Showing posts with label Adam Diment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Adam Diment. Show all posts

Monday, June 15, 2020

The Bang Bang Birds (Philip McAlpine #3)


The Bang Bang Birds, by Adam Diment
December, 1969  Bantam Books
(Original UK publication September 1968)

This was the final installment of the Philip McAlpine series to be published in the US, but at least it went out with a bang, so far as the cover goes, at least: this paperback edition sports one of the greatest covers ever. And for once it sort of illustrates a moment in the book, but as ever author Adam Diment is too busy buzzkilling all the entertainment factor with his pissy, dour, oh-so-cynical narrative tone. This one might be even more cynical and acerbic than the previous two, despite having the most pulpy villain and plot.

Diment was hyped as the “new Ian Fleming,” but as I mentioned before he isn’t nearly as gifted or talented an author. This is mainly because it’s clear that Ian Fleming actually enjoyed writing the James Bond novels. One doesn’t get that impression from the McAlpine books. Rather, you get the impression that Adam Diment hates the entire genre – not to mention the riff-raff who would even read such garbage – and goes out of his way to piss on everything. Any opportunity for some fun, colorful entertainment is constantly avoided or ignored; narrator Philip McAlpine is such a cynical ass that he’ll even find a way to bitch about a naked young woman. And here’s another way to put the entire series in perspective: In this one, McAlpine goes up against a global ring of mod cathouses which employ hot spy babes, many of whom prance around in jackboots and nothing else, toting submachine guns. And McAlpine brings along his pregnant girlfriend. It’s all such an inversion – or nonunderstanding – of what the average fan wants from this genre that it’s no wonder this was the last one to make it to the US.

There isn’t much pickup from the previous volume; when we meet narrator Philip McAlpine he’s in New York, working with the American Intelligence agencies in an outfit called Hun Sec 3. The angle of this outfit is that it’s computer-based, so McAlpine’s role is to collect all the communiques sent in by British agents and put them into the database. We get that old-school distrust of computers and gadgets, and I always appreciate these vintage reminders that once upon a time automation and “android brains” were dismissed as not nearly as dependable as human intelligence. McAlpine’s been sent here by Quine, his cunning boss in British Intelligence, and now reports to General Eastfeller of the US Army. The dialog of Diment’s American characters doesn’t always ring true; there’s a scene where Eastfeller calls in McAlpine for a talk, and at times it sounds like two British characters in discussion. The only problem is that Eastfeller has been presented as your stereotypical, cliched, “Commies are everywhere” American Cold War general, as if he’s stepped right out of Dr. Strangelove.

Meanwhile McAlpine has a new girlfriend: Marianne, a brunette model type. As McAlpine helpfully informs us, “I was immediately attracted to her because she was beautiful.” He’s already been with her for a bit before the novel begins; long enough, we’ll gradually learn, to knock her up. Oh but McAlpine also has a busty blonde secretary in his Hun Sec 3 office, Wendy, and he’s constantly putting down her offers for sex. I mean she’s beautiful and all, but McAlpine just can’t be bothered, as he’s afraid after one lay she’ll be planning their wedding. And he goes on and on explaining his reasoning to us. Shockingly, this won’t be the only time McAlpine turns down an offer of sex. At length one realizes this is indeed a spoof or at least piss-take on Fleming; there’s a part where McAlpine is taken on a tour of the Hun Sec 3 gadgets factory, a total parody on the Q sequences in the Bond movies, with gadgets like a trick lighter, a transistor radio that turns into a bomb, and etc, and he mocks them all, refusing to use any of them save for an AR-16 machine gun.

Though by contract he’s bound to a desk job only, McAlpine is asked to do a “favor” for Quine: deliver heroin to a junkie agent. He does the job, going into a dingy Manhattan bar, only for someone to pull a gun on him. McAlpine’s been taking all sorts of training, we’re informed, thus he’s able to duck and dodge and come up firing. Only, the guy with the gun turns out to be a fellow agent and this has all been a test from the General. McAlpine, despite the contract, is to go back onto the field: the General wants him to look into these Aviary Clubs that have sprouted around Europe, “kind of a super-charged Playboy Club” sort of thing. Basically high-tech, high-society brothels, run by a very Flemingesque individual: Count Vitconne, a hirsute Frenchman who likes to wear purple togas, showing off his copious red body hair and his pupil-lacking eyes. Diment will do his best to fumble this memorable creation, too.

