Not Quite Review Corner: Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger: the untold story of the academics who became the Spies, invented modern spycraft and helped turn the tide of the war. 2024, Elyse Graham, Harper Collins

I still don't know what to make of this one. 

It's proven harder to read than I thought. I didn't take to it right away. I found it too easy-going, a little facile. I'm still not sure why the text rubs off on me the way it does. Maybe it's just writing style. If that's the case, then your milage will definitely vary.

However, the story it's telling is remarkable (though I question the 'untold' bit). Well worth your time, particularly if you ever intend to run or play Bookhounds of London, or Delta Green. This is the story of how the intelligence services in the West became true intelligence services. How they picked up those peculiar skills that would become the obsession of spy novelists in the decades to come. 

How the booksellers and academics turned into spies.

Most importantly it tells you who they were and what they got up to. I like to think I know a little bit about the subject matter, but I'd not heard of Adele Kibre before, for example. It's one of those times when you're reminded that actual spy work is not like a Bond novel. That John Le Carre had a point. Here's someone who did very important work, but who did it by talking, by finagling, by paying attention and taking notes. Not for Kibre the daring car chases and escapes across rooftops. She bought or acquired books. Lots and lots of books, and papers, and news. 

Judging by what is known of her she seems to be the kind of researcher who would have driven Barbara Tuchman to distraction; the kind that accumulated a wealth of knowledge but seldom put anything down on paper. There was always one more scrap to be had, one missing piece, and Kibre, by the looks of it, would rather have squirreled away that academic nut than published a single word.  

Kibre isn't the only character, of course. Graham covers a wide range, focusing mainly on American sources. Her subjects are recruited from their dusty academies, set to training with the likes of Fairbairn and Colonel Applegate, and then off they go to the war, which might be in Spain or Switzerland or France or a dozen other places. There they hoover up knowledge both academic and military, funneling it back to their shadowy bosses. 

From a Mythos perspective, or anyone with interest in running a supernaturalist spy campaign, this is definitely something you want to be looking at. This is Bookhounds taken to its logical extreme, where instead of the profit motive the squirrely bookish types are driven by loyalty to country and cause. Who knows what peculiar secrets they might uncover in that library collection?

I just wish I liked it better than I do. I've gone headlong into the likes of Barbara Tuchman and Liza Picard, and those are far more academically rigorous works. I rank Tuchman's March of Folly as one of the finest works of scholarship in the English language, and that covers about as broad a topic as you could wish for, with as much imagination - far more, I'd argue - than Graham displays here.

I suppose it could be writing style, or it could be a lurking suspicion that Graham's attention to detail is a little off. Never anything major, but several minor clangers that threw me out of the narrative. 

There's a bit in the section about breaking codes where Graham imagines a conversation between two bigwigs shortly after a successful North African campaign. One asks the other whether the academics figured out how to read Hitler's plans from the flutter of ribbons in little girl's pigtails.

"No," the other responds. "They thought they'd break U.N. custom and actually apply intelligence to their intelligence."

Which works as a comeback, just barely, but all I could think was 'U.N.? As in United Nations? But they don't exist yet, surely? Or is this meant to be U.S.N. as in U.S. Navy - presumably Naval Intelligence?'

It's things like that which throw me off. The minute I start wondering whether the author can be trusted to tell the story straight - the author, mind, not the narrator - I lose interest in the work. 

Part of the problem is Graham's use of fictionalized narrative to fill in the gaps, where historical information is lacking. It's a handy device in moderation. However, there's a lot of gaps, so moderation flies out the window.  You're never entirely sure which bit is backed by some kind of record (any kind, please our lord Herodotus) or whether it's emerging full-formed like a Greek God from a historian's head. You have to have a lot of trust in the author before you can easily swallow that kind of thing. 

It's a bit like the rant at the end of Murder by Death: 'You've all been so clever for so long, you've forgotten to be humble. You tricked and fooled your readers for years. You've tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. You've introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before. You've withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it. But now the tables are turned ...'

Murder By Death (1976)

Which brings me back to the likes of Tuchman and Picard. I trust those authors, but they earned their trust by being academically rigorous from the start. Graham never did. She starts with fictitious narrative and carries on in that vein. 

