in short, that you are a living canker in the heart of the City of London. But beware! Knowing you for what you are, I insist that you stop—and stop immediately—any scheme on which you may now be working! In particular, I warn you to leave Dr Charles Vernon, who is a friend of mine, alone! If you don’t, I shall strike—and when I strike I hurt!

The voice on this exclamation-mark pocked billet-doux is that of the Nighthawk, as proved by the presence of the Nighthawk’s famous signature sketch, which he left in the box of Dictaphone rolls.

Schiervoigt has, incredibly, never heard of the Nighthawk. This gives Horler the opportunity to have Abrahams briefly recapitulate the Nighthawk’s previous caper (see They Called Him Nighthawk, 1937). Nighthawk, we hear, "smashed Edmund Thursby" among others about eighteen months ago, and it was a Fleet Street sensation at the time. He was now thought to be dead or retired.

Faced with a warning from an infallible super-hero who has a dramatic nom-de-guerre and leaves sinister sketches behind, any sensible crook would immediately pack up and move to Monte Carlo. To their credit, this gang is made of sterner stuff and they decide to fight back; but then, if they didn't, there would be no novel. The former Fleet Street hack Howes is delegated to find out who the Nighthawk really is so the gang can either neutralise him or expunge him.

The Nighthawk Strikes

WHILE HOWES wanders around in a web-footed search for the identity of the Nighthawk, the Terrific Trio (Frost, Tryst and Fettisbury) swing into action against the villains. First, they file the inventor Vernon away in a monastery in Staffordshire, well out of the bad guys' reach, and then they tackle the unpronounceable Schiervoigt.

The oily South African is travelling in his chauffeured Roller to his palatial country house overlooking Camberley, Surrey, for a dirty weekend with the notorious society tart Lady Sybil Tremayne. Near Camberley his car is held up by armed, masked bandits who are of course the Nighthawk and his cronies. The Nighthawk extorts a cheque for £25,000 (payable to a Hospital) from the irate millionaire, and secures him in a nearby cottage where he is to stay until the cheque clears. Then the Nighthawk delivers this amazingly pompous and priggish speech to Lady Tremayne:

"Lady Sybil Tremayne, you are an influence for evil in the life of present-day London and, although in the ordinary sense, I am no moralist I have come to the conclusion that you must be taught a lesson. You are twenty-five miles or so away from your home – you are perfectly at liberty to walk back, if you like."

"Walk back! Don’t be a fool! How can I walk?" demands the irate tart.

"On your feet," says Nighthawk, repartee worthy of Noel Coward. The text then goes on to state that Lady Sybil gnashed her teeth, but I don't think Horler meant us to take the figure of speech literally. At least, I hope not.

Off she goes into the darkness.

But, but, but... La Tremayne knows exactly where Schiervoigt is being imprisoned. Why doesn't she just hoof it the two or three miles into Camberley and rouse the cops, or at least get a train or cab home? She does no such thing, and we are left to believe she walked all the way back to London.

Once the cheque for £25,000 has cleared, Schiervoigt is found tied to a tree with a signboard above his head: "Silas Schiervoigt is a swindler. He has been placed here as a warning! Let others beware!"

Phase two in the Nighthawk’s campaign is to stick up Goldman in his flat at 997 Park Street. Here the Nighthawk empties Goldman's safe of all the papers on his current bucket-shop swindle, with a view to writing to his victims and telling them of the scam. A badly rattled Goldman tells Nighthawk everything about the Vernon campaign, including the identity of the paying customer, viz., Consolidated Petrol, before taking it on his toes to New York.

Escape from Maidmoor

AS THOUGH the campaign against the Abrahams gang wasn't enough to be going on with, Horler now introduces a spy sub-plot. Otto Weiss is a trusted emissary from Herr Kuhnreich, the dictator of Ronstadt (ie Hitler, dictator of Germany; why didn't Horler say so, for Pete's sake?). Weiss wants Vernon’s formula and is leaning on Mr Leofar, boss of Consolidated Petrol. Leofar in turn transmits the leaning-on to Abrahams.

A snazzy but utterly irrelevant plot by the baddies to compromise a Cabinet Minister by framing him for cheating at cards collapses when the Nighthawk and his gang intervene at the psychological moment. What this plot was supposed to achieve, or for that matter how the Nighthawk knew that this particular game was afoot, is anybody’s guess. Maybe it was in Goldman's papers, but the text omits this vital information.

By now Vernon has vanished, Schiervoigt has been diddled of £25,000, and Goldman has legged it for New York. You'd think the remnants of the gang would pack up and call it a day. Although the reader’s eyelids are now drooping heavily, the author, contrariwise, is just getting interested. He introduces (a) a retired Scotland Yard cop, who suddenly vanishes from his tobacco shop in Balham, (b) a former New York hit man now living in London’s Maida Vale, and (c) a certain Mr Ansell who has just escaped from Maidmoor Prison.

The ex-cop possibly knows who the Nighthawk is; the hit-man is commissioned to kill the Nighthawk; and Ansell is intent on killing Abrahams, who had framed him into prison some years before. Oh, and the mad scientist Vernon, bored with his stay in the Staffordshire monastery, books out and is promptly seized by the baddies who were waiting nearby. (How did they know he was there? How did they know he was going to walk out that day? Search me.) The baddies hand Vernon over to Herr Otto der Shpy, whereupon the ubiquitous Nighthawk sticks 'em up, rescues Vernon and hands the scientist over to the British Secret Service. Thus the gang's plot is now utterly foiled, leaving Abrahams boiling with the desire for vengeance.

