Desmond Cory’s Trieste (AKA Intrigue)

Trieste (originally published as Intrigue) was published in 1954 and is the fourth of Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora spy thrillers.

Englishman Shaun Lloyd McCarthy (1928-2001) was quite a prolific author, writing under the name Desmond Cory. If you’re new to the Johnny Fedora books you might make the mistake of thinking that they’re Bond imitations. In fact the first of the Johnny Fedora books pre-dates the first Bond novel.

Trieste begins with the British arresting a Communist agitator named Panagos. They believe that he’s the head of a major subversive organisation which is planning an operation in Trieste, backed by the Soviets. The ultimate objective would be to secure Trieste for the Soviets as a naval base. The problem is that the British have zero evidence against Panagos. Then comes a surprise - the Soviets want to exchange two captured British agents for Panagos. The British are willing to make the exchange, but only if they can first put a spoke in the wheels of Panagos’s Trieste operation.

Johnny Fedora has no official standing. He’s a freelancer but for various reasons British Intelligence think he’s the right man to send to Trieste to find out what Panagos was planning. And Johnny has a personal stake in the case - one of the captured agents the Soviets are willing to exchange is his girlfriend, who also seems to be a freelance spy.

Johnny has a professional British spy, Sebastian Trout, to help him on the case.

There just don’t seem to be any leads to follow up. Johnny and Trout have an uneasy relationship with the local authorities. Johnny has a hunch there’s a woman involved somewhere but a hunch is all he has. The prisoner exchange is coming up on the 30th of the month so there’s a race against time aspect.

Once things start happening they happen quickly and there’s plenty of action. People get shot, Johnny gets arrested and somehow he has to keep a key informant alive. He was right about the woman - there is one, her name is Gisella, and she’s Panagos’s girlfriend, or maybe she isn’t really. There are some further clues but it takes a surprisingly long time for Johnny to spot their real significance. There’s a deadly marksman hunting both Johnny and the girl.

There’s action at sea, which is always fun.

The plot has a few twists, including a major one that makes Johnny realise he’d been groping in the dark.

Johnny Fedora, in this story at least, has an ambiguous official status. That gives him a certain freedom of action. It’s not specifically stated that he has a licence to kill but it’s understood that if he feels the need to do so that’s OK with the British Government. And as we will find out Johnny is very good at killing and it doesn’t bother him. He’s not particularly good at following rules, but that makes him more useful in some ways.

He’s only a part-time secret agent. He has a day job. He’s a piano player, and a pretty good one.

Trieste is a kind of transitional spy thriller. It still has some of the feel of the pre-Bond British spy fiction of the 40s and early 50s, but it also has some of the toughness of the new breed of Cold War spy novels (the later Johnny Fedora books become a bit more Bond-like). The violence is only moderately graphic. There’s no actual sex, but there’s a degree of sexual frankness in regard to Gisella’s relations with men.

Trieste is a good solid Cold War spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two of the later Johnny Fedora novels, Hammerhead and Undertow. They’re both pretty good.

Don Tracy’s Criss-Cross

Criss-Cross is a 1934 noir novel by Don Tracy, an American writer who seems to have been overshadowed by Hammett, Cain et al.

I confess that I know little about Don Tracy (1905-76) other than the fact that he wrote quite a few noir novels, some historical novels and some TV and movie novelisations.

Noir fiction had not yet been given a name and at the time this would have been thought of as hardboiled crime. But noir fiction already existed and Criss-Cross is the real deal. It’s also a heist story.

The protagonist-narrator is a washed-up boxer who goes by the name of Johnny Thompson. Johnny is a total loser and he’s as dumb as a rock but he thinks he’s pretty smart, which is of course very noir.

He does admit that he’s not smart when it comes to Anna. He’s crazy in love with her. Anna goes out with him when he has money. When he doesn’t have money he can forget about it. They have a good time together but Anna’s idea of a good time with a guy always involves money. And even when he has money she won’t go to bed with him. There’s clearly no future in this for Johnny but he’s obsessed with this dame.

Johnny has a rival for Anna’s affections, Slim. Slim always has plenty of cash. Johnny can’t figure out where Slim gets all this money.

Johnny works as a security guard in an armoured car. It pays OK, but not enough if he hopes to get Anna. He also has a kid brother to worry about.

