11 replies to this topic

[chrisno1]

I recently bought these novels by James Mayo through Antiq Books. I had Let Sleeping Girls Lie for several years and always enjoyed its mixture of raw violence and spurious sex. It has remained one of my favourite thrillers for ages. I didn’t realise you could obtain the others so easily. I wondered what you guys thought of Hood. What follows is my assessmant of Hammerhead.

Hammerhead was Mayo’s first effort and while it is quite good, I was a little disappointed. Compared to Fleming, this story seems to twist and turn too much, switching from one scene to the next with no discernable reason other than to put Hood into more peril.

The book starts really well with a disappearing cafe (which reminded me of the James Coburn film Our Man Flint – made in the following year, I think) and some intrigue aboard the villain’s yacht Triton, but it gets a bit disjointed from here on.

Hood meets his adversary Lobar, but Mayo doesn’t really make him a powerful enough figure; in fact he seems rather suave and a bit of a playboy. He is though surrounded by a bunch of ghouls – the nosey steward Perrin, the ape like Golos, the mimic Andreas and two beautiful women Sue Trenton, a teenage nymphet of dubious morals who drinks too much, and Ivory, a half caste drug addled jealous sex addict. All good ingredients, but underused.

Hood spends time spying about onboard Triton, but his manoeuvres seem improbable and fraught with unnecessary danger. He doesn’t actually find out very much. Then when he wants to go ashore he’s forced to kill one of the guards. Later at Lobar’s empty villa, Hood battles a chauffeur and recues a tortured informer. You would think this killing and mayhem would break his cover, but Lobar ignores the chaos Hood brings, perhaps only because he doesn’t want to show Sue Trenton his true colours. This seems highly unlikely as he’s a pretty vicious piece of work. Eventually he imprisons her anyway.

The plot circles around the book, turning from a vague investigation of submarine tracking into the infiltration of a top NATO organisation. Quite how Mayo gets there and why is lost to the reader because Mayo seems more inclined to talk up the violence and the various deaths.

Hammerhead is a nasty novel. Top of the offences is a scene where a characters mouth is stapled together. Later the freak psychopath Golos squeezes a man’s skull until it snaps. Equally galling is how Hood drowns a man with a grease gun. He’s also trapped inside a coffin and even spends a night driving through Nice with a corpse in his passenger seat.

The sex too has a nasty unseemly edge to it. Hood doesn’t actually get very physical with the ladies; there is just one coupling with Ivory. But at every turn Hood is looking at girl’s breasts or buttocks, admiring their form the way one might a race horse. The girl he ends up with is the most unlikely of the three, a bar girl called Kit who cheekily calls him “sailor.” Their chaste romance starts at a strip bar where they discuss the merits of the various women on display. Later, Hood, on the run from Lobar’s men, takes a time-out to eat an exotic lobster lunch with her, a feat he repeats with Sue Trenton. Indeed while Ivory turns out to be Hood’s believable saviour, it is Sue Trenton who is central to the plot and the girl Mayo’s hero should be seducing.

So what exactly do we have here? An exciting novel, certainly. However, while during many of these unpleasant escapades, Mayo takes time over his descriptions, wallowing in the awfulness of the scenes, he’s neglecting his narrative responsibilities and the story spirals out of control, to the point I really didn’t care about what was happening. When I tried to it was too hurtful to try. The nods to Fleming are there, with the yacht, the rich, sleek villain, the beautiful women, the violence; but there isn’t a lot more and it all feels like too much already. A little less of the nasty stuff and a bit more character and story would have provided a safer more rewarding result.

Hammerhead is worth a read though, if only to remind us how unique and exceptional Fleming was. I will enjoy reading Mayo’s other thrillers (Let Sleeping Girls Lie, Shamelady, Sgt Death, Man Above Suspicion, Asking For It) and I’ll let you know how I get on.

[Von Hammerstein]

I agree, Hood is good fun. However I felt Lobar was suitably grotesque, the shaven head, the eye minus a lid, the scar around his neck from where the pirates tried to hang him. I reviewed this in my ongoing posts about old 60's and 70's spy novels: PAPERBACK SPIES I, I think you'll find more than a few fans of Charles Hood here.

