Tuesday, December 31, 2019
“The Bishop of Somaliland” by H. Bedford-Jones
Someone named Henry James O’Brien Bedford-Jones surely has a
title, but it’s not one you’ll find in Burke’s Peerage (no matter how deeply
Philip Jose Farmer may scrutinize its pages). Indeed, Peter Ruber named H. Bedford-Jones
the King of the Pulps. That’s a title disputed by some pulp fans, who point to
the popularity of author Edgar Rice Burroughs and the prodigious output by Max
Brand (and a raft of other pseudonyms for Frederick Faust). Perhaps Faust and
Bedford-Jones are the two main contenders based on wordage sold.
All three writers worked in multiple genres. Based on
marketing savvy, Burroughs might be the clear winner, with movies, comic books,
radio shows, comic strips, television shows, and a boatload of licensing for
foodstuffs and clothing and toys and you-name-it associated with his characters
and settings. Perhaps just the number of knock-offs from Tarzan and the number
of planetary romance characters and settings his works influenced would put the
final stamp on ERB capturing the title of King.
Faust also made the jump to other media with his characters,
and three movies based (loosely) on just one novel, Destry Rides Again.
Dr. Kildare appeared in movies and television (and, if I’m recalling correctly,
as a radio show as well) plus comic strips and comic books. I haven’t counted,
but a gut feeling tells me more movies have been based on Faust’s novels and
stories than on those by Zane Grey. Burroughs’ influence on writers who
followed him was immense, but if we use continuing popularity or sales of written
works as our measuring stick, Faust claims the kingdom: Max Brand books
continue to be released in one format or another every year, many of them in large
print editions intended for library collections.
Bedford-Jones, however, seems known today only by readers
and collectors of pulp magazines. Altus Press/Steeger Books’ campaign to publish
the bulk of his work in its H. Bedford-Jones Library may change this situation slightly,
but from my perspective, it appears the publisher’s marketing efforts are
focused on the population of already-knowledgeable pulp fans, not on expanding awareness
of HBJ’s oeuvre to uninitiated readers outside the pulp community. Like
Burroughs and Faust, HBJ toiled in a variety of genres: mystery, western, spy, contemporary
thriller, historical adventure, swashbucklers, naval action . . . gosh, you name
it, you can find at least one example with Bedford-Jones’ name (or pseudonym)
on it. He wrote stand-alone stories as well as series characters. Surprisingly,
such a prolific storyteller didn’t make the leap to movies or television. A quick
check of IMDB shows only two entries for HBJ. This writer has hogsheads’ worth
of tales suitable for adapting to film and TV—in a world hungry for streaming
content, HBJ’s library is a treasure chest waiting to be discovered.
Today we’re taking a look at “The Bishop of Somaliland,” a
stand-alone adventure tale (“A Stirring Novelette”) published in the March 1936
issue of Blue Book (vol. 62 no. 5). (HBJ has a second story in this
issue, an entry in his Arms and Men series: “XIV—The Sword of Michelangelo.”)
A contemporary story rather than one of HBJ’s narratives located
in the Wild West or a distant historical era, this is an entertaining tale that
includes some humor and some drama against a quasi-wartime setting: remember, it’s
1936 (probably 1935 at the time it was written), and the German invasion of
Poland, which triggered Britain and France’s declarations of war, didn’t occur
until 1939. Here’s the state of that part of the world (in as simplistic a list
as you’ll probably ever see):
The territory:
- After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the Port of Aden became one of the busiest ports in the world.
- Aden is a British Protectorate that lay along the northern coast of the Gulf of Aden, which connects the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea. Aden Command was a Royal Air Force command formed in 1928 to control all British Armed Forces in the Protectorate.
- North of the Aden Protectorate lay Yemen, which extended from the Bab el-Mandab Strait northward about one-quarter of the length of the Red Sea’s eastern coast. Yemen and the British signed the Treaty of Sanaa in 1934 to confirm the border between Yemen and the Protectorate and for Britain to guarantee Yemen’s independence for forty years.
- Mocha (Al-Makha) is a Yemen port on the Red Sea just north of the strait connecting the sea to the Gulf of Aden.
- British Somaliland lay along the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden. British Somaliland was bordered on the northwest by a smaller territory, French Somaliland, at the narrowing of the Gulf of Aden known as Bab el-Mandab—the Gate of Tears—the strait connecting the Gulf to the Red Sea.
- Flanking the French and British Somalilands were Italian territories. Extending northwest of French Somaliland from the Bab el-Mandab Strait to a third of the length of the Red Sea’s western coast lay Eritrea, an Italian colony. East of British Somaliland from the Horn of Africa and extending southwest along the coast of the Indian Ocean lay Italian Somalia.
