A regularly irregular column of musings on (mostly) crime and thriller fiction both ancient and modern, Think of it partly as the ramblings of someone who has read more thrillers than he needed to and some so you don’t have to, and partly as a warning from history.
Ancient
From the To-Be-Read Pile
It is almost sixty years since, as a schoolboy, I was briefly tempted by the ‘counterspy novels’ of Philip McCutchan (1920-1996) which featured the exploits of Commander Esmonde Shaw. I think the title in question was Moscow Coach. Now I find myself reading Shaw’s second adventure Redcap, first published in 1961.
Firstly, I should say that the novel has no connection to the television series which ran from 1964 to 1966 and was the launching pad for the career of John Thaw, as a military policeman, nor with the thriller of the same title in 2007 which was the late Brian Callison’s last novel (and Brian had actually served in the Military Police). And it must be said that although Esmonde Shaw and James Bond both hold the naval rank of Commander, the similarities end there; Shaw is the perfect gentleman with women and although he frequently points a revolver at an enemy’s stomach, he rarely pulls a trigger – and usually loses his gun.
There are some similarities, however, between the plots of Shaw’s missions and the Bond films in that they involve world domination or nuclear threats to civilisation. In Redcap, it’s the Chinese who are beating the war drums and attempting to steal or disable a mutually-assured-destruction defence device called Radio Equipment for Defence Co-ordination Atom Powers. (R.E.D.C.A.P. – geddit?). The Redcap equipment is crated up and put on a nuclear-powered cruise liner(!) for transit to Australia where it will be housed for some ‘technical’ reason. Commander Shaw is put on board to protect it because he’s on secondment from British intelligence to the MAPIACCIND organisation, which stands for Major (Atom) Powers International Authority for Centralised Control and Inspection of Nuclear Devices. One cannot help thinking it would have been easier if he had worked for UNCLE.
En route, Shaw is mugged in Port Said, drugged and left to be eaten by vultures – escaping remarkably easily once the drugs wear off – ambushed in the Australian outback, uncovers a traitor and finally confronts the villain whose identity he has known all along. There are no nuclear explosions, world peace is secured and Shaw returns to London and his girlfriend Debonnair, who despite having a very minor role, is the most interesting character in the book.
If nothing else, reading Redcap reminded me why I had not tried another Commander Shaw novel for sixty years.
I came to much the same conclusion about the ‘Charles Hood’ thrillers of James Mayo, the pen-name of Stephen Coulter (1914-1986), who was said to be a close friend and associate of Ian Fleming. Certainly, Charles Hood was a close associate of James Bond – perhaps clone would be a better word – and was described by one reviewer as the ‘slickest of the super-Bonds’ at a time when there were plenty of fictional secret agents infiltrating the paperback bestseller lists.
Under his real name Coulter penned several noteworthy thrillers, but it was using his Mayo pen-name in the Sixties during the boom in spy fiction created by the success of the Bond films, that mass-market sales came with his art connoisseur secret agent Charles Hood who was of course, this being the Sixties and him being male, irresistible to women. In Let Sleeping Girls Lie, Hood’s second outing in 1965 (and the title should have been the first red flag), every component of the novel is James Bond turned up to eleven: the cars, the foreign locations (southern France, Venice), the girls (identical twins called Tiara and Tickle Evenly, but only one of them ‘is a nympho’...), the violence and the obligatory mega villain, a Rasputin-like figure called Zagora who actually says the line ‘It will be no surprise to you, Mr Hood, to hear that I have arranged for you to die.’
Naturally, the villain can’t just simply shoot Hood, which would be far too easy although Hood does seem to get knocked out fairly regularly. After an achingly slow duel involving earth-moving equipment in a quarry, Hood is drugged and staked out to be eaten by vultures, just as Commander Shaw was in Redcap and just like Shaw he escapes to have more adventures. In Hood’s case, only three more novels (whereas Shaw went on counter-spying in a further twenty) up to 1969 when Mayo/Coulter retired him.
I have admitted to not being a regular reader of westerns, but I have long been a fan of the thrillers and spy stories of Brian Garfield (1939-2018), so was happy to find Tripwire, from 1973, in my TRB pile. Set in Arizona and Mexico in the 1880s, this is the story of Boag, a discharged ‘Buffalo Soldier’ drifting across lawless territory and inevitably falling in with the wrong crowd – ‘Pickett’s Marauders’, a small army of bandits with plans to steal a huge shipment of gold bullion.
Boag joins the gang on the promise of a share of the gold, is quickly double-crossed and shot at ‘for target practice’ (something, being black, he’s sadly used to), but crucially only wounded, not killed. The bulk of the novel is how Boag gets his revenge, and what he sees as his rightful share of the stolen gold, on Mr Pickett and his gang, who he tracks into Mexico. Along the way Boag interacts with some fascinating characters, fights with thuggish ones, is thrown into jail and generally put through the wringer. It’s a brutal journey studded with an immense amount of detail of life and death in the Old West and you can’t help wanting Boag to succeed in his quest, although the final battle where he is alone facing huge odds, is somewhat over-the-top. You do, however, find out at last why the book is called Tripwire.