The Aviary Clubs are hosted by lovely young women from around the world, and as part of the fee you can take them to a room upstairs or keep them for yourself for a few weeks. It’s all very Jeffery Epstein-ish. Vitconne is fantastically wealthy and has turned the Clubs into veritable feasts for the senses, with sci-fi esque imaging that changes the entire look of the interiors and also a top-tier chef who can whip up any obscure dish you could think of. The General despises the Clubs because they’re perverted and dirty, of course – again, he’s a walking cliché – but also more importantly because important men go to these Clubs (they’re insanely expensive to join) and Count Vitconne is likely getting info from these men. When scientists and other types who are privy to US secrets go up into one of the rooms of the “birds,” as the hookers are lovingly called, many of them begin to blab freely about classified data shortly after the adult activities have transpired. McAlpine is to infiltrate the main Club, in Stockholm, and get the list of all Americans who have visited the place.

McAlpine is to pose as wealthy young Boston heir Lexington Sullivan, Junior, with unlimited funds at his disposal. McAlpine’s already been studying the guy, practicing his voice and whatnot, so now it’s just a matter of going over there in his fab mod clothes, hobknobbing with all those sexy birds – and the real Lexington is known as a lady-killer, thus McAlpine will be expected to do his share of scoring as part of his cover – and fool the Count long enough to get the list. Sounds like a surefire Bondesque spy-pulp yarn, doesn’t it? Yep…then Marianne informs McAlpine’s she’s pregnant, and he decides to bring her along…to get a handy abortion in one of those Swedish clinics. For some strange reason I didn’t chuck the book at this point, likely because the cover’s so nice and my copy’s fortunately in mint condition so I didn’t want to damage it. But yeah, this is the one where McAlpine takes his pregnant girlfriend along with him. Oh, and a “.36 revolver with built-in silencer and telescope.” Actually he doesn’t take the latter along on the job, he leaves it in his apartment in New York, but I wish he’d taken it instead, even though such a thing couldn’t possibly exist.

We get more cursory catering to the Fleming form: even though McAlpine is a “fairly qualified pilot,” he still feels Bond-esque pangs of anxiety during the flight to Stockholm. The Fleming vibe is very strong in the ensuing sequence, as McAlpine is taken on a tour of the Stockholm Aviary Club, with nude women walking around and rooms that change décor and atmosphere in seconds, thanks to tricky light projection that’s never fully explained. The “birds” are all dressed in a variety of revealing costumes, including an actual Nazi She-Devil who leads around a Jewish guy on a leash (she only appears long enough for the shock factor). Meanwhile, McAlpine/Diment somehow finds a way to describe even the naked women in cynical, acidic tones. You almost get the impression the narrator is like an immortal vampire or something, just bored with humans in general, not a 20-something British spy in the height of mod fashions. Even the dude from Operation Hang Ten would think McAlpine was an arrogant prick.

But the Aviary Club is so cool sounding that it manages to capture the reader’s interest, despite the narrator’s constant dismissal of everything. At one point the entry foyer turns into a veritable Valhalla, complete with a tall, perfectly-proportioned and beautiful blonde in a sort of Classical World getup (McAlpine actually refers to her as a “blonde beast,” folks); next it’s turned into a reception hall complete with a half-nude Indian gal behind the front desk. McAlpine finally shows a little bit of a libido when he feels up one of the birds while riding in an elevator, but it’s all conveyed so vaguely that I didn’t know what the hell even happened. Here he’s taken into the presence of the Count, resplendent in his purple toga, and there follows another catering to the Fleming form as the Count delivers a long speech to the latest Club member, Lexington Sullivan, aka McAlpine. 

Sadly though the Aviary Club isn’t exploited nearly as much as it should be. Folks there’s honestly a part where one of the birds tries to get friendly with McAlpine, and he turns her down, actually informing us in the narrative that he has “plenty of sexy in my life without charming, practiced little professionals.” The girl actually has to pressure McAlpine into doing the deed (which is rendered off-page, as usual), saying that if they don’t it will look suspicious to the Count, who monitors everything. I mean even the brothel whore has to remind our “super spy” hero that he’s supposed to keep his cover identity intact, and she doesn’t even know he’s a spy! She later shows him around the Club and introduces the titular “Bang-Bang Birds.” These are the brothel gals who guard the orgies that occasionally go down in the clubs; per the cover of this US edition, they perform this role fully nude save for a pair of knee-high jackboots, carrying submachine guns to finish the look. Sadly, the author does absolutely nothing to exploit these characters. But then, the entire novel – and pretty much the entire series – is one missed opportunity after another.

