Dark Duet by Peter Cheyney (Pan, 1958)

(For the Fontana edition of the same book, go here.)

COUNTER ESPIONAGE!

IN THIS BUSINESS YOU'RE EITHER A BRAVE MAN ... OR A DEAD ONE

A look of intense surprise came over Mrs Marques's face.  Then her mouth opened.

Her face twisted in supreme agony for a split second; then she slumped sideways on the settee.

You have to be as tough as seven devils in hell for Process 5 ... but it's artistic.

"Process 5" is murder... of course!

The Saint and Scotland Yard by Leslie Charteris (Pan, 1951)

THE SAINT VERSUS SCOTLAND YARD (originally entitled The Holy Terror), tells how Simon Templar relieves crooks of their ill-gotten gains and, while thus helping Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard, at the same time receives a fair proportion for himself and his girl assistant Patricia Holm.  Part I tells how he settles accounts with a professional blackmailer and murderer called the Scorpion and is thereby enabled to pay his income-tax.  In Part II he foils a giant currency swindle, but incidentally leaves a dead man and other casualties to be explained by the exasperated Teal.  In Part III he confronts two diamond-smuggling gangsters after a murder in a train ; Inspector Teal butts in and is fooled, while the Saint takes one of the gangsters on a wild car-ride ; Teal is finally checkmated on the great liner Berengaria and is left to open a strangely filled trunk labelled with his name.

The copy on the back cover of this book is so exhaustive it reads more like a synopsis than a blurb!  The Saint vs Scotland Yard is comprised of three loosely-connected novellas, in which Simon Templar foils the villains and the law, and escapes with the loot.  And his "girl assistant"?  Actually it's made clear that she is his live-in lover, an arrangement that is common today, but must have raised a few eyebrows back when this was written.

No wonder "The Saint" series became so popular.  The character must have been so much fun for respectable and law-abiding citizens to identify with!

Four Books by Agatha Christie (Pan, 1955-1960)

And.... the Lifeline Bookfair continued!  Here I have another four paperbacks by Agatha Christie:

Five Little Pigs (1955)

Is the floating head meant to be Poirot?  Somehow I never pictured him as wearing glasses.

FIVE LITTLE PIGS starts with Carla Lemarchant calling on the famous detective Hercule Poirot.  She tells him she is really the daughter of the painter Amyas Crale for whose murder, sixteen years ago, her mother Caroline was sentenced to death.  Carla, convinced of her mother's innocence and eager to clear her name, persuades Poirot to investigate the case.  It appears that there are five people who are concerned (hence the book's title) from the nursery-rhyme about the five little pigs).  They are: Philip Blake, Crales's greatest friend; Philip's elder brother, Meredith; Elsa Greer, "the girl in the case", who is now Lady Dittisham; Cecilia Williams, the governess; and Angela Warren, Caroline's half-sister.  Poirot interviews each of the five.  Then each provides for him a written narrative of the events leading up to Crale's murder.  Finally, Poirot reconstructs the crime and reaches his startling conclusion.  Whether you will guess the solution before it is revealed will depend on your ability to avoid being deceived by the 'double twist' at the story's climax.

... And the back cover contains a solid block of text, ticking of all the main plot points and characters one by one.  Really, why buy the book when you can get a complete summary of the story on the back cover?

The Secret of Chimneys (1956)

THE SECRET OF CHIMNEYS.  This is Agatha Christie at her mysterious best.  Anthony Cade, who liked an exciting life, was in Bulawayo escorting a group of tiresome tourists for Castle's Select Tours when Jimmy McGrath, an old friend, turned up with an attractive offer: £250 if he would carry to a London publisher the memoirs of Count Stylpitch, late Prime Minister of Herzoslovakia.  Anthony jumps at it, and also agrees to find a lady named Virginia Revel and return to her some letters misguidedly bequeathed to McGrath as possible blackmail material.  He hasn't been in London long before the letters are stolen from him, and Virginia, a beautiful widow, finds a dead man in her study—shot with a revolver engraved with her name.  Then a Hersoslovakian envoy is shot at 'Chimneys', one of England's stately homes.  From there on, this light-hearted thriller moves at a terrific pace.  There are detectives French, British and American ; characters gay, scatter-brained, sinister and odious.  And there are murders, clues, secret passages, a fabulous jewel, a mysterious rose emblem, a curious organization called the Comrades of the Red Hand, an international jewel-thief called King Victor, and impersonations, assassinations and machinations.  At the end of it all Anthony, who has done most of the work and kept everyone (including the reader) guessing, claims a double reward ; a lovely lady and a very, very strange new job.