Do I recommend it? Yes. After all, I've recommended far worse works, both fiction and non-fiction, precisely because even the bad stuff can be a source of inspiration. The Book of Spies and Army of Thieves, to name but two, are absolute stinkers. They can still be mined for useful ideas. 

The same applies here. I do not consider this a serious work of history. It's the historical equivalent of a summertime beach read. But it does have some interesting features and has enough of relevance to Keepers and Directors to warrant a read. 

Tho maybe not buy the expensive hardback version? Borrow it from the library; that's the better option by far.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

The Magical Battle of Britain (UK, RPG All, Bookhounds, Dreamhounds, Trail)

 Cometh the hour, cometh the woman.

When war breaks out and the Phoney War becomes all too real, as the Germans push through Belgium in May 1940, as the Battle of France begins and ends in a heartbeat, Dion Fortune does her bit to save England from the Germans.

She organizes the Magical Battle of Britain, with a cycle of rites beginning July 1940.

Bear in mind, that’s a busy month. You’ve got bombing raids on mainland Britain, the Cardiff Blitz; the Germans are chewing up the RAF in the Kanalkampf in preparation for Unternehmen Seelöwe; Vichy is the new French government, allied with its conqueror Germany; the country’s plunging into debt to fight a war in which it seems it will soon be the sole Allied combatant, with Churchill telling the country they’d fight on alone, seeking no terms or parley; the buying and selling of new cars is banned, the first of a series of stringency measures; everyone thinks the German invasion is imminent, including the Germans. It’s one of those times when you daren’t read the newspaper because you know what the headlines will be. It’s enough to scare someone into spiraling depression.

In all this, Fortune marshals the occultists of Britain to … actually, it isn’t entirely clear what the point is.

With a title like ‘Battle of Britain’ you expect, well, combat. Of some kind. Lonely duels high in the sky, where life and death is seen as a scattering of contrails punctuated by crashing aircraft. Explosions. Derring-do, that kind of thing.

What actually happens is a little less exciting.

Fortune gathers together a number of people, not all of them occultists but all known to her personally. She persuades them to meditate on a particular subject at a particular time and write to her with the results of their meditations. She then wrote back, instructing her correspondents that they weren’t to open or read the letters until just before the next session, at which point the cycle begins anew.

Fortune openly admits that what she’s attempting is more about morale building than anything practical. Victory, if it is to be had, must be fought for and won in the physical realm. What she’s after is more of a spiritual victory.

You know what that reminds me of?

ITV News

Again, bear in mind when this is happening. This is the bleakest point in the war, for the English. The news isn’t going to get better any time soon; the actual Battle of Britain is about to see some of the heaviest casualties, the most significant engagements. The Hardest Day is coming in August. Everyone knows a family where someone’s died, or is that family mourning a loss. Food is running short. Meanwhile Charles Lindberg the celebrated American aviator is telling his fellow Americans not to get involved; that so long as America is strong, none will dare invade her, and she need not intervene on another’s behalf.

People need to feel as though they’re doing something, even if it’s a gesture of defiance.

Foreign Correspondent (1940, Hitchock)

I have to wonder whether Fortune was drawing on her own war experiences in the Women's Land Army during the First World War. That was all about rallying round and doing your bit, even if it was less than spectacular and didn’t require a lot of derring-do. It’s also where she allegedly had her first serious spiritual experience and began her communications with the Ascended Masters. Was she intending some kind of mass recruitment to the esoteric cause? Introducing her followers to the Ascended Masters that first intrigued her so long ago, during another war?

As the war news improves, Fortune loses interest in the effort. It becomes more about what will happen after the war, when peace returns to the green and pleasant land. She begins developing ‘the Arthurian Formula’ where Arthur and his knights become dim and distant reflections of Atlantean forebears. Not that she has long; leukemia will claim her by 1946.

OK, that’s what actually happens.

How to gamify?