McAlpine doesn’t spend too much narrative time in the Aviary Club. Instead it’s back to the apartment with Marianne, and also he gets in the occasional car chase; turns out some mysterious Russian agent is after “Lexington,” trying to kill him. Occasionally Diment cuts over to third-person for the sequences with this agent, and these are the best-written moments of the novel because at the very least they get us away from McAlpine’s pissy narration. Also these parts are very Flemingesque, and again makes one wonder if Diment were intentionally spoofing the style. With the caveat that Diment is more “British” in his tone than Fleming was, and also that, despite writing around a decade earlier, Fleming was actually more risque. Not to mention clearly more invested in his writing than Diment is. Reading The Bang Bang Birds, it’s no mystery why Diment dropped out of writing after the next volume (and became a recluse): he was already bored, and clearly so, while he was churning out this one.

McAlpine’s plan to get the list from the Club involves a huge batch of LSD and some amyl nitrate. He gets these from a hippie in a Stockholm bar, and unleashes them – with Marianne’s assistance – during one of the Club’s orgies. Here our hero again sort of has some off-page sex with one (or possibly two) birds, though he himself is a little affected by the LSD which has been dosed into the wine. He basically shrugs this off, as well as the amyl nitrate chaser, long enough to crack the safe and make his escape via helicopter. Meanwhile the Count, so heavily built up as a menacing villain, sits navel-gazing on a bed, hammered by the acid trip. It’s all so lame and anticlimactic. Despite his successful escape McAlpine gets captured, and is himself drugged, whisked across the world to the Tangier Aviary Club…and the Count interrogates him with LSD. Even here, in a dingy jail, McAlpine manages to score with a pair of birds, first asking them to join him in his trip and then having an off-page three-way with them.

This is as exploitative as the novel gets, as Diment has been saving his most egregious buzzkilling for the finale. That Russian agent has also been captured, and amid much fanfare the Count announces that he and McAlpine will have a gladiator fight to the death. So a pretty much nonchalant McAlpine has his “last meal,” then goes out to the arena…and defeats the Russian in like a sentence. There’s absolutely no suspense, no tension, no exploitation of the entire pulpy conceit. It’s like, “well I’d been trained in knife-fighting, luckily, so I knew what to do,” and after a couple ducks and dodges he’s felled his opponent. Then his ass is saved by a friendly bird, and he makes his escape, telling us in the conclusion that it all was, of course, yet more plotting via Quine that got him here, and also Marianne finally got that abortion at some clinic while the two were off on vacation.

And this would be it for McAlpine for a couple years, not returning until Think Inc. in 1971. I’ve got the UK paperback of that one and will read it eventually, at least to see how the series ends. Now you might ask, if I dislike this series so much, why am I reading it? And that’s a damn great question. Here’s the answer – back in the early days of the blog, I’d usually buy every volume of a series that caught my interest, before even reading a single installment. This is what happened with the Philip McAlpine books. I got them all about nine years ago, collecting them before reading them. With age comes wisdom, though (not that I was exactly “young” nine years ago), so these days I don’t go to the trouble…I get one, and if I don’t like it I don’t get any more. If I’d just read The Dolly, Dolly Spy when I got it, I wouldn’t have tracked down the others.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

The Great Spy Race (Philip McAlpine #2)


The Great Spy Race, by Adam Diment
June, 1969  Bantam Books
(Original UK publication, 1968)

Seven years ago I read The Dolly, Dolly Spy spy, the first of four novels about “bird-chasing, hash-loving” young British spy Philip McAlpine. I pretty much forgot all about the series after that, given that I didn’t much enjoy the book. But then I came across this second one, which I’d picked up along with the others back then, and figured I’d give the series another go. And I’m glad I did, because I enjoyed The Great Spy Race a lot more.

First of all, a big thanks to Aaron Jeethan, who posted a comment the other year on my review of The Dolly, Dolly Spy, linking to a 2015 Esquire UK article in which reporter John Michael O’Sullivan fruitlessly tried to track down the still-reclusive Adam Diment. The article, which is highly recommended, gives what little insight exists about the guy, who appears to have dropped out of sight in the early ‘70s, at least so far as the publishing world goes. It also gives the impression that the majority of his “hip” persona was created by his manager; even this American paperback edition goes to great lengths to compare Diment to his narrating protagonist, McAlpine, so I’m sure the gimmick was even more forcibly employed in England.

