Carter Brown’s The Hong Kong Caper

The Hong Kong Caper, published in 1962, was the second of Carter Brown’s Andy Kane novels. Andy Kane featured in only three novels which is a pity because he’s a great character. The Hong Kong Caper is a partial rewrite of his 1957 novel Blonde, Bad, and Beautiful.

Andy Kane is based in Hong Kong. This was during the days of British rule in Hong Kong. It was a rather wild and wicked city. It’s a perfect setting for a Carter Brown thriller.

Andy Kane is not quite a private eye. He’s an entrepreneur with varied business interests, some of them legal. He’s a smuggler and an adventurer. The Hong Kong Police know all about him but they don’t consider him to be a particular menace to society. He might be a smuggler but he’s never touched dope and ordinary smuggling is not considered to be a big deal.

Glamorous brunette singer Natalie Dove offers Andy a proposition. It sounds like a tall tale. A Chinese Nationalist leader making his escape by air in 1944, carrying a million dollars in a briefcase, the plane crash-landing in Kwan-Po Bay, the pilot surviving but ending up in prison and passing on the story to a fellow prisoner. The pilot was Natalie’s brother. And she has a map showing the location of the sunken briefcase.

Andy stopped believing in treasure maps about the time he started wearing long pants. But then he gets another offer that seems vaguely connected. And then a third offer, once again with the story about the million dollars. This time the story is told by a glamorous blonde, Tess Donavan.

Andy still doesn’t believe it but he has been offered several thousand dollars up front. He does believe in money. So he figures he’ll play along.

After the murder and several encounters with very nasty hoodlums and an interesting conversation with Sub-Inspector Cross regarding a Chinese secret society Andy starts to get more interested. And he does owned a powered junk and a couple of sets of scuba gear. The briefcase should be in shallow water - no more than 12 feet deep.

The whole thing would be easy except that it’s in Red Chinese waters. Andy has entered Red China illegally before but it’s always a risky proposition.

Of course with two gorgeous dangerous dames involved you know things will get lively. Especially if the two dames hate each other. Plus each of the women has a partner in on the deal and the two guys don’t seem likely to be very trustworthy. And one man has already been murdered.

This is I guess a kind of caper story. There’s plenty of action involving guns, knives and spears. And Red Chinese patrol boats, and pirates.

Andy Kane is more morally compromised than Carter Brown’s other series characters. He’s basically a charming rogue. Combined with the exotic setting this makes The Hong Kong Caper great slightly disreputable fun and I have no idea why Brown apparently lost interest in the character. Perhaps he was increasingly focused on the American market and wanted to concentrate on thrillers with American settings.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Hong Kong Caper and I warmly recommend it.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of Carter Brown’s Al Wheeler mysteries including No Harp for My Angel as well as one of his Danny Boyd PI thrillers, The Savage Salome and one of the delightfully sleazy Mavis Seidlitz lady PI books, The Bump and Grind Murders. And also one of his books featuring Hollywood troubleshooter Rick Holman, Where Did Charity Go?

Robert Tralins' Android Armageddon

Android Armageddon is a 1974 dystopian science fiction novel by Robert Tralins.

Sandor Robert Tralins (1926-2010) was an immensely prolific American writer of pulp novels, published under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms.

The story takes place on Earth’s colony planet Pulsar 143, in the city of Mnemosyne, several centuries in the future. Mnemosyne was the classical goddess of memory and that’s important.

It begins with an attempted alien invasion. The hero of the successful resistance, Doyle, is given a plum job as commandant of the Orrery. But is this a reward or a punishment? Or a means of controlling him? Mnemosyne is ruled by the Secretariat. It’s a totalitarian regime in which supreme power is vested in a super-computer. An artificial intelligence.

Dissent is brutally suppressed. As Commandant of the Orrery Doyle has his thoughts probed. He must agree to show unswerving unquestioning loyalty to the Secretariat. In reality Doyle abhors the Secretariat and everything it stands for. He has reluctantly accepted this post since it might offer possibilities for undermining the totalitarian regime in Mnemosyne. The post gives him some powers but involves huge risks.

Perhaps there are other rebels. Perhaps there is hope.

Firstly he needs to now if he can trust his girlfriend Petra. She’s been getting very close to Kagan and Kagan is definitely a man not to be trusted.

