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Post by dem bones on Nov 16, 2014 17:07:59 GMT
Justin Marriott (ed.) - Men Of Violence #3 (Nov. 2014) Introduction. Read Or Dead. Nick Carter, Malko, The Death Merchant & friends versus Che Guevara Whitlatch's Fulfilment. John Whitlatch's Gannon, Tanner and Morgan series' plus. Gerard De Villiers 1929-2013. Obituary of the Malko man from The Independent (3rd November 2013) Hell's Highway. Terrifying Trucker fiction. Merchant Of Death. Andreas Decker tackles Joseph Rosenberger's Death Merchant series. The Death Merchant Writes. A letter from Joseph Rosenberger to the Glorious Trash blogspot. MOV reviews. Jack Lewis - Blood Money Peter lovesey - The Detective Wore Silk Drawers Andrew McCoy - Atrocity Week Don Scott - RakerHaving been out of circulation for a week, it is quite a booster to come home and find an item in the mail which is actually welcome. God knows, I love Men Of Violence. Men's adventure novels are not my trip and, give or take the odd 'black magic' title featured in these pages, have never felt that sinister urge to investigate further. But reading about these socio-paths/ psychopaths/ xenophobes/ red haters/ vigilantes versus everyone (delete as applicable) and those out there types who created them is an entirely different bucket of vomit. That several of the paperbacks under discussion are "not to everybody's taste" should be self-evident; that they are to anybody's taste is the big mystery. " This is probably the most violent story ever written. If you are easily shocked or frightened, you should not attempt to read it." So runs the " warning" emblazoned across the cover of Andrew McCoy's Atrocity Week (Sphere, 1978), thereby guaranteeing maximum sales. When even Mr. Fanatic confesses he found passages of this novel so brutal they "induced me to queasiness" i'm inclined to take note. Elsewhere we have it confirmed that Joseph The Death Merchant Rosenberger's political leanings are so right wing as to make Jim Moffat reek of "pinko commie liberal attitudes" in comparison. MOV #3 comprises 56 fun-packed pages of such hideous insights. My personal pick of the issue is the feature on extremely extreme vengeful trucker novels (including a brief guest appearance by the Dead Kennedys). It has to be said that this stuff sounds so much scarier than 99% of namby pamby horror fiction. Thank you, mr. Fanatic!
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Post by severance on Nov 17, 2014 14:33:28 GMT
Can't really add to what the big D has already said other than repeat one of his statements - namely that I have no desire to read most of the books described in this issue, reading about them is another matter entirely.
While I was familiar with most of the series/authors, Justin managed to come up with a new one on me - John Whitlatch, complete with some garishly colourful cover art. J wasn't too impressed with the guys writing though, an opinion not shared by most online remarks I've been able to find since. Paul Bishop, James Reasoner and Bill Crider all have good things to say about him, so I'm split as to deciding if he's worth trying.
I wasn't award that Gerard de Villiers was dead - I've got a couple of the SAS books that NEL translated in the early seventies - not read them yet!
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Post by dem bones on Nov 17, 2014 19:42:34 GMT
The bastard of it is, now i can't get that trucker stuff out of my mind. In the unlikely event of, say Rig Warrior or Joe Broderick's Woman' turning up in usual haunts, the big D would be inclined to give it a go.
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Post by pulphack on Nov 19, 2014 10:55:09 GMT
What an excellent issue of MOV!! Loved the long Rosenberger/Death Merchant stuff. I read a couple of early ones and found them a bit turgid, but the later ones sound a lot more fun... if you can use that word. It was also interesting to read the letter again - how much of that stuff about PI work and 'The Agency' was true and how much a drunkard's braggadiccio? (Spelt wrongly, as well.)
So with Malko and the Death Merchant, the bulk of this issue was about series that I've struggled with enjoying, yet love features about them. Wonder what that says about me?* However, the CB & Trucker piece made remember those books clogging up the newsagents racks when I was young - and how wonderfully dumb they were, even for someone that age. I think I may have got all my early sex education from Manor paperbacks, which my wife would find explained everything...
The thing I did like most was the piece about the use of the cold war and communism as 'the enemy' before the Mafia came along. I've been reading some old British spy fiction from the sixties lately (a Jimmy Sangster, a couple of James Mayos, and one apiece by James Eastwood and Martin Woodhouse). All were better written than your average US actioner of the time, and all had the Chinese rather than the Russians as the main enemy. This struck me as odd - I also remember watching The Champions box set a few years back and also found that this UK series had the Chinese as the main threat rather than the Russians. Now given some of the films and TV from the USA I watched as a kid, I remember the Chinese were generally a bigger Commie Pinko threat in these than the Russians. I can understand that in the US, what with Vietnam, etc - but why did the Brits pick them as the biggest threat? I wonder if it was because the geopolitics of the time had Wilson's Labour Govt (thought commie enough by the British establishment - and Dennis Wheatley - to inspire a possible coup after darling 'arold deposed Teddy Teeth in '74) appeasing the Russians, and so we all looked further East for the inscrutable Communist threat?
