Augustus Mandrell is back!

Frank McAuliffe greets readers from beyond the grave, and we laugh our keisters off:

"Before Clifford Waxout died escaping my arms, he screeched, `...bastard...you lousy bastard...' It was a farewell fraught with genealogical inaccuracy, but one of enviable vigor, under the circumstances. (The brisk descent from the picturesque cliff; the sudden, definitive embrace of the rocks...)"

That's the opening of Shoot the President, Are You Mad?, the very long-awaited fourth book about the amazing international hit man Augustus Mandrell. (How long awaited? The first three in the series, Of All The Bloody Cheek, Rather A Vicious Gentleman and For Murder I Charge More, appeared in 1965, 1968 and 1971. The usual explanation for the delay is sensitivity over President John F. Kennedy's assassination. McAuliffe himself died in 1986.)

I raved about the first three Mandrell books in the early days of this blog, and I'm pleased that the opening of Shoot the President ... lives up to one of my early remarks, namely that:

"I'd assumed from Mandrell the narrator's cheeky tone and Mandrell the character's cool demeanor that Frank McAuliffe was British. ... Then I looked at a biographical note and read that McAuliffe was born in New York — and worked as a technical writer for the Navy. The surprise was delightful, just another of the joys of reading these stories."

Mandrell has the sang-froid and heated libido of a well-known British fictional spy, only no Bonds for him, just cash. He's an American creation, after all, and his main worry is money. He has to earn his living, and his worries about getting paid are yet another of the surprises that contribute to McAuliffe's absolutely unique voice.

Read all my raves about Mandrell and McAuliffe here (scroll down). Read a short biographical sketch about the author here. And give a hearty high five to JT Lindroos and The Outfit for getting McAuliffe back into circulation. This is an event, folks.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Augustus Mandrell is as American as hamburger

I'm rereading Shoot the President, Are You Mad?, Frank McAuliffe's long-awaited fourth book Augustus Mandrell. How long awaited? The book appeared in 2010, twenty-four years after the author died and following collections of Mandrell "commissions" (he's an international hit man) that had appeared in 1965, 1968, and 1971.  Here a post I made back when I first read Shoot the President, Are You Mad? When I'm done with it (the book, not the post), I just may reread the first three Augustus Mandrell books. They're that good.

================

I've mentioned the bracing mix of British manners and American sensibilities in Frank McAuliffe's books about Augustus Mandrell. McAuliffe, an American, made Mandrell a kind of outsider, apparently British. This gave him the luxury of observing American ways with amused detachment. Here are some examples from Shoot the President, Are You Mad?:

"There was certain to be some grumbling regarding the issue of `conspiracy' since the American people, despite their impressive history of individual action, appear rather keen on attributing dramatic events, particularly those of an anti-social nature, to shadowy groups."

and

"[A]s the days passed with still no apprehension of the despicable manufacturer of air conditioners, the president, now enjoying the role of spiritual leader to the electorate ... "

and

"`But no class, Man, no class,' the Doctor objected. `They underbid each other. "If Tony will do-a da job for 300 bucks, I'll tell-a you wot. I'll do it for 250, if you buy da bullets." How you going to get class when you're shopping around for the lowest bidder?'

"`My dear Doctor, are you questioning the "free enterprise" system? The very cornerstone of America's greatness?"

McAuliffe also pokes delicious fun at insecure Americans' worship of culinary luxury, having Mandrell issue elaborate instructions to a chef that include "a quarter pound of lean Argentine beef. You chop it into an even consistency and form into into a patty. Fry, over a natural gas flame for eleven seconds per side ... A folded leaf of California lettuce ... place just under the top bun a slice of Bermuda onion, one sliced within the past 12 hours."

"`Clifford,' says Mandrell's puzzled companion, `that concoction you ordered, do you know what it sounded like? One of those dreadful hamburgers the Americans are always eating in their backyards.'

"`Of course, my dear,' I smiled. `I've been dying for one all day. I was but attempting to spare the man the embarrassment of writing `hamburger, with the trimmings' on his pad. He'd have been the laughing stock of the kitchen.'"

=============

Historical notes: It has been reported that McAuliffe submitted the manuscript of Shoot the President, Are You Mad? to his publisher just before John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 and that the unfortunate coincidence was responsible for the decades-long delay in the book's appearance. But an afterword from McAuliffe's daughter says McAuliffe wrote the book in 1975. Even then, she wrote, "the mutual consensus was that the American people ... were not ready to make light of the demise of an individual who held possession of the highest office in the land."