- From Eritrea’s northern point to the Horn of Africa and on to the southernmost point of Italian Somalia, the coastal colonies of Italia, France and Britain make Ethiopia (also known as Abyssinia) a land-locked state.
1935:
- January—Italy united Eritrea and Italian Somalia to form Italian East Africa, whose capital was located in Mogadishu. The northern section (Eritrea) and southern section (Italian Somalia) remained separated by French Somaliland and British Somaliland.
- August—The United States passed the Neutrality Act of 1935, initiating a prohibition on trading in arms and war materials with any parties engaged in a war. The Government of India Act separated Burma and Aden from British India. (
- September—The Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws, legalizing the persecution of Jews.
- October—The second Italo-Abyssinian War began when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Launched from Italian East Africa, the Italian armies bore toward the Abyssinian interior in a pincer campaign from the north (Eritrea) and simultaneously from the south (Italian Somalia).
This map may help clarify some of the geography:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethiopia_War_Map_(1935-feb_1936)_it.svghttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethiopia_War_Map_(1935-feb_1936)_it.svg
 |
| Aden, 1935. |
That’s the background for Bedford-Jones’ story, which takes
place on only a small chunk of a territorial map that had been highly volatile
since the end of World War I. And maybe that’s too much historical detail to
provide for a story that fills only 21 pages of a pulp magazine, but that’s the
sort of information that globally savvy readers of the time would have had at
least a general awareness of while reading “The Bishop of Somaliland.” And if
they hadn’t been reading the papers and listening to the radio news, HBJ’s tale
still would have entertained them. These political and geographic details lend
verisimilitude to Bedford-Jones’ story, which is quite what any professional
writer would desire.
The story—which, by the way, is prefaced with an editorial
blurb that reveals part of the plot, “Guns for Abyssinia”—opens with two men at the rail of a French coastal
mail ship putting in at Mocha after sailing north from Aden. One is an
American, Breen, who’d been first officer on a ship until he’d gotten ill and been
left at Aden. The other is George Augustus Kenworthy Braggton-Hurts, a spare,
rough-hewn Briton in black clerical garb who introduces himself as the Bishop
of Somaliland. The latter explains to Breen he’s heading to a mission in
British Somaliland near Djibouti (in French Somaliland) because the curate there
had left his post and left behind “all the sacred vessels, which are of much
value, and also the books and reports and records of the diocese—and he died of
malaria at the Djibouti hospital last week.” The Bishop’s on his way to
retrieve the diocesan property, because it’s been left near the area of the
Italian-Ethiopian conflict.
The Bishop intends to board an Arab steamer, the Nurredin,
to travel to French Somaliland. However, the Nurredin needs a captain; having
learned that Breen is a master of steam, the Bishop beseeches the American to
take the ship’s open post so he can leave straightaway to fulfill his duties at
the mission.
Breen balks at the request. There are Italian destroyers
patrolling the waters “with savage intent to stop all running of guns across to
Ethiopia and parts adjacent.” He raises objections:
“Look here, Bishop,” he said
curtly. “That Red Sea yonder is fuller of warships than of Egyptians right now.
The Italians have twice tried to land troops right here in Yemen, and the
British chased ‘em off. They want to stop gun-runners. So do the French and
British. I’d gamble any money that these ships anchored here are loaded with
munitions for Ethiopia. I bet these boys have made use of you.”
The Bishop waves aside Breen’s points, saying that any gun-running
the Nurredin may be engaged in is “aside from the question of my duty.” He
declares the steamer sails under the British flag, which should protect Breen,
the Bishop, and the crew from assault by any foreign power.
Once ashore, the Bishop introduces Breen to the ship’s
owner, Yusuf the Damascene. At the American’s questioning, Yusuf claims the
steamer’s cargo is condensed milk intended for the French troops at Djibouti. Breen
agrees to consider the position, but leaves to wander the town while the Bishop
negotiates with Yusuf for a larger fee on behalf of Breen to finally entice him
aboard.
In a typical pulp-magazine coincidence, Breen encounters the
Nurredin’s first mate, Gaffney, who tells him the steamer’s British crew
is hiding below decks and only its Arab stokers are moving about in sight to
keep curious eyes from becoming more curious. When Gaffney lets slip that the
captain the Nurredin is awaiting is a man named Stafford, Breen is
shocked. The public opinion of Stafford is that the man is a murderer and a
pirate. Gaffney assures Breen that the stories the American has heard are
overblown and don’t include the facts; that Stafford’s crew is loyal to the man
as he only deserves. For that reason, Gaffney won’t tell Breen what Nurredin’s
cargo is—not unless he signs on as the steamer’s master.
