Angus Hall To play the Devil

[andydecker]

Always wanted to do one of those "work-in-progress" thingies. As I kind of struggle with this novel, this is the opportunity.

Sphere 1971

I first read about this writer in the PF. Didn´t knew that the first Toombs novel was the basis for the movie Madhouse. And with this cover, how could I refuse

But I had problems with it form the start. I don´t like the style, I don´t think the jokes funny (at least most of them), and at page 60 (out of 140) this is still a lot more like one of crime novelist Carter Brown´s horror spoofs than the genuine thing.

Young novelist Mark Payne isn´t doing so well.

I was wrestling with an adversary known in the literary game as 'the second novel', and instead of beating my opponent with ease, I was held in a diabolical brain-lock from which I could not extricate myself.

Payne gets the commission to write the autobiography of satanist Paul Toombs, I had even read a lurid novel based on his criminal and cinema careers, and had later seen a film version of the book starring, pleasingly enough, Vincent Price. How postmodern in 1971.

So Payne flies to tropical island New Albion. On the flight he has run-in with amazonian stewardess Grese, as he doesn´t want to eat the free barley-sugar. She pushed a wrestler´s hand into my face. Locked in her fingers was a cellophane-wrapped piece of barley-sugar. "If sir does not take this barley-sugar", she said grimly, "then I shall have no option but to report him the captain. At the very least it will mean returning the plane to base. After that you will be handed over to the airport police. You might even be heard of again."

I guess there is a terrific joke somewhere, I just don´t get it.

So he arrives on the island and meets his employer Rose West, who wants to expose Toombs and his Church of Lucifer. Or something. And Toombs has given his full cooperation. After some supposed witty banter - while Payne gets smashingly drunk with the island cocktail Neckbraker - Toombs arrives and collects our young hero, to show him is new temple, which is situated at the former home of the british consul Sir Roderick Peregrine. Toombs drives a hearse and is a colourful fellow. Payne meets briefly Peregrine and his family, who are still living on the grounds, including "his inhibited, dead from the pudenda down wife; and his chaste, virginal daugther - priestess of Vesta, waiting to be ravaged on the household hearth. As Toombs describes them.

Payne watches a speach to the new disciples, along with naked girls and a b-movie altar. "That was very, very naughty. The wanton creatures! I´d like to b-b-beat their b-b-bottoms!" exclaimes one of the newbies delighted. Tooms, outfitted with fake plastic horns, does his welcome to holiday camp speech, a lot of "do what you wilt" nonsense, but when he says that for doing the genuine satanic thing the boys have to have sex with the other boys, most of the newbies leave discreetly. (You just can imagine the Carry On team waiting in the wings.)

Toombs goads Payne with a lot of talk. Later Payne gets a nocturnal visit by the ambassadors daughter Sarah Peregrine, who was at Rhoedan and has only sex on her mind. With which she will pay Payne if he is willing to help her. Her friend Madelaine Carruthers is on her honeymoon on the island, but her husband Nick has become a disciple of Toombs and doesn´t perfom in bed. And Madelaine cries her eyes out.

"It´s not that Nick is like ... well ... sort of ..."
"A length of chewing gum", put in Sarah.
"It´s more that his thing - his little dickie -"
"Little being the operative word."
"- has more or less retracted!"


According to Rose West Toombs put a curse on him. Payne promises to speak with him. Flaccid husband Nick is wasting away in one of Toombs Limbo Retreats, where the disciples seek comunication the The Great Adversary. Toombs has no problem at all bringing Payne to him. Nick is sick, wasting away with typhoid because of some bad water. Toombs tries to cure him with some magic. Payne insists on bringing his wife, and Toombs allows it.

After the visit Sarah does her part of the deal, but to everyone´s surprise and her everlasting shame she is still a virgin. But it also is psychological with her. She will be impenetrable untill that simple gold band is in place, third finger, left hand.