[TheSaint]

Through a friend I read the Hood books. I enjoyed them. I think I ended up getting them.

[chrisno1]

I agree, Hood is good fun. However I felt Lobar was suitably grotesque, the shaven head, the eye minus a lid, the scar around his neck from where the pirates tried to hang him. I reviewed this in my ongoing posts about old 60's and 70's spy novels: PAPERBACK SPIES I, I think you'll find more than a few fans of Charles Hood here.

I'll look that up, Von H.
Incidently, just to clarify as I wasn't specific enough. Lobar is grotesque, certainly, but there is precious little of his psyche coming to the fore. He comes a across as a well heeled, if powerful, man, but we don't really get any feel of why he has turned out that way; the whole back story is missing ( or rather if it is there, it isn't given the significance it deserves)

[Von Hammerstein]

Yes, his back story is thin, but this was the 60s and spy novels were about adventure and excitement and the author had to cram that into a narrative that rarely exceeded 200 pages, so something was bound to suffer. But I feel the brief Sir Richard gives Hood is a deep enough insight into the man. Lobar was a shiphand from a poor family, he may have been part Arawak, who wanted to make something out of himself. He had a bad encounter with Malay pirates and set upon a life of crime to achieve his goals, he deals in contraband, possibly selling secrets, definitely blackmail, and maybe is tracking NATO subs for the Russians with his yatch. That's something I wish Mayo had expanded upon. I felt the snatching of Sir Richard's documents a poor second to keeping tabs on the silent service. Hood really little serious meetings, once in the beginning with a brief stay on Lobar's yatch, where he had the requisite meal and verbal jousting. Then at the end when he was prisoner, and then at the climax. As I said this was the 60s if you were looking for Tom Clancy style accuracy and Ian Fleming's insight you were out of luck. Which is why many of the authors of that period paled in comparsion to Fleming.

[chrisno1]

That's very insightful, thanks, Von H.
I can see already you are something of an expert in this field!

Unfortunately I can't find your review in Paperback Spies 1; do they delete posts here? Searching the spoofs forum only goes back to part 7!

I will be reading LSGL this week and hopefully we can swap a few criticisms about that novel.

I do concede I may have overlooked the briefing Hood received. I think that is
because I always enjoy the 1-2-1 that Fleming often employs in his work and felt that level of revelation was (as you do suggest) slightly missing. I also agree the plot shift was a disappointment; the submarine tracking idea was a good one, but Mayo seems to be using it as a literate MacGuffin - always a tricky prospect - and I think he fails because he sets out so much stall by it from the start.
None the less, Hammerhead stands up fairly well. In a year or so I will re-read it and I dare say find more to love and more to hate.
But that's the beauty of art! (as Hood may well say himself)

[chrisno1]

CHARLES HOOD #2

I confess to having a soft spot for LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE. When I was in my early teens there was a second hand book shop in my home town. It was only a small place; I think someone had just bought up stuff from house clearances and jumble sales. But there was a wealth of literature there including lots of Fleming, MacLean, Shute, Smith and Bagley, the big ‘60s and ‘70s authors. Indeed Wilbur Smith is still churning them out! Anyway, the point being, I bought shed loads for about 10pence a shot and consumed them in days. I then took the one’s I didn’t want back in bulk, got a few quid in exchange for more. I nice old lady ran it, but eventually her lease on the tiny shop ran out (2 years I think) and my resource for books dried up. I still have an almost full set of the 1966 Pan covers from ‘Books & Things.’

Anyway, I am digressing. The only James Mayo she had was LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE and I was in love with this novel before I even read it. The cover has the most beautiful, sexy naked girl stretched across its base and the title of the book is in bold silhouettes showing a golden field of corn. I just thought: WOW! I must but this book. The blurb on the back cover was equally slick and tempting.

It remained one of my favourite thrillers for several years and I still consider it a cut above the average. This time Mayo’s hero Charles Hood is employed by The Circle, with the knowledge of SIS, to keep tabs on Tiara Evenly, a nymphomaniac twin, who, together with her sister Tickle, is able to telepathically memorise secret formula.

