Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 4: the Richard Stark and Parker of Spy Fiction

(NB: This post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

For Part 1, go here; for Part 2, go here; for Part 3, go here.
 
Much as Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake had done in his eighth Parker novel, The Handle (Pocket Books, 1966), with the third Earl Drake thriller, Operation Fireball (1969), Dan J. Marlowe turned his narrator-protagonist from a violent career criminal into a reluctant operative for the US government ("The man with nobody's face", as Drake became known, due to the plastic surgery he'd undergone in his second outing, One Endless Hour). But unlike Parker, for Earl Drake this vocational change was to become effectively permanent, and much of the remainder of his literary career (the twelfth and final Drake novel, Operation Counterpunch, was published in 1976) would be directed by his new "handler", Treasury Agent Karl Erikson.

Whether this switch to spy fiction was at the behest of Marlowe's publisher, Gold Medal, as Josef Hoffman (among other Marlowe commentators) suggests (see the Mystery*File article "Playing with Fire"), or the influence of Marlowe's friend – and by-this-point collaborator – the convicted criminal Al Nussbaum, or indeed simply a literary choice, I'm not in a position to determine for certain. Hoffman reasons in his piece that Gold Medal pushed Marlowe in the direction of the espionage thriller because the publisher was already home to another series starring an unrepentant criminal – the aforementioned Parker, whose initial outing, The Hunter, was published in the same year (1962) as the debut Earl Drake novel, The Name of the Game is Death – and consequently Gold Medal felt the market couldn't support a similar series.

If true, that strikes me as being short-sighted on the publisher's part. After all, reportedly Gold Medal had been eager for a sequel to The Name of the Game is Death, so for them to later insist Marlowe turn the series into an espionage one seems counterintuitive. Furthermore, it's worth noting that from 1969 to 1976 Dan Marlowe would write Earl Drake adventures almost exclusively, forsaking completely the standalone crime works he'd previously penned as well. If the considerations for turning the Earl Drake series into a spy series rather than a crime one were entirely commercial, as Hoffman maintains, why didn't Marlowe write other books besides – books he was more interested in writing?

I wonder how much of this is a selective rewriting of history on the part of modern day aficionados of mid-twentieth century hard-boiled crime fiction. By and large the Drake spy thrillers are dismissed out of hand by fans who – understandably – prize the coruscating hard-boiled crime works of the 1950s and '60s above their corresponding spy confections. But to have lasted seven years and ten books as a spy series (the series as a whole having lasted fourteen years, although there was a considerable gap between The Name of the Game is Death and One Endless Hour), Marlowe's post-One Endless Hour novels must have had something going for them – indeed, the series may only have been curtailed because Marlowe suffered a suspected stroke in 1977. And even if sales alone aren't a marker of quality, then surely the fact that the only one of Marlowe's around fifty novels and novellas (after an eight-year gap he knocked out twenty younger reader novellas from 1983 to his death in 1986) to win an Edgar Allan Poe Award was one of his Earl Drake spy thrillers (Flashpoint, 1970, alias Operation Flashpoint, the fourth book in the series, which won the Best Paperback Original prize).

For me, this prejudice against the Drake spy novels is typified by the attitude towards the debut Drake outing, The Name of the Game is Death (1962). Widely – and justifiably – hailed as Dan J. Marlowe's towering achievement, the novel was later rewritten – presumably by Marlowe himself, although it's claimed at the insistence of Gold Medal – for a 1972 revised edition (published as Operation Overkill in the UK in 1973) – one revision being the insertion of the name "Earl Drake" as one of the narrator's many aliases. The critical consensus these days is that the original is the superior beast, legend having it that the novel was drastically toned down for its '72 reissue, so as to make Drake more palatable now that he was an "heroic" secret agent. In fact that doesn't appear to be the case at all. As this Mystery*File post demonstrates, most of the revisions are editorial in nature – often to the benefit of the text – the exceptions being two subtle alterations to do with Drake's sexuality. Drake is just as vicious and murderous in the revised edition, so to claim that he and the book were "toned down" is disingenuous.

