Count Luna - Alexander Lernet-Holenia

 Count Luna is an absolute work of genius by an extremely fine writer who is inexplicably under-translated into English.   Sadly, I have now read all three of the more-or-less available: this, plus Baron Blagge and I was Jack Mortimer.   My posts on the other two have had great responses and loads of clicks, so I don't see some enterprising publisher starts digging into Lernet-Holenia's back catalogue.

Like the others, Luna is a work of wit and imagination.   It also hinges on a serious subject: how does a vanquished people deal with its guilt over the crimes against humanity committed in their name?

Alexander Jessiersky, a third generation millionaire of Polish extraction, lives in a palace in central Vienna.   He has a beautiful wife and loads of children.   He is not especially interested in the family transport business but it functions prosperously without him.   Before the war, however, the board of directors wanted to buy a property owned by the down-at-heel aristocrat Count Luna.   Luna wouldn't sell - it was the last of his inheritance - and the board of directors therefore reported him to the Gestapo who hauled him off to a concentration camp.   Jessiersky had nothing to do with it - but he knows he should have intervened and used his veto.   Guilt has gnawed at him throughout the war and after.   During it, he tried to send Luna money and food.   Now he is obsessed with the notion that Luna has survived his ordeal and is back in search of revenge.

Jessiersky is an obsessive researcher, happiest in his well-stocked private library.   He delves, develops theories - and goes quietly mad.   He takes to killing people.   He flees Austria and ends up in the catacombs of Rome.   We know this from the outset - his disappearance below ground in the Church of Sant' Urbino is where Lernet-Holenia starts his fable.   The interest - the game - is how he came to be there.   The genius is that Lernet-Holenia doesn't leave it there.   He takes us with Jessiersky into what happens next, which is something rather beautiful.

Lernet-Holenia writes like a dream.   He juggles complex ideas like guilt and death and the possible hereafter with deceptive ease.   Jessiersky has done no more than thousands of his compatriots did.   His only sin is that he failed to do something.   The outcome of his inaction may not have been too terrible.  But what Jessiersky does to himself and others fifteen years later is terrible.   Terrible yet empathetic and therefore sad.   We laugh and we sigh but always with sympathy.   Which is what makes Count Luna an absolute masterpiece.

Maigret Sets a Trap - Georges Simenon

 Maigret Sets a Trap dates from 1955, the year I was born.   It is vintage Maigret, written when Simenon was at the height of his power.   Women are being attacked in Montmarte, their clothing slashed, their throats cut.   The police haven't a clue to work with - until Maigret gets chatting with a psychiatrist, Professor Tissot, at dinner one evening.

Simenon's great contribution to crime literature was the pschological angle.   Here, Professor Tissot develops an early version of a criminal profile, diagnosing the kind of man who would be most likely to commit such a series.   He also hazards an equally ahead-of-its-time geographical profile.   The killer must know Montmarte like the back of his hand.   If not living locally, he must certainly have spent considerable time there.

Maigret is thus able to track down his suspect.   He does this via a single jacket button, snatched from the attacker's suit.   But while Maigret is questioning the suspect at the Quai des Orfevres another woman is killed up in Montmarte.   Maigret remains convinced that he has the serial killer in custody.   So the latest killing must be a copycat.

Having set a trap to catch the suspect, Maigret (or Simenon, typically playing with our expectations) sets another to catch the copycat.

I'd forgotten how great Maigret can be.   It must be twenty years since I read one.   I'm glad I read this.

Spaceways - Charles Eric Maine

I was reading Arthur C Clarke's Prelude to Space (reviewed below) in the 1953 paperback when I was struck by one of the ads in the back. Spaceways (never heard of it) was "originally a radio play, broadcast by the BBC in 1952 with immense success. Later it was made into the first British science-fiction film." As regular visitors must know by now, my doctorate is in radio drama and, as I say, I had never heard of Spaceways. As for movies, what about The Shape of Things to Come (1936)? That was science fiction, surely? It was certainly British (London Films). Anyway, I had to investigate further. Firstly I bought the book.

Not as good a cover as the Clarke paperbacks of the same era. The science is not as heavy as in Clarke, but ironically that results in it being closer to what actually happened - rockets taking off vertically in the middle of nowhere, rather than Clarke's fancy of horizontal runways. Maine, however, is a much better novelist than Clarke. His characters not only have inner lives, they have sex lives too, something the early Clarke would never countenance. In fact Spaceways is a genre hybrid, a noir-ish murder mystery based on the eternal triangle and set on a space research facility in the Nevada desert. Oh yes, I should have mentioned that. The pseudonymous Maine was British but this is an entirely American novel.


