FFB: A Beastly Business - John Blackburn

THE STORY: Bill Easter, conman and rogue for hire, will do nearly anything for the right price. He’s recovered stolen goods, he’s located missing persons, he’s even committed murder. Now he’s been hired to dispose of a dead body in the ground floor apartment of a landlord who can’t bring himself to enter the place. The body turns out to be Henry Oliver, a enormously overweight and hirsute recluse who is suspected of having been a mass murderer known as the "Mad Vicar". After successfully disposing of the body employing unorthodox and slightly illegal methods Easter also uncovers some puzzling documents that hint at the existence of a valuable jewel encrusted relic that Oliver brought back from his travels in the Nueva Leone, South America. Easter’s detective work leads him to eccentric adventure J. Molden Mott, also looking for the jeweled relic. Easter along with his sidekick and sometime lover Peggy Tey find themselves in Scotland and knee deep in a macabre adventure that involves Russian spies, a mutating fungus, a mad scientist, the legend of a South American conquistador, and werewolf mythology that all adds up to A Beastly Business (1982).

THE CHARACTERS: Bill Easter is John Blackburn’s lesser known series characters. He, along with Peggy Tey, appeared in four books prior to their last appearance in A Beastly Business. This is also the only crossover novel to feature both Easter and General Charles Kirk, Blackburn’s primary series character whose work with foreign intelligence has often led him into the world of paranormal activity. The Easter books differ greatly from Blackburn’s other occult and supernatural thrillers because they have a very black humor. Easter is a vulgar, opinionated, often foul mouthed rogue who is out only for himself. Peggy is no better. They are often secretly double crossing one another when money, jewels or valuable treasure are involved.

Easter is hired by Allen Smeaton a pseudo-posh banker who thinks very highly of himself. Yet he and his corrupt wife Cynthia are all too easily tempted by the chance to get rich quick. Easter does all the work while they drool greedily in the background demanding he risk his life and what little reputation he has left to recover the treasure and split it four ways. Clever readers know that split is never going to be four equal shares. Someone is bound to be left out if not eliminated altogether.

INNOVATIONS: As with most of Blackburn's thrillers we get an abundance of weirdness, macabre deaths, strange legends and his usual trademark touch of an insidious organism, in this case a botanical fungus, as the cause for much of the mayhem. He always found new ways to invigorate old horror motifs.  The werewolves in this novel are like no others you have read about or seen in the movies.

This is much funnier than any of Blackburn's other books I've read, but you do have to be sort of a sicko to enjoy his vulgar jokes and black humor at the expense of other characters. I unapologetically admit to being one of those sickos. Revenge is served piping hot and supersweet in A Beastly Business and I very much enjoy seeing the wicked suffer punishments in Grand Guignol fashion.  Theatre of Blood, one of my favorite satiric horror movies, kept coming to mind as I pored over this entertainingly perverse book. Those familiar with that Vincent Price cult classic will have an idea of what kind of beastly business Blackburn gets up to.

QUOTES: "Owing to your wanton stupidity [Allen] I had to live over a monster. To nurture a viper in my bosom."
An unjust and inaccurate cliche. Even the smallest of vipers couldn't have found shelter between Cynthia Smeaton's skinny breasts, and I wouldn't have blamed her husband if he'd lost his temper and clouted her.

"Peg go could go to bed with [the reverend] if she wanted, though it was unlikely he'd fancy her. But during the last two hours I'd had a dead lamb lobbed at me. I'd been threatened by a twelve-bore shotgun and nearly killed by the bailiff's motor bicycle [...] and earned the displeasure of Sgt. Gillespie. I'd achieved quite a lot and what had Peggy done? Mrs. Tey had confided in an oily non-conformist minister and spilled the beans."

THINGS I LEARNED: One thing I must have known as a kid, but clearly had forgotten. The real name of a well known figure from the Russian Revolution turns up over the course of the book. If you're hip to this facet of world history and know it well, then you won't be taken in by a ruse of General Kirk's. Bill was. I was. And most readers will be. Sadly, part of this ruse is spoiled by the blurb on the rear cover of the new reprint edition. Do yourself a favor and don't read that before you read the book.