Payne wants to marry her at once, but Sarah wants to do it only after the Toombs business is over. But our novelist hero gets some, Sarah has no problem with her lucky number sixty-nine. So Bill Clinton was right. Who would have thought.

Now we are on page 60 and there wasn´t anything remotly supernatural or suspenseful. I thought a lot of the inane dialog hard to read and the comedy (if it was meant as a comedy, I really don´t know) felt forced. But maybe the plot will thicken and this will tranform itself into a occult tale. I will see ...

[dem bones]

Never had a copy of this but it sounds very similar to what I remember of Devilday/ Madhouse which probably isn't all that hot either, though I've a soft spot for it. Did he write any more Toombs novels?

[killercrab]

I bought this for the cover which for an occult book is outstanding. Been meaning to read it since but hey always another book gets in the way. I'd still put this up for a best photo cover EVER award.

KC

[killercrab]

I'm three chapters in on this and I agree the writing style takes a bit of getting used to! I'm finding it akin to those old noir flicks from the 1940's - that gumshoe patter. I will admit I've smirked a few times so it's not put me off yet.

I've just finished Etienne Aubin's DRACULA AND THE VIRGINS OF THE UNDEAD so maybe *anything* would seem rivetting.

KC

[dem bones]

Angus Hall - To Play The Devil (Sphere, 1971)

Blurb:
"He raised the sword above Madelaine, paused while she smiled and nodded, then plunged it into the white pillar of her throat .... Again the sword curved through the air. This time it sliced into her chest — twice, forming a red and dripping cross ..."

Commissioned to write the biography of a black magician called by his followers 'The Master", a young British writer flies to the island of New Albion — where he is trapped in a mesh of occult and macabre events.

The Master (otherwise known as Paul Harvard Toombs, the Hollywood horror star) embarks on a series of gruesome deeds and sacrificial killings as he bids for more power than any other man has enjoyed.

A number of people seek to destroy Toombs. But rumour has it that he is im­mortal, and cannot be killed ...

Did you get to finish this one, Andy? Been so long since I read it's predecessor, Devilday/ Madhouse that I can no longer recall if Hollywood horror star Paul Harvard Toombs was the murderer, or if he just took the blame/ credit for a series of Ripper-style slayings? Fifty pages into To Play The Devil and this time around, seems Toombs is pretending (?) to be dead, his old body and trademark pentagram tattooed eyeball now a mere receptacle for 'The Master,' the Greatest Great Beast since Aleister Crowley. As was the case with Devilday, it's not unlikely that To Play The Devil was conceived with filming in mind, presumably a sex comedy with occult trappings/ rauchier Carry On Up The Satanic Arts, hence such colourful walking clichés as; Sir Roderick Peregrine (even before he opened his mouth I just knew the word he would use to indicate the island's indigenous population); Nick Forsyte, the upper class, chinless wonder with the retractable dick ("If only he hadn't read that ghastly Devilday book all this might never have happened"); Sarah the wannabe sex kitten (favoured reading material, The Single Hand Of Love); Grese, the SS prison warden turned air hostess. Best/ worst of the lot, Jay Jay, Payne's manager-agent, who is Gay Gay turned up to eleven, calls everyone "Duckey," and whose lavish office furniture boasts "a glass-top coffee table, specially manufactured for perverts."

Toombs makes for a first rate pantomime villain. Like Crowley, his shock tactics and flair for obnoxious theatrics often work against the heartfelt philosophy he seeks to convey, unless that, too, is just another pose (see p. 55's vindication of Lucifer). As yet there's been little reference to our big-boned monster's movie career save for Mark Payne's tantalising synopsis of The Phantom Of The Crypt, in which: "Toombs .... bossed a gang of undead, murdering in London from a vault beneath a disused Highgate church. Like vampires, the killers had to be back in their coffins before light broke over the eighteenth century necropolis ...." & so on: won't spoil the spectacular ending.

