Golden Temptress (original title The Broken Gate, 1948) by Charles Grayson
(Charles Wright Gray). Jack Shepherd, a grade-A heel, is a freelance writer and
an adventurer in foreign lands where he hopes to make some money, legal or
otherwise. He travels with two companions: Frenchman Jean-Louis Lemar, his
personal valet, etc., and a beautiful Canadian singer, Peggy George. They are
in Saigon on what he believes is to assure a liquor smuggler that a buyer has
the money for the product. It’s all a scam, and the shipment is weapons for
rebels. However, now he’s not so sure of the deal. But when Shepherd meets the
buyer, the beautiful Bijou, a Eurasian, whose father was French and her mother
Vietnamese, he learns she doesn’t have the money. Vietnam is under French
colonialism at present, but war is threatened, and Inspector Duphaine has an
idea Shepherd is up to no good. He senses what it is all about. Different
angles, different sides, each ready to double-cross the others. They travel to
Pnom-Penh, Cambodia in search of a treasure temple in the jungle near Angkor,
the fabled Emerald Buddha of Yacodharapura. And Shepherd is as bad as the rest.
In the story, Sheppard meets the King of Cambodia; in truth, the author
actually hung out with the King of Cambodia when he was in that part of the
world. He was well traveled, and was a Hollywood screenwriter with numerous
credits, including “Battle Hymn” and “Barbarian And The Geisha”. This is a great
story, though it’s hard to like any of the characters (except Peggy George).
Shepherd is a heel to the very end, and then comes the final, unexpected
double-cross.
Earl Norman
The Earl Norman books are becoming extremely rare, and publishers don’t seem to be interested in reprinting the series. The only way some of us may ever have all the stories is for collectors to scan and type the stories into PDF to swap with other collectors. I have already completed PDFs of HANG ME IN HONG KONG and KILL ME IN ROPPONGI. I am working on KILL ME IN YOKOSUKA. If other collectors would do the same for some of the other books, we could eventually have PDFs of all ten books. Why not help? I can be contacted at fadingshadows40@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment