The Black Gang

Definitely dated, and often silly (not to mention occasionally offensive), still, this book has its occasional charms. Not the least of which is giving one an insight as to what the British (and American) book-buying public wanted in the mid-1920s. The blurb on the jacket of the edition I have says the book is an action-packed thriller "set in the 1920s," which is a bit misleading, when you consider when it was written.

This is the second bulldog Drummond books. The first one was so silly and I wasn't sure I've ever read another one, but then we saw some Bulldog Drummond movies and I decided to give the books a second chance. This was much better than the first book I think, although it was still pretty silly.

Somehow, in the first book, I missed the fact that bulldog Drummond was very large and very strong. Anyway, in this book he is in charge of the Black Gang. They are a set of more-or-less idle, rich, entitled Britishers who decide that they need to clean up the red menace in England.

So they go about "collecting" leaders of local cells and exporting them off to an island—off the coast of Ireland, I believe—to be held for later. The police show more begin to get worried about the disappeared people, and also about the rumors of there being such a thing as the Black Gang. Bulldog Drummond blunders into the office of the head of police and insinuates himself into helping in the investigation. Little do the police imagine that Drummond, who is rather a fool, has any involvement in the Black Gang. His public persona is of one of those effete sort of rich, idle British people who speaks a lot of blather, don't you know, and sits around drinking in the club and all that sort of thing.

Anyway it's not a bad story and much more fun than the first bulldog Drummond book. It turns out that the master criminal that is behind the red uprisings in England is also the guy who was causing trouble in the first book. I forget what that was now. Like in the first book, Drummond almost gets killed, multiple times, but he escapes and captures the bad guy. But then the bad guy vanishes at the last minute. So I'm guessing this might be the schtick through the rest of Bulldog Drummond, that the master criminal keeps showing up, in different guises, and that he keeps escaping to live again. In the movies, the schtick is that something comes up to prevent Bulldog Drummond from getting married to his betrothed, Phyllis. This happens in each movie, just as they're off to the church, or whatever, something gets in the way. Anyway, I guess I have to read a third in the series to see if this stuff keeps happening. We'll see. show less