FIRST BOOKS: The Swan Island Murders - Victoria Lincoln

There is nothing more upsetting than falling for the hype on a book jacket. The Swan Island Murders (1930) with its striking Art Deco influenced illustration of a silhouetted damsel being threatened by claw-like hands and the promise of "mystery, horror and detection" was enough to lure me in. While there is plenty of mystery and a smattering of rudimentary detection on display there is little horror to thrill a 21st century reader.  This is a book of its age when its intended audience surely would've been thrilled by the exotic and bizarre plot elements but which led me to spend time on outside research as I found fault with the author's supposed arcane knowledge of Indian religion and mythology that dominates the story,

The story mostly involves the guests at an impromptu house party hosted by wealthy eccentric Nahum Gould, a collector of Indian esoterica and a variety of Southeast Asian artifacts. The rear of the book jacket leads one to believe that the poor souls stranded on Swan Island are at the mercy of a mad strangler. This is not the case. Two Portuguese immigrant workers are strangled over the course of the novel (so a partial truth) but none of them are major characters at the house party. Instead, the focused crime is that one of the guests is shot dead, a presumed suicide for much of the book. The editorial staff at Farrar & Rinehart seemed more intent on selling the book under false pretenses and playing up to the contemporary demand for sensational popular fiction.  Had they told the truth about the book they would've been "spoiling" the surprises. Of course, I think nothing of diving right and telling you that this book is really about abnormal psychology and monomania related to arcane Indian mythology and its effect on Indian criminal culture.

Connie Steel is our narrator very much modeled on a Mary Roberts Rinehart amateur female detective easily affected by eerie atmosphere and with a tendency to talk about madness far too often. Swan Island, as you might predict, is a fog enshrouded lonely place and Gould's mansion is an imposing and dreary, shadow-filled haven well suited for a reclusive eccentric obsessed with the Mysterious And Inscrutable East. Victoria Lincoln does an admirable job of laying on thick this atmosphere of dread signalling "horrible things to come" with typical HIBK prose like "...but that boat was to come and go again without carrying any one of us away from Swan Island." More typical are Lincoln's florid stylistic touches like this: "How dreadfully right I had been...when I had thought that all our proportions were chemically incorrect, and that some cataclysmic reaction was bound to take place."  This odd chemistry metaphor pops up two times later in the book. She heightens the mystery and terror when we learn that Nahum Gould is so fearful and paranoid he has turned the house into an impenetrable fortress. All the windows have steel frames, there is only a single key for every door lock in the place with no copies and only the butler Gomez or Gould's secretary Torres are allowed to keep these original keys. Gould himself keeps only the key to his bedroom which has a heavy oak and steel door, steel enmeshed windows and other security overkill enhancements making his bedroom more of a prison cell. He speaks in a hushed voice of keeping "It" out and is constantly on guard, especially at night .

Needless to say someone manages to kill the playwright John Parsons and as Connie and her fiance Edward Benedict soon discover the murderer can only be one of the four remaining guests, Gould, or one of his employees. Gomez has a son Joe with developmental delay who in true period fashion is referred to as "the idiot" throughout the novel. Though he is slow to comprehend anything asked of him Joe's father says the boy can have days when he is perfectly lucid. Joe is the first one suspected of being the mad strangler and also the shooter until the stunningly beautiful (she has to be, right?) Nana Moeller, a German actress about to appear in Parsons' latest play, insists that she knows John committed suicide. There is evidence to disprove this suicide theory and that the death is a cleverly covered up murder. Not the least of these clues is a blood stained book written in Urdu that has vanished from the library when Parsons was shot.

A blood stained book written in Urdu?!