Probably the simplest method is to assume that Fortune embarks on the Arthurian/Atlantaen bit a good deal earlier than she does. The occultists she recruits - the player characters - are all Knights in her Arthurian army, and there are dragons on the horizon attacking the very soul of Britain itself. Their job is to use scavenged Atlantaen rituals (and later, technology) to establish a perimeter - castles, in her vernacular - first on the coast and, later, when those are bombed in the Battle of Britain alongside the coastal airfields, further within. From these castles the Knights defend the realm against foreign psychic incursion. The intent is to provide aid at first, when the country's need is greatest, and later, when the tide turns, a base for assault across the Channel against those same foreign dragons who were ravaging the countryside a few short months prior.

All Arthurian stories need a Mordred figure and in this instance there's one ready-made: occultist Aleister Crowley. He seems friendly enough to Fortune, but his smiles hide evil intent. He may present as an ally at first, but someone's working with the dragons, and it may well be the wickedest man alive. 

Now, some options:

Option One: Yithian Malice Fortune isn't a free agent. She's been corrupted by the Yithians, who see the outbreak of war as their last chance to scoop up as much Pnakotic material and lost technology as they can before the war ravages what's left of their network. The Yithians intend to gather all this at their Oxford Camelot, a secret base where they'll hide all of their secrets until some future date when they can re-establish their network. The Yithians see this as a rescue mission - shades of Three Damsels of the Fountain - but the player characters may disagree, particularly since the Yithians follow an old human maxim: no witnesses. In this version, Crowley is Mordred, but Mordred isn't the real enemy of mankind.

Option Two: Dragons of Dream Fortune is facing real threats, but these are threats to the English Dream. The Dragons ravage the nightmares of all who listen to Haw-Haw's broadcasts and it's up to the player characters to perform miracles of resistance. They may be assisted in this effort by whatever's left of the Dreamhounds of Paris who may be trying similar methods of resistance in occupied France. In time the characters may become a kind of psychic Special Operations Executive; entirely unofficial, but there were many such unofficial, undocumented operations. A supernatural Small Back Room, with Fortune as the lead brain and Crowley as the greasy politico.

Small Back Room

Option Three: Accidental Arthur This borrows from Pagan Publishing's Golden Dawn and Pelgrane's Dracula Dossier, but neither are required reading. In the dying days of the last century Golden Dawn occultist Randolph Northcote attempted to bring back King Arthur to save Britain, but his attempts ended in disaster and Arthur's plans to reestablish his Shub-Niggurath cult were thwarted. Temporarily, at least, though some of Arthur's ideas and forbidden texts he and Northcote consulted found their way into the archives of a secretive supernaturalist organization within Military Intelligence. Now that same obscure branch of Military Intelligence is drawing on those old ideas to create a new Arthurian cycle, and in the process bringing back Arthur's Shub-Niggurath cult. Fortune the Golden Dawn inheritor, in this version, may be the heroic resistance, or may be a willing catspaw of British Intelligence; if the latter, then Crowley/Mordred is what little's left of the heroic resistance. The ultimate goal is to bring back Arthur the same way Northcote did, but Northcote didn't realize what he was bringing back, and neither does Military Intelligence. 

That's all for this week! Next week, something completely different.  

The Funeral (NBA, Dracula Dossier)

This week's post is based loosely on the life & career of 'Mad Mike' Hoare, who recently died at the age of a hundred. His wartime career spanned the world war, the cold war, and some present day shenanigans, all of which goes to show you should never mess with a chartered accountant.

Thomas Michael Hoare, born in India, was sent by his Irish parents back to the UK for his further education in 1927, at the age of eight. Though trained in accountancy what he really wanted was to be a soldier, and he got his opportunity when war broke out in 1939. He joined the Territorials, became a small-arms expert, successfully completed officer training and rose up the ranks, ending his world war fighting Japanese in Burma with the Chindits, guerrilla warfare experts.

Finding post-war life as a chartered accountant dull, Hoare moved to South Africa with his young family, going on a motorcycle tour of the continent in 1950, searching for the Lost City of the Kalahari. From there it was a short step to the battlefield again, and an encounter with Moise Tshombe, a Congolese politician who would become prime minister in 1964, forced out in 1965, led to Hoare becoming a mercenary leader fighting against communist-backed troops. It's this Congo conflict that gives Hoare his nickname; communist radio broadcasts described him as 'that mad bloodhound Hoare,' a description he delighted in.

