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Charles Hood #5
The Man Above Suspicion
Charles Hood, the toughest of tough agents, is given a formidable assignment... it is to find out what is going on at St Kilda's, the independent island in the Windwards. Sinister things happen to people who get inquisitive about the place. Sinister things happen to Hood too... They also involve a number of girls who seem to be always undressing whenever Hood is around...
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 22, 2021
I can best describe my feelings towards Charles Hood’s fifth escapade, The Man Above Suspicion, as ambivalent. First off, I must say it has a brilliant cover. Then you open the book. All the ingredients for the recipe of a great espionage adventure are present: intrigue, action, seductive women, powerful villains, beautiful locations, wicked henchmen, boisterous set-pieces, a world threatening plot. And yet, and yet…
I can’t quite put my finger on the problem; yet there most definitely is a problem. James Mayo has constructed a novel essentially of many parts. He kicks off with the strange disappearance of Professor Dunlop and the equally strange treatment of his daughter by a series of innocent bystanders, who, we are led to believe at this point are in on the conspiracy. Mayo then drops this line of enquiry completely and introduces us to Henry Belgeorge, philanthropic businessman extraordinaire, a man who Charles Hood has been ingratiating himself with for the past few months because the Circle reckon he’s up to no good.
Apparently it’s something to do with oil and the island of St Kilda. Only now Hood is suddenly chasing another industrialist, the mysterious Morrell, who appears to have kidnapped the beautiful Kim McClaine for primitive amorous reasons. It isn’t clear why Morrell has bought this little Caribbean enclave, but isn’t for oil exploration; the Circle know there’s none there. As Hood goes undercover, using his rudimentary pilot skills to fly sorties between St Kilda and Guadalupe, he learns there is more to the exotic island than meets the eye.
The band of assorted hoodlums who occupy Morrell’s Veruna Sands estate are straight out of stranger-than-fiction. Hood takes a dislike to them all. He does a couple of ill-advised recces and discovers a strange disused zoo and an even odder clapboard mansion where he eventually rediscovers Kim, naked and afraid. No, I couldn’t figure it out either. To be honest, I began to lose interest in the story at this point because I had no idea why or what Hood was supposed to be doing. I don’t think the writer did either.
The novel hangs together by the merest of threads. It’s essentially a series of short vignettes, each on their own fairly interesting, but together they can’t seem to function. There’s a roller-disco interlude in Guadalupe [you have to read it to get it], a beach hut seduction of the beautiful Terry Windmiller, a fight with a bullwhip expert, a madcap escape. Each scene is borderline excellent, but each feels separate to what surrounds it because there’s no commonality, so tension is too easily dissipated and requires rebuilding with each vignette. It reads as if James Mayo created the scenarios purely for his own entertainment with no direction for a coherent narrative.
This piece-meal building of the story continues when Hood decamps to France, following up on information he’s garnered that Morrell has a secret chemical manufacturing plant there. After a car and a foot chase and a few nights creeping around an old Chateau, Hood is bundled off the Austria, meets Belgeorge, meets Morrell, meets a man wrapped in bandages, meets a dismembered yet still functional brain – yes, he really does – escapes with the help of revenge obsessed Terry Windmiller and eventually, with Kim at his side, winds up in a huntsman’s cottage like Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
It’s all well and good packing in the action chapter by chapter, but I wasn’t learning anything about the dastardly plot or the group of political fascists, The Movement, who orchestrate it along with their rich bastard backers, The Brothers. It was all hearsay. Hood never found incorruptible evidence, he never confronted anyone, the villain never properly explained his schemes – Belgeoge demonstrated it, but this resulted in a man having his head torn off by a tiger, so the ruse was pretty much all set to fail. Latterly Hood spent a good deal of time evading strong men at an Austrian schloss while dodging them from room to room. It was almost like a bedroom farce. I got really bored.
I at least had some gratification come the climatic couple of chapters, for here Hood encounters the Hammer Horror-like ‘mummy man’ on a train. It’s not explained how the henchman got there, but a vicious fight breaks out. It’s end is suitably gruesome. We then have a few pages of epilogue where everyone converges on the National Opera House, Covent Garden, and the whole affair is conveniently sorted by a suicide and the vengeful Terry Windmiller. I didn’t believe it for a page. I was also once again reminded of The Thirty-Nine Steps. I felt cheated.
Perhaps most disconcerting is Mayo’s prose. He does himself no favours by neglecting his powers of description, which are normally very good. I had real difficulty visualising everything in this novel, from hotel rooms to zoo enclosures, chateau to schloss, airfields to theatres, everywhere is a mess of adverbs and adjectives, with no point of order. He’s chosen locations so complicated to explain a reader can’t possibly interpret the action with any pace. To have to constantly reread sections of a book to understand what is happening is a poor show on any author’s part.