The Sinister Dungeon

ALL THAT is required now is for the Nighthawk and his crew to be lured to some sinister Soho establishment which has a secret trapdoor in the floor, so the villains can bind the heroes up in chains and gloat over their imminent demise. And yes, that's exactly what happens next. The Terrific Trio plummet through the trapdoor into a dungeon, where the cackling, gloating villains kick them in the ribs and then hand them over in chains to a crooked sea captain who will dump them in the ocean in concrete socks. But the sea captain proves to be that retired Scotland Yard cop from the tobacco shop in Balham, who promptly arrests the baddies in a distinctly limp Deus ex machina climax.

There are loose ends dangling everywhere from this inept, hastily written farrago. By the end of the story a least a dozen people (including all of the baddies and some of Scotland Yard) know exactly who the Nighthawk is. He is never arrested and charged with anything, despite such serious criminal offences as armed robbery, extortion, burglary, kidnapping and making moralising speeches.

The character Ansell was created by Horler, and sprung from Maidmoor Prison, solely to kill Abrahams' wimpy clerk by error. This in turn lets Abrahams plant a Nighthawk drawing on the corpse in a lame-brained attempt at a frame-up. Ansell is then completely forgotten about. According to the story, he was an innocent man framed by Abrahams; he has escaped from the Bastille; he has committed a murder and got the wrong man by mistake; he writes to the cops telling them the Nighthawk didn’t do it. What became of him? I don’t know, and neither did Sydney Horler.

Apart from his obsession with large street numbers, Horler is a pretty sloppy worker all round. The prison Ansell escaped from is imaginary Maidmoor Prison in one place, genuine Dartmoor in another. Towards the end of the book a uniformed bobby named Constable Thursby makes a brief appearance to take someone away. We have been hearing about Edmund Thursby (the villain who was defeated in Volume One) off and on throughout the book, so the constable’s surname naturally caused me me to sit up and pay attention when I saw it. Can he be Edmund Thursby in disguise, and up to no good? But no; the constable was no relation to Edmund Thursby. It's just a walk-on part and an astonishingly careless slip.

Finally, Horler's grasp of English grammar is shaky indeed. As a typical example, when the three good guys fall through the trap, he writes "Before either of them could recover himself, they had all ..."

I’m not complaining about the $5 I paid for the tatty old Hodder & Stoughton hardback, even though it lacked the gaudy, sulphurous yellow dust jacket which was probably its best feature. I had a pretty good idea what to expect. And I wouldn't put this particular novel in a definitive list of the 100 worst novels of the 20th century. There are lots of novels which have actually won great reviews and even literary prizes which are far, far worse. It's essentially a comic strip without the pictures, and taken in that spirit it’s harmless fun. Nevertheless, it’s easy to see why nobody reads Horler any more.

Oh well, hardly anybody.

_______________

1943: The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

"There's my expert," said Mrs Dane Calthrop. "Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about  the different types of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known."

ONE WET winter's day many years ago I committed an automotive faux pas by sliding my car on a greasy road and crashing it into a light pole. I spent that night not in my own flat, but back at my parents' house, just in case the colourful bruises weren't the only injuries. I was so awash with adrenalin that I couldn’t sleep, but there was a cardboard box of Agatha Christie paperbacks in the spare room, so I read all night and well into the next day.

I didn’t look at another Aggie novel for over twenty years, whereupon I started assembling a full set of second-hand paper-backs, typically at $2 to $3 each. The books now occupy about six feet of shelving in my library, and contain nearly six million words. It took a remarkably short time to collect them all; Aggies are everywhere. In fact, Agatha Christie is the most successful novelist in the history of English literature.

At better than 800 million copies to date, or an average of about 10 million copies of each and every title, sales of the fiction of Agatha Christie are third in volume only to the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare, both of which had a considerable head start. And every one of Agatha Christie’s 80+ novels and short-story collections is still in print, even though the earliest, The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920), is a positively geriatric ninety-plus years old. As Robert Barnard put it in his survey of Agatha Christie’s writing (A Talent to Deceive, 1980): "So dated, so irrelevant, and yet so compulsive, still, today. Why?"

It gives one furiously to think.

Live rabbits from empty hats

FORGET ALL THAT pretentious malarkey about whodunits being "pure puzzles" or "intellectual problems". That is not their attraction (at least, not to me). A good whodunit is like a magic show. The magician on the stage produces live rabbits from empty hats, makes elephants vanish in front of your eyes, saws pretty girls in half. They are all illusions, and, dammit, the audience enjoys knowing that they are being deceived. They half hope that they might spot the reality behind the illusion, but they don't expect to. If the magician is so inept as to accidentally allow the audience to spot how it was done, the audience feels cheated.

The whodunit provides exactly the same pleasure, with the added bonus that, after the surprise revelation of the killer there is an explanation of how the illusion was perpetrated. And, like that magic show audience, if a whodunit reader works out who done it before the author reveals the secret they don’t feel elated, but cheated. It was too easy; the author wasn’t trying hard enough.

Although I'm often told that what people remember of an Aggie novel is the crime, I don't. I remember the people. This goes right against the received wisdom that Aggie's characterisations were stock, perfunctory, shallow, forgettable— insert your own pejorative. Many of her characters floated around in the back of my memory for all those twenty years between reads: one in particular was a skinny, awkward, graceless girl, desperately unhappy. I had no idea what novel she had been in, but a couple of years ago I eventually found her in The Moving Finger.

The Moving Finger is one of Agatha's typically engaging conjuring tricks. It was written during her peak years, which were roughly 1925-1955. That's a lot of peak years, but Aggie’s writing career began in 1920 and ended only when she died in 1973.

