COMMUNIST SLUMBER PARTY

Chinese espionage cabal sleeps with one spy open.

A while back, when we read Holly Roth’s 1954 Cold War novel The Shocking Secret, we said we suspected she’d done better work. Well, we found it. 1955’s The Sleeper is also an anti-communist thriller, but Roth course-corrected after her middling previous effort by making the main communist agent in this story intellectually and tactically brilliant. That’s been a regular complaint of ours, that mid-century writers cheat by making Cold War antagonists too hapless to realistically worry about. They rarely took the easy way out with other types of villains, so we wonder if, considering the anti-commie hysteria of the period, they were afraid of seeming sympathetic. But The Sleeper features an agent who’s smart, charming, and determined to a level nobody else in the story can match.

This spy, an all-American boy type, is introduced to the reader while already in jail. A journalist named Robert Kendall has interviewed him for a profile in a prestigious magazine, but comes to believe—as does the U.S. government—that messages to other spies have been seeded into the article. Quaint ideas about press freedom prevent the Feds from killing the piece. And there’s no proof anyway. Nobody can figure out the embedded message, but time is a factor—the piece is to be published in a few weeks. Drawn into the turbulence is an acquaintance of the jailed spy, Marta Wentwirth. Is she in on the plot? Maybe, but Kendall likes the cut of her jib, and decides she isn’t. How else can he get laid?

As in The Shocking Secret, the protagonist here is just a regular guy and journalist, and Roth is again interested in the Chinese more than the Russians, which is no surprise with the Korean War just ended. She smartly kept her chapters short, and the overall narrative compact. The gimmick of a sleeper agent being able to carefully load an interview with crucial information may seem unlikely, but it ends up believable the way Roth works it. We have a feeling the concept was used previously. If not, it was certainly used afterward. It’s too good not to recycle. We’ll probably try Roth once again at some point. As Cold War focused authors go, this one makes clear that she’s no sleeper.

Pyramid Books, Holly Roth, cover art, literature, communism

Vintage Pulp

August 4 2023

SURPRISE PENDING

She could tell them the secret but it would be a bad Korea move.

Holly Roth, who also wrote as P.J. Merrill and K.G. Ballard, originally published The Shocking Secret as The Content Assignment in 1954. This Dell edition came in 1955 with William Rose cover art. The story, set beginning in 1948, deals with John Terrant, a British reporter in Berlin whose American love Ellen Content is a CIA agent who disappears during a mission. Nearly two years later her name turns up in a newspaper story that says she’s a dancer in New York City. So Terrant crosses the pond to track her down but ends up in the middle of the Cold War, with bad commies and the whole nine.

Roth infuses her tale with an Englishman in New York fish-out-of-water quality, which is occasionally amusing and adds interest, but in the end the entire enterprise comes across lightweight—which is to say it lacks menace and the proper amount of intellectual heft needed for a book about the political/ideological clash of the era. And another issue, though an admittedly nit-picky one, is that the surprise of the title, which we mostly gave away in our subhead, isn’t all that shocking. Dell never should have renamed the book.

Moving on to Roth herself, she’s one of those writers whose life had an eerie parallel with her fiction. Her 1962 novel Too Many Doctors is about a woman who falls off a ship and loses her memory. In 1964 Roth disappeared from her husband’s yacht one stormy night off the coast of Morocco and was never seen again. Officially, her death was an accident. If we get ambitious maybe we’ll read Too Many Doctors. While we can’t recommend The Shocking Secret, we wouldn’t be surprised if several of her other books are better. Her reputation would seem to suggest it.

England, Germany, Morocco, Berlin, New York City, Dell Publications, Holly Roth, P.J. Merrill, K.G. Ballard, William Rose, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

November 6

1935—Parker Brothers Buys Monopoly

The board game company Parker Brothers acquires the forerunner patents for Monopoly from Elizabeth Magie, who had designed the game (originally called The Landlord’s Game) to demonstrate the economic ill effects of land monopolism and the use of land value tax as a remedy for them. Parker Brothers quickly turns Monopoly into the biggest selling board game in America.

November 6

1991—Gene Tierney Passes Away

American actress Gene Tierney, one of the great beauties in Hollywood history and star of the seminal film noir Laura, dies in Houston, Texas of emphysema. Tierney had begun smoking while young as a way to help lower her high voice, and was hooked on cigarettes the rest of her life.

November 5

1937—Hitler Reveals His Plans for Lebensraum

Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting with Nazi officials and states his intention to acquire “lebensraum,” or living space for Germany. An old German concept that dated from 1901, Hitler had written of it in Mein Kampf, and now possessed the power to implement it. Basically the idea, as Hitler saw it, was for the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Russian and other Slavic populations to the east, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate those lands with a Germanic upper class.

November 5

1991—Fred MacMurray Dies

American actor Fred MacMurray dies of pneumonia related to leukemia. While most remember him as a television actor, earlier in his career he starred in 1944’s Double Indemnity, one of the greatest films noir ever made.

November 4

1955—Cy Young Dies

American baseball player Cy Young, who had amassed 511 wins pitching for five different teams from 1890 to 1911, dies at the age of 88. Today Major League Baseball’s yearly award given to the best pitcher of each season is named after Young.

November 4

1970—Feral Child Found in Los Angeles

A thirteen year-old child who had been kept locked in a room for her entire life is found in the Los Angeles house of her parents. The child, named Genie, could only speak twenty words and was not able even to walk normally because she had spent her life strapped to a potty chair during the day and bound in a sleeping bag at night. Genie ended up in a series of foster homes and was given language training but after years of effort by various benefactors never reached a point where she could interact normally in society.