After the mishit of Sergeant Death, I should be pleased that Charles Hood is back centre stage of his adventures, but it doesn’t feel like a reward. The Man Above Suspicion is a slapdash, quick affair. I reckon Mayo wrote it because he was told to, not because he wanted to. A bit like this review, which isn’t my best effort either. Duress must be infectious.
I can’t quite put my finger on the problem; yet there most definitely is a problem. James Mayo has constructed a novel essentially of many parts. He kicks off with the strange disappearance of Professor Dunlop and the equally strange treatment of his daughter by a series of innocent bystanders, who, we are led to believe at this point are in on the conspiracy. Mayo then drops this line of enquiry completely and introduces us to Henry Belgeorge, philanthropic businessman extraordinaire, a man who Charles Hood has been ingratiating himself with for the past few months because the Circle reckon he’s up to no good.
Apparently it’s something to do with oil and the island of St Kilda. Only now Hood is suddenly chasing another industrialist, the mysterious Morrell, who appears to have kidnapped the beautiful Kim McClaine for primitive amorous reasons. It isn’t clear why Morrell has bought this little Caribbean enclave, but isn’t for oil exploration; the Circle know there’s none there. As Hood goes undercover, using his rudimentary pilot skills to fly sorties between St Kilda and Guadalupe, he learns there is more to the exotic island than meets the eye.
The band of assorted hoodlums who occupy Morrell’s Veruna Sands estate are straight out of stranger-than-fiction. Hood takes a dislike to them all. He does a couple of ill-advised recces and discovers a strange disused zoo and an even odder clapboard mansion where he eventually rediscovers Kim, naked and afraid. No, I couldn’t figure it out either. To be honest, I began to lose interest in the story at this point because I had no idea why or what Hood was supposed to be doing. I don’t think the writer did either.
The novel hangs together by the merest of threads. It’s essentially a series of short vignettes, each on their own fairly interesting, but together they can’t seem to function. There’s a roller-disco interlude in Guadalupe [you have to read it to get it], a beach hut seduction of the beautiful Terry Windmiller, a fight with a bullwhip expert, a madcap escape. Each scene is borderline excellent, but each feels separate to what surrounds it because there’s no commonality, so tension is too easily dissipated and requires rebuilding with each vignette. It reads as if James Mayo created the scenarios purely for his own entertainment with no direction for a coherent narrative.
This piece-meal building of the story continues when Hood decamps to France, following up on information he’s garnered that Morrell has a secret chemical manufacturing plant there. After a car and a foot chase and a few nights creeping around an old Chateau, Hood is bundled off the Austria, meets Belgeorge, meets Morrell, meets a man wrapped in bandages, meets a dismembered yet still functional brain – yes, he really does – escapes with the help of revenge obsessed Terry Windmiller and eventually, with Kim at his side, winds up in a huntsman’s cottage like Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
It’s all well and good packing in the action chapter by chapter, but I wasn’t learning anything about the dastardly plot or the group of political fascists, The Movement, who orchestrate it along with their rich bastard backers, The Brothers. It was all hearsay. Hood never found incorruptible evidence, he never confronted anyone, the villain never properly explained his schemes – Belgeoge demonstrated it, but this resulted in a man having his head torn off by a tiger, so the ruse was pretty much all set to fail. Latterly Hood spent a good deal of time evading strong men at an Austrian schloss while dodging them from room to room. It was almost like a bedroom farce. I got really bored.
I at least had some gratification come the climatic couple of chapters, for here Hood encounters the Hammer Horror-like ‘mummy man’ on a train. It’s not explained how the henchman got there, but a vicious fight breaks out. It’s end is suitably gruesome. We then have a few pages of epilogue where everyone converges on the National Opera House, Covent Garden, and the whole affair is conveniently sorted by a suicide and the vengeful Terry Windmiller. I didn’t believe it for a page. I was also once again reminded of The Thirty-Nine Steps. I felt cheated.
Perhaps most disconcerting is Mayo’s prose. He does himself no favours by neglecting his powers of description, which are normally very good. I had real difficulty visualising everything in this novel, from hotel rooms to zoo enclosures, chateau to schloss, airfields to theatres, everywhere is a mess of adverbs and adjectives, with no point of order. He’s chosen locations so complicated to explain a reader can’t possibly interpret the action with any pace. To have to constantly reread sections of a book to understand what is happening is a poor show on any author’s part.
After the mishit of Sergeant Death, I should be pleased that Charles Hood is back centre stage of his adventures, but it doesn’t feel like a reward. The Man Above Suspicion is a slapdash, quick affair. I reckon Mayo wrote it because he was told to, not because he wanted to. A bit like this review, which isn’t my best effort either. Duress must be infectious.
August 16, 2014
Pretty boring book about the adventures of a James Bond wannabe.
More here:
http://inkquilletc.blogspot.in/2014/0...
More here:
http://inkquilletc.blogspot.in/2014/0...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews