Roberson's Interminable Ramble

Has it really been more than a month since I last did an installment of Secret Services? Yeesh.

According to my notes, we're up to 2001 in my list of "clandestine government agencies that investigate the supernatural," which can mean only one thing. We've reached one of my favorite Secret Services of recent years, Charles Stross's The Laundry.

The Laundry was first introduced in the novel The Atrocity Archive, which was originally serialized in the pages of Spectrum SF in 2001, and subsequently collected in book form by Golden Gryphon Press in 2004 along with novella "The Concrete Jungle," which won the Hugo for Best Novella in 2005.


The Laundry stories are alternatively referred to as the "Bob Howard" series, after the techie protagonist of the novels and stories to date. He works in the IT department of a secret branch of the British intelligence services known only as the Laundry, which uses modern technology to deal with the occult. Think Lovecraft meets Len Deighton by way of Slashdot and you'll have a pretty good idea what it's all about.

Here's the description of that first novel from the Golden Gryphon site:

In Charles Stross's world of "The Atrocity Archive," Alan Turing, the Father of Modern Computer Science, did in fact complete his theorem on "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning." Turing's work paved the way for esoteric mathematical computations that, when carried out, had side effects that would leak through some kind of channel underlying the structure of the Cosmos. And out there in the multiverse were "listeners" — and sometimes these listeners could be coerced into opening gates: Small gates through which minds could be transferred and, occasionally, large gates through which objects could be moved.

In 1945, Nazi Germany's Ahnenerbe-SS, in an attempt to escape the Allied onslaught, performed just such a summoning on the souls of more than ten million. A gate was opened to an alternate universe through which the SS moved men and materiel — to live to fight another day, as it were. But their summoning brought forth more than the SS had bargained for: an Evil, patiently waiting all this time while learning the ways of humans, now poised to lunch on our galaxy, on our very own Earth.

Secret intelligence agencies, esoteric theorems, Lovecraftian horrors, Mid East terrorist connections, a damsel in distress, and a final battle on the surface of a dying planet — in "The Atrocity Archive," Charles Stross has written a high-octane thriller, and readers need to buckle up and hold on with both hands!

The "bonus story" in the novel, "Concrete Jungle," sees Bob Howard involved in a departmental power struggle involving the basilisk's stony gaze and the ubiquitous cameras of the modern British surveillance society. And intriguing hints about the background of the Laundry are dropped in the form of secret files and memos with which Bob is briefed.

In 2006, Golden Gryphon released The Jennifer Morgue, the follow-up to The Atrocity Archives. If the first novel had been Len Deighton, this one was Ian Fleming all the way.


Here's the description from the publisher's site:

In 1975, the CIA made an ill-fated attempt to raise a sunken Soviet ballistic missile submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. At least, "ill-fated" was the information leaked to the press. In reality, the team salvaged a device, codenamed "Gravedust," that permitted communication with the dead — the very long dead. Enter Ellis Billington, glamorous software billionaire, who has acquired Gravedust by devious means. Billington plans to raise an eldritch horror, codenamed "Jennifer Morgue," from the vasty deeps, and communicate with this dead warrior for the purpose of ruling the world. Worse still, he's prepared occult defenses that can only be penetrated by one agent walking a perilous path.

But James Bond doesn't work for the Laundry. Instead, they send Bob Howard, geekish demonology hacker extraordinaire. Bob must inveigle his way aboard Billington's yacht, figure out what the villain is up to, and stop him. But there's a fly in Bob's ointment by the name of Ramona Random — a lethal but beautiful agent for the Black Chamber, the U.S. counterpart to The Laundry. Billington's yacht is docked in the Caribbean, and Her Majesty's Government is not allowed to operate in this area without an American minder. The Black Chamber has sent Ramona to ride shotgun on Bob, but Ramona has her own agenda that conflicts with her employer's . . .

Bob and Ramona become entangled (literally), and are then captured by Billington and used to further his insidious plot. But let's not forget Bob's significant other, Dr. Dominique "Mo" O'Brien, also an agent of The Laundry, who has been trained especially for this mission. Can these intrepid agents stop Billington from raising the dead horror and thus save the world from total domination? The Jennifer Morgue takes the reader on a wild adventure through the worlds of Lovecraft and Ian Fleming, non-Euclidian mathematics and computer hackerdom — sort of like Austin Powers, only more squamous and rugose — with fast cars and faster women.

