"Sounds far-fetched, old chap," cut in Morrison. "What about the sound of the engine?"
"The engine was fitted with a silencer. Any more questions?"
As the foregoing demonstrates, Horler, unlike Le Queux, had a serviceable ear for and a deft touch with dialogue. His specialty was epithets. He could be positively brilliant when it came to inventing the unusual curse and the sharp retort:
"My dear old cock-eyed ass, I was waiting for you to be Christian enough to offer me a drink!" "Having no whisky of your own—as usual!" "You heathen without bowels, do you think I would ever cross your doorstep it I naci sumcien dough to buy a drink for myself? Hang you and your fusel-oil whisky! May it rot you and all your descendants!"
"You scraggy-haired swine, keep a civil tongue, can't you?"
"Let me be boiled in linseed oil if I ever saw such a perishing fool!" he declared passionately. "Let me tell you this, you stale suet-pudding; you're coming down to my cottage on Dartmoor if I have to carry you there. Isn't it just the place for a sick man? Isn't it so lonely that no one could possibly find you, even granted that they were mugs enough to be still looking for you? And supposing this blight or blighters, as the case may be, should happen to strike the right bridle-path, am I such a useless hulk that I couldn't put forward a blow for St. George and the Right? Strike me a greenish-yellow heliotrope, if ever I saw such an ass as you!"
A second Horler novel of note, Lord of Terror (1937), pits Sir Brian Fordinghame, Chief of Y. 1, British Intelligence, against Dr. Paul Vivanti, one of Horler's megalomaniacal supercriminals. Once a respected neurologist and author of several medical textbooks, Vivanti abruptly turned to a life of crime for no evident reason. Fordinghame's personal view is that Vivanti "had suddenly developed an unsuspected criminal kink." In any case, the doctor has "set himself the colossal task of endeavouring to bring about the ruin of the country which up to this time had presented him not merely with wealth but with personal honour. Mad? Undoubtedly—but his madness was of a highly dangerous type."
One of the ways in which Vivanti previously attempted to bring about the ruin of England was by poisoning the reservoirs that feed London its water, so as to murder the city's entire population (Vivanti Returns, 1931); Fordinghame had thwarted that effort at the last possible second. The Lord of Terror's present "gigantic coup" is to throw in with Kuhnreich, dictator of Ronstadt—thin disguises for Hitler and Nazi Germany—and render all British aircraft useless by means of a "Vray" machine and a "giant aero-magnet," thus allowing Ronstadt to invade and seize control of England. For the use of his evil genius, he demands ten million pounds sterling and the complete annihilation of the English populace. As a dry run to prove to Kuhnreich that his V-ray and his giant aero-magnet work as advertised, he proceeds to use these devices to capture the Sky King, Britain's most advanced passenger zeppelin, and along with it, several prominent British citizens who happen to be on their way across the Atlantic to New York.
Fordinghame is one of those who helps foil Vivanti's plot, but he is only an incidental figure; the novel's primary "hero" is one Johnny Cardell, a newspaperman by trade and one of Horler's more obnoxious protagonists by construction. Cardell insults menials, shows marked racist tendencies ("The conviction that this odd-looking Scandinavian swine was possibly at the back of the threatening letter Mary had received roused him to a state of insensate fury."), and marked priggish tendencies ("Girls were flinging their legs about, indifferent to the amount of underwear—elegant or otherwise—they showed. They were asking to be kissed, and they were being kissed. . . . It was all rather disgusting and stupid. Johnny suddenly felt ashamed of it.").
Lord of Terror is distinguished for the aforementioned reasons of plot and characterization, and also for the overall idiosyncrasy of Horler's prose. The novel fairly bulges with such singular passages as:
Johnny Cardell spoke his last words in the office where he had worked for the past nine months with acknowledged brilliance. They were memorable words—destined to be quoted for weeks (which is a long time in Fleet Street newspaper offices) by the incoming and outgoing staff of the Daily Whim.
