The Peeping Tom Murders (Morocco Jones #3)

The Peeping Tom Murders, by Jack Baynes

No month stated, 1958  Crest Books

Hardboiled junkies with a quarter to burn would’ve been well-pleased to discover Morocco Jones, but I’m assuming the series didn’t gain much traction in its day. The Peeping Tom Murders is more hardboiled in its approach than the previous two books, with Morocco in seedy Los Angeles and trying to figure out who murdered a movie star and her husband. 

I’m under the impression book producer Lyle Kenyon Engel was at least aware of this series; it seems very in-line with the paperbacks he would produce the following decade, particularly Nick Carter: Killmaster. This is mainly in how Morocco is a former globetrotting secret agent, and also how the books are written in third-person instead of the more hardboiled-esque first person. Even the narrative style of Jack Baynes (aka Bertram Fowler, apparently, but as with my previous two reviews I’ll refer to him by his much-cooler pseudonym) is similar to the house style Engel would instill in his productions. 

And on that note, The Peeping Tom Murders is almost like something Manning Lee Stokes would’ve written for Engel in later years, with an unwieldy plot and an ever-growing cast of characters. The only thing it lacks that Stokes would’ve brought is a lurid quotient; the uncredited cover art is the most lurid thing about The Peeping Tom Murders. But it’s misleading, as it doesn’t depict a sequence in the novel; the beautiful young starlet is already murdered before Morocco Jones arrives on the scene, so there’s no half-nude corpse for him to look at through a window. 

There’s also no pickup from previous volumes, nor an appearance of Morocco’s recurring cast of characters, the General and Llora. The former is only mentioned in passing and Llora is often thought of, but Morocco proves his macho worth by sleeping with some random lady during the course of this novel, even if he suspects Llora is the perfect woman for him! But folks that’s the biggest difference between Morocco Jones and the men’s adventure novels of later decades; the sex scene isn’t just off-page, it happens between paragraphs, leaving the sordid details to the reader’s fevered imagination because it’s 1958 and all. 

The novel gets off to a fine opening in which Morocco makes his way to a secluded estate up in the winding hills around Hollywood and is jumped by a trio of armed goons. Morocco makes short work of them, taking them out in believable fashion, even if he doesn’t have a gun. Oh and that’s another misleading element from the cover art: Morocco doesn’t even use a gun in the course of the book. At one point he gets hold of one, but tosses it aside later on. 

This is because Morocco is in the cross-hairs of the Los Angeles cops, just one of many factions that zero in on Morocco. I do not exaggerate when I say that the majority of The Peeping Tom Murders concerns this or that character approaching Morrocco, usually in his hotel room, and either threatening him or asking him for his help. The novel quickly becomes overly complex and muddled with too-many characters and subplots overcrowding the central storyline of the murdered starlet. 

There’s also the question of why Morocco is even here; we’re told in the opening that the General “insisted” Morocco handle this job, but I never could figure out why an LA-based detective wasn’t hired instead of Morocco, who has come over from his home base of Chicago. He soon learns he’s out of his depth, with practically every character involved in the case figuring out where he’s staying in Hollywood and what his next move might be. Forward momentum is constantly halted by badgering, annoying characters who crowd the narrative. 

But the opening is cool. Morocco takes out the trio waiting for him, leaving one of them dead from a broken neck, and he goes into the bungalow of the man he’s working for: Garado Parano, scion of a wealthy family who claims not only that the men outside were not his, but also that he’s been framed for murder (the starlet and her husband). The thugs, Garado says, must have belonged to Santash, the leader of a local cult. 

Here The Peeping Tom Murders detours from what the reader might rightly assume would be the plot: rather than focusing on Hollywood and the movie biz, Jack Baynes gives us a story about a New Age cult that is run by a conman who works with a gossip columnist, and together the two are blackmailing Hollywood notables. There are also gangsters and whatnot involved, and all of them are constantly ten steps ahead of Morocco Jones; once again, Baynes manages to make his protagonist come off as dumb for the convenience of the busy plot. 

I was also a little let down with how Baynes treats the novel’s sole female character, Sonya Langley, a purple-eyed up-and-coming starlet who is one of the first characters to make an unnanounced appearance at Morocco’s hotel shortly after he arrives in town. With her “lowcut neckline” (which is about as risque as Baynes gets; there is zero in the way of anatonimical exploitation, sad to say) and her comment that “there are many beds between a bit part and a starring role,” Sonya throws herself at Morocco…who turns her away, not trusting her. This will begin a frosty rapport between the two, with Morocco suspecting that Sonya is working with the bad guys and trying to sway him. 