According to the faq on Stross's site, a third Laundry novel, The Fuller Memorandum, is due over the horizon, possibly in 2010. He has this to say about it:

Newly married and looking for a quiet life, Bob Howard thinks that a spell working in the Laundry's secret archives and catching up on the filing is just the ticket. But when his boss Angleton falls under suspicion and a top secret dossier goes missing, Bob is determined to get to the bottom of a historical puzzle: what was in the missing Fuller memorandum, and why are all the people who knew dying ...?

And I've just this very minute (!) learned that there is a new Laundry story I've missed, "Down on the Farm," which is available freely online at Tor.com.


Okay, so now I know what I'll be reading on my walk today...

Anyway, back to the Laundry. It's eventually revealed that the Laundry was originally Department Q of SOE, or Special Operations Executive, before being spun off as a separate black organization in 1945. As it happens, Department Q was a real department of the SOE during the 1940s, concerned with obtaining through clandestine methods all sorts of equipment, arms, and explosives for SIS operations.

Longtime readers of the Ramble may recall me mentioning the Laundry novels before, back when I was finishing up The Jennifer Morgue, the second in the series. There are many points of similarity between Stross's Laundry and my own MI8--their shared origins in the wartime SOE, the involvement of Turing, and their opposition by the Ahnenerbe being only the most obvious examples--and if I'd read The Atrocity Archive before starting work on my own MI8 stories I'd probably have just chucked the whole thing and gone off to work on something else. But I hadn't, so I didn't, and I stuck with them.

As I said in 2006, after finishing The Jennifer Morgue, "I like my own little occult spies too much to cut them loose, so they stay in the picture. But I don't kid myself that they're anywhere near as clever as Bob Howard and his crew at the Laundry. I'm reminded of Thomas Pynchon including a note in Gravity's Rainbow exhorting readers to check out Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo if they want to learn about African-American secret societies. I don't think I'd go quite as far as to put a foot note in End of the Century [I didn't, as it happens], but trust me when I say that if you want to read about occult secret agents, Charles Stross is the guy to go to."

I've seldom had as much fun reading in adult life as I had with the two Laundry novels. (And while I wouldn't dream of second-guessing another writer, if I were a betting man I'd wager than Stross had more fun writing them than he did on other stories.) Relentlessly clever, perfectly pitched, and more fun than you can shake a stick at. Highly, highly recommended.

Labels: secret_services

Forgive me, internets, it's been nearly a month since I posted the last entry in Secret Services, but I promise I have a good excuse. Two weeks lost to traveling to and from Calgary for WFC (and WFC, of course), and another week and a half of downtime waiting for my new computers to arrive, and then getting all my files reinstalled from backup, etc. I'm meant to be writing the fifth issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love, but having had this interminable silence in the Secret Services series hanging over my head for weeks, I figure I'll get this out of the way first.

For those of you who've been following along at home, I'm using "secret services" to define those ubiquitous clandestine government agencies that investigate the supernatural and the occult. I've been tackling them more or less in chronological order based on first appearance (though I'm fudging a bit with a few notable exceptions, as will eventually be seen). We're now up to those halcyon days of 2000, when an eager world got its first glimpse of Paul Grist's Jack Staff.

Now, as I've told you, and told you, and told you (and told you and told you) before, Jack Staff is the best superhero comic on the market today, and that everyone who doesn't hate goodness owes it to themselves to pick it up. But I won't retreat what I've already said before about the unremitting awesomeness of Jack Staff. Instead, I'll be focusing on one particular aspect of that awesomeness--namely, "Q."


Who, or what, is Q? Well, here's how they were first introduced, on page 17 of Jack Staff Vol 1. #1.

Helen Morgan
Ben Kulmer
Harry Crane

Three unusual people caught up in a world where the bizarre is commonplace.

They are the guardians of the gate between reality and unreality.

They are the investigators of the unexplainable.

The question mark crimes.

They are Q.

(Make a note of that letter, will you? It will turn up quite a few more times in future Secret Services entries.)

One of the things that Grist does in Jack Staff that makes the book so good is the dense layering of story, with breadth--a large cast of characters and many ongoing plotlines--and depth--backstory and flashbacks that reach back decades, centuries, and longer. This is in evidence from the very first issue, which introduces the patriotic working class hero Jack Staff, his WWII era teammates in the Freedom Fighters, "girl reporter" Becky Burdock (soon to be vampire girl reporter), Tom-Tom the Robot Man, vampire hunters Bramble and Son, and the members of Q.

And like those other characters, the three members of Q feel somewhat familiar, even in that first appearance. That's because the world of Jack Staff is peopled by types, characters that can be boiled down into brief Homeric epithets. "Vampire Girl Reporter." "Working Class Superhero." "Victorian Escape Artist."