Then Johnny is offered a chance to make some real money. It’s highly illegal and it involves that armoured car but the plan is fool-proof. This story is full of guys who are dumb but think they’re smart.

You know that in a heist story the heist will not go off the way it’s supposed to but in this case things go off the rails in an interesting and devious manner.

The Anna situation gets complicated. She gets married to Slim but as soon as she’s married she starts sleeping with Johnny. Johnny convinces himself that this means she’s starting to love him. The Anna situation is definitely going to complicate the heist.

Johnny is not really evil, he’s not even by nature criminally inclined, but he just can’t think straight where Anna is involved. And he keeps thinking he’s got things all figured out.

There’s only one decent character in this tale. Bertha is a whore but she’s a really nice girl and she’s crazy about Johnny. She’s decent and honest but Johnny doesn’t want her.

Anna is of course the femme fatale. The femme fatale had not yet been given a name but she definitely existed. In movies she was called the vamp. The most interesting femmes fatales are always the ones that the reader can’t be sure of. They might turn out to be evil spider women or they might turn out to have valid reasons for their actions or they might turn out to be good girls who have landed themselves in a jam. Anna is one of the ones with this touch of ambiguity. She appears to be heartless and scheming but you just never know what she might do.

There’s a bit of action and a bit of violence but mostly this is a twisted tale of unhealthy love and lust, and betrayal. And double crosses. With a nicely twisted ending.

There’s also plenty of noir desperation, delusionalism and typical noir bad decision-making and poor judgment.

Criss-Cross was filmed in 1949 by the great Robert Siodmak. Obviously some changes were made but it’s a superb example of film noir.

Criss-Cross is top-notch noir fiction. Highly recommended.

Stark House have re-issued this novel paired with another Don Tracy title, Road Trip, under their Staccato imprint in their Jazz Age Noir series.

Joseph E. Kelleam’s Hunters Out of Time

Joseph E. Kelleam’s Hunters Out of Time (apparently also published as The Little Men) appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories in February 1959 and in book form in 1960.

Joseph E. Kelleam (1913-1975) was an American science fiction writer of whom I know nothing.

Jack Odin had been an army doctor. The Korean War convinced him that he did not want to be either a soldier or a doctor. Luckily for Jack he has a lot of money so he’s taking some time off to think. Then he receives some mysterious visitors. There’s a lovely young woman named Maya. She is accompanied by four dwarves and a wounded man. Jack patches the man up. His visitors depart but Maya leaves him with a fancy key, assuring him that he will need it.

Much to his surprise Jack is later arrested for aiding and abetting a murderer. That wounded man had killed a very high-ranking general. The case against Jack is flimsy and the charges are soon dismissed.

Then his visitors turn up again. They invite him to visit their land. Jack, being rather bored with life (and being rather taken with Maya’s beauty), accepts.

It turns out that their land is the land of Opal, deep beneath the surface of the Earth. At first it seems like a kind of underground fairy kingdom, complete with a miniature artificial sun.

Opal is neither a utopia nor a dystopia. It’s no better or worse than our world. There is violence and ambition and treachery but to Jack it appears to have a sense of purpose missing in our world.

The dwarves are not human. They are Neeblings. They are the little people of so many legends. Maya is not human either. She is a Bron. The Bron come from a very distant planet. The Bron and the Neeblings share the world of Opal but there are plenty of tensions between them.

The inhabitants of Opal have always avoided contact with humans. Opal now faces a deadly threat and they may mo longer able to avoid such contact. There is also a bitter power struggle going on in Opal. Jack Odin is somewhat caught in the middle and being human he is not entirely trusted by either the Bron or the Neeblings.

It’s the fact that Opal is neither a paradise nor a hell that is this novels’s most interesting feature. The author also throws all kinds of interesting things into the mix - the legends of Atlantis, the folk tales of the little people, sea serpents, dinosaurs, a giant spaceship, Norse mythology and some very advanced technology.

Having been written in 1959 it’s fair to say that to some degree it reflects the anxieties of its time, such as the Cold War. But happily Kelleam has no particular political axe to grind.

There’s some reasonably adept world-building. There is action (including plenty of sword-fights) and there is some low-key romance.

There’s also quite a bit of focus on questions of trust and loyalty. And plenty of emphasis on the doomed (or potentially doomed) lost civilisation angle.