"Go and fry your filthy fish!"
Dr. McFee frowned a second time.
"This is verra, verra serious," he said, lapsing into his native tongue.
Vivanti looked at her before speaking like a purring animal.
There are means of eliciting information, let me remind you—for instance, hot irons to the soles of the feet, or the more primitive thumbscrew—but perhaps in your case I should prefer a little trick I learned from the Chinese—"
"You swine!" broke out Sinclair. "Torturing a woman!"
"I am a firm believer in the absolute equality of the sexes," returned Vivanti.
He dashed to the lamp in front of the chair and was about to pick it up when a crashing sound was heard. A man jumped in through a window, the iron shutters of which were not closed. His face was ghastly; blood flowed from his chest, but he had a revolver in his hand.
"Johnny!" cried Mary. "Oh, JOHNNY!"
"Just a minute, my dear. I've got a spot of business to see to first. Where's that swine Vivanti? Ah!" catching sight of him. "Here you are! Thought I was dead, you hound, didn't you? Get back against that wall or I'll plug you!"
A considerably grimmer, if no less typical, Horler espionage tale is Dark Danger, published in the United States by Mystery House in 1945. It seems never to have appeared in England, which fact, if true, is not surprising; Horler is at his most vituperative in these pages, loudly beating the drums of war, railing against Prime Minister Chamberlain, the British press, the British intelligence network and Foreign Office, American isolationist tendencies, and "ballyhoo religionists preaching general defeatism and submission to Hitler" (meaning Father Coughlin and also the Fascist Christian Front—called Stanford Circle in the novel—of Father Curran in the late 1930s). The time at which the book is set is obviously not 1945 but late 1938 or early 1939, when Chamberlain was still prime minister of England and Germany had not yet declared war on the British Commonwealth. This, along with other internal evidence, suggests that the novel was written in 1938/1939 and rejected everywhere before winding up at Mystery House. Little wonder, too. This is not a novel so much as an inflammatory pro-war tract.
The underlying premise is that Nazi spies and saboteurs have infiltrated the British Secret Service and are working from within to undermine it and to steal the "Red Book," a complete list of all British espionage agents working at home and abroad. Pitted against the forces of evil are a pair of close friends named Arthur Wentworth, who is British, and John Widdemar, who is American (a rather heavy-handed attempt to demonstrate the necessity and importance of a British/U.S. alliance against "the Huns"; Horler had evidently decided by this time, in the face of creeping Nazism, that Americans weren't quite so absurd after all). Neither Wentworth nor Widdemar is a Secret Service chap, although Wentworth once held a position with the diplomatic service and had been assigned to the Berlin embassy; they are adventurous young men just back from a hunting expedition in Africa (where they shot lions, elephants, and "ever so many other things!"). They are also superpatriots, and when they uncover the Nazi infiltration plot, they decide to destroy the organization all by themselves. Just a couple of likable young fellows, doing their duty according to Horler. Witness this exchange after Widdemar has rescued a kidnapped Wentworth and Wentworth has tossed one of the Nazi thugs off a roof:
"We had a scrap; he nearly got me, but I saved myself in time—and over he went. What was that noise I heard?"
"The people in the street looking at his dead body, I expect; how are you feeling now, Wentworth? We ought to be away from here, you know."
"I'm ready," was the reply: "where's this fire escape you were talking about? I want to get home; I feel hungry."
The American laughed.
"You've just killed a man and all you say is that you feel hungry! And this is the crowd Hitler thinks he's going to beat—what a hope!
"
Joining these two jolly comrades in their quest is Hargreaves, Wentworth's "man"—the "Perfect Servant," the "Admirable One." (Horler, in most of his later books, longs for the good old days, when all the minorities were in their proper place and good domestic help was easy to find. Of course, his heroes always manage to have good domestic help in spite of the changing times.) Hargreaves, the Admirable One, fought in World War I as a machine gunner and developed such a hatred of Germans that "nothing would give me greater pleasure than removing a few more of the pests in this war." He means it, too. When informed that Wentworth had been forced to kill a Nazi, he says with a twinkle, "I'm sure that the master did it very effectively."