On his way back to Yusuf’s, Breen encounters the Bishop
belaying three attackers with knives; the Bishop uses his fists in a very
unclerical manner, and quickly puts down the three men. The Bishop then spots
Breen, tells him he’s convinced Yusuf to guarantee Breen a larger fee, and the
two men set off for the Nurredin.
At this point, the reader is 110 percent sure that the
Bishop and Captain Stafford are one and the same and the Nurredin’s hold
is stacked with boxes filled with guns. While the American has no illusions
about his cargo, Bedford-Jones doesn’t let on just how much Breen is sure about
Stafford or whether he only still suspects. It hardly matters, because HBJ has
fun showing us crewmembers trying to keep Stafford’s secret in front of Breen.
It’s perfect fodder for strong character actors of the period in a Hollywood
adventure tale: as humorous scenes lighten the drama, so the dramatic scenes are
intensified as the likeable secondary characters we’ve warmed up to are
threatened.
The Nurredin, like every other boat afloat that
night, makes its way without lights. There are a few near-crashes with other
craft, but all goes well as Breen relies on his charts and his memory of the
local waters. All goes well, that is, until the steamer strikes something in
the dark: it turns out to be an Italian submarine, and its officer and his men
quickly board Breen’s ship.
One thing astonished him—the acrid
hostility between his men and the Italian seamen. True, relations between the
two countries were badly strained, with warlike moves in the air, with the
destiny of Europe trembling in the balance against that of Ethiopia; yet the
swift reflection of this racial trouble surprised Breen, who was not accustomed
to the sharp emergence of nationalism. His men were quite helpless, it is true;
but they could snarl, and snarl they did.
This is writing with a sure hand based on good knowledge of
the military and political maneuvering in the region. Maybe that’s just the
perception from eighty years away, but Bedford-Jones handles the contemporary
tensions from a far corner of the world in a solid manner for the readers of a
popular mass market periodical.
Breen is further confused and infuriated when the Italian lieutenant
says, “I don’t mind telling you that we had advance information that this ship
was loaded with contraband.” Breen recalls a “scrap of talk from Gaffney. The
men had their orders; it didn’t matter if an Italian ship overhauled them. Why?”
In this way, Bedford-Jones lays aside the faux puzzle of Stafford’s disguise as
the Bishop and gets to the crux of his plot: what’s really going on here?
The lieutenant locks Breen in his cabin. The cook brings him
food and tries to pass a message to Breen—something’s up, but he can’t fathom just
what it may be. The American is further confused by the sounds he hears and the
Nurredin’s sudden movement in the water.
A wild tumult of voices—and then a
sudden lifting shock that stopped Breen’s heart for an instant. He had felt
that lift before now, when keel surged on coral; but it was no coral. He was
flung off his feet, hurled headlong into a corner of the cabin. The bows of the
ship lifted and settled again, with a frightful crunching crash.
Then shots burst forth from the
bridgedeck.
The Bishop and one of his men had broken loose and rammed
the submarine. I won’t spoil all the details, but Breen learns the truth behind
the stories about murderous Stafford, and that’s just what we expected, right?
The entire plot set up not just to run guns to Ethiopia for money, but also to
sink an Italian submarine. Stafford’s story is a tale of revenge, and turns to a
darker note than its opening and middle scenes suggested may be coming.
Still, Bedford-Jones handles the adventure, the humor, and
the pathos in a fine manner. A career writer didn’t sell so much as he did if
he didn’t have a storyteller’s true hand as a narrator. Not all his work is
consistent—writing so much so quickly for so many markets will make any writer
falter from time to time. But this tale, “The Bishop of Somaliland,” is a fine
piece that, while perhaps not in the highest echelon of Blue Book’s
fiction, is certainly entertaining, diverting, and engaging. That’s just what a
reader expects for 15 cents in 1936. It's what Alistair MacLean and Jack Higgins would be doing in print many years later with great success. Again, I can see in my mind’s eye a black-and-white
motion picture with a dramatic score and a dandy script based on this story. It
would have been just the thing Hollywood would have produced to wind up the
American viewers in the years leading to the war.
My brief research doesn't show that Steeger Books has reprinted this particular story. But this publisher has released a number of books containing much of the best of HBJ's Blue Book work. Check the links below to view some of the volumes in the H. Bedford-Jones Library. I've also included a link to a contemporary adventure tale, if something like "The Bishop of Somaliland" whets your appetite: check out Black Dog Books' The Master of the Dragons. There's a lot of good reading to be found within those covers.