He came out of the Congo conflict with an illustrious reputation that would later be captured on film in The Wild Geese, where he was fictionalized as Richard Burton's Colonel Faulkner. The Wild Geese was Hoare's name for his Congo mercenary group.

He seemed to have retired after this, but embarked on a mad adventure to 'rescue' the Seychelles from its communist government in 1981. He and a group of grey-haired gunmen, disguised as a bunch of tourists, tried to fly in, but the plan all fell apart when Customs agents found a folded-up AK-47 in someone's bag. One abortive shootout later, Mad Mike and some of the survivors flew out to South Africa, where Mike found a prison cell waiting for him. His stay in jail was not prolonged, and he spent the rest of his life travelling, writing, and filming or being filmed. He died in South Africa on the 2nd of February, aged 100.

From a Night's Black Agents perspective, here you have a gun for hire who's seen out some of the major conflicts of the Cold War, the World War, and the modern era. If Edom wasn't hovering in the background someone certainly was, else why and how does a man who put himself in harm's way so often live to be a hundred?

So, to gamify:

The Funeral

A legend is dead. The funeral's this week, but Edom has much work to do before that happens.

The legend is the last survivor of the Carmilla Sanction, who went on to have a bloody and spectacular career as a mercenary in Africa throughout the Cold War. Cameroon, Congo, even Rhodesia - wherever a nationalist, and preferably Communist, government tried to seize power, there was the legend right in the thick of it. He helped Edom more than once, and was a known British intelligence asset, but despite the worst war could throw at him, the man wouldn't die. He even formed his own PMC in the late 1960s, RiskControl, though that ended in an embarrassing mess in Sierra Leone, when RiskControl failed to prevent Siaka Stevens regain the Presidency. The legend's financial backers deserted him, and his Edom connections weren't much help.

Disgruntled, the legend went into semi-retirement, though he was drawn out in the early 1980s - or so they say. He's supposed to have been a minor player in the investigation that led to the capture of the Rainy Night Butcher in Hong Kong, though few could understand why someone like him should abandon his African haunts for Hong Kong. Only the higher-ups in Edom know the full story of China vampire program Room 452's involvement in that affair, or why Triad gangsters were offering large sums of money for an experienced vampire hunter, no questions asked. It was allegedly his last hurrah, and it went like a dream.

Except that he was grabbed by Chinese authorities as he made his departure, and spent eight years in prison. Not that he was bitter, or wrote a scathing memoir about his intelligence operations and the failure of his superiors after his release. It was never published in English, but is well known in the Chinese-speaking world. One publishing house that tried to make an English language translation mysteriously burned down, with the publisher inside. The rumor mill differs as to whether than was a British or Chinese attempt to stifle the truth. Anyone with Vampirology knows the story, and someone with Vampirology and Tradecraft knows who burned down the publishing house. There's also a 1998 schlock film, Trust Me U Die Twice, in which the legend's reimagined as a CIA rogue agent who gets killed in the penultimate scene.

When the legend was an operator it was standard practice that, on the operator's death, Edom would conduct an autopsy and complete cleansing of the operator's personal effects. It was wartime. Nobody really knew what long-term physical effects prolonged exposure to Seward Serum would have, and in any case nobody wanted Edom's secrets to be accidentally discovered by their next of kin, or, worse yet, their landlady. Edom's insisting on its rights, and sending in the agents along with some helpful Director characters - the Pathologist, Phlebotomist, Serum Researcher, perhaps the E-Squadron Veteran as minder - to take the legend apart and see what there is to see, as well as strip his home, nursing home and anywhere else he's recently been right down to the floorboards. Grieving family be damned - this is Defense of the Realm stuff.

Except nobody knows where the body is ...

Options:

Last Flight of the Wild Geese: The legend still has contacts in the mercenary world, and he knew Edom would come looking for his corpse. He arranged for his body to be retrieved by some of his comrades, now septuagenarians (at the youngest), and buried in some easy-to-overlook South African beauty spot. They might be elderly, but they're combat veterans and prone to extreme violence. No supernatural element here, though there might be a few Chinese intelligence assets in the background; Room 452 just wants to make sure the old sod really is dead. Of course, if the Director wants a supernatural element, there's always old Roland ...