=============

The third Mandrell book, For Murder I Charge More, won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best paperback original in 1972. A second award would not be out of place in 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010, 2014

Augustus Mandrell is coming back

Top news from Mike Ripley (left), my table mate at Crimefest 2016's gala dinner: Frank McAuliffe's great international fixer Augustus Mandrell is coming back, courtesy of Ostara Publishing.

Here's part of what I've written about McAuliffe and Mandrell:

I've mentioned the bracing mix of British manners and American sensibilities in Frank McAuliffe's books about Augustus Mandrell. McAuliffe, an American, made Mandrell a kind of outsider, apparently British. This gave him the luxury of observing American ways with amused detachment. Here are some examples from Shoot the President, Are You Mad?:

"There was certain to be some grumbling regarding the issue of `conspiracy' since the American people, despite their impressive history of individual action, appear rather keen on attributing dramatic events, particularly those of an anti-social nature, to shadowy groups."

and

"[A]s the days passed with still no apprehension of the despicable manufacturer of air conditioners, the president, now enjoying the role of spiritual leader to the electorate ... " 

and

"`But no class, Man, no class,' the Doctor objected. `They underbid each other. "If Tony will do-a da job for 300 bucks, I'll tell-a you wot. I'll do it for 250, if you buy da bullets." How you going to get class when you're shopping around for the lowest bidder?'

"`My dear Doctor, are you questioning the "free enterprise" system? The very cornerstone of America's greatness?"

McAuliffe also pokes delicious fun at insecure Americans' worship of culinary luxury, having Mandrell issue elaborate instructions to a chef that include "a quarter pound of lean Argentine beef. You chop it into an even consistency and form into into a patty. Fry, over a natural gas flame for eleven seconds per side ... A folded leaf of California lettuce ... place just under the top bun a slice of Bermuda onion, one sliced within the past 12 hours."

"`Clifford,' says Mandrell's puzzled companion, `that concoction you ordered, do you know what it sounded like? One of those dreadful hamburgers the Americans are always eating in their backyards.'

"`Of course, my dear,' I smiled. `I've been dying for one all day. I was but attempting to spare the man the embarrassment of writing `hamburger, with the trimmings' on his pad. He'd have been the laughing stock of the kitchen.'"

Here are all my posts about Mandrell and McAuliffe.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

One of these days I'll shut up ...

... about Frank McAuliffe's Augustus Mandrell stories, but not yet. The stories themselves as well as comments from readers keep striking interesting chords and suggesting enticing tangents.

Mandrell is an interesting omission from T.J. Binyon's excellent Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Binyon's discussion of "gentleman burglars and Robin Hoods" includes the observation that "By the 1960s ... the gentleman-adventurer had become an anachronistic figure, and he was replaced by a character who was his opposite in every respect, Richard Stark's Parker."

Binyon is right; Parker is no Saint. Neither, though, is Augustus Mandrell, at least in one major respect: He's no gentleman; he works for a living. But Mandrell does have affinities with a figure Binyon cites as a pinnacle of the post-war gentleman burglar, Leslie Charteris' Simon Templar. Here's Templar, quoted by Binyon, speaking words that Mandrell might have uttered:

I'm mad enough to believe in romance. And I'm sick and tired of this age -- tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest -- battle, murder and sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn't be life as we know it, but ought to be.

I don't know why Binyon omitted Mandrell. On the one hand, it's hard to believe that the widely knowledgeable Binyon didn't know McAuliffe's work. On the other, despite McAuliffe's having won an Edgar award in 1972 for For Murder I Charge More, the third Mandrell collection, his books are hard to find today. (I'd never read a word of him a month ago.) Perhaps McAuliffe's work had already begun to slip below crime fiction readers' radar by 1989, when Binyon's book was published. Or maybe Binyon had to draw the line somewhere. As it is, he packs an amazing amount of information into a thin book.

But perhaps Binyon simply didn't know what to do with a character who combined British sensibilities with American preoccupations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Meet Augustus Mandrell

A reader who apparently wished to avoid publicity (he sent me e-mail, rather than post to this blog), introduced me to Frank McAuliffe and his stories about the amazing professional killer Augustus Mandrell. Mandrell is an impossibly suave, cool international master of disguise about whom McAuliffe published three collections of stories between 1965 and 1971.

I've just finished the first volume, Of All the Bloody Cheek, and I'm here to tell you McAuliffe must be one of the slyest, hippest, funniest, sharpest most satirically minded writers who has ever written crime fiction. He offers the reader thrills, surprise endings, laugh-out-loud jokes, and a memorable protagonist. Mandrell may remind you of the Saint or of James Bond, but he's deadpan funnier than both without being at all groaningly spoofy. And he' s not all thrills and laughs, either. The third story in Of All the Bloody Cheek, for example, has a rather poignant moment just before its end.

