Gun in Cheek (17 page)

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, and 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 mysteries 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—"

"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?"