There is a secret concealed in the Orrery, a secret Doyle needs to discover. Memory is the key. An important part of the training of leaders like Doyle is mnemonics, specifically the mnemonic technique of the memory room in which objects in a room are the mnemonic code keys. Which is cool because this is a very ancient technique not used for centuries but Tralins uses it in a far future high-tech setting. In this story it’s part of the mind code, the mental training given to the elites. It’s one of a number of very cool touches in this novel.

Doyle will need to find a way to destroy, disable or neutralise the central computer but in the meantime he has to stay alive and stay out of trouble. Dissenters in this world face worse fates than prison.

There are several nice little touches. The building housing the master computer is called the Orrery, an orrery being a mechanical model of the solar system.

There are android servants everywhere, known as servomen and servomaids. Only they’re not androids. They’re human beings who have been modified to reduce their intelligence dramatically so they can function as mindless zombie drones. It’s creepy, but then this is a sinister future dystopia.

Having spent much of his career in spaceships on the Frontier, traveling at near light speed, Doyle has aged only seventeen years in the past century. This is significant because it means that Doyle remembers the past, he remembers Earth before the space colonisation began. This is one of the reasons he is determined to oppose the Secretariat. He knows from personal experience that the past was better.

For an obscure book by an obscure author Android Armageddon is a lot more complex and clever and interesting than you might expect. This is not a shoot ’em up space opera. There’s not much action but there’s suspense, lots of paranoia and a well-realised future world. The ending has a few odd touches.

Android Armageddon is above-average pulp science fiction. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Tralins’ fairly interesting 1966 sci-fi novel The Cosmozoids which deals with aliens and the paranormal and his hugely enjoyable 1966 sexy lady spy romp The Chic Chick Spy.

Philip McCutchan’s Redcap

Redcap, published in 1961, was the second of Philip McCutchan’s Commander Shaw spy thrillers. The fact that Shaw, like James Bond, is an ex-naval officer who served in the Second World War might lead one to expect him to be a Bond clone.

What’s interesting about Redcap is the time setting. It’s obviously set some time in the future. It’s not the technology - slightly futuristic technology is a common enough ingredient in spy stories with contemporary settings. But the international situation described in this novel is very very different from that of 1961. McCutchan has done a lot of speculating and extrapolating.

The problem of chronology is complicated by Shaw’s age. He has to be old enough to have served in the Second World War but young enough to still be an active field agent. Which makes the late 60s the most likely time setting.

The future setting was a bold choice since it’s the sort of thing that can date a book very quickly.

An international agreement to prevent nuclear war has been signed but it might actually work because there is a way to enforce this agreement. That’s what Redcap is for.

Redcap has to be taken to Australia. It’s too heavy and much too valuable to be entrusted to air transportation. It will go by sea, aboard the world’s first nuclear-powered passenger liner.

The clue that there is a threat to Redcap comes from Donovan, with Donovan’s daughter Judith acting as go-between. Donovan is a disgraced British spy and he’s been dead for years, only he isn’t dead. The clue is fragmentary and ambiguous but very very worrying.

And according to Donovan Karstad is involved. That’s bad. Also Lubin has disappeared, which is also bad.

There’s plenty of potential for treachery and no-one can really be trusted. Donovan was believed to be a traitor. Shaw and many others don’t believe it, but there’s no way to be sure. Karstad is Norwegian and was definitely a traitor but maybe he’s had a change of heart. Lubin is a top Russian electronics specialist and his loyalties are entirely a mystery. Judith is a sweet girl and very cute but in the world of espionage sweet cute girls can be deadly.

The passenger liner sets sail for Australia with Shaw aboard. He’s uneasy from the start. He’s fairly sure he’s being watched. The first murder naturally increases his unease.

There’s plenty of action and it’s handled pretty well. A lot of the action takes place at sea and personally I adore nautical mysteries and thrillers. McCutchan had a naval background and it shows. He has a real knack for using the sea itself as a source of menace. The action at sea is superbly done.

Shaw is a basic hero type with one weakness - he has a very delicate stomach. Overall he’s less ruthless than Bond but he has his moments. Although he has a girlfriend (her name is Debonnair Delacriox which is awesome) this is spy fiction with zero sex.

It’s fast-moving and the pace just keeps accelerating and it gets rather violent. This is a fine spy thriller and it’s highly recommended.

