Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

"What sort of book are you looking for?"

  "Teach yourself private eye," I replied.

  "Oh deary, you're in the wrong section. You've got a lot to learn about crime," the four ladies said at once.

  "Which section should it be then?" I asked, disconcerted by their unison speech and eyes.

  "Maps," they said.

  "Maps?" Christ, did I have a lot to learn.

  "Teach yourself always appears by the maps," one explained.

  "It's in the nature of exploring you see ducks."

  "I see," I replied. But I didn't really.

  "Is there a book on teach-yourself crime?" one asked another.

  "No, it's Teach Yourself Private Detection or something like that."

  "Well you're in luck young man."

  "He's out of luck Ethel, all the Teach-Yourself Crime books have been stolen. Shoplifting. It's shocking."

  "So do you have a Teach Yourself Private Detection?" I asked stiffly.

  "No. But we do have a So You Want to be a Gumshoe."

  "I'll take it," I said,

  "We'd rather you paid for it ducks," she said.

  "Hello," I said, "I'm Sam."

  "Sam what?"

  "Sam North."

  "Hello, Sam North."

  Whatever she was, she had a voice that could melt Ice Nine.

  "You're Lindy."

  "Lucky me," she said.

  "May I come in?"

  "If you're a friend of Danny's . . ."

  "I'm not exactly a friend. I'm what you might call his posthumous biographer."

  "And you want me for the index?"

  "Let's say, an appendix."

  "I wasn't figuring on an operation."

  "Actually I came about a little list of names."

  "Well, you can come inside but leave your jokes out there."

  A new kind of British policeman is emerging, too—tough, hard-bitten, lusty; the kind who would laugh derisively at the proper and plodding methods of old-fashioned coppers like Jumper Cross and Johnny Lamb; the kind who take as their role models such real American cops as Serpico, such fictional ones as Starsky and Hutch. One of this new breed is Jack Regan, a member of Scotland Yard's Flying Squad, who fights, cusses, and screws his way through a series of books by novelist and British TV writer Ian Kennedy Martin. Notable is The Manhattan File (1976), the second of the Regan novels, which finds the "Sweeney" dick in New York, hot on the trail of $200 million in missing American military hardware and pitted against the Mafia, the FBI, and some deadly African politicos. Kennedy's style—and that of an increasing number of British mystery novelists—is of the following variety:

  "The killers. The ones who are killing all of us, you shit hawk, everyone in the deal! They're wiping us out one by one because you sold that fucking letter! And you know something, we don't know who the fuck these killers are—" The guy stopped there suddenly, an instant decision, suddenly realizing his explanation to Regan was redundant and unnecessary as he proposed to kill the English cop shortly. "Okay, bastard, one last question."

  As Tolefree might have said: O tempora! Omores! O England!

  6. Dogs, Swine, Skunks,

  and Assorted Asses

  A giant ray from the searchlight to the right of the laboratory flashed vividly across the night sky. It searched here and there and at last picked up an object which . . . looked no bigger than a silver cigar.

  "There she is!" cried Vivanti, pointing. "The greatest airship the world has ever known—and soon to be in my power. Now for the V-ray!"

  Rushing to his switchboard, he directed the pointer of a machine and pulled down a switch. The effect was uncanny, for out of the void a vivid green ray shot up and joined the white beam of the searchlight. What occurred was not only spectacular but sensational: instantly the sound of the [zeppelin's] engines stopped.

  ". . . The 'Sky King' is now a derelict; she is moving forward only by her own impetus. And now, Kuhnreich, for my masterpiece. I've winged my bird and I'm going to bring her to subjection. Behold, my giant aero magnet!"

