Something of a legend in his homeland -due to his private detective creation Dick Bos- Dutch comics artist Alfred Mazure spent his final few years living and working in the UK. It was here that his talents turned to the topic of sexy female crime fighters. Lindy Leigh -Mazure's airheaded spy- had her own comic strip in Mayfair magazine and even made it to the big screen as a segment of Antony Balch's Secrets of Sex in 1969. The same year, Mazure brought the Lindy Leigh concept to book, eventually writing three paperbacks centred around the mono named Sherazad, a redheaded, slightly more intelligent, but no less glamorous version of Lindy Leigh.
The toast of fashionable London, Sherazad drives a jaguar, lives in Chelsea -but of course- and gets invited to all the finest LSD parties. She also finds the time to be a member of BOSC (Bureau of Special Cases) a top secret origination with headquarters located underneath a monastery, where her bosses are mock-friars Brother John and Brother Joshua.
It's a premise worthy of The Avengers, which I'd wager Mazure fell in love with during his time in blighty. Welcome Sherazad does pilfer a little blatantly from that show at times. While Emma Peel had an eye-shaped peephole in her door, Sherazad has a faux-donkey's head on hers, pull the donkey's tongue and a braying noise in her pad will alert Sherazad to your presence. Mazure also seems to have an eye in the direction of the ITC shows of the time, both as a source of inspiration and parody. Sherazad's initial assignment being to investigate several actresses who disappeared while starring in an action oriented TV series. In order to get to the bottom of the case, Sherazad has to rub shoulders with handsome toff John Hulme, who is renting out his Hampshire estate as a TV studio "I don't mind making money in vulgar ways, but I insist on enjoying it graciously". Hulme becomes Sherazad's latest squeeze or 'Heigh Ho' as the lady herself likes to call her love interests. Suspicion for the disappearances falls on TV mogul Alwyn Harpinger and King Ibn Fuad, the rich oil baron who Harpinger has been cozying up to. Fortunately as well as jiu-jitsu and being able quote Max Miller, Sherazad's talents include the ability to smell non-white villainy from a mile off "not only was she able to say that somebody had stood in that closet not long ago...but she was able to say the man was not white-skinned".
Even by the standards of the 1960s, Mazure does seem to have had issues with people of the camel travelling persuasion. Fuad is at one point referred to as an 'over sexed baboon', his followers 'ragged desert dwellers' while Fuad's heavies set off Sherazad's acute sense of smell 'they were undoubtedly Arabs, though this was no news to her-her nose had told her already'.
Welcome Sherazad does have an odd structure, the disappearing actresses/white slavery plot concluding very abruptly half way into the book, leaving a secondary storyline to come to the forefront. It is an experience akin to when ITC would combine two episodes of a TV series into a feature film, leaving the tell tale sign of the narrative ending then restarting in the middle of the 'movie'. A change is for the best here though, since while the initial sending up of the TV industry threatens to stagnate at times, Mazure gets his mojo back and goes marvelously nutzoid in the second half of the book. Thoroughly embracing the horror genre and English eccentricity, Mazure throws in a rich misogynist who enjoys cutting women's tongues out, a mad scientist on a Pavlovian kick, a lovesick gorilla and an army of naked part female, part wolf creatures. If anything Welcome Sherazad was even more tailor made for an Antony Balch movie adaptation than Lindy Leigh. Welcome Sherazad is also proof that any novel can be greatly enlivened by the presence of a lovesick gorilla, an army of naked wolf women sure helps as well.
So of the period that you feel as if wearing a cravat and a paisley shirt should be compulsory while reading it. How much passion you have for Swinging London artifacts will dictate whether you want to make Welcome Sherazad your latest Heigh Ho, or give the book the Heave Ho. Still when it comes to dolly birds doing the Bond bit, Miss Sherazad is undoubtedly sexier, wilder and of course groovier than James Moffatt's The Girl from H.A.R.D and Jimmy Sangster's Touchfeather books.
No comments:
Post a Comment