DEATH OF A THIN-SKINNED ANIMAL by Patrick Alexander

British screenwriter and novelist Patrick Alexander has brought the battered and betrayed assassin Abbott back home after a failed contract on Njala, a fictional African dictator modeled on Idi Amin. Now Abbott's superiors must scramble to ensure that Abbott doesn't make good on his mission and ruin a new trade deal with Njala, who's suddenly worth more to them alive than dead.

Njala has Amin's personality, with a few fictional flourishes: the nation he rules has been moved to West Africa, and gifted with substantial uranium reserves. It's this radioactive bounty that has resulted in the cancellation of Abbott's mission and the newly budding friendship between Njala and the UK.

Compared to the ripped-from-the-headlines fury of Target Amin by James Konrad, Alexander's use of Njala/Amin is somewhat restrained. That opening text about the AR-15 promises a lot of blood and guts, but much of the story is taken up by dithering from Abbott's spymasters, a mass of men with titles like the Controller and names like Smith, and their attendant secretaries/mistresses/wives. There's too much domestic drama around this, and Abbott's relationships too. Alexander never quite goes for the throat action-wise, and as Abbott and his former bosses feint and counter feint it all starts to feel like a very British farce - that's not unintended by Alexander, but the end result is somewhat toothless. When we finally get to the showdown between Abbott and Njala, the story picks up and the energy crackles, but it's too little, too late. Alexander also writes his villain Njala better than his protagonist Abbott, who we spend much more time with.

Despite my quibbling, Alexander's novel was a hit, it seems, with multiple editions:

The cover art is all a little generic (the bird on the hardcover is a nice touch, though), while the main cover art for this review makes the story look like some kind of James Bond caper. The book was also adapted into a popular 1981 French film titled La Professionnel, starring BELMONDO:

With music by Ennio Morricone, too!

The book review blog Olman's Fifty also reviewed this title back in 2013, giving high marks for suspense but criticizing the soppy love story. Meanwhile, a Kirkus review from 1977 is even less forgiving, calling it "just another Whitehall black-sheep story with slightly more flesh on the bones and slightly less blood on the pavement."

My verdict? Alexander sadly misses the mark one too many times, leaving Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal with a disappointing 2/4 rating. Njala and Abbott deserved a better stage.

This title is available to read and download at archive dot org.

Jove Books, 1979 (original pub. 1976)

THE WEIRD, THE WILD, & THE WICKED by Brad Steiger and John Pendragon

"TAKE CARE OF THAT SISSY, J. EDGAR!"

Settlers defeating savage Indians, the "revolting" rites of said Native Americans, scary slaves and Voodoo Queens ... despite the sexy cover art, this dreary volume has more in common with C.B. Colby's Strangely Enough! from 1940 than it does with any contemporary, cutting edged works on psi or the unknown. Pendragon's influence seems nil, with nothing much in the way of ESP or astral content. Instead, we get a bunch of time wasting chapters on weird guys from olden times and the aforementioned residue of Manifest Destiny.

The first chapter sets the tone, with Thomas Day embarking on a bizarre quest to raise the perfect wife from childhood. He adopts two orphans girls to this end. Steiger's writing is cutesy and glib, and you'd be forgiven for thinking Day was some random crank and not a major man of letters of the time! Day's story could fill an entire book, but Steiger boils it down to a quick, easy filler chapter, the first of many about a guy from way-back-when who did something weird.

Ma Barker's Bloody Brood provides that pull quote up above, one of the few exciting moments in this text. Another chapter on Victorian grave robbers is pretty good, but too many others are on the level of KING'S PIGS SQUEAKED THE NATIONAL ANTHEM. Fat guys getting custom coffins makes for a good time too, but not enough to carry the filler. There should be plenty of historical heft here with characters like Day or John Nichols Thom, but Steiger's glib treatment robs each story of any weight or context. The result is a boring slog.

As a final insult, Pyramid Books suggests we check out their other titles "listed in the back of this book" ... and then don't list any! Was everyone asleep at the wheel?

Pyramid Books, 1969

COVER UPDATES: WORLD OF THE STRANGE

A groovy green cover for Susy Smith's World of the Strange!

Pyramid Books, 1970

WORLD OF THE STRANGE by Susy Smith

The "improbably named" Susy Smith (see below) brings her considerable talents to bear and shows us an entire WORLD OF THE STRANGE! It's ESP, astrology, poltergeists and more psychic debris in this vintage explainer text.