Tied in with this is the guru Zagora, who is enticing rich and influential women to his mountain retreat in the Dolomites, where it is believed he is extracting money and political secrets from them. Zagora it seems is also after Tiara and Tickle. Zagora is a well constructed adversary, like a modern Rasputin, with a past shrouded in mystery and a present equally shady.

Best of all, the novel is phenomenally sexy; full of naked women and an undercurrent of sensuality and masochism. The nudity is much more appropriate here than the untidy ogling in HAMMERHEAD. Not only is the heroine a sex magnet, but Zagora’s retreat in the Dolomites, Kuan-t’eng, is a Buddhist temple peopled almost exclusively with half dressed women, one of whom, Malaren, attempts to seduce Hood.

It is here that Hood meets his nemesis, and Mayo is at pains to point out the electric, mesmeric presence of the man. Through the whole piece the power and control Zagora exerts is evident, from the women he seduces and hypnotises, to the freaks he employs and the fear of the town’s folk in Belluno and the city slickers of Venice.

It is slightly odd then, that we first learn of Zagora in an almost off the cuff remark from Hood. Apparently, during his first dalliance with Tiara, Hood has detected signs that she is under the villain’s influence. But Mayo never expands on this. He never mentions it during their tryst at Gaston’s and he never explains it, other than a sentence or two. It is one of several flaws in the book that, like the previous HAMMERHEAD, you have to ignore or else become disenchanted.

As in his first adventure, Hood escapes the villain’s lair, only to return there, at some danger to himself. It seems odd he doesn’t carry out a thorough search for Tiara on his initial visit. Similarly after his second escape (this time with the girl) he stops overnight in an abandoned climber’s hut, which seems a peculiar decision given the bad guys are on their heels. Of course they are both re-captured in the morning.

The novel itself is one extended chase. Mayo builds the suspense really well several times during these long scenes; he’s particularly effective in Venice, but after a while there is too much local knowledge employed and it becomes both dull and confusing. He does though give a good impression of the spy at work and Venice, in particular, is a great setting for pursuit, with all its shadows and squares.

He also gives us some outstanding action set pieces. There is a vicious fight with a gatekeeper and his vampire wife and an equally tough battle with a predatory vulture. Latterly Hood and the big henchman Moore have a smashing time destroying antiques during a shoot out in a Venice museum (Moonraker, 1979, anyone?) The second escape from Kuan-t’eng is tense and while a mash up between two drag shovels isn’t so compelling, Mayo’s likening it to a triceratops versus a tyrannosaurus conjures up the images wonderfully.

There is also another henchman, Balek, who is in the same vein as Golos (and Fleming’s Oddjob) in being physically and mentally freakish. Balek has a skeletal tumor that has fashioned his skull to resemble the beak of a mighty bird. Indeed his whole psyche has been taken over by birdlike actions. Balek is a great creation, but the birdman’s downfall is not as dramatic as one might have expected. It also comes before the finale.

Indeed, the major criticism of the book is that it tails off towards the end. There is plenty of dramatic stuff and intrigue and sexiness going on for three quarters of its length, but as the novel reaches its climax the result is somewhat underwhelming. Malaren is killed for no real reason (another of Mayo’s flaws) and the Venice scenes become repetitive. When Zagora’s men are finally lured into the open, in, of all places, an exclusive ladies spa and salon, the denouement is less than thrilling. Unbelievably, Zagora isn’t even apprehended; I can only hope he re-appears in another novel, as Mayo has done so well with this creation (much more credible than Lobar) that to leave him sidelined by the ending seems a waste.

None the less I thoroughly enjoyed re-reading LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE. It has a good central story, a great villain and a much more acceptable and desirable heroine, who has a nice line or two (and place or three) of seduction. The action fairly pounds along and overall, I think it is a vast improvement of Mayo’s earlier effort, being compact, descriptive and exciting. It has none of the sickening nastiness of before and feels much more like an escapist thriller than the somewhat more down-to-earth HAMMERHEAD. I enjoyed it. I am sure LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE will remain on my reading list for quite some time.