The Gate of Farwell: The John Solomon Stories Volume 1
The Gate of Farwell: The John Solomon Stories Volume 1
Labels: 1936, Alistair MacLean, Blue Book, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Bedford-Jones, Max Brand, Steeger Books
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Now available: FIGHTING ALASKA, the ebook version
Set in 1900, Fighting Alaska tells the tale of a reluctant fighter's trip to the Alaskan gold rush. On the way, he encounters a fictional hero who may be recognized by fans of TV westerns from the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as historical folks like Wyatt Earp, Rex Beach, and Tex Rickard.
You can find the ebook version now at Amazon. You can reach it by clicking here. (For those who prefer paper and ink over Kindle pages, the print version should be available soon.)
You can also find my article on writing Fighting Alaska, "A Fighter's Trail to the Alaskan Gold Rush," at the Fight Card site. Read the article to find out why Charles Bronson's photo is included with this post. Click here to visit the site and see the article.
Labels: Charles Bronson, ebook, Fight Card, Fighting Alaska, gold rush, NorthWestern, Rex Beach, Tex Rickard, Wyatt Earp
Saturday, May 9, 2015
The vigor of pulp prose: Alistair MacLean's WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL
Reading Puppet on a Chain--the local library had a copy, and its shelves were well-stocked with the works of many crime and thriller writers--led me to other MacLean novels. (My interest was encouraged by the very dramatic cover paintings and consistent typographic treatments on the Fawcett paperback editions being published at the time. That red bulls-eye dot over the I in Alistair was just the perfect touch.) But most of my interest in MacLean ended by the time I left junior high school.
Seeing some new editions of MacLean on the bookstore shelves in recent years, I picked up When Eight Bells Toll. (It's nice to see some appropriately dramatic cover treatments on these new editions published by Sterling. They don't recall the style used by publishers in the 1960s and '70s for MacLean's books, but they appropriately communicate the dramatic vigor of his storytelling.) I'd not read this one before, and I wondered whether if my memories of MacLean would hold up after all these years. I remembered reading about five years ago an Agatha Christie novel--again, I went through a Christie phase of reading during junior high. I was remarkably bored. It's easy to see why her books receive so many film and TV treatments--activity, dialog, activity. Little to make the characters really interesting other than their tics and mannerisms and the murders happening around them.
Fortunately for me, this particular MacLean novel appeared (1966) during his glory days as a thriller writer. Some of his later works just didn't carry my interest, even when I was reading them as they were published. The first-person narrator is a man of action, and his cynical outlook combines with his sense of duty and his remarkable facility to survive to fashion an interesting character. He's a creature of his times--the 1966s were the days of James Bond's rising popularity, the aging of Cold War/Fear of the Bomb angst, and the growth of cultural unrest.
The following passage from late in the book--pages 186 and 187 in the 1966 Doubleday hardcover--give a sense of the vigor and action in MacLean's prose as his protagonist, Philip Calvert, describes an ally (Hutchinson) he's just recruited. It's the sort of writing one might have seen in the best Adventure or Blue Book writers (although one might argue they would have communicated the same in a shorter passage):
<<
Those huge hands on the throttle and wheel had the delicacy of a moth. He had the night-sight of a barn owl and an ear which could infallibly distinguish between waves breaking in the open sea, on reefs or on shores: he could invariably tell the size and direction of seas coming at him out of the darkness and mist and touch wheel to throttle as need be: he had an inbuilt computer which provided instant correlation of wind, tide, current and our own speed and always let him know exactly where he was. And I'll swear he could smell land, even on a lee shore and with the rest of us suffering olfactory paralysis from the fumes of the big black cigars which seemed to be an inseparable part of the man. It required only ten minutes beside him to realize that one's ignorance of the sea and ships was almost total. A chastening discovery.He took the Charmaine out through the Scylla and Charybdis of that evil alleged harbor entrance under full throttle. Foaming white-fanged reefs reached out at us, bare feet away, on either side. He didn't seem to notice them. He certainly didn't look at them. The two "boys" he'd brought with him, a couple of stunted lads of about six foot two or thereabouts, yawned prodigiously. Hutchinson located the Firecrest a hundred yards before I could even begin to imagine I could see any shape at all and brought the Charmaine alongside as neatly as I could park my car by the kerb in broad daylight--on one of my better days, that was.
