Michael Avallone (1924–1999)

Ed Noon is a typical pulp era private eye operating out of an office so small he called it the mouse auditorium. In later novels in the series, he actually moves to a more normal sized office and hires a secretary, Melissa. But he's still the same wisecracking Joe. In still later novels in
the series, he becomes a super spy and meets space aliens. But in this book, the second Ed Noon book in the series, he's still the original swashbuckling PI.

One of the best things about Noon books is show more Avallone's wild phrasing and crazy descriptions. The book begins with a new client rushing into Noon's office: "She was a brunette edition, pocket size, but her binding was not what you usually find in bookstores." "Dames," Noon explains,
"especially the good looking ones, were always getting into trouble. This was a very good looking one. That meant only one thing to me. A lot of trouble."

Well, he wasn't wrong on that account. When told that this is June Wexler and that her twin sister is April Wexler and June is scared of their chauffeur Anton, Noon wants to know if Anton's surname is
March. Too bad June doesn't think he's funny. He knows who they are now. The rich spoiled heirs to a tremendous
fortune who were in all the gossip columns. Some bullets go flying and Noon observes that: "what was left of
Anton wouldn't interest anybody but his mother or maybe a ghoulish
morgue attendant." No one else writes quite like this.

Indeed, when Lieutenant Mike Monks wants to hear June's side of the story, he finds out that "She was one of those dames who can't talk sitting down. Either that or she knew she had a figure and she wanted to make the most of it show less

The first of a series that I won't be reading, 'Satan's Sleuth' is a 1970s sex and violence updating of the Bulldog Drummond/Doc Savage school of lone heroes backed up by sufficient infrastructure to do their job, helped by immense wealth. It is a club that includes Batman.

Naturally, being a very dark novel, it is centred on vengeance. Equally naturally, without giving the game away, there is some kind of redemption alongside a new dedication by our hero to being a crime-busting super hero. show more

It is hard to avoid the emerging essence in this tale of the stories that were to develop in the second half of the twentieth century - that the good and existentially tormented psychopath would prove necessary to deal with the sociopaths the law seemed incompetent to deal with.

There is a certain raw energy in the novel but the plot is very thin and the writing so bad at times that it becomes quite enjoyable in a 'Plan 9 from Outer space' sort of way. There really is not much to it except concentrated sadism and violence, leavened by platitude.

What makes it interesting is that it expresses perfectly the rage of conservative middle class America at the emergence of hippies and all their occult paraphrenalia. Anything occult is solidly labelled as hysterical and unreal. There is no hint here of a 'real' supernatural.

This is the world of the man in the grey suit, the manager and the entrepreneur faced with the layabouts from which he has to draw the labour force that will keep him in antiques and yachts. There is an order in this world and that order is secular and rational.

But why is he so enraged? Because wealth, beauty and achievement, the world of the ubermensch and uberfrau in a free America, had been terrified, perhaps worse insulted, by the Manson killings seven years earlier. They certainly get name-checked and the debt is crystal clear in the crime.

Never have four killers been portrayed as so deeply unpleasant - the lumpenproletariat sociopath, the feeble victim bimbo, the queer (the homophobia in the book is pungent) and the drop-out. Avallone appeared to want us to want to have them slowly tortured and then killed.

But it is more than the Manson kilings at stake here. Those killings were just a lightning rod raising awareness that not all was well in the Garden of Eden. 1973/1974 were a period when things were falling apart for conservative America - the defeat in Vietnam, increased crime, inflation.

What happens next in the book is not for me to say because I still think it wrong to offer spoilers even to bad books. After all, somewhere out there may still be angry conformists who think of much of contemporary liberal society as warts on the body of a free America. Why destroy their fun?

