THE DELICATE APE
DOROTHY B. HUGHES
Open Road Media
$9.99 ebook editions, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The Terror of the Hunted
Piers Hunt was followed—by a rat-faced little man, by a detective named Cassidy, and by a dark, soundless shadow, felt rather than seen. But worse than the fear of his followers was Hunt's terror of a beautiful and passionate girl. With his emotions he loved her violently; with his mind he hated her. She was evil—a seductive force in evil hands. They all wanted what he had: information which no one but himself must know for a week. On Sunday he would tell it, not to a chosen few, but to the entire world.
This story by Dorothy B. Hughes, author of The Fallen Sparrow and Dread Journey, is more than just a whirlwind tale of spies and intrigue. As Will Cuppy said, "Miss Hughes offers an exciting story wrapped in an idea that is certainly on the side of the angels. Complete with murder, valuable papers, problems to solve, and not one scrap of nonsense. A necessity for Grade-A addicts."
(The above is the back-cover copy of the 1947 Pocket Books mmpb edition that belonged to my father. I think it's better than the modern editions' efforts, so here it is.)
My Review: Look at her Wikipedia entry linked above...you'd never know how much of a Thing she was back in the day. She was Miss Hughes by the "courtesy" of the times; she had three children with her husband, Lewis Allan Hughes, Junior. Her burst of creativity came in the 1940s, when twelve of her fifteen novels appeared. The last was published in 1963, The Expendable Man; it had been eleven years since the novel before it appeared and none would follow. (A far better condensation of Author Hughes's affect and effect is in the LA Review of Books, not paywalled.)
Hughes was, however, astonishingly prolific as a writer of criticism (winning an Edgar for it in 1951); she was awarded a Grand Mastership by the Mystery Writers of America in 1983 for her decades of critical work, and, I believe, in no small part for her 1978 biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. It remains my very favorite biography—it's really what we'd call today "a life" in that it's not full of footnotable "and on Wednesday the nineteenth came a surprise" stuff—of a mystery writer. It's got the insider-thriller-writer knowingness and the loving appreciation of a fan, coupled with a woman (who rejected the label "feminist" her entire life) who sees what he's doing there's tolerant tutting.
I decided that this book, an oddity in Author Hughes's career, needed a review. Most of Author Hughes's most popular works feature a woman lead. Here, not for the first time, she writes from a man's point of view, though honestly Piers doesn't feel like a man so much as a machine-part, a character without that much character. It's no one's favorite of her works, poor thing, though possibly for that reason. She wrote it in 1942-1943, set it in 1955, and made a lot of assumptions about how the post-war world would work. They are all completely wrong.That should surprise no one. After all, SF writers get *gleefully* bashed and pointed at when they get things wrong, so why exempt Author Hughes?
In a weird way, this 1947 printing is a near-future story about the US Secretary of Peace and his dealings with an about-to-be de-occupied Germany. And that, we're let in on, is a Very Bad Idea...one that even gets people killed for so much as conceptualizing. If there is to be a change in Germany's occupation, you see, it must be one that allows Germany to rise again or it will cause more wars! (If they're released from under the occupation, of course, there will be more wars...so, one might wonder, what the hell's the difference?)
Piers is in possession of evidence that will somehow derail the whole peace convocation. It isn't like anyone doesn't know he has it...the femme fatale Morgen, the love of Piers's life, is sent to violate her marriage vows to collect the information from him on her husband the German General's certainty that he is still besotted...but Piers isn't having it. The Germans must be kept down! Like the Chinese are keeping those losers the Japanese in their place!
See? She really got everything seriously wrong here.
But what she didn't get wrong is the pacing of the chases. As Piers dodges bullets and babes, as he does every-damn-thing in his power to prevent a murderous cabal of powerful profiteers from returning this peaceful 1955 to the charnel house-filling state of perma-war Author Hughes cynically posits they want, she never once takes her foot off the gas pedal. In under two hundred pages, she delivers a set-piece of an ending that wraps the speeding car of story around the lamp-post of inevitability.
It's a weirdo, a little misshapen bump in the road of her career. I think it's all the more fun for that. I also think that the pleasures of reading it are sharpened if one deals with it as alternate history of World War II's ending.
Don't be fooled by Dorothy B. Hughes's factually unsupported claims for her fictional 1955...she saw what was coming. She wasn't a fan of the Germans. She wasn't fooled by the industrialists' patriotic mouthings. She was limpidly clear about what a raw deal ordinary people will always get, especially when they're standing up to be counted for the Right Thing to be done (read The Expendable Man!!).
And she wrapped it all in clear, clean prose that ages like single-malt whisky.
This seems like an interesting one -- and one I'd never heard of. I always feel a bit sorry for such topical works (those in the super near future about a specific topic) as it's easy to ignore them on the basis that what she speculated about didn't play out.
ReplyDeleteDoes she address anything about the impact of the Holocaust in the "about-to-be-occupied" Germany?
It's all the more shocking because she wasn't at all a spec-fic writer, which is another reason it fell between the stools.
DeleteShe wrote it in 1944, and the Final Solution wasn't known about by the public yet. So basically this book was outdated within months! Like "A Rose for Ecclesiastes." its primary interest now is in its actual story...in this case, one man against the system who pays the ultimate price.
One close-to-accurate prediction she made was the de-occupation of Germany in 1955...actually happened late in 1954.
I don't think that is correct. By 1942 Americans knew about the Final Solution.
Delete"The United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and nine Allied governments released a “Declaration on Atrocities” on December 17, 1942. This declaration condemned the “bloody cruelties” and “cold-blooded extermination” of Europe’s Jews and vowed that the Allies would punish war criminals after the fighting stopped. It made no promise to initiate rescue efforts."
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-united-states-and-the-holocaust-1942-45?parent=en%2F3486
That does not mean that all Americans believed it.
So I find her omission considering she's covering the post-War environment notable...
DeleteNewspapers in the US were reporting it earlier than the Declaration I mentioned in 1942 as well: "On November 25, 1942, many American newspapers published reports that 2 million Jews already had been murdered."
DeleteHistory tells it one way; the fact is that my parents, not ill-informed, were *unaware* of the news reports. Just because something is said doesn't mean it's heeded, particularly in the middle of a war.
DeleteAnd then, as a totally separate issue, comes the "do you believe this happened?" behavior...my Bavarian Catholic grandfather said all my life, "where would they have found that many Jews?" He insisted that it was the numbers that were lies, not the actions.
Not everyone got the memo that early, is the short version; then they started fighting over its truth and accuracy.