This is the single most interesting facet of the novel. Not to mention Lincoln's most macabre and original touch. It will prove key to the solution of all that is baffling about the strangling murders as well as John Parsons' death. Unfortunately, the revelation in the final chapters is so far removed from a fair play traditional detective novel that it called to mind the most popular American detective of the era -- Philo Vance.  I'm sure Victoria Lincoln read her fair share of both Rinehart and Van Dine prior to writing her first mystery novel because apart from the Rinehart style narration, and the Rinehart-like emphasis on terror and madness infecting everyone, ultimately the book is an esoteric treatise much like a Philo Vance detective novel. Thankfully Lincoln spares us pedantic footnotes, but the final chapter is overloaded with arcane trivia about a criminal subculture that thrived in 19th century India. Sadly, the finale is also littered with misinformation and poorly Anglicized spellings of terms and mythological figures and haphazardly mixes fact and legend. I had to sort it all out in about 90 minutes of internet searches and reading up on the incarnations of Kali until I found Bhawani which is the modern spelling of what Lincoln renders in her novel as B'wannee. She also seems to believe that T'huggee (once again her odd spelling) is an actual religion rather than a criminal class.

Victoria Lincoln, age 26 (circa 1930)

THE AUTHOR: Victoria Lincoln (1904 - 1981) was born in Fall River, Massachusetts and claims (on her author bio on the DJ for this mystery novel) that as a child she managed to make the acquaintance of that town's most famous resident Lizzie Borden. She attended Radcliffe College and graduated in 1926. The same year she married her first husband Isaac Watkins who was a graduate student in fine art at Harvard. She had her first child, Penelope, with him. A few years after her first novel was published she divorced Watkins and in 1933 married Victor Lowe, professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

Her New York Times obituary mentions only her mainstream novels and her non-fiction but not her debut novel, The Swan Island Murders, her first and only foray into mystery and thriller fiction. Among her other works are February Hill (1934) adapted for the stage by George Abbot under its new title The Primrose Path. In 1940 The Primrose Path was made into a movie starring Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea and Marjorie Rambeau who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress as a mother who turns to prostitution to support her family. Lincoln's other fiction includes Grandmother & the Comet (1944), The Wind at My Back: Three Short Novels (1946), Celia Amberley (1949) and Out from Eden (1951). Notable among her non-fiction works are the Edgar Award winning biography/true crime work A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight (1967) and her last book on the life of St. Theresa of Avila. She lived with her husband Victor Lowe and her family in Baltimore until her death in 1981. 

HORROR SHOW: Tiger Girl - Gordon Casserly

Despite the subtitle on the original first edition cover of this genuine supernatural novel Tiger Girl (1932) is not really a love story. But is most definitely set in the jungles of India. True, there is an underlying love triangle being played out between two men vying for the attention of the young woman, but it is not the focus of the plot. Why it was marketed as a romantic love story amazes me. Anyone hoping for a hearts and flowers traditional romance would have been sorely disappointed -- most likely appalled -- at what they found in the pages of this outlandish ghost story. Here's just a sample:

• Vampiric gray-furred tiger
• Demonic female phantoms
• Reanimated corpses
• Astral projection
• Telekinesis
• Death by mind control
• Cult that performs human sacrifice

Personally, I was not expecting a love story at all. And I was genuinely thrilled with what I found in this enthralling and thoroughly researched work of supernatural fiction. More thrills than I ever expected, in fact.

Alan Stuart is our hero, Margery Webb our plucky heroine, and Morton, Stuart's rival and the novel's human antagonist. When a a grey skinned tiger invades the Indian tea plantation owned by Margery's father Stuart turns hunter determined to track down the man-killer. He is warned by the superstitious locals that this will be no easy task for the tiger he is looking for is not an animal but a demon. Legend has it the shaitan kills only women and drains their bodies of blood. Bullets do not seem to harm this predator as Stuart soon finds out in his several battles with the phantom beast.

Meanwhile Morton plots revenge after he is spurned by Margery who he was hoping to marry. Morton allies himself with a powerful yogi who practices black magic and has paranormal skills including astral projection and the ability to revive corpses. Stuart must also contend with a mad elephant on the rampage and a bizarre religious cult that worships Kali for whom the tiger acts as a sort of human sacrifice delivery service.

A scene in which a minor character who, while looking for the rogue elephant hides himself high in a tree, witnesses the cult's ritual ceremony is one of the most gruesome in the book. But the climax of the book surpasses the cult sequence with genuine horror and follows with several scenes of more mystery and supernatural incidents. The action keeps building to an unnerving finale with a completely unexpected twist similar to something one might encounter in a murder mystery.