But more than that, the characters are, by and large, analogues of specific characters from British popular culture. Most (but not all) of the referenced characters are from mid-20C British comics (though Bramble and Son, for example, are vampire-hunting variations on Steptoe and Son, the British comedy about father and son rag-and-bone men that later inspired the junkyard father-and-son pair in Sanford and Son), in many cases being virtually identical to the originals. (If you can slide a piece of paper through the original Spider and Grist's version, I'd be surprised.) But in the case of Q, Grist has done something a bit more interesting.

(And as a brief caveat, I'll point out that a reader's enjoyment of Jack Staff doesn't depend at all on familiarity with the characters being referenced. There were quite a few references that shot right past me when I first read the book, Anglophile that I am, but I was still hooked from page 1. The characters are recognizable as types, and in fact work on their own as fully-formed characters in their own right, even if the reader has no notion that they're analogues for other characters. Contrast that with Leah Moore and John Reppion's Albion, which depended entirely on the reader's familiarity with moribund British comics characters. Ian Edginton's Establishment, on the other hand, used a very similar approach to Jack Staff, employing figures from 60s and 70s genre television, primarily, to good purpose; well worth hunting down.)


Helen Morgan, Ben Kulmer, and Harry Crane are not analogues for any specific characters that have previously appeared. Instead, they are new characters that have been impacted by analogues for previous characters.

Let me try that again, from a different angle.

In the 60s there was a British strip entitled "Kelly's Eye", about a guy who finds the "Eye of Everlasting Life" while traveling in South America, a gem that protects its wearer from any and all harm, rendering them effectively immortal. Around the same time another strip featured the "Steel Claw," a superhero able to turn invisible and channel electricity thanks to the metal claw that gave him his name.

In the world of Jack Staff, the "Eye of Everlasting Life" is known as the "Valiant Stone," and it was once worn by an adventurer just like Kelly of the strip. But that adventurer came to a messy end when the Stone itself was shattered, broken into tiny shards. One of those shards came into the possession of Helen Morgan, who is now cursed with immortality until she can gathered all the scattered shards together again.

And a small time thief named Karl Stringer steals a steel claw from a museum, only to have it bond directly to his hand. Unable to remove it, he finds that he can turn invisible and channel electricity. Recruited by Q, he is given a new name and identity, but as time goes on, he finds himself drawn inexorably back to his former ways.

Harry Crane, for his part, is a former policeman who receives psychic visions of past events. (If he's related to any previous character, it's not been revealed yet.)

As the storylines in Jack Staff have progressed, it has been slowly revealed that while Q is recognized as some kind of official body by the police and other authorities, it doesn't seem to be directly affiliated with the government. For example, when Helen encounters Colonel Adam Venture ("Britain's first man in space--not that you'll find that in any official record!" -- see what I meant about types?) and the rest of the Starfall Squad (Their motto, "If it falls from the sky, it stays on the ground!"), Venture has no idea who she is. In the best tradition of clandestine secret services, though, Helen doesn't even bother to explain, but carries on with the investigation.

It's been gradually revealed that there are two supernatural forces at work in the world, the "Green" and the "Red." It was Mister Green who set Helen the task of recovering the pieces of the Valiant Stone (and who tried unsuccessfully to recruit Jack Staff as one of his agents). Just what the Red is, we've not yet discovered.


I should probably stop now, before I start recounting the plot of the entire series to date. In short, Jack Staff is the best superhero comic currently on the market, and the cryptic adventures of Helen Morgan and the rest of Q are a key ingredient in that mix. Check it out, unless you hate goodness.

Labels: secret_services

Now we come to a Secret Service that had--albeit someone indirectly--a significant influence on my own work.

Back in the heady days before the dot-com bust, all sorts of ambitious plans were floated, and one of them was Gorilla Comics. The idea was that a capitalized internet startup would fund a raft of creator-owned comics by some of the best writers and artists in comics--Busiek, Waid, Perez, Wieringo, etc. Sadly, the startup was a nonstarter, and the titles already in production were left without a home. With their funding evaporated, the creator's ended up self-funding and publishing what they had through Image Comics. Most of the titles only ran for a few issues each, but they offered tantalizing glimpses of what might have been.

One of those titles, and the one that resonated most with me as a reader, was Karl Kesel's and Tom Grummett's Section Zero.


What is Section Zero? Well, according to the inside cover of the first issue, there's no such thing...