Horler has an abundance of theories about the Huns. All Germans have fanatical eyes, gaping mouths, and twitching lips; a fanatical devotion to the "God-sent" Hitler and the principles of the Third Reich; and nothing but contempt for England, America, and all other nations. Any person who is half-British and half-German, or any British or American citizen who happens to fall in love with and marry a German, is certain to have been corrupted and thus has become a traitor. ("Forbes-Thompson's face was a cold, repellent mask, the man's good looks adding to the impression that he was a person who would stop at nothing to achieve his ambition.") All German agents, in and out of the Fatherland, are bound to perform terrible acts of torture on helpless victims, such as applying lighted matches and burning cigarette ends to the soles of the feet, an activity Horler considers barbaric and which he angrily deplores. He does think it's all right, though, for British Intelligence to torture German spies when the shoe is off the other foot.
All Nazi thugs speak in the same fashion in this and other Horler novels of the period, saying such things as "American dog!" and "English swine!" and "Open your mouth, and I'll blast your liver to blazes!" The only exception is the Chief Thug (so designated), who is prone to propaganda-style rhetoric: "The time is coming, my friend, when England will be in the state which you Americans call 'through'—in other words, finished."
The British characters always speak proper English, naturally (except when those of "the working-class type" are brought onstage; they speak in exaggerated Cockney accents). The American characters—Widdemar, his fiancée Helen George, and Jonathan Grantley, the weak and evil leader of Stanford Circle—speak a curious mixture of British and American slang. Widdemar, for example, says to one of the Nazis, "You skunk! You rotten swine of a skunk!" And later he confides to his fiancée, "I'm beginning to think that way myself, honey, but as for being afraid of him, I'd be just about as afraid of a mangy cow who stood a good distance away and started yapping."
The plot of Dark Danger is a beautifully conceived mishmash of disconnected scenes and improbable situations. The heroes and heroine are gassed in the backseats of taxis and then abducted, or clumsy attempts are made on their lives on public streets. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Richard Chandler, is kidnapped, and a German actor is made up to look like him and installed in his place. Helen George is spirited away from the theater where she is starring in a play, held for hours under the guardianship of a lesbian Nazi sympathizer (" 'You don't know how tempting you are, dearie' "), threatened with a whip, and then summarily released in time to make her evening performance. Grantley convinces Helen that the only way to save Widdemar, who (like everyone else) has been abducted, is to spend the night with him; he takes her to a secluded inn, but before he can subject her to this fate worse than death, Grantley himself is abducted by the Chief Thug, who, it turns out, also has a letch for Helen (" 'lam here to take Mr. Grantley'splace!"). Helen is saved not by Widdemar and Wentworth but by the owner of the inn, who has no other plot function; and Widdemar and Wentworth are saved not by their own guile or ingenuity but by the fortunate intervention of a rescue squad of British Secret Service agents.
The writing of all this is handled with Horler's usual élan, as already demonstrated. Here are two additional examples:
The permanent Under-Secretary looked as though he was about to lose his reason.
"The Red Book!" he shrieked.
"Yes, Sir Richard," replied the frightened Peel [Sir Richard's longtime secretary].
"You'll leave the Red Book where it is," said Wentworth, taking charge of the situation. "And get out! I've told you I want to speak to this creature"—he motioned toward the toothache victim—"alone. And if you don't clear Out, I'll chuck you out!"
"Creature!" gasped Peel. . .
"And now, Mister Masquerader, I'll deal with you!" stated Wentworth.
"Masquerader!" choked the other.
"Yes, masquerader: if Peel wasn't so short-sighted, and scatterbrained as well, he would have seen through you himself; that faked toothache wasn't bad, but unfortunately from your point of view, it hasn't worked."
