Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  As a heroic figure, Newman leaves something to be desired. Like Horler's protagonists, he is a class-conscious prig, though not nearly so shrill or obnoxious. And when it comes to women . . . well, women are just not Newman's forte. He knows very little about them. In fact, he may know less about women than any other hero in crime and espionage fiction.

  I felt a sudden grip at my arm, heard a little half-strangled cry, and there she was lying on the floor beside me, once again in a dead faint! This was a situation to which I was scarcely accustomed. My life has been planned along somewhat sterner lines than the succouring of distressed ladies. However, it was obviously no time for finesse. I picked her up and carried her to the bed again. I stripped off her skirt and coat, for I had the impression that the proper thing to do in the case of a severe faint was to remove a lady's corsets. However, apparently this girl wore none. Again I resorted to the time-honored method of bending her double, flooding the brain with blood.

  Whatever else you can say about James Bond, he knew what to do when he had a woman on a bed with her skirt off. And it wasn't to bend her double so blood would flood her brain.

  The involvement of the United States in World War II spawned a surfeit of American spy novels, some of which were the equal of anything Horler, Newman, and others were turning out in England. Nearly all of these dealt with home-front espionage—the threat of Nazi spies and saboteurs in the large cities, in and around defense plants and military installations. Outstanding among them is Frank Diamond's Murder Rides a Rocket (1946), featuring the breezy escapades of Vicky Gaines (a.k.a. "the Dish") and counterespionage agent Ransome V. Dragoon (a.k.a. "Drag," not inappropriately).

  The scene is Manhattan, where Drag and the Dish mix it up with German spies, French spies, Russian Army Intelligence, the FBI, assorted vamps, a couple of horny but good-hearted naval officers, a couple of murders, and the model of a "new form of compact one-man hand rocket weapon," similar to a bazooka, which contains three "sausages" (i.e., rockets) and has an interchangeable barrel and magazine of "the ordinary tommygun type." The Dish is fun to watch in action because she's cute and cuddly and kissable and wily and is always doing something unpredictable, like Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy. Drag is fun to watch because he has an amazing repertoire of clever expressions, including (but not limited to): "Great murderous mastodons!", "Dangle my remains from a tree," "Well, rack and-thumbscrew me," "Burn me for an infidel!", and, best of all, "Great whistling wheels of the Pit!"

  But the real charm of Murder Rides a Rocket lies in its breezy style. William Le Queux may have been a master of padding, but Frank Diamond was no slouch in his own right; where Le Queux's method was to use description and repetitive dialogue, Diamond's favorite tool was an endless stream of devastatingly simpleminded humor. This novel (and its forerunner, Murder in Five Columns, also starring Drag and the Dish) fairly bulges with wisecracks, atrocious puns, snappy one-liners, B-movie patter, and Bowery Boys routines—sort of like the joke book for a stand-up comic on the forties burlesque circuit.

  Just a few samples:

  "I want a lawyer," Vicky said instantly. "Get me

  Danglewrit and Loophole. On second thought, get Dragoon. He's better than a lawyer."

  "Did Dragoon put you up to this stunt?" demanded Petersen.

  "Why don't you ask him?"

  "Don't worry, I will! Where is he?"

  "He said something about going on a USO tour, but he ought to be back by now. He wasn't in good voice, you see."

  "You mean I'm a desperado?" said Vicky in delight. "Shall I start going around with a six-gun on each hip?"

  "No, the hips themselves are quite dangerous enough!"

  "And here I slave over a hot tommygun all day!"

  "Who lives up in yon hedonistic penthouse?"

  "The owner of the building," Vicky said. "He's a highly successful playwright, name of Ian Waldo Craig. In private life, Paddy Hoolahan."

  "I wonder if Ian Waldo, né Hoolahan, would object if we nimbly scaled his terrace and browsed about up there?"

  "He wouldn't even hear you. . . . When he writes plays, believe me, he lives 'em. Right now he's working on a play about Olde Englande."

  "Odds boddikins!" exclaimed Dragoon. "I hope he doesn't decide to sink a clothyard shaft into my midriff. . . ."