It is good sometimes to read bad books occasionally. People who only read good books tend to be a bit up themselves and detached from reality. Bad books often tell you more accurately what many people were feeling than will great literature. This one stinks of contemporary fear and resentment. show less

review of
Michael Avallone's Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 1-2, 2019

I enjoyed watching Charlie Chan movies on TV in the 1960s when I was young & still living w/ my parents. In 2014, remembering the pleasure I got from these movies but retroactively suspicious of them as symptoms of the racism of their times, I decided to revist them & analyze them. The result was this movie I made:

402. "CHAN(geling)"
- a media analysis of yellowface in show more Warner Oland movies by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
- made from January to February, 2014
- edit finished on February 21, 2014
- 30:05
- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/XMP8mU1OfSY

I allowed ready availability of materials to limit how far I wd go w/ the project. As such, I got every relevant Warner Oland movie I cd find from my public library but didn't succeed in getting out "The Mysterious Dr Fu Manchu" (1929) in wch Oland played the title character. This wd've been an important addition to the films analyzed. In the long run, I found the Charlie Chan films to be full of stereotypes-as-character-definition but to be presenting Chan as a positive Chinese figure to be treated respectfully. Given the long history of negative stereotyping of Chinese since the mid-19th-century & the brutality wch Chinese immigrants were subjected to, I found the Charlie Chan character to be generally a positive force.

5 yrs later, in 2019, I decided to read some Earl Derr Biggers Charlie Chan out of curiousity. I didn't find any at my favorite local bkstore but I did find 2 Charlie Chan novels written by other authors who'd continued the character post-Biggers. Such a practice isn't uncommon. There're Sherlock Holmes stories written post-Arthur-Conan-Doyle by hundreds of authors (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_of_new_Sherlock_Holmes_stories ). Then there's Poodle Springs a Philip Marlowe novel started by Raymond Chandler but left unfinished by him — it was then finished by Robert B. Parker. Popular characters are kept alive after their authors' death not only for commercial reasons but b/c readers haven't had enuf. Charlie Chan must've been very popular. There was a Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine that put out at least 4 issues from 1973 to 1974. Biggers, the creator of the character, was dead by 1933 so enthusiasm for Chan wd've still been strong enuf 40 yrs later to generate a magazine.

Avallone's Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen was published in February, 1981, & turned into a movie w/ well-known actors Peter Ustinov, Angie Dickinson and Lee Grant in the same yr. Given that the movie story is credited online to Jerry Sherlock & given tht the bk has images from the movie on its cover I reckon that Avallone wrote the novelization of the story published as a marketing tie-in to the movie. As such, this is very much the kind-of-thing-I-wdn't-ordinarily-read but I'm not always so rigid, eh?

In the meantime, I've also been reading Yunte Huang's Charlie Chan — The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History (2010), wch I'll review eventually, a scholarly look at the Chan character & his greater social context. Huang's bk goes into much greater detail than I did in my "CHAN(geling)" & is a much more valuable resource than anything I'm likely to add in my Charlie Chan reviews.

Avallone's dedication says:

"For those splendid entertainers
of childhood—Earl Derr Biggers,
Warner Oland, and Keye Luke"

Keye Luke was the actor who was probably most well-known, at least in the present context, as the man who played Charlie Chan's Number One Son.

As a way of introducing the plot, there's this on p 1:

"CHARLIE CHAN TAKES OVER
LUPOWITZ SUICIDE CASE
Claims Wealthy Pineapple
Magnate Was Murdered

"That was the bold, black, screaming headline and breakfast-interrupting sensation which alerted all the five islands of Hawaii, not to mention the world, to the latest deductive pyrotechnic of the globe's Greatest Living Detective. . . ."

Hhmm, so Chan's now "the globe's Greatest Living Detective"!! Looked at in the timeline of the USA's demonization of the Chinese in general & of Chinese immigrants in particular, the character of Charlie Chan has now considerably counterbalanced the insidious Fu Manchu by providing an extremely positive image.

"And the bland, untroubled face had none of the Fu Manchu sinister aspect, despite the drooping string moustache. Rather, Charlie Chan's face reflected the patience and the wisdom of centuries of deep thought and conclusions about Life, Death, and man's inhumanity to man." - p 8

It's the Chinese who're being given credit for centuries of wisdom & Chan who's being credited for having absorbed this knowledge. Some people might find this too stereotyping in a way similar to thinking that all Asian-American students are assiduous scholars. Having personally had highly unpleasant & inaccurate stereotypes projected on me most of my life since I was 12 I'd much prefer stereotypes that are at least friendly & respectful.