Anyway, a fine issue. I was a little surprised to see Peter Lovesey in there, though! As was Justin, no doubt when he first read the book. What idiot editor thought he could flog Cribb as a men's actioner??!! I love those books, but they sit much more in the British detective niche - Lovesey also wrote a series of 'Bertie And...' mysteries with Edward VII as a bored and irritable man turning to detection for sport, which don't shy away from having a thoroughly unlikeable hero, and at least one featuring an actor nicked-named Keystone for being in Mack Sennett's rep company - a failed English stage actor at large in the early days of silent Hollywood. It's a while since I've read anything by him, but would always recommend him for a good mystery with great characters and atmosphere.
(* the same as Dem and Sev, evidently)
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Post by andydecker on Nov 19, 2014 16:52:36 GMT
Malko changed a bit during the years. De Villiers wrote the first couple of the books absolutely by the numbers. The later novels became the mixture of political thriller and ripped from the headlines the later books were. It sometimes was uncanny reading. I remember reading the name Osama bin Laden for the first time in the mid-eighties in a Malko novel. In retrorespect chilling. But the novels are hard to enjoy. The pseudo-reality - or maybe it is more realistic as one likes to admit - and the bleak cynism is sometimes a bit off-putting.
Still I miss this series. The german edition was cancelled in 2001, the last 60 novels were only published in France.
A couple of the later ones are published by Black Lizard right now.
Wasn't there much tension with Hongkong in these years?
For me one of the most intriguing thing about Rosenberger's letter is the remark about Weird Tales. Did he really publish a story in WT? Under what name?
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Post by pulphack on Nov 20, 2014 16:20:02 GMT
That's an interesting point, Andy - Hong Kong wasn't much of an issue in the newspapers and TV news during those years that I can remember; Russia was always a much bigger story running through my youth (say 1970-83, as I first became aware of news media from about 6 onwards). Hong Kong only became a big story as the handover approached.
However, looking back there may have been more that was in less tabloid media about this (my youth was ITV & BBC news and tabloid papers). If there were underlying tensions that were not generally discussed in media, then that would explain the Chinese threat in espionage novels that may have had more of a finger on the pulse than a kid watching Scooby Doo and jason King. Looking back, it does beg the question of why - if this was so - Russia was promoted as the bogeyman rather than the Chinese (who we now love as they have 'embraced' capitalism, etc).
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Post by dem bones on Nov 20, 2014 16:54:06 GMT
For me one of the most intriguing thing about Rosenberger's letter is the remark about Weird Tales. Did he really publish a story in WT? Under what name? He might well have done so pseudonymously, possibly even The Man With Legs for all I know, but, without wishing to do a man an injustice, i'm not sure we should take everything Mr. Rosenberger has to say in his letter at face value. It's pretty self-serving stuff!
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Post by andydecker on Nov 20, 2014 19:37:43 GMT
For me one of the most intriguing thing about Rosenberger's letter is the remark about Weird Tales. Did he really publish a story in WT? Under what name? He might well have done so pseudonymously, possibly even The Man With Legs for all I know, but, without wishing to do a man an injustice, i'm not sure we should take everything Mr. Rosenberger has to say in his letter at face value. It's pretty self-serving stuff! No doubt about that. He reminds one of the neighbour from hell. As a writer he was in the right age bracket, still it is hard to imagine him as a WT-writer.
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Post by jamesdoig on Nov 20, 2014 19:51:49 GMT
[/p]
Wasn't there much tension with Hongkong in these years?
I wonder if this isn't so much a commie threat as the usual Western fears of Asian invasion/infiltration - it's an idea that goes back a long way in popular fiction. I don't know about the UK, but in Australia there was a lot of Asian immigration in the 70s and 80s, especially refugees from Vietnam, and that brought the racists out in full force.
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Post by andydecker on Nov 20, 2014 20:40:55 GMT
That's an interesting point, Andy - Hong Kong wasn't much of an issue in the newspapers and TV news during those years that I can remember; Russia was always a much bigger story running through my youth (say 1970-83, as I first became aware of news media from about 6 onwards). Hong Kong only became a big story as the handover approached. However, looking back there may have been more that was in less tabloid media about this (my youth was ITV & BBC news and tabloid papers). If there were underlying tensions that were not generally discussed in media, then that would explain the Chinese threat in espionage novels that may have had more of a finger on the pulse than a kid watching Scooby Doo and jason King. Looking back, it does beg the question of why - if this was so - Russia was promoted as the bogeyman rather than the Chinese (who we now love as they have 'embraced' capitalism, etc). China is far away, the Russians were in East-Berlin. Also I guess - from my position as an outsider from the continent of course - after Philby and friends Russia was a very real villian. In the 80s I was a big fan of Ted Allbury, who as a british writer did many spy novels about the KGB. Same goes for Brian Freemantle, who wrote the great Charlie Muffin novels. Also KGB villians. I guess they wanted to swim in the waters of Le Carre.