I'm not sure what copy writer decided that Susy Smith was an improbable name but bless 'em anyways! Smith aims to educate with her writing, laying out the promising field of psychical studies circa 1963. There's a newfangled term called "parapsychology" which covers all the bases, showing us just how long ago this book was written.

Susy Smith looking lovely as usual

Smith opens with some startling poltergeist activity, as an illustration that even in this modern space age there are things lurking beyond our ken. It even happens in "matter-of-fact Dallas!" A brief history of Spiritualism follows, and while Smith's honesty is never in doubt, her credulity sometime stretches a mite too far. For example, the Fox sisters and their confession to fakery - Smith wants to believe so badly that she tries to wriggle around this, basically saying that the sisters didn't know any better than to falsely claim fraud. Smith even speaks to this desire of hers to believe in the unknown, and it is refreshingly candid in a genre where authors often strike a pose as supremely neutral arbiters. Rolling into the 20th century we find J.B. Rhine, his ESP cards, and the Society for Psychical Research, and a survey of today's witches. Smith would later fill an entire book with modern witchcraft in 1970. Smith also covers psychical pioneer Dr. Nandor Fodor, and superstar seer Eileen J. Garrett. Garrett's sessions channelling the captain of airship R101, which crashed spectacularly in 1930, are summarized in a naive manner by Smith - despite the author's claims to the contrary, it turns out Garrett did follow the construction of R101, and was savvy to the technical terms she supposedly channelled from flight lieutenant Herbert Carmichael Irwin. C'est la vie.

Above, a 1970 reprint cover. Out of left field who should wander by but the abominable snowmen! According to Ivan T. Sanderson, they could be extant relic hominids. Oh yeah, and Sanderson disclaims the term "abominable snowmen" altogether in favor of yeti, almas, and Sasquatch. Smith thinks it's just too cromulent a phrase to pass up, even if its etymology is flat busted. Astrology gets a chapter, as do vampires and ghosts. Smith notes that "real" ghosts are rarely the shrieking specters shaking chains that they appear as in other genre fare. Some are downright lovely, like Ocean Born Mary! Astral projection and levitation make for some light reading before Smith presents some do-it-yourself ESP experimenters and a return of the poltergeists. Smith specializes in slice-of-life Americana by way of the weird, with housewives and blue collar Joes across the country brushing up against the other side. Right before the last page Smith drops in the well worn case of Patience Worth, before finishing with another sensible statement as to the possibility of the paranormal. She's also kind enough to give us a fantastic bibliography, not something to be taken for granted. Thanks Susy!

Table of contents:

1.  Nearer Than You Think (5)

2.  Dreams Do Come True (13)

3.  The Weird Sisters (28)

4.  Fact or Fiction (41)

5.  They Hitch Their Wagons to the Stars (54)

6.  The First Men in Orbit (66)

7.  Traveling Without a Ticket (78)

8.  Miracles Do Happen (85)

9.  Hocus-Pocus (94)

10. And Shall Man Live Again? (102)

11. Things That Go Bump in the Night (117)

12. Invisible Juvenile Delinquents (130)

13. The Unexplained Residuum (139)

14. Do-It-Yourself Phenomena (147)

Pyramid Books, 1963

MORE "THINGS" by Ivan T. Sanderson

More of those awful "Things!" On April 1st, no less, which is very appropriate for one particular "Thing" profiled in this second compilation of assorted Sanderson articles on assorted and sundry THINGS! The big "Thing" in this one is the giant penguin of Clearwater Beach, Florida, which stomped its way around town back in 1948 and left quite the impression on Sanderson, who analyzed its prints so thoroughly he actually upset the original plans of the local hoaxers responsible, who had wanted to fake a dinosaur. But the heavy iron stompers that Tony Signorini and Al Williams used for footprints were so unwieldy that Sanderson determined the resulting waddling gait must have belonged to a more cumbersome creature, such as ... a gigantic prehistoric penguin. The rest, as they say, was some especially colorful local history.

Our man Sanderson ...

And Tony Signorini, wannabe dinosaur

After such a dynamite story, even something like the ol' Patterson Film seems old hat, even if it was hot off the presses in 1969. Sanderson has reams of detailed reasoning to persuade us that whatever the "Thing" is that Roger Patterson filmed in 1967, it wasn't human! But we've heard all that before. Maybe it's hard to appreciate nowadays what Sanderson did, given that so much of modern cryptozoology grew directly out of his many articles and dispatches from around the globe, on real life Bigfoots and living dinosaurs and flash frozen mammoths. In so many cases, he established the terrain of the anti-establishment weird science that dare concern itself with those "Things" ...

Available to read and download at archive dot org.

Pyramid Books, 1969