She started out in close imitation of Conan Doyle, with the dimwitted Captain Hastings as "Watson" to her detective Hercule Poirot. She soon retired Hasting to the Argentine, and from then on used ad hoc "Watsons" whenever one was needed, which wasn’t often. Nurse Leathern, in Murder in Mesopotamia, is an example; So is Jerry Burton, who tells the story in this novel.

A cast of dozens

BURTON IS A YOUNG PILOT who was badly injured a plane crash, presumably a fighter plane, but this is unstated. He is enjoying a leisurely convalescence in the peaceful village of Lymstock, some 50 or 60 miles from London, accompanied by his very glamorous and very modern younger sister Joanne.

There are certain internal clues that the book is set in early 1940, during the "phoney war", but World War 2 does not intrude. Except for the plethora of servants it could easily be the late 1950s; the book is timeless. Jerry Burton, for example, is a public school educated young man with a fair bit of money who employs a full-time cook/house-keeper and a housemaid. As a card carrying member of the upper-middle class, he has social entree to the village upper-crust, mostly the professional classes, and it is through his eyes that we meet them all.

Symmington is the town solicitor, married with a stepdaughter and two young sons. He employs a maid, a cook-housekeeper, and a governess for his youngest children, all full-time, which again suggests the 1930s; he certainly couldn't have afforded them in Austerity, Supertaxed 1950s.

Colonel Appleton is an amorous retired military man who constantly ogles the vivacious and glamorous Joanne Burton. Owen Griffith is the intense, dedicated young doctor, unmarried and living with his dynamic spinster sister Aimee. Mr Pye is the effeminate town aesthete, living in a house more like a Country Life exhibit than a home. Caleb Dane Calthrop is the very unworldly vicar whose very sharp eyed wife tends to make the locals uneasy. Miss Emily Barton is a fluttery spinster whose family long owned Furze Hall, the village's Big House, which the Burtons are renting from her. There are sundry other minor characters. Pretty much Agatha Christie's usual stock company, in fact.

The one non-stock-company figure is Megan Hunter. She is Mrs Symmington's daughter by her first husband, a man who was, apparently, a criminal. Megan is twenty years old, awkward, shabbily dressed, socially graceless, and neglected by her parents. Her mother doesn't like Megan very much because she reminds her of her very unhappy first marriage; and Mr Symmington is indifferent to his stepdaughter. I was quite surprised how well I remembered Megan after twenty years, and how little I remembered of any of the story.

When it came to characterisation, Aggie was an impressionist, not a photo-realist. Her characters are lightly but clearly sketched, with the reader unconsciously filling in the gaps. They all have quite different and distinctive speech patterns. Natural-sounding dialogue was one of Aggie’s strengths, and you learn more about the characters by their conversation than from any other source. You learn all that you need to know for the purpose of the novel, but little more. Agatha Christie was an extremely economical writer; there are few superfluous words in her best novels.

On the other hand, she was a tirelessly inventive illusionist. She pulled rabbits out of empty hats with consummate ease. The murderer was the investigating cop; or the "Watson"; or a child; or the romantic male lead; or all the suspects together; or Hercule Poirot himself! And the scene of the crime was an archaeological dig; or rose-red Petra, half as old as time; or the cramped passenger cabin of a cross-channel aeroplane in 1934; yes, even the traditional library in the manor house.

The clues are often of the utmost simplicity: two teaspoons in a saucer; an empty matchbox; a white lab coat; a suicide note on a fragment of paper; the remains of a medicine bottle label; a girl's hair falling out.

And her misdirections are often the simplest you can imagine. For instance, she may introduce a middle aged couple called, shall we say, George and Mildred Roper, and leave the reader (and the other characters in the novel) to assume they are husband and wife when, as it later turns out, they are actually a man and his sister-in-law. It's the victim who was the man’s wife.

Typically neat illusion

In The Moving Finger, the supreme magician pulls off one of her typically neat illusions when neurotic Mrs Symmington seemingly commits suicide in the wake of an anonymous poison pen letter, one of a series of such letters to hit the villagers. There is quite a lot of very skilful misdirection, with the result that the reader never notices the very obvious central triangle on which the murder plot hinges. And it’s not as though Aggie doesn’t tell her readers about it. In fact, she tells the reader several times over in the gossipy words of several different characters, and still we are unable to see the bleedin' obvious. What’s more, several clues which appear to point away from the actual murderer turn out to point directly to him once that relationship is grasped. Of course, Miss Marple, who is called in very late in the novel as an "expert" by her old friend the disconcerting Mrs Dane Calthrop, spots it at once.

"The very first thing I hear is that there is a very attractive young governess in the house," she murmurs modestly after Symmington is arrested for the murder of his wife. "So clear, isn't it? Mr Symmington, a rather dry, repressed unemotional man tied to a querulous and neurotic wife and suddenly this radiant young creature comes along. I'm afraid, you know, that gentlemen, when they fall in love at a certain age, get the disease very badly."

Damn it all, it was very clear. We just weren't looking in that direction.

The story ends on an odd, and obviously unintentional, callous note. The narrator Jerry Burton is engaged to Megan; his sister Joanne has fallen for the intense Dr Owen Griffith; you forsee the confetti flying through the air. So far so good.

But one thing worried me. Mrs Symmington is dead; Mr Symmington, having murdered two people, is clearly destined for the dreaded Eight O’Clock Walk. What on earth happened to the Symmingtons' two young boys, now orphaned? Aggie doesn't say, and plainly doesn’t care. I have a grim suspicion that they would have been shipped out to Australia as Orphans of Empire, poor sods.