Hunters Out of Time is by no means a neglected classic but it’s reasonably enjoyable and it’s worth a look.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Milton Lesser’s rather good Slaves to the Metal Horde in a two-novel paperback edition.

Dell Holland's The Far Out Ones

The Far Out Ones by Dell Holland is included in Stark House’s three-novel paperback edition A Beatnik Trio. It was published in 1963.

The authorship of late 50 and early 60s sleaze novels can be challenging to untangle. Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block, prior to finding fame as crime writers, made a very good living churning out sleaze fiction using pseudonyms such as Andrew Shaw. They figured it would be cool if they could get other writers to ghost-write some of these novels. Which is how William R. Coons came into the picture. He wrote sleaze novels as Andrew Shaw and as Dell Holland. The Far Out Ones is one of the books he wrote as Dell Holland.

It has to be said that The Far Out Ones doesn’t have a huge amount to do with beatniks. The only beatnik is Jim, and he never considered himself a fully-fledged beatnik.

Jim is hitchhiking and gets picked up by two gorgeous young women, Sue and Joan. Sue and Joan are headed for New York. The three need a place to stay for night and end up at Zach’s Inn. The inn is hard to miss, what with the nude girl on the roof and all. Not a picture or a statue but a real nude girl. Her name is Emmy. She’s fixing the roof for her pa. Emmy isn’t keen on wearing clothes.

Her pa is Sam. He has a distant cousin by the name of Charlie working for him as handyman. Charlie belongs to the local tribe but they’re a bit embarrassed by him. Every time he ventures into the woods he gets lost. Charlie has no more idea how to survive in the woods than any greenhorn city boy.

Jim is keen to get Joan into bed. Sam and Charlie are equally keen to bed Sue. They all get their way. Sue is a very broadminded girl and she’s happy to have two men alternating as her bed partners. Joan is a bit more prim and proper but Jim’s charm wins her over and she’s soon shedding her clothes for him.

It’s all rather cosy, until disaster strikes. But it’s not a real disaster, since Sam ends up with quite a bit of money. Sam likes making his friends happy so they all head for new York. They end up in Greenwich Village. Emmy comes along as well - she has dreams of making it as a dancer.

Joan is the only one with any keenness for work. Emmy does however get a job as a belly dancer. Jim has decided to become a famous playwright. It sounds like a good way to make a living, as long as he doesn’t actually have to write plays. He thinks he’s found a way to make his plan work.

Along the way there’s lots of sex for everybody.

Despite the fact that some later scenes take place in the Village and despite Jim’s semi-beatnik status it’s a stretch to call this a beatnik novel. It’s basically just a sleaze novel.

A sleaze novel with major comic overtones. In fact at times it approaches farce. And it is genuinely amusing and pleasingly crazy and frenetic.

It’s also reasonably sexy, with the sex being described moderately graphic (by 1963 standards). One nice thing is that everybody enjoys the sex. The women enjoy it every bit as much as the men. This is a cheerfully amoral good-natured feel-good story. Nobody gets punished for having sex. Nobody gets punished for choosing freedom rather than the daily grind of a 9 to 5 job. It’s OK to have a good time. In that respect, in its rejection of the conventional social norms of its day, I guess it could be considered a sort of counterculture or beatnik novel.

This isn’t a work with any literary aspirations but it’s a lot of fun. Highly recommended.

Modesty Blaise: Warlords of Phoenix

Warlords of Phoenix collects three Modesty Blaise comic-strip stories from the tail end of the 60s. If you’ve only read the Modesty Blaise novels (which are wonderful) I urge you to check out her comic-strip adventures which are also excellent.

Peter O’Donnell created the character in 1963. He wrote the comic strip until 2001. It became the last of its breed - the ongoing comic-strip story unfolding three panels at a time in a daily newspaper.

Halfway through the second story in this collection, Warlords of Phoenix, the strip’s original artist Jim Holdaway passed away. He was replaced by a Spanish artist, Enrique Badía Romero. The result was a very slight change in style, with Modesty’s appearance subtly changed.

It’s also noticeable that there’s just a bit more nudity compared to the earlier strips.

The 1969 story Takeover was the last to be drawn entirely by Jim Holdaway whose collaboration with O’Donnell went back to the 1950s when O’Donnell was writing the popular Romeo Brown comic strip.

