The Terminators – Berkley Mather

 adventure, Berkely Mather, espionage, India, Top Notch Thrillers  Comments Off
Apr 212013
 
Eleven years after his first appearance in The Pass Beyond Kashmir Idwal Rees is teamed up once more with his bloodthirsty and belligerent Pathan cohort Samaraz in a tale of espionage and derring-do that only Berkely Mather could have written. This time the duo face a band of marauding Tibetan nomads while on the hunt for a missing spy. Oddly enough that spy turns out to be Mather's second series character -- James Wainwright, a hapless and insecure British agent who appeared solo in two previous books by Mather.

The Terminators (1971) begins with a hijacking sequence that is eerily resonant in its detail of airport security systems. I remember the skyjacking paranoia of the 1970s that was largely responsible for the installation of metal detectors throughout the airports of the world but the way the hijackers manage to sneak weapons on board in this novel will be all too familiar to any modern traveller. Once again Mather creates some eyebrow raising scenes that predict criminal behavior yet to come in the real world. The hijacking plants the seed for the hair rising climax that takes place in the final third of the book. Once the prologue is done the story focuses on Rees and Samaraz and their assignments for a covert British secret service agency known as "the Firm".

And for those who are familiar with Rees in his first outing The Terminators will seem like a regular homecoming of characters. In the first recounted escapade of many engaging action scenes the corrupt Indian police office Nadkarni and his Sikh colleague appear briefly only to fall victim to a brutal attack. When Rees receives his assignment to track down Wainwright he learns he will have to travel to the home of the blind General Culverton, father to his old flame Claire, a nurse at the Tibetan refugee hospital. He will also learn that Wainwright and Claire have struck up a relationship that will serve as fuel for a rivalry between the two men. This portion of the book -- a long bickering/arguing sequence -- is the only time where my interest in the story flagged. I could have done without Wainwright's petulance, the juvenile name calling, and his "I'm such a loser" attitude as well. He does, however, step up to the plate in a final heroic act in which he proves himself to be not as self-serving as he at first painted himself.

Mather's unusual sense of humor comes into play throughout the book. We get a variety of awful insults, some translated literally and some left to our imagination, from the foul-mouthed and ill-tempered bigot Samaraz. The humor is a mix of the salty, the vulgar and the oddball. Here are two fo my favorites:
...he had about as much chance of pinching my woman as he had of shoving butter up a wildcat's arse with a red hat pin.

What I know about radio, plus a nickel, wouldn't buy the ghost of Gandhi a haircut.
Best not to reveal all the excellent adventure delivered at the hands of this master storyteller. Mather really should have turned to the movie screen more often in his writing career. This book as the other two I have previously reviewed here is both a cinematic wonder of action, an Asian travelogue and a crash course in Indian/Tibetan/Pakistan relations and politics. If you haven't discovered Berkely Mather yet -- what are you waiting for?

The Terminators is now available as part of the library of Top Notch Thrillers, that fine imprint from Ostara Publishing. You can order direct from them (click on the link) or amazon.com (both US and UK versions). Do yourself a favor and introduce yourself to Idwal and crew soon. You won't be disappointed.

Previously discussed on this blog:
The Pass Beyond Kashmir (also available form Top Notch Thrillers)
The Gold of Malabar


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This post is by J. F. Norris and appears in its original form at Pretty Sinister Books. Please visit Pretty Sinister Books for more insightful and bantering commentary on forgotten but worthwhile books and movies. All written content is © 2011-2013 by John Norris.
 Posted by at 3:40 pm

NEW STUFF: The Invisible Code – Christopher Fowler

 Bryant and May, Christopher Fowler, espionage, Harry Stephen Keeler, impossible crime, John Russell Fearn, New Books, occult detectives, webwork, witchcraft  Comments Off
Feb 132013
 
Each new Bryant & May crime novel brings with it the anticipatory thrill of discovering more arcana of London that Christopher Fowler loves to share with his readers. (There should be a word for all these nuggets of England's past. Londoniana? Albionisms? Mull those over.) The latest escapade of the Peculiar Crimes Unit or PCU does not disappoint. Within the labyrinthine plot of The Invisible Code (2011) the reader is treated to the fascinating world of Sir John Soane's museum housed at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields; the secrets of the "Scarlet Thread" and what it means to the Knights Templar; St. Bride's, the church of journalists; and more tidbits about the occult that always work their way into the adventures London's much maligned and unappreciated specialized police squad. For fans of vintage crime and adventure novels there is the added bonus of allusions to the work of Dennis Wheatley and especially a particular title by Fritz Leiber.

