Gun in Cheek (20 page)

"Chloroformed you?" Yvette gasped.

"Never mind how I got chloroformed. The point is . . . she bugged my belly button!"

The most slavish Bond imitation is the venerable Nick Carter. Like Sexton Blake, the British detective who became an unsuccessful Bondian spy for a time before his 1963 demise, Carter's roots are imbedded in the nineteenth-century dime novel. Though born a master detective in Street & Smith's Nick Carter weekly in 1886, Carter underwent several character changes in the next seventy or so years, including that of hard-boiled pulp hero and gadget-oriented radio detective in the thirties, before evolving into the master spy (and sexual acrobat) we know and love today.

The new series of Nick Carter "Killmaster N3, agent of AXE" spy stories began in 1964, the brainchild of Lyle Kenyon Engle, who arranged for merchandising rights to the Carter name and who has gone on to become a millionaire packager of paperback originals. There have been nearly a hundred titles in the Kill. master series, perpetrated by at least a score of writers; some are told in the first person and some in the third person, but all are carefully crafted in the Bond mold. Such reviews of this modern Carter as "the man who inherited the mantle of James Bond" (Film Daily) and "the superspy who out-Bonds James Bond, mixing espionage, mayhem, mystery and loving in equal doses" (
Buffalo News
) are testimony to the fact that Engle's troops have learned their lessons well.

As does Bond, Carter works for a top-secret espionage network, goes about well armed (among his accouterments are a 9-mm stripped-down Luger named Wilhelmina and an Italian stiletto named Hugo), has access to all sorts of esoteric weapons and escape gadgets, and is well schooled in karate and other methods of killing enemies in hand-to-hand combat. As is Bond, Carter is a rogue with the ladies—many of whom are summarily disposed of by villains after bedding down with Nick. And as is Bond, Carter is sent on assignments of vital importance to national and international security and pitted against a wide assortment of archfiends, lunatics, beasts, machines, and weaponry.

(One of the few differences between the two superspies is that in the Carter books, violence, particularly when it involves copious bloodshed, is described in great and loving detail—a paean, one supposes, to the current marketability of mayhem. Sixteen million copies of the Carter adventures have been sold in this country alone, which makes an eloquent, if not very pleasing, statement in favor of gore.)

The wildly improbable plots of such Bond novels as
Goldfinger
seem downright sedate when compared to some in the Carter saga. In
Ice Trap Terror
, Carter goes head to head against a mad Mexican scientist named Zembla, who has invented a machine that can create mountains; "that is, simulate one with radio waves, projecting all the symptoms of a mountain into the air currents of the troposphere." With this device, Zembla intends to alter radically the weather in Mexico and Central America, creating arctic conditions and a new Ice Age that will destroy the economy, topple governments, elevate him to power, and thus establish "the Third Mayan Empire." In
The Weapon of Night,
Nick joins forces with three other spies—his sometime sexual companion, Julia Barron; a jolly Russian peasant woman "built like a tank but [with] a heart as big and warm as the sun"; and a cross-eyed Egyptian criminologist—to foil a Red Chinese plot to seize control of the free world through nationwide blackouts, clouds of poisonous smog, and mass hysteria. In
Hour of the Wo1f
, Nick is sent to Yugoslavia to recover a deadly nuclear secret buried beneath the pelt of a semisavage white wolf and soon runs afoul of an evil genius named Karac, who keeps a small garrison of slaves trained as gladiators; Carter is forced into gladiatorial combat against these men, as well as against a pack of ravening wolves. (The reason he is forced into this combat is that he refuses to tell Karac what and where the nuclear secret is and in fact insults the great man by making reference to a goat. "Your family's goat, Karac," he says. "Too bad your mother didn't fit it with contraceptives.") In
The 13th Spy
, he travels to Moscow, becomes involved with a ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet, and eventually forms an alliance with Smirnov, "legendary dean of Russian Intelligence," and the vicious Comrade Ludmilla in order to foil another insidious Chinese plot, this one designed to "explode World War III." This novel has a little bit of everything alternative, including inspired similes ("he's going to be about as unobtrusive as a can-can dancer in Lenin's mausoleum"), mixed metaphors ("A great rock of a hand reached out and slammed down on the top of the man's head like a pole-axe wielded by a giant"), garbled sentences ("Nick caught a glimpse of a machine gun and the man behind it, spitting death from the edge of the sidewalk up ahead and then saw Volgin clutch his chest and kicked out convulsively"), and not a little lyrical sex ("For long, melting moments of absolute dissolution they clung to each other on a high, hot peak of passion; as one, they soared with breathtaking happiness . . . and then slowly glided down to an earth that seemed carpeted with velvet clouds").