Agatha Christie's books have aged much better than many of those of her contemporaries. In my scrounging for Golden Age whodunits I have found many of the great names are out of print, or very hard to find even in second-hand bookshops. A few of them, I couldn't help noticing, were specialists in a particular type of whodunit. John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson was the locked room or impossible crime specialist. Freeman Wills Crofts' Inspector French spent his time dismantling seemingly impregnable alibis. Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver whodunits invariably involve star-crossed lovers. Cyril Hare's are, well, lawyerly (he was a judge).

None of Agatha's contemporaries, however, were anywhere near as good at devising lively and imaginative conjuring tricks, nor so skilled at performing them in the public gaze. You settle into your chair as Agatha produces her usual stock company of characters and the usual props and starts her patter ("At no time do my fingers leave my hands"). And you prepare yourself for another very satisfying and baffling illusion.

All of which, I think, answers Robert Barnard's question: "So dated, so irrelevant, and yet so compulsive, still, today. Why?"

________________________

1956: Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goesas she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.

_________

IT'S HARD to remember, now, what a monumental storm Peyton Place roused when it was published way back in 1956. It was a scandal and a sensation in the USA, where it topped the best seller lists for the best part of two years. It was an even bigger scandal and sensation in more conservative Australia, where people talked about it behind their hands. The Australian Women’s Weekly serialised it (or at least the tamer bits of it), and adults who bought it made sure they hid it from their kids. Still, many of us adolescents managed to get our hands on a copy and hunt furtively for the dirty bits.

However sensational it may have been in the 1950s, Peyton Place was also totally forgettable. Forty years after I read it I could not recall the name of a single character in the book, nor a shred of the plot (if there was one, which I was much inclined to doubt). I could remember just one scene, in which two characters accidentally killed themselves by driving a car full tilt into the back of a parked truck. The only reason I recalled even that was because of what they were doing just before they hit the truck.

It's not as though I have a bad memory. I haven't read Treasure Island since the 1950s either, but I can still vividly recall the Admiral Benbow Inn, the Black Spot, Ben Gunn, Jim Hawkins, Squire Trelawny, Long John Silver and the rest of that enthralling company, and many of its livelier incidents are vivid in my memory still. But Peyton Place just faded away.

Low budget Reunion

RECENTLY I discovered a copy of the Pan paperback edition of Peyton Place in the "20 cents" tray in a second-hand book shop. After careful fiscal consideration I bought it, and staged a low-budget reunion with a dubious literary legend.

Grace Metalious’s magnum opus on the seedy side of life in a straight-laced New England town is, by today’s standards, touchingly innocent. Time, that great bowdleriser, has rendered Grace Metalious’s fragrant melange of small-town lust, suicide and murder as bland as a bowl of vanilla icecream.

The novel covers a 20-year period from 1935 to about 1955, but the author takes it for granted we are all mind-readers, because it's not until page 130, when two years of action have passed, that we finally discover that it is now 1937. There is not the faintest trace of period flavour or character to the narrative, and we just naturally assume that the narrative's "now" was the present day, i.e., the mid-1950s when the book was published.

The story pivots around the affairs of a handful of families in the mythical New England town of Peyton Place, and every family is a cliché.

The Crosses live in a tar-paper shanty on the wrong side of the tracks. Daddy is a shiftless, violent, abusive drunk, his wife is a spiritless half-mad drudge of a charwoman, and his 13 year old stepdaughter Selena is just budding into young womanhood. Uptown we meet the Harringtons: Leslie, a greedy spiv who owns t'mill and most everything else in town, and his spoiled bully of a son Rodney, aged about 14. Mid-town we find the MacKenzies, the juicy widow Constance and her daughter Allison, young Allison being Selena Cross's contemporary and best friend. Constance retails schmottas from a boutique on Elm Street, Peyton Place's main drag, and represents the middle class.

In addition to these three families, there is the widow lady Mrs Page and her mama's boy son Little Norman Page, and the upright and earnest Ted Carter who fancies Selena but is even more interested in his education and career. There is the dignified near-saintly town Doctor, the slightly subversive editor of the local newspaper, and a Greek Chorus of old codgers who gather around the cracker barrel in Tuttle's Store and gossip the day away. The only missing cliché is someone sittin' whittlin' on the porch.

Wrong Side of the Tracks

SURPRISINGLY, nothing much happens when you average out the action over the nearly twenty year span covered by the novel. A new high-school headmaster, a big, brawny bloke named Michael Kyros, arrives in town and sets his cap for widow Constance MacKenzie. He eventually wins, but in doing so discovers her deepest secret. Her dead "husband", named Allison MacKenzie, was always married to someone else; Constance is in fact an unwed mum with an illegitimate child. This doesn’t faze Kyros, but when her priggish young daughter, confusingly also named Allison, finds out the truth she appalled; and after calling her Mum a lot of very hard names she flees to New York to pursue a career in writing. As one does.

Selena, at the age of 14 or so, is raped by her drunken stepfather, falls pregnant, and has an abortion performed by the saintly Doctor, who then successfully terrorises the stepfather into leaving town in a hurry. The dim Mrs Cross, finally becoming aware of what has happened, and fearing that she's going insane, hangs herself. Orphaned Selena gradually takes control of the remnants of the family and falls for Ted Carter. Then, several years later Pop Cross reappears in the dead of night, AWOL from the Navy and looking for another tumble with Selena. Understandably enraged, Selena bashes his brains out and buries the corpse under the sheep run.

