BULLDOG DRUMMOND is loose!
From 1920, this was the first in a series that spawned sixteen books, over a dozen movies and a radio and TV series. Enormously successful in his day and very influential on later writers like Leslie Charteris and Ian Fleming, Sapper and his hero are today nearly forgotten. Another one! Sometimes I think we need a book called FORGOTTEN HEROES about these guys.
'Sapper' was actually Henry Cyril McNeile (1888-1937) who saw action in World War I and who (like many of those who survived that nightmare) never really got over it. He created a character shaped by that war, a former Infantry captain who had been exposed to danger and violence,rather liked it, and looked for similar thrills in civilian life. So our story starts with young Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond bored and restless. He's comfortably off with some unspecified income that lets him loaf around without working, even retaining a valet and cook on his premises. Drummond places an ad in the newspapers offering to help innocents in distress if the circumstances look exciting, and, although at first he seems merely to be rescuing a delectable young debutante's father from a
criminal gang, he soon gets in over his hand against a plot that threatens the very existence of England itself.
What offends modern readers about the Drummond books is their openly racist and fascist tone. As I understand it, in the second book THE BLACK GANG (which I haven't read), Drummond basically leads a vigilante goon squad to terrorize Jews, Socialists, foreigners and anyone else he doesn't like. There isn't much of that in this book. He does uncover a Bolshevik plot to start a worker's revolution in England much like the
one which overthrew the Czar a few years earlier (good luck with that project!), and the revolutionaries are described as wild-eyed, unshaven scum. And there's also a few sharp remarks about Germans ('The scum certainly would not be complete without a filthy Boche in it'.), but frankly you have to expect that sort of dig in British thrillers after
WWI. For that matter, right up into the 1950s, Ian Fleming was still having James Bond discover Hugo Drax was actually a German plotting to blow up London. (Fleming wrote that 'the Hun was always at your feet or at your throat.')
But aside from that, there's no obvious ethnic slurs. Of course, I'm going by the 1999 Regnery reprint and it may have had pages of racial rants excised, but I hope not. I like to read books as they were first published and take the offensive parts as hi storical flaws without getting too worked up over it (not always easy).
The story of BULLDOG DRUMMOND itself is brisk, lively and has an occasional flash of imagination but only one or two sparks of humour. It has lots of action and suspense, with such unlikely ingredients as a cobra guarding a staircase, a Pygmy assassin in a London hotel (running around inside the cabinets with a deadly blowgun)a bathtub full of acid and an assortment of deathtraps. But the book loses any credibility when
Drummond gets involved with a strangling match against a gorilla and breaks its neck. (True, it's a half-grown gorilla, but still....come on!) And it trails off limply after a dramatic fight between Drummond and thesecondary villain, with some hollow speeches and an obvious setup for a sequel.
Drummond himself is nothing like the dashing, romantic playboy Ronald Colman portrayed in those wonderful films or even like the 007 imitation from the 1967 DEADLIER THAN THE MALE with Richard Johnson. Frankly, Captain Hugh Drummond is an unlikeable thug. He freely admits he's not too bright and that he can't be expected to come up with a clever ruse. What he is mostly is an extremely dangerous commando. A former boxer, Drummond used to go out by himself at night in France during the Great War and silently kill stray Germans. Once he tasted blood, he missed the adrenalin surge of deadly combat and is pining for it in peacetime England. Luckily for the general public, he kept enough general decency to channel his aggressive instincts into a crusading cause rather than
simply beat up random strangers.
Introduced here are also Drummond's rather pliable young lady, Phyllis, and the interesting villain who calls himself (among other identities) Carl Peterson...master of disguise, international schemer,partnered with a lovely vamp who is obvously not his real daughter. The book and the character read very much like a prototype for the
Saint, who came along a decade later. The big difference is that Leslie Charteris had genuine wit, zest for life and a poetic love of language for its own sake that McNeile lacked. And Simon Templar has a sharp sense of right and wrong that Drummond wouldn't understand. I would love to see the two characters clash, with the Saint effortlessly
manipulating and out manuevering the violent but not very perceptive Bulldog. It would be like one of the cartoons where Bugs Bunny deals with the Tasmanian Devil......