McCutchan wrote more than twenty Commander Shaw books and if I find any more with nautical backgrounds I’ll be grabbing them.

Johnson McCulley's Daughter of the Idol

Daughter of the Idol is a 1909 novel by Johnson McCulley, originally serialised in Railroad Man’s Magazine. Steeger Press have reprinted five Johnston McCulley novels including this one in a mammoth paperback omnibus edition, King of Chaos and Other Adventures.

Johnson McCulley (1883-1958) was a prolific American writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. He is of course most famous as the creator of Zorro.

Daughter of the Idol takes place almost entirely at sea, aboard a tramp steamer. Shipboard thrillers and adventure tales are always a joy to me.

Minding his own business on the docks in San Francisco a young lad named Roland is accidentally shanghaied aboard the tramp steamer Faraway but his uncle, the famed explorer Dick Engle, was deliberately snatched. Initially no-one knows the lad is aboard, until he is discovered by Ruth Holland. Ruth is a beautiful young lady but is very enigmatic about her presence aboard the steamer. She will not explain why things are so tense between her and Dick Engle.

The steamer is bound for a remote Pacific island. The steamer’s crew comprises natives of this island and they seem to be in awe of Ruth, as if they consider her a sacred personage.

A man named Welch, a thorough-going villain, is the prime mover in some mysterious plot. It involves an idol. Welch may be an adherent of a blood-soaked cult centred on the island. Whether he is really sincere about his allegiance to the cult or whether he’s after money or power or a woman remains uncertain.

The steamer’s skipper was in league with Welch but he’s having second thoughts.

Now the action begins and it doesn’t stop. There are gunfights. Some of the good guys get captured by the bad guys. Some of the bad guys get captured by the good guys. There are more gunfights. There are hair’s-breadth escapes. There are fistfights. There are more gunfights. And piracy.

Ruth, Uncle Dick and Roland will need to do something before they reach the island.

That’s where the executions will take place. Perhaps executions, or perhaps human sacrifices.

Dick Engle is a brave hero but he’s not infallible. Ruth is a fine feisty heroine but sometimes she jumps to conclusions. Dick and Ruth are in love but they’re not sure if they trust each other.

Roland is a brave resourceful lad. The captain of the Faraway adds some interesting uncertainty. Maybe our heroes can trust him and maybe they can’t. Welch is a pretty effective villain, ruthless and calculating rather than crazed.

McCulley knows how to handle both action and suspense and create an air of breathless excitement and danger. The nautical setting and the exotic remote island add some splendid atmosphere. There’s a plot with plenty of twists and betrayals. There’s superstition and mystery. And there’s a tangled romance.

McCulley is one of those largely forgotten adventure writers who does not deserve to anguish in obscurity.

Daughter of the Idol is a marvellous adventure yarn and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the title story from this collection, King of Chaos, and the first of McCulley’s terrific Zorro novels, The Curse of Capistrano.

Douglas Sanderson's Prey by Night

Prey by Night is a 1955 thriller written by Douglas Sanderson using the pseudonym Malcolm Douglas.

Douglas Sanderson (1920-2002) had an odd life and an odd career. He was born in England. He moved to Canada and became a Canadian citizen. Then he moved to Spain, then back to Canada, spent a brief period in the United States and then moved permanently to Spain. He originally tried his hand at “serious” literature with little success. He switched to frenetic hardboiled thrillers and enjoyed considerable success. He might be better remembered today except for the fact that he switched between his own name and two pseudonyms and at the peak of his powers as an author he wrote four novels which were only ever published in French. They sold well in France but have never been translated into English. Eventually he decided he liked drinking more than writing.

Bill Williams is an American smuggler based in Tangier. He’s 26 years old. He smuggles all kinds of things into Spain, but mostly fairly innocuous stuff like cigarettes and nylon stockings. He won’t touch narcotics. He works for the Marquesa. She’s an ageing Spanish noblewoman who isn’t really Spanish and while she’s a real marquesa the title was bought. Bill’s business partnership with her was sealed in the bedroom. That’s how she operates. If you want to be in business with her you first have to satisfy her physical appetites. Bill wasn’t happy about this part of the deal, the marquesa is thirty years older than he is, but it’s a profitable partnership.

And, much to Bill's relief, she now has a new young bed partner, a guy named Page.

