MAN-EATER by Ted Willis

Got shiny diamonds

Like the eyes of a cat in the black and blue

Something is coming for you ...

Look out!

A washed up circus trainer dumps two tigers on a dark country road and so begins THE SHOCK EXPERIENCE OF THE YEAR ... or maybe not quite, for author Ted Willis is very restrained with his mayhem, and aims for more emotional blows than bloody guts and grue. Though not as feverish as Andrew Sinclair's action in The Cat, Willis delivers a similar setup: a small English town (in this case Whitford) that will soon learn that killer cats are the least of its problems, as their predations on the populace uncover an unholy tangle of sex, lies, and rape that runs straight through the halls of power. It's almost too much for an honest copper like Gosford, but thank God that strange fellow Birk is skulking around, having rented a cottage on the hill ... he seems to have some experience in hunting beasts, whether human or feline. Gosford, Birk, and the rest are about to find out that the tigers are just two of the predators on the prowl in Whitford.

The author

Author Ted Willis (1914-1992) was no slouch, being a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, a devoted communist, Chairman of the Writer's Guild of Great Britain 1958-1964, and a recipient of a life peerage in 1963! His Man-Eater is artfully drawn out, introducing us to the town of Whitford through the man-eaters' first victim Tom Pickford, stepping out with a local girl on a forest road, and then through Chief Inspector Gosford's stumbling investigation of Pickford's disappearance, which proves frustrating as nobody wants to talk lest they expose Pickford's double life and their own shady dealings. Our tiger mates Ranee and Mohan seem almost perplexed by this bizarre community that's become their hunting grounds, and Willis keeps sympathy for them strong throughout. Meanwhile his focus on his human characters verges on the parapolitical, as we get a feel for the class lines and power networks that keep little Whitford plugged into the national body politic - what a day for some bloody tigers to ruin your child pornography ring!

As philanderers, innocent bystanders, and biker hooligans are rent and bloodied on the moors and in the woods, as the suicides and self incriminations ring out, and as the fierce, lost, doomed tigers find a net tightening inexorably around them, it's enough to drive you to drink. Says gunman Birk, "I'm a bit of an anachronism too, you see, part of the post-imperial hangover. Like those tigers - a member of a doomed species. I'm not really equipped for life in the last half of the Twentieth Century. And frankly, the more I see of it, the less I feel inclined to care."

Some other editions

With Ranee and Mohan burning brightly in the night, Man-Eater hunts down a 3/4 rating.

They're out there ...

Bantam Books, 1977 (original pub. 1976)

THE FLYING SAUCERERS by Arthur Shuttlewood

Arthur Shuttlewood: BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF 'THE WARMINSTER MYSTERY!' If that blurb meant anything at all to you in 1976, you'd be snapping this book right off the rack. The Warminster mystery concerned strange earth sounds heard in 1965 (said to knock birds right out of the sky!) which developed over the years into UFO sightings and photos of varying provenance. 

One photograph of the Thing ...

... and its location in the UK

Arthur Shuttlewood was a local journalist in the small town of Warminster who soon became entranced by the mysterious happenings of the Thing, as the mystery was eponymously dubbed. A series of books followed, and eventually Shuttlewood was fully enveloped in the '70s British UFO scene, dominated as it was by the muddled mysticism of the fascists behind The Flying Saucer Review. This current title is a melange of mystic mumbo jumbo that starts with a soft pedal as Shuttlewood goes over some regular British folk and their UFO sightings:

The bold cover art promises space aged revelations, with a pair of cutting edge F-104 Starfighters engaging a saucer. But soon enough Shuttlewood is delivering the standard mystic saucer stew, citing Brinsley le Poer Trench and Otto Binder for musings on ancient astronauts and their genetic plan for humanity, and quickly blending in hollow earth and polar openings with nary a hesitation. Shuttlewood name checks Kiwi pilot Bruce Cathie and his world energy grid alongside ley lines and supposed ancient Celtic nuclear piles, as he swerves into pyramid power and dense bouts of numerology. Says Shuttlewood:

My own belief is that the great pyramid is a multi-dimensional space-time condenser, the four-triad group of a veritable powerhouse in which every dimensional form of life in the whole universe could, if so deciding, converge and converse by pure mental communication.

There's a WWII sighting of an "egg shaped craft" by Polish fighter Antoni Szachnowski and mention of foo fighters, which sound like the typical nuts'n'bolts American stuff, and then suddenly Shuttlewood is dropping his favorite mystic numerology volume, The Seal of God by one F.C. Payne. Payne's work inspired Shuttlewood to investigate recent history for signs of divine guidance:

The six leaders whose nations were involved in the biggest show of hostilities in the history of mankind were: Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt, Il Duce, Stalin, and Tojo. Take the initial letters of these names and what have we? Spell it out loud and clear, for it was and is so true! We have C-H-R-I-S-T!