I enjoyed this installment more, but be advised it still suffers from the same problems as the first one, or at least what I consider problems. Mainly, the narrator-protagonist, Philip McAlpine, who comes off like a dick. The novel is infused with his cynical bitching about this or that; he has a massive chip on his shoulder, only equaled by his massive sense of entitlement. Nothing’s good enough for him, everything sucks. This, coupled with his first-person narration, gives the novel more of a hardboiled pulp vibe than the “mod spy” angle the publishers so desperately want to imply. Indeed, there’s nothing remotely “psychedelic” about McAlpine, other than occasional mentions of his mod clothing (colored satin capes, etc) or the occasional joint he smokes.

Special sidenote – anyone who wants to read a ‘60s “psychedelic spy” novel that does tap into the acid era zeitgeist and doesn’t feature a cynical protagonist should read, as soon as possible, The Psychedelic Spy, which is everything – everything! – the Adam Diment novels are supposed to be. (It’s even written in third-person!) If only there had been four books about that character.

Anyway, it’s a year or so after the previous book, and McAlpine just has three weeks left in his contract with Rupert Quine, “gargoyle”-like man behind “6,” the secret department McAlpine was roped into working for last time around. Quine is basically the M to McAlpine’s Bond, though this is an even grumpier M, one who is given to wearing all the latest fashions (up to and including an “LSD hallucinatory tie”). After a lot of scene setting – in which McAlpine’s “flat” is broken into by a dude McAlpine punches in the throat and escapes from – we get down to business: Quine wants to send our hero out on a “simple courier job.”

Meanwhile McAlpine has hooked up with sexy but “thick” Josephine, meeting her at a hip Chelsea party; we get a lot of talk courtesy McAlpine about how big-butted, thick girls are “nice to lie down on,” and also the sex scene is a bit more risque than those in the previous book. (Speaking of which, we’re informed that McAlpine’s girlfriend from last time, Veronica, is off chasing greener pastures or somesuch.) The Chelsea party by the way seems to exist so Diment can show off his “hip” cred, with mentions of The Who and The Stones, the chapter even titlted “Let’s Spend The Night Together.” 

McAlpine’s convoluted job has him getting money from Quine, to pay a “little, gay Gaul” in a mod clothing store for some ancient stamps, which the Gaul informs McAlpine are to be sold to a dude in Mali. This is a fictional island “on the Indian ocean” which is home to Club Oceana, a luxury resort for the mega-wealthy. Supposedly there is a Quine contact there who has some info he will sell in exchange for those stamps and twenty thousand pounds. Even Mali withers beneath McAlpine’s jaded, cynical eye, though we do learn you can buy “marijuana cigarettes” from vending machines, packaged and wrapped in “psychedelic” paper.

The resident spy turns out to be the owner of Club Oceanic, an old, clearly rich former spy named Peters who is very much in the Fleming mold. He is given to florid speeches and expensive tastes, and even retains a memorable henchman: Petite, a towering, very old butler who is superhumanly fast with a gun. This talent is shown off for McAlpine’s benefit in a sequence that could’ve come straight out of the classic Bond films. But don’t be fooled – McAlpine is no Bond. He’s more along the lines of the protagonists who starred in the more spoofy spy-fy series of the ‘60s: “There’s hardly a man alive more a coward than me,” he casually informs us.

But it turns out to be a typical Quine setup; McAlpine’s real job here is to deliver the twenty thousand pounds, which is Peters’s entry fee for “the Great Spy Race,” which he explains is “a competition to exercise the oldest virtues of our art: to wit, extortion, blackmail, and seduction Especially seduction.” Agents from organizations around the world (save for Red China) will compete for the grand prize: a list of every Red Chinese spy currently operating in the Far East. Daniel Honneybun, a portly Ministry employee who was the guy who broke into McAlpine’s apartment early in the book, shows up with a bandaged throat (and a grudge against our hero) to bring word from Quine: if McAlpine doesn’t take part in (and win) the Race, Quine will either have McAlpine killed or something worse.