  The clicking of a typewriter ceased abruptly, and was followed by a loud and eerie clanking. From a desk in the corner a figure reared up. It was presumably Ian Waldo, but it could have been anybody, because it was encased from head to foot in a brightly burnished suit of medieval armor. The apparition jerked a broadsword from its sheath with a spine-chilling zing, and approached threateningly. Perceiving Vicky, he stopped, and dramatically stuck the broadsword into the floor. "Ah!" bellowed a muffled voice. " 'Tis the Gaines wench!"

  "Sire, I bring with me the Duke of Dragoon!"

  "Avaunt!" thundered Ian Waldo, wrenching the sword from the floor. "Let me cleave this king's man to the navel!"

  "You monster!" Vicky accused. "You put me to bed with my clothes on!"

  "Must you use one of my men as your calling card?" snapped Petersen.

  "It's a Sort of barometer," Dragoon explained, coming in and looking down with a friendly grin at Carter. "When I can't handle one of your buckos, Pete, I intend to retire and open a fish shop. I see myself now, in a white apron, behind a carefully weighted scale—"

  "Breakisdamneck!" groaned Carter from the carpet.

  "You realize you've assaulted a federal officer?" said Petersen.

  "My dear lovable Pete, he assaulted me! By the way, here's his gum" Dragoon grinned mockingly. .

  "Knockisbrainsout!" growled Carter, finally able to sit up.

  "There's nothing so restful as slab after slab of cool, complacent fish!" Dragoon rhapsodized. "And when Pete comes snooping around, I can always wrap one around his neck. Fascinating!"

  Yes it is. A veritable laff riot.

  Or, as Drag says hilariously to one of the Russian characters, "'Da, da! Ja opororzghenil nie odnou boutilkou s Semonom Vasilievim!'" And you can't argue with that, now can you?

  No study of the good spy novel would be complete, certainly, without mention of James Bond; similarly, no examination of the bad spy novel would be complete without mention of some of the James Bond imitators. There have been dozens on both sides of the Atlantic since Fleming and Bond achieved international fame in the early sixties, but the two worst are American. The first of these is Sean O'Shea's rollicking and heavily erotic adventures of Valentine Flynn, a spy of sorts whose specialty is cases of industrial espionage. An oddball mixture of Bond, The Saint, Ted Mark, and Shell Scott, Flynn owns a Ph.D. and sports a "Doctor" in front of his name. Which is appropriate, because playing doctor is what Flynn most likes to do, with bevies of beautiful and willing ladies as his "patients."

  The foremost Flynn caper is What a Way to Go! (1966), which takes place in the Grand Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean. The plot is undistinguished, but the writing is alternatively brilliant. Classic lines abound, the most notable of which, not coincidentally, are of a sexual nature.

  I looked at her naked figure and felt my pulse beginning to race through my veins.

  While I had now made up my mind to be clinical about my lovemaking with her, I found it somewhat difficult to remain professional in my approach. It was too hard for that.

  She frowned and kissed me again, playfully tickling me. She poked a fingernail into my navel and something stung me. When she withdrew her fingernail she was holdirfg something up between her thumb and forefinger. "Whatever is this, Val?"

  I sat up and blinked in amazement. "So that's how the baroness was able to trail me everywhere I went! And that's why my pants' belt had been tighter than usual when I came to after she chloroformed me!"

  "Chloroformed you?" Yvette gasped.

  "Never mind how I got chloroformed. The point is . . . she bugged my belly button!"

  The most slavish Bond imitation is the venerable Nick Carte
r. Like Sexton Blake, the British detective who became an unsuccessful Bondian spy for a time before his 1963 demise, Carter's roots are imbedded in the nineteenth-century dime novel. Though born a master detective in Street & Smith's Nick Carter weekly in 1886, Carter underwent several character changes in the next seventy or so years, including that of hard-boiled pulp hero and gadget-oriented radio detective in the thirties, before evolving into the master spy (and sexual acrobat) we know and love today.