  —Sydney Horler, Lord of Terror

  It may safely be said that the first spy novel in the English language was written by an American—James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1821). But as Julian Symons writes in Mortal Consequences, the development of the spy story as we know it today "was directly linked to the inventions that came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. As the breech-loading rifle replaced the muzzle-loader, and the quick-firing mitrailleuse, Gatling, and Maxim guns seemed to threaten the effectiveness of many other weapons, and naval power increased with the development of dreadnoughts and submarines, and airplanes turned from dream into possibility and then reality, a genuine threat was implied in the theft or copying of secret plans and documents. The highly developed industrial countries were those with most inventions to uncover, and this was the primary reason why the spy story had its origins in Europe, and particularly in Britain."

  The tradition of the British tale of espionage is a long and distinguished one, beginning with the stories of William Le Queux in the 1890s and extending to the present day through the works of John Buchan, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, the redoubtable Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, and John Le Carré. This country has had a few moderately successful spy novelists, mostly in paperback original—Donald Hamilton, Edward S. Aarons, and James Grady are among the more well known—but they pale to insignificance in comparison with the giants across the water. What both countries do seem to have had in more or less equal shares is the number of spy novels of dubious repute published during the twentieth century. This may be a bit unfair, in that England has all the good ones, but there is nothing to be done about that.

  The first of the spy writers of interest here, ironically enough, was the first of the modern developers: William Le Queux. A journalist by training and a Secret Service agent himself before and during World War I, Le Queux spent a good part of his life on the French Riviera, and many of his novels, both spy and mystery romances, are set in and around Monte Carlo, with side trips to England and the Continent. The settings appear to be authentic, as do the military and political backgrounds of his spy fiction; what makes Le Queux a classicist are his often-farfetched plots, his ability to pad them out interminably with description and repetitive conversation, and his unsurpassed ear for stilted dialogue.

  A case in point is The Mystery of the Green Ray (1915), which is set not in Monte Carlo but in Scotland at the outbreak of the First World War. The novel chronicles the adventures of a young man named Ronald Ewart, who journeys from London to Scotland to tell his lady love, Myra McLeod, that he can't marry her as planned because he is going to enlist in the army. While Ronnie and Myra are out fishing (the one thing they seem most to enjoy doing together), she is inexplicably stricken blind. Later on, her dog, Sholto, is also stricken blind and then dognapped. Why steal a blind dog? As one of the other characters says, "It seems to me that the man who steals a blind dog steals him because, for some reason or other, he wants a blind dog—that very one, probably."

  With the aid of an occulist named Garnesk and a chum called Dennis, Ronnie sets out to find Sholto and to discover what "fiend of hell" made Myra blind. And of course he succeeds. As the jacket blurb puts it, he "solves the mystery of the Highland loch, recovers his girl's sight for her, captures for the British NID the wonderful installation of the Green Ray, upsets the devilish and deep-laid schemes of as cunning a pair of spies as ever Mr. Le Queux's fertile brain invented."

  The cunning spies turn out to be Germans, naturally, the leader of which, "a brilliant physicist who has done some big things with electricity and light," has been masquerading as an American named Hilderman. The Green Ray turns out to be a device "formed by passing violet and orange rays through tourmaline and quartz respectively. The accident to Miss Leod was their first intimation of its blinding properties. - . . When the two rays are switched on simultaneously the air does not become de-oxygenised, but when you put the violet ray first it does, a
nd it remains so until the orange ray is applied. The effect that Hilderman imagined, and succeeded in producing, was a ray of light which should so alter the relative density of the air as to act as a telescope."

  Both Myra and Sholto are cured of their blindness by being outfitted with specially made motor goggles (in which Sholto looks "incredibly wise"—for a dog, that is). Those same motor goggles also help protect the eyes of the crew of a British destroyer the German spies assault with the Green Ray before Ronnie and Dennis and the ever-loyal and incredibly wise Sholto do them in. (Sholto was dognapped, you see, so the villains could practice vivi-section and thus determine just why their Green Ray made animals and humans blind in the first place.)

  Here are some examples of Le Queux dialogue, a great deal of which the reader is assaulted with along the way:

  "Am I very heavy, Ron, dear?" she asked presently.

  "You're as light as a feather, dearest," I protested, "and, as far as that goes, I'd rather carry you at any time."