Bullying Rodney Harrington carries on his usual way, his path smoothed by Pop's money and influence. When he gets a girl pregnant his father buys the family off. When he gets expelled from College for too much wenching and boozing, his Dad is proud of him. When war comes, Dad's influence keeps him well out of the draft, and Rodney rides out the War on a wave of sex and alcohol, roaring around in a car full of black-market petrol. In the end he gets his richly deserved come-uppance, meeting a sudden sticky end when he drives full-bore into a parked truck.

Little Norman Page comes back from the war with a stiff leg and a chest full of campaign ribbons, both of which, we discover, were faked by him under pressure from his doting, obsessed mother. He actually fell apart under stress: shell-shock. But at least he went, which is more than Rodney Harrington ever did. Ted Carter, nominally engaged to Selena by Pearl Harbour, gains draft deferment to finish his college education, which appals patriotic Selena. Their engagement is off.

Post-War Revelations

AS THE STORY drifts into the postwar years, we find young Allison MacKenzie, still in New York, at last having the great passionate love affair of her life. She can already see that long white dress and hear the sonorous tones of the Wedding March. Then she discovers that her lover is married with kids, and all he was having was a dirty weekend. "I'm just like Mom," she realises in horror. Meanwhile, the Military Police have been tracking down wartime deserters, and the secret of Pop Cross’s murder is finally brought to light. Selena is put on trial for his murder, but after the saintly Doctor's evidence the jury acquits her without leaving the box.

The publicity about the trial brings Allison home to see her childhood friend Selena, and she is finally reconciled with her mother. As the end-papers loom Selena, who has doggedly refused to leave Peyton Place despite the scandal surrounding her, is being gently romanced by one of the town's nicer guys.

It hasn't worn well, although it’s still very readable and even remarkable for a first novel. There is not much in the way of successful characterisation, despite Grace Metalious's most determined efforts. Only Selena Cross has some spark of vitality in her, and her adventures are by and large no more dramatic than the ones suffered by Lillian Gish in the soapy silent flick Way Down East: virtue, systematically traduced, finally winning through in the end. And quite honestly I was unable to find any dirty bits, so I am blowed if I know what all the excitement was about back in '56. There is a skinny-dipping scene just as resolutely off-stage as the one in The Green Hat; the (very few) sex scenes are devoid of lubricious detail; and Selena's rape is almost entirely off-camera. The so-called steamy bits of Peyton Place are considerably milder than you’ll find in practically any modern-day bodice-ripper romance novel, or for that matter any prime-time TV soaper.

Grace Metalious was a young, bored housewife, married to a school-teacher in a small New England town, when she wrote her novel. She became rich and notorious in a big hurry, wrote several further books of ever-diminishing success, and then drank herself to death. Peyton Place was made into a big-budget movie in 1957 and a dud sequel in 1961, and then into a very bad but amazingly popular TV soap, which in turn spun off two "TV series reunion" tele-movies, one as late as 1985.

___________

1959: Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming

"Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago. 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.'  Miami, Sandwich and now Geneva. I propose to wring the truth out of you." Goldfinger’s eyes slid slowly past Bond’s head. 'Oddjob. The Pressure Room."

_____________

THE SENSATIONAL James Bond novels of the '50s and '60s seemed to bring a new sophistication and realism to spy novels. They certainly brought a vast new readership to the genre who would have scorned the elementary spy yarns of Oppenheim or Manning Coles. The Bond novels were tough, they were modern, they were fast-moving, and the resourceful hero was not a wealthy free-lance adventurer but rather a career civil servant in a strange line of work. He was 007, licenced to kill.

A lot of the apparent realism stemmed from the fact that author Ian Fleming worked in Naval Intelligence during the war, and knew the bureaucracy behind Britain’s convoluted Secret Service system. James Bond’s boss was "M", a convincing and authentic detail; Sir Stewart Menzies, a former head of the genuine SIS, invariably signed his papers with a simple "S". Fleming’s own Naval Intelligence had a "Q" (for Quartermaster) Branch.

Although the James Bond novels have been described as sophisticated modern adventure stories, on re-reading them it is surprising just how much of the corny old tradition of John Buchan and "Sapper" lingers on. There are the hair's-breadth escapes, the endless convenient coincidences, the secret laboratories, the flamboyant villains, and the the more or less indestructible hero. The big difference is the sex. If Fleming had written Bulldog Drummond, good old Capt Hugh Drummond would have been in bed with Phyllis Benton by page 90 at the latest, and the novel would have climaxed with Drummond rogering the beautiful Irma Petersen on the grand staircase of The Larches.

Ian Fleming's first Bond novel was published in 1953, and a new book appeared each year until Octopussy in 1966. He died in 1964 at the early age of 52. Under the name Robert Markham, Kingsley Amis wrote the first non-Ian Fleming James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, for the 1968 season. After a long gap a confusing sequence of new James Bond books began to appear from 1981, written by a variety of authors including John Gardner. It’s fair to say that none of them, with the possible exception of Colonel Sun, stands serious comparison with Fleming’s originals.

Auric Goldfinger

GOLDFINGER is an early entry in the James Bond saga, appearing well before the first successful movie. The tale opens in Miami, with James Bond resting after a messy case. Here he bumps into a former acquaintance, an American, who knows he is being cheated at cards by a certain Mr Auric Goldfinger but can’t work out how it is being done. Can James Bond help? The Yank introduces Bond to Goldfinger, and they discover a mutual interest in golf and an identical handicap of 9. Goldfinger is one of Ian Fleming's more memorable villains:

Goldfinger was short, not more than five feet tall, and on top of the thick body and blunt, peasant legs, was set almost directly into his shoulders, a huge and it seemed exactly round head. It was as if Goldfinger had been put together with pieces of other people's bodies.