There is no Section Zero.
Section Zero isn't a secret section of the United Nation's charter. It does not perpetually fund a team of experts and adventurers to investigate the fantastic and unknown. The idea that this "team" looks into such things as UFOs, Monsters, Lost Civilizations, Time Travel, Ancient Gods, and still-living Dinosaurs is no more than an urban legend. After all, none of these things exist.

Here's how Kesel described the outfit in an interview at the time:

The team is led by the smartest woman in the world. Her name is Doc Challenger. She belongs to a long lineage of adventurers. Her right hand man is Sam Wildman, who’s our loveable rogue character. Everything comes effortlessly to Doc Challenger and everything is a struggle for Sam. He can’t walk across the street without getting beat up by ninjas. That’s the sort of life he leads. Adding spice to the relationship is that they are ex-husband and wife. As the series progresses, we’ll learn more about the backstory there. There’s also a childlike alien being named Tesla who has vast, vast, vast powers but, thank God, he only has the mentality of a 6-year-old, otherwise he’d be running the world. We also have a 14-year-old Cambodian boy who has one of those cursed tattoos. You know all about those! If he rubs this bug tattoo on his arm, he becomes a bug boy character for exactly one day, so his name’s the 24 Hour Bug. He gets a big bug head and these big bug arms grow out of his back. Obviously, he’s not really thrilled with this power. It’s not a power that really wins the girls. That’s kinda where we start and we move off from there. There’s a few other members who’ll join the team as the 6-issue mini-series progresses. It’s one of those stories that starts out pretty small. There’s some sort of animal or creature killing sheep in the Australian Outback, and they go to investigate this. But as it often happens in comics, this is a small pebble that creates massive ripples. By the end of the mini-series, nothing is the same.

Elsewhere, Kesel has talked a bit more about the origins of the idea. Early last year I mentioned how, while looking for something else entirely, I stumbled upon these interesting comments Kessel made a few years ago on something called Monster Blog Mailbox:

"Twice I've tried to interest Marvel in series that would feature these monsters and misfits. The first was the Marvelmen— a Challengers of the Unknown-type group who fought giant monsters. The second was a Giant-Man pitch that would have had him involved with adventures so out-there that even his fellow super-heroes didn't believe him— in other words, tall tales (appropriate for a giant, I thought) or Tales to Astonish— and a lot of the stories would have involved the Marvel monsters. I actually wrote and got paid for a plot to the Giant-Man story before Marvel decided it wasn't really their cup of tea.

And then, in response to another reader's comments, he goes on to say...

1) The Marvelmen would have had their origins in the early 60s, allowing me to do period stories, but would have also had a modern version of the team. I recycled this approach when Tom Grummett and I created “Section Zero.” As for art— hard to say. I think a lot of artists today would do killer versions of the classic Marvel monsters, and I'd love to see 'em, so maybe there would be some way to set up a comic with a lead story by one recurring artist and self-contained back-ups by a rotating roster. If there ever was a Marvelmen comic. Which there probably won't be.

2) I created the Marvelmen in 89 or 90. I was trying to ride the coat-tails of Marvel's Monster Masterworks trade paperback, and even pitched the idea to the editor of that book— Marc McLaurin. With the assumption that the only Marvel monster stories most readers would be familiar with would be the ones in that trade paperback, the Marvelmen were characters from stories reprinted there: Lewis Conrad from TABOO, the scientist from SPORR, and Chan Liuchow from FIN FANG FOOM. There was also one MarvelWOMAN, but I created her new since I didn't know of a Marvel monster story where a woman was the hero. (Are there any?)

(Interestingly, this prefigures much that I dig about Agents of Atlas, as well as covering much the same ground as Roger Stern's similar concept "Monster Hunters", which came in between.)

In an author's note in the back pages of Section Zero #1, Kesel adds another bit of detail, that in itself is even more telling.

"Then I noticed--about thirty years after the fact--that the [Fantastic Four] were a natural, creative outgrowth of the Challengers [of the Unknown]. And I thought, well, what if one actually did evolve into the other?"

And it's there that the book's essential charm, at least for me, can be found. This kind of metafictional play, encoding the history of genres inside genre stories, are my bread and butter. (More about this in a moment.)


The original members of Section Zero, who had to contend with "atomic power, giant insects, [and] little green men", were Everest Pike, Sarina Ursari, "Gorgeous" Georges Seine, and Bernie Cork. As another character says of them, "Those four faced the fantastic, and unknown... yet none of them had any special powers!"



By the 1970s, the lineup of the team had changed. Everest Pike still lead the group, but he'd been joined by Tele Moteka, Sargasso, and Jesse Presley (who seems oddly familiar...).