Hopping Away: How does someone become a Jiangshi? The legend knows - now. All those years ago in Hong Kong, he was possessed briefly by a wicked, unclean spirit. He thought he'd thrown off that curse, but it turns out spirits are harder to deal with than he thought. The Jiangshi inside the legend's body wants revenge for the Rainy Night hunt, and is after the legend's friends and family. How fortunate for it that all the people it wants to kill have gathered in South Africa for the funeral.

Advanced Persistent Threat 452: All those years ago, China didn't capture the legend - Room 452 recruited him. Already angry with his former colleagues, the legend accepted their job offer and helped train some of China's best vampire killers. The legend isn't dead; his life has been prolonged by Room 452's version of the Seward Serum. However, Room 452 knew it couldn't carry on the deception much longer. People were beginning to gossip about the gunman who wouldn't die. The funeral is Room 452's chance to lure some of Edom's top talent into a trap, and either infect their computers with malware that they'll take back to base or, even better, capture or turn the Pathologist, Phlebotomist or Serum Researcher. Who better to lead the operation than the legend himself ...  

Enjoy!

Spy Tech: The Minox (Night's Black Agents, Dracula Dossier)

Say hello to the Minox A, an antique bit of spy kit due to be sold at Bonhams Hong Kong in a few days time. If you fancy a flutter, the projected price is hovering at the US$5000 range. Personally I quite like the look of the Expo Police Camera, more modestly priced at $2,000-odd, but then I've always been fonder of Prohibition-era kit.

The Minox line was the spy's best friend from the earliest days of the Cold War. The OSS used them in World War Two, while the KGB were still using them as recently as 1990. If you've seen Doctor Strangelove, for instance, there's a scene in which the Soviet Ambassador uses one. A Minox also became part of JFK lore, when his assassin Oswold was found with one in his possession. John Anthony Walker, the Navy man convicted of spying for the Soviets in 1985, used a Minox C.

Its popularity wasn't because the typical Minox was cunningly disguised as a potted plant, but because it was small and lightweight, with remarkably clear close focus for its size, and very decent long focus. You can get as many as 36 exposures from a single reel of film, on the old cameras. The A series being sold at Bonhams was manufactured until 1969. The C series, used by Walker, was manufactured from 1969 to 1978. The C series was electronic, with a light meter, while the less sophisticated mechanical A series had an aluminum shell, which at least made it lightweight. However the A series was so beloved of Minox fans that a special edition was produced in 1992, completely mechanical, in chrome, black or gold. The Minox brand is still on the market today.

Now, let's take a look at the Dracula Dossier, and see where the Minox might fit in.

As with every other item in the Dossier, the Minox is described as an item of major importance, minor importance, or as a fraud.

SUPPOSED HISTORY: If a 1940s artifact, the Minox was taken by the Van Sloan team on its desperate mission. It's a battered Riga model, modified by Edom for special operations. Built in 1939, Edom saw the advantage in having a miniature camera, but knew that taking photographs of vampires was, at best, a tricky business. The original design was retrofitted with lenses designed by Teman to overcome the vampire problem, but Edom never had a chance to test the design before deployment. If a 1970s artifact, the Minox was used by foreign agents - perhaps KGB - during the mole hunt, but was either captured or lost. The information it contains has been exploded out of all proportion by rumor after rumor, but best guess has it that one of the photos is of the real mole. If modern day, it was until recently the plaything of one of the Legacies, who fancied themselves a modern-day spy. Perhaps it's a tricked-out gold replica A model, all mechanical, specially engraved with the owner's initials. Nobody knows why a dangerous crime syndicate ordered its theft, but for it to be worth so much to that kind of people, the information hidden on it must be damning.