EASY TO FIND? Those savvy devils at Valancourt Books have done fans of 60s & 70s horror a great service in reprinting John Blackburn's books. A Beastly Business is yet another in their ever growing library of forgotten classics being revived for new generations of lovers of the macabre, be they the lugubrious and melancholy horror of 18th century Gothics or 20th century monsters on the rampage. I don't often see used copies of the original UK edition of A Beastly Business for sale as it's one of his scarcest titles.  If a copy should turn up expect to see it outrageously priced. Best to stick with the $17 paperback from our good friends at Valancourt. This new reprint is also the first and only US edition.

IN BRIEF: The Sins of the Father - John Blackburn

“What sort of mind could wish to free and harbour a group of compulsive murderers and then release them again? Men and women as dangerous as bombs, bullets or… Or hydrophobia.”

-- Marcus Levin in

The Sins of Our Father

 

A rash of crimes committed by criminally insane murders who have coincidentally all escaped from the institutions where they were incarcerated has General Kirk and a committee of prison reform experts more than alarmed. Is it possible that some mad genius is engineering these escapes with a nefarious purpose in mind? You betcha. And since this is a John Blackburn book can be sure that not only is there an evil mastermind at work but that some insidious virus will be uncovered and that some sort of supernatural power will be worked into the story.

The less than subtle "Prologue" to The Sins of the Fathers (1979) neatly ties in the title to an incident in the life of a notorious Nazi war criminal known as Papa Otto Fendler, "a geneticist far ahead of his time." Seems ol’ Papa was fond of a select group of children at the concentration camp where he conducted a variety of unseemly experiments. Just what he did to those children will not be fully revealed until the final chapters. And is it possible that Papa Otto has survived the destruction of the camp and is controlling a now adult group of his favorite human guinea pigs?

With ace bacteriologist Sir Marcus Levin on hand partnered with his wife Tania, a former KGB spy, the sinister plans of Papa Otto are proven to involve a form of germ warfare with humans used as a missile substitute. In a pulpy twist many of the infected madmen and madwomen exhibit symptoms indicative of rabies. Blackburn concocts several scenes where this unfortunate rabid-like victims attack innocent bystanders like so many wannabe vampires by taking healthy chomps out of their arms, hands and faces.

It’s not one of Blackburn’s more original stories. He seems to have culled together plot elements from several of his previous books. Interestingly, this book has a few didactic asides in the committee members heated debates. Blackburn raises all sorts of issues related to prison reform. Overcrowding, segregation of prisoners, and reinstatement of the death penalty are among the hot topics discussed at length. This was one of his last books and it may indicate a trend towards social criticism, a path so many genre writers seem to take in their later career as they tire of the so often formulaic structure of crime and thriller fiction. Nazis, viral experimentation on humans, grisly murders and mind control have all been featured in Blackburn's other novels.

Still it’s a neatly plotted book, swiftly paced and jam packed with pulpy adventure sure to satisfy fans of this kind of over-the-top thriller. The climax taking place in the catacombs of an ancient church with our heroes in peril of drowning by the impending flood from the underground River Larne more than makes up for any of the book’s recycled shortcomings.

* * *  

  Reading Challenge update: Silver Age Bingo Card – E1: “Book with a Detective Team”

Valiant Valancourt Books

I'm always ready to help publicize the work of any small press that dares to reissue my favorite writers languishing in the Limbo of Out-of-Printdom. Valancourt Books, who have reissued some of the earliest Gothic novels from the 18th and 19th century, has now turned their attention to 20th century weird and supernatural fiction. They are in the process of reissuing many of the books of John Blackburn.

Regular readers with good memories may know that I have reviewed three of Blackburn's wholly original thrillers which blend crime and the supernatural into thrillers with a hip 1960s vibe. Not since Dennis Wheatley gave up writing had anyone really done such an exceptional job as Blackburn at incorporating the supernatural into a modern setting.

I was so excited I sent a letter of thanks to the publisher James Jenkins and learned in his reply that my rave review of Broken Boy "helped persuade" him to reprint that book. What an honor for this humble little blog. I helped bring a forgotten book back into print!

