The Best New Horror 2 (51 page)

Crosbie didn’t start talking business until eyedropper-sized cups of coffee arrived. With the plates taken away, the Art Editor opened his folder on the table, and brought out a neatly paperclipped set of notes. Tamara was still picking at her fruit salad, five pieces of pale apple and/or pear floating in a steel bowl of water with a solitary grape. She and Crosbie had been drinking dry white wine with the meal, but Greg stuck to mineral water. The gritty coffee gave him quite a punch, and he felt his heart tighten like an angry fist. Since
Fat Chance
, he hadn’t done anything notable. This was an important meeting for him. Tamara might not dump him if it didn’t come out right, but she might shift him from her A-list to her B-list.

“As you probably know,” Crosbie began, “Leech United Kingdom is expanding at the moment. I don’t know if you keep up with the trades, but Derek has recently bought up the rights to a lot of defunct titles with a view to relaunch. It’s a lot easier to sell something familiar than something new. Just now, Derek’s special baby is the
Evening Argus
.”

“The Brighton paper?” Greg asked.

“No, a national. It folded in 1953, but it was very big from the ’20s through to the War. Lord Badgerfield ran it.”

“I have heard of it,” Greg said. “It’s always an
Argus
headline in those old films about Dunkirk.”

“That’s right. The paper had what they used to call ‘a good War’. Churchill called it ‘the voice of true democracy’. Like Churchill, it was never quite the same after the War . . . but now, what with the interest in the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain and all that, we think the time is right to bring it back. It’ll be nostalgia, but it’ll be new too . . .”

“Gasmasks and rationing and the spirit of the Blitz, eh?”

“That sort of thing. It’ll come out in the Autumn, and we’ll build up to it with a massive campaign. ‘The voice is back.’ We’ll cut from this ovaltine-type ’40s look to an aggressive ’90s feel, yuppies on carphones, designer style, full-colour pages. It’ll be a harder news paper than the
Comet
, but it’ll still be a Leech UK product, populist and commercial. We aim to be the turn-of-the-century newspaper.”

“And you want a cartoonist?”

Crosbie smiled. “I liked your
Fat Chance
work a lot, Greg. The script was a bit manky for my taste, but you draw with clean lines, good solid blocks of black. Your private eye was a thug, but he looked like a real strip hero. There was a bit of Jeff Hawke there. It was just what we want for the
Argus
, the feel of the past but the content of the present.”

“So you’ll be wanting Greg to do a
Fat Chance
strip for the new paper?”

Greg had made the connection, and was cracking a smile.

“No, Tamara, that’s not what he wants. I’ve remembered the other thing I know about the
Argus
. I should have recognized the name straight off. It’s a by-word . . .”

Crosbie cut in, “that’s right. The
Mirror
had Jane and Garth, but the
Argus
had . . .”

Greg was actually excited. He thought he had grown up, but there was still a pulp heart in him. As a child, he had pored through second- and third-hand books and magazines. Before
Brainrape
and
Fat Chance
and
PC Rozzerblade
, he had tried to draw his other heroes: Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, Sexton Blake, Biggles, and . . .

“Dr Shade.”

“You may haff caught me,
Herr Doktor Schatten
, but ze glory off ze Sird Reich vill roll over zis passetic country like a tchuggernaucht. I die for ze greater glory off Tchermany, off ze Nazi party and off Adolf Hitler . . .”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Von Spielsdorf. I wouldn’t dirty my hands by killing you, even if it is what you so richly deserve.”

“Ain’t we gonna ice the lousy stinkin’ rat, Doc?” asked Hank the Yank. The American loomed over the German mastermind, a snub-nosed automatic in his meaty fist.

“Yours is a young country, Henry,” said Dr Shade gently, laying a black-gloved hand of restraint upon his comrade’s arm. “That’s not how we do things in England. Von Spielsdorf here may be shot as a spy, but that decision is not ours to make. We have courts and laws and justice. That’s what this whole war’s about, my friend. The right of the people to have courts and laws and justice. Even you, Von Spielsdorf. We’re fighting for your rights too.”

“Pah, decadent
Englische Scheweinhund
!”

Hank tapped the German on the forehead with his pistol-grip, and the saboteur sat down suddenly, his eyes rolling upwards.

“That showed him, eh, Doc?”

Dr Shade’s thin, normally inexpressive lips, curled in a slight smile.

“Indubitably, Henry. Indubitably.”