Oskar Kasavian (familiarly known to the PCU staff as The Prince of Darkness), an executive in the Home Office, is the top level overseer of this unusual police unit set up to protect the public. He is also their number one enemy. For years Kasavian has been doing his best to shut them down and now Arthur Bryant and John May are surprised to be called into his office for a personal favor. He needs their specialized help in handling the embarrassing public behavior of his wife Sabira who is becoming increasingly erratic and violent. She's been raving about demons and witches and seems to have submerged herself into a world of paranoid imaginings. Kasavian thinks for that reason the PCU team are perfect for discovering the cause of Sabira's delusions. Or are they delusions? And what about the odd death of the woman found in St. Bride's Church who apparently was the target of some children playing an RPG called Witch Hunter? Like all PCU cases the coincidences prove to have more significance the further the team plows.

Arthur Bryant talks about the importance of connections and patterns at one point in the book. This is the basis for all the PCU books. There is a wealth of information that at first comes at the reader in random incidents, then are fired out in rapid succession. Fowler, unwittingly perhaps, is one of the greatest modern practitioners of an old subgenre known as the webwork novel. Harry Stephen Keeler was the best known American writer of webwork novels. He even wrote a manifesto -- "The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction" -- about the art of creating a single story out of random multiple narrative threads. John Russell Fearn, prolific British pulp magazine writer of SF and detective fiction, credited Keeler with influencing him in his SF webwork stories.

Synopsis in diagram form depicting the webwork plot of Keeler's Voice of the Seven Sparrows (1924)
Fowler's story incorporates the mysterious death of Amy O'Connor in the opening chapter, the death of a character in a previous novel, the madness of Sabira Kasavian, and several other apparently random acts of violence in a tour de force of webwork plotting. Webwork might be called the fictional counterpart of a conspiracy theorist's obsessive hunt for nefarious patterns real and imagined in the operations of global conglomerates and world politics. Allusions in The Invisible Code to modern paranoid thrillers like Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby and the movie The Parallax View add another level of enjoyment to the randomness that will eventually reveal a pattern of sinister construction. The novel is the best of this type I have read in all of the ten Bryant & May detective series. Though there is sometimes a tendency towards didactic dialogue passages -- the kind typified by forensic crime TV shows and The X Files -- Fowler mostly manages to introduce the Albionisms (I used it!) in a way that flows naturally out of the densely compacted action.

Bryant & May find a victim in St Bride's Church
(Artwork by Keith Page)
 The series characters each have a turn in the spotlight with some interesting developments in Janice Longbright's life and the usually bickering partnership of detective constables Colin Bimsley and Meera Mangeshkar. Dan Banbury and Giles Kershaw do their usual forensic wizardry in the morgue and in the technosphere. Maggie Armitage, the "white witch", is featured prominently offering much lore and occult knowledge to help Arthur Bryant in explaining some of the baffling elements of the case. And, finally, we are introduced to a new character, Mr. Merry, who appears to be a 21st century Aleister Crowley and who promises to be a formidable foe in the future books as hinted at in a teasing final chapter.

Sampling the escapades of the Peculiar Crimes Unit can be an addictive reading experience but also a dangerous one. In relating to us his love for all things bizarre and strange about the city he loves so unabashedly Fowler not only fuels a crime fiction lover's taste for the bizarre he is something of an alluring siren for the armchair traveller in all of us. He sings a song of London better than any music hall chanteuse. This armchair traveller has been tempted more than once to dip into the savings for a overseas trip to see up close and personal the many unusual places recounted in these extremely entertaining books. And that's the kind of connection I like between a writer and his readership.

Bryant & May and The Invisible Code by Christopher Fowler
Transworld/Doubleday,  August 2012
ISBN: 978-0857520500 (hardcover in UK and Canada only)
GBP 16.99

Available as an eBook and audio book in the US now
US hardcover edition release date is unknown
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This post is by J. F. Norris and appears in its original form at Pretty Sinister Books. Please visit Pretty Sinister Books for more insightful and bantering commentary on forgotten but worthwhile books and movies. All written content is © 2011-2013 by John Norris.
 Posted by at 8:39 pm

FFB: The Avenging Saint – Leslie Charteris

 adventure, espionage, Leslie Charteris, Simon Templar, spies  Comments Off
Jan 252013
 