The inference, of course, is that the original work is as Marlowe intended it – "authenticity" being the trait prized above all others nowadays – and that both the later version and by extension the Drake spy works were essentially written for a paycheck. But historically much great art has been created on commission, and Marlowe, like all professional writers, undoubtedly wrote for money as much as anything – and that's probably as true of The Name of the Game is Death as it is of the later Drake novels. Like his contemporaries in the hard-boiled field – Jim Thompson, Westlake, Peter Rabe – Marlowe wrote fast and frequently – the only way to make a living wage from paperback crime fiction. Based on the available evidence, I'm leery of ascribing motives to the choices Marlowe made: who's to say how hard he fought to stop The Name of the Game is Death being rewritten – if indeed he fought at all. Perhaps the revised version is as Marlowe intended, not the original. (If anyone can offer any informed insights here, I'd welcome your thoughts.)

Ultimately, what you make of the Drake spy books rests on which side of the genre fence you find yourself – hard-boiled crime fan or international espionage freak. (Even more ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, it's entirely likely that, other than me and possibly Bill Crider, nobody gives a damn whether the Drake spy novels are better or worse than the Drake crime novels anyway, so this whole post may well have been a complete waste of everyone's time.) Personally, I've plenty of time for both, and I'm not alone: as the indispensable Spy Guys & Gals site points out, there's much to enjoy with the Drake spy novels, Drake's unusual origin as a lawless killer lending them an added frisson. And for book collectors, there's plenty to investigate, too, as we'll discover in the final post in this run...

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 3: Operation Fireball; from Crime Thrillers to Spy Thrillers

(NB: This post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

For Part 1, go here; for Part 2, go here.

The same year as the sophomore Earl Drake adventure, One Endless Hour, appeared, the third Drake outing also hit. And it was here that the template for the remainder of the series began to be established...

Published in paperback by Gold Medal in the States in 1969 (and by Coronet in the UK in 1974... although there was actually a British hardback edition published ahead of that; more on that in the final post in this series), Operation Fireball marked something of a departure for both Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake. Up to this point, Marlowe had been writing hard-boiled crime fiction – not just the two previous Drake novels, but many other standalone crime works besides (see Josef Hoffman's Mystery*File article "Playing with Fire"). But with Operation Fireball, the author changed direction, pitching his amoral career criminal antihero into what is essentially a spy thriller.

Once again picking up almost directly after the preceding novel – which ended with Drake out of pocket following another heist-gone-wrong and wondering whether he should look up his Amazonian, flame-haired flame from The Name of the Game is Death, Hazel Andrews – Operation Fireball opens with Drake driving towards Ely, Nevada, where Hazel is looking after her father's ranch. No sooner has he arrived and reacquainted himself with Hazel's ample delights, however, than Hazel's dad gets into a spot of bother with the local unruly teens. Being a dab hand with a firearm, Drake elects to settle the matter the old-fashioned way: he shoots them.

Contrary to appearances, this encounter with the teenagers is the first sign of a softening of Drake's character, although in truth it's a matter of degrees: the feral youths wind up with severe gunshot wounds but they do at least escape with their lives. Even so, Drake thinks it best if he lights out, and heads back to San Diego, where he spots a message to one of his aliases on a noticeboard in one of his old haunts, requesting he call a number. The independently wealthy Hazel had offered to support Drake, but since he's not the kind of guy who'd ever be happy as a kept man he follows up the message, and soon he's involved in a scheme to retrieve a cool two million in cash from, of all places, Havana.