MAJOR ARTIFACT: Not only does it contain a photograph of a very important figure or location within the Conspiracy - Dracula's Castle, for example, or one of the Conspyramid higher-ups - it can also take photographs of the Undead. Not necessarily good photographs, mind you; this is a prototype, perhaps from Edom, perhaps from another manufacturer, and it never got tested. However even if the photographs aren't perfect, everyone from Edom to the Conspiracy to China's Room 452 wants this one, because they think its design can be studied and improved. Of course, whoever originally created the modified Minox also wants it back, and is willing to do quite literally anything to get it. Funny thing; it seems almost to attract Renfields. Perhaps that has something to do with its design, which may or may not have included a drop of rather potent blood.

MINOR ARTIFACT: The Minox contains many interesting, potentially damaging photographs. Even though none of the pictures show important Conspiracy locations or people, there's enough here to wreck careers. At least one significant person, perhaps involved or formerly involved with the intelligence community, is very keen to get the negatives, and will pay any price. There's more than enough blackmail material here to Intimidate that person. At the Keeper's discretion, there may also be pictures of blueprints or other curious documents on the Minox; there's just enough detail here to give the protagonists a clue as to the location or means of manufacture of another Item.

FRAUDULENT ITEM: The Conspiracy, or perhaps Edom, deliberately built this Minox and its photographs for disinformation purposes. It's bait, intended to lure enemies out into the open. Either they reveal themselves when they turn up to claim the camera, or the photos on it lead the owner to a predetermined ambush point. Alternatively, the information contained here is black propaganda, designed to smear a chosen target. If the latter, then the Minox is almost certainly Conspiracy manufacture; there's hardly any point in, say, Edom trying to blacken Dracula's reputation.

["My God! not only does the foul creature drink the blood of innocents, he also strangles kittens! Is there no end to his perfidy?"]

CONNECTIONS: Any of the 1940s people might have the Minox in their possession, or have stashed it somewhere for safekeeping. It might have been left behind by Van Sloan, somewhere in Romania. If it ended up in Conspiracy hands, it could be in any of Dracula's London safe havens, probably long forgotten. A former intelligence operative from the 1970s may still have his old Minox left over from his days on active service. An antique Minox may find its way via Sotheby's to the open market. A modern Minox may still be in the possession of its current owner; it may need to be stolen, or perhaps prised from their cold, dead hands.

Haw Haw (Trail of Cthulhu, Bookhounds of London)

Lord Haw Haw, like Tokyo Rose, was a propaganda broadcaster during the Second World War, who each night told the people of Britain that the war was a hopeless cause, and that Nazi victory was inevitable. There were several broadcasters who wore the Haw Haw mantle, but the one I'm interested in is William Joyce, who presents a unique opportunity for a Trail or Bookhounds Keeper. Theoretically he could also show up in a Night's Black Agents game, particularly if, in your Dracula Dossier, you're running the 1940s campaign. That's the great thing about the radio; it doesn't matter where you are. You don't have to find it. It will find you.

However from a Bookhounds perspective, the bit you're interested in is Joyce's pre-war career.

Though born in New York to Irish immigrants, Joyce's parents soon returned home to Galway, Ireland, where he spent his youth, and where he is now buried. Following what he claimed was an assassination attempt when he was fifteen, Joyce and his family went to England. Though he attempted to get into the army, he had to lie about his age to do it, and was soon found out. Denied entry to the military, he went back to school, and attended Birkbeck College at the University of London, hoping to go from there into officer training. While he was there he fell in with the British Fascists, thus beginning what was to become a lifelong obsession.

He was an enthusiastic campaigner from the first, and not just as a talking head. Front-line clashes with the political opposition were common in those days, and Joyce had his face slashed open in a brawl with Communist agitators. He claimed ever afterward that his attacker was a Jew. However for all his faults one thing Joyce didn't lack was physical courage, and he soon had a reputation as a brawler.

It was an age of street battles. Cable Street is the most notorious, with Stockton-on-Tees a close second. People fought with whatever they could get their hands on; it might be a chair leg, a chamber pot, or a thrown potato with a razor blade stuck in it. Confrontations tended to be violent and bloody, but with few, if any, fatalities. Joyce was in the thick of it. It was the kind of thing he enjoyed.