Another solid and pedestrian block of prose, this time listing all the story elements in one of Christie's early thrillers.  "But wait!  There's more!"

The ABC Murders (1959)

MR HERCULE POIROT

        YOU FANCY YOURSELF, DON'T YOU, AT SOLVING MYSTERIES THAT ARE TOO DIFFICULT FOR OUR POOR THICKHEADED  BRITISH POLICE?  LET US SEE, MR. CLEVER POIROT, JUST HOW CLEVER YOU CAN BE.  PERHAPS YOU'LL FIND THIS NUT TOO HARD TO CRACK.  LOOK OUT FOR ANDOVER ON THE 21ST OF THE MONTH

YOURS, ETC.,

A B C  

This letter disturbs the famous detective.  Sure enough, a Mrs. Archer is murdered at Andover on the 21st. 

A second lettter announces a murder at Bexhill: and Betty Barnard is found strangled. 

Then a third, at Churston, the victim being Sir Carmichael Clarke... a fourth, at Doncaster on the day of the great St. Leger race. 

Beside the corpse each time lies an ABC railway guide open at the name of the place where the crime occurs. 

A B C D... How far through the alphabet will the crazy murderer get?  Will his challenge to Poirot succeed?

Now this is better.  The back cover tells you just enough to spark your interest.   And The ABC Murders is one of Christie's more intriguing whodunnits, too. 

The Hound of Death (1960)

Here is Agatha Christie in a different mood.

Her first story, THE HOUND OF DEATH, is fair warning that she intends to make you shiver and think!

Each of the twelve stories underlines the remarkable versatility of this very remarkable writer.  Some, like THE RED SIGNAL and THE FOURTH MAN, may make you shift uneasily in your chair.  Others, like the ironic WIRELESS, will give you grim satisfaction. 

Tucked away in the middle, like a bonus, is a story which is clearly the origin of her world-wide stage and screen success, WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION.

And this is a volume of short stories, so we can forgive the blurb writer for selecting a handful of stories and telling us how we're going to react to them.  What really grabbed me was the picture on the front cover.  It's not often you see pictures of frightened men on the covers of books, and this chap is so plainly terrified he has got me intrigued!

The Stars are Dark by Peter Cheyney (Pan, 1948)

I found this at the Lifeline bookfair:

Its a bit of an oddity, because it's a paperback with a - gasp! - dust jacket!  I've never encountered one like this before, and I suspect I won't find a second one in a hurry.

THE STARS ARE DARK belongs to Peter Cheyney's 'Dark' series, by which word he denotes his stories of Secret Service and counter-espionage. His books are always based on fact, to an extent that would alarm his readers if they believed it; indeed, he only forsakes fact when it would be a little too incredible to be presented as fiction.  Here he gives a glimpse of some of the strange and deadly things that are perpetuated in the name of war; his characters are the men and women who wore no uniforms and won no medals, who were prepared to sacrifice everything, who stood to gain precisely nothing.  The story is told in that tense, gripping style that is his hallmark.

A sailor has arrived in Britain from Nazi-occupied Morocco, and says he has some intelligence on enemy troops stationed there.  The question is: can he be believed?  Or is he peddling misinformation?  This is what our agents set out to discover, and the plot involves several layers of deception, and more than one double-cross.

As far as spy stories go, this book stands a lot closer to John Le Carré than Ian Fleming.   There's no glamour here, no travel to exotic locations, no high-tech gadgets.  Instead The Stars are Dark is set in wartime Britain, and the action takes place in some decidedly un-glamorous locales.  What's more, two agents are killed in the course of this story, and a third appears to be sliding slowly into depression as he realises the long-term cover he has adopted has left him isolated from everything he holds dear.

However—this book was first published in 1943, and for obvious reasons the author couldn't let the Nazis win.  So there is a happy ending of sorts: most of the protagonists survive, and the villains are thwarted.  One character even gets to escape the world of espionage which is the best anyone in The Stars are Dark could hope for.

The Green Ribbon by Edgar Wallace (Arrow, 1957)

 

She inherited a fortune--& sinister misfortune...

Young, wealthy and beautiful Edna Gray suddenly found herself, like a fly, caught in a web of sinister intrigue.  New to the racing game, she found that one of her tenants, Elijah Goodie--the famous racing owner and trainer--was indulging in strange, nocturnal activities...

And alone in the dark Perrywig Caves--she awaited a horrible death.

Well might Our Heroine be afraid--she's being pursued by a floating man emerging out of what appears to be a pink radioactive cloud!