Indeed, she seems to be involved with Santash, formerly known as Joel Tuck, a black low-level criminal who started pretending he was a psychic to swindle superstitious gamblers. Now, in his robe and with a legion of followers, Santash commands a “psychic cult” that operates on the fringes of Hollywood society; the novel’s most memorable sequence has Morocco sneaking onto the cult grounds while a ceremony is in progress, complete with proto-psychdelic stuff like Santash praying to a “purple light” of the cosmos that shines on him. Morocco spends the time wondering what optical and stereo tricks Santash is using to fool his followers…talking aloud to himself the whole time. Yes, folks, a “tough” private eye who talks aloud to himself while sneaking around, just like Renegade Roe. 

The sordid Hollywood trash one might expect isn’t much to be found in The Peeping Tom Murders. The closest we get is a part where Morocco follows one of his innumerable leads to a Demille-esque director, and goes to the guy’s house to find him not there, but a bevy of post-party women lying around in an alcoholic stupor, and one of the women tells Morocco to “knock out” a particular young lovely who is getting on her nerves or something. 

What the lady is asking Morocco to do is bang the gal, you see, but it’s 1958 and all – and Morocco gamely obliges, but as mentioned above it occurs between paragraphs! Morocco takes the girl to a bedroom, she pulls him down to her, and next paragraph begins, “Five miles later, after a shower, Morocco…” I re-read the sequence just to ensure I hadn’t missed anything. Perhaps “five miles later” was a 1950s euphemism for “after banging the broad.” 

But really, Morocco just spends the novel going from one lead to another, and occasionally getting jumped by various characters. And in fact there are so many characters in the book I quickly got lost keeping track of them. There’s a lot of wasted opportunity, too; Garado, aka Morocco’s ostensible client, is himself protected by a lawyer who looks out for the family, and said lawyer employs this monstrous brute called Chaco who is described like some proto-Hulk. Hardly anything is done with the character, though. 

Not much is done with Santash, either. I thought it was interesting that Baynes made this character black, but it’s not much dwelt upon. One interesting angle though is that Morocco gets his information on Santash from a black crime boss in the city; Baynes again shows an admiration for inner-city blacks that was apparent in the previous two books. But otherwise Santash is sort of lost in the narratorial shuffle. 

Then there’s Ham Potter, a hard-drinking newsman (man, I wish those were still around today) who becomes Morocco’s pal during the course of the novel…eating steak and drinking hard and shooting the breeze. Again, I don’t exaggerate when I say that much of The Peeping Tom Murders features Morocco Jones talking to the many and sundry characters who populate the novel. 

Action is scant, and usually involves Morocco getting in a fistfight in pure hardboiled style. Lots of characters pull guns on him, but Morocco either turns the tables or manages to get saved by the sudden presence of yet another character who will distract the gun-toters. Again, Morocco gets saved quite a bit in the novel, which as with the previous books robs him of his tough-guy nature. 

To be honest, The Peeping Tom Murders was one of the most deceptively-slim books I’ve ever read. Despite “only” being 144 pages, it seemed that no matter how dogged of an effort I put into reading, the book just wouldn’t end! It was strange, because I wanted to like the novel, and thought the setup was interesting. But Jack Baynes fumbled the delivery this time, turning in a muddled effort that constantly stalled itself out, and way too many scenes of characters popping out of the woodwork to either threaten Morocco Jones or to provide him with info that would lead him to yet another character. 

My assumption is readers of the day felt the same, as the next volume would be the last. And as for Jack Baynes, aka Bertram Fowler, I have no idea whether he wrote anything else…if I had a copy of Hawk’s Author’s Pseudonyms, I’d see if there was an entry for him. Maybe I should order it from Interlibrary Loan again. The librarians are always super happy to lug that several-thousand-page monstrosity through the library’s pickup window for me when I pull up.