One of the weak points in the presentation of Chan is in his stereotyped pidgin English & somewhat corny sayings (although I, personally, find the sayings entertaining w/o finding them to be particularly relevant to things-Chinese):

""Contradiction, please." said Charlie Chan. "Hasty departure merely indicated guilty mind."" - p 7

""I've got it, Pop!" Lee Chan exploded suddenly. "The killer is somebody who stirs their tea with a fork."

"Number One Son jump to conclusions like kangaroo on trampoline."" - p 9

""Ah, Slyvia." Chan bowed. "Most pleased to see maternal grandmother of Number One Grandson. Trust you are in good health."

""We're all getting older, Charles."

""Merely a condition of living. Growing old not always pleasant but alternative is worse."" - p 70

["And Death was still the black camel that paused unbidden at every gate—for everyone." (p 81) There's a Charlie Chan movie called "The Black Camel"]

But not all Chan stories tell it this way. E.G.: in my "CHAN(geling)" movie I've selected a section from the "Charlie Chan in Paris" movie (1935) that shows Chan parodying he Pidgin English that a drunken foil character addresses him in: https://youtu.be/XMP8mU1OfSY?t=408 .

Another aspect of this story that some, seeking racism to critique, tht might annoy critical readers is that the story features a "Dragon Queen". The Dragon Queen is a cliché that's the female equivalent of Fu Manchu, a diabolically clever Asian woman ever-ready to murder or otherwise victimize. She's enthralling.

I think of Asian-American actress Anna May Wong:

"In 1935 Wong was dealt the most severe disappointment of her career, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer refused to consider her for the leading role of the Chinese character O-Lan in the film version of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, choosing instead the white actress Luise Rainer to play the leading role." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_May_Wong

It was, unfortunately, typical of Hollywood at the time to deny Asian actresses any roles except as 'bad people', such as Dragon Ladies. Only the white women cd get good roles in yellow face. B/c of this:

"Frustrated by the stereotypical supporting roles she reluctantly played in Hollywood, Wong left for Europe in the late 1920s, where she starred in several notable plays and films, among them Piccadilly (1929)." - ibid

African-American jazz musicians went to Paris in the 1960s for similar reasons: in Paris they cd be respected as the talented people they were instead of discrimanted against by racists in the US.

As such, any movie featuring a Dragon Lady evokes the racist legacy in one way or another. In the case of the movie that this bk is the apparent novelization of, I speculate that having a 'white' actress, Angie Dickinson, as the Dragon Lady is a deliberate reversal of earlier Hollywood stereotyping.

Chan, at the scene of an apparent suicide, quickly sees thru the subterfuge:

"When later, clock read two-forty-two, Lupowitz still at desk, gun still pointed at head. Killer knew that when rigor mortin set in, victim's hand would tighten on trigger of gun and . . ."

"In imagination's vivid domain, all could now hear the thunderous blast of the gun in Bernard Lupowitz's hand, though his death had been many hours ago." - p 14

The novel, &, presumably, the movie (wch I haven't seen), has a somewhat campy sense of humor:

"The man in the wheeelchair, who had lighted a cigarette somewhere along the route of his motorized drive, now paused before the stern portrait and looked about furtively, before triumphantly, with a quick motion, flicingd some ashes from his cigarette into the urn." - p 25

This dark humor gets amplified:

"She picked up the urn and pressed it to her bosom.

""My dearest Bernie . . ."

"Then she looked starlted, staring into the urn, and gasped.

""Oh, my God! You're gaining weight!"" - p 31

Alas, Number One Son is KILLED & replaced as a side-kick by HIS son, who's half-Jewish — thusly complicating any potential stereotyping:

"Lee Jr. loved Chinatown. The sights, the sounds, the colors, the traditions, the entire milieu.