As Edgar Wallace thrillers go, this one isn't bad mainly because the plot is halfway believable.  Criminals have set up syndicates to cheat at the races.  However Edgar Wallace can't resist adding a few over-the-top flourishes to this basic story--his chief villain is slain by panthers!

Alias the Saint by Leslie Charteris (Pan, 1953)

ALIAS THE SAINT tells of three adventures of Simon Templar.  In "The Story of a Dead Man' we find the Saint supervising an office in which many irregular things take place; there is a network of mystery about the firm of Vanney's Ltd. and Pamela Marlowe, who is employed there as a secretary, is very puzzled--as indeed she has a good reason to be, for she and the Saint are soon in a very dangerous situation, shared (curiously enough) by Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal of Scotland Yard.  "The Impossible Crime" displays the Saint pitting his wits against a gang of smuggling crooks; there is an amazing battle in a London square, where a night porter is shot dead.  "The National Debt" opens with the Saint making a trip to a quiet seaside village, hot on the track of three men who have kidnapped a girl analytical chemist whom they hope to compel to carry out a nefarious scheme.

Oh look!  It's The Saint.  Younger readers might not have heard of him, but older readers over a certain age will probably remember him well.  They might even have watched a young Roger Moore playing The Saint (aka Simon Templar) in the TV series of the same name.

The three novellas in this collection come from fairly early on in The Saint's career.  They were first published in the early 1930s, and people who recall Templar's smoother, newer, incarnations might be surprised at how much of a roughneck he is in this book.  He is not adverse to working on the wrong side of the law, and is quite prepared to use lethal violence if he feels it is necessary.  It is quite clear that it is only his own cunning that keeps him safe from the law--as well as the villains he tackles.  Because, criminal though he is, Templar is also one of the Good Guys, and someone you'd want on your side when the going gets tough.

(This is a fairly early Pan paperback.  I only have one older in my collection!)

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie (Pan, 1959)

Found in a charity shop on a shelf full of Christie paperbacks:

THE mysterious man in the brown suit is a link between a fatal accident at a London Underground station and the body of a strangled woman found at a Member of Parliament's lonely country house.

Enterprising Anne Beddingfeld, back by a newspaper magnate, follows clues leading to South Africa, and there finds herself plunged into a highly dangerous Secret Service adventure.

First published early in Agatha Christie's career in 1924, this book was written while she was still experimenting with different genres.  It is a thriller rather than a classic whodunnit--and her heroine is an enterprising amateur caught in the middle of things rather than a professional detective.  Readers of Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series will find this a rather different kind of read!

The Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart (Hodder, 1964)

Found in a Salvos Store this weekend:

 

Now this is awkward!  The blurbs on the back of this book tell us what the Daily Express said about this book, and gives us a paragraph in praise of the author, but it has nothing at all actually about the book:

The Ivy Tree

"has the ideal thriller blend of plot, suspense, character drawing and good writing... it opens with the impact of a rifle report on a calm summer's day and drives to its climax of action with compelling urgency."

 Daily Express

Mary Stewart, 

author of 'The Moonspinners', has found success with every word.  Her books have been translated into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish and enjoy enormous success in America where they appear regularly on the bestseller lists.

This kind of thing is not uncommon with Hodder paperbacks!


(From memory, The Ivy Tree contains a heroine (in peril), a case of mistaken identity, an isolated house and a family with a secret.   In other words, fairly standard ingredients, but mixed by a master of the genre!)

Never A Dull Moment by Peter Cheyney (Fontana, 1955)

 

In NEVER A DULL MOMENT, our tough, wise-cracking hero, Lemmy Caution of the F.B.I., finds himself in England caught up in a tangled web of intrigue and international espionage.  As usual, Lemmy finds it hard to keep his mind on business when two such lovelies such as Tamara and Julia are on the scene--or maybe they are his business!  Here indeed is vintage Cheyney of the kind that prompted one reviewer to write: "Heavens, what a craftsman!  How adroitly he keeps a story in and briskly shakes together all the right ingredients--sex, violence, mystery."

Now this is an odd one: an English author whose main character (and narrator) is a hard-boiled, tough-talking American FBI agent.  The result is... well, it reads like bastardised Damon Runyon:

"An' I reckon that the dame is gonna talk without a lot of pressin'.  I reckon she was plenty scared when Nikolls took her outa the cottage an' she thought she was goin' to get herself nicely creased out an' chucked in the river.  An' she has plenty of time since then to think over what's gonna be good for her."

 (Page 93) 

Still, there's nothing like stealing from the best!

Double for the Toff by John Creasey (Coronet, 1973)

 

The Toff certainly didn't want to take on two problems at once, but these were entreaties he couldn't ignore.

