Showing posts with label Thrillers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thrillers. Show all posts

14 March 2023

James Moffatt Wins the Race


The Marathon Murder
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1972
124 pages

On January 12, 1972, Canadian writer James Moffatt appeared on BBC 2's Late Night Line-Up.  The public broadcaster had a habit of wiping tape back then – most famously David Bowie's January 3, 1973 Top of the Pops performance of 'The Jean Genie' – but footage survives. At the time, Moffatt was the biggest paperback writer living in Britain. Skinhead was his greatest success.


The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers describes Skinhead as a "million-copy seller." I don't doubt it. Every Brit I know around my age has read Skinhead.

Skinhead was published in 1970. By the time of his Late Night Line-Up appearance, Moffatt had followed it with Suedehead (1971) and Boot Boys (1972); Skinhead Escapades (1972), Skinhead Girls (1972), Top Gear Skin (1973), Trouble for Skinhead (1973), and many more followed, all published under "Richard Allen."

Moffatt once claimed that as a child he'd earned third prize in a Toronto Star short story competition. In one interview he spoke of studying law at Queen's, but in another he said it was chemistry. Moffatt talked about writing for pulps in New York, living in Hollywood, and being the publisher and editor of a bowling magazine.

Was any of this repeated on Late Night Line-Up? Segments of the 12 January1972 broadcast were used in the 1996 BBC2 documentary 'Skinhead Farewell,' but not enough to get a real handle on all that went down that night.


Because the episode itself hasn't been posted online, I rely on the publisher's note:


Added to this is Moffat's four-page author's note, in which he claims that The Marathon Murder began as a sort of spur of the moment thing with host Will Wyatt throwing out an an idea. "I had precisely five seconds in which to think of a title and write the first few sentences ON CAMERA!" writes Moffatt. 

Here are those first few sentences:
Munich was but two weeks away. This left Harry Nolan with two weeks solid training to get himself in shape. He had not been too keen of late to keep himself in shape because he had problems.
It's not much of a start. This gruff Canadian, a self-described veteran of hard-boiled American pulps, writes: "Munich was but two weeks away" and "He had not been too keen of late to keep himself in shape." Reading these words, I'm almost surprised that Moffatt used "two weeks" and not "a fortnight."

Anyway, here's my fix:
Munich was two weeks away. This left Harry Nolan fourteen days to get in shape, but he had problems.
It may be that Moffatt was going after word count; his thirty-seven to my nineteen. New English Library describes The Marathon Murder as a novel, but at 38,000 words it is more accurately a novella. The low number surprises in that, when divided by seven, it amounts to fewer than 5400 words per day. Two months earlier, in a Daily Telegraph Magazine profile, Moffatt claimed ten thousand words as his daily output. He repeated that very same figure on the Late Night Line-Up appearance.

The writer at his desk.
Late Night Line-Up, 12 January 1972
The Marathon Murder was written when the Olympic ideal of amateurism still held. Hero Harry Nolan, who ranks amongst the very best long distance runners on the planet, is an English office worker. His wife, Emily, has left him for another man. He worries that this will... um, affect his performance. 

Terry Grayson is the other hero. A BBC journalist with no background in sport, for whatever reason he's been assigned to cover the marathon. Where Harry pines for Emily, Terry is stuck on some bird named Gloria. He just can't get over her, yet happily accepts leggy Sandra into his bed: "He had no illusions regarding their relationship. It was fleeting like fame. A fast, furious, fornicating union that had no basis in fact." Terry is surprised when Sandra follows him to Munich.

The Marathon Murder was written seven months before the start of the 1972 Olympic Games. It imagines violence, but in no way anticipates the actual horrors. At time of publication, Moffatt's likening the Olympic Village to a hastily constructed kibbutz would not have been chilling.


At some point in his Late Night Round-Up appearance Moffatt stands next to a New English Library spinner-rack."These are some of the 250 books I've written these past twenty years," he says. "During the last year I've written eight, nine books, due to the fact I haven't been too well." The words hint at his future. A drinker, Moffatt's addiction got the better of him. His final book, Mod Rule, appeared in 1980, after which he went silent. He died thirteen years later at the age of seventy-one.

James Moffatt (right) in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, 19 November 197
The Marathon Murder is no speedy read. A tough slog, it took me two weeks to reach the end.

I was outpaced by the author.

Trivia: Harry Nolan is a fan of James Bond and Silas Manners, the latter being a British spy who features in Moffatt's The Sleeping Bomb (1970) and Justice for a Dead Spy (1971).


Object and Access: A cheap mass market paperback, typical of its time, the last four pages are given over to other New English Library titles, including Skinhead, Suedehead, and Boot Boys

I purchased my copy last October for £5.00 from a Lincolnshire bookseller. As of this writing, all of two copies are listed for sale online. 

WorldCat suggests that no library, Canadian or otherwise, holds a copy.