By the 1980s, Tele Moteka was in charge of a team that consisted of Johnny Colossus, Artifax the mechanical man, and A.J. Keeler.



By 2000, the team consisted of Dr. Titania "Doc" Challenger, Samuel Wildman, the alien Tesla, and Thom Talesi, the 24-Hour Bug.

This kind of metafictional "genre history as fictional backstory" was not new with Section Zero, of course, far from it. In fact, Kesel's friend and Gorilla Comics studio-mate Kurt Busiek had previously done something very similar with his Astro City, and in particular with the First Family.

Patriarch Dr. Augustus Furst, scientist and adventurer, first searched the world for adventure and knowledge with his brother Julius Furst in the 1950s. In the 1960s Augustus Furst adopted the twin offspring of his ex-wife, who had inherited from their mother the ability to control alien energies. Together the four become world famous adventurers, known as the First Family. In time, the adoptive daughter Natalie went on to marry Rex, the reptilian son of one of the First Family's greatest enemies, and sometime later their daughter Astra was born. And so on...


Around that same time, Kesel and his Section Zero collaborator Tom Grummett did a similar take on a Kirbyesque quartet of adventurers with Challengers of the Fantastic.


The book was part of the second "Amalgam Comics" intercompany crossover, in which DC Comics and Marvel Comics "merged" their titles for a single month, producing books featuring characters like Super Soldier (Captain American merged with Superman) and Dark Claw (Wolverine and Batman). Challengers of the Fanastic were, naturally, the Challengers of the Unknown merged with the Fantastic Four. The Challengers in this merged universe were were scientist Reed "Prof" Richards, SHIELD agent Susan "Ace" Storm, her daredevil brother Johnny "Red" Storm and fighting senator Ben "Rocky" Grimm. Together they faced Doctor Doomsday (Doomsday and Doctor Doom) , Galactiac (Brainiac and Galactus), and others.

Kesel seems to have a real affinity for this kind of thing. In the Fantastic Four Annual 1998, with art by Stuart Immomen, he has Ben Grimm visit an alternate universe where, instead of having been formed roughly ten years before, the Fantastic Four first got their powers in 1961. This is a Marvel Universe that operates in real time, and in which Franklin Richards is now a grown man with a child of his own on the way (married to a character first introduced in Roger Stern's "Monster Hunters" mentioned above, btw), Johnny Storm and his wife Crystal have a teenaged son and daughter, and Reed and Sue Richards have mostly retired from adventuring to concentrate on research. (Kesel's Marvels Comics: Fantastic Four, with collaborator Paul Smith, is also worth hunting down; supposedly a reproduction of an issue of the "Fantastic Four" comic published within the Marvel Universe, the licensed magazine mentioned so often by the characters back in the Lee and Kirby days.)


John Byrne has played with similar ideas in the past. In What If #36 he answered the question "What If the Fantastic Four had not gained their super-powers?" The answer?


They became the Challengers of the Unknown, naturally.

Later, in his all-too-brief Danger Unlimited, he played with the idea of a family-based quartet of superpowered adventurers in real time (though interestingly, here the model for the characters before getting their superpowers was not the Challengers of the Unknown, but instead Jonny Quest and company.)


Danger Unlimited remains one of my favorite of Byrne's comics, and I've always thought it a shame that he never returned to the concept.


But what does all of this have to do with Secret Services, you might ask? Well, very little, to be honest. But it's this metafictional aspect of Section Zero that intrigued me, far more than the "occult investigation" business, I'll confess.

In that post early last year I mentioned above, I talked a bit about the influence that Section Zero had on me. To avoid repeating myself, I'll just quote myself instead.

With someone as obsessed with Wold Newton-type stuff as I am, Challenger and Wildman were names to conjure with. The clear suggestion in Section Zero is that Doc Challenger is the grand-daughter of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger. And with that being the case, how much of a leap would it be to assume Sam Wildman is some relation to James Clarke Wildman, Jr. (better known as Doc Savage)? There were scattered references to challenging the "unknown", and facing the "fantastic," which served not only to evoke the Jack Kirby series Challengers of the Unknown and the Fantastic Four which served as the comic's inspiration, but also offered the tantalizing suggestion that the Section Zero teams in past decades might have themselves served as the "real world" inspirations for the "fictional" teams Kirby and collaborators depicted in the comics. (That makes sense in my head; does it make sense out in the world?)

In the end, unfortunately, the series only ran for three of the projected six issues, along with a five page preview that ran in another title. And while in those issues we only got the barest glimpse at the backstory Kesel and Grummett had worked up for the team, it was clear fairly quickly that I was reading too much into off-hand references, and that the series would have headed in very different directions than I'd originally anticipated.