Murder She Read
I am indebted, yet again, to those generous and innovative Californian publishers Stark House Press for introducing me to two female American mystery writers of whom I was previously, and disgracefully, unaware. Both had relatively small outputs and were published during or just after the Second World War and were firmly in the ‘cozy’ camp of crime fiction which we here often wrongly appropriate as an exclusively English genre.
Two years ago, Stark House Mystery Classics imprint revived four novels (in two of their trademark double volumes) by Louisa Revell, the pen-name of Ellen Hart Smith (1910-1985), a writer who eschewed the limelight very successfully. Her writing career began with an academic biography of Charles Carroll, one of America’s Founding Fathers and [Fun Fact] the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, but history fairly quickly gave way to mystery and her first crime novel, The Bus Station Murders in 1949, introduced retired teacher Julia Tyler as her series’ amateur detective.
Amazingly, the FBI did not seem to have a file on Julia Tyler because, like the more famous Jessica Fletcher (or Miss Marple for that matter), murders seemed to follow wherever she went. But where Ms Fletcher wrote about crime, Julia Tyler read crime fiction and was wonderfully forthright in her opinions on it. {In one of her novels, she has a wonderfully acidic go at Della Street, the lovelorn secretary of Perry Mason.} Being unafraid to cite other mystery writers, often at the drop of a hat, and to take a sideways glance at some of the tropes of the genre, especially when they involve lady detectives in their mid-to-late sixties, give the books a very modern ‘meta’ feel and they are sprinkled with some excellent throw-away one-liners.
The Bus Station Murders is published in tandem with Revell’s second novel, No Pockets in a Shroud and her third and fourth titles, A Silver Spade and The Kindest Use A Knife from 1950 and 1952 make up the second volume.
Mary Collins (1908-1979), another new name on me, wrote six mysteries between 1941 and 1949, the first of which, The Fog Comes, is just republished by Stark House. Collins’ books are all set in California and whilst admired as good examples of the American domestic school of ‘had-I-but-known’ cosy crime novels, they are also interesting picture of west coast America during and just after WWII.
Modern
The Kindness of Authors
Despite the best efforts of her publisher to cancel me, I have received a copy of Murder in Purple and Gold thanks to the author herself, my old chumette Lindsey Davis.
This is the latest case for Flavia Albia, Ancient Rome’s foremost (and forthright) female investigator who has inherited all the investigative nous of her father and stubbornness of her mother when it comes to solving crimes in the Rome of AD90 under the rule of the Emperor Domitian, who gets a bad press here and probably rightly so. Just as today, in Ancient Rome a considerable number of dead bodies were found by dog walkers and when it is Flavia Albia out exercising the family mutt Barley and the dog sniffs out a corpse, Flavia realises it is a murder victim and scents a new investigation. Naturally, it is anything but straightforward as the victim is the rising star driver of the Purples chariot-racing team and jealous rivals in the other professional teams (Golds, Blues, Greens, Whites and Reds) could be suspects, not to mention the teams’ wealthy sponsors, including the emperor, and the no-doubt totally honest on-course betting industry.
Life, death and detective work in first century Rome is described in all its glory through Lindsey’s wry and twinkling eyes and the whole thing is an absolute delight. An added bonus comes in the climactic chariot race in the Circus Maximus which lacks only a Peter O’Sullevan commentary but otherwise gives Ben Hur a run for its money. Read SHOTS’ review by Kerry Hood.
We’ll Always Have Berlin
For legal reasons I was unable to attend the lavish lunch which marked the launch of Michael Ridpath’s new novel. I have, however, received a copy of Operation Berlin [Boldwood Books] which shows Michael taking a new tack in his wide-ranging thriller writing career, kicking off a new series known as ‘the Foreign Correspondent mysteries.’
Ridpath has adopted many diverse settings for his fiction, from the ruthless world of high finance and bond trading, to a series proving that Icelanders do not have a monopoly on Icelandic noir, from America to South Africa via the confines of a nuclear submarine and, yes, he has explored pre-war Germany before now in his ‘Traitors’ thrillers. Operation Berlin is more of a detective story, set in 1930, though there are hints of espionage and there are lots of those pesky Nazis lurking in the shadows, with an unlikely detective duo: Esme Carmichael, a feisty young American determined to become a foreign correspondent, and Sir Archie Laverick, a war-damaged English aristocrat soldier turned historian. They meet while Archie is in Germany researching the biography of Prussian general Blücher and Esme finds herself taking on the job of his secretary (which involves experiencing Archie’s terrifying flashbacks to WWI) and when she witnesses, at very close quarters, the murder of her best friend, she sets out to find the killer with Archie (at first) a reluctant sidekick – or perhaps it’s the other way round as this mis-matched couple bounce off each other with growing respect and affection. Read SHOTS’ review by Ali Karim.