Here's another well known character who is most assuredly not completely forgotten, but I think the novels are at least overlooked these days. No doubt many people are familiar with Simon Templar in one of his many TV or film incarnations. I think I had only read one or two stories in my teen years and had never bothered with the novels. The Avenging Saint (1930) is the US paperback title for Knight Templar, the third novel featuring Simon Templar and the second part in a trilogy detailing his battle with criminal mastermind Dr. Rayt Marius. It's probably best to read all three in order starting with The Last Hero (or The Saint and the Last Hero) in order to get the true effect of the books.  Having begun with The Avenging Saint -- a bracing action-packed thriller -- I feel compelled to go back to the first before continuing onto Getaway (aka The Saint's Getaway).  The first book is frequently referenced here and the ghost of Norman Kent (the last hero of the first book's title) hovers over this second entry.  I want to know him as the man not the memory.

Simon Templar is sort of a forerunner to all the superspy characters that became all the rage in the 1960s. Though he is a direct descendant of the gentleman thief character (he starts off as a criminal with a gang of Robin Hood style thieves) I found The Saint to have more in common with hero pulp characters like Doc Savage and even James Bond.

Sonia and Vassilloff are married (UK reprint)
The story is very simple. Templar is out for revenge after one of his friends is killed at the hands of Marius, a weapons expert bent on starting the next world war. There is a kidnapping of a millionaire's daughter, an elaborate plan to arouse the ire of her oil tycoon fiancee by forcing a marriage to a Russian aristocrat. There are confrontations with the villains, daring escapes and rescues, more disguises and false beards than an Arsene Lupin book, fist fights galore, and several jaw dropping stunt sequences. I dare any reader to resist succumbing to the pull of this story.

It all sounds terribly old fashioned like something out of E. Phillips Oppenheim when I reduce it to its bare bones, but it's so breezily told with wit and verve you can't help but get swallowed up. When Templar strips naked, dives into a frigid ocean and single-handedly overtakes a motor boat by punching out one of Marius' thugs, lashing him to the wheel and then manipulating the controls with a makeshift rudder and ropes tied to the tiller while being dragged behind the boat in the water you can only marvel at the preposterous ingenuity of it all. Charteris seemed to have been a born screenwriter rather than a novelist who was decades ahead of Hollywood in terms of stunts and thrills. And he was only 23 when he wrote this book.

Simon Templar alternates between a flippant and condescending adventurer to a stern and humorless Nemesis throughout the book. He can exhibit a gleeful almost boyish attitude calling all the bad guys "sweetheart" and "old dear" in one moment then delivering an expert jab to a rogue's jaw rendering neatly unconscious with that one blow. I think he did this about twelve times over the course of the book. And there is a running gag about how he always looks immaculately dressed after all his fights. He even goes the the trouble of saving his clothes in the boat escapade by neatly tying them into bundle he ties to his head while he's steering the boat. Later, he takes that bundle apart, dresses himself on board the villain's yacht looking as if he's ready to join a posh dinner party. You have to smile and laugh at it all.

Charteris can get carried away with himself though. He has a terrible weakness for purple prose of the gaudiest kind. Here are a few examples:

"The jaws of the perambulating mountain oscillated rhythmically, to the obvious torment of a portion of the sweetmeat which has made the sapodilla tree God's especial favour to Mr. Wrigley."   (describing Inspector Teal, a large portly policeman who enjoys chewing gum)

"...and the quintessential part of the plot, so far as Simon Templar was concerned, was how soon -- with a very wiggly mark after it to indicate importunate interrogation."  
(I'd just use the question mark and forgo the cuteness)

This kind of silliness tapers off thankfully.  I made only five notations of egregious examples of these kind of indulgent lapses. The two above were the most flagrant. As I read on the purple prose either disappeared or I was no longer being critical of the lapses. It was Simon Templar himself who won me over.

Or more precisely Charteris' exuberance for Templar won me over. Whether steering motorboats with ropes while submerged in the sea or descending a rope from an airplane onto a moving train the Saint is the premiere action guy. A superhero whose only super powers are sheer guts and bravado.  Forced marriages, bondage ropes, fisticuffs and firearms, the delirious dreams of a warmonger are no match for this one man army. The world of Simon Templar may be old fashioned but I find it utterly addictive. I'm off to read more right now.
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This post is by J. F. Norris and appears in its original form at Pretty Sinister Books. Please visit Pretty Sinister Books for more insightful and bantering commentary on forgotten but worthwhile books and movies. All written content is © 2011-2013 by John Norris.
 Posted by at 7:38 am

Year End Review: Tradecraft 101, Spy Tips from Mischa Hiller’s Shake Off

 espionage, Excerpts, Israel, John Le Carre, Mischa Hiller, Mossad, Mulholland Authors, Palestine, PLO, research, Shake Off, Tradecraft, Writing, writing tips  Comments Off
Dec 292012
 

With 2013 just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to sit back and reflect on another year of great content and great books. Check back twice daily in the last days of 2012 for a selection of our favorite MulhollandBooks.com posts from the past year!

