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The Friends of Lucifer
Corgi, London, 1977
The blurb on the back:
When English aristocrat Sir John Wycombe vanished after the brutal murder of his wife and child, international journalist and SURVIVAL agent Greg Ballard was ordered to find him. For Wycombe was a fellow-member of SURVIVAL – the secret international organization pledged to prevent the world destroying itself – and he’d been on to something big before he disappeared.
Well, you can see what attracted me to buy the book: a secret organization devoted to protecting the world, a Satanic circle, racial conflict, the English aristocracy… what more could anyone want? Well, some decent writing and plotting would have been a help. As would some convincing characters. But this is pure exploitation stuff, and maybe I’m just being too demanding. What is vaguely interesting is the appearance yet again of the right-wing trend in popular fiction; we’re not necessarily supposed to support this, but here’s one of the upper class characters explaining why Little England has to get littler before it can rise again:
Oh, and there’s also the inevitable bit of sex ‘n’ sadism (‘She’d been brutally beaten; her whole bottom and the tops of her thighs were covered with these big ugly weals’ – p.133), and lesbianism and so on, but – equally inevitably – it doesn’t amount to much. The book starts with a Prologue outlining the foundation of Survival as a force ‘composed of men and women of high intelligence, dedicated to the belief that mankind must survive.’ And Dennis Sinclair is also credited as the author of two other books - The Blood Brothers and The Third Force - both of which sound as though they’re probably part of the same series. But I don’t know. Anyone else read any other Survival novels that they could help me with? ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: 2/5 HIPNESS QUOTIENT: 2/5  The Daughters of Satan crime home |
