In a parallel series on my personal Facebook page I have a series called ‘Convalescent Reading’, which was a continuation of ‘Hospital Reading’ which I commenced on November 19th, a week after I got home from hospital. That tends to concentrate on impressive single books, whereas here, in this series that has gone on for nearly one and a half years, I am more eclectic, covering whatever I have read. There are of course several very good books I finished since coronavirus struck, but I have also recorded more ephemeral stuff, the thrillers that kept me going in the days of forceful restrictions, lots of light reading, and also books that can be looked at in job lots as it were.
Last Friday, on Facebook, I wrote about Sapper, H C McNeile, who created Bulldog Drummond. But I concentrated on an early book of his called Jim Maitland, a romp in many places round the world with a monocle Englishman dealing summary justice to a host of villains
I had not read Sapper previously, though I had heard of Bulldog Drummond. When I mentioned to my cousin Shan, to whom most of the books I enjoyed so much had belonged, how much I was enjoying those long ago adventures, she included in her response ‘Bulldog Drummond – now THERE was a hero if ever there was one’.
Unfortunately the two Bulldog Drummond books I found at Roshanara were later ones, written by Sapper’s friend Gerard Fairlie, on whom it is said Drummond was based. McNeile had died in 1937 and Fairlie finished the play on which he had been working and then turned it into a novel and afterwards wrote six more about Drummond. It was the two he wrote in the late forties that I have now read.
Drummond’s great enemy was Carl Peterson, but he had been killed off in the twenties. However his widow Irma survived and continued over the next quarter of a century to plot revenge against Drummond. She is thus the principal villain in Bulldog Drummond Stands Fast (1947) and Hands Off Bulldog Drummond! (1949), in both of which she escapes through fiendish technology with which she has equipped the rooms in which she plans her escapades.
The plots are very different, though the techniques Drummond employs to foil them are similar, as are the ineffable absurdities of his principal sidekick Algy Longworth, the solid devotion of the similarly gung ho Peter Darrell, and the devotion to beer of all three. But whereas the first deals with an attempt at blackmail through getting evidence of indiscretions during the war, the second involves a plan by the Soviet Uniont to engender revolution in Britain. Drummond uses to deal with that a band of patriotic socialists who beat up their less scrupulous peers once he has exposed to them through a loudspeaker in the garden Irma’s call to revolution.
Both novels have plausible youngster’s in Irma’s pay to lead Drummond astray, both sinister paymasters whom she milks for whatever she can. Though both she and Drummond swear vengeance on each other, he seems delighted when she gets away so he can resume the chase, while she delays the final blow endlessly, which allows him to escape any tricky situation.
Great stuff and, though I can understand why the stories now have a very limited appeal, they were wonderful facilitators of retreat into a very comforting world, where the threats were palpably artificial and the enjoyment of life so heartening.
The pictures are of the first Drummond book and one I read, of Sapper and Fairlie, and of a film poster.