McAlpine mostly slobbers over the sight of Mallia, Peters’s ravishingly-hot (and topless) fifteen year-old “child concubine,” who sits obediently on her master’s lap while Peters regales McAlpine with stories, taking the occasional moment to dab expensive champagne between the girl’s bare breasts. I don’t think you could swing a scene like this in the present day, but then such are the wonders of vintage pulp. McAlpine takes a few days off to bask in the “Malikin” sun and smoke some of those “manufactured reefers” (he also bumps into an old “friendlet” I assume returning from the previous book, but I couldn’t recall her), before heading back to London to begin the Race.

Anyone hoping for a peek of Swinging London will be disappointed. As in the first book, McAlpine is more focused on just mentioning the things that annoy him, rather than bringing to life the mod fashions, the swinging “birds,” and whatnot. This is I think the main thing that annoys me about this series; I read all the industry blurbs and expect this wide-eyed look at that long-ago world, but instead I get a dude who sounds like your average gumshoe, slouching through a world that both irritates and bores him. It’s like something a burned-out old contract writer would’ve turned in, instead of a “hash-loving” twenty-four year old.

McAlpine has another run-in with the “gay Gaul,” who turns out to be named Pierre Roussin, a Commie French agent taking part in the Race and given to wearing outlandish fashions (ie knee-high purple suede boots). But our hero isn’t much for Bond-esque action; even the literary Bond, who is mostly prone to kicking guys in the shins and running away, is more gung-ho. Instead McAlpine steals a camera and takes blackmail photos of a male bank employee having sex with Roussin; McAlpine threatens to send the bank board the photos if the employee doesn’t tell him the contents of the bank deposit box both he and Roussin (and the other Race participants) were after. It’s a note from Peters, informing the reader that the next step of the Race will occur in Nice.

Here McAlpine drafts Josephine in a plan to co-seduce Mr. and Mrs. Omega, the latter of whom is Peters’s latest step in the game – a notorious slut of incredible beauty (her exotic look courtesy a mixture of “African” and “Indo-Chinese” blood). While Mr. Omega is an old French general, Mrs. Omega is “upper-strata sexy” and when McAlpine first glimpses her she’s dressed in “modish chain mail.” Here he runs into an Irish agent and a “Jap” agent (who speaks with a “Harvard accent”), but manages to mostly see his plan through. McAlpine beds Mrs. Omega shortly after Samura, the Japanese agent, fails to satisfy her; again Diment delivers a somewhat risque sequence, but nothing outrageous. McAlpine tells Mrs. Omega she is “the greatest lay” of his life.

But to tell the truth, the “Great Spy Race” is kind of underwhelming. After the briefest of stopovers in Geneva, McAlpine ends up back off the coast of Mali; he gets there by booking passage on an International Charter flight, in a nice callback to the previous book – turns out his former employers hold no grudges over McAlpine having betrayed them last time. Diment finally delivers at least a little action as McAlpine must dodge machine gun fire from a pillbox to enter the building that holds the prize – which doesn’t turn out to be a list of spies at all, but plans, stolen from NASA, for hyperspeed engines.

As if tossing the entire “spy race” idea, Peters next has McAlpine run for his escape from Mali, an old Nazi plane waiting for him; he will be chased by eight fellow secret agents. This part is just downright dumb – Peters has left a handy table filled with guns and McAlpine grabs a “Schmeisser” (another callback to the previous book) and runs for his life, shooting no one. No one, that is, save for Petite, Peters’s quick-draw servant, who shows up at the plane for “the last test.” McAlpine guns him down accidentally and then feels like “crying” as he stands over Petite’s corpse. Mind you, this is McAlpine’s first and only kill in the book. And the dumbass manages to lose the hypserpeed plans in the plane, which ends up catching on fire after getting him to safety.

The funny thing about these McAlpine novels is that Diment was hyped as the hip, countercultural Ian Fleming, but in reality, Diment’s books are almost exactly like those by Fleming himself – dry, more grounded in realism than in outlandish thrills, and very, very British. Save for a single mention of McAlpine smoking a joint, or listening to rock music (at a party – and we get the impression that, surprise surprise, McAlpine doesn’t even like it), none of the material here would’ve been out of place in a Bond novel. (And even the literary Bond wouldn’t cry after killing someone who just tried to kill him!)

In this regard I’d say the New York Times blurb quoted on the cover is accurate – Diment truly was “Fleming’s successor.” And Diment, for a 24 year-old, is even more obsessed with WWII than actual war veteran Ian Fleming was; The Great Spy Race is filled with references to the war; at least every other page mentions Nazis or war surplus or what have you.

I’m still not sold on the series – I much prefer other swinging sixties spies, in particular Nick Carter: KillmasterMark Hood, and Joaquin Hawks.