Not only has Valancourt chosen to reprint John Blackburn they have a long list of books they plan to reissue, many of them out of print for decades, that will be of interest to readers of weird, supernatural and fantasy fiction. Some of the titles I am anticipating are Benighted by J. B. Priestley, The Hand of Kornelius Voyt by Oliver Onions, the books of Claude Houghton and The Burnaby Experiment by Stephen Gilbert, best known as the author of Ratman's Notebooks, AKA Willard in its movie adaptation. Valancourt Books' forthcoming list also includes crime novels like He Arrived at Dusk by R. C. Ashby (read my review at Mystery*File),  Ritual in the Dark by Colin Wilson and The Killer and the Slain by Hugh Walpole. Perhaps the most astonishing planned release will be The Birds by Frank Baker (author of Miss Hargreaves), an exceptionally scarce title I've wanted to read for years now. This is just a sample of the genre fiction. Valancourt also has an interest in early 20th century literary fiction and early fiction with gay themes. There is plenty that will appeal to a variety of reader tastes. All of it exceptional in quality and wisely chosen, I think.

Three John Blackburn books are available for purchase via amazon.com where Valancourt Books has chosen to market their titles. Below is a list of links. According to a blog post back in December 2012 Valancourt Books plans to reprint at least five other John Blackburn books including extremely scarce titles like The Beastly Business and The Household Traitors. 

All current titles published by Valancourt Books are available in either trade paperback or digital format.

Start saving your pennies, gang. I know I am!

John Blackburn's work at Valancourt Books
Broken Boy
Nothing But the Night
Bury Him Darkly

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: For Fear of Little Men

Ex-Nazis, terrorism via biologic tampering, Celtic folklore and legends, reincarnation, mind control, immortal beings -- all this in one book? All this and more, my friends! General Charles Kirk, Marcus Levin and his wife Tania (whose previous adventures are reviewed here and here) are all on hand once again battling possible supernatural beings and investigating microbiological terrors in John Blackburn's unique genre-blending thriller For Fear of Little Men (1972). The little men of the title come from an oft heard Celtic verse:

Up the airy mountain,

Down the rushy glen.

We dare not go a-hunting

For fear of little men.

There are no little men per se to fear in the context of the story. Professor Rushton, an archaeologist digging in the mountains of Wales, lectures the characters on local folklore and legends and alludes to that verse. He is hoping to unearth proof of the existence of an pre-Celtic race who were the forbearers of the fairies, leprechauns, pixies, and what have you of Irish and Scottish mythology. He proposes his theory that the "little people" are the genetically mutated descendants of a powerful superhuman race who had arcane powers connected to Earth's natural forces. Rushton's lecture though it appears early in the book will have startling ramifications as the story progresses.

Kirk has been enlisted by the government to investigate possible terrorist activity in the form of toxic pollution being purposely emptied into the water supply on the Welsh coast. The pollution has been traced to D.R. Products, an aerodynamic manufacturing company. On their staff is Hans Graebe, a known high ranking ex-Nazi who escaped punishment through a technicality during the war crimes trials. Kirk and his Home Office associates believe that Graebe is perhaps in league with a foreign government and has hatched an insidious plot to poison the marine life and kill the population dependent on the fishing industry in that part of the UK. Kirk sends Levin, a trained microbiologist, to gather samples of waste, run tests looking for identifiable toxins, and question Daniel Ryder, the head of D.R. Products, about the dangerous effluent being discharged in the waste water at his factory.

As in The Young Man from Lima there is a substantial portion of the story devoted to a scientific explanation for the poison that has been tainting locally fished shellfish. Levin runs a series of experiments and discovers that the toxic waste, rather than being created or biologically engineered contains an accidentally mutated bacillus that seems to have evolved from the polluted waste water. Interspersed with this scientific thriller plot we get a variety of intriguing incidents like the archeology project in the mountains determined to reveal the existence of the mythic home of Daran, legendary immortal leader of a Celtic race; the mysterious death by falling of Daniel Ryder, an expert mountaineer; and the frequent test flights of a newly designed airplane threatening havoc.

And what of those hippies Ryder invited to camp out on his land? Why are they still there after his horrible death? Do they figure in the story at all? Frequent references to them seem arbitrary. Yet nothing in this story that seems to be made up of haphazard incidents is ever random or inconsequential. All the seemingly unconnected threads will all tie together to form the fabric of a wicked plot. The eyebrow raising finale is suitably nightmarish enough for a Hammer horror movie.

