The Music Of The Spheres

The Music Of The Spheres, by Allister Thompson

April, 2021  Independently Published

I recently went on another of my rock novel kicks and started trying to find a novel I’d come across the mention of years ago, something about a prog rock band. At the time I wasn’t into prog rock so didn’t look further into the book, the title of which now escapes me. But I’m into prog rock now, baby, so I went on a hunt for “novel about a prog rock band.” I never did manage to find the novel I’d come across the mention of years ago, but somehow I did manage to end up finding out about a writer named Allister Thompson and his recently-published rock novel The Music Of The Spheres, a sort of alternate-history rock novel (set in 1968) in which psychedelic rock bands are the vanguard of free speech in a corporate and drug-controlled world. 

Running to 270 pages, The Music Of The Spheres does a fine job of bringing to life this strange alternate 1968; Thompson sprinkles background material into the narrative instead of shoehorning in all of his world-building. But we learn that for one, the United States never existed in this timeline, with the Americas still a colony of the Empire. Also, despite being set in 1968, there’s an almost sci-fi vibe to the novel, with entire cities covered in domes and such advanced technology that compact discs have recently been introduced into the late 1960s music market. 

Despite this, the rockers of our real world still proliferate, though in alternate forms and with names that are jokes on their real-world counterparts. For example, psychedelic voyagers The Peuce Frank, with lead guitarist Bill Fillmour and acid casualty former lead singer Ned Barrett, is clearly intended to be Pink Floyd, just as jazzy psych voyagers The Flying Teapots are intended to be Gong. Better yet, we have meat-eating, right-winged Ned Loogeant and his band the Muttonchop Killers, known for their hatred of all things hippie – not to be confused, of course, with Ted Nuget and the Amboy Dukes. Thompson fills the novel with jokey fake band names that are plays on real-world bands, but occasionally will slip in reference to a real group – for example I caught references to The Pretty Things, Kaleidoscope, and Fairport Convention. 

The opening of The Music Of The Spheres is especially cool. Hero Simon Hastings (the novel is told in third-person, by the way, but we have a first-person opening by a narrator – a scholar telling us this story in the format of a novel – who will occasionally pop up in the narrative) is with his band the Spheres in New York, about to play a concert with the Muttonchop Killers and The Asparagus Stalks, “a group of white Hundu vegetarians who propounded their creed via the new hard rock genre, a style of music highlighted by an overpowering use of distortion.” 

Thompson slowly brings us into this world, in which all drugs have been legalized – at least, those that are not deemed to be addictive. It’s a sort of dystopia, with the Cartels running South America (again, the novel’s 1968 seems to be taken from future decades) and the corporations running the West, and the rock groups are allowed to exist so as to be heroes for the people. It’s a cool conceit, with these pyschedelic rockers nearly seen as superheroes by the downtrodden masses, their art welcomed by a drug-addled community. Visionaries who are given free reign to pursue their most crazed excesses – in other words, it’s a late ‘60s in which the whole space rock/prog rock thing was fully formed…and the more out-there musicians are the ones at the forefront. Time moves so fast in this world that even previous trendsetters “The Beach Bums” and whatever the fake Beatles name was (I forget) have been pushed aside by the burgeoning space rock scene. As for the Rolling Stones, they’re a Mick and Keith-lacking group called the Wylde Flowers which goes more for improvisation on drums, bass, and organ. 

Our hero is referred to as “Hastings” throughout, and I thought it was strange that we’d refer to our “hippie” hero by his last name. But then, Simon Hastings doesn’t come off much like a hippie…he’s in his early 30s and is a bit too posh and reserved. I mean, “hippie” is a pretty specific term, referring to a specific type of person, and not an accurate description of Simon Hastings. I just chalked this up as another of those alternate reality differences, as Hastings is called a “hippie” by all and sundry, including his dad when Hastings goes back to London to visit him. 

For me the main problem with The Music Of The Spheres is this cool world of free drugs and cosmos-soaring acid rockers isn’t as exploited as it could be; instead, we take a turn in the first quarter into a murder-conspiracy angle, and despite returning to the “rock novel” setup around page 150 Thompson still keeps focusing on the murder and the conspiracy. I just didn’t find this nearly as compelling as the world itself; the fifty-page opening sequence alone, in which Hastings and his band, the Hawkwind analogue The Spheres, take a variety of drugs in perparation for their upcoming gig, watching as the Muttonchop Killers get in a fistfight with the Asparagus Stalks (who just want to do a little group meditation). 

But then Guy Calvert, charismatic lead singer and poet of The Spheres (not to be confused with Robert Calvert of Hawkwind, of course), ODs on stage – a parallel of the climactic incident in the earlier rock novel Triple Platinum. And, as with that novel, we’ll find that there was more behind this death than just wanton drug use, though that’s what the cops chalk it up as. Thompson has it that the rock scene is so hated by straight society that cops rarely investigate claims of murder or foul play in the hippie world, thus the cops on the scene declare that Guy got what was coming to him, what with all his drug use, and there’s no “murder” to investigate. 

So the frustrating thing is…we don’t even get to see anything with the Spheres! The first pages build up this world, with Hastings and his group about to have their big gig, supporting their latest album…and Calvert dies almost as soon as the gig starts (though of course first he confirms that his mellotron is set up!), and next thing you know the band’s broken up and Hastings is on his way down to Colombia to track down the man he thinks murdered Guy – a Hispanic type who showed up with a lot of new drugs for the band to try, eagerly encouraging them and then watching from the wings as if waiting for something bad to happen to them. In other words, he was an assassin, psychedelic drugs his weapon of choice, and Hastings spends some pages finding out who he is and where he came from. 

As mentioned the novel takes place in a world that seems curiously modern, so this South America is run by the cartels (even the airlines!), and cocaine dust is funnelled into the air pumps for the domed city. I did really enjoy this “drugged-out future” scenario but don’t feel that it was sufficiently exploited, either; Hastings starts off the novel as a partaker of these weird drugs, but after Guy’s murder he abstains for the most part. But those opening 50 pages are cool, though – Hastings, for example, starts off the novel taking something called a “C-Enhancer,” a drug which allows him to feel the emotions of those around him. 