Come page 83 Shuttlewood's quoting a crank letter he got from one Muriel Barker of Southend-on-Sea, which cites his colleague Brinsley le Poer Trench on the fact of Jesus Christ flying a UFO from Gethsemane to Glastonbury, where the Son of God inspires the legend of King Arthur! It's so British it hurts at times, especially with time capsule passages like: "Not many admirers know that vivacious Adrienne Posta, well-known actress and comedienne, saw a UFO on Monday 24 January 1972 at Cambridge Square, London." You're right, I didn't know that!

Ms. Posta looking glam

Shuttlewood's friend and former Warminster nurseryman Jack Harraway sends him translations of Spanish newspaper articles on UFOs, for an informative chapter which is also another time capsule piece, as Harraway is living in Alicante, Spain while serving on the executive committee for the National Farmers' Union in the Common Market. Further Britishisms follow as Shuttlewood quotes UFO witness Ray P. Logan, who hypothesizes that the flying sorcerers (as Shuttlewood's been calling them throughout) are avoiding direct contact with us in the same manner that we'd avoid waltzing right into the gorillas' enclosure at London Zoo, and that they're feeling us out through observation “very much as Dave Sexton, manager of Chelsea FC, will send scouts to watch another team’s style of soccer play before planning his tactics in a coming match.” Shuttlewood references John Keel and Robert Charroux for more ultraterrestrial meddling in ancient mysteries, before relating a strange experience with two college students named Micah and Joeb who demonstrated strange powers on a train - the weirdest part is that Shuttlewood separately receives an account by another experiencer, Marion, who met the same boys!

Shuttlewood relaxing with a cuppa ...

... and in the field (left), pointing out a
UFO location for the Marquis of Bath

The author's approach is summed up near the end, when he asks us, “Astrology, Numerology, Symbology: Have these abstract or long-forgotten arts any contribution to make towards slotting the UFO jigsaw pieces together?” The final chapter features some intense numerology, and at this point you're either vibing with Shuttlewood or you've written him off entirely.

Grand old UFO man Hilary Evans made his appraisement clear in his essential annotated UFO catalogue:

Right before his numerological rally, Shuttlewood drops a final anecdote about one Randy Otter's "zoo hypothesis" printed as an article in the Post Office Courier, which is reheated from Charles Fort's terse observation that "we are property." The Space Age calls out to the Golden Age with the musty archives of generations between, and Shuttlewood rallies round the maypole alongside Trench, Holiday, and the rest of the British mystic brigade.

The Flying Saucerers is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Sphere Books, 1976

THE OGDEN ENIGMA by Gene Snyder

It's been waiting a million years ... to scare you to death! It's got the government so panicked they've locked it away for thirty years in a hangar, tucked away in a far corner of the sinister Dugway Proving Grounds with orders to shoot to kill anyone who tries to get inside. But something's happening now, there are lights in the sky and death on the ground, and soon the whole world will understand THE OGDEN ENIGMA!

I'll quote a previous entry featuring this book's maps for some background on Ogden, Utah: "Before Roswell entered the popular imagination (and after an infamous VX gas leak that killed nearly 4,000 sheep) this was a likely location for Hangar 18 or similar skulduggery." Author Gene Snyder plays coy and writes his novel as based on a "true" personal experience, identical to the opening action where a mysterious student tells writer/professor Ted Lawrence a whale of a tale about that hangar outside Ogden. It's a cute meta structure as Lawrence and his sexy editor Cathy Seward workshop a novel based on their unfolding story.

Some of the cloak and dagger action feels like filler and the climax comes in a bullrush during the final 20 pages, but Snyder manages a tidy tale in just over 300 pages. The enigma is something from out there, and it's been here with us since the dawn of history. Our sick Cold War psychopolitics can only kill or coverup, stacking lie upon lie for fear of submission to truth.

For a solid conspiracy thriller, Snyder's The Ogden Enigma earns three mystery hangars out of four:

Playboy Press, 1980

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Stonehenge

From The View Over Atlantis by John Michell. Courtesy Ballantine Books, 1969.

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Hej! NLO Jugoslavia!

The track of a "Neidentifikovani Leteći Objekat" from an investigation by the Academic Astronautical and Astronomical Club of Jugoslavia. The AAAK determined the object was an observational balloon. From the excellent UFO's From Behind the Iron Curtain by Ion Hobana and Julien Weverbergh, courtesy Bantam Books, 1974.

THE FLYING SAUCER VISION by John Michell

Ace Books, 1967