Drake's contact is a loose associate named Slater, but the real brains behind the operation is a man Drake doesn't know: Karl Erikson. Tall, statuesque and blond, the mysterious Erikson is compared to a viking more than once – a military type with useful links to his former profession. It's Erikson who manages to smuggle Drake, Slater and a third man, Chico Wilson, onto a US navy vessel and from there to Guantanamo and Cuba – a perilous journey that's one of the best bits of the book – and it's Erikson whose knowledge of Castro's Communist regime (portrayed here in a pitiless manner by an obviously – some might say justly – unsympathetic Marlowe) and whose familiarity with military equipment and skill with a weapon saves the day more than once.

Indeed, though Drake may be reunited with Hazel in Operation Fireball – she provides the financial backing that makes the scheme viable, and even lends a hand operating the radio back in Florida – there's actually another love story at the heart of the novel: that of Drake and Erikson. Drake's narration regarding "the big man" frequently verges on the fawning, while his descriptions of Erikson's confident handling of tense situations at times becomes so gushing that you half expect the orchestra to swell and the two of them to fall into a passionate clinch. In fact, so supremely able is Erikson that Drake is effectively sidelined for much of the action, reduced to the role of ineffectual onlooker while Erikson kicks Commie ass.

That said, Operation Fireball is still a gripping read, certainly pacier than One Endless Hour. And though the plot is more outlandish than those of its two predecessors, as an action/spy thriller it works very well. The incursion into a nightmarish Cuba is fraught with danger, and only a half-baked reveal from Hazel and Erikson at the end of the novel lets the side down. But both of Drake's "love interests" would soon return, as the espionage elements introduced in Operation Fireball increasingly came to characterize the series as a whole – a turn of events that not every fan of Dan J. Marlowe was terribly pleased about...

For Part 4, go here.

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 2: One Endless Hour (alias Operation Endless Hour)

(NB: This post also appears on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

For Part 1, go here.

Seven years after ruthless career criminal (and Parker parallel) Earl Drake made his debut in Dan J. Marlowe's violent, twisted The Name of the Game is Death (Gold Medal, 1962), Drake returned to print in a new full-length novel. Except now things were different for both Marlowe and Drake... and they were about to take a turn for the bizarre...

Dan J. Marlowe had continued to write in the wake of The Name of the Game is Death – indeed, for many, the years 1962–1969 marked the high point of his crime fiction writing career, encompassing standalone classics like Strongarm (1963), Four for the Money (1966) and The Vengeance Man (also 1966); see "Playing with Fire" and "The Gold Medal Corner" by Josef Hoffman and Bill Crider on the Mystery*File site. But Marlowe had also become friends with a real-life convicted criminal: Al Nussbaum. Nussbaum had read The Name of the Game is Death whilst on the run from the FBI following a string of bank robberies with his partner Bobby Wilcoxson, and was duly impressed; he wrote a number of letters to Marlowe (using the alias "Carl Fisher"), and once imprisoned (sentenced to forty years, he was paroled in the early 1970s), Nussbaum kept up his correspondence with Marlowe.

The result was an (unpublished, I believe, due to FBI objections) article titled "Anatomy of a Crime Wave", detailing Nussbaum's exploits. But what Nussbaum – and, it must be said, Marlowe's publisher, Gold Medal – really wanted to read was a sequel to The Name of the Game is Death. According to Josef Hoffman's Mystery*File piece, "Nussbaum suggested to Marlowe that he go through the novel for him, looking out for the elements which constituted the figure of the hero, and for ways in which the story might be continued. Nussbaum then produced an outline of the character for the series, gave him a name, and drew up a 60-page concept for the sequel." The name Nussbaum came up with was Earl Drake. (Presumably this means the couple of mentions of the Earl Drake alias in later editions of The Name of the Game is Death/Operation Overkill must have been inserted as part of the revisions and edits the novel underwent – see previous post.)