Actually, the first half of The Music Of The Spheres had me experiencing déjà vu. The psychedelic superhero protagonists, the wanton drug use, the alternate ‘60s setting, the general British vibe – finally I realized it reminded me of the obscure British comic Storming Heaven, which I reviewed here back in 2010. The Music Of The Spheres is similar in many regards to that comic, minus of course actual superhero stuff. I found the odd little touches the coolest, like a minor mention of a current craze in which London juveniles wear eerie blue lenses that cover their eyes, making them look like little aliens. 

The novel also picks up the vibe of another book I reviewed here: namely, The Psychedelic Spy. Hastings hooks up with a cartel operative in Colombia who gives him a special pistol, which reminded me of the special gun used in that earlier novel. Not that Hastings becomes a spy. Instead, he heads back to London and here, near the midway point, the novel gets back into the “rock novel” vibe, with Hastings and his former bandmates putting together a new group, to be named Astronomy. Again they are essentially Hawkwind, and also Hastings’s American girlfriend Teresa plays keyboards. 

That’s right, girlfriend. For a novel about a drugged-out rocker, The Music Of The Spheres is G-rated in the sex department. Typical of a novel written today, there is zero exploitation of any female characters – the only characters who show any libido are the pricks in the Muttonchop Killers, and given the derision everyone treats them with, it’s clear these inclinations are to be seen with dismay. My Trash Senses were already tingling in the first few pages, in which Hastings thinks of his girlfriend, and we’re told he’s always been “a one-woman guy.” Sadly, the Sleaze-O-Meter stayed at one or below for the entirety of the novel; even when said girlfriend, Teresa, finally appears halfway through the book, she spends the majority of the novel ranting against the establishment and pushing Hastings to fight for socialism. 

We have some stuff with Astronomy touring around Europe – including an appearance of a pseudo-Can (twenty years ago I was obsessed with Can, but these days I can barely stand to listen to them). And Thompson actually describes the music (according to his bio, he himself was once in a prog band), so unlike a lot of the “rock novels” I’ve reviewed here we actually get an idea of what some of these songs sound like. I also loved how a mellotron was mentioned throughout the text. But gradually the “conspiracy” angle comes back, climaxing in a cool scene where Hastings uses that special sonic gun he was given in Colombia. The finale of the novel has Hastings finding out that someone is targeting the top “radicals” in the rock movement, Guy having been one of the victims and Hastings finding his own name on the target list. It all climaxes with Hastings infiltrating the fortress of a German pharma company that is the main psychedelic drug provider of the West – again, all like a spy novel. 

I haven’t mentioned yet, but The Music Of The Spheres is self-published. I have to say though, judging from the self-published books I’ve read over the years, the old saw about self-published books being poorly written should be dismissed these days. What I’m trying to say is, the novel is very well written, and Thompson keeps the narrative moving, though sometimes he summarizes events that I felt should have been dwelt more upon. My main contention was that the book panned out to be something different than what I expected – I still think the concept of a legion of drug-fueled psychedelic shaman-rockers acting as the “voice” of the collective masses is ripe for potential, so maybe Thompson could do another book in this world and remove the crime and conspiracy angles.

Len Levinson Back In Print

I meant to post this back in September, but better late than never, I guess. Thanks to Devin Murphy of Destroyer Books, six novels by Len Levinson are back in print, in both paperback and eBook editions. 

The six books are:

The Bar Studs 
Doom Platoon
Inside Job
The Goering Treasure 
Without Mercy 
Operation: Perfidia (with a new, never-before-published ending)

The print editions all look great and are trade paperback size. These six are the first in “The Len Levinson Collection,” but to quote those ads in the back of old Pinnacle paperbacks, there will hopefully be “more to come…”

Here’s a direct link to the Len Levinson Collection on Amazon.

The Camp

The Camp, by Jonathan Trask
No month stated, 1977  Belmont Tower Books

An interesting obscurity in the work of Len Levinson, The Camp is notable because it was a collaboration between Len and his editor at Belmont Tower, Peter McCurtin. Len provides the full story below, but long story short, McCurtin came up with the plot, wrote the first chapter, and then handed it over to Len, who ran with it.

Speaking of obscure, The Camp is real obscure, even for one of Len’s Belmont books; the only other review you can currently find of it online is by Marty McKee. Thus once again I have to bemoan the fate of Len’s early books, the majority of which deserved better distribution and recognition. While I wouldn’t rank The Camp as a lost pulp masterwork like his earlier Shark Fighter, it is still a fun and breezily-written tale that attempts in its short length to tap into the post-Watergate paranoia that gripped the nation in the mid-to-late 1970s.

Our narrator is Phillip “Phil” Gordon, a ‘Nam Green Beret who now works as a reporter for Tomorrow magazine, which is dedicated to outing corruption and whatnot. Phil regales us with stories of the many powerful men he has toppled, and then informs us that “last summer” he went up to northern Maine for a much-needed vacation, to reconnect with the land in which he’d been born. The novel is his report of what happened to him there.

I’m not sure if I would’ve recognized this without knowing beforehand that Len and McCurtin co-wrote the novel, but the switchover after chapter one is very apparent. In McCurtin’s hands Phil comes off as a lazy sort who seems more curious than intrigued by the strange tale told by his old Indian pal, Jimmy Jacks; Jimmy informs Phil that one of his nephews, who was like a son to him, has gone missing, last seen as he was attempting to get a closer look at the mysterious new Army base that’s been built about five miles away, deep in the Maine woods.

Jimmy himself is vastly different in McCurtin’s first chapter; all he wants to do is drink beer, eat bear steak, and watch old Westerns on TV. But then Phil slouches off for bed, chapter two begins, and Len takes over – and suddenly Jimmy is waking Phil up, armed with a bow and arrow and ready to go out into the woods and kick some ass. The affable drunk of chapter one has become a “native warrior” type who dispenses his wisdom as he moves stealthfully and swiftly as a fox through the darkened forest.