He was needed by Robert Benning--accused of murdering the beautiful and promiscuous Marjorie Fryer--and his mother and girlfriend, both desolate and desperate for help.

He was needed by young Cendric Dwight--with his so-called delusions and his genuine fears, especially when he was taken away by men, who might not kill, but certainly aimed to terrify him.

And then quite suddenly there was Bill Ebbutt--owner of an East End boxing gymnasium and a staunch friend to the Toff--to avenge as well.

I bought this for the sheer ugliness of the cover.  It's hard to imagine that this was ever considered appealing--even in "the decade taste forgot"!

John Creasey was another prolific crime writer, active under a number of pseudonyms from the 1930s to the early 1970s.   The "Toff" (aka The Honourable Richard Rollinson) is a freelance crime fighter and righter of wrongs not unlike The Saint.

The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (Pan, 1967)

From the Green Shed:

 

THE THIRTY-NINE STEPS

a story of adventure which for sheer excitement has never been surpassed

'Remains the definitive story of espionage, intrigue and pursuit - terse, taut, endlessly inventive, and as delightfully fresh as the day it was written'

NEW YORK TIMES

Pan doesn't bother describing the story on the back cover of this book. After all, the plot is well known--having been adapted for film, television and radio. Instead it tells potential readers how good it is.  And it is--one of the classics!

The Ringer by Edgar Wallace (Pan, 1957)

More Edgar Wallace.  This one was found in The Green Shed:

 

THE RINGER, considered by many Wallace 'fans' to be the best of his thrillers, tells of a killer known by this name, whose exploits had terrified London--such a master of disguise that the police had never been able to circulate a description of him.  Mixed up with the Ringer was a tricky lawyer of Deptford, Maurice Meister.  Now young Detective-Inspector Alan Wembury is taking over the Deptford police division, and is hoping to marry Mary Lenley, who has recently become Meister's secretary.  News comes that The Ringer, who had been traced to Australia and was reported dead, is back in London.  Meister will be his next victim, for he left his sister in Meister's charge and her body was found in the Thames.  Soon a gaunt stranger is shadowing the frightened lawyer, who seeks police protection. Wembury is involved in an affair of extreme difficulty, complicated by the fact that Mary's brother, ruined by association with criminals, is jailed for robbery--and Meister knows more of this than he will admit.  Moreover, the unpopular, bearded Inspector Bliss, just returned from America, is working along his own lines to solve the problem.  Who is The Ringer?  It will be a clever reader who can spot him before the very end of the story.

With a summary that detailed, it's hardly necessary to read the book!  And given we're talking about Edgar Wallace here, probably just as entertaining.  Just skip to the last chapter to find out who actually was The Ringer.

(Edgar Wallace was a best seller in his day, but his books have dated woefully.  However they were reprinted often--well into the middle of last century.  Delightful paperbacks like this one turn up quite regularly on charity stalls and in junk shops, so expect to see a few of them featuring on my blog!)

The Golden Hades by Edgar Wallace (Hodder, 1962)

Another book acquired during my Lifeline Bookfair Crime Spree.  This one I definitely bought for its cover:

 

The banknotes marked with the sinister little yellow sign of the Golden Hades were not just state money. 

Wilbur Smith of the F.B.I. had seen the sign twice before--

The first time they involved a masked gang; the second time, they meant murder.

Edgar Wallace is one of those authors whose life is more interesting than his books.  Born into poverty as the illegitimate child of actors, he became a war correspondent during the Boer War, then took to writing thrillers to make money.  In the 1920s his publishers Hodder and Stoughton began promoting him aggressively, and he pretty much became a one-man fiction factory, eventually churning out around 170 novels:

Needless to say, the quality was NOT high.  This particular example of his work concerns a Satanic cult in New York.  To be fair, a book on a similar theme today would probably have more graphic violence and a lot more sex, but the characters might be equally cardboard.

Wallace eventually died in 1933 of untreated diabetes, and few of his books are in print today.

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (Pan, 1958 and 1963)

Here we have two versions of the same book, from the same publisher, but printed five years apart.  They provide proof that while things always change they don't necessarily improve.   First, the version from 1958:

 

THE SECRET ADVERSARY tells how two young people advertise for adventure and are caught in a whirlpool of international intrigue which almost costs them their lives.  A gay and exciting thriller!

 A woman, held at gunpoint, hands over documents to the mysterious figure in the foreground.  The cover doesn't tell you who the woman is, or what the documents are, but it certainly lets you know that what you're about to read is a crime thriller.

