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The Fictional Avengers: Part II
February 8, 1998 Australian Avengers fan Geoff Barlow wrote and privately published his first Avengers novel in 1980. The Saga of Happy Valley tried to skirt the copyright laws by referring to the leads as Steade and Peale. Barlow was contacted by lawyers representing EMI, who held the copyright at that time. Although he was allowed to sell the copies which had already been printed, the book was removed from the market when those copies sold out.
In the late 1980's and early 1990's, Barlow, in conjunction with the Dave Rogers' Official Avengers Fan Club, printed a group of stories called "The Missing Cases." Each story is in booklet form, running between 60 and 90 pages, with the last book in the series containing two stories. It's a pleasure to hold these little books. They're what Avengers fiction should be--slim, light, fast reads. In comparison, I worry about the upcoming Avengers movie novel, written by Julie Kaewerf and said to run 352 pages. How much padding is tucked into all those pages!
Case #1: The Weather Merchants. Is the English climate so capricious that it can change from high summer to the dead of winter, complete with blizzard, in a matter of minutes? And do these sudden shifts in weather have anything to do with the mad Admiral who has built a lighthouse on his property.... twenty miles from the sea? The weather control plot of this story is reminiscent of the episode A Surfeit of H20 and, since these are the "missing cases", it would be interesting to know where it fits in the Avengers chronology. If Steed and Emma had already run across the distardly Dr. Sturm, you'd expect them to say "By George! Another weather control fiend!" And, speaking of resemblances, does this 1989 story remind you of a certain upcoming movie?
Moonlight Express is accompanied by a shorter story, The Spoilers, which brings all the Avengers back together again, ala Too Many Targets. The plot involves a group of spoil sports who want to ruin British amateur sport for some reason; too many people having too much fun, I think. At the end, The Cybernauts show up again, in gigantic and totally unbelieveable form. Well, you can't keep a good robot down. Barlow's come up with some pleasant, Avengerish plots. Though they might be too over-the-top science fiction for some tastes, they are reflective of many episodes in the color Diana Rigg series. His endings though, the big fight scenes and the chase scenes, are too complicated. The Avengers is a very visual show and I think he tried to incorporate that visualness into his endings. Simplicity would have worked better. The most outstanding story, Moonlight Express, falters at the end, when locomotive chases and huntmen on horses chasing the locomotives make for confusion rather than chase/fight-scene excitement. Crafting a good fight scene is difficult; the tendency is too put in too much, hoping to convey mahem and fist-swinging excitement. Writers who do them ought to turn back to the John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books, or even Fleming's James Bond novels, to see how pared-down writing can convey action and excitement in a fight. That quibble aside, these books show what the Berkeley Medallion series could have been if better writers had been chosen.
For information on purchasing books in The Missing Cases series, contact Australian bookseller, Strictly Literary.
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Case #2: The Monster on the Moor. Barlow pays homage to Conan Doyle in this story of a monster running loose on the Devonshire moors. He even brings in his own Toby, in the form of Special Agent Peabody, a low-slung little Corgi-Spaniel mix, whose earnestness just about makes him the most appealing character in the story. Steed and Mrs. Peel find the mystery of the moor centering on a local circus whose owners seem to want to develop into a huge entertainment park. As Steed tramps over hill and dale, Emma joins the circus as a high wire trapeze artist-in-training and gets the best action scene in the book--a no-net-below face-off with one of the villains.
Case #4: Moonlight Express. While the first two books borrow ideas from tv episodes of The Avengers and from Sherlock Holmes, Moonlight Express is entirely original, and Barlow has a big idea here for a plot. In fact, it concerns a big steam locomotive; a very big steam locamotive and very possibly a ghost locomotive at that. Early in the century, the last great steam locomotive, the magnificent Spirit of Diablo, crashed on her maiden run, killing everyone aboard. Sixty years later, the engine reappears, threatening the populace and carrying off locals. And the Diablo doesn't stick to the local rail system either; it swoops at great speeds down highways, byways, pathways and across pasture and heath. The opening vignette introducing the big ghost engine is quite atmospheric and could have been a great piece of Avengers film.