The Irish Beauty Contract - Philip Atlee (James Atlee Phillips)

THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT is the fifth novel in Philip Atlee’s Joe Gall series of espionage adventures, or the sixth if you count PAGODA, an unofficial part of the series that’s the actual debut of the Gall character. I’ve read all the previous novels, and with the exception of PAGODA, the plots don’t make much sense, but the books are all very well-written.

I’m happy to report that THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT actually does make sense for the most part and gives us a coherent narrative that, thankfully, continues to be very well-written. Joe Gall, who lives on an isolated, mountaintop estate in Arkansas when he’s not working on a contract basis for the U.S. government as an intelligence agent, is in New Granada (a fictional but real-sounding country in South America) pretending to be a military attaché at the local U.S. embassy while he secretly keeps track of a suspicious character from the States who may have ties to communist rebels in the country. He’s also carrying on an affair with the beautiful wife of an Irish lord.

Then violent things start to happen. Shootouts, knife fights, double crosses, secret identities, and an encounter with a jungle emperor lead Gall to a lost city high in the Andes where a final mystery awaits. (And, I might add, the solution to that final mystery is pretty hokey, even for 1966 when this book was first published.) The action flows reasonably well and Joe Gall is a sympathetic if not really all that likable narrator/protagonist.

Philip Atlee was really Fort Worth’s own James Atlee Phillips, whose first novel THE INHERITORS was something of a scandal when it was published in the early Forties because of its unflattering portrait of Fort Worth high society at the time. I’ve never read it, and I ought to. He wrote a few other novels under his real name, but he’s remembered primarily for the Joe Gall books, which were pretty successful paperback from Gold Medal in the Sixties and Seventies. They’re still available as e-books, which is how I read THE IRISH BEAUTY CONTRACT even though I own the paperback. I have the whole series in paperback, by the way, although they’re not easy to get to at the moment. So if I read more of them, which I probably will based on my enjoyment of this one, I’ll probably stick with the e-books. Although as all of you almost surely know, it’s hard to beat the smell and feel of an old paperback . . .