His great talent was for public speaking. He could electrify an audience, and soon became one of the British Union of Fascists' leading speakers. Under Sir Oswold Mosley, Joyce soon rose to great heights in the BUF, standing for Parliament under the Fascist banner, and ran the West Sussex branch of the party. Youth groups, rallies, public events, Blackshirt marches; Joyce turned West Sussex into a Fascist stronghold.

He maintained this position until 1937. He had hoped that, come the revolution, Mosley would make him Viceroy of India, but events turned out differently. The 1937 elections had been the party's goal, and it spent time and effort grooming candidates, only for its major political supporter, Lord Rothermere, to withdraw funding. Without its most influential backer, the BUF had to tell its supporters to abstain, and fight for fascism in the next election. Little did Mosley know what was to come; war would interrupt the electoral process, and there would be no election till 1945.

Without a victory in 1937, and lacking a big-money patron, Mosley had to cut back on BUF expenditure. One of those fired in the ensuing cuts was Joyce, who found himself at a loose end. Though he tried to stay in politics, and split with his former friend Mosley, by 1939 it was very clear to him that, if he stayed in Britain, he would be arrested and interned. Joyce and his wife fled to Germany, where they stayed for the duration. At war's end Joyce was tried and hung as a traitor, for his Haw Haw broadcasts. He was 39 years old.

From a Keeper's point of view, Joyce's main use is as an antagonist, though, in a Bookhounds setting, he could conceivably also be a patron. Any campaign involving Radicals could easily have Joyce as a prime mover, and if there genuinely are Nazi agents roaming around London looking for occult tomes, Joyce is bound to be assisting them.

There's no suggestion that Joyce was superstitious in any way, or believed in the occult, but a fictionalized version could easily turn him into a kind of Svengali figure, using his (Mythos inspired) hypnotic voice to sway crowds. Theoretically he could even be an avatar, or dupe, of Nyarlathotep, since the Old One likes causing chaos and disaster and Joyce is in a prime position to do it.

On one famous occasion Sherlock Holmes himself tackled the Fascists, tracking down and defeating a fictionalized Haw Haw. That suggests a potential Dust Thing connection. Suppose the Dust Things decided to oppose Joyce and his Fascist friends, perhaps because of a book burning that Joyce organized. What better way to get the protagonists to act as their allies against Joyce, than to recruit Sherlock Holmes himself, and get Holmes to lead the protagonists into battle? Best suited to an Arabesque style game, but - particularly if one of the protagonists is deluded into thinking he or she is Holmes - it could be an excellent roleplay opportunity for gamers who enjoy a bit of Baker Street sleuthing with their Mythos madness.      

With all that in mind, William Joyce:

Athletics 10, Driving 4, Electrical Repair 6, Explosives 2, Firearms 6, Fleeing 6, Health 8, Mechanical Repair 4, Scuffling 9, Weapons 8. In a Pulp game, assuming use of Hypnosis, then Joyce has Hypnosis 5/15, the number after the slash representing the bonus he might get as a Mythos-powered Svengali figure.

Alertness Modifier: +1
Stealth Modifier: 0

Damage: -2 (fist), -1 (knife, thrown brick or razor blade), +0 (handgun)

Special: Joyce can summon Radicals (Bookhounds page 55) to do his bidding. He can command the allegiance of up to 20 Radicals at a time, perhaps sending them on missions or using them as bodyguards. Radicals tend to have few useful General abilities, but are handy to have around when you want someone beaten up or knifed. This is in addition to any forces he may have at his disposal as a Nazi spy or Mythos agent, assuming he is one. 

Sykes, Fairbairn and the Wilds of Scotland: Post Bookhounds

There is a book in my collection I've been searching for without result. I say book; it's more of a pamphlet really, but one of those pamphlets you pick up knowing it will be of great use to you for a long time. I picked it up at the Soane Museum in London, which museum I highly recommend to anyone with an hour or two to spare; the pamphlet was from one of the architectural societies, and talked about the stately homes in Scotland that the security services used to train its agents, often with the enthusiastic assistance of two very skilled roughnecks, Eric Sykes and William Fairbairn.