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06 March 2023

The Great Canadian Author Photo and Bio?


Purchased last week to treat myself. Lord knows I deserve it. Above is the cover of the first and only British edition of Hot Freeze by Martin Brett. Published in 1954 by Max Reinhardt, it follows Dodd, Mead's first American edition by a matter of weeks. I prefer the latter, but only for the dame.


I first read Hot Freeze in 2011, roughly nine years after the author died. It's the very best work of post-war Canadian noir, those by Brian Moore and David Montrose included. Four years later, I helped return it to print as part of the Véhicule Press Ricochet Books series. It is the only edition to be published under Douglas Sanderson, the author's true name. 

A few months later, Ricochet brought back Blondes Are My Trouble (original title: The Darker Traffic), the sequel to Hot Freeze.

Blondes Are My Trouble is the second-best work of post-war Canadian noir.

Sanderson is an unlikely top dog. A transplanted Brit, he began writing thrillers after the commercial failure of his literary debut, Dark Passions Subdue (1952). He claimed the turn toward genre was done on a dare. If true, it sure paid off; throughout the decades, he produced nearly two dozen, most of which enjoyed French translation.

Mon cadavre au Canada [Hot Freeze]
Martin Brett [Douglas Sanderson; trans Bruno Martin]
Paris: Gallimard, 1955
I wrote the intro to the Ricochet Hot Freeze and invited John Norris to contribute another for Blondes Are My Trouble. Greg Shepard of Stark House Press has done more than anyone in reviving interest in Sanderson, republishing nine Sanderson novels, featuring additional material by himself, Kevin Burton Smith, Paul Charoff, Jonas Westover, and the author's son John D. Sanderson. This, I believe, forms the bulk of Sanderson scholarship. What else have we got? Never mind The Canadian EncyclopediaThe Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, and W.H. New's Companion to Canadian Literature, not even Wikipedia recognizes Sanderson.

No, I'm wrong. The French Wikipedia has a Martin Brett entry – very informative it is, too.

I reference all this because after all my years researching Sanderson, the brief Max Reinhardt author bio brought some revelations.


That is one great author photo.

12 October 2022

Quebec City Noir


Whispering City
Horace Brown
Pickering, ON: Global Publishing, 1947
190 pages

Whispering City may be Canada's very first film noir. This 75-year-old paperback may be the very first novelization of a Canadian film. The heroine of both is Mary Roberts, a young crime reporter with Quebec City newspaper l'Information. Mary is preparing to leave work one day when she receives a call that a woman has been hit by a truck. The accident victim, faded vidette Renée Brancourt, was once a big deal in Quebec until her lover, Robert Marchand, plunged over Montmorency Falls. The struggle to accept his death led Renée to be institutionalized. In recent years, she'd been living in a squalid flat on rue Sous-le-Cap in Quebec's Lower Town.

La rue Sous-le-Cap. Quebec City, 1947

Renée has held firm to her belief that Robert's death was no accident. She tells Mary as much from her Hôtel-Dieu hospital bed, pointing an accusing finger at Albert Frédéric.

Surely not! The man is not only the most respected lawyer in Quebec, he's a patron of the arts!

Frédéric is currently supporting talented Michel Lacoste, whose Quebec Concerto will soon be making its debut at the Palais Montcalm. Unfortunately, the composer's work on final revisions s stymied by Blanche, his shrew of a wife. Just you try working on your concerto with big band music blaring in the background. Can't be done.

Michel breaks her 78. She slaps him. He storms out, ties one on, and shows up in the wee hours at Frédéric's palatial home. It isn't long before Michel passes out. When he does, Frédéric dons the composer's overcoat and sneaks off to the Lacoste flat. His intent is to murder Blanche, just as he had Robert Marchand all those years earlier, but he arrives to find she's committed suicide. A note is pinned to her pillow, which Frédéric quickly pockets.

The following morning, Frédéric convinces a hungover and confused Michel that he killed his wife in a fit of rage. The lawyer then offers the composer a deal: Frédéric will work to save Michel from the hangman if he kills Mary Roberts. The reporter's investigation of the old Marchand murder is getting too close to the truth.


The story and screenplay are straight out of Hollywood – Americans George Zuckerman and Michael Lennox wrote the former; Americans Rian James and Leonard Lee wrote the latter – but adapt well to Quebec City.

Brown sticks close to the script, though there are departures. He improves on the dialogue and wisely does away with the talkative sleigh driver who introduces the film. Brown gives Mary Roberts a backstory as an American who had begun her career writing for a New York tabloid. In one memorable scene not featured in the film, Mary and Frédéric discuss Canadian painters. If anything, Brown depicts the lawyer as a more sinister figure – clearly a psychopath – making the book all the more dark.