Marlowe wrote the sequel "in three weeks flat", and Earl Drake was reborn in One Endless Hour (1969, later retitled Operation Endless Hour). When we left Drake in The Name of the Game is Death, he'd been burned to a crisp in a car-related conflagration after a shootout with the cops and landed up in prison hospital, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, in terrible pain but utterly unrepentant. Handily, One Endless Hour recaps these final moments (again, slightly rewritten), and then picks up the story with Drake still on the prison ward, beginning to plan a breakout. This first part of the novel is perhaps the best, and plays like a fucked-up One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (as in, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel), with Drake taking the role of Chief Bromden, narrating events while everyone on the ward believes him to be a vegetable

Enlisting the aid of the plastic surgeon who reconstructs his ruined face (shades of Richard Stark's Parker in The Man with the Getaway Face there, although the surgeon is unable to reconstitute Drake's hair; henceforth he has to wear a wig), Drake eventually effects his escape (leaving behind one corpse, naturally) and goes looking for the money he never managed to recover in the first book. The cash is long gone, however – although Drake does get to tie up one loose end – and so, short on funds, Drake seeks out Robert "the Schemer" Frenz, an underworld figure who provides ready-to-go plans for bank jobs "for a fee or a percentage of the gross". The resultant robbery (or rather, robberies) takes up the remainder of the book, providing a fair bit of excitement and climaxing, in a spooky echo of the previous book's finale, in a flaming car crash (Josef Hoffman's Mystery*File article draws attention to the repeated reappearance of fiery motifs in the Earl Drake series).

That One Endless Hour isn't quite the equal of The Name of the Game is Death perhaps won't come as a huge surprise – few books by any crime novelist scale those lofty heights – but it's still an effective crime thriller, and Drake is as compelling – and repulsive – a creation as ever (although not quite as murderous here). In "the Schemer" one can detect Marlowe and Nussbaum trying out a possible series character, setting up potential sequels... but in fact after this point the series would start to diverge from the blueprint it had established, gradually leaving crime fiction behind and veering into a whole other genre...

For Part 3, go here.

Dan J. Marlowe and Earl Drake, 1: The Name of the Game is Death (alias Operation Overkill)

(NB: This post also appears – with comments – on The Violent World of Parker blog.)

In 1962, one of America's leading genre publishers issued a paperback original by an author who'd only been a novelist a few years, but already had a handful of successful, critically praised crime works under his belt. Starring a violent career criminal who operates under various aliases and is respected in the underworld for his ability to plan and take down dangerous scores, the book was stunning: gripping, edgy, original. The author had no intention of penning a sequel to the novel – indeed, his leading man almost dies at the end of the story – but after some encouragement from his publisher he elected to extend his memorable antihero's literary life into a series. Armed with a new face following plastic surgery, the cunning and lethal criminal would go on to execute a number of spectacular heists (some of them going spectacularly awry), find himself pitted against mobsters and gangsters, and even wind up working for the US government.

So far, so familiar, at least to fans of Donald E. Westlake's pseudonymous Richard Stark/Parker novels. Except it's not Stark we're talking about here, or Parker, or The Hunter/Point Blank; it's Dan J. Marlowe, Earl Drake... and The Name of the Game is Death.

Published in the States in the same year as The Hunter by Gold Medal – who would eventually pick up the rights to the Parkers after Pocket Books issued the initial eight – The Name of the Game is Death – later retitled Operation Overkill – was Dan James Marlowe's seventh novel (his debut, Doorway to Death, featuring hotel detective Johnny Killain, was issued by Avon in 1959), but the first to star Earl Drake. Drake isn't actually called Drake for the bulk of the novel (and may, in fact, never once be called that in the original printing of the book... I'll return to that shortly) – "Earl Drake" is merely a name he gives to an associate – but after this initial outing the Drake alias would stick.

Written in the first person from Drake's perspective (and here we encounter an essential difference to the third-person Parker series), The Name of the Game is Death begins in the midst of a robbery, as Drake, his partner in crime Bunny, and a young kid doing the driving hit a Phoenix bank. It's a blistering opening to the book: tense, chaotic, and climaxing in a bloody shootout in which the kid is killed ("The left side of his head was gone") and Drake is wounded. Drake and Bunny split up, Bunny taking most of the cash, with the intention of mailing Drake his share at the rate of a thousand dollars per week. But after three packages the deliveries stop, so Drake sets off to Hudson, Florida to find out where his share of the money is and what happened to Bunny.