The stories are set in Europe on the fringes of World War II, and a sharp vein of political and social satire runs through them. The satire is occasionally ahead of its time. Here, for example, is Mandrell, who also narrates the stories, commenting on two military men's assessment of Mandrell's methods. Mandrell, one of the men has said, operates through a network of intermediaries that includes "disbarred barristers, unlicensed doctors, a homosexual or two.":

"This homosexual angle," Lieutenant Proferra said. "What about Mandrell himself?" As I mentioned, Proferra was an American.

Click here for more on Augustus Mandrell, McAuliffe, his narrative technique, his satirical vision and more.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Augustus Mandrell's surprises

I'd assumed from Mandrell the narrator's cheeky tone and Mandrell the character's cool demeanor that Frank McAuliffe was British. Then I guessed from the occasional jabs at American attitudes and from the (relatively) greater availability of his books in Canadian bookshops that he might be a Canadian poking occasional fun at the American military. Then I looked at a biographical note and read that McAuliffe was born in New York -- and worked as a technical writer for the Navy. The surprise was delightful, just another of the joys of reading these stories.

P.S. He aims jabs at the British and the French, too -- all amusing.
P.P.S. Bill Crider, an Augustus Mandrell fan of long standing, has some exciting news as well as biographical information about Frank McAuliffe here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Ahead of his time again

I remarked here that Frank McAuliffe's amazing international hit man Augustus Mandrell had made a daring wisecrack in Of All the Bloody Cheek. There, the subject was American attitudes toward sex. In the second Mandrell book, Rather a Vicious Gentleman, published in 1968, McAuliffe delivers at least two jabs as fresh as a Paris Hilton nightclub wrangle and as up to date as the newest Bluetooth/zoom lens/Internet and TV capable/voice-recognition cell phone.

Here, a gossip columnist gives a protesting Mandrell a lesson in the technique of manufacturing celebrity:

"They didn't know your name six weeks ago," he gloated. "Now they do, thanks to `Rochey's Roundup.' When I first started mentioning you I had to identify you as `the mysterious Augustus Mandrell.' ... Gradually, using your name at least once a week, I feel I have established your identity. Thus, in yesterday's column my readers had no difficulty flashing up a mental image when they read: `Insiders of the Green Room set say it was a dispute over who would throw the upcoming Augustus Mandrell birthday party that caused that unholy din in the Poe Park Tavern powder room last P.M. ... A new art form, old man."

And here's Mandrell in a philosophical mood on the eternal demand for his services:

Ah well, like so many old fashioned business firms, Mandrell, Limited but serves an existing market. Mandrell does not, as is the new business approach, create the market and then sustain it.

Sure, McAuliffe smoothly pulls off leaps of time within his stories; perhaps I'll discuss his backward and forward narrative technique in a future comment. For now, though, here's the important thing: By God, are his books fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Augustus Mandrell is coming back!

Back between 1965 and 1971, Frank McAuliffe brought out three collections of linked stories about an amazing international hit man and master of disguise named Augustus Mandrell. Another Mandrell book lay unpublished for more than forty years, scuttled, it is said, by the unfortunate coincidence of its title with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Shoot the President, Are You Mad? will finally see the light of day in the first quarter of 2010, thanks to The Outfit, a new crime-fiction publisher headed by JT Lindroos and Sean Wallace. The book will take its place beside the first three Augustus Mandrell books: Of All the Bloody Cheek, Rather a Vicious Gentleman and For Murder I Charge More.

Here's what I wrote after reading Of All the Bloody Cheek:

"McAuliffe must be one of the slyest, hippest, funniest, sharpest, most satirically minded writers who has ever written crime fiction. He offers the reader thrills, surprise endings, laugh-out-loud jokes, and a memorable protagonist. Mandrell may remind you of the Saint or of James Bond, but he's deadpan funnier than both without being at all groaningly spoofy. And he's not all thrills and laughs, either. The third story in Of All the Bloody Cheek, for example, has a rather poignant moment just before its end."

Read all my raves about Frank McAuliffe and Augustus Mandrell to learn why I'm so delighted that another book is on the way.

N.B. The forthcoming book is usually discussed under the title They Shoot Presidents, Don't They? but Lindroos says The Outfit is publishing it with the title McAuliffe intended.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Augustus Mandrell vs. Modesty Blaise

Back in the days when this blog had readers, I posted a comment about Modesty Blaise, Peter O'Donnell's gadget-toting 1960s super spy. More recently, I've been discussing Frank McAuliffe's books about that non-gadget-toting 1960s super hit man, Augustus Mandrell.