Bill has a very fast boat and he knows how to handle it, with the assistance of a 17-year-old Spaniard named Paco. Paco is a fine seaman, he’s brave and he’s a good kid. Bill is not so sure about his new crewman, Griswold. Maybe he’s just a drunk, which is bad enough.

Everything goes wrong on the next smuggling run. So wrong that it can’t be bad luck.

Smuggling into Spain is dominated by a crime syndicate known as the Association. There are also independent operators, like the Marquesa. Perhaps there are others. There are independent brokers, like Silva. Competition is ruthless.

Bill knows that someone is trying to set him up. It could be any one of a dozen individuals or gangs. He doesn’t know exactly why.

It could be the Association, or Silva. Or another group. Or the Marquesa. It could be Griswold, or Page. Or Navarro, a rich man with a very expensive hobby (breeding bulls for the arena). Or Hatherton, an enigmatic Englishman, reputed to be a tough guy. Or Hatherton’s cute bed-hopping blonde wife Lavinia. Or Ferrer, who buys from the Marquesa.

He also has to worry about a Spanish cop named Blanco. Blanco appears to be honest, which is always annoying. He also seems to be efficient, which is even more annoying.

The situation is complicated by the fact that Bill is sleeping with Paco’s slightly older sister Maria. If Paco finds out he will try to kill Bill. It’s a matter of defending his sister’s honour.

Bill is a fairly tough guy but he’s not a thug and he’s not exactly a hardened criminal. He certainly doesn’t think of himself as a real criminal. He’s not a bad guy. He’s moderately smart but whether he’s smart enough remains to be seen.

It’s a game of intrigue with multiple players and nobody, not even those doing the most active conspiring, sees the complete picture. Nobody is sure who is double-crossing whom. And they’re not all motivated by greed. Some are motivated by jealousy. The Marquesa and Lavinia are motivated by lust. Which makes their actions unpredictable.

The tone is reasonably hardboiled with a touch of cynicism. There’s a nicely twisty plot, there’s suspense and there are some fine action scenes both on land and sea. Speaking personally there are few things I love more than a nautical thriller.

Prey by Night is filled with frantic action and it’s highly recommended.

James Mayo's Shamelady

Stephen Coulter (1914-1986) was an English author who wrote the five Charles Hood spy thrillers using the pseudonym James Mayo. The third of these spy novels was Shamelady, published in 1966.

I have the impression that Charles Hood’s backstory changed a little from one novel to the next.

In Shamelady he’s not exactly a spy or a secret agent or even a private eye. He works for a consortium of banks. He’s a kind of trouble shooter. It is mentioned in passing that he had worked for the Secret Service. He had killed for them, and apparently he has killed for the bankers as well.

As this story begins he has been instructed to meet a girl named Alex in New York. He has no idea what it’s all about but it presumably involves some kind of criminal activity or shady financial dealing.

Alex is apparently out of town but will be back on Boxing Day. It’s now Christmas Eve, so Hood has two days to kill. He finds himself at one of the legendary Christmas parties organised a very rich and eccentric couple, the Sessels. There are supposed to be some very friendly girls at these parties. Hood likes girls very much indeed. It’s an amusingly wild party but there is something not quite right. Hood can’t quite put his finger on what it is that makes him uneasy.

On the other hand he does meet Bonbon. She’s a charming witty very kooky redhead. He likes her a lot by the end of the evening he has discovered that she is also very good in bed.

The next day it’s back to work, arranging to meet Alex. And he discovers that she is now deceased.

This makes it even more likely that there is something big going down. Maybe Bonbon’s friend Rosario could be a lead. Rosario has become very very rich by marrying multiple times and marrying wisely.

Hood’s vague uneasiness increases. Just odd little things that worry him.

Pulling the strings is a diabolical criminal mastermind who is motivated not by money or power but by boredom. He needs to make his life exciting even if that involves extreme danger. Charles Hood has a similar outlook on life so he’s not entirely unsympathetic but on the other hand he is firmly on the side of law and order.

The plot involves gold, aeroplanes, perfume and exotic flowers (including one known as the Shamelady which opens up for you if you stroke it the right way). There’s also the island with the nude girl, the decaying chateau, some very scary henchmen, plagues of bugs and a super-computer named Lulu. Lulu is the key to various daring and insanely ambitious criminal enterprises.