Bond solves the card-sharping scam, which results in an angry Goldfinger disgorging a large amount of money to his victim. Then, pausing only for a dirty weekend with Goldfinger's gorgeous assistant Jill Masterton, 007 returns to UK. He is soon being assigned to investigate a gold-smuggling racket being operated by, according to the Bank of England, one Auric Goldfinger. This is one of the many amazing coincidences that stipple the pages of this novel like buckshot in a dead grouse. Even more intriguing is the possibility that Goldfinger may be a paymaster for Bond"s old enemy SMERSH (smiert spionam), the KGB's execution branch.

Goldfinger runs a gold-refining and metal smelter at Reculver on the Kent bank of the Thames Estuary, so Bond tootles down in Q Branch's Aston Martin DB3 to reconnoitre. Sadly for the movie fans this car lacks the ejector seat and the machine guns behind the indicator lights, but it does have revolving number plates and a radio tracking system. He then heads off to the golf club Goldfinger had told him he regularly played, in the hope of reviving the acquaintance and worming his way into Goldfinger's confidence.

In another remarkable coincidence Goldfinger turns up to play that very day, and there follows one of the most famous golf games in spy history. Spread over 18 holes and 23 pages, it kept me glued to the book in the days when I had never played a stroke of golf in my life, which suggests considerable descriptive skill on the part of Ian Fleming. Now that I have played a few strokes of golf (far too many per hole, it must be said), it's even more fun.

The game, in which both sides cheat enthusiastically and Bond "wins", results in an invitation to Goldfinger's country house and a scary introduction the amazing Oddjob, the deadly Korean man-servant/chauffer with the steel-brimmed bowler hat. It also begins the great chase, in which Bond, discovering how Goldfinger smuggles gold out of England, follows him across Europe. Goldfinger is travelling in his antique bullet-proof Rolls-Royce, Bond in the DB3.

Tilly Soames

IN YET ANOTHER coincidence, Bond encounters a pretty girl named Tilly Soames, who is also following Goldfinger and who subsequently turns out to be none other than Tilly Masterton, sister of Jill Masterson. Tilly is out to kill Goldfinger, because he had murdered Jill shortly after the Miami episode. The upshot of all this is that James Bond and Tilly are captured by Goldfinger and taken to The Pressure Room for interrogation. Fans of the novel will recall (with watering eyes) the scene where Bond, strapped spreadeagled to a sawbench, watches a circular saw heading inexorably towards his mating tackle.

True to the tradition of Buchan and "Sapper", Goldfinger decides at the last minute not to kill Bond on the spot, which is a very big mistake. Thinking Bond is a free-lance criminal, he recruits the secret agent to aid in his great project: knocking over the Gold Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

This ambitious project requires a fair amount of clerical and logistical support, and Goldfinger as organised a conference with representatives of various American organised crime gangs, foreshadowing the sort of conference that Ernst Stavro Blofeld of SPECTRE conducted in later volumes. You begin to realise that this book is not to be taken too seriously when Goldfinger distributes a typed agenda to his potential recruits (and I love the last line of the document):

Meeting to be held under the chairmanship of Mr Gold.

Secretaries: J Bond and Miss T Masterton.

Present:

Helmut M Springer, The Purple Gang, Detroit.

Jed Midnight, Shadow Syndicate, Miami and Havana

Billy (The Grinner) Ring, The Machine, Chicago.

Jack Strapp, The Spangled Mob,Las Vegas.

Mr Solo, Unione Siciliano.

Miss Pussy Galore, The Cement Mixers, Harlem, New York City.

A project with the operational name GRAND SLAM.

(Refreshments)

Ah, that wonderfully suggestive name Miss Pussy Galore! She is pale, dark-haired, violet eyed, beautiful, leather-clad and of course a lesbian. You don't have to be Nostradamus to foresee that James Bond will do something about that last state of affairs before the final curtain.

When I first read this book I thought that the gangster details were remarkably authentic. There really was a Purple Gang in Detroit, and everyone has heard of the Chicago mob. Actually, Fleming didn't quite get it right, but he can’t be blamed for that. It's only since all those Mafia gangsters started writing their memoirs recently that we got to know so much more about organised crime than Fleming did in the 1950s.

The Chicago mob is known to insiders as the Outfit, not the Machine, while in the late 1950s Miami, Havana and Las Vegas were largely dominated by Meyer Lansky's Jewish gang, just as the New York mafia was at that time dominated by the devious Vito Genovese.

Operation Grand Slam

BY THE TIME the Great Fort Knox Caper, aka Operation Grand Slam, gets underway we have raced through to page 190, and Ian Fleming doesn't waste ink wrapping it all up in the remaining 30 or so pages. A cable that Goldfinger sent to Universal Export under Bond’s name, explaining Bond's intention to go to the USA, lacks the secret codeword to guarantee authenticity, and so it tips off M that something is up. And Bond himself manages to transmit a warning to Felix Leiter of Pinkerton's, New York, with details of the scheme for the elaborate heist. Presumably both these worthies got the wheels turning, because the cavalry arrive in the nick of time; or in this case, the cavalry are lying in wait.

So naturally Goldfinger's grand scheme comes unglued, the mobsters are rounded up, Tilly Masterton steps in the way of a stray bullet and dies, and Goldfinger makes a bizarre getaway in a train. The US Army mops up, but it isn't over yet. Bond returns to London on a BOAC airliner (one with propellers, yet!), and is alarmed to discover that the plane has been taken over by Goldfinger. The villain is on his way to Moscow with his own hoard of gold, plus Oddjob and (for some unfathomable reason) Pussy Galore. Goldfinger thinks that James Bond, suitably gift-wrapped, would make a very neat present for SMERSH, and wants to take him to Moscow too.