Hand Of The Mafia (Morocco Jones #2)

Hand Of The Mafia, by Jack Baynes
June, 1958  Fawcett Crest Books

The four-volume Morocco Jones series continues with another volume that comes off like the Mike Hammer books if they had been handled by Lyle Kenyon Engel’s fiction factory instead of Mickey Spillane. This one hews a little more closely to the Spillane mold than the first one did, with bad-ass Morocco Jones heading down south to bust up some heads, meet some willing dames, and deliver a couple tough-guy lines. 

There isn’t much pickup from the previous volume, nor any idea how long ago it was. We do learn that Llora Madigan, aka former spy babe The Countess, now works at Morocco’s P.I. firm in Chicago, along with their old boss General Weyland. Whereas that first book implied that Morocco and Llora would become an item, in this one she only gets a couple lines of dialog in the opening pages, and it’s clear that she doesn’t have any proprietary rights on our two-fisted rake of a hero. This is of course as it should be so far as men’s adventure goes (or at least proto-men’s adventure), and thus Morocco will be free to score with a couple new willing babes in this installment.

Morocco learns in the first few pages that Chris Shane, his old intelligence world comrade (and a supporting character in the previous volume) has been murdered down in Border City, a badlands in a southern state which is never identified. Morocco decides to head down there posthaste, find out who killed Shane, and deliver some bloody payback. He tells Llora so long – the General we’re informed being in DC on business – and heads on down to Border City, where the rest of the novel plays out. It’s very much along the lines of the later Vice Town, a small city totally in the grip of crime; Morocco gets a lot of info from pal Joe Kincaid of the Chicago police, and learns that a new boss named Carlo Fontana has taken over the town, complete with his own army of henchmen and a dirty police force. The question is how Fontana is keeping the Syndicate out of the picture, as he appears to be running the entire city without the influence of the Mafia.

Our hero’s entrance is very memorable; a couple Border City hoods accost a local muckracking journalist and a pretty young woman in a bar, about to take them on a one-way ride. Then the big lanky new guy gets up from the bar and proceeds to maul them, even killing one of them with his bare hands. It is of course Morocco Jones; the reporter is a guy named Larry Mellon whose life has been endangered for his attempts at uncovering the truth (wow, even then it was rare for a journalist to seek the truth!), and the woman is a beauty named Brenda, a former flame of Carlo Fontana’s.

I’d forgotten that Morocco has this comic book schtick where his gray eyes turn green when he’s in a rage; Brenda duly notices this, getting all hot and bothered when Morocco wipes the floor with Fontana’s toughs in the bar. That night Morocco takes her to dinner, and too late Morocco realizes that Brenda’s car parked out front will bring in more toughs. So using those quick wits he often boasts of, he buys a pail of oil from the kitchen and sits in the passenger seat as Brenda tears through town, the stooges giving chase. Like that old Spy Hunter video game I played religiously in the ‘80s, Morocco tosses the oil onto the street and causes the car pursuing them to crash spectacularly. Immediately after this Brenda pulls over to the side of the road, hops on Morocco’s lap, and tells him she wants him, the shameless hussy.

But as with the previous book, the actual tomfoolery is left completely off page, usually denoted by an ellipsis. The raunch occurs in a “secret” cabin Brenda has in the woods; we do get only a minor bit of exploitation as Morocco checks out Brenda’s gloriously nude bod as she lays on the bed for him. But really he’s more concerned about leaving the windows out front open, as someone might sneak in. Baynes (I insist on referring to Bertram B. Fowler by his much-cooler pseudonym) spends so much dialog on this that, when the unexpected guests finally appear, it’s a foregone conclusion – and again Morocco takes Fontana’s stooges out without much fuss, killing all four of them without even the use of a gun.

Brenda turns out to be here on her own vendetta; her sister, also a former flame of Fontana’s, was killed – and in fact Brenda’s the one who hired Chris Shane to look into it. Then when she heard nothing more from him she came down to Border City herself, changing her last name and herself becoming a floozy of Fontana’s. This plot element is lost in the shuffle – like last time, Baynes throughs way too many characters into the mix – and indeed Brenda herself soon disappears from the narrative. Now that she’s served the function of providing Morocco with his first lay in town, she’s no longer needed…and Morocco scoots her off to safety with “a friend” and periodically calls her on the phone to make sure she’s still alive.