  The new series of Nick Carter "Killmaster N3, agent of AXE" spy stories began in 1964, the brainchild of Lyle Kenyon Engle, who arranged for merchandising rights to the Carter name and who has gone on to become a millionaire packager of paperback originals. There have been nearly a hundred titles in the Kill. master series, perpetrated by at least a score of writers; some are told in the first person and some in the third person, but all are carefully crafted in the Bond mold. Such reviews of this modern Carter as "the man who inherited the mantle of James Bond" (Film Daily) and "the superspy who out-Bonds James Bond, mixing espionage, mayhem, mystery and loving in equal doses" (Buffalo News) are testimony to the fact that Engle's troops have learned their lessons well.

  As does Bond, Carter works for a top-secret espionage network, goes about well armed (among his accouterments are a 9-mm stripped-down Luger named Wilhelmina and an Italian stiletto named Hugo), has access to all sorts of esoteric weapons and escape gadgets, and is well schooled in karate and other methods of killing enemies in hand-to-hand combat. As is Bond, Carter is a rogue with the ladies—many of whom are summarily disposed of by villains after bedding down with Nick. And as is Bond, Carter is sent on assignments of vital importance to national and international security and pitted against a wide assortment of archfiends, lunatics, beasts, machines, and weaponry.

  (One of the few differences between the two superspies is that in the Carter books, violence, particularly when it involves copious bloodshed, is described in great and loving detail—a paean, one supposes, to the current marketability of mayhem. Sixteen million copies of the Carter adventures have been sold in this country alone, which makes an eloquent, if not very pleasing, statement in favor of gore.)

  The wildly improbable plots of such Bond novels as Goldfinger seem downright sedate when compared to some in the Carter saga. In Ice Trap Terror, Carter goes head to head against a mad Mexican scientist named Zembla, who has invented a machine that can create mountains; "that is, simulate one with radio waves, projecting all the symptoms of a mountain into the air currents of the troposphere." With this device, Zembla intends to alter radically the weather in Mexico and Central America, creating arctic conditions and a new Ice Age that will destroy the economy, topple governments, elevate him to power, and thus establish "the Third Mayan Empire." In The Weapon of Night, Nick joins forces with three other spies—his sometime sexual companion, Julia Barron; a jolly Russian peasant woman "built like a tank but [with] a heart as big and warm as the sun"; and a cross-eyed Egyptian criminologist—to foil a Red Chinese plot to seize control of the free world through nationwide blackouts, clouds of poisonous smog, and mass hysteria. In Hour of the Wo1f, Nick is sent to Yugoslavia to recover a deadly nuclear secret buried beneath the pelt of a semisavage white wolf and soon runs afoul of an evil genius named Karac, who keeps a small garrison of slaves trained as gladiators; Carter is forced into gladiatorial combat against these men, as well as against a pack of ravening wolves. (The reason he is forced into this combat is that he refuses to tell Karac what and where the nuclear secret is and in fact insults the great man by making reference to a goat. "Your family's goat, Karac," he says. "Too bad your mother didn't fit it with contraceptives.") In The 13th Spy, he travels to Moscow, becomes involved with a ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet, and eventually forms an alliance with Smirnov, "legendary dean of Russian Intelligence," and the vicious Comrade Ludmilla in order to foil another insidious Chinese plot, this one designed to "explode World War III." This novel has a little bit of everything alternative, including inspired similes ("he's going to be about as unobtrusive as a can-can dancer in Lenin's mausoleum"), mixed metaphors ("A great rock of a hand reached out and slammed down on the top of the man's head like a pole-axe wielded by a giant"), garbled sentences ("Nick caught a glimpse of a machine gun and the man behind it, spitting death from the edge of the sidewalk up ahead and then saw Volgin clutch his chest and kicked out convulsively"), and not a little lyrical sex ("For long, melting moments of absolute dissolution they clung to each other on a high, hot peak of passion; as one, they soared with breathtaking happiness . . . and then slowly glided down to an earth that seemed carpeted with velvet clouds").