Phil changes, too; per the standard Len Levinson protagonist type, he’s become a man driven to succeed in life, despite all the odds. Now he’s chomping at the bit to get at the story of “the Camp” – later to be revealed as Camp Butler, an Army installation that doesn’t exist on any record. As a sidenote, I found the name “Camp Butler” interesting, given Len’s later Leisure series Butler, which he wrote under the pseudonym Phillip Kirk. Could he have been flashing back on The Camp when he came up with it?

Sneaking through the barbed wire fence, Jimmy and Phil find a crazed Army base which is more like a prison, with watch towers and roving guard dogs. They find even crazier stuff, like the mutilated remains of a few hippies who have apparently been tied up to a post and used for bayonet practice. After a quick skirmish with the bloodthirsty soldiers who have discovered them – including a bit where Jimmy Jack takes out a bunch of dogs with his arrows – our heroes manage to escape.

Jimmy again proves himself a superhumanly capable person, showing Phil a hidden cave he’s used before, in a ravine outside of the camp’s territory. Hidden by a rock, the cave not only has a fresh-water stream but also a bunch of beef jerky and booze Jimmy has hidden here…just for these sorts of situations, of course. The two stay here for a few days, waiting for the soldiers to stop searching the immediate area. After this Phil heads back home to DC (Phil being one of the few Levinson protagonists who doesn’t live in New York), where he tells his editor that he’s got a whopper of a story.

At 155 pages, The Camp is even shorter than the average ‘70s men’s adventure novel, but Len tries his best to present it as a gripping suspense thriller, concerning a plot that threatens the American way of life. True to the era in which it was written, this means that there are shady political overtones; through a contact, Senator Wingfield, Phil is put in touch with General Ed Sutherland, an old military man who is stationed in the Pentagon and who tells Phil that “a secret government” is threatening to take over the current one.

I forgot to mention – Phil’s meanwhile found the time to sleep with Susan Cole, Wingfield’s pretty secretary. However there’s no funny business at all, Len cutting to the next chapter before the exploitative hijinks start; as a matter of fact, there’s barely any sex or violence in The Camp, even the action scenes going down with little detail of the blood being spilled. But then there really isn’t much detail in the novel, the events transpiring as quickly as Len can pound on his typewriter; I get the feeling that he wrote this particular novel very fast.

General Sutherland proposes Phil with an idea: for Phil to be the general’s inside man and actually be sent to Camp Butler. A soldier can only be ordered to the camp, and even then he must face a tribunal to be accepted; Camp Butler is reportedly the training ground for ultra-special forces. Sutherland relates that it’s really a training ground for a fascist group within the military that plans to take over America. Sutherland plays on Phil’s nature by telling him that it’ll be the story of the century – guaranteed money in Phil’s pocket.

Despite being out of the army for several years (not to mention being out of shape), Phil is able to pass himself off as a bona fide Green Beret with papers forged for him by Sutherland. He meets with the Camp Butler tribunal and gives them a bunch of fascist swill in response to their questions, ie “What would you do about hippies and other protestors?” “I’d kill them or throw them in jail,” and etc. All of it of course over the top – any man on that board would easily know Phil was bluffing – but the tribunal buys his story without question.

The actual material in Camp Butler is unfortunately brief. Phil spends a whopping single day there. In his entrance with the other camp recruits he’s informed that all of his ranking is now moot; you’re either a private or a captain here, a leader or a slave. But when Phil is bullied by his drill seargent – who has the right to beat his recruits to death, by the way; another Camp Butler oddity – he refuses to back down.

“I shit on your mother’s soul, you fat fuck,” Phil tells the seargent, in what is probably the greatest put-down in literary history. This obviously leads to a fistfight, in which Phil makes short work of the guy. Then a dude who announes himself as a captain enters the fold, escorting Phil away – and telling him that the only way to succeed at Camp Butler out of the “slave” role is to affront authority. And guess what, within like a few hours of his arrival into camp, Phil has been promoted to a captain!

From here the novel plunges into cartoonishness, likely due to that short wordcount; Phil, brand new at Camp Butler, is able to use his newly-given authority to freely walk around the top-secret camp, and also to find Jimmy Jacks’s three abducted nephews. He even blithely asks where the armory is! So then that night he merely gets up, waltzes to the stockade, informs the guards to let the Indian prisoners go, and then hands them a bunch of guns he’s stolen from the armory! Taking off in a commandeered jeep, they make their escape.

The action scene is quickly rendered, the four men barrelling across the camp fields as they’re chased by foot soldiers and helicopters. For a special forces camp, the soldiers of Camp Butler are not an impressive lot, easily taken down by an out-of-shape ‘Nam vet and a trio of untrained Indian youth. To Len’s credit he explains this away with Phil’s sideline commentary that the Camp Butler soldiers seem more interested in sadism than coordinated action, thus the four are able to get away unscathed.

And guess where they go? Yes, that same hidden cave, where they hide for three whole weeks, Phil almost in a delirium due to a flesh wound he’s suffered in the escape. Rushing for the conclusion, Len employs a requisite downbeat ending, mandatory in the mid-‘70s, in which Phil discovers that no one is interested in his story, once he’s escaped the cave, returned to DC, and written it in a feverish haste – not his editor at the magazine, nor his friend Senator Wingfield, nor even General Sutherland.

Len works this up that all of them are either concerend over the mass panic that would ensue if the story broke, or concerned over the patriotism which would be lost in America, or even that America has already become so desensitized that its citizens need only food and TV to be happy, so who cares if an ultra right-wing group is plotting to take over? The only problem here is that these characters are suddenly presented as villains, which doesn’t jibe with what came before, particularly in the case of General Sutherland; otherwise, why would he have sent Phil to Camp Butler in the first place?

So Phil, escaping an attempt on his life (by none other than Susan Cole, his former bed playmate), heads on down to Mexico, where he has now written down his account of Camp Butler…which is presented as this very novel. His intent is that, couched as “fiction,” the story will get across to Americans, who will head up to northern Maine to see what’s really going on up there at Camp Butler. I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning my trip anytime soon.