If the blood-soaked opening of The Name of the Game is Death isn't indication enough, it quickly becomes even more apparent that Drake is a very bad man indeed. A hapless doctor who Drake forces to tend to his injury meets a sticky end, and Drake's trip to Hudson involves another murder and sets up more to come. Interspersed amongst all this are flashbacks to Drake's youth and young adulthood, via which we learn just how fucked up an individual he is: as a child he mercilessly tormented a fat kid who'd killed his cat and exacted a bruising vengeance on a corrupt cop, and by the time he was twenty-three he had already killed two men.

The picture of Drake that emerges isn't a million miles away from, say, Lou Ford in Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (1952) – and this is the key to The Name of the Game is Death. Much as Ford is the driving force behind The Killer Inside Me, compelling even as he repels, Earl Drake is the reason The Name of the Game is Death is so powerful (I made it my number one read of last year). Dan J. Marlowe isn't much of a stylist, but Drake is so fascinatingly monstrous it's hard not to root for him. And once Drake, now calling himself Chet Arnold, gets to Hudson (setting himself up as a tree surgeon while he investigates Bunny's disappearance), we learn he also has problems getting it up; his first attempt to make it with a buxom redheaded bar-owner named Hazel ends in flaccid disappointment.

Reportedly, the original edition of The Name of the Game is Death implicitly links Drake's eventual sexual success with Hazel to his taste for killing, although this inference is removed from later US and UK editions. And that's not the only change, either; I've only read the 1973 UK Coronet printing of the book (retitled Operation Overkill), but this post on the Mystery*File blog details some of the other alterations. Although the majority of these seem to be simple copy edits (and actually improvements in many cases), it may well be that the name "Earl Drake" was inserted at a later date, too.

As to why Marlowe made these changes to his text... I'll be exploring that over the course of the rest of this week's posts. Because it would be seven years before Chet Arnold/Earl Drake reappeared, by which point Dan J. Marlowe had become friendly with a real-life criminal who would help to shape the remainder of the series... and despite the allusions at the beginning of this post, that series would end up taking quite a different path to that of Richard Stark and Parker...

For Part 2, go here.

Game Without Rules (Hodder & Stoughton, 1968) by Michael Gilbert: Book Review, plus Mr Calder and Mr Behrens (Hodder, 1982)

Well look at that: Existential Ennui is five years old today. Now, before we get all carried away n'shit (shyeah, right), I should point out that 1 February is really only technically Existential Ennui's birthday. When I originally set this blog up in 2007, it was as a back-up to another, long-defunct blog; I didn't really begin posting properly on Existential Ennui until July 2009, and Existential Ennui didn't really become what it is today – i.e. a pompous, pretentious, prolix books blog – until the following year. So I'll forgo any celebrations, if you don't mind – not that anyone would be celebrating the anniversary of this utter waste of everybody's time anyway – and carry on regardless, with a spot more spy fiction.

And if you've been following my series of posts on spy fiction series, you might have noticed that the tendency has been to post an introductory essay to whichever spy series I'm blogging about at that juncture and follow that with one or more subsequent posts on various novels in that series. But not this time. This time, just for a change, I'm keeping it all in one single, solitary post – partly because, including Monday's post on Desmond Cory's Secret Ministry, by the end of the week I'll have posted three pretty lengthy reviews*, and I'm afraid I can only devote so much time and effort to this blog (and yes, astonishing as it may seem, a certain amount of time and effort does go into Existential Ennui); but also because this particular spy series doesn't consist of novels, but rather of short stories...