>>
Labels: Agatha Christie, Alistair MacLean, Puppet on a Chain, vigor, When Eight Bells Toll
Thursday, April 16, 2015
The vigor of pulp prose
<<
Liston's rise through the amateur ranks had been so fast and so fulminous--such a sudden, attention-commanding burst of neon lightning and Shango thunder--that the price negotiated for his professional debut was two hundred dollars, about four times the going rate for a preliminary novice.
>>
Fulminous: a word you don't see very often unless you're a chemical engineer in a niche career or a backyard pyrotechnist, ala George Plimpton. Or, perhaps, a meteorologist. But it's a word I like, perhaps all the more so because of its rarity.
Labels: Nick Tosches, prose, purple prose, Sonny Liston
Saturday, November 23, 2013
If the Pulps StiII Thrived: Charles McCarry as a contemporary Blue Book writer
So, happily in our fantasy, you are able to go to a store and purchase the latest issue of Blue Book, which includes stories of adventure by folks writing in the tradition of the Blue Book of yore -- literate tales of adventure, of striving, of fighting and violence, of treasure and romance -- written in a readable, not-too-purple prose whose style emphasizes storytelling and entertainment, not shock and sensation.
One of those writers might be Charles McCarry.
I've been aware of McCarry only a short while, but each reference to him I've seen describes him as a "great but unknown" writer or, as in a Metroactive.com article by Morton Marcus, "the undiscovered master of the spy novel."
I first heard of McCarry through separate mentions on two email discussion lists. First on Rara-Avis, a group dedicated to discussion of hard-boiled fiction (and named in honor of Caspar Gutman's nickname, rare bird, for the Maltese Falcon), when someone pointed to McCarry in a cyber- conversation about writers who were former CIA agents. The poster included this URL for an article by P.J. O'Rourke from the September 13, 2004 issue of The Weekly Standard, "No Country for Old Men: Charles McCarry's Gray-haired Spies Take a Curtain Call."
Ostensibly a review of McCarry's latest novel, OldBoys, the essay provides an overview of McCarry's literary career, and is a good introduction to his work.
The next mention of McCarry on an email list provided another URL, this one to an interview with the author at an online magazine, The Morning News.
In this, McCarry provides an interesting inside look at the CIA during his days as a Cold Warrior and at his cover as a writer while he was a spy.
Intrigued by these bits of info, I found a copy of Old Boys. I recommend it whole-heartedly to those readers looking for new writers who carry that torch of entertainment that lit the delights we find in old pulp magazines.
While reading this story, I could imagine it serialized in a contemporary version of Adventure or Blue Book -- covert meetings, encounters with mysterious and dangerous people in exotic locales (Paris, Moscow, Xinjiang, Brazil, Rome, Tel Aviv, Budapest, Kyrgyz, and more) international threats, personal danger, old Nazis, treasures to locate (a 2000-year-old Roman scroll originally unearthed by the Nazis, 12 nuclear bombs smuggled from a Soviet arsenal), betrayals, gunfights, hand-to-hand battles, spies and counterspies. In short, more than enough ingredients for a great adventure novel.
McCarry's writing style follows the pulp-style tradition, the non-florid (but not so spare as to be gaunt) but clean and smooth style of writers like Dashiell Hammett, George F. Worts (I'm thinking of the Peter the Brazen stories in Argosy), Theodore Roscoe, Talbot Mundy, Georges Surdez, and innumerable PBO (paperback original) authors for Gold Medal and other publishers (such as John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, Dan Marlowe, Edward S. Aarons, Donald Hamilton and others). If you like the cool but elegant prose of spy story writer Alan Furst, you'll have an idea about the prose McCarry creates.
And McCarry gets kudos even from someone like Eric Ambler, no slouch in the thriller department.
Old Boys is not the latest book from McCarry, but it seems to wrap up a loose series of books about spy Paul Christopher and his nephew, spy Horace Hubbard. (The first of these books, The MiernikDossier, was also McCarry's first novel.) However, one doesn't have to read the entire series and know all the backstory to read and enjoy Old Boys. As noted, it was the first McCarry book I read, and I picked up all the character history I needed during the course of the narrative to rave about it here. I'll be going on the hunt for McCarry's other novels now.
LINKS
We live in a fortunate time, now that all McCarry's books are back in print, primarily thanks to Overlook Press. You'll find Amazon's Charles McCarry page here.
As a former spook, it's appropriate for McCarry to have written a novel about the JFK assassination (a timely reference, since this month marks the 50th year from that murder): The Tears of Autumn. An article by Mark Judge about the novel and its implications, "Charles McCarry’s unbearable masterpiece," can be found here.
Labels: Adventure, Blue Book, Charles McCarry, contemporary pulp, Ed McBain, Old Boys, Paul Christopher, spy novel
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