Bond wins through, of course, thanks to a little help from the desirable Pussy Galore, and there is a great scene where Oddjob is inexorably sucked out of one of the plane’s windows. The plane ditches in the ocean off Canada. All the remaining baddies conveniently drown, while James Bond and Pussy Galore bob to the surface and are rescued from the freezing ocean. As the curtain comes down, Bond is happily showing Pussy Galore what she has been missing during her lesbian years.

Deplorable Taste

IT'S ALL IN deplorable taste of course, and incredibly politically incorrect. But it’s still great reading for various reasons. One is that Bond isn’t the usual utterly infallible dimple-chinned super-hero; he has a few endearing weaknesses (he doesn't like flying, for instance). The second is that Fleming had a considerable talent for making his improbable villains come to vigorous life. Both Goldfinger and Pussy Galore have full lives behind them, which accounts for them being where they are, and what they are. Furthermore, the central concept, the Fort Knox raid, may well have worked in real life. Granted, it involved killing the entire population of the town by poisoning the water supply, and then blasting the vault open with a tactical nuclear weapon, but within those givens it certainly seemed feasible to me.

The James Bond of Fleming's novels has been submerged under the increasingly gaudy and fantastic movies, and it is worth reminding ourselves that the man in the books was far more human, and far more interesting, than the one on the screen. Most of the original James Bond novels are still splendid reads, if a touch dated. Fleming was dead before Jumbo jets, Concordes and space shuttles arrived on the scene. Aston Martin is now owned by the Ford Motor Company, Universal Export has long departed from its HQ near Regent’s Park to a vast, and very visible, fortress on the Albert Embankment, there really has been a female "M" at the top of the Secret Intelligence Service, and the Double-0 section was probably sold by Margaret Thatcher to Group 4 or Securicor.

But that’s all right. Bond was 35 when he made his fictional debut in 1953, so he must be in his 80s by now. It's time he wrote his memoirs.

Everybody else in the SIS has.

_________________

1976: Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler

They all turned and watched him grow smaller in the distance, until he entered a shroud of mist and disappeared.

_________

AS P G WODEHOUSE once observed, there’s nothing an author has to guard himself against more carefully than the saga habit.

"The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him," Wodehouse wrote in the 1930s. "He writes a story. Another story with the same characters occurs to him, and he writes that. He feels that just one more won’t hurt him, and he writes a third. And before he knows where he is, he is down with a Saga, and no cure in sight."

Struggling authors might easily fail to see the problem. They'd love a successful saga. But there are many traps. The most lethal is the Improbability Barrier.

The Improbability Barrier

FEW HEROES have hit the Improbability Barrier harder than Clive Cussler's noble, square-jawed, two-fisted underwater super hero Dirk Pitt. He has discovered Abraham Lincoln’s mummified corpse in the Sahara desert while saving us from The End of Civilisation As We Know It; located the entire contents of the ancient Library of Alexandria in perfect condition in a cave in Texas; raised the Titanic in one piece (no mean effort, given that it sank in two pieces); discovered the Treasure of El Dorado in a cave in Baja California; and saved Washington DC from being bombarded with virulent bacteria—these being representative samples of his mighty (and improbable) deeds.

In the course of a score of best-selling adventures he has been shot so many times he is practically solid lead, been beaten up so many times his skull looks like a crushed ball of aluminium foil, and lost enough blood to transfuse an entire city,

He has escaped from a Cuban prison in an outboard-powered bathtub (I wonder where he found the bath plug?), and, in a plot twist straight out of Fleming’s Dr No, saved a NASA space shuttle from capture by the bad guys, by disabling their jamming radio signal. He has driven a vintage car down a steep ski-run while being chased by machine-gun shooting villains and survived, been shot out of the sky into the ocean while flying a vintage blimp in a hurricane and survived, been washed through hundreds of kilometres of fast-rushing under-ground river and survived—

Any one of Dirk Pitt’s adventures is wildly improbable in its own right. The odds of one man having dozens of these wildly improbable adventures is conservatively estimated (by me) to be at least a gazillion to one against. After a while, the reader begins to snigger, and when the intrepid hero hits the Improbability Barrier at Warp 7, the willing suspension of disbelief dies with him.

Nevertheless, I greatly enjoy each new entry in the Dirk Pitt saga, and have done so ever since I first picked up a copy of Raise the Titanic! some years ago. This book was a very early entry in the never-ending story, coming after Mayday!, Iceberg and Vixen 03. My present copy is a 1980 Sphere paperback, which I bought second hand for $3.50 from Mr Thrifty’s paperback exchange in Canberra in the late '80s. Raise the Titanic!, now that I re-read it for the first time in more than a decade, is not unlike a Bulldog Drummond adventure. There is the intrepid, noble, square-jawed hero, the evil villains, the McGuffin, the inevitable last-minute rescue of the glamorous heroine from A Fate Worse Than Death, and the equally inevitable climactic face-to-face encounter of good guy and bad guy.

The McGuffin

IN THIS NOVEL the McGuffin is a quantity of a rare radioactive element byzanium (so rare that it is unknown to science; perhaps Cussler ought to have called it unobtanium) which is indispensable to a new US anti-missile defence system. Geologists advise that the only known source is on the Russian island of Novaya Zemlya, in the Barents Sea. A US secret agent who is a geologist surreptitiously investigates the location, and discovers that the whole lot was dug up way back in 1912 by a bunch of miners from Colorado, no less.