Monday, February 7, 2011

The Dolly, Dolly Spy


The Dolly, Dolly Spy by Adam Diment
July, 1968 Bantam Books
(Original UK publication October, 1967)

I'm surprised I've only now discovered the work of Adam Diment, who, starting in the late '60s, published four novels about the exploits of a dopesmoking sort of anti-007, Philip McAlpine. Diment proved to be similar to his protagonist, and the press hyped him accordingly -- a 24 year-old British youth who listened to rock, smoked dope, and surrounded himself with a bevy of miniskirted London "birds." Indeed, the media coverage made Diment seem more outlandish than his hash-loving secret agent of a protagonist.

As a guy who spent a semester of college in Holland, I can assure you that dope and physical violence are an impossible combination -- and it's something Diment too knows, as his hero Philip McAlpine only relaxes with a bit of hash here and there in The Dolly, Dolly Spy, the first of the four novels. As usual, the media and the back-cover blurbs oversell McAlpine's drug life; the novel is more of a parody of the spy genre, with an overly-arch narrator who does his best to kill all of the escapism one would expect of a James Bond-type of world. The idea here is moreso of a Swinging London-type who is manipulated into the world of international espionage, rather than a drug-fueled satire on the genre, a la Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius material.

The Dolly, Dolly Spy is more of an introduction to the series than a straight-up novel. It concerns itself mostly with how McAlpine is recruited into this world. Actually he's instead blackmailed into the world -- during a raid on his place a brick of newly-bought hashish is discovered. The person who called the raid and now holds the hash is Rupert Quine, an overbearing gargoyle of a man who claims to head up CI-6, a subset of British Intelligence. Quine offers McAlpine a choice: either go to prison for the hash or work for CI-6.

The job, as Quine presents it, is too simple. McAlpine is to apply for a job with International Charter, Inc, a non-aligned sort of FedEx which acts as courier for all the world's Intelligence agencies and even the Mafia. They fly agents, documents, prisoners, the works, and all under the radar. Quine wants McAlpine to answer an innocuous ad in the newspaper to become a pilot for a small firm: the firm is International Charter, and Quine is certain that McAlpine, with his pilot's license, his devil-may-care attitude, and his general insubordinance will be a perfect fit for the role. At length McAlpine complies and, after a lenghty series of interviews -- all of which are relayed for us -- he is offered the position.

After some intensive pilot training in Texas, McAlpine is sent to a remote island named Dathos, off the coast of Greece. Here he flies various missions for International Charter, his commander a former Nazi Luftwaffe ace. McAlpine bides his time, occasionally going for "vacations" where he relays what he's learned to various CI-6 women who visit, posing as cousins or other relations (McAlpine is sure to inform us that these women are always unattractive and they always want to sleep with him -- he bets it's yet another twist of the knife courtesy Rupert Quine). But eventually he gets so used to his now-mundane life that McAlpine's girlfriend comes to stay with him in Dathos for some fun in the sun, Dylan on the turntable, and plenty of hash.

Soon Quine re-enters and McAlpine discovers why he's been infiltrated into International Charter: a mission comes up in which McAlpine is tasked with picking up three men and flying them to another destination. It develops that the leader of these men is Detmann, a former Nazi honcho who is described as "The Angel of Death." Quine orders McAlpine to pick up Detmann but instead deliver him to Quine's men rather than the designated drop-off point. After a US agent tries to keep McAlpine from taking the job, he knows he's lucked out: all he must do is sequester this Detmann somewhere and then make his demands to Quine -- he'll be rich and he'll be free.

The novel saves its action for the final half. At 154 pages, The Dolly, Dolly Spy is a quick read, but it's hampered by the narration. In short, McAlpine comes off as a total pisshead, bitching about things that have no bearing on the narrative at hand. Seriously, long sections of this novel are given over to digressions -- endless ones at that. (No doubt courtesy the dope Diment himself was smoking.) The climax however is appropriately thrilling, with McAlpine squaring off against Detmann, who comes off as a true James Bond-type villain. Anyway, the climax is thrilling if too short: Diment rushes through it and doesn't fully play out the potentials.

I've got the next three volumes and they appear to be more of the "psychedelic spy" sort of thing I expected. As for Adam Diment, these were the only four novels he published and they've gained a cult following; word is the man himself dropped out of the publishing world after 1971's Think Inc and never looked back.