First published in hardback in the UK by Hodder & Stoughton in 1968 – the year following the 1967 US Harper and Row first edition – under an attractive dustjacket designed by the appealingly monikered Mick and Ging, Game Without Rules is a collection of short stories by crime and suspense writer (and lawyer) Michael Gilbert, starring two late-middle-aged British Intelligence operatives named Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens. The Hodder edition seen here is quite hard to come by these days – there are only a few on AbeBooks at the moment, and a presentable example will set you back at least £50–£100 – but in truth the book isn't common in any edition; it fell out of print years ago and at time of writing AbeBooks has just twenty copies in total.

Most of the stories in this collection originally appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the early- to mid-1960s – which is probably why, despite Gilbert being British, the American edition of the collection preceded the British one – and they are, quite simply, some of the best espionage tales I've ever read. Resting somewhere on the spy slide rule between John le Carré's Smiley stories and Anthony Price's David Audley novels – I wouldn't be at all surprised if Mr. Gilbert were an influence on Mr. Price in particular – the Calder and Behrens tales share with le Carré's work a healthy distrust of the establishment and with Price's an unshakable belief in the seriousness of the Soviet threat. But in common with both of those authors' novels they're also fine mysteries, with plausible scenarios, deft characterisation, believable dialogue, lashings of wry observation and wonderful pay-offs.

Both in their fifties, Samuel Behrens and Daniel Joseph Calder work for Mr. Fortescue, ostensibly the manager of the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank – where he is based – but in fact "the controller and paymaster of a bunch of middle-aged cutthroats known as the 'E' (or External) Branch of the Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee" ("The Spoilers"). Behrens and Calder live not far from each other in the Kentish North Downs, in a fictional village named Lamperdown; Behrens lives with his aunt in the The Old Rectory, and Calder lives with his loyal Persian deerhound, Rasselas, in a cottage on Hyde Hill overlooking the village. The two men do not reside close by each other by chance; we learn that they do so in order to watch over one another, their line of work frequently being a dangerous one.

Gilbert's Calder and Behrens stories are clipped and economical – of necessity, being short – but still manage to pack a hell of a lot in; at one point in "The Spoilers" nothing less than the survival of democracy in Britain seems to be at stake, while the European chase in "Cross-Over" could fuel an entire Bond novel. Indeed, reading one of these short tales is akin to reading a full novel, so complete is the experience.

As characters, Calder and Behrens (and Fortescue) can be ruthless, but they're also pragmatic; while in "The Road to Damascus" an enemy agent is summarily executed by Mr. Calder upon a signal from Mr. Behrens, in "On Slay Down" a target is ultimately made an offer rather than, well, offed. But Calder and Behrens are certainly devious – as are the plots in which they find themselves, full of twists and hidden agendas; "Prometheus Unbound", for example, which sees Mr. Calder losing his marbles and boasts a tense pursuit and stand-off in London's Latin Quarter, genuinely keeps you guessing right up till the very end. And in Mr. Calder's dog, Rasselas, the two men possess a secret weapon who helps resolve more than a few plot points – although Rasselas also provides perhaps the most affecting moment in the entire book.

Game Without Rules isn't the only collection of Calder and Behrens stories; a second collection, Mr Calder & Mr Behrens, followed the first one in 1982, again published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK. As with Game Without Rules, though, Mr Calder & Mr Behrens has slipped out of print, and there are currently fewer than twenty copies of any edition on AbeBooks (although they are more affordable than copies of the former). And of those (fewer than) twenty, only one is the Hodder first: an ex-library copy, possibly missing its jacket. My Hodder first came from the always-dependable Richard Sylvanus Williams of Winterton in North Lincs, but I've yet to read it. My learned friend Olman has, however, and you can find his review here, along with one or two other Michael Gilbert reviews (Olman's something of a Gilbert aficionado). There's also a good overview of all of Gilbert's work here, and a fine Guardian obituary by the late critic and crime novelist H. R. F. Keating here.