What was most enjoyable about The Camp was how Len worked with what was given to him. In addition to the title, plot, and characters, I’m betting McCurtin also gave Len the cover, and insisted he include a scene with it. There’s a part where Phil strangles a Camp Butler guard with the man’s own carbine, and Len writes the sequence exactly as shown on the cover, even down to the detail of the blood drizzling from the guard’s mouth. This brings to mind a real-life incident Len spoofed in The Last Buffoon: when Len was writing The Sharpshooter #5, McCurtin called to tell him to include a part where hero Johnny Rock was being chased by a helicopter, as that was the cover McCurtin was having painted for the novel.

The speedy writing mentioned above does lead to some unintentional humor, like when Phil tells us, “One man can make a difference. I truly believe that. Just look at Woodward and Bernstein.” Uh, Phil – Woodward and Bernstein were two men. Also, the story is not nearly developed as it needed to be, to fully impart the dire ramifations of the men behind Camp Butler; even the bizarre subplot about hippies being murdered is barely explored, and Phil himself seems to forget about it when he’s first relating the horrors of the camp to his editor and friends.

Regardless all of that, this is still a Len Levinson novel, which means there is still a lot of enjoyment in it. His characters still seem to be cut from life, and not the cardboard caracicatures you usually encounter in pulp fiction. Minor characters sparkle with life, like even Susan Cole, who trades barbs with Phil during her unfortunately-brief time in the narrative. And as usual there is a lot of fun dialog, including incidental bits of wisdom sprinkled throughout.

So long story short, while I enjoyed The Camp, I felt that something was missing from it, that it was just too speedy and bare to make a lasting impact. Len, in his comments on the novel below, seems to feel the same way:

The Camp wasn't my idea. Peter McCurtin, editor at Belmont-Tower, wrote the first 30 pages or so, and hired me to finish it. I really don't know why Peter didn't finish it, or what happened. Perhaps he had more commitments than he could handle, because in addition to being an editor, he also wrote novels.

I seem to recall that he left BT around that time, and was replaced by Milburn Smith. I don't know why Peter left, but he embarked on a career of writing novels full time. Occasionally I ran into him on the street, because he also lived in Hell's Kitchen. One day he asked if I knew of inexpensive office space he could rent, because his apartment was too noisy. I told him that if I knew about inexpensive, quiet office space, I'd rent it myself.

I was very fond of Peter's warm, affable personality, especially his sardonic sense of humor. He influenced my writing tremendously, and I'm very sorry he's no longer with us. I hope he's in a quiet corner of heaven now, with a good working typewriter.

I don't remember much about writing The Camp. I just picked up where Peter left off and kept going, creating scenes, situations and characters out of my lurid imagination. Sometimes I wonder what would've become of me if I didn't have a lurid imagination. I might've been a doctor, lawyer or engineer, and led a decent middle class life, instead of low rent paperback commando. But I've never been a very decent person, so I probably ended up where I belonged.

Operation: Perfidia

Operation: Perfidia, by Leonard Jordan
April, 1975  Warner Paperback Library

Very different from any of his other books I’ve yet read, Operation: Perfidia was the first novel published under Len Levinson's “Leonard Jordan” pseudonym (though the book itself is copyright Levinson). Len told me once that this was his attempt at writing a John Le Clarre-type spy thriller, and it shows; while entertaining, Operation: Perfidia lacks the spark of the other Levinson novels I’ve read.

I think this is mainly due to the protagonist of the tale, David Brockman, a CIA agent who has just gotten out of Attica prison after serving eight years. Brockman is nothing like the typical Levinson protagonist: he’s dour, taciturn, and pretty much a cipher. In other words, he’s what you’d expect a real-life spy to be like, a faceless guy you’d forget moments after seeing. And while this could be factored as realistic, it doesn’t work as well when such a character is the star of the show.

Brockman as mentioned has served some serious time – but again, he’s such a blank slate that you get little feel for the hell he’s endured. The thrust of Operation: Perfidia is Brockman’s struggle to find out who set him up for this prison term and why, and also to find out what happened to his wife, Miralia. But he’s so emotionless, so sterile, that the reader feels little empathy for him. I mean, if it had been Alexander Frapkin sent to Attica for eight years, I’d certainly be rooting for him to find out who set him up.

The novel alternates between sections taking place in the “modern day” (which we can determine to be 1972, given that we’re informed Brockman was sent to prison in 1964) and backstory that documents Brockman’s involvement with what would become the Bay of Pigs fiasco, starting in 1960. In the modern section Brockman emerges from Attica as a highly-paranoid person, certain the Agency is stalking him. He’s clueless why he was sent to prison, having been set up on a fake breaking and entering charge, and the reader is gradually brought into his background as Brockman tracks clues around New York.

Another big difference about Brockman is that, unlike the average Levinson protagonist, he isn’t a horndog. Brockman’s still hooked on his wife, a pretty young Cuban revolutionary named Miralia Guzman; we see how they met during one of the flashbacks, while Brockman is stationed in Guatamala in preparation for the Bay of Pigs campaign. Maralia and her brother Julio are high in the revolutionary movement, and she and Brockman get in an argument the first time they meet, given Brockman’s pessimism about the plans for the campaign and its success. However Miralia still comes to him that night, stating that despite their political differences they have an obvious attraction for one another.

Now in the present Brockman wants to find Miralia, who has been missing since he was imprisoned, but to tell the truth it’s not like he’s rabid about it. This factors into the lack of emotion in the book, and Brockman himself – he hasn’t seen Miralia since the day he was arrested, and isn’t even sure if she’s still alive, but the way Brockman goes about trying to find her comes off as almost robotic, as if he’s doing it all by rote, and there doesn’t seem to be much drive behind it. Also, Miralia clearly comes off as a duplicitous person in these flashbacks, so much so that the reader is well ahead of Brockman by the halfway point, when he finally starts to suspect her of having something to do with his incarceration.

Brockman does though score with an old friend of Miralia’s, a heavyset Cuban lady who, having been Miralia’s gynecologist, informs Brockman that Miralia had a secret abortion while she and Brockman were married. The lady throws herself at Brockman, who ends up giving in to temptation, given his eight-year dry spell. But other than that, the sex scenes are relegated to the early ‘60s flashbacks, and there’s really nothing explicit throughout, even so far as the scant action scenes go. Again, the feel of the novel is more of a “straight” or at least standard spy tale, Len trying to keep things realistic.