  In all his adventures, Carter of course escapes at the end with his hide and his suavity intact. He does not, however, always escape with his dignity intact. The final few paragraphs of a recent entry in the series, The Day of the Dingo (1980), are a case in point—and in fact offer a much more pithy "last word" to this chapter than any I might come up with.

  As we stood scanning the skies a big civilian Sikorsky appeared over a rise and headed for us. I ran back down the passageway with Yoshida, opened the doors at the top of the stairs and stood there waiting while the chopper disgorged Hawk [Carter's AXE superior]. He came over and offered his hand.

  "Everything under control, Carter?"

  "It was touch and go for a while, sir, but there are no more problems to concern us, now."

  He started to usher Yoshida and me toward the chopper.

  "I hope I wasn't interrupting a romantic interlude . . ."

  "Sir?"

  "I just wondered," he said. "Your zipper is still open."

  7. "C-H-I-N-K-S!"

  "Hell would be sweet compared to it! You—you see, Andy, I—I have already seen the thing we must face. It's going to be maddening—starved octopi, mad for blood and flesh and coming—coming out of a well with sea-water in the bottom to keep them alive!" Her voice was rising hysterically. "Coming! Trained by hunger to come, to leave the water. Rising up like old stumps thrusting themselves out of the ground by their roots! Oh! Oh! I—I know I can't, can't stand it, Andy! Oh-o-o-o!"

  —Tom Roan,

  The Dragon Strikes Back

  The evil Oriental villain, as typified by Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu, was a favorite of a small but prolific group of mystery and thriller writers who flourished between the two world wars. So much was written during that period of fiendish devil-doctors and "yellow hordes" bent on world domination, of secret passageways and underground lairs, of fearful opium dens and exotic Chinese tortures, that a folkloric belief in these things became widespread—and is still believed in in some quarters to this day. Yet nearly all of it is spurious sensationalism, concocted out of ignorance and the racist attitudes of the first half of this century. As Cohn Watson says of the Fu Manchu novels in his study of English crime stories and their audience, Snobbery With Violence (1971): "Their only clear message was one of racial vituperation. Had there not existed in the minds of many thousands of people an innate fear or dislike of foreigners—Oriental foreigners, in particular—Sax Rohmer never would have become a bestselling author."

  Rohmer, a journalist whose real name was Arthur Sarsfield Ward, was certainly the foremost practitioner of the "Chinese archfiend" school, and Dr. Fu Manchu the character on whom most other Oriental villains were based. There is no question that the Fu Manchu stories are bad, full as they are of coincidence, incredible motivation, stilted dialogue, the superhuman powers of Fu Manchu himself, and such fantastic inventions as the laboratory-created Hairless Man whose trunk and limbs "glistened moistly like the skin of an earthworm" and the giant flying bubonic plague flea produced by cross-breeding with the African tsetse fly. But there is also no question that they have terrific narrative drive, an intensity that not only grips the reader but totally involves him in the action. Anyone who can suspend disbelief for one chapter of Rohmer will likely find himself hooked until the last chapter.

  But the most important thing about th
e Fu Manchu series is that Rohmer believed in his creation. The insidious doctor was not just a character in Rohmer's eyes; he was a living, breathing human being, his own personal bogeyman. In a BBC radio broadcast in the early thirties (later included in a 1935 book, Meet the Detectives), Rohmer concocted a wholly serious dialogue between himself and Fu Manchu and closed with the words, "Perhaps one day he may conquer the world. It would be a queer world, but I am not sure that it would be any worse or any better than the world we live in." This belief, this fearful fascination, is evident on every page of every Fu Manchu novel. And it is the one quality, more than any other of the series' positives, that keeps Rohmer and his creation from being laughable today.

  The same cannot be said for his imitators, however.

  Like most imitators, they lacked the commitment of Rohmer; they didn't believe—or if they did, not deeply enough—in their characters and their story lines. They also lacked Rohmer's imagination, his sense of place and pace, and his ability to portray "Satan incarnate" in a convincing fashion. The best of these imitators produced pallid reproductions of Fu Manchu. The worst of them produced hilarity.