To be continued. Already thinking of giving Devilday another seeing to.

[andydecker]

It's been 7 years? OMG!

No, I never finished this. I can't even remember I wrote this  Unbelievable.

But the cover is still great

[helrunar]

I may get a little too much perverted pleasure out of reading your notes on these things, Maestro Dem.  I didn't even know that the V. Price classic/turkey (some think of it as a classic, others regard it as a rank gobbler), Madhouse, was based on a book.

Another choice bijou from Sphere Books, I see...

cheers, H.

[dem bones]

Oct 12, 2017 17:23:44 GMT andydecker said:

It's been 7 years? OMG!

No, I never finished this. I can't even remember I wrote this  Unbelievable.

But the cover is still great

It has certainly perked up.

"Watched suspensefully by everyone - filmed and recorded for future use - Madelaine moved forward ... She halted by the centre of the catafalque, stooped, and kissed the corpse on its most private and intimate place."

With Madelaine newly widowed and gone over to the dark side, Sarah steps up the vendetta versus Toombs by unleashing her secret weapon, namely king of the TV interview, Barry Lambert of Probe notoriety. Lambert, quite possibly the most obnoxious character in a novel brimming with same, has his own score to settle with Toombs. The Satanic horror star, unfazed at the prospect of trial by television, invites Lambert and crew to film what proves his most disgusting ceremony to date. Madelaine going down on her dead husband is merely the warm up act. Once she's performed her "obscene, necrophiliac kiss," Toombs whips off his clothes and takes her very forcibly, if not against her will, the cue for his frenzied followers to orgy. Only a calming word from Sarah prevents a gagging for it Payne entering the fray. Piling excess upon excess, Toombs ends proceeding with a very bloody human sacrifice.

Now that Lambert has his incriminating footage, how can Toombs possibly allow him to the leave the island?

Fifty pages to go. Don't know about you, but after that astonishing episode I reckon we've already had our money's worth.

[dem bones]

Could be I'm getting jaded but, after the heady thrills of the Black Mass extravaganza, To Play The Devil kind of fizzles out. Can't really explain why as it is not like the novel lacks for incident - Toombs levitation of Government HQ and Payne's discovery of the bubbling chemical vats being particularly effective. Mr. Hall keeps us guessing until the last fifteen pages as to whether Toombs is the Master Black Magician he claims to be or a particularly gifted stage magician with a big nose (I guessed wrong). Also, it's a rare instance of a novelist depicting 'Black Magic' as an unlikely source of good - Toombs successfully stirring the indigenous population to overthrow the President's fascist regime (albeit for opportunist rebel chief Nagwambi to replace it with another Dictatorship). We finally get to discover why the unfortunately named Rose West - who fancies herself for Miss Whiplash 1971 - hates Toombs so. Seems they were married in a previous incarnation and he sacrificed their daughter to Satan.

[andydecker]

Oct 19, 2017 16:22:12 GMT dem bones said:

Seems they were married in a previous incarnation and he sacrificed their daughter to Satan.

That will put the dent into most marriages.

[dem bones]

Oct 19, 2017 17:50:25 GMT andydecker said:

Oct 19, 2017 16:22:12 GMT dem bones said:

Seems they were married in a previous incarnation and he sacrificed their daughter to Satan.

That will put the dent into most marriages.

I'm all for nursing a grudge but five centuries? Ok, it's not for everyone, but they might at least consider counselling.

Feel almost guilty for not liking To Play The Devil more than I did. Can't think for the life of me why I came over all disappointed during final third. It's not remotely "bad," just somehow not the book it should be. Found his non-Toombs novel Deathday way more fun.

Angus Hall has had an enviable career, wrote several occult non-fiction titles - sometimes in collaboration with Dan 'transplant, "I am Bram Stoker's nephew" etc' Farson - and edited Phoebus publishing's bit-part Crimes & Punishment for much of the early 'seventies.