Before the spy-genre fell out of favour after the fall of the Berlin Wall, before it kind of re-invented itself after 9/11, ist old topics were tired. One could argue that it was running on fumes when Afghanistan spawned the Post-Doomsday genre (Jerry Ahern) and the continuation of Rambo. I can't remember any major spy novel of the 90s.
Come to think of it, american espionage novels also shied away from the topic of Vietnam. I only remember Nicholas Proffitts Embassy House which was written long after the war and McCombs and Klose The Typhoon Shipments, which was published in the 70s. Surely there must be more, but it seems this topic wasn't seen as popular enough for a sale.
And the Chinese will kick our asses some day
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Post by pulphack on Nov 21, 2014 8:45:46 GMT
Too right - given their size and emerging economic power, we'll all be speaking Chinese in three generations...
Of course, the whole Philby/Burgess/MacLean/fourth man (later known to be Blunt) thing influenced the way in which the Russians were viewed by the Brits, but this hadn't really changed since the 1930's - I did quite a bit of inter-war history for A-level and have been fascinated by the 'long weekend' period ever since, and the Russians were always viewed with suspicion, which of course caused no end of umming and ahhing when they switched sides in WWII! Hong Kong should have raised more about the Chinese in public consciousness, as should British involvement in wars in Korea (marginal), Malaya and Kenya (the Mau-Mau being believed to be Communist funded). I'm now interested to dig a bit and find out more.
James, I don't think the use of Chinese as bogeymen was motivated in the UK in quite the same way as for Australia. For a start, we never had immigration from those quarters in the same way. There was a long tradition of Chinese population in London, as evinced by pulp crime fiction - hello messrs Rohmer & Wallace! - but this was really a Docklands phenomenon, and was also true of Liverpool, I believe. I know that when my mum was small (she was born in 1919) it was still common for parents to frighten their kids into coming home early or not go down dark alleys by telling them 'a Chinaman will get you'! As she said to me - 'as if Fu Manchu would be hanging around an alleyway in Tottenham!'...
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Post by ripper on Nov 21, 2014 9:35:32 GMT
Pulphack, were the James Mayos that you read by any chance part of his Charles Hood series? I have not read any and wondered what they were like :-).
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Post by pulphack on Nov 21, 2014 10:39:25 GMT
Hello Rip - yes, they were: Let Sleeping Girls Lie and Sergeant Death. Hood is not a straight spy as such, working as he does for a cartel of financial and insurance businesses, with an interest in antiques, but the pursuit of money crosses over with espionage, both political and industrial. Hood is quite colourless to me, and is like Bond in that he's a series of characteristics for you to place yourself in rather than a character as such. Having said that, Mayo was a chum of Fleming and had also worked in intelligence, and like Bond the books have a sense of authority. He's also very good at chases (like Fleming) and better on atmosphere and sense of place (the books I read were set in Italy and North Africa mostly, and you do feel you're there). I prefer him to Fleming, and would heartily recommend giving him a go. He's a fine storyteller.
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Post by ripper on Nov 21, 2014 11:05:13 GMT
Hi Pulphack and thank you for the information on the Charles Hood series. It sounds very interesting and I shall keep a look-out for one to try. Also interesting that the author was in intelligence with Fleming during WW2. I am sure that there are many books in the spy genre that were published in the 60s that are now unjustly forgotten. I don't think I have come across anything by two of the other authors you mentioned i.e. Eastwood and Woodhouse.
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Post by severance on Nov 21, 2014 11:59:08 GMT
I've been reading some old British spy fiction from the sixties lately (a Jimmy Sangster, a couple of James Mayos, and one apiece by James Eastwood and Martin Woodhouse). Let's see if I can guess these: Sangster - Katy Touchfeather Mayo - Charles Hood Eastwood - Anna Zordan Woodhouse - Giles Yeoman I recently read one of Simon Harvester's 'Dorian Silk' novels - excellent sense of place but the plot was dry and dull - and one of Stephen D. Frances' 'John Vail' novels - didn't think much of that, either. I've got several of the Hoods and Zordan's so must give them a try soonish - though I doubt anyone will better Modesty Blaise.
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