He had (a model of) Berlin
Following the recommendation of Rob Mallows, the curator of the website the Deighton Dossier, I immediately purchased a copy of You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love by French novelist Jean-Noël Orengo, published for the first time in English by Penguin under their International Writers imprint.
It is a fascinating book which I can only describe as the novelisation of an autobiography, specifically Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, Hitler’s pet architect who became his Minister of Armaments, was tried at Nuremburg and served twenty years in Spandau prison in Berlin, though not the Berlin he had designed to last a thousand years. This is (I think) fiction without fictionalising anything and it gives mesmerising insights – or at least hints – into the mindsets and machinations of the Nazi hierarchy and the self-delusion of outwardly civilised and intelligent professionals such as Speer who were attracted like moths to the flame of brutal power.
Jean-Noël Orengo is in no doubt that Speer lied to avoid the hangman’s noose for war crimes, denying any knowledge of the Holocaust and his book also provides a detailed assessment of the role of architecture in Nazi propaganda and image-making, including the revelation (to me at least) that the famous ‘searchlight’ effect at the Nuremburg rally was designed to divert attention away from the slovenly, unfit and overweight SA troopers marching in formation.
Crime Fiction; a dog’s life
Although I have yet to see a copy, I believe that there is a new ‘Pumpernickel’ mystery out now from that legendary author-turned-agent-turned-author-again, Peter Buckman
Dead Innocent [Word of Mouth Books] is another murderous adventure for the ‘veteran’ Soho-based solicitor Leo Wengrowski, who shows no sign of letting creeping age affect his performance (and you can, as they still say in Soho, take that any way you want.) Whilst many readers will be hanging on Leo’s every wisecrack, I suspect the majority will be anxious to follow the career of Leo’s black poodle Pumpernickel, the real hero of this series and although also a veteran in years, there’s life in that old dog too.
Hot Enough For June
I am looking forward to next month’s publication of Death By Noir by Olly Smith [Baskerville] mainly because the title is irresistible, referencing as it does Pinot Noir. Perhaps not surprising as the author is a television wine expert and his fictional hero, Barclay Flint, is a wine merchant and the proprietor of The Bottle Bank in the lovely Sussex town of Lewes. If you know anything about the place, you should expect fireworks.
June will also see the latest Whitstable Pearl mystery, Murder At St Alfred’s by Julie Wassmer [Constable]. The cosy, viewer-friendly Whitstable Pearl has been a feature on certain streaming services since 2021, starring Kerry Godliman as Pearl Nolan, restauranteur an amateur detective. I have no idea if a new series is in the pipeline and of course Kerry Godliman now has a second career as the manager of that legendary rock band Spinal Tap.
Future Proof
Coming soon – well not that soon actually – in September next year (so curb your enthusiasm) will be Tramps, Seducers and Dictators from No Exit Press., an anthology of stories with one common theme: Charlie Chaplin.
Edited by Maxim Jakubowski as a follow-on from his successful Birds, Strangers and Psychos, which had the works of Alfred Hitchcock at its core, contributors include an abundance of screen and crime writing talent including Barbara Nadel, Colin Bateman, Jerome Charyn, Vaseem Khan, James Grady, Jake Arnott and even me.
The Spy Guy
When I heard that Randall Masteller had published (on Amazon) his own collection of spy stories, I just had to get hold of a copy. Randall is an old friend and the curator of the website Spy Guys & Gals, possibly the most comprehensive database of spy fiction in the world, and a source I have consulted on many an occasion.
After decades of reading and promoting spy fiction, Randall has finally made his own contribution to the genre with The Thing About Not Being A Spy (Volume I, a second is imminent), a collection of interlinked stories about the life and tradecraft of the logistics agents who service spies in the field. They are not spies themselves and have to keep reminding themselves that and they must never, ever get involved in the missions they are supporting – but of course they do.
In style and technique, the stories reminded me of the scatological approach of Frank McAuliffe in his Augustus Mandrell thrillers, with a nod to Brian Garfield’s Checkpoint Charlie stories and even Michael Gilbert’s Mr Calder & Mr Behrens anthologies. And those comparisons show that Randall knows his stuff.
Given Randall’s supreme knowledge of spy fiction, I always thought he would be hard man to surprise, but I think I managed it some years ago, when I sent him a copy of my novel Angels in Arms which was delivered personally to his North Carolina home by one of my sleeper agents in the US who just happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to the model on the cover of the book.
Football Focus
I could not resist noticing the celebrations of fans of Venezia FC on the team’s promotion to Italy’s Serie A, who took to the Grand Canal with gay abandon.
Even a die-hard Aston Villa supporter such as Lee Child would surely have to admit that the scene in Venice was classier than an open-top bus ride round Birmingham.
(As the editor of Shots is a dedicated Spurs fan, I am not allowed to comment on English football this season.)
Ciao for now,
The Ripster.