  "I'm glad you were here when it happened, dear," she whispered.

  "Tell me, darling, how did it happen?" I asked. "I mean, what did it seem like? Did things gradually grow duller and duller, or what?"

  "No," she answered; "that was the extraordinary part of it. Quite suddenly I saw everything green for a second, and then everything went out in a green flash. It was a wonderful, liquid green, like the sea over a sandbank. It was just a long flash, very quick and sharp, and then I found I could see nothing at all. Everything is black now, the black of an intense green. I thought I'd been struck by lightning. Wasn't it silly of me?"

  "My poor, brave little woman," I murmured. "Tell me, where were you then?"

  "Just where you found me, on the Chemist's Rock. I call it the Chemist's Rock because it's shaped like a cough-lozenge."

  "Drink this, old chap," he said.

  "What is it?" I asked suspiciously. "I don't want any fancy pick-me-ups. They only make you worse afterwards."

  "That was prescribed by Doctor Common Sense," he answered lightly.

  "You see you could not possibly live for a second in electrically produced atmosphere which was so thick that you couldn't hear yourself speak. Death would be instantaneous. . . . Imagine what would happen if this had occurred in a city, in a crowded street. Hundreds would have been stricken blind, then hundreds would have suffocated. Vehicles would have run amok, and the result would have been an indescribable chaos of the maimed, mangled, and distraught. A flash like this green ray . . . at the mouth of a harbour, say, the entrance to a great port—Liverpool, London, or Glasgow—would be responsible for untold loss of life. If this terrible phenomenon spread, Ewart, it would paralyse the industry of the world in twenty-four hours. If it spread still farther the face of the globe would become the playing-fields of Bedlam in a moment. Think of the result of this everywhere! Some suffocated, some blinded, and millions probably gone mad and sightless, stumbling over the bodies of the dead to cut each other's throats in a frenzy of sudden imbecility."

  For the most part, and despite their melodramatic aspects, Le Queux's books are restrained and civilized—a reflection, as are most works of fiction, of the author's outlook on life. In comparison, or more properly, in direct opposition, we have the lurid, opinionated, sometimes nasty prose of Sydney Horleralso an accurate reflection of the author.

  Himself a journalist until his early thirties, Horler began publishing "shockers" in 1925 and went on to produce well over a hundred, most in the same sensational vein, until his death in 1954. He was considered heir to the prolific Edgar Wallace, and in fact adopted some of Wallace's self-promotional methods (as well as purchased Wallace's desk and Dictophone at auction after E.W.'s death in 1932, and later hired Wallace's personal secretary). That Horler was successful at this is evidenced by the fact that several of his early novels were modest bestsellers in England. He created a ménage of series characters, most of them Secret Service agents of one kind or another, including Bunny Chipstead, "The Ace," Nighthawk, Sir Brian Fording hame, and that animal among men, Tiger Standish. The Standish books—Tiger Standish Steps On It (1940) is a representative title in more ways than one—were especially popular with Horler's readership.

  In the thirties, some British and American editions of Horler's novels carried the logo "Horler for Excitement." The slogan might better have read "Horler for Racism." Or "Horler for Priggishness." He excoriated Jews, "Huns," "dagoes" (that is, the Portuguese and Spanish), and "stinking Italianos" (a.k.a. "wops," "macaronis," and "the hyena-race") and saw to it that his fictional heroes, Tiger Standish in particular, expressed a similar viewpoint. But it is in his nonfiction works—a pair of diaries, Strictly Personal and More Strictly Personal; an informal (and surprisingly astute) commentary on popular fiction of the early thirties, Writing for Money; his "impudent autobiography," Excitement; and a vicious World War II diatribe, Now Let Us Hate—that he most vividly stated his prejudices.