Next, the version published in 1963:

Two Innocents in search of adventure.

An Elusive Young Woman holder of a vital secret

A Faceless Man with a Blueprint for Anarchy

The woman being held at gunpoint has been replaced by a picture of a dark and gloomy mansion.  While the art isn't bad, the contents of the book could be anything: a Gothic romance, a collection of ghost stories, and traditional murder-in-a-country-house whodunnit.

At least Pan's copy writers had learned to write snappier blurbs for their back covers--albeit ones with really strange ways of using capital letters!

The Case of the Backward Mule by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pan, 1957)

I got this one from a bookshop in Tasmania via eBay:

 

Chase in San Francisco's Chinatown

To baffle the lie-detector clamped on his arm, Terry Clane practises the intense concentration he learned in the Orient.  But the sight of a little Chinese figure--an old man riding backward on a mule--sends the indicator-needle leaping; for he'd given it once to Cynthia, his former fiancee and close friend of a man convicted of murder who has escaped.  Says the police examiner: "Either there's something I haven't accurately diagnosed or else ... you murdered Horace Farnsworth."  Then begins a grim game of hide-and-seek through Chinatown.

Erle Stanley Gardner--a prolific mystery writer, best known as the author of 82 (!) Perry Mason books.  None of his works could be described as great literature (not surprisingly, given his output) but they are mostly entertaining light reading.  I find them great reading for the daily commute.

The Case of the Backward Mule is one of the (many) books Gardner managed to write when he was not churning out Perry Mason mysteries.  The book has many "Chinese" elements, as you can see from the cover of this edition and the blurb.   It's interesting to note that Gardner probably drew upon his own experiences in writing this.  As a young lawyer he had many clients (and made some lifelong friends) among California's Chinese community.  Being the writer he was, you can't expect any deep insight into China or the Chinese from this book, nor is it entirely free of cliches, but it is surprisingly sympathetic and lacking in the racism of its era!

Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes (Fontana, 1974)

I bought this in what you might call a charity stall clearance sale--the sellers were losing their storage space and were offering their books at "$10 for all you can carry!" just to get rid of them.  I went around filling a shopping bag with everything and anything that looked remotely interesting.

Von Aschenhausen sat on the edge of a large desk.  His eyes were fixed on the man standing over the girl roped to a chair.  He spoke again: "You fool.  You stupid little fool.  Can't you see I must, I will find out?  Kurt, try some more of your persuasion..."

The girl felt a hand of iron on her aching shoulder.  She tried to turn her face away from the glare of the powerful lamp, but it still pierced her eyelids  with a dull-red burning.  She struggled weakly against the ropes that held her, but they only cut deeper into her breast and thigh...

What is it with cover blurbs and ellipses? 

Above Suspicion was Helen MacInnes' first book and was originally published in 1941.  The villains of this story are (not surprisingly) Nazis.  Interestingly, these fictional Nazis actually seem a bit less evil than their real-life counterparts--probably because in 1941 the full extent of the Nazis' crimes were not known.

There's a sprinkling of propaganda throughout this story (again not surprisingly--1941!)  Most of it is of the "this is what we're fighting for/against" variety as the very English hero and heroine are chased around pre-war Europe:

"You believe you have not changed.  And yet under the leadership which you praise so much you may only read certain books, listen to certain music, look at certain pictures, make friends with certain people.  Isn't that limiting yourself?"

"Oh well, limiting yourself to the good, eliminating the bad--all that is better in the end."

"But who is to say what is good for you or bad for you?  Is it to be your own judgement ... or is it to be some self-appointed leader who can't even speak grammatical German?"

(Page 21) 

There's also a sympathetic American journalist who comes to the aid of our beleaguered heroes--surely a shout out to the United States which in 1941 was not in the War exactly, but certainly coming to the aid of those who were. 

Sadly, Fontana decided to package this book in an ugly seventies photo-cover, with anachronistic models posed in a vaguely dramatic manner.  It's horribly generic, and only gives the loosest idea of what the book is actually about.

The House of the Seven Flies by Victor Canning (Hodder and Stoughton, 1958)

Another book from the Lifeline Bookfair:

 

A sunken launch.  It couldn't be much more than a couple of fathoms near the island ... one could dive without any elaborate outfit ... a steel deed-box, small enough to lift.  It sounded too easy ... Perhaps it was.

 (Page 111)

World War II and its aftermath inspired a whole generation of thrillers.  This one sees a gaggle of rival crooks searching the Netherlands for lost Nazi loot.  The good guys (such as the are) eventually wind up with it, but not without a lot of plot twists and turns along the way.