Gun in Cheek (16 page)

"A politician's unlike other people—he's got to keep away from wet tar if he wants to stick to his seat." (
The Corpse With the Grimy Glove
)

And exchanging clichéd similes and metaphors with other characters:

"Very well. You'll be as happy as a fisherman in the Mayfly season, won't you? But I think you've hooked a sunken log, Tolefree."

"Never mind, sir. It's not the kill that counts but the cast." (
The Corpse Without a Clue
)

". . . What's biting you?"

"A nasty little insect of the hunch species."

"Very well—produce the beast. I suppose, by the way, its family name isn't Raleigh bug, is it?" (
The Corpse Without a Clue
)

Although Tolefree operates out of a London apartment, most of his cases seem to take him into the countryside, to places like Goonbarrow Downs (
The Corpse With the Eerie Eye
), where he becomes embroiled in the murder of a man with horrible gray eyes that "failed to betray the astonishment commonly seen in people who met violent death. They were eerie. The pupils seemed scarcely larger than pin-heads. . • ." He solves this and other cases in the accepted Sherlockian manner of detection and deduction, plus an inexhaustible fund of knowledge both esoteric and ephemeral. Another of the reasons he is so successful at unmasking murderers may be traced to a familiarity with such matters and motives as skeletons in closets, hidden relationships, peculiar wills, strange disappearances, and Nazi infiltrators, since nearly all his investigations seem to uncover one or any combination of these.

On some detective sojourns, he is accompanied by a Watson named Farrar, who is inclined to drool over Tolefree's brilliance. In other books, the narrative is presented in the third person, in which event everyone (including Tolefree) is inclined to drool over Tolefree's brilliance. These other characters all have names like Garstang, Blenkinsop, Snagley, Grazebrook, Cornwood, Calderstone, Mapperley, Horridge, Quigley, Limpenny, Treglohan, Clodgey, Coverdale, Pugsley, and Sir Benjamin Hex—and are generally upper-class folk who own large estates, play croquet, enjoy killing animals for sport, mistreat their servants, and bore each other (and the reader) with stuffy observations on politics, history, tradition, and moral decay.

Plodding though Walling's prose may be, it is not devoid of an occasional bit of flare. Every now and then a sentence or a passage of dialogue will appear that makes one sit up and take notice, as if by design on the author's part, to ensure that his readers stay awake.

"Just a moment," said he and frowned like a man trying to find the lady's nose in a jig-saw puzzle. (
The Corpse With the Floating Foot
)

Tolefree heard the car door bang, a deep voice exploring the soles of its owner's boots, and footsteps in the hail. (
The Late Unlamented
)

A hint of excitement hovered about Miss Kane, looking well in an afternoon frock and explaining that she had obtained a weekend leave and was looking forward to the party. (
The Corpse Without a Clue
)

"In plain English, Patterson," said Pye, "nix on the gats!" (
The Corpse With the Floating Foot
)

"Lowell had nothing to do with the shooting of Beresford or the placing of his corpse on the Goonbarrow. You think Lowell had a strong motive for killing Beresford because the scoundrel was blackmailing his wife as a bigamist and playing off his daughter against him."

"Good God!" cried Mapperley. "Have you got as deep as that?" (
The Corpse With the Eerie Eye
)

O
ver the past twenty years, the British mystery has shown signs of evolving into something quite different from what it had been since Sherlock Holmes made his first bow. There are those writers (Gladys Mitchell is one) who continue to cling to the traditional approach: genteel, civilized, appealing more to the intellect than to the emotions.
 
But their numbers seem fewer with each passing year. More and more English crime novelists appear eager to emulate their American counterparts in the selection of sensational plotlines. Politics, terrorism, high finance, drugs, rock music, the sexual revolution—all these and more have replaced the traditional tale of domestic murder and/or commercial skullduggery. Concomitantly, detection has given way to action as the primary ingredient, with a keen emphasis on matters sexual and psychological.

A new kind of amateur detective has emerged. No longer do we have Dr. Fells and Miss Marples; now we have the likes of Sam North, self-styled author and hero of
209 Thriller Road
(1979), who operates The Novel Shop in downtown London:

Here it is folks, 209 Thriller Road, step right in, transform your life into an adventure, thrill your friends with a trip to Africa or Luna 5. - . . Buy your way into the elite, the Starfleet? And I don't care if you want to be Bogie in Casablanca, in love with a girl on the lam and no place to hide or a reluctant hero from Apocalypse Now. Camelot or weeping romance, all yours for you and your friends to enjoy, written by the king of ghost writers. No more will he hide his bushel under the likes of a happy hooker or (I survived) the comeback story of a Hollywood alcoholic mother of three, no more will he suffer, now it is ghosting for the people, by the people; the ghost has gone public!

Sam's first novel-shop writing assignment is to ghost a book for Danny Plant, scrap king and mobster—a thriller in which Danny himself will be the villain and get away with his (unspecified to Sam) crime. But before Sam can get started, Danny turns up dead; and North finds himself mixed up in a wild and woolly adventure blending gangsters, a corporation worth seventeen million pounds sterling, a precocious five-year-old kid, assorted chases, some kinky sex, and a plethora of what the jacket blurb calls "fiendish" humor—all of it told in North's divergent style, replete with eccentric grammar and punctuation, plus asides to the reader.

I had never heard of such a lot of impossible coincidences. I bet even you find it hard to swallow. But there was bound to be some logic somewhere. Lord Kirk Fawcett. An English absentee landlord. Therefore an income to sustain the fabulous house near Regent's Park. . . . So would it be reasonable to assume that the absentee landlord assisted Danny in his conquest of the City underworld and money fiddles? Or - . . my brain was doing incredible twists and turns, Lord Kirk lost out on the Irish land to Danny and because of his own problems was in hock to Danny, now that he was dead, Lord Kirk was after getting everything back.

"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!

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

I
t 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.