[chrisno1]

CHARLES HOOD #3

SHAMELADY came out in 1966, hard on the heels of Mayo’s first two outings and the movie version of HAMMERHEAD. The world of Charles Hood was up and running.
I really enjoyed SHAMELADY. While I could go on criticising Mayo’s reliance on action at the expense of suspense and the remarkable lapses in his plots, I think he succeeds better here overall than he has in either of the previous outings.

The novel starts with Hood in New York over Christmas. Nominally he’s there to watch over Alexis Falkenburg, a woman suspected of being a foreign agent. But she disappears before Hood makes contact and he finds himself alone for the festive season. He accepts a curious invitation to a party, which turns into something of an orgy. He meets and is seduced by the beautiful Bonbon. Back in London the mystery of the party, of Falkenburg’s disappearance thickens. Hood becomes embroiled in the schemes of Nick Rosario, playboy and millionaire industrialist. His criminally programmed super computer has been plotting a recent spate of master robberies and Rosario needs Hood’s help. The Russians are involved, as are a host of wicked henchmen, Bonbon and an alluring blonde Girl Friday.

The action is swift and while, at times, Mayo still seems to be inserting violent scenes for fun, they are as relentlessly vicious as before. There is a shoot out in the desert with a paraplegic war veteran, a fearsome fist fight with an Arab, a pummelling from a Basque pelota expert and a confusing forest pursuit following the hijacking of an aeroplane. If the latter scenes borrow much from Thunderball, Mayo has given them a neat twist in having Hood present and almost powerless to act.

As usual Mayo has a tendency to allow Hood to escape his captor, often killing someone along the way, but being recaptured or simply returning without so much as a nod and a wink. It happens three times in this book, and although it becomes apparent Hood’s usefulness is paramount, the licence to roam which Nick Rosario gives him is beguiling.

Rosario himself is a well drawn character. I got a good feel for his avaricious and extravagant lifestyle. He’s a man unused to failure. When it comes he is angry and disappointed. He shows fits of a blistering temper. He is equally urbane and good company. Several times Hood states he admires and likes him, enjoying the hospitality at his exotic villa.

Hood also enjoys Bonbon. There is a real attraction between the two. After the peculiar sex-party, their eventual coupling and romance is wholly believable. Bonbon is a sexy desirable woman. Equally sensual is Alexis, who makes a startling re-appearance standing naked on a desert island. It’s a bit of a tribute to Dr No, but the chase through the palms and Hood’s sexual assault on her is described so well, you forget that he’s (at the very least) forgotten to ask and she’s forgotten to complain. Alexis is a feisty character; Mayo hasn’t developed her persona much, indeed she spends much time hiding in a boat house, but at the novel’s end it is Alexis not the raven headed Bonbon who may share Hood’s bed.

Mayo ties up his story cleverly in SHAMELADY. There is a very odd battle against the super computer Lulu and finally a shoot out in some prehistoric caves, all described in Mayo’s customary off hand manner. It’s a more rewarding finale than LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE.

Overall I enjoyed SHAMELADY. I liked the plot, I liked the girls and I liked the villain. I’m still not sure Mayo has the magic touch; he creates very exciting sequences, but doesn’t seem capable of slotting them appropriately into the narrative, so people end up being killed at strange times. None the less I can’t fault his general storytelling. Mayo was a contemporary journalist to Fleming and in the early chapters, while Hood prowls New York, I felt the essence of the Master. Those chapters were very effective, putting me in the place of Hood and his thoughts and emotions and observations. I’d give him 8/10 for those chapters alone. It falls away a little to the end, but SHAMELADY has a lot to recommend it.

[chrisno1]

CHARLES HOOD #4

Remarkably easy to read, SERGEANT DEATH is something of a change of direction for James Mayo. His hero, Charles Hood, has previously worked as an agent for both the O.S.S. and The Circle, a mysterious conglomerate of powerful industrialists. While the former provided the scope of the mission for HAMMERHEAD, it has subsequently been the latter that sent Hood on his missions. Nothing changes in this opus, except here the operation involves the theft and forgery of priceless Mesopotamian antiques. It allows Mayo to wallow in the world of art, antiquities and archaeologists, the very field Hood is expert in.