Whispering City is far from a great film – its current 6.2 rating on IMDb seems fair – though I must say it gets better with each viewing. See for yourself; the film is now in the public domain. Of the muddy prints available on YouTube, this appears to be the best:


Sadly, Brown's novelization is nowhere near so accessible. This is a shame because his Whispering City improves on the film. It's easily the best Horace Brown novel I've read.

I wouldn't be surprised that it gets better with each reading.

Dedication: 

Paul L'Anglais was the producer of Whispering City and its French-language version La Forteresse.

Fun fact: In 1952, the film Whispering City was rereleased under the title Crime City. Seems a bit unfair to Quebec, especially when one considers that there's only one criminal.


Object: 
A mass market paperback bound in thin glossy covers. Whispering City is one of a very few books published by Brown's Global Publishing Company. Curiously, the spine features the name of its distributor, Streamline Books. I purchased my copy a year ago from a Burlington, Ontario bookseller. Price: US$89.95.

The novel is preceded by an enthusiastic foreword by the author followed by a "CAMERA-QUIZZ" in which readers are challenged to place twelve stills from the film in the correct order.

Don't mean to brag, but I had no trouble.

Access: The University of Calgary has a copy.

30 May 2022

Walking in on Virginia Box and Baird Rodd



The Girl From H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied"
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1974
112 pages 

I first visited the UK in 1974, arriving on a British Airways jet still painted in BOAC colours. My mother had brought us – my sister and myself – to meet relatives and friends of our late father. She gave me fifteen pounds, by far the most money I'd ever held held, which I spent it on a hardcover copy of the most recent Guinness Book of Records, a SHADO Interceptor, and a SHADO 2 Mobile.

The SHADO Dinkys have proven good investments – I have them still – but if I could go back in time, I would buy every copy of Skinhead, Suedehead, Demo, Boot Boys, Skinhead Escapes, Skinhead Girls, Glam, Smoothies, Sorts, Teeny Bopper Idol, Top Gear Skin, Trouble for Skinhead, and Skinhead Farewell I could find. Written by Canadian James Moffatt, sold for 30p, few can be purchased for under one hundred quid today. 

The Girl from H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied" was published during that 1974 summer in England. The second novel in the series, Moffatt presumes that the reader has read the first (right). I had not, but found it took little time to get up to speed. H.A.R.D. is the Hemisphere Administration for Regional Defence. Virginia Box – "leggy, busty blonde" – is its most valued agent. Baird Rodd is her superior. He sits on a "phallic-backed chair" behind a buttock-shaped "erotic desk."

Juvenile stuff, right? But things turn very dark in the fourth and fifth pages with Virginia working to procure an abortion for Ima Kissoff. Here the uninitiated are given a sense of what transpired in the the first Virginia Box novel. A Soviet agent, Ima was defeated by H.A.R.D., and at some point was raped by a man named Willi Kumm.

The Girl from H.A.R.D.: Virginia Box and the "Unsatisfied" is a lighter read. Our heroine is assigned to infiltrate Connie and the "Unsatisfied" (always in quotation marks), a rock band suspected of having ties with T.R.U.S.S. (Terrorism, Revolution and Underground Specialists in Sabotage). Much is made about lead singer Connie Linguistam being a lesbian, as are T.R.U.S.S. higher-ups Dolores Glamm and Magda Hott:
It stank of Rodd manipulation. As if her boss had deliberately put the computers to work and punched Box against lesbian and waited for a tray of cards to provide him with some inner, perverted sense of achievement.
May as well add that Ima Kissoff is also a lesbian.

Virginia's value to the agency is a sexuality so great that it can destroy creepy H.A.R.D. scientist Dr Spill's "sex computer" Exita (EXItments Transmitted into Action). Everyone is attracted to Virgina Box and wants to bed her. Club owner Dick Long gets lucky, but only because the agent was feeling amorous. There are no sex scenes, nor is there anything particularly sexy. Nothing else is so hot or inept as this passage:
Quickly now, she dressed. When she finished she postured before the mirrors again. The small, uplift brassiere did nothing except emphasise how firm her breasts really were and hoe exciting their nipples could be when fully awakened. The transparent blouse let every man see this. And the mini-skirt only served too whet appetites which could not, after one glance, have failed to be already whetted. Curvaceous legs, more curvaceous thighs beckoned sensually.
     "You're a sight for sore, lecherous eyes," she told her glassy self.
Late in the novel, Moffatt Rodd decides Virginia must uncover the identity of the man funding T.R.U.S.S. This she does by determining that his true initials are the reverse of those in his false name.

"'That's all you had to work on?' the man asked incredulously."

Yep.

All in all a frustrating, disappointing read. And not because it didn't last long.


Trivia:
The Girl from H.A.R.D. was retired after a third adventure, Perfect Assignment (1975), in which she crosses paths with Perfect Laye, queen of the London underworld. 

Object and Access: A slim softcover. If WorldCat is to believed  – why should it? – only the National Library of Scotland has a copy. Mine was bought four years ago. I see only one copy listed for sale online. At US$9.96 it might seem a bargain, but the bookseller lists the shipping from New Zealand to Canada at an even US$37.00. 