At the time of my Modesty Blaise post, a reader commented that Blaise, James Bond and other popular spy/caper heroes of the time were products of pure wish fulfillment. "I think readers were a lot more naive then, and the heroes and plots of these books impossibly suave," my intelligent correspondent wrote. The first Modesty Blaise novel and the first Augustus Mandrell collection appeared the same year, 1965. Each in its own way seems both a reaction to James Bond and an illustration of my reader's point about wish fulfillment. The differences between the two heroes are at least as interesting as the similarities.

Both are projections of fantasy. Modesty Blaise is impossibly rich, impossibly fit, impossibly talented and impossibly accomplished. Her impossible dexterity in martial arts is supplemented by impossibly elaborate, impossibly miniaturized gadgets cooked up by her assistant, Willie Garvin.

Augustus Mandrell, on the other hand, has impossible sang-froid and an improbable skill with disguises (though the running comments he offers on the practice and the psychological effects of disguise render him a more accessible and less remote hero than is Modesty Blaise. He lets the reader in on his thinking). Mandrell gets by on guts and guile; Modesty Blaise's currency is raw skill.

Blaise works for the forces of good; Mandrell, though his sympathies are usually in the right place, works for the forces of money. Blaise has all the luxury goods that an upwardly aspiring reader in the consumer culture of the mid-1960s could wish for. Her apartment is decorated expensively but with taste, and her liquor is the best. At the age of thirty, having made her pile in ways only hinted at, she has risen above the need to work for mere money.

Augustus Mandrell cheerfully embraces the quest for cash, and his difficulty collecting the fees he charges for his "commissions" are a delightful running theme of all the stories. Could these contrasting attitudes toward money be due in part to the authors' nationalities? O'Donnell was British, McAuliffe American.

And then there's sex. Had Modesty Blaise and Augustus Mandrell ever wound up in the same story, they'd likely have been adversaries who eventually wind up cooperating. They also would have wound up in bed, where both would have performed extremely well. For her, the sex would have been a release of tension, fully enjoyed, expertly accomplished, leaving her prepared to resume her work. For him, it would have been a romp. They'd both have derived pleasure from it, but Mandrell would have experiened more joy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Crime fiction and unfortunate events

I’ve rhapsodized about Frank McAuliffe and his three amazing books about Augustus Mandrell, that sly international spy and master of disguise who must nonetheless work for a living. But did you know a fourth Mandrell book, never published, predates the others? Its title is They Shoot Presidents, Don’t They?, and when I tell you that McAuliffe apparently submitted it to his publisher not long before Nov. 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, you may understand its failure to appear. (Read this enlightening account and this discussion about the astonishing, brash, satirical and very funny Mandrell series.)

Thirty-eight years later, just before Sept. 11, 2001, the acidically satirical Christopher Brookmyre published A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away, one of whose characters is a terrorist who blows up a plane. Brookmyre’s own Web site breaks down critical reaction to the novel into “Pre September 11th” and “Post September 11th” groups, and it’s natural to wonder how the terrorist attacks affected the novel’s popular and critical reception.

Each author ran full speed, smack-dab, face first and unaware into a historical event beyond his control. What other crime authors have experienced similar tricks of fate?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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विमल, or meet Vimal, India's pulp hero

Oh boy, have I learned a lot from The Sixty-Five Lakh Heist, fourth of Surender Mohan Pathak's many Vimal novels.

I have learned that the author tired of his first series after the first hundred books or so before he created Vimal. I have learned that Vimal is an elusive thief and a master of disguise, a kind of Punjabi mix of Richard Stark's Parker and Frank McAuliffe's Augustus Mandrell.

I have learned, among many new words, dacoit: "robber, usually one who attacks in broad daylight, in a group." I have learned that lakh in the novel's title means hundred thousand; the title refers to the 6.5 million-rupee bank robbery in which Vimal is stiffed by a colleague before embarking on a violent quest to recover what's his.

And I have learned that Surender Mohan Pathak had better slow down to a stately Simenon-like pace, or he'll soon have to express his own output in lakh. At age 70, he has written about 300 novels and translated Ian Fleming and James Hadley Chase into Hindi, the latter while working full-time for the Indian phone company.

Check out Vimal and more at the publisher's Web site, Blaft Publications. And check out this essay on Vimal by Brian Lindemuth, to whom I owe my acquaintance with Vimal.

ਬੱਲੇ!, which means, roughly speaking, "Vimal is one righteous dude!"