The story, then, is not an espionage thriller, but an elaborate smuggling caper involving the crooked Master-Sergeant Lloyd Bannion, the equally crooked businessman Franklin Delgado, the smuggler Ahmed Malik and the archaeologist Philip Helpman. It hasn’t any world-wide significance or even a national importance. The fake pieces are merely causing embarrassment to the auction house Kristoby’s and they want Hood to uncover to the players in this muddy market.

Mayo’s change of emphasis works very well and he’s provided a short, readable adventure peppered with good characters and enjoyable scenes. Also the book avoids the usual voyeuristic descriptions of death and violence in favour of several almost pørnographic exposés of its characters private lives. This makes it, while not necessarily enduring, certainly memorable. If I cringed a few times, it’s only because I don’t particularly enjoy graphic sex scenes in a book. While sex has always been uppermost in the Hood novels, Mayo tended toward guarded eroticism; the obtuse frankness here was something of a surprise and sits awkwardly next to the sensuality he provided in LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE.

Lloyd Bannion, the titular Sergeant Death (although the term is never used in the book, Bannion is responsible for most of the killings) is the storys nominal villain, but he isn’t ever in control of his destiny and events spiral out of his control. This is a direct result of his greed. The nominal power he wealds at a U.S. Army Base is no substitute for his rampant urges. He is a rapist and a psychopath, whose sexual thrills release him from the desire to maim. Sometimes the two cross and he’s found the perfect outlet for his frustrations in Zarin, the Persian teenage bride of his partner in crime Malik.

Bannion is a believable and ugly villain, contrasted next to the sleek, urbane and powerful men he tries to blackmail. Both Malik and Delgado are unphased by his protestations and he sits uncomfortable in their presence. Even his line officer, Major Colonna, while receiving the sergeant’s contempt, shows a maturity and poise lacking in Bannion’s manners. That Bannion is attracted to the deceptive, coy charms of the nymphomaniac Zarin is hardly surprising. It is disappointing Mayo doesn’t spend more time with this creature, for she is the slyest among this band of fraudsters.

While the other adversaries are distinctly one dimensional, Mayo does provide excellent back stories to them all, introducing us to their world and their wishes before we witness them in action. Strangest of these is Helpman, a historian uninterested in all but money: having discovered the greatest tomb since Tutankhamen, providing an opportunity for redemption to his peers, all he wants to do is sell the treasure on the black market. History has ceased to be of value to him, except in dollars, and in that respect Helpman resembles all his other cohorts. Meanwhile Bannion’s problems escalate to the point he is virtually driven mad, experiencing black outs and panic attacks. Like King Nebuchadnezzar, whose sarcophagus he’s trying to pawn, Bannion is going insane in the desert.

Among all the double crossing, Charles Hood is almost an after thought. He acts on the periphery of the drama and doesn’t so much resolve the case as be present at its unravelling. He spends most of his time drinking in bars, sitting in an office in Tehran and falling in love with the capable, but dull Debbie Ansell. It’s disappointing because his adventure starts very well, at an exclusive Paris eatery and an opulent Officer’s Club, blending the extraordinary with the mundane. Towards the end of the novel, Mayo comes up trumps with a few tough fight scenes, but they feel redundant, an after thought. The novel doesn’t really need them, except at the finale, because the interest he’s created chiefly lies in the wily quartet of baddies trying to put one over each other.

SERGEANT DEATH was originally entitled ‘Once in a Lifetime’ – relating, I assume, to Bannion’s, Helpman’s or Delgado’s desire to make that one great coup. Neither title sits well with the story. It’s something of an experiment, I feel; not bad for all that, but not quite Charles Hood.

[chrisno1]

CHARLES HOOD #5

THE MAN ABOVE SUSPICION is the least vicious of Mayo’s thrillers to date. It is also rather familiar. While Mayo begins to reinvent Charles Hood’s adventures, he also finds the time to cast a wink at the Master, Ian Fleming. The novel is an easy read (I digested it in two evenings) and better for it, but there is precious else to recommend it.