The opening half is very much in the hardboiled action mode; Morocco seems like a force of vengeance, mauling and killing Fontana’s goons without breaking a sweat. But as with last volume Baynes can’t contain his impulse to muddy up what should be a streamlined action yarn. So we have this triple mystery – how Fontana runs town without the Mafia, who killed Chris Shane, and what happened to the son of local newspaper magnate Blake Ellis. Of course all of it is mixed together, but Morocco chases separate threads, at one point even wasting time on former town boss Mike Dravo, a dude who employs his own henchmen (one of them an albino) but is otherwise Mr. Rogers when compared to Fontana.

Baynes tosses so much stuff into the middle half that the reader can quickly become lost; nothing lasts long enough to make an impression. I mean Morocco goes to great lengths to disguise himself as a bum and then, not too many pages later, has to drop the act. Or things that pomise to blossom into more interesting developments don’t pan out, like the passing mention that Fontana employs roving gangs of juvenile delinquents. Morocco gets in a quick fight with some of them, showing the punks the proper use of a chain, but it’s over too quick and nothing more is made of it. At least the element of Fontana employing a gang of crooked cops pans out, one of them a sadist named Granger who gets his mitts on Morocco and beats him to a pulp.

But the thing about Morocco Jones is that he’s got all the tough-guy lines, he’s got all the fancy espionage and commando training…but he keeps walking into traps and he keeps getting saved by other people. Like here, when he’s pulverized by Granger and other dirty cops in a dingy room in the local precinct…I mean that’s it for Morocco, he’s toast. Then a local crusading lawyer happens to come in and save his ass. The same exact thing happens at the end of the novel, Morocco caught dead to rights by Granger and Fontana…and he’s saved by one of the most brazen acts of deus ex machina I’ve ever read in a novel. But more griping on that in a minute.

Gradually heroin smuggling works into the plot; Morocco gets word to be on the lookout for a certain ship coming in from New Orleans. Once again he gets the drop on Fontana’s men, discovering that they’re bringing heroin in on it and going to elaborate lengths to get it off the ship before it docks. Morocco hides the stuff in the bum area of Border City, using a spot he learned of earlier thanks to a bum; as with the previous volume, Baynes again displays compassion for the downtrodden of society. While posing as a bum, Morocco becomes friends with a real one, a guy who knew another Border City character Morocco’s been hunting for, and the bum makes for one of the more interesting characters in the novel. But like the juvenile delinquents and sundry others, he disappears from the text too soon.

Morocco’s next conquest is another local babe: Dorsa Ellis, hotstuff blonde daughter of the newspaper owner. She too practically throws herself on Morocco moments after meeting him, but before the expected shenanigans she first takes him to a local watering hole and introduces him to…Carlo Fontana. At first I thought Dorsa was a honey trap of sorts, but she claims to have brought Morocco here to initiate the war full-on; she’s sick of her father’s cowering. Another of the too-many mysteries afoot is why Blake Ellis isn’t using his paper to take down Fontana. It’s clear that his vanished son – and Brenda’s murdered sister – has something to do with it.

The action of the first half gradually fades away and the mystery stuff takes precedence. But as mentioned Morocco does find the opportunity to score again, but as ever the most we get is stuff like, “[Dorsa’s] breasts were superb.” Dorsa’s kind of a trendsetter in her own regard; after some all-night sex she basically tells Morocco so long the next day, that this was a one-time thing she’ll never forget! Later she takes care of Morocco after his savage beating, but has her own cross to bear when her dad finally decides to do something about the situation with Fontana, and pays the ultimate price for it. This leads to the “big finale” where Morocco storms into Fontana’s place…and is promptly captured, once again.

Spoiler warning so please skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know. But man, talk about a brazen copout ending. Morocco’s about to get wasted by Fontana and Granger when someone springs in and shoots Fontana in the arm. And folks it’s – Llora Madigan, the Countess! You see, she has been working the same case these past few days, without Morocco’s knowledge, acting as Fontana’s latest floozy! And General Weyland is here, too! They both waltz in with guns and grins and cover the hoods while Morocco can beat Granger to a pulp. It’s all so brazen and unsatisfying; Baynes attempts earlier in the book to set up this lame reveal, with Dorsa Ellis casually mentioning she’s heard that Fontana has a new girl, “a real beauty,” but the revelation that it’s Llora is incredibly flatfooted, because it just reinforces the notion that Morocco Jones always needs help to get out of scrapes.