Tiger Girl has been one of the most elusive supernatural thrillers for decades having been out of print for over seventy years. Vintage copies are difficult to track down or absurdly priced when they ever so rarely turn up for sale. Thanks to Bruin Asylum and the efforts of some savvy collectors of supernatural fiction there is a new and affordable edition of this minor classic. Bruin Asylum's reissue has a brief but detailed biography of Gordon Casserly, highlighting his military service and life in India, as well as discussing his handful of adventure and supernatural novels. The new edition ends with an appendix consisting of an engrossing chapter from Occult Science in India and Among the Ancients (1875) by Louis Jacolliot, a non-fiction work briefly mentioned in the novel's story. His writing is just as evocative, fascinating and thrilling as Casserly's fictional story.

I urge fans of  forgotten supernatural and horror novels to buy a copy of this formerly out of print minor masterpiece. This attractively produced volume proves that it really was worth the long wait to have a new copy at a very affordable price.

The Terminators - Berkely Mather

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 of 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/Pakistani 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 from Top Notch Thrillers)
The Gold of Malabar

FFB: The Gold of Malabar - Berkely Mather

Prison escape! Hidden treasure! A secret map! Villains in pursuit!

Sound like some kind of Indiana Jones movie?  You'd not be far off. These are the plot elements of Berkely Mather's third ripping yarn, The Gold of Malabar (1967), once again set in India but this time dealing with a legendary lost treasure of gold ingots dating back to 1941 in the days of Japanese occupation in the East Indies.

While serving time in a prison in Goa Mike O'Reilly strikes up an acquaintance with a dying old Dutch prisoner named Rokkjer. He entrusts to O'Reilly a gold medal and tells him to take it to a Buddhist monk named Nu Pau in Bombay. He is convinced that O'Reilly will be able to escape and get this done.  when he meets the monk he is to tell him, "Rokkjer said to keep faith." He makes O'Reilly swear to do this and just as he is about to die manages to get out the following cryptic last words: "Pythagoras, northeast, and the word is try, try, try..."  Rokkjer's body is buried in the cemetery conveniently located just outside the prison walls near an even more convenient cliff.  O'Reilly is on burial duty.  Guess who manages to dig a grave, bury the corpse and take flight by bravely and stupidly  jumping off the cliff in the ocean?  O'Reilly survives the jump, a barrage of bullets, and near drowning. Luckily he is rescued by some peasant fisherman and the boat he ends up in just happens to be headed for Bombay.  His luck is soon to run out though his adventure leds him into a treacherous world of greedy looters all looking for the map that will lead to the hidden cache of gold

UK 1st edition ( Collins, 1967)

Once again Mather provides a medley of eccentric outsiders and crooks. Among O'Reilly's allies are Claudette, a lovely brothel madame and Anne Haytor, a sharp witted nurse, and a variety of fishermen, tradesmen and beggars. O'Reilly accidentally becomes a sort of male incarnation of Blanche DuBois as he comes to depend on the many kindnesses from strangers. As for the numerous villains there is a duplicitous ex-pat British colonel, a corrupt Indian police inspector, and a sinister Arab and his gang of goons who subject our hero to a gruesome torture sequence. Above all there is the brilliant character of Nu Pau, the defrocked Buddhist monk who holds the key to location of the map, and has more than a few secrets of his own. The oddball pairing of O'Reilly and Nu Pau make this adventure thriller at times seem like one of those unevenly matched "buddy pictures." They work marvelously well together -- both as adversaries and collaborators.

O'Reilly at first seems like he wants the partnership but the danger escalates and he risks his life multiple times, endures horrible injuries, and is finally burdened with a mortally wounded Nu Pau. He begins to think all would be easier if he dumped Nu Pau in a village and went for the treasure by himself. The story takes on the essence of Traven's Treasure of the Sierra Madre as everyone seems to want the all the gold for himself. Will O'Reilly get his hands on the gold? Or will his conscience get the better of him?  The ending is something of a surprise and was more than satisfying.

Entertaining, educational (more insight into Indian history and culture) and enlivening The Gold of Malabar is one of the best real adventure novels from the late 1960s.  I enthusiastically recommend this one to all devotees of the rousing ripping yarn.

Previously reviewed on this blog The Pass Beyond the Kashmir also by Berkely Mather.

The Pass Beyond Kashmir - Berkely Mather

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.