Another thing missing from the typical Levinson tale is the sparkling cast of supporting characters. Unfortunately, none of them are very memorable, given that Brockman interracts mostly with Cuban rebels or fellow spys, with the former all being staunch idealists and the latter all dour professionals. The only minor character who has any spark is Ollie Rimsen, a circus dwarf who rents one of the rooms in the flophouse Brockman calls home in New York in the modern sections. In his few pages Ollie makes more of an impression on the reader than any other character in the novel, but unfortunately he’s gone too soon. Even Miralia, who is alternately a loving wife or a potential enemy, doesn’t really grab the reader’s interest.

When the Bay of Pigs fiasco goes down just as Brockman predicted, he finds himself an odd man out. Miralia no longer talks to him, too distracted as she waits in campaign headquarters for word of her brother Julio, who was part of the assault. Brockman has submitted many papers to his superiors that the campaign is doomed, but not until afterwards does anyone contact him about this, and this is merely due to the President’s desire to ferret out the people who were behind it and remove them from the Agency. Now Brockman works as a double agent within his own organization, but this subplot doesn’t really go anywhere, Brockman eventually no longer even calling in to report.

There aren’t many action scenes in Operation: Perfidia, though at one point in the modern section Brockman’s jumped by a Latino-looking guy in New York. Brockman takes him out, but we never do find out who the guy was; Brockman assumes he was either CIA or one of the old Cuban revolutionairies. A strange vibe comes to the novel when Brockman gets into the apartment he once shared with Miralia in New York; visions of being tied to a bed and drugged hammer through his mind, and he passes out. Thoroughly rattled, he leaves New York and heads for Miami, where he thinks he’ll finally find Miralia.

The last quarter of the novel mostly takes place in 1963, as Brockman flashes back to a suppressed memory of how he started to suspect Miralia of being unfaithful, given how she’d often head off for New Orleans without him. On one such occasion Brockman followed her, secretly bugging her room; he came to the conclusion that she, Julio, and other Cubans were plotting the assassination of someone, likely Castro. The reader of course guesses they have someone else in mind. And by the time Miralia’s announcing she’s heading down to Dallas one November day, you can see where it’s going.

Here we have a bit more action, as Brockman surprises a group of Cubans in a Dallas hotel with a blazing Colt .45, and then quickly deduces from their radio chatter that they have more men in Dealy Plaza. Getting down there as quickly as possible, given the crush of spectators, Brockman arrives just in time to spot Julio and others toting rifles on the infamous grassy knoll – but when Brockman tries to get help, he discovers this is all much bigger than he suspected.

And actually that’s another problem I have with Operation: Perfidia; the JFK angle is introduced too late, and it’s a bit unbelievable, given how many people Len has involved in it. There’s no way so many people could keep quiet about it, with Brockman the only one who knows the truth – and, of course, suffering for it. For we learn it was his knowledge of who really killed Kennedy that got Brockman set up on that phony breaking and entering rap; that is, after he’d been drugged and brainwashed for a while by his Agency “friends,” Miralia included.

Brockman at least gets revenge, and Len pulls an interesting trick by having Brockman gain vengeance before we learn what exactly happened to him – it’s only after he’s dispensed justice that we get the long flashback to what happened in ’63. But again, his victory is a bit hollow, as despite the fact that Brockman’s life was torn apart eight years ago, the guy is presented as such a bland cipher that you feel little empathy for him, and there’s no vicarious thrill when he gains vengeance.

I enjoyed Operation: Perfidia, but I didn’t love it like many of the other Levinson novels I’ve read. While Len’s writing is strong and fluid, taking you from scene to scene with ease, there was just something off about it, like a sort of sterile feeling. Again, though, this is likely do to Brockman, who himself is pretty sterile. On the plus side, Operation: Perfidia is one of Len’s novels that’s available as an ebook, so be sure to check it out. (The original paperback by the way is deceptively slim – it comes in at 174 pages, but it has eyestrain-inducing small print.)

Len recently sent me his thoughts on the novel, and his comments on the manuscript’s original ending are very interesting:

I wrote Operation: Perfidia circa 1974 and haven’t read it since delivering the ms to Warner. I also never read the paperback published in 1975, assuming it was identical to my ms except for minor editorial fixes to grammar, punctuation and syntax. 

I don’t want to give away the plot because it was supposed to be a psychological thriller. But I will say that it partially concerned the Kennedy Assassination. 

Those of you not alive then probably cannot appreciate the impact of the Kennedy Assassination on America. Some commentators have called it America’s loss of innocence. 

I was working at my desk at Paramount Pictures at 1501 Broadway in NYC when the news broke. Everyone was in a state of shock. At first it wasn’t clear whether JFK was alive or dead. Then the death knell was sounded. The President had been assassinated. 

I couldn’t deal with it. Like many Americans, I believed the Camelot myth. Our beautiful world had been shattered by seemingly demonic forces. 

I went home to my pad on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village and didn’t go out all weekend. My eyes were glued to the television set as horrific events unfolded. I even watched live as Jack Ruby emerged from the crowd and shot the cringing Lee Harvey Oswald. 

In days to come, conspiracy theorists went into high gear. Everyone was blaming everyone else. Few believed the Warren Commission Report. It seemed as if the foundations of America were being shaken. 

I read the Warren Commission Report and many other books and articles on the Kennedy Assassination, many of which contradicted each other. Gradually a theory formed in my mind amidst all the other concerns and hassles swirling around my life at the time. 

I quit PR and became a novelist in 1971. Soon I was writing pulp fiction for a small, not very prestigious publisher named Belmont-Tower that didn’t pay very well. I wanted to elevate myself to a prestigious publisher and make more money. In order to accomplish that great goal, I’d need to write a great novel. What should I write about? 

As I looked the market over, I felt most attracted by the kinds of novels written by John Le Carre, mainly because character development was an important part of his novels. He wasn’t simple-minded like some of the spy writers of that era. 

So I decided to write a John Le Carre-type spy novel that touched on the Kennedy Assassination. I called it Betrayed. The leading man was based loosely on me as a CIA agent. The leading lady was based on my first wife. The plot was based on my assassination theory at the time, which I no longer believe, but was credible and many still believe something like it. 