SHAKE OFF‘s Michel Khoury is a veritable encyclopedia of the espionage tradecraft that is essential to his life as a spy, which Mischa Hiller gleaned from access to someone with direct knowledge of the tricks of the trade. Want to learn how to become a skilled agent? Here are a few of the tips from Mischa’s novel:

Concealing documents and cash? Use a newspaper.

“They are easy to ditch, and you can carry one under your arm even as your bags are being searched.”

Know your cover.

“If you can believe just a bit of your cover story then you can convince your listener (and even yourself) that it is all true.”

Incriminating evidence to ditch? Use the restroom.

“It is easier to flush soaked paper than dry.”

Disguise yourself.

“Hospitals have no security to speak of.  You can wander almost anywhere unchallenged, particularly if you don a white coat – best acquired from the doctors’ lounge in the A&E department.  Or go dressed in a suit carrying a briefcase and pretend you are a drugs salesman.”

Watch your back.

“You should always sit at the back of the bus when you get on, because surveillance like to sit at the back to get a good view of you embarking without having to turn around.”

Beware the honeytrap.

“It is easier to believe that a woman finds you irresistible than that she is trying to ensnare you.”

Tired of looking over your shoulder?

“Take a few days off, go to the cinema, sit in the park, stay at home and read a book….Make them bored. A bored surveillance team is a careless one.”

Blend in.

“Be gray, not colorful, my trainers in Moscow had said.  I always matched my shoes to my clothes.  I’d heard that immigration officers checked for illegal immigrants by looking at their shoes.”

Finish the job.

“To kill someone you need to shoot them at least four or five times in the head, just to make sure.  And it needs to be up close with a hand-held weapon.  You have to put it right up against the head or very close to it, otherwise you could miss; some weapons give a massive kick, and any shot following the first could go wild.  If you can’t get close enough to kill the target with your first shot, then you will need to incapacitate them with a body shot first and finish the deed close up, a coup de grâce.”

Mischa Hiller is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Best First Book category for South Asia and Europe. Raised in London, Beirut, and Dar El Salaam, he lives in Cambridge, England. Visit him at www.mischahiller.com.

SHAKE OFF, selected by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2012 (“Hiller’s novel has the benefit of mining every trope of the thriller genre while being absolutely original at the same time. I will read anything by Hiller from now on”), is now available in bookstores everywhere.

"I loved Mischa Hiller’s SHAKE OFF. I picked it up entirely by accident. I’d never heard of Hiller…"

 best of, Books, espionage, Lit, new yorker, quotes, thrillers  Comments Off
Dec 132012
 
““I loved Mischa Hiller’s SHAKE OFF. I picked it up entirely by accident. I’d never heard of Hiller before, and the book absolutely blew me away….Hiller’s novel has the benefit of mining every trope of the thriller genre while being absolutely original at the same time. I will read anything by Hiller from now on.””

- Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker (Best Books of 2012)

The Pass Beyond Kashmir – Berkely Mather

 adventure, Berkely Mather, espionage, India, Top Notch Thrillers  Comments Off
Jul 152012
 
The P.R. materials I received with my copy of the recent reprint of The Pass Beyond the Kashmir (1960) call it a "ripping yarn." While that is a perfect marketing catchphrase it is something of a disservice to this remarkable novel by John Weston-Davies, former military man who served in both Australia and India. Writing as "Berkely Mather" Weston-Davies created three series characters Peter Feltham, British spy Jack Wainwright, and Idwal Rees who debuts in this book. Amazingly, this action packed story is Mather's second novel. It's a masterfully balanced story that blends literate prose, spirited characters, cultural insights and suspenseful action. So impressively done The Pass Beyond the Kashmir is practically a textbook on how to write the perfect adventure page-turner.

