The Five Faces of Fear

Jay Eales The Five Faces of Fear (2013)
Darn - I really should have got around to this one sooner, and I'm not sure quite why I didn't. My general dislike of eBooks would be one significant factor. I find the whole Kindle deal unpleasant, and not really at all like reading a book as I recognise it; so with forty or more big, fat paperbacks stacked in a tall, sexy pile awaiting my attention, it's easy to forget I also have a specifically new arrangement of zeros and ones stored on that black square thing. Additionally I realise I have begun to resent these Señor 105 novellas by some peculiar psychological convolution of association.

Señor 105, for those who don't know, is a masked and vaguely supernatural Mexican wrestler who has adventures in the tradition of some of the weirder Luchador films. He was created by Cody Schell, and the plan was for one of these eBook novellas to appear every few months in the general spirit of a comic book or the pulp magazines of the thirties and forties - to which Señor 105's escapades allude to some degree. The thing which pisses me off, and which forms the core of my great big metaphysical ball of bad vibes, is the love and effort which has gone into this series in contrast with the general indifference which has greeted it.

So far as I am aware, the main Señor 105 sales drive has been on Gallifrey Base, an internet forum populated by Doctor Who fans. Señor 105 first appeared in an Iris Wildthyme story, Iris Wildthyme being a character created by Paul Magrs who turns up in some of his Doctor Who fiction; so I suppose you could call this a spin off of a spin off of a spin off, if your criteria is centred upon degrees of separation from the logo of a corporate entertainment franchise.

Gallifrey Base has about four million members, and there's a fair few of them hanging around in the section specifically concerned with books, which is the virtual arena in which our man has had some coverage. Señor 105 novellas are short - so they don't take too long to read - they're cheap, they're fun, and they're eBooks so it's not like the space they take up on a shelf is valuable space which could be better employed as home to The Brilliant Book of Doctor Who Sink Plungers and Plumbing Accessories or some other indispensable masterpiece; and guess what? Ignoring the fact of my having written one, they're pretty damn readable and pretty damn great.

Despite this, sales have been depressingly limited because - well, take a wild fucking stab...

—Here, take a look at this. You might like it.

Does it feature that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as the Doctor?

—No, but it's still pretty good.

I don't understand.

You do something nice for people. You spend an hour or so preparing chicken in walnut sauce, and they'll tell you it looks delicious but they're really in the mood for McDonalds, and would you like us to bring you back an Egg McMuffin, and oh you should try one - they're really nummy.

Anyway, to get to the point, The Five Faces of Fear is another hit, or should have been. Jay Eales writes tight yet breezy prose with confidence and the sort of attention to certain kinds of detail which make him a perfect fit for this sort of story. His Mexicana rings true, giving this the genuine feel of a written equivalent to Luchador movies with familiar Cantinflas types staggering in and out of the pulquerias in the background, and even that same peculiarly pensive pacing one sees in certain films of that era, and specifically films which saw no contradiction in wedding ludicrous slapstick to high drama, although this is probably unavoidable if one of your supporting characters is a sentient gas inhabiting a balloon.

Sheila was positively fizzing with excitement. Señor 105 had asked her to undertake a secret mission for him. For this vitally important escapade, she had decided to wear her most inconspicuous balloon, one that was the colour of sand. Rodrigo had done his bit to help by drawing a big curly moustache and sunglasses on it with marker pen.

Without giving too much away, the story is pacey and all very enjoyable, roughly speaking Señor 105's own version of the X-Men's Days of Future Past. It's dramatic where it needs to be and funny where it needs to be without pulling faces or planting whoopee cushions on your chair. It doesn't contain the meaning of life, but then it doesn't need to.

The Five Faces of Fear is another wonderfully written little gem which will probably remain ignored for no good reason whatsoever, and now I need to download the one by Stewart Sheargold.

Available from this site right now for peanuts. Just buy it.

Zenith Lives!

Stuart Douglas (editor) Zenith Lives! (2012)
As a kid, Nigel Bruce and Basil Rathbone so impressed me in those Sherlock Holmes films as to necessitate a trip to the library in search of Arthur Conan Doyle's originals; but beyond that - and I suppose Victor Drago, the Sexton Blake that never was in the short lived Tornado comic - detective fiction has never really grabbed me. Even as Obverse announced this collection of stories featuring Sexton Blake's albino nemesis, I was thinking of Nils-Olof Franzén's Agaton Sax, probably because they're both fictional detectives and the latter was published in England with illustrations by another Blake, and they both have an x in their names. Therefore it's fair to say that I don't really know Sexton Blake from a hole in the ground, but here I am offering my pearls of wisdom regardless.

The first Sexton Blake story appeared in 1893 and the character has been solving crimes and getting into fights ever since - roughly speaking the Sherlock Holmes whose pint you really shouldn't spill, with Zenith amongst his more distinctive foes.

Mark Hodder was an obvious choice of author for this collection, his being a long time Blake aficionado - owner of the world's largest collection of Sexton Blake periodicals no less - and somewhat nifty with a biro in his own right. Of course he delivers the goods, perfectly invoking time and place without recourse to nostalgia or writing as though perched before the typewriter sucking on a pipe with Max Miller blasting away in the background. Zenith's pulp origins are acknowledged without The Blood of our Land reading like a pastiche, and as always Mark Hodder writes with a sense of purpose and moral conscience which elevate his narrative some way above being mere romp.

Others here are perhaps less faithful to the general tradition of Blake, but nonetheless enjoyable for all that the Zenith character is in part used as springboard more than subject.

Paul Magrs' All the Many Rooms roughly amounts to Michael Moorcock at his nuttiest remixed by Nurse With Wound, even resorting to non-sequiturial lists of names and somehow getting away with it - which I'm not sure I've seen before. It actually reminds me a little of the sort of thing Moorcock once published in New Worlds magazine, and I mean in a good way.

Speaking of Moorcock, he too is present - arguably another obvious choice having cut his publishing teeth at the offices of Fleetway's Sexton Blake Library, later writing Seaton Begg, his own idiosyncratic interpretation revived here for Curaré.

George Mann and Stuart Douglas round up the collection with neat little tales, both relatively low on incident but told with such engaging prose that it's not a problem. I only really know of George Mann as editor to a couple of excellent Solaris Books anthologies a few years back, but he's very clearly a talent in his own right; as is Stuart Douglas, despite his own protestations to the contrary.

Zenith Lives! may take some liberties with the Sexton Blake tradition, but is nevertheless a great collection, possibly Obverse's best thus far in terms of consistent quality. Having recently acquired the rights to originate and publish new Sexton Blake material, I'd say the detective is in good hands with Obverse, and it would be nice to see lengthier efforts from at least Mark Hodder and George Mann very soon.