  He considered the Americans absurd, the French dishonest, the Swiss avaricious, the Armenians a race of rug peddlers, and the English the only civilized people on earth. An outspoken male chauvinist, he thought that women possessed "the herd-mind," that "the inanity of nine females out of ten is mainly responsible for many of their husbands going completely off the rails," and that "the majority [of 'mentally sadistic sex-novel readers'] are women; very few men read the unhealthy novel." He also found most females unattractive: "Of how many women can it truly be said that they are worthy of their underclothes?" He believed that explicit mention of sex was degenerate and homosexuals ought to be incinerated; that male cigarette smokers were emasculated because they didn't smoke pipes instead; and that D. H. Lawrence was "a pathological case, a consumptive who was driven by his disease to write about sex." As for detective fiction, he was of the opinion that the work of Dashiell Hammett was "crude to the point of mental disgust" and the plot of The Thin Man "verminous". His most memorable comment on the genre, however, is this one: "I know I haven't the brains to write a proper detective novel, but there is no class of literature for which I feel a deeper personal loathing."

  It would be an understatement to say that Horler, in addition to his charming personal views, was a writer of meretricious SPY thrillers. (LeRoy L. Panek, in a chapter on Horler in his study The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980, calls him "an egregiously bad writer even by the less than exacting standards of the popular novel.") No other author produced more alternatively memorable novels of any type than Horler. He was sui generis. An entire book of the nature of this one could, and probably should, be written on his work alone.

  Horler's greatest literary attribute was his imagination, which may be described as weedily fertile. His favorite antagonists were fanatical Germans and Fu Manchu-type megalomaniacs, many of whom were given sobriquets such as "The Disguiser," "The Colossus," "The Mutilator," "The Master of Venom," and "The Voice of Ice"; but he also contrived a number of other evildoers to match wits with his heroes—an impressive list of them that includes mad scientists, American gangsters, vampires, giant apes, ape-men from Borneo, venal dwarfs, slavering "Things," a man born with the head of a wolf, and—his crowning achievement—a blood-sucking, man-eating bush.

  Then came something that almost turned the watchers sick with horror. Practically the whole space in the greenhouse was occupied by a huge ugly bush about fourteen feet high that had innumerable long creeper-like tendrils of dull reddish-brown springing out in all directions from its trunk. These tendrils, covered with coarse red hair . . . might have been the suckers of a gigantic octopus—only they appeared infinitely more terrifying because of their infinitude. . . . [They] closed like a gigantic cocoon on every exposed part of the doomed man's flesh. ("The Red-Haired Death," a novelette in The Destroyer, and The Red-Haired Death)

  A typical Horler novel is The Curse of Doone, originally published in England in 1928 and reprinted here in 1930 by The Mystery League, an outfit that seemed to specialize in terrible mysteri
es during the brief three years of its existence. It is inspired nonsense about a Secret Service agent named Ian Heath; a virgin in distress; a friend of Heath's, Jerry, who worries about "the primrose path to perdition"; a couple of incredible coincidences (another Horler stock-in-trade); a secluded mansion on Dartmoor; the "Vampire of Doone Hall" and monstrous vampire bats; a pair of bloody murders; hidden caves, secret panels and caches; a Prussian villain who became a homicidal maniac because he couldn't cope with his sudden baldness; and a newly invented "war machine" that can force enemy aircraft out of the air by means of wireless waves and stop a motor car from five miles away.

  In this case, a "logical" explanation for the apparent presence of supernatural creatures is given at the denouement. The vampire, we are told, was just an ordinary spy dressed up in black clothing and wearing a mask, who used various means to create the illusion of Dracula-style killings. As for the monstrous vampire bats—

  "Inside the cave I found a tiny monoplane, a make corresponding to the new British Tiger. It was so small that it might almost have been mistaken for a toy, and was painted a dull, gun-metal gray. But an examination of the engine showed that it was a Victory sixty h.p. which would probably allow a machine of that kind to travel at one hundred and eighty miles an hour. A machine like this, flying slowly round a house at night, with the wheels tucked up inside the fuselage, would look very much like what one would imagine a vampire—"