My then agent Elaine Markson submitted Betrayed to various publishers. An editor at Warner Paperback Library really liked it. I went to his office and he praised it to high heavens. I thought I was on my way to the bestseller list. 

Warner changed the title to Operation: Perfidia. For the first time, I could use whatever name I wanted as author. After much cogitation I decided not to use my real name. The novel was controversial and I thought someone might try to kill me, so decided on my first name and middle name, Leonard Jordan. 

When I received my author’s copies, I was appalled by the cover. It showed a guy holding an automatic rifle of strange manufacture, his trigger hand awkwardly bent. The painting of this guy was amateurish. Obviously Warner didn’t spend much on the cover because evidently the Warner brass didn’t like this book. Naturally it didn’t sell very well, so I returned to Belmont-Tower with my tail between my legs. 

I thought I should read Operation: Perfidia for this article. Having not read it for around 40 years, when I cracked my desk copy open, it read as if written by someone else. I don’t want to sound immodest, but I thought it pretty good. As I read, the story came back to me. I couldn’t wait for the ending, because I remembered it as very powerful and unexpected. 

As the plot was building to my fabulous power ending - SUDDENLY THE STORY CAME TO A SCREECHING HALT! I wondered if the pages has fallen out. It didn’t look that way. Evidently somebody at Warner had chopped off my great ending and written some new tag lines. At first I couldn’t imagine why. It wasn’t a long book to begin with. But publishers often do whatever they want with writers like me who have no clout. 

Then I thought that perhaps Warner might have seen the novel as possible first of a possible series, and wanted to keep the protagonist viable as opposed to the dark end I wrote for him. Whatever happened, the weak cover and new non-ending really torpedoed any chances the novel might’ve had in the market place. 

So that’s the backstory for Operation: Perfidia. It’s now available as an e-book and not selling well despite an intriguing cover. If I had any brains, I wouldn’t confess my true feelings about the truncated ending, because doubtlessly this confession will hurt e-book sales. But you shall tell the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Besides, there are lots of other Len Levinson e-books available with intact endings.

Secret Orders

Secret Orders, by H. Paul Jeffers
October, 1989  Zebra Books

The awesome cover has you expecting a horror novel, but Secret Orders is in fact a conspiracy thriller, one about a former Nazi who now lives in New York City and the group of people who try to bring him and his colleagues to justice. Another misleading thing about the novel is that the back cover and first hundred pages make you assume it takes place in 1989, the year of publication; only after page 100 does author Jeffers bother informing us that all of this occurs in 1967!

Secret Orders is also a novel in search of a protagonist. Is it young Daniel Ben Avram, who opens the tale, a young Israeli secret agent who is sent to the US to discern if wealthy and famous arts patron Peter Helder is in fact former SS concentration camp sadist August Grenier? Or is it David Hargreave, a veteran New York homicide detective who takes over the middle portion of the novel? Or finally is it Alexander Somerfield, a portly former reporter and CIA agent who now makes his living writing mysteries? (The back cover pronounces Somerfield as the hero of the tale; humorously, he doesn’t even appear until about 200 pages in.)

Another issue with the novel is that it starts off so great and then settles in to become for the most part a tepid and bland crawl. But that opening is something else. Young Daniel is summoned from Tel Aviv into Jerusalem, where he meets with his handler Ammon and a famous general, who give Daniel his mission – going undercover to New York City and finding Helder. Here we have several chapters made up of backstory provided by various witnesses, each who tells us who Helder was in the war and how he got his sordid kicks.

Before the war Helder was also into the occult, and after joining both the Thule and Vril societies he became obsessed with harnessing the “vril” power from other humans. So we learn that, while he ran the concentration camp, Helder would have young men stripped down and shackled up, hook up electrodes to their testicles, force them to masturbate, and then switch on the electricity when they orgasmed! Oh, and while doing this he’d wear a leather face mask with zipper slits for the mouth.

And it keeps on going…given that Helder’s gay and Daniel’s posing undercover, this means that Daniel has to move through the NYC underworld of gay bars. Yes, there’s even a scene where he buys leather chaps and etc to complete the look, in the hopes of sauntering into one of the clubs and catching Helder’s eye! Of course it works, and soon Daniel is hanging around with Helder, going with him to fancy restaurants and the occasional leather club; a recurring joke is Daniel’s certainity that Helder will soon make the expected pass at him, but Daniel’s not certain how he’ll react.

Just when it’s all getting nice and lurid the narrative jumps over to David Hargreave, an old cop who is close to retirement. All the lurid stuff evaporates from the novel, along with Daniel himself, who just disappears – it isn’t until nearly the very end that we discover what happened to him. Meanwhile Helder is dead, hanging nude from the secret dungeon beneath his Manhattan art gallery, a leather zipper mask covering his face.

This sequence is a bit trying. Hargreave is a fine character, but after the forward momentum of the opening several chapters with Daniel, this slower-paced police procedural stuff just brings the novel to a dead halt. Even more damning, Jeffers repeats a ton of information here, with Hargreave methodically discovering stuff about Helder that we readers already know.

There’s even an extended bit where Ammon, who has come to NYC looking for Daniel, finds Daniel’s journal, and Jeffers writes out most of the entries in the book – taken word-for-word from earlier scenes with Daniel! My assumption is that this is yet another indication of Zebra’s bizarre policy of making their paperback originals nice and long; Secret Orders could stand to loose a hundred or so pages, easy.

Another character here who gets a bunch of narrative time is a grubby reporter, who mostly serves as the impetus for getting Alexander Somerfield into the tale. Castle style, Somerfield is wealthy from his writing but still enjoys digging up real-life crimes and whatnot. A former spy, Somerfield was more along the lines of a courier, never getting into any sort of action or trouble. In fact what most draws him to the Helder case is the potential for new book material.

I bring up Castle for a reason. While it’s an okay show, I’ve noticed that, for a world-famous author, Castle never friggin writes. For that matter, the son of a bitch never even mentions books! In fact the whole show presents a misguided view of the author’s life – don’t be interested in books and seldom if ever write, and you too can be a wealthy novelist. But anyway, as it so happens Secret Orders proves how boring Castle would be if its titular character was more engaged in the act of writing and the world of books – because, my friends, Alexander Somerfield is a snoozer of a protagonist.