This was of course 1966 so Lulu uses punch cards but this was a time when people were starting to have wild expectations of computers could do. It was also a time when it was starting to occur to some people that computers could be used for sinister purposes, such as crime.

Charles Hood is a charming womaniser. He firmly believes that the best way to get vital information from pretty female suspects is to sleep with them. And even if they don’t have useful information time spent making love to pretty girls is never time wasted. The arch-criminal likes girls as well. Everybody in this story likes girls, and the girls like men. It’s sexy in a good-natured slightly naughty way but not actually sleazy.

There’s enough action to satisfy any reasonable reader and there’s plenty of woman in peril stuff to keep the tension nice and taut. The tone is not actually tongue-in-cheek but it is witty and the plot is outrageous with some definitely bonkers touches. It’s the genuinely interesting arch-villain that makes this book really notable, and it’s a fast-paced and consistently enjoyable read. Highly recommended.

Valerian Complete Collection vol 1

The French Valérian and Laureline science fiction comic book series was written by Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières. The series was immensely popular and ran from 1967 to 2010. It was inspired to some extent by the success of Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella comics, but without the erotic overtones.

The setting is the 28th century. The city of Galaxity is the capital of Earth’s galactic empire. Science and technology have created unlimited prosperity. Government is in the hands of technocrats and scientists. In 1967 that sounded utopian. Today of course the idea of rule by technocrats and scientists sounds like a recipe for a dystopian nightmare.

The overwhelming majority of people do no work at all. They spend their entire lives in artificially induced dreams. Which also sounds a bit dystopian!

Valérian and Laureline are among the tiny majority who still do useful work. They are spatio-temporal secret agents who travel through space and time and act to prevent any tampering with time and space. Like Time Lords.

Bad Dreams was the first Valérian and Laureline adventure, published in the magazine Pilote in 1967. Valérian is sent back to the 11th century to apprehend a mad scientist, Xombul, who is making use of sorcery with the intention of taking over people’s dreams. He wants to shock them out of their dream existence (which might be a good thing but might be dangerous). And of course he wants supreme power for himself (which is definitely a bad thing).

Valérian meets a cute 11th century forest girl named Laureline. In the course of the adventure she is temporarily tuned into a unicorn and since as everybody knows unicorns can read minds she now knows that the world of the 28th century exists and she knows what it’s like. This means that she can no longer be permitted to remain in the Middle Ages, so she is recruited as a spatio-temporal agent. She and Valérian will henceforth operate as a team.

This first adventure is as much fantasy as science fiction with perhaps just a hint of the French concept of le fantastique. Magic is introduced without the least embarrassment.

The City of Shifting Waters and Earth in Flames, written in 1968, form a single adventure in two parts. Valérian and Laureline are sent to New York in 1986. Nobody really knows what happened in those times, prior to the 23rd century. That time period is a dangerous forbidden zone. They find a flooded Manhattan being looted by feral hippies.

Xombul has come up with another nefarious plan which has something to do with a lost scientific library. There are two scientific geniuses is this tale, Xombul the mad scientist and Schroeder the eccentric but certainly not evil young scientist who is on the verge of discovering the secret of time travel. Given that nothing is known of this time period perhaps at some stage he really did unlock the secret.

The American setting was not chosen randomly. Christin and Mézières had spent some considerable time in the United States and had picked up a love of the American landscape.

The third story, Empire of a Thousand Planets (dating from 1971), moves us into full-blown space opera territory. The planet Sirte is the centre of an interplanetary empire but the Sirtean had never discovered spatio-temporal travel. Now their empire is decaying. The prince’s rule is fragile and perhaps mostly illusory. The Merchants’ Guild is hatching conspiracies. And then there are the mysterious Enlighteneds, possibly a priestly caste with great powers but possibly something stranger.

It’s a confusing situation with no clearcut good guys and bad guys.

The first two stories are fun but a little tentative but by the third story the series has really hit its stride. Mézières’ visual style is becoming more confident and more flamboyant and Christin’s storytelling is becoming more ambitious. This is the European approach to comic books which is quite unconcerned with genre boundaries but very concerned with aesthetic style. Highly recommended.

In 2017 Luc Besson brought Valérian and Laureline to the big screen in the underrated Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Besson drops the time travel angle (which would have added too many complications) but he captures the overall feel of the comic wonderfully well.