Related posts:

12 October 2021

A Shadow Moves Through a Shadowy Underworld




The Shadow
Arthur Stringer
New York: Century, 1913
302 pages

Time was when Jim Blake could pass unnoticed through the seedier side of New York. He'd hobnob with dips, yeggs, till-tappers, and red-lighters. Blake befriended ticket snips, queer shovers, hotel beats, bank sneaks, keister-crackers, dummy chuckers, sun gazers and schlaum workers. He studied their routines, their tricks, their hang-outs, their histories, and got to know the Tammany heelers, "the men with 'pull,' the lads who were to be 'pounded' and the lads who were to be let alone, the men in touch with the 'Senator,' and the gangs with the fall money always at hand."

All this was when he was a Secret Service man with the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. That job ended – rather he ended it – when the press began reporting on his exploits. Blake pretended that he wasn't encouraging the coverage, but his higher-ups at the Bureau were no dummies.

Good thing he'd made those connections at Tammany Hall.

Blake left the Secret Service to become Third Deputy Commissioner in the New York Police Department. His fame increased. There were newspaper features, magazine pieces, and even a Broadway play based on his exploits. Blake never forgot standing, in private box, to acknowledge the applause of an admiring audience.

But this is all backstory. Years have passed, times have changed.

The early pages of the The Shadow find our protagonist in decline. Not long after joining the NYPD, Blake was elevated to Second Deputy Commissioner, but there his career stalled. He'd known to throw in his lot with the Tammany crowd, but that was the extent of his political savvy. Younger members of the force have come to see Blake and his crude methods as relics from an earlier time. He's even been put down by a cop on the beat:
"You call yourself a gun! A gun! why, you’re only a park gun! That’s all you are, a broken-down bluff, an ornamental has-been, a park gun for kids to play ’round!"

The Cavalier, 21 September 1912
Stringer encourages the reader to share this impression with an opening scene in which an exhausted Blake summons a former lover, Elsie Verriner (a/k/a Chaddy Cravath; a/k/a Charlotte Carruthers). Years earlier, Blake had picked her up as an accomplice of con man and bank thief Connie Binhart. Elsie had pleaded that she'd change her ways. Blake had been taken in by her pretty eyes, protected her from the law, had fallen in love, and had gone so far as to propose. Elsie was reluctant, Blake pressed, and then she returned to Connie Binhart.

Never-Fail-Blake (New York: McKinlay, Stone & MacKenzie, [c. 1928])
Again, this was years ago, which is not to say that all is forgiven or forgotten. Blake comes down hard on Elsie, demanding that she tell him just where her old partner in crime has been hiding. The last seven months have seen Binhart chloroform a woman, shoot a bank detective, and make off with $180,000. The Commissioner is under pressure to capture the crook. When Copeland, the First Deputy, fails, Blake steps up, seeing the capture of Binhart as a means of reestablishing his old reputation. Under threat of arrest for an unrelated crime, Elsie hands over a letter Binhart has written from Montreal.

Blake makes for Montreal, only to learn that the crook has decamped for Winnipeg. At Winnipeg, he's told that Binhart is on his way to Calgary. No dummy, Blake realizes he's been set up for failure, most likely by Copeland. Because returning to New York would only add to his humiliation, Blake takes a train to Chicago, where he begins his own inquiries into Binhart's whereabouts. It's here that the chase really begins, taking the Second Deputy through the more seedier locales of the United States, Brazil, Central America, and the Far East. 

The Shadow follows The Wife Traders (1937) and The Devastator (1945) as the third Stringer read this year. I'm glad I gave it a go. While those disappointed, The Shadow proved entertaining, imaginative, exciting, and highly atmospheric. If nothing else, read Chapter XIII, set on a ship running guns to Ecuador. This is Stringer at the height of his talent.

Anyone with an interest in the criminal underworld and its slang will enjoy, though I do warn that racial epithets feature. I admired Stringer's disregard of convention. Blake's life will be saved by a sexy female assassin in Shanghai. Elsie will reappear – reformed – as an agent for the Treasury Department. Both disappear well before the happy ending.

No women feature.

Were you expecting a love story?

Trivia: The return address on Binhart's letter is 381 King Edward Avenue, Westmount. Part of the plant is that the letter was posted from Montreal's King Edward Hotel, not King Edward Avenue. Neither avenue nor hotel exist outside the pages of the novel.

Object: A bulky hardcover purchased earlier this year from the Princeton Antiques Bookshop. Price: US20.00 (w/ a further US$25.00 for shipping). Much as I'm happy to add it to my library, how is this right?