But really, the first half of Hand Of the Mafia is very cool and comes off just like you’d hope a series titled Morocco Jones would. Our hero comes off like this inhuman force of wrath, beating the shit out of various hoods and delivering one-liners with aplomb. Even when the odds are against him, Morocco wades into combat with a grin, confident that the training he received in Europe will make him more than a match for his opponents. He doesn’t use as many guns this time, using his fists to do the killing; he also employs some Judo moves to further maul and maim his enemies. But the thing is, Baynes retains his strange tendency to make Morocco a fool for plot contrivances…he’s forever forgetting to do something or overlooking something obvious and walking into an easily-avoided trap.

The book ends with Morocco and Llora deciding to take a quick vacation before getting into the latest caper the General has cooked up; there’s a bit of a modern feeling in how it’s implied Llora had to sleep with Fontana as part of the job, but it’s nothing for her to be ashamed over. In fact, she’s the one who scolds Morocco for sleeping around so much on this one. But at any rate we are reminded that Llora is Morocco’s woman (or she’s “his person,” in the gender-neutralized parlance of our miserable modern world), and all these other babes are just passing fancies. Two more volumes followed, and Morocco’s image returns to the covers; looks like the repeating image of his upper body, used on the first, third, and fourth volumes, couldn’t fit on this volume’s cover painting.

Meet Morocco Jones (Morocco Jones #1)

Meet Morocco Jones, by Jack Baynes
No month stated, 1957  Fawcett Crest Books

Starting off a four-volume series, Meet Morocco Jones is like a men’s adventure series ten years early. My guess is Fawcett wanted to tap in on the success of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books, but instead series protagonist Morocco Jones, while nominally a private investigator, comes off more like the sort of hero you’d encounter in the men’s adventure paperbacks of the ‘70s and ‘80s.  The book (and series) is even written in third-person, unlike the first-person of the Hammer novels.

Apparently “Jack Baynes” was a pseudonym used by someone named Bertram B. Fowler, but it doesn’t look like he ever published anything under his own name. And since “Jack Baynes” is such a damn cool name that’s how I’ll refer to him. His writing is good, not as hardboiled as you’d expect, more along the lines of something Lyle Kenyon Engel would’ve produced, with that firm command of craft, character, and plot. To be sure, the plot does get out of Baynes’s hands a bit (just like in many of those Engel productions, in fact), but the novel is a lot better than you’d expect, even with a bit of an unexpected social conscience when it comes to inner-city blacks.

Now, as for our hero, it’s hard not to picture ubuiquitous paperback cover model Steve Holland in the role. Described as a lanky but muscle-bound, craggy-faced stalwart of manhood, Morocco Jones is such a badass that the mere mention of his name is enough to make men piss themselves in terror. For the past five years Morocco was with “the top counterespionage unit in Europe,” where he took on “the Commies,” and he hates them almost as much as Richard Camellion hates them. Morocco served under General Weyland, a moustached bastard described as looking like he walked off the cover of a men’s magazine; their chief adversary was the mysterious Bardo, “the top Commie spy,” whose face has only been seen by one person.

In exposition-laden backstory, we learn that, on the unit’s last job, Bardo kidnapped a young woman and unit member Chris Shane went after her. After being tortured horribly Shane had his face changed and disappeared. Morocco saved the girl, and spirited her away with no one else on the unit learning who she was. After which Morocco, the General, and other unit member Brett Culver quit the spy game, moved to Chicago, and put their Cold War skills to work in a private eye venture. All this Morocco relays over breakfast to the lovely Llora Madigan, his sometimes-girlfriend who herself is a fellow spy, codenamed “The Countess.” I mean, this series prefigures so many ‘70s action series it isn’t even funny; Llora is basically The Baroness about two decades early.

She too is out of the spy game but Llora intimates that she came to Morroco’s penthouse apartment last night to see if he was aware of anything about to happen. Instead the two went straight to bed (true to the era the author is firmly in the fade-to-black mold when it comes to sex), and now as Llora’s about to reveal the purpose of her visit the two are interrupted by the entrance of Syndicate goons. Here we get our first taste of Morocco’s bad-assery as he dispenses of these guys with his bare hands. He has nothing but contempt for the Syndicate and figures he won’t even need to use his .45 on this latest caper.