P.S. Vimal apparently means "clean, pure, spotless" in Sanskrit, and yet Vimal is just one of the hero's many names ...

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Happy New Year, and thanks

Everybody and his brother is offering lists of the best books he or she read in 2006, so I'll do something different. Here is some of the crime fiction I've read or am about to read based on recommendations from you these past three months, dear readers. Thanks for letting me know about these wonderful books and authors. These discoveries have been the chief joy of this first venture of mine into blogging.

Happy New Year!

The Big Ask, Shane Maloney
Stiff
Something Fishy
Of All the Bloody Cheek, Frank McAuliffe
Rather A Vicious Gentleman
For Murder I Charge More
The Devil Taker, David Owen
Pig's Head
X and Y
The Dying Trade, Peter Corris
Bad Debts, Peter Temple
Kickback, Garry Disher
Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra
The Turkish Gambit, Boris Akunin

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

R.I.P. Peter O'Donnell, the man behind Modesty Blaise

The Rap Sheet wrote last week about the death of Peter O'Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise, the beautiful, mysterious action heroine who enjoyed a long life in comic strips, novels, and a ludicrous 1966 movie.

I had written about creator and character from time to time, including an observation that Modesty Blaise reminded me of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.

I also enjoyed a collection of the comic strips as examples of brief, punchy storytelling, and I linked to an excellent interview with O'Donnell in Crime Time that revealed the real-life inspiration for Modesty.

And here's part of my answer to a challenging comment on my post about Modesty Blaise and Frank McAuliffe's Augustus Mandrell:

"What makes her a hero a reader can identify with? She does everything you wish you could do, only she does it better: retired from a successful business she started herself, lives an independent life, has money, has sex and love on her own terms, etc. Maybe my earlier reader's comment about wish fulfillment was more to the point.

"In fact, if I were to expand on my comments (but blog posts are best kept short), I'd have noted all the folklore elements that play into her story: the foundling, the wandering child, etc.

"Re gadgets, I'd say they figure into the plot more than now and then, at least in Modesty Blaise [the first novel]. Remember the exploding tie?

"But maybe there's a very subtle message in O'Donnell's use of gadgets. Yes, he'll have Modesty and Willie use them, in part, perhaps, to lull an audience accustomed to such things from James Bond. But, in the end, the deciding factors are more down to earth: Modesty's body and Willie's knife, especially when Modesty uses her body, say, to distract a sadistic jailer, then whacks him with a concealed gadget."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

A new blog from a blogger with good taste

Steve Lewis opens his new Mystery File blog with discussions of two subjects near and dear to me: Augustus Mandrell and Alfred Hitchcock. He says They Shoot Presidents, Don’t They?, the heretofore unpublished "fourth" Augustus Mandrell book, never saw the light of day because author Frank McAuliffe submitted the manuscript just before President Kennedy was assassinated, and the book was cancelled.

That would be interesting, because the first three books were published in 1965, 1968 and 1971. Perhaps They Shoot Presidents contains adventures that Mandrell referred to in the other books and that commentators have suggested were hints or teases, stories never actually written, in the manner of some of the never-written Sherlock Holmes cases that Watson would refer to from time to time. Maybe some of them will turn out to have been "real" cases after all.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

"Hell ... with a good electrician"

You know that nighttime view of Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills that you've seen in a million movies and television shows? (At right, if your memory needs refreshing.)

Here's how the narrator of Alfred Hayes' 1958 novel My Face for the World to See assesses that view:

"Besides, she’d heard it before: I was sure she’d heard it all before . Possibly in a scene that was a close duplicate of this: the car parked in the hills, and two cigarettes, and the town below looking as hell might with a good electrician."

That ought to be enough to persuade anyone that the book, which appeared when disillusion with Hollywood was becoming a staple of American popular culture, is a good deal more that just another self-pitying rant. Even at his most morose and detached, the narrator can crack wise in even better than the best hard-boiled style. And, while the novel is not crime, it is hard-boiled, noir, even.

Elsewhere, I've picked up Brian Garfield's Checkpoint Charlie, a collection of spy stories, hard-boiled but with a touch of the British-style eccentric detective to its protagonist, somewhat in the manner of Frank McAuliffe's wonderful Augustus Mandrell or Michael Gilbert's equally wonderful Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens.  Garfield's creation is not quite up that level, but I like very much the author's description of the character in the volume's introduction (highlighting mine.)::

"He really enjoys only two things: eating, and practicing his trade."

Eating--rather than the more delicate food or, the even delicater fine dining--lets the readers know that their just may be an edge to this Charlie.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014