The adventure kick starts with the disappearance of an industrialist and his daughter. Hood is then assigned to investigate the strange goings-on on St Kilda, a tiny island republic in the Caribbean. Posing as an aviator, he comes into contact with Terry Windmiller and in a scene reminiscent of Diamonds Are Forever, meets her half naked in adjoining hotel rooms. Next he visits a rich man’s playground similar to Rosario’s in SHAMELADY and wreaks some havoc amongst the assorted toughs before the action transfers to Europe. There is also a kidnapped girl, the delectable Kim McCaine, who Hood first met at another bizarre party. Together Hood and Kim learn that a criminal organisation called The Brothers is planning to blackmail various governments under the threat of bacteriological warfare. Very On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Mayo is concise with his detail, but he lacks punch where he previously scored. There isn’t much action, though there is lots of suspense, and when it does come it feels awkward and contrived. Hood is threatened by Novak, an ex-circus man who is devastating with a bullwhip; he rescues Kim in a set up similar to Malaren’s unfortunate death in LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE; he fights a baddie to death on a train, eventually, in the book’s highlight, casting him out of the window; there are the requisite foot chases and repetitious nosing Hood performs under the gaze of his enemies.

That it doesn’t hold together is because Mayo hasn’t provided any memorable characters. Of the women, Terry is a very ordinary femme fatale, while Kim is a youthful but uninteresting foil. The villains are two cultured powerful businessmen, Morell and Belgeorge, in it for different motives and neither convincing. There are numerous hoodlums of which Novak is the most defined, but he’s killed off half way through the story.

Latterly Hood is attacked by a man wrapped in bandages a la “The Mummy.” There is even a peculiar scene where he discovers a laboratory containing an artificially animated brain. It isn’t entirely clear what significance these have to The Brothers’ scheme (none at all, I would hazard). The two images sit uncomfortably in the espionage world and add a “Hammer” flavour to a fairly un-horrific novel. In fact it is one of Mayo’s nicer efforts. Having decried all the nastiness in HAMMERHEAD, I rather miss it in THE MAN ABOVE SUSPICION, which seems quite staid in comparison. Not a classic.

[chrisno1]

CHARLES HOOD #6

A strange one this. ASKING FOR IT is a bit of a curate’s egg. In all honesty, I didn’t really like it. This time Hood is in Nicaragua (I don’t think he ever tells us why) and he bumps into a sexy girl (surprise, surprise) called Matilda Roebuck who is in a whole host of bother. Hood passes her onto his assistant who is subsequently murdered. And so the story goes on.

The problem with the novel is it is a monologue. Mayo writes the tale as if Hood is dictating the adventure into a dictafone. It has a certain observational edge to it, and we get more of the Hood-isms, especially surrounding the girls and the sex, but the format doesn’t really work. The story is very short but it meanders all over the place, from hotel, to apartment, to offices, to new hotel, to abandoned mansion. Characters come and go, disappear and reappear. It’s endless. And made all the more frustrating by being asked to believe Hood has the patience to relate the adventure on tape every day. Really? I doubt it!

Mayo provides the fights at odd times and odd ball hoodlums at the right times, especially a ventriloquist hit man, but it all feels a bit awkward. There is no assignment happening here, Hood seems to be on some sort of jolly jaunt to Central America, and the story is basically lifted from the pages of Raymond Chandler.

Indeed it was those hard boiled thrillers that this most reminded me of, what with the sexy secretary Margy, the femme fatale Matilda, the old man living in a mansion, everyone searching for a safe deposit key, our hero non-plussed by the whole affair but keeping his feet firmly on the ground. It runs a fairly predictable course right up to the denouement in New York. Hood is given a few nice lines of wry comment through the piece, but it’s not enough to sustain the reader’s interest. Even the sex isn’t titillating.

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, well I guess Chandler might consider him self flattered. Unfortunately ASKING FOR IT doesn’t have very much else to recommend it. It’s not a patch on the Marlowe novels and suffers in comparison. I like to think of it rather as Mayo’s The Spy Who Loved Me, a valiantly hopeless attempt to bring a new angle to his hero. Basically, it just isn’t very good.

As far as I am aware ASKING FOR IT was the final Charles Hood thriller and it is a disappointing way to end what in the main has been an enjoyable series of books. There are faults, certainly, but most of them, particularly the first four, have something to offer the casual reader.