The story takes our hero Idwal Rees through a rugged adventure marked by multiple pursuits, captures and escapes as he and an Australian opportunist named Smedley try to make their way from Bombay to Kashmir. There they plan to meet George Polson, a retired British major, who will lead them to the location of documents that may reveal the source of a hidden oil reserve. Aided by Rees' servant Samaraz, a strong-willed Pathan, the two men get off to a bad start when the major vanishes from his home where his wife has been brutally attacked. The local police begin to show an interest in the major's disappearance and based on the probing questions Rees suspects that it may have something to do with the documents. As the three continue eluding and escaping a variety of villains it is clear everyone wants the major and/or the documents. At one point Rees quotes an Indian proverb which aptly sums up the seemingly endless chases: "The Indian night is blind for the watched, but has a thousand eyes for the watcher."

Over the course of these densely packed 190 pages the reader will also be tutored in all things Indian and Asian. Mather is especially adept at interspersing into the action a series of lessons in everything from the Indian caste system to the making of Tibetan butter tea. Below are a few more of the numerous tidbits picked up:
  • In India it is not the Express train that will get you to your destination the fastest, it is the Mail train. The express is actually a local.
  • Speakers of Urdu cannot pronounce an initial S sound with first adding an additional vowel sound. Therefore, Smedley becomes Ish-medley.
  • Only Muslims who have made the arduous journey to Mecca and paid their respects to Mohammed there have earned the right to wear a green turban.  (this may not be so true now apparently)
  • A Pathan is an upper caste Muslim. In the story Samaraz is a particularly intolerant, in fact intensely hateful, of anyone not of his caste.
  • You apparently cannot do anything in India without the help of baksheesh. Rees and friends are lucky to have the wads of rupees with them as they are constantly passing out money to everyone they meet.
The characters are alive and human and so unexpected in how they behave. Along the way Rees will meet a mysterious Sikh of unknown allegiance; Yev Shalom, "seller and buyer of anything" especially information, who is eerily omniscient in how he obtains that information; a tenacious and very clever British nurse who sees through one of the many disguises Rees and Smedley must adopt; a blind brigadier general who helps guide them to Kashmir; and the requisite master criminal who will turn out to have a surprisingly close connection to Rees. These and several others make for a even more entertaining "ripping yarn."

Humor is also abundant amidst the more serious aspects of the story's violence and politics. Smedley becomes the object of Rees' anger several times and Rees deals with his frustrations and sublimated rage when he chooses to give Smedley a variety of humiliating disguises. He at first shaves his hair and eyebrows, uses shoe polish to darken his skin, and passes him off as a lower caste servant. Pathan insults Smedley further by saying he looks like a dung seller. Later, Smedley is forced to wear a burkah and pretend to be a woman. When he takes advantage of this disguise by attempting to board one of the women only passenger cars on a train all hell breaks loose. It seems his physique and gait give him away immediately.

The Pass Beyond Kashmir is one of the many reissued adventure thrillers released by Top Notch Thrillers, that fine imprint of Ostara Publishing. Mike Ripley, editor of the series, has once again uncovered a whopper of a tale, an exciting page turner to rival anything published today. In fact, I prefer something like this book over the padded doorstop tomes we have nowadays. Mather's story not only has the ring of truth and authenticity thanks to his many years of living in India he tells his tale with hardly one diversion into the Land of Backstory and limits himself with psychological character explanations. As I mentioned before this book is a wonderful primer on how to write a thriller, how first and foremost in this genre it is how action can reveal character better than long drawn out explanations of past life experience. An adventure tale more than any other genre should have immediacy and should take place first and foremost in the present. The Pass Beyond Kashmir is as immediate as they come.

The Espionage and Adventure Novels of Berkely Mather


Idwal Rees and Samaraz appear in:
Berkely Mather as he appears on
the DJ of one of his early books
The Pass Beyond Kashmir (1960)
The Terminators (1971)
Snowline (1973)

Jack Wainwright, British spy appears in:
The Springers (1968) aka A Spy for a Spy
The Break in the Line (1970) aka The Break
The Terminators (1971)

Peter Feltham appears in:
The Achilles Affair (1959)
With Extreme Prejudice (1975)

Non-Series Thrillers
Geth Straker (1962) (based on radio scripts of an adventure serial)
The Gold of Malabar (1967)
The White Dacoit (1974)

Mather has also written historical fiction, TV scripts and was the screenwriter for Dr. No and The Long Ships, an unintentionally campy sword and sandal feature about Vikings and Moors in search of a legendary golden bell.  I may write up a review of that movie which he co-wrote with Beverley Cross.
 Posted by at 4:47 pm
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