". . .You have played your game, Basil Forbes-Thompson, but you have lost the final trick. In other words, your association with the Wilhelmstrasse has been discovered, and you won't send any more valuable information, you bloody traitor. It's no good to shoot; there are six men outside, all picked fellows, and you wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance against this gang of my private execution-squad."
The other managed to gasp: "Who are you?"
"Call me 'Nemesis,"' was the reply.
Another prolific British spy novelist of the thirties and forties (and through the fifties into the sixties) was Bernard Newman, a member of the Civil Service, a staff lecturer with the Ministry of Information during World War II, a traveler and travel-book writer, and an amateur spy-watcher. Although Newman was not nearly as lurid or sensational a writer as Sydney Horler, he nonetheless managed to produce at least one novel of enduring status. This is The Mussolini Murder Plot, published here in 1939.
The jacket blurb for the American edition reads as follows:
"On October 3rd, 1935, Italian troops marched into Abyssinia. I wonder if Mussolini knows how near he stood to death on that eventful day? And I wonder if he realizes that he has me to thank for his escape? Mussolini is admittedly a nuisance, but as Saint Benito he would be insufferable! Yet, many times I have wondered if I were right in saving him from the sudden death which threatened him."
With this opening bombshell, Captain Newman plunges into the narration of a wildly exciting mystery which utilizes fact in the manner of fiction and fiction in the manner of fact.
The League of International Amity, early in 1935, gave formal warning to the world that any statesman who led his nation into war would be tried and, if condemned, executed. The Abyssinian venture proved that the organization was not jesting. Mussolini was duly condemned to death, and the sentence came within an ace of being carried out.
The novel purports to deal with the events leading up to this mythical assassination attempt by the mythical League of International Amity. Newman himself is the narrator and, more or less, hero of the piece, referred to by name. Inspector Marshall, of the "Special Branch of Scotland Yard," also plays a fairly large role in the story.
What is the League of International Amity? A right-wing nut group, we are told, full of good intentions and misguided methods of accomplishing them. As Marshall explains to Newman at one point:
"Of course, every organization is liable to become freak on the slightest provocation. Their ideas are often excellent in their own sphere, but enthusiasts gradually assume that their pet theory will solve all the world's problems. The Nudists, for example, claim that their cult would ease our problems by abolishing clothes, which causes complexes. Other people want compulsory free love. One brainy fellow devised a new religion to be ruled by a priestess, to be chosen as 'Queen of Hearts,' as an 'object of worship,' because of her feminine build—she was to have a wide pelvis, and so on. The choice of the lady was to be effected by 'detached scientists, with a tape-measure and a pair of dividers.' I should think the scientists would have to be very detached! Imagine choosing a girl as a sort of unofficial goddess just because she's got a bulgy behind!"
The scene of action
shifts frenetically from England (where Marshall also lectures on the methods by which Scotland Yard solves crimes: "Anonymous letters and squeaking are the detective's stand-bys") to Venice, to Sarajevo, to the Slovene Mountains, to Rome, back to England, back to Rome, to Corsica, through the Italian countryside back to Rome. Along the way there are two kidnappings, some poisoned bullets, fights on narrow ledges, a character crawling out on the wing of an airplane in flight to repair "a control wire," secret coded messages, villains who say things like "I thought we were foolproof . . . I read up all similar cases in the Crime Club books," a couple of chases (car and airplane), a miraculous escape by Newman (" 'One of the arts you learn in my business is to write in the dark—or in your pocket"), and many footnotes to make sure that the reader is paying attention. The thrilling climax involves a race against time to stop the final Mussolini assassination attempt—and a deucedly clever attempt it is, as Newman might say, utilizing a rifle mounted on the roof of a building, with a string tied to the trigger and the string then dropped down through a water pipe to the street, so the killer can stand below and pull both string and trigger at just the right moment. The attempt fails, of course, because Newman and his troops arrive in the nick of time. C'est la guerre.
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