A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Suitable for Framing - James Atlee Phillips

Like last week’s THE FAST BUCK, James Atlee Phillips’s novel SUITABLE FOR FRAMING concerns treasures looted during World War II. That’s where the similarities end, though. In SUITABLE FOR FRAMING, the things everybody is after are fabulously valuable paintings, rather than jewels. And SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is much better written than THE FAST BUCK.

The narrator in this novel is Jesse Barker, a journalist who gets finagled into joining a scheme to smuggle some paintings out of France following World War II and sell them to a Mexican general Barker happens to know. Most of the book takes place in the Mexican mountain town of Hidalgo, and Phillips paints a very vivid picture of this setting. As anybody who has read very much in this field will expect, the plot falls apart and becomes a maze of double-crosses, and of course there’s a beautiful woman involved, and Barker gets hit on the head and knocked out several times. Plus you get a colorfully eccentric (and really evil) villain, Mexican wrestlers, spooky scenes set in graveyards, and a considerable amount of action.

I’ve always liked Phillips’ novels about espionage agent Joe Gall, which he wrote under the name Philip Atlee, although the plots in them sometimes get so complicated that I can’t keep up with them. I also really like his early novel PAGODA, which introduces Joe Gall when Gall was still a pilot, rather than a spy. SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is a little lighter weight than those books but shares many of their virtues: crisp prose, good descriptions, and hardboiled action. One thing that annoyed me was Phillips’ habit of paraphrasing what his characters are saying, rather than just quoting the dialogue, but I sort of got used to that technique after a while. As a rule, though, I don’t like that. I liked the book overall, though, and I think if you’ve read and enjoyed Phillips’ other novels, you’ll enjoy this one, too.

(This post first appeared on October 3, 2008.)

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 . . .

Forgotten Books: The Ill Wind Contract - Philip Atlee (James Atlee Phillips)

Recently there was some discussion about the Joe Gall series on one of the Facebook groups I belong to, and since I hadn't read one of the books in a long time I figured that would be a good excuse to do so. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, which has been out of print for quite a while now, Joe Gall is a former pilot who knocked around the Far East after World War II, had some adventures there (one of which is the basis for PAGODA, the actual first book in the series), and eventually became an agent for the CIA. Between missions he spends time at his isolated home in the Ozark Mountains.

THE ILL WIND CONTRACT, published in 1969, finds Joe being sent to Indonesia, with a stopover in Japan first, to find out why an Indonesian army officer is trying to recruit an American mercenary. That's how it starts out. After that . . . well . . .

I've read about half of the Joe Gall novels, and one thing is consistent in all of those: the plots never make sense to me. Maybe I'm just dense. At first this one seems to be about some sort of new wonder drug that makes people either super-smart or super-dumb (I was never sure which), which would make it fit right in with the Sixties secret agent boom which produced James Bond, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Our Man Flint, etc. But then that part of the plot goes away and the book reads like it's going to turn into an Indiana Jones-style adventure as Joe tries to retrieve a fortune in gold and silver bullion that's hidden in an ancient temple. Suddenly, though, civil war breaks out in Indonesia (a development based on actual events), and Joe is caught in the middle of it. Characters and storylines are introduced and then promptly discarded (or forgotten). And this is one of the more coherent novels in the series, as author Philip Atlee (really James Atlee Phillips) at least makes an attempt to tie everything together in the end.

So given all that, is this book actually worth reading? Well, yeah. Definitely. Joe Gall can be unlikable at times, but he's an interesting protagonist/narrator. The action scenes are pretty good, the local color is excellent, and Phillips wrote terse, hardboiled, at times lyrical prose that's very effective. I don't know if the messiness of his plots was a deliberate attempt to capture the murky world of international espionage or if he just couldn't keep up with what he was writing. Somehow, though, it all works fairly well. I suspect that somebody will reprint these as e-books one of these days. In the meantime, copies of the original paperbacks are readily available on-line and not expensive, and they still show up in used bookstores. (I bought this one from Half Price Books' nostalgia section for a dollar.) The series can be read in any order, although the books sometimes refer back to previous entries, so if you run across any of them and have never made Joe Gall's acquaintance, give 'em a try.

Forgotten Books: Suitable for Framing - James Atlee Phillips

Like last week’s THE FAST BUCK, James Atlee Phillips’s novel SUITABLE FOR FRAMING concerns treasures looted during World War II. That’s where the similarities end, though. In SUITABLE FOR FRAMING, the things everybody is after are fabulously valuable paintings, rather than jewels. And SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is much better written than THE FAST BUCK.

The narrator in this novel is Jesse Barker, a journalist who gets finagled into joining a scheme to smuggle some paintings out of France following World War II and sell them to a Mexican general Barker happens to know. Most of the book takes place in the Mexican mountain town of Hidalgo, and Phillips paints a very vivid picture of this setting. As anybody who has read very much in this field will expect, the plot falls apart and becomes a maze of double-crosses, and of course there’s a beautiful woman involved, and Barker gets hit on the head and knocked out several times. Plus you get a colorfully eccentric (and really evil) villain, Mexican wrestlers, spooky scenes set in graveyards, and a considerable amount of action.

I’ve always liked Phillips’ novels about espionage agent Joe Gall, which he wrote under the name Philip Atlee, although the plots in them sometimes get so complicated that I can’t keep up with them. I also really like his early novel PAGODA, which introduces Joe Gall when Gall was still a pilot, rather than a spy. SUITABLE FOR FRAMING is a little lighter weight than those books but shares many of their virtues: crisp prose, good descriptions, and hardboiled action. One thing that annoyed me was Phillips’ habit of paraphrasing what his characters are saying, rather than just quoting the dialogue, but I sort of got used to that technique after a while. As a rule, though, I don’t like that. I liked the book overall, though, and I think if you’ve read and enjoyed Phillips’ other novels, you’ll enjoy this one, too. It would be a natural for Hard Case Crime to reprint. It reminded me quite a bit of David Dodge’s PLUNDER OF THE SUN.