[chrisno1]

THE QUICKNESS OF THE HAND

 

James Mayo’s THE QUICKNESS OF THE HAND was originally published in 1952, so it predates Ian Fleming and OO7. The novel received a paperback reissue from Pan in 1959 and, following Mayo’s Charles Hood crackers, a belated reprint and fresh cover arrived in 1971. The novel however is stuck firmly in the post war years. I’ve included it here for several reasons.

 

Firstly, the novel concerns in part a complicated insurance fraud that involves the hero in the theft of a half dozen valuable paintings. This is pure Hood territory and is the sort of conjecture which brings him into contact with Helpmann in SERGEANT DEATH or creates enmity with Zagora in LET SLEEPING GIRLS LIE. Secondly, the hero is called Charles Rayner and while he is at the lower end of life and has a criminal past, he bears an uncanny worldliness that is similar to Hood’s.

 

Thirdly Mayo’s writing style, his slightly disjointed action scapes which tend to confuse rather than clarify, and the meandering storyline, which has Rayner in peril for exploitative reasons (tension not narrative) are unerringly familiar. There is a particularly nasty interrogation scene with a hoodlum tied up and dehydrated being threatened, and eventually impaled, with the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle. This too has the sordidness of Charles Hood’s adventures wrapped all over it.

 

Rayner’s grim adventure however has little of the sophisticated oeuvre of Hood’s. There are no extravagant meals and classy women. There is no elaborate world threatening scheme for the baddies.  There is no joy in the luxurious. The novel starts off more like Greene’s Brighton Rock, with the hero walking the streets of a seaside town full of the waifs, strays and the downbeat dregs of society. It’s a dull, hardy time and place and Mayo doesn’t pull his punches in describing Rayner’s disdain for the world he inhabits. This makes for quite difficult reading; we’re on a downer from the start. The prose doesn’t pick up much.

 

There’s a couple of intriguing sequence where Rayner’s prison experience infringes on his daily existence. These read very well, are cleverly constructed and tell us much about the protagonist’s fears. Additionally three over-the-desk stand offs with Tessin (a local villain), Lissender (the top man, a jewel thief) and Macquire (the fraudster) are more than welcome for they display Rayner’s wit and verbal skill. It’s the smaller moments which satisfy: a sexless assignation with a prostitute, a crafty piece of escapology to flee Lissender’s clutches, the initial murder at Ma Bryce’s guest house, a set to with the local police inspector and a flight across balconies from a hotel room.  The torture scene though, while gruesome, feels out of character for Rayner, who isn’t depicted as such a mean piece of work for most of the novel.

 

Disappointingly, for such a sturdy novel, the ending is very swift, curtailed over a few pages without really explaining how the jigsaw puzzle plot fits together – the jewel heist still seems unrelated to the art insurance fraud – and even worse Rayner, whose actions and thoughts occupy the whole scenario, takes a back seat at the very climax: having exposed Lissender it is left to other’s to carry the resolution to its conclusion.

 

It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy THE QUICKNESS OF THE HAND, but it does share many of the faults visible in Mayo’s Charles Hood series and unfortunately has less substance to paper over the cracks. It isn’t an espionage thriller, true, yet Mayo doesn’t quite seem to have grasped the fundamentals of storytelling, that of clear and concise plotting matched to a strong sympathetic central character. While the novel has some tension, much of the descriptive prose is garbled and this spoils the active suspense.

 

Mayo’s Hood novels are better because there at least the personas are developed and the plots, while still a trifle muddled, have a grand arc which creates tension and intrigue. It’s possible to interpret Rayner as a pre-Hood for in many ways the circumstances and situations he inhabits are similar to the sixties spy, so much so I can almost see it ‘re-imagined’ with Hood replacing Rayner.  Wishful thinking!

 

N.B. James Mayo (real name Stephen Coulter) worked with Ian Fleming at The Times and (apparently) helped the Master revise the first draft of Casino Royale. I wonder if Fleming’s Moonraker chapter ‘The Quickness of the Hand’ which, like the confidence trick played here is all to do with sleight, was in part a tribute to Mayo’s novel and a printed ‘thank you’ for his help.