I'll be returning to Messrs Calder, Behrens and indeed Gilbert before too long – I have a couple of other Michael Gilbert books besides Mr Calder & Mr Behrens to blog about, one of which is a collection of short stories featuring a policeman who makes a brief guest appearance in Game Without Rules. Next, though: a spy series which began life as a crime series...

*UPDATE 2/2/12: At least, that was the plan. It now looks unlikely that I'll have time to finish that third review before the week's out, so it'll have to wait a while. Hey: that's blogging!

Secret Ministry (a.k.a The Nazi Assassins; Johnny Fedora #1) by Desmond Cory (1951 Frederick Muller First Edition): Book Review and a Lewes / South Downs Connection

For this final post (for now) on Desmond Cory's Johnny Fedora spy thrillers (see here, here, here, here and here for previous posts) we're heading right back to the beginning of the Fedora series, to the book that introduced both Cory and Fedora to the world of spy fiction:

Secret Ministry was first published in hardback in the UK by Frederick Muller in 1951, under a dustjacket designed by the great illustrator, graphic artist and children's author Val Biro. Now, all throughout these Desmond Cory posts I've been banging on about how scarce some of the Johnny Fedora novels are. In one sense, Secret Ministry isn't scarce at all – you can download it as an ebook and read it right now. But in another, more tangible sense, it's nigh on impossible to get hold of. At time of writing there's only one copy of any edition of the book under its original title available online – a Shakespeare Head Conpress Printing (whatever the hell that is) on AbeBooks – although there are also a couple of US Award paperback printings of the novel on AbeBooks under its later title of The Nazi Assassins. Of the Frederick Muller first edition, however, there is not a single, solitary trace.

So where did my copy of the Muller first come from? Not from AbeBooks, or Amazon, or eBay, or even an actual, physical, bricks-and-mortar bookshop. No, my copy came from South Africa, via an African eBay-like site called bidorbuy. See, having drawn a blank through the usual channels in my search for a first edition, I resorted to desperately Googling the book's title, and eventually came up with a listing for what looked like it could be the Muller first – the listing included an image of the cover and a date of 1951, but no further publishing info – on bidorbuy (of which I'd never heard before). Unfortunately, the listing had closed. Undeterred, I searched bidorbuy to see if the auction had been won or simply ended, and discovered the latter to be the case. Bidorbuy being an African website I had no idea whether foreign bidders could even participate on it, but I signed up anyway, and contacted the seller to see if they'd consider shipping overseas. Happily they said they would, and after some further communication, between us we managed to arrange shipping to the UK.

And I'm glad we did, for a number of reasons. In the first instance, for a collector such as myself, obviously it's quite exciting to own a copy of such an old, rare and important book – not only the debut Johnny Fedora adventure, but one of two novels Cory had published at the outset of his career in 1951 (the other being the first Lindsay Grey murder mystery, Begin, Murderer!) – and in its original dustwrapper, too (which is a little battered, but still bright). Then there's being able to compare and contrast the story to later Fedora outings to see how Cory and his leading man developed, which is certainly instructive. But for me, the book also boasts an added, more personal significance, one I had no inkling of before I read it.

Secret Ministry, you see, is set in large part in the Sussex South Downs, specifically the area around Brighton and Lewes, the latter being the town in which, for the past four years, I've lived and worked. Lewes is mentioned a couple of times in the book, and Brighton looms large as well, but much of the story centres on the fictional village of Cootsbridge – and when you consider that Desmond Cory was born in Lancing in Sussex, it's not a huge leap to conjecture that he probably based the made-up Cootsbridge on the real village of Cooksbridge, which lies about two miles north of Lewes. (By the way, Secret Ministry isn't the only spy novel set in the South Downs; Anthony Price's The Alamut Ambush is also partly set not far from Lewes.)