"That was inherited too, probably. Once a Chinaman, always a Chinaman. Half-Jewish or not." - p 48

""Ever since he was orphaned when my beautiful daughter and her husband were—were—"

""Killed?"

""I was an auto accident."

""It was the curse," Mrs. Dangers said with triumphant force. "The Curse of the Dragon Queen."" - p 29

Lee Jr., the grandson, is a klutz, a klutz w/ an infatuated girlfriend:

""Cordelia!"

"As she flung her arms about him for an adoring embrace, his hand struck her elbow. The upper end of the riding crop poked directly into one eye. Cordelia recoiled in pain, crying out.

""I'm sorry, darling—" As Lee Jr. [a]ttempted to comfort her in his arms, he pushed against the riding crop so that it thrust very solidly into Cordelia's stomach. "Oops," Lee Jr. said miserably, "I'm so clumsy."

""No, you aren't, darling," Cordelia smiled finely, still very much in love with him. "You're just uncoordinated."" - p 45

He's downright dangerous.

"He inserted a key, which was attached to his belt by a chain, into the lock of the ancient door. When he stepped inside, he did not realize the key was still in the lock.

"He kept on walking, heading for the battered desk in the small, cheaply furnished office. This easily pulled the door off its rusting hinges. Lee Jr. sighed, removed the key from the lock, and stood the old door against the wall for the time being." - p 59

"Later that night, at Charlie Chan's behest, the hunt was truly on. The matchbook clue had led them all to a nefarious San Francisco street. All being Chan, Lee Jr., Chief Baxter, Masten, and Cordelia Farrington the Third. She had insisted on coming and Lee Jr. had been unable to dissuade her. Who could argue with a WASP with a made-up mind? Not Lee Jr. He was learning fast." - p 101

This bk was given to me by someone who wanted to get rid of it b/c "it's racist". They hadn't read the bk & didn't really know anything about it. I tried to explain, to no avail, that it wasn't necessarily racist. As such, a sub-theme of this review is: 'racist or not racist?'. What if I were to say that the most racist thing about it so far, for me, is "Who could argue with a WASP with a made-up mind?"? As for "Cordelia Farrington the Third"? When was the last time you met a woman who was a "Jr." or a "the 2nd" or a "the Third"? Probably never, I reckon. It's usually men who get stuck w/ being put in a megalomaniacal lineage. Having Cordelia be "the Third" is, presumably, more campy humor.

""Nobody leaves the premises. Musician murdered!"

"All eyes were on him. Nobody saw the scarlet Chuangtsan dress as it disappeared through a side door." - p 106

Even Charlie Chan didn't notice. Personally, if a dress disappeared & the woman wearing it stayed put even I wd've noticed & I'm not a detective. But where were we?

"Within the theater proper, a movie was already on. It was an ancient Charlie Chan movie, no less, complete with Warner Oland, Keye Luke, and all the props and gimmicks of another day. It was like a time capsule" - p 151

I enjoyed this bk.. even tho it's lit lite. I find the Charlie Chan character engaging & entertaining.. but I'd never be silly enuf to take him as somehow representative of Chinese people or of Chinese-Hawaiians or of Chinese-Americans. Chan is fiction. show less

Apparently, this is the 12th Ed Noon story, but they are all, in my
humble opinion, great reading. Avallone was a most prolific writer and
is credited with writing a ton of books from the late fifties through the
seventies. Ed Noon is one of his best characters, a classic old school
gumshoe who wisecracks his way through bizarre cases. I have heard
that in later books Noon is a spy and a bodyguard to the president. In
this book, he is a small time PI who works out of a tiny office in show more
Manhattan, nicknamed the Mouse Auditorium. He has one buddy on the police force, Monks. In this tale, a broadway character stumbles
into a theater lobby and falls to Noon's feet, bloodied and with a bullet
in his guts. Turns out this character has the lost Shakespeare play
memorized and any number of people are after it. Noon is warned off
the case but that doesn't stop him. A real fun quick read. show less