So the comic in my head was nothing like the one that I ended up reading. So what? In a writer's world, nothing is wasted, not even idle thoughts. I had just started work on one of the early Bonaventure-Carmody stories, those featuring J.B. Carmody and the team at the Carmody Institute, and as those stories developed, bits and pieces of the thing I'd thought Kesel's book was going to develop into crept in, gradually. I liked the idea of making a character's figurative antecedents his literal ancestors, which is how J.B. Carmody ended up being the grandson of the very-James-Bondish Jake Carmody, the grandson of the somewhat Doc-Savage-like Rex "King" Carmody, and the great-nephew of the vaguely Tarzan-esque Lord John Carmody. The Bonaventure side of the family (the "B" in "J.B.") developed later on, along somewhat different lines. And in short order JB Carmody's story resembled not at all the idea I'd originally had in mind for it, either. And so it goes...

And there you have it. In any event, backissues of Section Zero can be found without too much difficulty (Mile High has them on discount), and they're well worth picking up, if you don't mind the frustration of being left with only tantalizing glimpses of what might have been.

Labels: secret_services

Now we come to an entry in our list of Secret Services so secret that, as far as I can recall, they're never even given a name. Agents of the outfit pose as members of CIB (the Complaints Investigation Branch of the London Metropolitan Police Force) on occasion, and so that name seems to work as well as any other. They are a clandestine government agency, though, and their remit definitely falls under the general heading of "occult"--though in extremely clever ways.

Ultraviolet was a 1998 British television production created by Joe Ahearne, who has since directed episodes of Doctor Who and Strange, among others. The series was recommended to me a few years later, and I picked up the Region 2 DVD to check it out, sight unseen. I never regretted it.


Ultraviolet is arguably the best show of its kind to date. In the first episode, a detective-sergeant with the London Metropolitan Police (played by Jack Davenport of Coupling and Pirates of the Caribbean) is drawn into a mystery when his partner begins behaving strangely, claiming that he's been targeted by some kind of black-ops government-backed death squad. Davenport's character encounters the "death squad," which includes a former soldier, a priest, and a cancer specialist, who reveal that they really are after his partner--who just happens to have been infected with something called "Code V."

What's Code V? Here's the list of characteristics, from the show's official site:

Code Vs do not show in mirrors, photographs or videos. Their voices cannot be recorded or transmitted by phone. Image and sound can only be detected face to face.

They are immortal. They cannot be killed, only reduced to ashes (neutralized).

They can be neutralized by exposure to sunlight or by introducing carbon into the chest cavity (projectile, probe or explosive). Resulting immolation releases enough energy to start fires.

Code V ashes can be regenerated and must be kept secure.

They can be repelled by ultraviolet light (the radiation in sunlight) or by allicin (the chemical in garlic).

They can shield themselves from ultraviolet light with tinted glass.

They can be affected by polluted blood.

When they feed, the host wound heals over in minutes and can only be detected in ultraviolet light. The bite can be treated with lasers. The skin around the wound is burnt away leaving a small scar.

If untreated, a human becomes suggestible and develops aversion to sunlight.

There may also be an aversion to religious symbols. This may be psychological. The effect of religious symbols on Code Vs is unproven.

When drained to death, a human becomes a Code V.

No-one is forcibly recruited. They only take those who want to go.

Code Vs claim to have human-type emotions. This is unproven.

One of the terrific things about Ultraviolet is that it's a show about vampire-hunters that never mentions the word "vampire." Not once. The series takes the basic premise of vampirism and treats it with rigorous logic. If vampires don't show up in mirrors, for example, why not mount mirrored sights on weapons, along with a miniature video camera. If a target appears in the video screen but not in the mirror sight, you're looking at a Code V and should open fire. But not just with regular rounds, but bullets of compressed carbon--reinforced charcoal--that have the same effect as a stake through the heart. Then there's the mace that's laced with oils expressed from garlic, and the UV lights used to check a subject's reaction to sunlight. Clever, clever stuff.


The series ran for only one season of six episodes, a lamentably short run, but those six stories are packed to the gills with terrific writing, great acting, and viciously clever twists. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

Labels: secret_services

Today's entries in the list of Secret Services comes from Japan ("entries" because there's actually two of them here). Both originate in the pages of the long-running manga series by Kouta Hirano, Hellsing, and were featured in the later anime adaptations, as well.


In the world of Hellsing, supernatural monsters like vampires and ghouls are real, and Bram Stoker's Dracula is a more-or-less accurate historical account (though clearly the ending must have been a little different). Someone has to stand in the breach to civilization from being overrun by blood-drinking fiends, and that's where the Hellsing Organization comes in.