—Rex Cash, “The Fiend of the Fifth Column”,
Dr Shade Monthly
No 111 [May, 1943]

The heart of Leech UK was a chrome-and-glass pyramid in London docklands, squatting by the Thames like a recently-arrived flying saucer. Greg felt a little queasy as the minicab they had sent for him slipped through the pickets. It was a chilly Spring day, and there weren’t many of them about. Crosbie had warned him of “the Union Luddites” and their stance against the new technology that enabled Leech to put out the
Comet
and its other papers with a bare minimum of production staff. Greg hoped none of the placard-carriers would recognize him. Last year, there had been quite a bit of violence as the pickets, augmented by busloads of radicals as annoyed by Leech’s editorials as his industrial relations policies, came up against the police and a contingent of the
Comet
-reading skinheads who were the backbone of Leech’s support. Now, the dispute dragged on but was almost forgotten. Leech’s papers had never mentioned it much, and the rest of the press had fresher strikes, revolutions and outrages to cover.

The minicab drove right into the pyramid, into an enclosed reception area where the vehicle was checked by security guards. Greg was allowed out and issued with a blue day pass that a smiling girl in a smart uniform pinned on his lapel.

Behind her desk were framed colour shots of smiling girls without uniforms, smart or otherwise, their nipples like squashed cherries, their faces cleanly unexpressive. The
Comet Knock-Outs
were supposed to be a national institution. But so, according to the
Comet
, were corporal punishment in schools, capital punishment for supporters of Sinn Fein, and the right to tell lies about the sexual preferences
of soap opera performers. Greg wondered what Penny Stamp—Girl Reporter, Dr Shade’s sidekick in the old strip, would have made of a
Comet Knock-Out
. Penny had always been rowing with the editor who wanted her to cover fashion shows and garden parties when she would rather be chasing crime scoops for the front page; perhaps her modern equivalent should be a pin-up girl who wants to keep her clothes on and become Roger Cook or Woodward and Bernstein?

He rode up to the 23rd floor, which was where Crosbie had arranged to meet him. The girl downstairs had telephoned up, and her clone was waiting for him in the thickly-carpeted lobby outside the lift. She smiled, and escorted him through an open-plan office where telephones and computers were being installed by a cadre of workmen. At the far end were a series of glassed-off cubicles. She eased him into one of these, and asked if he wanted tea or coffee. She brought him instant coffee, the granules floating near the bottom of a paper cupful of hot brown water. There was a dummy edition of the
Evening Argus
on the desk. The headline was “IT’S WAR!” Greg didn’t have time to look at it.

Crosbie came in with a tall, slightly stooped man, and ordered more coffee. The newcomer was in his 70s, but looked fit for his age. He wore comfortable old trousers and a cardigan under a new sports jacket. Greg knew who he was.

“Rex Cash?” he asked, his hand out.

The man’s grip was firm. “One of him,” he said. “Not the original.”

“This is Harry Lipman, Greg.”

“Harry,” Harry said.

“Greg. Greg Daniels.”

“
Fat Chance
?”

Greg nodded. He was surprised Harry had kept up with the business. He had been retired for a long time, he knew.

“Mr Crosbie told me. I’ve been looking your stuff out. I don’t know much about the drawing side. Words are my line. But you’re a talented young man.”

“Thanks.”

“Can we work together?” Harry was being direct. Greg didn’t have an answer.

“I hope so.”

“So do I. It’s been a long time. I’ll need someone to snip the extra words out of the panels.”

Harry Lipman had been Rex Cash from 1939 to 1952, taking over the name from Donald Moncrieff, the creator of Dr Shade. He had filled 58 Dr Shade books with words, 42 novels and 135 short stories, and he had scripted the newspaper strip all the while, juggling storylines. Several
of the best-known artists in British adventure comics had worked on the Dr Shade strip—Mack Bullivant, who would create
Andy of the Arsenal
for
British Pluck
, Tommy Wrathall, highly regarded for his commando and paratroop stories in
Boys’ War
, and, greatest of all, Frank FitzGerald, who had, for six years, made Dr Shade dark, funny and almost magical. They were all dead now. Harry was the last survivor of those days. And so the
Argus
was calling in Greg to fill the footprints.

“Harry has been working up some storylines,” said Crosbie. “I’ll leave you to talk them through. If you need more coffee, give Nicola a buzz. I’ll be back in a few hours to see how you’re doing.”

Crosbie left. Harry and Greg looked at each other and, for no reason, started laughing like members of a family sharing a joke they could never explain to an outsider.

“Considering Dr Shade must be about 150 now,” Harry began, “I thought we’d start the strip with him trying to get the DHSS to up his heating allowance for the winter . . .”