In all his adventures, Carter of course escapes at the end with his hide and his suavity intact. He does not, however, always escape with his dignity intact. The final few paragraphs of a recent entry in the series,
The Day of the Dingo
(1980), are a case in point—and in fact offer a much more pithy "last word" to this chapter than any I might come up with.

As we stood scanning the skies a big civilian Sikorsky appeared over a rise and headed for us. I ran back down the passageway with Yoshida, opened the doors at the top of the stairs and stood there waiting while the chopper disgorged Hawk [Carter's AXE superior]. He came over and offered his hand.

"Everything under control, Carter?"

"It was touch and go for a while, sir, but there are no more problems to concern us, now."

He started to usher Yoshida and me toward the chopper.

"I hope I wasn't interrupting a romantic interlude . . ."

"Sir?"

"I just wondered," he said. "Your zipper is still open."

"Hell would be sweet compared to it! You—you see, Andy, I—I have already seen the thing we must face. It's going to be maddening—starved octopi, mad for blood and flesh and coming—coming out of a well with sea-water in the bottom to keep them alive!" Her voice was rising hysterically. "Coming! Trained by hunger to come, to leave the water. Rising up like old stumps thrusting themselves out of the ground by their roots! Oh! Oh! I—I know I can't, can't stand it, Andy! Oh-o-o-o!"

—Tom Roan,

The Dragon Strikes Back

T
he evil Oriental villain, as typified by Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu, was a favorite of a small but prolific group of mystery and thriller writers who flourished between the two world wars. So much was written during that period of fiendish devil-doctors and "yellow hordes" bent on world domination, of secret passageways and underground lairs, of fearful opium dens and exotic Chinese tortures, that a folkloric belief in these things became widespread—and is still believed in in some quarters to this day. Yet nearly all of it is spurious sensationalism, concocted out of ignorance and the racist attitudes of the first half of this century. As Cohn Watson says of the Fu Manchu novels in his study of English crime stories and their audience,
Snobbery With Violence
(1971): "Their only clear message was one of racial vituperation. Had there not existed in the minds of many thousands of people an innate fear or dislike of foreigners—Oriental foreigners, in particular—Sax Rohmer never would have become a bestselling author."

Rohmer, a journalist whose real name was Arthur Sarsfield Ward, was certainly the foremost practitioner of the "Chinese archfiend" school, and Dr. Fu Manchu the character on whom most other Oriental villains were based. There is no question that the Fu Manchu stories are bad, full as they are of coincidence, incredible motivation, stilted dialogue, the superhuman powers of Fu Manchu himself, and such fantastic inventions as the laboratory-created Hairless Man whose trunk and limbs "glistened moistly like the skin of an earthworm" and the giant flying bubonic plague flea produced by cross-breeding with the African tsetse fly. But there is also no question that they have terrific narrative drive, an intensity that not only grips the reader but totally involves him in the action. Anyone who can suspend disbelief for one chapter of Rohmer will likely find himself hooked until the last chapter.