Access: There was a Bell & Cockburn edition, but I've never seen it. While I've yet to find evidence that the Century edition of The Shadow enjoyed a second printing, in terms of sales this novel looks to be one of Stringer's most successful. It first appeared in a shorter version in the pages of Cavalier (September 21 - October 12, 1912). Century's first American edition followed in January 1913. Nine years later, cheapo publisher A.L. Burt reissued the novel under the superior title Never-Fail Blake. It last appeared under that same title as part of a set of Stringer novels, "Supertales [sic] of Modern Mystery," published in the late 'twenties by McKinlay, Stone & MacKenzie.

As I write, two copies of the Century edition are being offered online. Neither is in wonderful condition, but they seem worth the $20 asking price. Copies of Never-Fail-Blake are best ignored. I don't imagine anyone is tempted by this:


The Shadow is held by Library and Archives Canada and is fairly common in our university libraries. Curiously, the Canadian War Museum, the Institut National de la recherche scientifique and École nationale d'administration publique also have copies. What's that about?

Public library users will find that only the Toronto Public Library serves.

The Shadow can be read online – gratis – through the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. 

13 July 2021

Fumbling Towards Legacy



Legacy of Fear
Garnett Weston
New York: W S Mill/William Morrow, 1950
245 pages

The jacket illustration suggests a gothic romance, but Legacy of Fear is a thriller. Its protagonist is no-nonsense American war vet Duff Catleigh. With the fighting over, he's returned to the States vowing to never again leave its borders. And yet, the novel's opening scene finds Duff on the cabin deck of the Princess Marguerite, a passenger ship of undetermined size, as it makes the short voyage from Seattle to Vancouver Island. Duff was talked into making the trip by Callender, his business partner: "You've got a knack of finding things, I haven't."

Their business is antique furniture.

"We haven't had a shipment of English or European antiques for years," says Callender. "We're stocked up with Colonial and New England and Mexican and a lot of hybrid junk I'm ashamed to have around." Because he's the tougher negotiator – so insists Callender – Duff makes from their New York office to the American West Coast, thence to Canada.


Aboard the Princess Marguerite, he spots a woman, "tall and slender with a curious rhythm, faintly undulant, in her walk, as if she moved to the sound of music audible to her ears alone." Duff pretends not to notice – and pretends not to notice again when the woman ejects a man from her cabin. That man as Temple Moxx, an inquisitive lawyer whom Duff had met earlier.

The Princess Marguerite reaches its destination early that evening. Duff decides to walk to the hotel at which he's made a reservation. Along the way, he interrupts a kidnapping attempt. The intended victim, Temple Moxx, flees the scene, leaving the newly arrived antique dealer to deal with Bob Brown, the constable walking the beat.

Later that same evening, Duff accompanies Brown to Moxx's flat in the Thunderbird Arms. The constable is looking to investigate the thwarted abduction, but finds the lawyer something less than forthcoming.

Duff  is disgusted by it all. He makes for his hotel, and dodges a knife thrown by a "Chinaman" he recognizes as one of Moxx's attackers. Duff retrieves the knife, returns to the Thunderbird Arms, tosses it it on Moxx's dining room table, and again leaves in disgust. Back at his hotel, Duff sees the woman from the Princess Marguerite getting into a limo. As the car drives away, he notices she's being followed. Turning around, Duff again sees the Chinaman – this time stealing out of the hotel with the woman's luggage. The thief disappears into a fish-and-chips restaurant. Duff follows, orders a meal which turns out to be drugged, and loses consciousness.

Our hero awakens bound in a storeroom. He's rescued by Constable Brown – now off-duty – and together they uncover a brothel/opium den. Brown returns to the station to alert his superiors. Duff returns to his hotel room to find his luggage gone.

That's an awful lot for one evening.

Thrillers with this much action have little room for character. As a tough guy with a passion for antiques, Duff is atypical, right? Brown is an honest cop, who likes to do detective work in his leisure time. That's different, right? What of the woman from the Princess Marguerite? Well, her name is Maureen O'Donnell. Curious gait aside, she's a conventional young Irish lass of a type that will be familiar to the reader. Maureen has made the journey to Vancouver Island after learning that her long-lost great-uncle, Philem O'Donnell, is alive.

Well, barely alive.

Philem lies in his death bed, believing that there is no kin to whom he can leave his vast estate. Moxx, who happens to be Philem O'Donnell's lawyer, has his eyes on his client's land, and so tries to prevent Maureen from seeing her great-uncle.

He's not alone.