Blackburn was perhaps the earliest genre writer who saw the nightmarish possibilities of eco-terrors. He was joined by John Creasey, whose Dr. Palfrey novels also mined this area. Together they were true pioneers in the burgeoning, yet to be formulaic, techno-thriller we have today. The X-Files, The Andromeda Strain, and other similar thrillers dealing with biological horrors owe a lot, whether conscious or not, to Blackburn.

The Young Man From Lima - John Blackburn

In the opening pages of The Young Man from Lima William Raven, the Secretary for External Affairs, is assassinated by a snowman. It is yet another in a series of assassinations of government officials throughout the world who happen to be tied to a mythical South American country called Nueva Leon. This is not a fantastical thriller with supernatural beings in the cast as in other Blackburn books. The snowman turns out to be a man covered in snow. Frosty the Hitman, however, is far from your typical hired gun. In fact he is far from being human as we think of humans. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Marcus Levin, a bacteriologist who appears in several other Blackburn books, is called in to consult on an autopsy. A strange life form has been found in the blood stream of the corpse that seems to be living even after the host body is long dead. Also there were elevated levels of serotonin in the body. It is pointed out that elevated serotonin is often seen in addicts who are partial to hallucinogenic drugs. Furthermore a vial of tablets found on the corpse proves to contain enough of a lichen like plant to cause hallucinations similar to those of LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. The corpse it turns out is Frosty the Hitman. There is a fear that someone has created an army of assassins whose minds are being manipulated by mind altering drugs. Shades of Sax Rohmer and a bit of The Manchurian Candidate.  But what about that strange microorganism?  Could that be playing a part as well?

Though this Blackburn book is lacking in supernatural content it still has much to raise it out of the realm of your ordinary espionage thriller and into the world of the weird and strange. It has a decidedly X-Files feel to it with a microorganism not unlike the one that caused the black oil in that cult TV series. I was also reminded of the many pathogen thrillers that range from The Andromeda Strain (a contemporary thriller for the time this was published) to a fairly recent book, Dead of Night by Randy Wayne White, that has a remarkably similar and equally gruesome parasite in the role of the vermicidal villain. There's even a bit of the 1950s monster movie thrown in when in the jungles of Nueva Leon our intrepid heroes must do battle with hordes of soldier ants. These are particularly gruesome scenes.

Overall, the story is one that holds your interest and keeps the pages turning at a rapid pace. There are long stretches of didactic dialog (another X Files trait) but it's probably the most interesting choice in delivering the necessary scientific information to educate the reader on the unusual monster of the piece. The politics of the story is another thing altogether. There are only so many Communist threat tales I can stomach these days. Thankfully, all the paranoia is kept to a minimum. When the true villains behind all the bioterrorism are revealed we are back in Sax Rohmer territory for their motives have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with megalomaniacal world domination.

It's a ripping yarn well worth reading if you want an example of what the eco-thriller was like back in the 1960s. Blackburn like John Creasey had a devilish imagination and could dream up the worst possible scenarios based on current ecological dilemmas. You can discover the many other undeservedly forgotten books that have been gloriously revived by Top Notch Thrillers and Ostara Publishing by clicking here. The series is edited by crime fiction writer Mike Ripley who has done a bang-up job in selecting some great titles that have languished in Out-of-Printdom for far too long. Check them out and read them. Or else.

FFB: Broken Boy - John Blackburn

Readers who enjoy the Peculiar Crimes Unit detective novels of Christopher Fowler and are impatient for the next Bryant & May adventure into the bizarre and macabre should turn to the works of John Blackburn as a more than suitable substitute. His books are amazingly similar in structure and theme to Fowler's work. Blackburn also shares Fowler's interest in arcane legends and folklore as well as the secrets of old London's infrastructure and architecture. I have to thank Mike Ripley for sending me a promo on Top Notch Thrillers, a reprint line he edits for Ostara Publishing. In that email there was some info on Blackburn that prompted me to investigate this writer. Though Blackburn wrote straight crime and straight espionage as well, it is his own special blending of crime supernatural and espionage that has made him according to the Top Notch Thriller publicity "the link between Dennis Wheatley and James Herbert."