In this adventure the Mafia is trying to take over organised crime in Britain. O’Donnell portrays the Mafiosi as smooth business types (albeit with a brutal and ruthless streak) capable of passing as reasonably respectable citizens. In 1969 this was still a slightly unusual approach in fiction dealing with the Mob.

The Mafia’s methods are sufficiently ruthless to discourage informers who might be tempted to talk to the police. Modesty will have to offer herself up as bait. Willie with then spring the trap closed. Her plan is sound enough, provided the Mafia guys are not suspicious enough to scent a trap. But these Mafiosi are very suspicious indeed and Modesty and Willie could be in trouble.

What’s most interesting about this story is that Modesty’s criminal past is a crucial plot ingredient. Her criminal past is also the key to her whole attitude towards the case but I won’t say any more about that for fear of revealing spoilers.

In Warlords of Phoenix Modesty and Willie are in Japan, visiting a very dear friend (and famed judo master). He’s 70 years old but he’s still a formidable master of the art.

His granddaughter’s boyfriend tries to murder her, apparently because she found out about his involvement with an organisation called Phoenix. Nobody knows anything at all about this organisation.

This organisation does however know quite a bit about Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. They have plans to use Modesty and Willie. Modesty and Willie will need all of their combat skills and experience - they are going to come up against some very highly trained killers.

There are plenty of clever action scenes.

Willie the Djinn takes Modesty and Willie into the desert, to a sheikh’s palace. It all started with the sheikh’s obsession with playing games with Modesty. Not sinister games - he genuinely just wants to play backgammon with her.

Modesty and Willie are caught up in palace plots and they have a whole troupe of pretty English dancing girls (the delightfully named Dollyrockers) to protect as well. And Willie is mistaken for a djinn.

There’s plenty of mayhem and the Dollyrockers join in with great enthusiasm. These girls just love having the chance to use submachine guns.

By this time O’Donnell was well and truly in the groove and these are three fine adventures. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed two other early Modesty Blaise comic-strip collections, The Gabriel Set-Up and The Black Pearl, as well as the first three novels - Modesty Blaise, Sabre-Tooth and I, Lucifer.

Thorp McClusky’s Loot of the Vampire

Thorp McClusky’s short novel Loot of the Vampire was published in two parts in Weird Tales in 1936. It’s a vampire story in a contemporary big-city American setting.

Thorp McClusky (1906-1975) is a rather obscure American writer whose works appeared in pulp magazines in the 1930s.

It begins with a jewel robbery. The jeweller has been discussing the sale of a very valuable string of pearls to a European nobleman. The jeweller is found dead and the pearls are gone. The strange thing is that there’s no obvious way the killer could have made his escape.

Even more curious is the fact that the jeweller seemed to be suffering from a very serious case of anaemia. It’s almost as if there’s no blood at all in the body.

Then on the following day the dead jeweller turns up at the jewellery story, very much alive. The police commissioner and Detective-Lieutenant Peters are both puzzled and alarmed.

They do have a suspect, a Count Woertz. The count is about to hold a mind-reading session at a swank charity party. Lieutenant Peters poses as a guy wanting to have his mind read and discovers, to his consternation, that the count really can read minds.

Peters has an interest in the occult and he wonders if possibly they’re dealing with a vampire.

There’s no solid evidence against the count and the police commissioner has another problem. He’s in love with a sweet girl named Mary. They’re going to be married. The count has threatened to steal Mary away from the commissioner and the big worry is that he may be able to do just that by using some form of mind control.

There’s not much more than this to the plot. There are a couple of slightly creepy moments. There’s no action to speak of. There’s no reign of terror carried out by the vampire.

And to be honest there’s not much suspense. We don’t get enough of a sense that Mary is in real danger, and we don’t get enough of the feeling that the natural order is being threatened and that’s something I consider to be an essential element in supernatural horror.

The sea chase is the highlight and it’s not too badly done.

The vampire in this tale conforms to some of the rules of established vampire lore as it stood at the time, but not all. This vampire cannot tolerate sunlight but on the other hand he’s totally indifferent to garlic. The mirror stuff is an interesting variation on the usual idea. I like vampire stories that vary the rules a bit.

Loot of the Vampire is OK but it doesn’t quite deliver the goods. It’s recommended purely for its historical interest and its curiosity value.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with The Man Who Made Maniacs in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions.