Amongst other characters are John Hambly, Moxx's law partner (he's bad), sea captain Victor Mycroft (also bad), crime boss Sin Gun Pow (bad, obviously), Eurasian courtesan Vera (bad), calligrapher Mr Wu (bad), and Philem O'Donald's servants Donald and Morgan (both bad). Moxx too has a servant, Ling Chi, a seventy-year-old "houseboy." I can't say whether he's good or bad, though I certainly recognized him from old American movies and comic books:
"Missie Hambly, he call. Come after you have chow. You eatie quick now for he come. He catch you at chow, he say. 'No thank you; no have chow. Not hungry at all,' he say. Then he sit down an' eat allee sammee pig."
Ling Chi surprised me greatly because Garnett Weston wrote both the story and screenplay for Daughter of Shanghai (1937). Praised for its portrayal of Chinese-Americans, in 2006 it was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

I really like this film. If you have the time:

To be fair to Weston, Sin Gun Pow is no stereotype, nor is Vera, nor the girls working in the brothel. This is not to say that they have much flesh. How could they? As I've suggested, action crowds character. Things happen in Legacy of Fear, but too much for the four days in which the novel takes place. Both Maureen and Duff are drugged twice and kidnapped twice. Moxx too is drugged. He's rescued by Duff. May as well add that Duff suffers two blows to the head, and loses consciousness both times. Duff falls for Maureen, a woman he'd not so much as spoken twenty-four hours earlier. He proposes. She accepts. They're in love.

Like everything in this novel, the climax comes fast. It spoils nothing to reveal that Brown again comes to the rescue.

The final chapter isn't so much a denouement as a postscript. Callender shows up at Duff's hotel. He was worried by about Duff. The last paragraph – just two sentences – occur after Duff introduces Maureen to his business partner:
Smiling, he lifted the Irish girl's hand and kissed it gracefully. Only a man with a Vandyke beard could do it so well.
I have no idea what this means.

Is Callender bad?
   
Dedication: 


Edward T. Lowe is best remembered as a producer and screenwriter. In the latter role, his greatest accomplishments are House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945); both penned in late career. Lowe and Weston's overlap in writing Bulldog Drummond films. Though they never wrote together, Lowe did produce the Weston-penned Bulldog Drummond in Africa (1938) and Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (1939).

Lowe also produced Daughter of Shanghai.


Trivia: The Princess Marguerite docks in "Port Albert," which is clearly Victoria. Duff stays at an unnamed hotel, which is clearly The Empress. I think the obfuscation is explained by Weston's portrayal of Victoria as a city in which tourists and their belongings disappear with regularity (often from the  unnamed hotel).  

Humour: The increasingly unreliable WorldCat provides this information on Legacy of Fear:
Summary: A third baseman is sick with anxiety about whether or not to help his team by using his knack for knowing where the batter is going to hit the ball.

Rating: (not yet rated) 0 with reviews - Be the first.

Subjects: Baseball — Fiction
Object: Bound in red boards, typical of its time. To these eyes, the uncredited dust jacket anticipates Psycho. The rear flap has an advert for Poisonous Relations by Joanna Cannan. The back cover provides a second sales pitch for Poisonous Relations, then tries to sell three more Morrow Mysteries:


My copy was purchased in May from Scene of the Crime Books in St Catharine, Ontario. Price: US$40.00. 

Access:
Legacy of Fear first appeared as an eight-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post (6 May - 24 June 1950). James R Bingham did the illustrations. Here's the first:


The rest are just as good (see the illustration above in which Catleigh strikes a similar pose when dodging a knife).

As far as I can determine, the Mill/Morrow edition enjoyed just one printing. There have been no other editions, though the novel did join Christianna Brand's Cat And Mouse, and Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the One-Eyed Witness in the Detective Book Club's January 1951 3-in-1 omnibus. 

Library and Archives Canada has a copy of the Mill/Morrow, as do the Toronto Public Library, the Vancouver Public Library, the University of New Brunswick, McMaster University, the University of Alberta, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Victoria.

As of this writing, no used copies were being offered for sale online.

02 July 2021

Have Bomb – Will Travel



This Suitcase is Going to Explode
Tom Ardies
Calabasas, CA: Brash Books, 2021
220 pages

Of all the books I've read in 2021, This Suitcase is Going to Explode has the best title by far. It follows Their Man in the White House as the second novel to feature journalist and sometime secret agent Charlie Sparrow. Our hero wasn't doing so well at the end of that first adventure. Had Sparrow been institutionalized? I don't quite remember. What I can say with certainty is that he was in a very bad place. The woman he loved had been killed and a man he knew to be a Russian plant had been elected President of the United States.

This Suitcase is Going to Explode opens with Sparrow back working for Morley, the head of CI-2, a secret American intelligence agency. Both are in a darkened room watching poorly edited surveillance footage of a frail, elderly man wandering slowly about the streets of Washington, DC. Where Sparrow sees a tourist, Morley sees a threat.

The old man is a German nuclear scientist by the name of Erik R. Schuler. In 1942, Morley was involved in a risky effort to steal Schuler away from the Nazis. Make no mistake, the scientist wanted escape. Schuler so hated Nazi Germany that he risked his life to join the Americans in the race to build the first atomic bomb. With the German surrender in May of 1945, Schuler breathed a sigh of relief, believing that he'd worked on a weapon that would never be used.

Then came Hiroshima.

Then came Nagasaki.