Here's the description of the outfit from the wikipedia entry.

More formally known as the Royal Order of Protestant Knights, the Hellsing Organization is a fictional group from the Hellsing universe. The Hellsing Organization was founded by Abraham Van Helsing shortly after the events of Bram Stoker's novel as a response to the threat posed by vampires such as Dracula. The Hellsing Organization is traditionally headed by Abraham's descendants, as they are the only individuals who can control Alucard, the ultimate undead created by the organization for use in their continuing struggle against supernatural threats. After WWII, it was decided that Alucard was too powerful or potentially too dangerous to continue to be used as a weapon, and was locked away in the basement of the Hellsing mansion. Upon Arthur's death, his daughter, Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing, became the director of the organization. Integra's uncle, Richard Hellsing, attempted to assassinate her and take control of the organization, but was defeated in part by Alucard, who was accidentally released on vague instructions from her father. Integra herself fired the bullet that killed Richard. During the timeline of the manga series, ten years have passed since Integra became director of the Hellsing Organization and Alucard was released.

In the Hellsing universe, the organization is an integral part of the true power-structure of Great Britain, which is, according to the story, still ruled by a hidden aristocracy and the monarchy. The organization is tasked with defending the country's shores from any and all supernatural threats and often faces controversy over the highly unconventional methods Hellsing chooses to do this, such as the use of "anti-Christian" powers and creatures. In the TV series, Hellsing is portrayed much more like a paramilitary or counter-terrorist organization armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns and GKN Saxon or VAB APCs used to transport Hellsing soldiers to areas where there are reports of supernatural outbreaks in Britain. The paramilitary aspects are rarely mentioned in the OVA or the manga.

But the Hellsing Organization isn't the only clandestine monster-hunting outfit out there. There's also the Vatican's Section XIII to consider.

Also known as the Iscariot Organization, Section XIII (and there's that familiar prime numeral again) fields "paladins" with swords, holy water, and holy writ to dispatch vampires and other nasties. Naturally, they take a dim view to the Hellsing Organization's pet vampires, Alucard most of all. And given the history of friction between Catholics and Protestants in the UK, there's some doctrinal tension between the two organizations, as well.

If you've never seen the Hellsing anime, but are familiar with Japanese animation in general, it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect. I kept seeing echoes of Vampire Hunter D, myself, in a setting not a million miles from the UK series Ultraviolet (about which more very shortly).

Labels: secret_services

Here's another "secret service" that I only know by reputation. Created by Adam Scott Glancy, Dennis Detwiller, and John Tynes, Delta Green is a game seting for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game.

The last time I devoted serious amounts of time to role-playing games was in high school, over twenty years ago, and I think I may have played Call of Cthulhu once or twice in there. And while I kept a toe in the rpg waters in the years that followed, occasionally picking up the manuals for new games (though never really finding the time to play them), I don't think I ever came across Delta Green. If I'm not misremembering, the first time I saw the name was in Charles Stross's afterword to The Atrocity Archive (about which more in a while), in which he says that he hadn't heard of it until he was done writing his novel, either. Stross says that having discovered it, the game came "dangerous close to making [him] pick up the dice again."

From what I've read about Delta Green, I'm with Stross on this one.


Here's a brief introduction from the game's official site:

Delta Green is a game setting for Call of Cthulhu, the popular horror roleplaying game published by Chaosium, Inc. Call of Cthulhu is a game about mystery, discovery, and horror, in which the characters are more or less ordinary men and women who slowly unravel terrible mysteries about the utterly alien powers at work in the universe.

Based on the writings of Jazz-era author H.P. Lovecraft and a number of authors who wrote stories based on his "Cthulhu Mythos," Call of Cthulhu is nominally set in the 1920s, and its scenarios have always been written with a small group of investigators, largely without organization or resources, in mind.

Delta Green brings the Cthulhu Mythos, and the men and women who encounter it, squarely into the modern day. Delta Green postulates a secret group dedicated to investigating alien and supernatural horrors, using the resources of the U.S. government to do so. Originally a unit of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency), Delta Green is now officially disbanded, its activities patently illegal; but its members carry on no matter what the cost, desperately facing the horrors that threaten mankind.

Delta Green was created by Pagan Publishing, an independent, small-press publisher under license from Chaosium to produce supplements for Call of Cthulhu. Originally developed in a 1992 issue of Pagan Publishing's acclaimed gaming magazine The Unspeakable Oath, Delta Green was published as a massive, award-winning sourcebook in 1997, to be followed by an award-winning sequel, Delta Green: Countdown, in 1999, and several smaller supplemental chapbooks and books of Delta Green fiction.