For one, the dude is almost a clone of Hargreave (who himself was a well-read sort prone to dropping literary allusions and esoteric quotations), but secondly, all Somerfield talks about or thinks about are books. I mean, it’s cool in a way, I myself am a book lover and all, but honestly if I was investigating a case where a former Nazi was found hanging nude with a leather mask on his face, I really don’t think I’d be walking around quoting Fitzgerald or Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

What I mean to say is, Alexander Somerfield is a boring protagonist for such a compelling plot – at least, a plot that starts off so compelling. The pulp material calls for a pulp protagonist, and Daniel fit the bill nicely. Like me you will no doubt miss him when he disappears from the text. He is much better than the overfed, Sherlock Holmes-obsessed bore who eventually takes his place. The Vril Society stuff, Helder’s occult background and interests, etc, all of it goes away and instead we get long scenes of Somerfield standing around and thinking about this or that book.

Which brings me back to the plot – it eventually develops that Helder was a member of the Atlantis Club, a global membership of the uber-wealthy which sort of seems based on the Freemasons. The back cover has you expecting a story about an underground society of former Nazis who have infiltrated the US government (ie Operation Paperclip, or even the COMCON storyline), but this is not to be – all such promise is lost as the novel settles into repetition and blandness. It becomes a simple murder mystery instead of a conspiracy thriller, as Somerfield tries to figure out who killed Helder.

Maybe Jeffers was going for something here – it’s hard not to notice how the youthful and brash Daniel is replaced by not one but two protagonists who are over-the-hill and heavyset, older men who are veteran thinkers and more prone to using their heads to solve a case. And really, bringing such “real-life” type protagonists to a pulpy spy tale is fine…as long as you don’t open the tale with talk about the Thule and Vril Societies and a dude in a leather mask who fries young men while they masturbate…I mean, that just sets the reader up for a whole different sort of novel than something “real-life.”

The Killing Of RFK

The Killing Of RFK, by Donald Freed
September, 1975  Dell Books

The JFK assassination gets all of the attention, but I’ve always been more interested in the assassination of RFK. With its “lone gunman” who to this day can’t remember pulling the trigger, allegations of MKUltra brainwashing, obvious LAPD coverup, and most compelling of all the infamous Lady in the Polka Dot Dress, the June 1968 murder of Bobby Kennedy is just downright weird.

This paperback original from Dell (my favorite publisher, by the way) is courtesy Donald Freed, a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter who previously co-authored a similar work on JFK, titled Executive Action. Some day I plan to read it, as I’m sure there are elements in The Killing Of RFK that reflect back to that earlier work. This novel opens on June 7th, 1968, the day after RFK’s death (he was shot after 12AM, June 5th, but died on the 6th), and as Ted Kennedy delivers a televised eulogy we meet our two ostensible protagonists, Paul Woods and Judith Shankman.

Paul, a black ex-Secret Service agent who was part of JFK’s retinue but fired after 1963 due to his allegations that the assassination was part of a conspiracy, now works as “Public Relations” for RFK. His job, we learn as the novel unfolds, is basically to provide clandestine back-up security. He’s also in love with Judith Shankman, a white former radical (or somesuch) who previously backed Hubert Humphrey. How she met Paul and indeed what exactly she brings to this tale is something Freed doesn’t really provide much detail on.

We then flash back to April, 1968; the novel never returns to the June 7th section, thus the opening pages of the novel are also the narrative’s end. (I even re-read this section after finishing the book, to see if it provided any hints of what was in store for our protagonists, but really it doesn’t.) These early chapters are very heavy in late ‘60s politics, and some of the names dropped were from before my time. However Freed captures the feel of the era, with Paul and Judith swept up in the idealism of RFK’s candidacy. Kennedy himself rarely appears in the narrative, and when he does it’s only from a distance, or on TV or radio.

Gradually Freed breaks away from these two charactes and weaves in the darker material we’ve come for. This presents itself in the creepy character of William A. Must, Jr, another former intelligence agent who now is also a self-styled “public relations” worker. Freed never outright states who gives Must his orders, his funding, or who indeed he now works for, but we do eventually learn that he was formerly CIA and was part of the task force that killed JFK. In fact we eventually learn that the Kennedy brothers actually created the task force that caused their own deaths; agents who were selected to take part in the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco. After that fell through, this contingent of CIA agents went rogue and first took out JFK, now setting their sights on RFK, mostly to keep him from re-investigating his brother’s murder.

Must has already selected his patsy, a Palestinian immigrant with occult leanings. Interestingly enough, Sirhan Sirhan is never named in the novel; he’s always referred to by the codename Must gives him, “Saladin.” And yes, Freed puts quotation marks around the name every single time he writes it! Must’s never-outright-stated plan is to brainwash Saladin into wanting to kill RFK, and to do so Must blackmails a gorgeous behavioral psychologist (with a brick shithouse bod, naturally) named Helen Dukemejian.

The most interesting character by far, Helen will become the Lady in the Polka Dot Dress. She’s 30, of Armenian descent, and grew up in war-torn Europe. Now she works in UCLA’s Violence Research Center (which doesn't exist in reality, though I read somewhere that one was planned to be built in the early '70s), where she carries out some pretty twisted experiments on test subjects both animal and human. Helen has done work for the CIA in the past, though against her will; they use her, basically, and gradually Must reveals to her that this is because Helen’s decades-missing father was a member of the infamous Ustaci, a Croatian terrorist group with fascist leanings. Helen’s father has been captured in Sweden, and the only thing that could exonerate him would be for the Agency to reveal that he was a double agent…something, Must assures her, the CIA would be just thrilled to do, in exchange for Helen carrying out this little project for them.

One of the more creepy aspects of the RFK puzzle is, if Sirhan really was brainwashed into his actions, then how in the world did the CIA pick him? That to me is one of the weirdest things…if they could pick some anonymous, penniless immigrant to become their patsy, then no one is safe. (In an interesting bit early on, Freed has it that before finding Sirhan Must had a black patsy pegged, but the man went rogue and escaped.) Helen insinuates herself into Saladin’s life, posing as a co-ed who herself is into the occult and etc, and posthaste Saladin’s fallen for the “stacked” brunette.