And then, after writing a letter condemning the United States for its use of the bomb, Schuler disappeared. The missing scientist's name was quickly scrubbed from the history of the Manhattan Project. Morley didn't know if Schuler was alive or dead until the footage arrived on his desk. What's most disconcerting is that neither he nor the agency has any idea who sent it.

English, the first assigned to find Schuler, is assumed to have had a live grenade shoved up his rectum.  It looks that way. Sparrow has much better luck in that he not only tracks down the scientist, but manages to bring him in – alive – to the Washington mansion Morley is using as a front.     

Schuler proves to be a confused old man whose actions are prompted by instructions received through an earpiece. He isn't all there, yet manages to relay with clarity that suitcases containing nuclear bombs have been placed in cities throughout the United States. Did Schuler, have something to do with these devices? He says not, but when questioned further appears to have forgotten about them entirely. Scars suggest he's had a bilateral temporal lobectomy.    

I enjoyed This Suitcase is Going to Explode even more than Their Man in the White House. The writing is tighter and the novel has a greater reliance on dialogue.

I do like dialogue.

Interviews at time of publication have Ardies describing his Sparrow thrillers as something of a lark. Perhaps they were. There's certainly a good amount of fun to be had in the reading. Early on, Sparrow is tasked with driving home Volrich, an egghead who's been probing Dr Schuler's damaged brain:
Volrich raised his newly acquired pistol and sighted down the barrel. His finger tightened on the trigger and he began chanting out a deliberate count. "One... two... three..."
     Is that thing loaded?" I asked.
     "Of course," Volrich said. "I thought that was one of the rules. 'You'll never kill anyone with an empty gun.'" His eye moved back to the gunsight. "Four... five...
     "Is it? I haven't looked in the rulebook lately."
     "Your problem," Volrich said. "One of your many problems..." He closed his eyes and squeezed as hard as he could. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. "How long does it take to kill a man?"
     We had about a minute more to wait. I took a last drag and stubbed out my cigarette. "It all depends. But, I'll tell you one thing. You just took too long."
Volrich is a prig. When he's had enough, Sparrow pushes "Magic Violins of Villafontana [sic]" into the tape deck. 


I made a point of tracking down the recording...


...and listening to it as I read the rest of the scene. As the Magic Violins play, we get several more pages of their exchange, beginning with this:
"You may need the gun, " I said the. "The best idea is not to think about it. If you take time to think it will be too late."
     Volrich removed his pipe. The stem made a small circular motion. "With all this protection..."
     "It could happen, I said. "So don't count, huh? Don't think at all..."
     He looked at me with disgust.
You just know Volrich is going to die.

I prefer The Magic Violins' A Night at the Villa Fontana myself, but that has everything to do with the cover. 


Having come to know Sparrow through Their Man in the White House and This Suitcase is Going to Explode, I'm betting he would agree. He appears for the last time in the 1973 thriller Pandemic.

I'm looking forward to getting to know him even better.   

Object and Access: An attractive trade-sized paperback, the Brash Books edition is the first in 45 years. It was sent to me by the publisher, along with three other Ardies reissues. Having now read the novel – I'd never encountered a copy of a previous edition – I'm happy to add it to my collection.

This Suitcase is Going to Explode
was first published in 1972 by McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and Doubleday (United States). Two years later, PaperJacks and Panther published Canadian and UK mass market editions. Curiously, it wasn't until 1976 that Fawcett issued the first American mass market. The publisher made up for the tardiness with a really cool hologram cover (right).

Used copies of Doubleday's American first are being offered online at prices ranging from US$3.00 to US$10.45, but all look to be in rotten shape. The much more common Fawcett is more expensive – something to do with that hologram cover, I expect. Decent copies hover in the ten to twenty dollar range, though some booksellers are asking for much more. Some joker in Florida wants US$100.94 for a 46-year-old copy he claims is "Brand New!"

The McClelland & Stewart, PaperJacks and Panther editions are nowhere in sight, though I once managed of capture this petite screenshot of the elusive PaperJacks edition:


Reminds me of Logan's Run

My advice is to purchase the Brash Books edition.

A French translation, Une valise qui explose, was published in 1973 by Hachette. Are we to assume the nuclear weapon was retrieved from a baggage carousel?


Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, and sixteen of our universities hold copies. Sadly, the Vancouver Public Library – its main branch, just a short walk from the Vancouver Sun, at which Ardies worked – hasn't one copy of his twelve novels. This Suitcase is Going to Explode is more common south of the border, I was interested to discover that those serving at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico will find it in their library.

No Canadian library has a copy of Une valise qui explose.

02 December 2020

Nazis Threaten from Beyond the Grave!