Johnny Fedora is sent to Sussex by Peter Holliday of the British Ministry of Information – the eponymous "Secret Ministry" – to investigate drug smuggling by Nazi agents intent in destabilizing Britain any way they can (in the early Fedora novels, Johnny is invariably pitted against Nazis rather than Soviets). At heart of the drug ring is the "Three of Clubs", a gambling den perched atop the Downs overlooking Brighton, where Johnny meets an intriguing mix of managers, barmen, cloakroom attendants, singers and wives, any one of whom could be involved in the nefarious Nazi plot. Before long, Johnny's assigned partner, Murray, winds up dead in a supposed car accident – and Murray is just the first in what will soon become a string of corpses...

I had a brief chat with spy novelist (and friend of Existential Ennui) Jeremy Duns about Secret Ministry on Twitter the other day. Jeremy had just finished the book and noted that it was "light but very enjoyable" and "almost a comic novel, strikingly different tonally from Casino Royale" (Ian Fleming's debut James Bond novel, published two years after Secret Ministry in 1953). And it's true that Secret Ministry is a breezy read – punctuated by bursts of violence, sure, but verging on the madcap in places. But what's especially interesting about it is the way its lightness stands in stark contrast to later novels in the series. Where, say, Undertow (1962, the twelfth Fedora novel) is characterised by longish, some would say ponderous sequences where seemingly little happens – although, it should be noted, those moments of languor do add colour and psychological depth to the proceedings – Secret Ministry consists largely of hectic dashes and quickfire smart alec dialogue.

Moreover, Johnny himself is a very different kind of man than in later books. It's fair to say that Johnny becomes more thoughtful, more introspective as the series progresses (and certainly a lot less gabby: he's quite the chatterbox in Secret Ministry). Here, though, he's a whirlwind of frantic activity, forever darting about, dispensing quips, charming the ladies, charging into action. To some extent a number of those traits are evident in later books, too; Fedora is never the most subtle of operatives, and he retains his roving eye. But in Secret Ministry he displays a young man's nonchalance and lust for life – perhaps reflecting Cory's own youth and joy at embarking on a writing career – with none of the world-weariness which would infect him down the line (not cynicism, though; never cynicism for Johnny).

Many of the differences between younger Johnny and older Johnny can, of course, be attributed to both Fedora and Cory growing up. But it isn't just Cory's chief protagonist who becomes more rounded (and, it must be said, more interesting) as the series continues: Cory's writing style changes as well. Self-evidently, Cory became a much better writer as time went on, more willing to let the narrative drift if he felt a few pages of reflection might be necessary, more assured in his handling of character, in digging beneath the surface of his cast. By contrast, there's not much in the way of "down time" in Secret Ministry, and a lot of character – surface character, anyway – is conveyed through dialogue and inflection – copious dropped consonants, colloquialisms, idioms, abbreviations, all rolled out in an attempt at mimicking the way different people actually speak. Which is all very well when it's a straightforward chocks-away airforce pilot (Murray), but slightly more intrusive when it's a young man of Spanish-Irish extraction who's spent some time in America (Fedora). Thankfully it's a habit Cory quickly rids himself of, and by the time of Undertow he can confidently convey nationalities and accents without recourse to verbal tics and idiosyncrasies.

All that said, the relative unsophistication of Secret Ministry shouldn't detract from it being a thoroughly likable spy thriller: exciting, agile, action-packed, and wearing its influences lightly but proudly; at one point Johnny directly references "Cheyney and Chandler and Chase" (and also, curiously, Jane Austen). On top of that, we learn Johnny's real name (Sean O'Neill Fedora), and there are hints of the darkness to come, notably in the novel's opening scenes, where Johnny and two fellow agents separately dispatch three Nazis. The remainder of the story may be quite jolly, but right from the off Cory makes no bones about the fact that an encounter with Johnny Fedora will, likely as not, lead to an unpleasant death.

I'll have more from Desmond Cory and Johnny Fedora in the future, but next on Existential Ennui, rather than a series of spy novels, I'll be reviewing a series of spy short stories, featuring a pair of older operatives who both live, not in the Sussex South Downs, but in the Kentish North Downs... in the village of Lamperdown, to be precise...