But the most important thing about the Fu Manchu series is that Rohmer believed in his creation. The insidious doctor was not just a character in Rohmer's eyes; he was a living, breathing human being, his own personal bogeyman. In a BBC radio broadcast in the early thirties (later included in a 1935 book,
Meet the Detectives
), Rohmer concocted a wholly serious dialogue between himself and Fu Manchu and closed with the words, "Perhaps one day he may conquer the world. It would be a queer world, but I am not sure that it would be any worse or any better than the world we live in." This belief, this fearful fascination, is evident on every page of every Fu Manchu novel. And it is the one quality, more than any other of the series' positives, that keeps Rohmer and his creation from being laughable today.

The same cannot be said for his imitators, however.

Like most imitators, they lacked the commitment of Rohmer; they didn't believe—or if they did, not deeply enough—in their characters and their story lines. They also lacked Rohmer's imagination, his sense of place and pace, and his ability to portray "Satan incarnate" in a convincing fashion. The best of these imitators produced pallid reproductions of Fu Manchu. The worst of them produced hilarity.

Take, to begin with, the Mr. Chang series written by A. E. Apple. Stories featuring this "slant-eyed Chinaman" first appeared in
Detective Story Magazine
, a fairly well thought of pulp, in 1919 and continued until 1931—a total of some thirty tales. Several of these stories were spliced together into a pair of episodic novels published by Chelsea House:
Mr. Chang of Scotland Yard
(1926) and
Mr. Chang's Crime Ray
(1928). Both these remarkable books must be read to be disbelieved.

(Robert Sampson, in an article on the Mr. Chang series for a fan magazine, postulates that Apple was basically a satirist. "The trick in this series," he says, "is to pull the reader's leg, gently, gently, and gently, gently, let the reader know it." If this is so, Apple was one of the most gently inept satirists ever to take pen in hand. He may have realized this himself in later years; his literary career came to an end when he took his own life in 1933.)

It should be pointed out first of all that Mr. Chang is no Fu Manchu. He neither thinks nor acts nor talks like Fu Manchu; about all they have in common is grandiose venality. How can one tremble in the presence of a master criminal who says such things as, "I am enjoying your company quite too much to permit you to desert me. Stick around, old boy! In a few minutes we are going to open a can of sardines and make merry." How can one hate an archvillain who is billed as having the most cunning of minds but who, at the beginning of
Mr. Chang's Crime Ray
, has been captured in his Montreal headquarters by a Scotland Yard detective named Lontana because Mr. Chang "had made the fatal blunder of hiding himself in a room that had only one exit. He had reasoned that if his secret room had two entrances instead of one, it would double the chance of his being reached and captured."

So much for the wily brain of Mr. Chang.

This novel continues in the same vein. Mr. Chang is taken aboard a train bound for Toronto, where he is to be tried for murder; but Lontana is not a very smart detective, and he accepts a cigarette from the evildoer, which turns Out to have been "doped with a powerful drug." When Lontana falls unconscious to the floor, Mr. Chang takes the key to his handcuffs and unlocks them. Then "his arm crept inside his shirt. The jade dagger, his emergency weapon, which had been overlooked when he was frisked, flashed into view."

At which point Mr. Chang turns Lontana's head and prepares to cut his throat. But instead he pauses—

"The jade dagger," he reflected, "is a killer reserved for royalty or for taking my own life in final emergency. It would be sacrilege to contaminate it with the foul blood of a Caucasian inferior."

The green blade slowly was returned to its concealed sheath.

Should he strangle Lontana? Would it be more judicious merely to knock him on the head? Mr. Chang meditated. After all, he decided, little could be gained by killing him.

So he doesn't kill Lontana after all. Elaborated reason: "Another would-be Nemesis would take Lontana's place—possibly one who would be more difficult to outwit."

Mr. Chang then escapes from the train by jumping off when it slows down for a curve and makes his way through a heavy fog to a nearby farmhouse. As he approaches, he is attacked by a large dog, which he proceeds to shoot with Lontana's gun. Lights go on in the house, and the resident demands to know what is going on. Mr. Chang tells him to stay where he is; then he cuts the telephone wires and enters the barn, where he finds a locked car. After determining that the owner probably has the keys in the house, he "wired around the lock [and] started the engine"