The Sleeping Bomb
James Moffatt
London: New English Library, 1970
125 pages

Jim used to say, "It's a business, it's the way I make my money, and I can live this way. I mean, people who write hardbacks can take a very, very long time to write them, which is very nice if you've got a good income behind you. Jim didn't have. I mean, he simply wrote to live, and he enjoyed doing it.
— Derry Moffatt, 1996 
The Sleeping Bomb appeared at news agents a few months after the author's pseudonymously published Skinhead. I wonder whether Moffatt knew by that time that he'd scored a smash hit. Skinhead was easily his biggest seller, spawning Suedehead (1971), Boot Boys (1972) Skinhead Escapes (1972) Skinhead Girls (1972), Top Gear Skin (1973) Trouble for Skinhead (1973) Skinhead Farewell (1974), and Dragon Skins (1975).

Even today, a half-century later, skinheads hold Skinhead and its sequels in high regard.

The Sleeping Bomb is a lesser work. Bereft of braces and Doc Martins, it begins on the other side of the pond – beneath the Hudson River, to be exact – with the discovery of a thirty-year-old one-man Nazi submarine during the construction of a new tunnel linking New York and New Jersey.

CIA agent Paul Henderson is assigned the case.

Why the CIA?

I have a theory – which is mine – that Moffatt knew he was out of his element when it came to responsibilities, jurisdictions, command structures, and the like. For this reason, he sets the novel in not-so-distant 1975, a year in which the armed forces of Canada, the United States, Mexican, and the United Kingdom fall under the centralized authority of the North Atlantic Defence Alliance. Intelligence agencies are being unified in a similar manner, which explains how Henderson ends up working under a Brit named Silas Manners

Not Silas Marner.

Not Miss Manners.

Because the sub is armed and booby-trapped, its hull cannot be breached. Dials, some broken, indicate that it contains a time bomb that is set to explode at some point in 1975. Whether government, intelligence or military, no one knows just  just what will happen, but everyone is sure it'll be really, really bad. 

The situation is so dire that I wondered why Henderson and Manner were left on their own to figure it all out. Restructuring, perhaps. As in any Richard Rohmer novel, the pair spend a good amount of time flying from place to place in an effort to get to the bottom of things. In their travels, they learn that the sub carries a "parasitic bomb" which will kill everyone within an area amounting to 250,000 square kilometres. 

The Americans published The Sleeping Bomb as The Cambri Plot. I mention this because because Cambri  – "Project Cambri" – is referenced a couple of times early in the novel.

Sure seems important. The ABC Movie of the Week President of the United States has a conniption when Paul Henderson let's slip that he's heard about it:
"WHAT!! Where did you hear that name, Henderson?"
   Paul wished to hell he'd kept his big mouth shut. "In General Herschfeld's office, sir. I overheard it when I paid a visit to him..."
   "Have you mentioned this to your colleagues?"
   "No, sir!"
   "Thank God!" The president's heavy breathing could be heard clearly.
Project Cambri involves rockets that can land on a pinprick. Their purpose is to carry documents and diplomats that might otherwise be intercepted by the Soviets.

That Project Cambri – note: not "The Cambri Plot" – is barely mentioned must have seemed strange to American readers. It vanishes in the early pages, only to reappear as the climax approaches. With three pages to go, I was interrupted by Kiefer, our nine-month-old Schnauzer. We played, and then went for a long walk.

As we made our way along our lonely rural road, I thought of everything that was wrong with the novel. I wondered whether visitors to East Germany were never searched. I tried to imagine Henderson piloting a locomotive across several hundred meters of railway ties, and then managing to get it back in the tracks.

Yeah, that happens.

More incredible was the Nazi plan, which involves planting a time bomb during the dying days of the Second World War and then waiting, waiting, waiting... The detonation, thirty years later, is intended to both bring about the reunification of a country that hadn't yet been divided and bring the world to its knees. Why not just set the bomb off in 1945? Why not kill millions and threaten millions more? Wouldn't that have brought the war to a sudden end? Wouldn't that have given Hitler the upper hand?

I'll never understand Nazis; James Moffatt's Nazis included.

Favourite passage: "CRAAAAASH! Wood splintered, flew in every direction. CRUUUUMP!"

Trivia I: New English Library's cover copy (below) was clearly written by someone who had not read the novel. The bomb would cover 250,000 square miles, not one thousand.

No neo-Nazis figure.             


Trivia II: Silas Manners reappears in Moffatt's Justice for a Dead Spy (London: New English Library, 1971).

Object: A slim, cheap mass market paperback. The novel itself is followed by three pages of adverts for other New English Library books.

Isn't this tempting!


Access: The Sleeping Bomb enjoyed one lone printing. Five copies are listed for sale online at prices ranging from £3.95 to £6.19. Condition isn't much of a factor.

The Cambri Plot was published in 1973 by Belmont Tower. Copies of that edition range from US$4.10 to US$55.42.

The novel last appeared as a Spanish translation, La Vengganza de Hitler, "una novela escalofriante," published in Mexico City in 1974 by Novaro.

Whether academic or public, not one copy of any is held by a Canadian library.