SHADE, DOCTOR
Scientific vigilante of mysterious origins, usually hidden behind a cloak and goggle-like dark glasses, although also a master of disguise with many other identities. Operating out of an outwardly dilapidated but inwardly luxurious retreat in London’s East End, he employs a group of semi-criminal bully boys in his neverending war against foreign elements importing evil into the heart of the British Empire. Originally introduced (under the name “Dr Jonathan Shadow”) as a minor character in
The Cur of Limehouse
(1929), a novel by Rex Cash (Donald Moncrieff), in which he turns up in the final chapters to help the aristocratic pugilist hero Reggie Brandon defeat the East End opium warlord Baron Quon. The character was so popular with the readers of
Wendover’s Magazine
, the monthly publication in which the novel was serialized, that Moncrieff wrote several series of short adventures, later collected in the volumes
Dr Shadow and the Poison Goddess
(1931) and
Dr Shadow’s Nigger Trouble
(1932). In 1934, alleging plagiarism of their character, The SHADOW, Street and Smith threatened to sue Badgerfield, publishers of
Wendover’s
and of the collections, and, to appease the American firm, the character was renamed Dr Shade.

A semi-supernatural, ultra-patriotic avenger whose politics would seem to be somewhat to the right of those of Sapper’s Bulldog DRUMMOND or the real-life Oswald Mosley (of whom Moncrieff was reputed to be a great admirer), Dr Shade is much given to executing minor villains with his airgun or gruesomely torturing them for information. He appeared in nearly 100 short novels, all credited to Rex Cash, written for
Dr Shade Monthly
, a pulp periodical issued by Badgerfield from 1934 until 1947. The house pseudonym was also used by a few other writers, mostly for back-up stories in the 1930s, when the prolific Moncrieff’s inspiration flagged. The character became even
more popular when featured in a daily strip in the
Evening Argus
, most famously drawn by Frank FitzGerald, from 1935 to 1952. Moncrieff, after a bitter dispute with Lord Badgerfield, stopped writing Dr Shade in 1939, and the strip was taken over by Harry Lipman, a writer who had done a few Dr Shade stories for the magazine. By the outbreak of war, Lipman had effectively become Rex Cash, and was producing stories and novels for the magazine as well as scripting the comic.

Lipman’s Dr Shade is a less frightening figure than Moncrieff’s. Although his uniform and gadgets are unchanged, Lipman’s hero was an official agent of the British government who refrained from sadistically mistreating his enemies the way Moncrieff’s had. It was revealed that Dr Shade is really Dr Jonathan Chambers, an honest and dedicated general practitioner, and the supernatural elements of the strip were toned down. During WW II, Dr Shade’s politics changed; as written by Moncrieff, he is an implacable foe of the non-white races and international communism, but Lipman’s hero is a straightforward defender of democracy in the face of the Nazi menace. Moncrieff’s Moriarty figure, introduced in
Dr Shade and the Whooping Horror
(1934), is Israel Cohen, a stereotypically Jewish master criminal in league with Russian anarchists and Indian Thuggees in a plot to destroy Britain’s naval superiority. During the War, Cohen was retired—although he returned in the late 1940s as a comic East End nightclub owner and
friend
of Dr Shade—and the penumbral adventurer, joined by two-fisted American OSS agent Harry Hemingway and peppy girl reporter Penny Stamp, concentrated exclusively on licking Hitler.

Moncrieff’s Dr Shade novels include
Dr Shade Vs the Dynamite Boys
(1936),
A Yellow Man’s Treachery
(1936),
Dr Shade’s Balkan Affair
(1937),
To the Last Drop of Our British Blood
(1937),
The Bulldog Bites Back
(1937),
The International Conspirators
(1938) and
Dr Shade in Suez
(1939), while Lipman’s are
Dr Shade’s Home Front
(1940),
Underground in France
(1941),
Dr Shade Takes Over
(1943),
Dr Shade in Tokyo
(1945),
Dr Shade Buries the Hatchet
(1948) and
The Piccadilly Gestapo
(1951). The character also featured in films, beginning with
Dr Shade’s Phantom Taxi Mystery
(1936; dir. Michael Powell), in which he was played by Raymond Massey, while Francis L. Sullivan was a decidedly non-Semitic Israel Cohen, renamed “Idris Kobon.” Valentine Dyall took the role in a BBC Radio serial from 1943 to 1946, and Ronald Howard wore the cloak in a 1963 Rediffusion TV serial,
Introducing Dr Shade
. . ., with Elizabeth Shepherd as Penny Stamp and Alfie Bass as Israel Cohen.