It’s been two years since our last Ace Double novel. We tend to avoid them because we have to read both before we can write about either. Well, we don’t have to. But that’s what we do. The one above is from 1954, and features Dan Cushman’s Tongking! on one side, and Charles Grayson’s Golden Temptress (originally 1948) on the other. We were frankly amazed that this was only fourteen dollars. It comes with cover art from Rafael DeSoto on both sides that—in the case of Tongking!—is so very, very good we didn’t much care about the fiction. But as it turns out we more or less got our money’s worth on that front too. We guess Ace paired the novels because both are set in the same areas of Southeast Asia. We prepared ourselves for exotic journeys.
Tongking! is about a soldier of fortune named Rocky Forbes who gets involved in a scheme to run fifty tons of “rifles, machine guns, ammunition, and grenades” into China to sell to guerrillas. He’s been chosen because he resembles the original architect of the caper, a man named Sachema, who’s gone missing, presumed fled. Turns out he’s unpresumed dead, but Forbes is in deep at that point and can’t back out. Anyway, he’s desperate for money to pay passage back to the U.S.
His main backer Fatto Kolski is six kinds of untrustworthy, so caution will be needed to avoid ending up presumed, unpresumed, or any other state except paid off and safely away. Since he spends the last third of the novel trapped on a ship steaming the contraband down the Gulf of Tonkin, survival will be no easy trick.
We’ve been around Asia with Cushman before in Jewel of the Java Sea, The Half-Caste, and Jungle She. He’s a solid tale-spinner in the colonial mode, by which we mean you have to endure some regressive social and political opinions, and a general assumption that Asians have no right to run their own lands as they wish. But for these types of adventures you can only do better with a few authors. What makes them work are Cushman’s rough and tumble leads, who barely manage to subsist in the tropics. Having done years of tropical time ourselves, and becoming acquainted with guys who got by playing poker, or working bar to bar, or giving tours, Cushman’s characters feel recognizably knockabout. Even so, Tonking! is a middling effort. All the books we named earlier are better.
Charles Grayson’s Golden Temptress tells of hard-edged hustler Jack Shepherd, who fetches up in Saigon with his majordomo Lem, and Peggy George, a stuttering beauty who is his partner in capers. Their scheme to smuggle whisky hasn’t worked out, and they’re short of cash. But in a city like Saigon something is bound to turn up. Shepherd’s
efforts initially revolve around Frenchwoman Alix Savery, who wants to leave her husband, a man who’s not only rich and powerful, but deadly. She can’t escape without help. This was an era when a French wife couldn’t legally have her own passport—only a page within her husband’s.
Shepherd then discovers that his whisky shipment had been intercepted and the contents of the crates replaced with—wait for it—“rifles, bullets, machine guns, and hand grenades.” Bad-a-bing! Tongking! and Golden Temptress are more similar all the time. Shepherd plans to get to the bottom of the hijacking, even as his dealings with Mrs. Savery grow more complicated, and her husband evolves from rival to kindred spirit to—gulp—possible friend. Their bromance will be either cemented or broken—we won’t say which—during a journey up Tonlé Sap, beyond Angkor Wat, to a lost temple in southeastern Thailand possibly filled with gold.
There are a number of good aspects to Golden Temptress. The atmosphere of Vietnam is well rendered. About a third of the way through there’s a very effective safari sequence with a good fistfight. The Thailand temple subplot, which comes a little later, is engrossing. In general, the journeys and sojourns in nature lift the narrative whenever dullness threatens. On the other side of the ledger, Grayson’s tough guy hero often veers into unlikable obnoxiousness, though it’s by authorial design. Still, he makes some hilariously rude generalizations about various brands of people. Example: For a Frenchwomen her legs were magnificent. Well, for a colonialist author Grayson is not magnificent, but he’s decent. We’d read him again.