Sykes and Fairbairn are the sort of people you need in a time of crisis. Sykes was a sniper and pistol expert, a veteran of the Great War as well as big game hunter, who went out to Shanghai in 1917 and for a time served, first as an unpaid volunteer and later as an inspector, in the police. That was where he met Fairbairn, a career copper, soldier, and close combat expert who developed his own martial arts system, which he taught to his fellow Shanghai policemen. Soon after the Second World War broke out, the pair of them shipped themselves home with a boatload of somewhat illegal firearms, and put themselves at the service of their country.

The intelligence services took them on board and set them up as instructors in sunny Scotland, teaching special agents, commandos and rangers how to fight, and live. Shooting to Live is in fact the title of their most famous instruction manual.  

The average shooting affray is a matter of split seconds, they warn. If you take much longer than a third of a second to fire your first shot, you will not be the one to tell the newspapers about it. It is literally a matter of the quick and the dead. Take your choice.

The bit that always sticks with me is, they used wax rounds and a slightly reduced powder charge to make their point, a practice which apparently is borrowed from duelists of the preceding centuries. In order to perfect your dueling technique, without actually getting your head blown off, you used these erzatz rounds in much the same way a paintballer would today. Sykes and Fairbairn used broadly the same method, putting trainees in a live fire range safe in the knowledge that, though they'd get bruised, they wouldn't actually die. At least, so says the Architectural Pamphlet, which I now cannot find. If you read Shooting to Live I highly recommend the Mystery Shoots section in chapter 6, which describes something like this scenario, but doesn't mention wax rounds.

Now, let's consider how this can be put in a Bookhounds context.

Bookhounds the campaign is set in the 1930s, with the War coming just around the corner. Nazi agents are specifically mentioned several times in the text as possible adversaries, or potential customers. When I discussed Technicolor London, way back in 2012, I touched briefly on the idea of a technologically advanced Nazi base complete with electric eyes and security cameras; that's the sort of campaign I'm thinking of here.

The question is, how to end it? If the game's been progressing well, no matter what your particular Final Adversary is, by the time war actually kicks off a Bookhounds game is effectively over. There's a certain charm in trying to keep the shop active while the Blitz is on - you could have some very effective scenarios set in the Undergound during air raids - but the whole grubby aesthetic of a books-and-auctions game is lost when everything's overshadowed by the threat of imminent, total destruction. You can't take the bickering over the price of a medieval missal seriously when your family was blown up yesterday.

Now is the time for a complete change of pace, and probably also an effective conclusion to the careers of these presumably established occultists. Now may also be the time for the security services to step in, recruit them, and send them off to Scotland. After all, if the protagonists have been involved in any way, shape or form with the Nazis before this, then one of Aunty Dora's children is bound to have taken note. Your country needs you. Time to step up and be counted.

Imagine what it would be like in one of those stately homes, miles from anywhere, set in God alone knows how many acres of carefully managed wilderness. Forgotten Gothic grandeur mixed with hasty wartime bodge jobs, as the military move in to make improvements of their own. Eager young recruits, polite but disbelieving, line up to be taught Idiosyncratic Magic or Megapolisomancy, and to be warned about the nature of some of the threats they will face. Meanwhile Sykes and Fairbairn are teaching them - and probably the Bookhounds too - how to shoot, stab, and throttle their opponents.

Then comes the inescapable warning: Trouble is on its way. Whatever the Great Adversary you might have been using in your game is, it is about to reach its destined conclusion. You could have this take place in London, for a Bookhounds game; whenever Dreamhounds comes out, you could have an interesting mix of the two campaign styles, as the surviving Bookhounds are sent in on a daring mission in wartime Paris. Odds on survival ought to be very low indeed.

The point ultimately being that this is an endgame moment. It takes on everything that has come before, and acknowledges that - thanks to the War - circumstances have changed such that things cannot proceed as they have done. There is a transition point - the stately home in Scotland - where the final encounter is defined, allowing the protagonists to plan for that moment when, whether on the rain-slick streets of London or the boulevards of Paris, they finally take action against the foe they've been crossing swords with all this time.

Then comes that moment when, after all those adventures, all that special training, they meet with the enemy one last time.