This story seems to belong to a very short-lived 1930s genre, the weird detective story. These were basically hardboiled detective stories with some supernatural and horror elements added for extra spice. That’s actually a promising combination.

If the weird detective story genre attracts you then you should check out Off-Trail Publications’ volume Cult of the Corpses which includes two novellas of this type by Maxwell Hawkins and they’re both far superior to Loot of the Vampire.

Fletcher Flora's Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is a slightly noirish murder mystery by Fletcher Flora. It was published by Avon Books in 1958.

Fletcher Flora (1914-1969) was an American pulp writer who wrote twenty-one rather varied novels including some noir fiction.

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is the story of three men who have sex with a young woman (we will later discover her name is Avis Pisano) at an isolated resort hotel. The three are all roughly the same age and curiously enough all are known by the nickname Curly. They have other things in common. All live in the neighbouring town of Rutherford. All three intend to marry Lauren Haig, a pretty heiress. One of the three murders Avis.

They all have motives, since in all three cases their chances of marrying Lauren might be prejudiced if it became known that they’d slept with a young woman of Avis’s dubious reputation.

The three men are all rather unpleasant and they all have issues with women but their issues are quite different and they’re unpleasant in different ways.

There was a witness, or at least an almost-witness.

Avis was killed soon after arriving in Rutherford by train. At the train station was Purvy Stubbs. Purvy is a nice enough fellow but he’s a bit of a misfit and he’s obsessed by trains. He watches all the trains come in. He saw Avis leave the train. He saw something else - a glimpse of a man. He cannot identify the man but that man might be, in fact probably is, the killer. Purvy’s evidence is not worth much to the sheriff, but if Purvy ever remembers a bit more about the incident his evidence might be crucial.

Mostly the book gives us a reasonable character sketch of each suspect. We realise that any one of the three might have been capable of murder but we still have no idea which of them is actually guilty.

We also learn a little about Avis. Her reputation for sleeping with lots of men was well deserved but she was really just a sad lonely girl looking for love in all the wrong places.

The novel does of course reflect the late 1950s small town attitude towards sex. That attitude is that sex is just wrong unless you’re married. Having sex outside of marriage makes a woman a tramp. Avis is not the only woman in the book who is condemned for her sexual misbehaviour. Phyllis Bagley is not only regarded as a tramp but as a whore, even though she is certainly not a whore. She does however have an active sex life and that’s enough to give her a bad reputation.

There’s quite a bit to admire in this novel. We get to know the three suspects pretty well and the identity of the murderer is skilfully concealed until the past page.

There is one major weakness. In a murder mystery I like to feel at the end that the solution feels right. That the murderer really is the person who would have been most likely to commit such a crime. In this case I felt the solution was a bit random. There was no real reason why he should been the killer rather than one of the other two suspects. And since this is not a true fair-play puzzle-plot mystery I was left feeling unsatisfied. There was no evidence to convince me of the killer’s guilt and no psychological reason to believe that he and only he could have killed Avis Pisano.

On the other hand you need to wonder what exactly the author’s intentions were. It seems quite likely that Flora didn’t particularly care about the identity of the murderer. He was more interested in the sexual tensions that drive the characters. All of the major characters are motivated directly or indirectly by sex or by anxiety about sex. And Flora handles this kind of material rather skilfully.

This novel is hardboiled but it would be a bit of a stretch to call it noir, although it does have a certain sordid squalid quality to it which might qualify it as marginally noir.

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is quite entertaining with at least some suspense but it misses out on greatness and it’s the weakest of the Fletcher Flora novels I’ve read so far. At least it’s the weakest considered as noir fiction. Considered as a psychological and sexual melodrama it’s much more successful. So I’m going to recommend it and it might even sneak into the highly recommended category if psychosexual melodrama is your thing.

I’ve read a couple of Fetcher Flora’s other novels. Leave Her To Hell is a fine slightly hardboiled private eye murder mystery. Killing Cousins is a witty lighthearted murder mystery with dashes of whimsy and black comedy and it’s excellent. So he’s a rather varied writer.

Let Me Kill You, Sweetheart is part of a stark House Noir triple-novel paperback edition along with two other Fletcher Flora novels, Leave Her To Hell and Take Me Home.