The narrative gets a bit lopsided, as previously Paul Woods and Judith Shankman were the stars of the show, but they basically disappear for a long stretch as Freed focuses on this storyline, which, truth be told, is more compelling. After breaking down Saladin’s emotional barriers (and it takes Helen a few tries to get him to sleep with her, due to how introverted and innocent he is) Helen moves on to the actual brainwashing and political invective. Sex, drugs, hypnotism, and Clockwork Orange-style film subjection are the tools at Helen’s disposal, and within a few weeks she has almost succeeded in creating a regular Manchurian Patsy.

Must meanwhile puts together his hit team; one of them is a former ‘Nam Green Beret named James Jerrold, who unfortunately disappears soon after being introduced into the narrative. But this happens throughout and at times Freed has a tough time juggling his large cast of characters. And also to note, The Killing Of RFK is much heavier on dialog and character and scene-setting, with very little action. However Freed is good at setting up scenes, of getting us into the heads of his characters (even Must’s, who despite being the villain has his own reasons for doing what he does).

The stuff with Saladin’s programming almost could come out of The Mind Masters; even Helen’s initial meeting with Must at the Violence Research Center is like something by John Rossmann, only slightly less expository. Must pressures Helen to move faster, as he wants RFK dead within a certain timeframe. This leads to the infamous Sirhan notebook entry where Helen asks a hypnotized and drugged Saladin about RFK, and Saladin sits and scrawls “RFK must die” over and over again.

Freed also incorporates known elements from the conspiracy, like the fact that Sirhan was seen in the days before the assassination in various places, from a gun shop to various gun ranges, always in the presence of “Arabic”-looking men; Freed has it that these are agents who work for “The Arab,” another of Must’s functionaries, and one who takes over Saladin when Must deems that Helen’s brain-programming isn’t proceeding fast enough.

When we get back to Paul and Judith, they’re still part of “the Candidate’s” whirlwind tour of the states as he makes his way to Los Angeles for the primaries. Paul has made contact with an FBI agent who, after pinning down Must as the man who put a “superbug” on Kennedy’s phone, manages to stumble upon Saladin and Helen at an RFK rally. He immediately suspects something strange about them, Saladin and his glassy eyes in particular. (Also, this dude reveals the fact that Must was the guy who posed as Oswald in Mexico.)  

Finally everything converges on the night of June 4, 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in LA. Must’s team is here in various disguises, posing as hotel workers and such, while Helen, in a polka dot dress, leads around a dazed and hypnotized Saladin. Curiously Freed makes Helen’s choice of the polka dot dress arbitrary, merely mentions she’s wearing it, when by all accounts it must’ve had something to do with Sirhan’s programming. The several witnesses of the infamous polka dot dress lady all said that the dress was rather weird looking, frumpy almost, and not at all flattering to what was otherwise described as a very pretty, very “built” lady. (But then, Freed also makes no mention of the strange story of John Fahey, a man who claims he spent the day of June 4th with the polka dot dress woman – and those who toss off his story as a tall tale are stymied when they discover that a sketch artist made a drawing of the lady’s face under Fahey’s descriptions, and when this drawing was later shown to Vincent DiPierro, a man who saw the polka dot lady closeup on the night of June 4th, DiPierro said the drawing was identical to the woman he saw standing beside Sirhan.)

Freed ramps up the tension here, as Paul sends Judith upstate to get a drawing of Saladin from his FBI contact, all of this going down during the primary festivities. Meanwhile a zombiefied Saladin stumbles about the Ambassador, Helen guiding him – Freed doesn’t go into Sirhan’s hypnosis-derived memories of pouring coffee for a pretty “Armenian” woman in a polka dot dress who asked for lots of cream and sugar (likely the trigger phrase that activated Sirhan, as this is his last memory until after RFK was shot) and then lead him “into a dark place.” Instead Freed has Saladin already hypnotized fully into kill mode, even though he’s not intended to be the actual assassin – but, as Must says, if Saladin actually does manage to shoot Kennedy, so much the better.

Of course Judith gets back too late to give the drawing of Saladin to Paul, and besides the Ambassador is filled to capacity with cheering throngs. Freed closes the novel with the assassination, with Saladin firing madly while Must’s top agent closes in and fires directly into the back of Kennedy’s head. After which Helen flees from the scene, screaming “We’ve shot him!” in horror, which again goes against the grain of the many eyewitnesses, who claimed that the lady in the polka dot dress yelled out this phrase happily, like she was celebrating RFK’s death. More upsetting though is that Freed doesn’t let us know what happens to Helen – does Must reunite her with her father, per his promise? Or does Must have her taken out, a possibility he intimates to one of his cronies, given that “the woman knows too much?”

But then, Freed leaves many questions unanswered, perhaps his way of mirroring in fiction the enigma that is the RFK assassination, a puzzle that has even more layers than the more famous JFK assassination. Now, as for the book’s style and quality. Freed’s writing is very good, though at times he goes for more of a literary feel, getting in the heads of his characters and focusing more on their memories and impressions than the action. Unfortunately however Freed is a hardcore POV-hopper, so the reader’s left unsettled sometimes as the perspective switches between paragraphs (sometimes within the paragraph), jumping from one character to another. As for the trash quotient, it’s there moreso in the creepy feel of Helen’s brainwashing of Saladin, but Freed does sleaze it up a bit in the two sex scenes between them, with lots of mentions of “full breasts” and “wet thighs.”

Anyway, I really did enjoy The Killing Of RFK, mostly because I’d recently become re-interested in the RFK assassination after a period of several years, so the discovery of this book was fortuitous. Freed states in his acknowledgements that he’d spoken with police and government authorities who gave him information “off the record,” and a lot of what he writes does dovetail with what’s now known about the assassination, though he does leave some things out, likely because he was writing before they were revealed. (For example the revelation that the LAPD destroyed all evidence from the case, even photos that were taken of RFK while he was being shot!) But overall it was an entertaining novel – though there was never a film version, despite what the cover proclaims.