It transpires that back in 1912 the miners, who had been clandestinely recruited by the French (who no doubt wanted it for their Edwardian anti-zeppelin defence system) got the stuff away from Novaya Zemlya and then decided to shake down the French Government for a lot more money. The French government, naturellement, couldn't see why it should pay a single additional sou, and set out to exterminate the miners and steal the stuff back. Hotly pursued by the French secret service, those nice people who later brought you the Rainbow Warrior tragedy, the miners flee across Europe to England. Alas, the team suffer heavy attrition at the hands of the French, and are rapidly reduced to but one man, who took passage to New York on the Titanic with his trophy.

NUMA

WHICH BRINGS US to Dirk Pitt and NUMA.

NUMA (The National Underwater and Marine Agency) is a sort of damp edition of NASA, dedicated to boldly going where no frogman has gone before. It is run by a tetchy former admiral named Sandecker, whose star employee is the said Mr Dirk Pitt©. (And I mean ©; Dirk Pitt is a registered trade mark.) The era of the free-lance adventurer of independent means is long gone; in these later more regimented days a hero has to have a "franchise". Just as James Bond is licenced to kill by the British Government, Dirk Pitt is licenced to adventure by NUMA.

Having deduced that the all-important byzanium is locked in a vault in the bowels of the Titanic, the President of the United States secretly commissions NUMA to raise the ship so that the stuff can be recovered. There’s a lot of double-talk about why it’s necessary to raise the ship, rather than simply crack open the vault in situ, but frankly I didn’t believe a word of it. Clive Cussler, an undersea salvage buff, wanted to write a story about raising the Titanic, and this is it.

In this operation, Pitt is aided and abetted by his trusty sidekick Al Giordino and by a new recruit in the hourglass shape of Dana Seagram, archaeologist. In the ironclad tradition of Cussler novels, Ms Seagram, age 31, is not just some dim bimbo for Pitt to rescue on page 256, and boink on page 285. She is a Ph.D. already at the top of her profession, and she is also a stupefyingly beautiful cupcake. Her ostensible role is to supervise the archaeological aspects of the salvage operation; her actual role is to be naked on page 253, to be rescued on page 256, and to be boinked by Dirk Pitt on page 285.

Quite different, really.

Spy vs Spy

MERELY TELLING the tale of the awe-inspiring salvage of the Titanic is not enough for Mr Cussler; lots of spy-vs-spy sub-plots and counterplots, which seem to have fallen out of an unpublished Le Carre novel, are introduced. The Russkies have woken up to what’s going on; there are US spies in the Kremlin and Russki spies in NUMA. Before you can say "George Smiley" there are Russian ships circling the small US salvage fleet poised above the Titanic. Furthermore, Hurricane Amanda, who was kicking up her heels near Bermuda during most of the expedition, is on her way north to join in the fun.

At around page 200, Cussler begins to pull all the narrative strands together. Sabotage strikes the salvage attempt, but is overcome at the last desperate minute; the Titanic bobs to the surface in one piece and wallows in the heaving sea; and the Russkies and Hurricane Amanda swoop in for the kill.

When the spume, seaweed and cordite settles, the Russkies are on board the Titanic in a Mexican standoff with Sandecker’s men, and Dirk Pitt is presumed dead in a fiery helicopter crash. Showing his true colours as a double-dyed villain, the chief of the Russki hijacking operation grabs the glamorous Dana Seagram, forces her to strip naked in front of his leering troops and Sandecker’s appalled men, and threatens to have her either gang raped or cut into small pieces, whichever it takes to force Sandecker to hand over the deeds to the ranch, or rather the byzanium.

This is naturally the cue for Pitt to rise from the dead and smite the Midianites. Dana Seagram is rescued at the last second, the bad guys are soon dead or in handcuffs, and it's time for port and cigars as the seaweed-covered Ghost of the Grand Banks is towed toward New York. It's also time for Pitt and Ms Seagram to slip into one of the Titanic's staterooms for a bit of horizontal folk-dancing; a modern super-hero has his inevitable rewards. Frankly, though, I couldn't help thinking that the linen and blankets, after sixty years at the bottom of the sea, might have been a touch soggy.

But there is one last complication. When the ship’s strongroom is opened, there proves to be no byzanium on board the Titanic after all. The last survivor had stashed it somewhere in England and left a very hazy clue in his dairy.

Pitt, with deductive skills worthy of Sherlock Holmes, solves this little problem too, and as the precious unobtanium is dug up from a grave yard in the UK he recedes nobly (and modestly) into a shroud of mist, rather like the hero in an old-time Western radio serial, "Mah work heah is done, Miz Seagram; Ah must rahd on!"

It is a preposterous novel, of course; many adventure stories of this type are inherently preposterous. But the pace is brisk enough, the rather pedestrian prose is serviceable enough, and Cussler’s paper-thin characters are just real enough, to keep you turning the pages to the very end. It's also good enough to encourage you to buy the next startling volume in the saga; perhaps not brand-new in hardback, but when it finally fronts up in paperback in a second-hand book store for, let’s say, $3.50.

________________

Table of Contents

Introduction

1915: The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan

1920: Bulldog Drummond, by "Sapper"

1922: Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini

1924: The Green Hat by Michael Arlen

1931: The Jade of Destiny, by Jeffery Farnol

1933: Lost Horizon, by James Hilton

1935: Regency Buck, by Georgette Heyer

1938: The Colossus of Arcadia, by E Phillips Oppenheim

1940: The Return of Nighthawk by Sydney Horler

1943: The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

1956: Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious

1959: Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming

1976: Raise the Titanic by Clive Cussler