Bardo is supposedly in town, trying to track down that woman who saw his face back in Europe. The General, who has a sort of antagonistic relationship with Morocco, informs him that Bardo has apparently made a deal with the Syndicate and something big is going down. Gradually we’ll learn that the Commies have been supplying the Syndicate with tons of heroin, the idea being to weaken the US with it. In exchange the Syndicate will provide Bardo with enforcers to help him take on the General’s agents while he tracks down the girl who saw his face.

Morocco really isn’t too sharp, but this is more so due to the demands of Baynes’s plotting. The lady who saw his face is Leni Grayson, married to a former reporter named Phil. Morocco heads on over to their place here in Chicago only to find that Leni is gone; he figures due to clues that none other than Llora Madigan has spirited her away for reasons of her own, and thus she’s safe. Instead of placing a distraught Phil under guard, Morocco instead orders the guy to eat a steak and have a few beers and then sends him home! How very surprising it is when later Phil finds some Syndicate thugs waiting for him at his place.

Our hero roams all over Chicago on this caper and the author seems to know the city well. In particular he writes about the dissolution the South Side was falling into at that time, and how the area had been abandoned by whites and taken over by blacks. What’s surprising is the sympathy the author shows for the blacks, how they are forced to share apartments at three times the rent the former white tenants paid, and the fact that they’re only here because the South Side offers the only jobs available to them. In fact this novel features an author who seems very sympathetic toward blacks, even if he does refer to them as “Negroes” and “the coloreds.”

In particular there’s Thurm, a tough enforcer for Elijah “Lije” Woodruff, the sort of black godfather of the South Side. Lije with his web of informants is privy to practically everything that goes on in the city and gives Morocco plenty of details on where Bardo and the Syndicate might be. Thurm, after getting his ass kicked by Morocco, becomes his BFF and throughout the novel will appear out of the woodowrk to give Morocco news or to offer his services. But really there’s not much help to give, as Morocco takes care of everyone with ease, usually with his fists. Not that the novel is filled with action, but there are plentiful fistfights and shootouts; however the violence is nil, with the author never dwelling on the gore.

Morocco operates on his own for the most part, occasionally meeting up with the General to trade info. Llora the Countess also pops up here and there, mostly to fret over Morocco and to spend the night with him. She’s apparently a kick-ass spy in her own right but she spends most of the novel off-page. A part Baynes doesn’t really explain is that Llora was hired by previously-MIA Chris Shane to get Leni Greyson, so he could use her to go around Chicago and find Bardo. Really the entire novel is comprised of Morocco looking for one person or another while taking on various Syndicate thugs. 

The plot gets muddier and muddier with dashed-off subplots that quickly fizzle, like when a pair of Mafia hitmen are heavily built up in the narrative, hired by the Syndicate to take out Morocco and the General, and are dispensed with just a few pages after being first mentioned. Baynes does at least keep the bullets and fists flying; Morocco at one point kills a dude by slamming his head through the railing of an iron fence. His killcount gives cause for a lot of deadpan dark humor; the Syndicate thugs are referred to so derogatorily throughout that some of the lines are a bit funny. Morocco and the General also exchange a lot of humorous banter.

But as mentioned the plot gets more and more bloated with a barrage of new characters introduced. While we start off expecting Bardo will be the villain of the piece, he doesn’t even appear until his outing in the final pages, and Morocco goes after one newly-introduced villain after another. First it’s Ardello, the top Syndicate man in Chicago, then it’s Ardello’s second in command. Then it’s the Mafia. Then it’s Bardo’s second in command. It’s almost like a video game as Morocco and crew advance from one level to the next, but the problem is the central plot just sort of evaporates. Even the whole heroin thing is muddied up as we learn that Bardo’s men have gotten greedy for it and want to steal it from the “top Commie” and sell it for themselves.

The surprise reveal of who Bardo really is won’t come as much of a surprise, but at least it doesn’t turn out to be Morocco’s old teammate Chris Shane, which I figured would be a given as soon as it was revealed the dude was missing and had gotten a new face. The novel ends with Morocco feeling crestfallen over the fact that his life will always be filled with blood, even if he is “retired.” It’s also implied that he’s about to become serious with Llora Madigan, the Countess, who by the way officially retires from the spy game at novel’s end.

Three more adventures followed, and while Meet Morocco Jones lost its way after a bit, it was still sufficiently entertaining – and such a precursor of the men’s adventure novels that were to follow – that I look forward to eventually reading them.