One of the most intriguing of Blackburn's thrillers is his fourth book, Broken Boy, published in 1959 in his native England and released in the US in 1962. The melding of crime, detection, and the supernatural ranks with the best of not only Fowler but groundbreaking genre-benders like Dennis Wheatley, A. Merritt and the stories of Seabury Quinn. While Blackburn is not shy to indulge in pulpy thrills like those last three writers he is more interested in the psychological motivations of characters who employ the occult and supernatural for their own selfish purposes.

The book begins as any standard detective novel with the investigation of a crime. What at first seems like a brutal murder of a prostitute dumped beneath a bridge by an angry and savage john will prove to be something far more complex. General Charles Kirk and his fellow Home Office agents, Michael Howard and Penny Wise, are called in when the prostitute is identified as Gerda Raine, a former East German spy, with a particularly callous and sociopathic nature. She is linked to the selling of British government secrets in exchange for a British passport that would allow her a freer life. But while the reader may think this will morph into a spy novel he will be dead wrong. When Kirk visits Gerda's apartment he meets her very strange landlady and the landlady's son. He also finds a weird idol in her room.

Queen Ranavalona I - a nasty piece of work

The title refers to that idol - a disturbing figurine of apparently African origin with blind eyes and unnaturally disjointed arms and legs. It is this object that leads Kirk and his team to the discovery of a strange cult in the town of Minechester. With the help of an anthropologist and a medical doctor Kirk learns that the idol is tied to ancient black magic studies with their roots in the French Revolution era that made their way to Madagascar where purportedly they were adopted by the very real historical figure of Ranavalona the Cruel. 

Mothers and sons play a big part in the story. Each mother Kirk and his team encounter has the odd habit of referring to her no longer living husband in this fashion: "My husband? Oh, he...died." In each case a slight pause before the word "died." Kirk only realizes this strange speech pattern very late in the book. It's a subtle clue to a larger and nightmarish revelation.

There is a point in the book where one of these women reveals her true nature and the entire book shifts in tone. It's a real "Aha!" moment for the reader. What seems like just another detective story with some bizarre plot elements instantly transforms itself. From this point on I kept thinking of the old TV series The Avengers. The finale, however, is something straight out of a 1960s Hammer horror movie or even the weird menace pulps of the 1930s. There is a perfect scene where one of the villains shouts out "You fool. You wretched, interfering, foolish fool." And she punctuates each adjective by slapping her bound captive across the face. How's that for a throwback to the pulp era?

Broken Boy is the kind of book I crave. It has the perfect blend of action and detection, the surreal and the supernatural, and the utterly bizarre. When I come across something as weird as this I want to find every other book the writer has written and read them all. As a matter of fact I've already ordered four more Blackburn supernatural thrillers and eagerly await their arrival in my book crammed house.

Reviews of other John Blackburn thrillers on this blog are hyperlinked in the lists below.

The General Charles Kirk Supernatural Thrillers
  # also with Marcus Levin and Tania

John Blackburn, circa 1959

A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958)
  US paperback reprint title: A Reluctant Spy
A Sour Apple Tree (1958)
#Broken Boy (1959)
The Gaunt Woman (1962)
#A Ring of Roses (1965) US title: A Wreath of Roses
Children of the Night (1966)
Nothing But the Night (1968)
#The Young Man from Lima (1970)
The Household Traitors (1971)
#For Fear of Little Men (1972)
#The Face of the Lion (1976) - Marcus Levin only
#The Sins of the Father (1979)
A Beastly Business (1982) - crossover book features Bill Easter & Peggy Tey (see below)
The Bad Penny (1985) - with Bill Easter

Other Supernatural & Bizarre Thrillers
   * feature Bill Easter & Peggy Tey
Bury Him Darkly (1969)
Blow the House Down (1970)
Devil Daddy (1972)
*Deep Among the Dead Men (1973)
Our Lady of Pain (1974)
*Mister Brown's Bodies (1975)
*The Cyclops Goblet (1977)
A Book of the Dead (1984)

Crime, Espionage & Suspense
Dead Man Running (1960)
Blue Octavo (1963) US title: Bound to Kill
Colonel Bogus (1964) US title: Packed for Murder
The Winds of Midnight (1964) US title: Murder at Midnight
Dead Man's Handle (1978)