The other thing I should mention is that the novel is not directly based on the radio play. The radio play was turned into a Hammer movie, written by Maine, which he then turned into this book. I have looked up the credits for the radio broadcast, which seems to me to use the framing device of a court trial. It lasted 75 minutes, as did the film. The protagonist of the novel, Barry Conway of the Security Division of Special Services, is not in either the radio play or the movie. The movie seems to have a different plot to either the play or the novel. The central plot device, however, remains the same.


One of the key scientists is having a torrid affair with the wife of a senior colleague. The wife has cheated on the husband before, and he has responded violently. On the morning before the launch of the first space rocket (the novel is specifically set in 1955) the husband turns up for work with a black eye. When the rocket is safely heading for orbit, from which it will never return, it is discovered that both the wife and her lover are missing. The theory is that Hills, the cuckold, has killed them and stowed their bodies aboard the rocket. On that basis he stands trial, only to cause a sensation when he offers to prove his innocence by flying the second prototype rocket and bringing back the original. This is what happens - with an almighty twist, which I won't spoil for anyone who wants to seek out this curiosity for themselves - albeit I have as yet no idea whether it was remotely the same in either the play or the film.


And I do intend to take this further. The movie is easily available on DVD but the play will be harder to track down. In the meantime I have discovered that Maine did the same trick with other stories. Timeslip aka The Atomic Man is the movie version of his novel The Isotope Man, both of which I have already acquired.


As for the suggestion that Spaceways was the first British science fiction film, my interim theory is that whoever wrote the blurb in the back of the Pan was drawing a distinction between the post-Hiroshima technology-based fiction of Clarke, Maine and their contemporaries, and the purely speculative future fiction of Wells and Verne. Interestingly, directly underneath the blurb for Spaceways is an ad for The Time Machine and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (the latter a celebrated BBC radio drama of 1934, adapted by Laurence Gilliam). This describes H G Wells as, specifically, a "Pioneer of Space Fiction".


In the meantime, check out the long-forgotten Mr Maine. He really does merit rediscovery.

Earthlight - Arthur C Clarke

Two hundred years in the future (from 1955) Earth has colonised the planets of the Solar System. Generations of humankind have been born and lived off-Earth. The situation is not much different from that of the British Empire in 1939 - the subordinate states are too big, the dominant hub too small and too demanding. The Earth is considered to be withholding essential heavy metals from the Federated planets. Conflict is inevitable and imminent.


For this reason Bertram Sadler, accountant, is sent to the Moon to try and track down whoever is leaking secret information to the Federation. The Moon consists of Central City and peripheral specialised bases, like the Observatory Sadler is officially auditing. But the Observatory's work is hampered by unknown traffic. It turns out an unauthorised base is being built nearby. Is this the first act of war by the Federation?


It all sounds like the perfect plot for a sci fi thriller. But, this being Arthur C Clarke early in his career, there are no thrills. Indeed, we are lucky to get a plot. What Clarke is interested in is the science. Sixty years on, of course, the science is faintly risible. Men have colonised the solar system but are still reliant on teleprinters and analogue radio. Even television scarcely figures. The standout sections for me were the ones about light beams on the Moon and the limited effect of atomic weapons in space. I sincerely hope Arthur C was right on both counts.

The Hammersmith Maggot - William Mole

William Mole was the pseudonym of Bill Younger, Dennis Wheatley's stepson and wartime MI5 agent, working for Max Knight and involved with the internment of members of the Right Club.  Stricken with polio as a child, Younger's growth was stunted but he apparently made up in aggression what he lacked in physical force. A well-reviewed poet before the war, he took to writing novels in the forties and fifties, and seems to have completed five before dying young, in 1962, aged only 45.

The Hammersmith Maggot is from 1955, so more or less the middle of his fiction-writing career.  The hero, Casson, is a Mayfair wine merchant with the time and the money to pursue his interest in unconventional criminality, wherein he is aided by Strutt of the Yard.  The criminal in this case, the titular maggot, is far from ordinary.  He blackmails well-off citizens over something they haven't done but the public would believe them guilty of if the allegation ever became public.  Lockyer, the elderly banker who draws Casson into the case, is a confirmed bachelor who admits he has no interest in women, but he's not gay, although the blackmailer suggests he could be.  He pays up because, obviously, he can't prove otherwise.  Besides, the amount demanded is substantial but nothing he cannot easily afford.  It's as if the extortion has been tailor-made for Lockyer and the other victims who come to light.  The Maggot has another trick up his sleeve.  He promises his victims that the payment will be a one-off - he will not be back for more.  Thus far he has kept his promise.  The threat of a return or, if captured, the allegation getting into the public domain, keeps the victims quiet.

This fabulous Penguin greenback, with a tremendous cover illustration by Romek Marber, is clever, well-written, very old-fashioned and highly amusing.  It could so easily have been formulaic but is kept on a higher level by Younger's gift for characterisation. I'm on the lookout for more.