And here's an "in-story" explanation of the outfit.

So, I'm a psycho-burnout fed with a death wish. Just the kinda guy Delta Green goes trawling for. Just like you're going to be, unless you get killed first. Why would a covert government agency want a guy like me? Because only a psycho-burnout with a death wish would take a Delta Green assignment.

Did I say "covert government agency?" Is Delta Green a covert government agency? Well, yes . . . sort of.

Or, at least, once upon a time.

Once upon a time there was a group of men who could see clearly and who were willing to take responsibility to do what needed doing. They were called Delta Green. However, while doing what needed to get done, they did it wrong. Hence, Delta Green no longer exists. Officially anyways.

We still see and we still do what needs to get done, only today, if we get caught doing what needs to get done, we'll be doing time. Because no one in their right mind is ever going to believe what needs to get done.

"What needs to get done?" For a start, books need to be burned, artifacts smashed into powder, men need to be silenced, and, ultimately, the future must never be allowed to become the present.

I can't vouch for the quality of the game-play and such, not having tried it out myself, but from everything I've read it certainly sounds intriguing.

Labels: secret_services

Now we come to a particular favorite of mine in the list of secret services.

The Diogenes Club was first introduced in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story, "The Greek Interpreter." Holmes's smarter brother Mycroft Holmes was a member of the club, about which Sherlock said, "The Diogenes Club is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft one of the queerest men." We learn little about the club in that first appearance, getting only the following description from Sherlock:

"There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."

Later, in the "The Bruce-Partington Plans", Holmes and his assistant John Watson have the following exchange:

I had some vague recollection of an explanation at the time of the Adventure of the Greek Interpreter. "You told me that he had some small office under the British government."

Holmes chuckled. "I did not know you quite so well in those days. One has to be discreet when one talks of high matters of state. You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government."

Aside from these tantalizing hints, Doyle never revealed much more about Mycroft's clandestine role in the British government, or about the Diogenes Club itself.

In the 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Billy Wilder offered an explanation--the Diogenes Club is revealed to be a clandestine intelligence agency for the British government, with Mycroft as its head. It was a clever idea, and one that other writers of Sherlockian adventures would pick up and run with.

Enter Kim Newman.

In his 1992 novel Anno Dracula, the first in the series of the same name, Newman introduced Charles Beauregard, a member of the Diogenes Club and player in the "Great Game," a secret operative of Her Majesty's Government. The novel is, of course, set in a world in which vampires are real, and in which Bram Stoker's Dracula was a bit of wishful propaganda. In this world, Count Dracula has ensconced himself as Victoria's new prince consort, and vampires are the new ruling class in Britain. In later installments in the series, Beauregard and other operatives of the Diogenes Club play a central role. (If you haven't read the Anno Dracula novels, for god's sake, what are you waiting for?!)

One of Newman's strongest gifts as a writer, I think, is his ability to rework and repurpose characters from his own work (and from that of other hands) in new and interesting ways, remixing familiar elements in unfamiliar ways. The Diogenes Club is perhaps the best example of that. Beginning as Doyle's club for silent misanthropes, expanded by Billy Wilder into a clandestine government agency, and then staffed by Newman himself by Beauregard and a host of other operatives, it was with the multipart-novella "Seven Stars" that the Diogenes Club finally took shape.


"Seven Stars" is set not in the vampire-infested alternate history of Anno Dracula, but in a history more closely resembling our own. But, like the characters in Michael Moorcock's Multiverse and DC Comics' "Imaginary Stories", which Newman cites as early influences, the characters from Newman's stories have a habit of spawning off alternate versions in other realities, and the Diogenes Club is no exception. In a history more like ours, then, the Diogenes Club is not merely a clandestine government agency, but is a clandestine government agency that handles all of the cases that the normal authorities can't--the paranormal, the occult, the strange. And that earns them a spot of honor on this list of "secret services."

Here's Newman explaining the story's origins in his own words (from the afterword to The Man from the Diogenes Club, about which more in a moment).

In the 1990s, Stephen Jones edited an anthology called Dark Detectives: Adventures of the Supernatural Sleuths, dedicated to the subcategory of weird tale in which detectives, in the traditions of Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe, tackle cases that involve the supernatural or the strange. The book represented William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Manly Wade Wellman’s John Thunstone, Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour and Jay Russell’s Marty Burns. Also in the “magnifying glass and wooden stake” business are Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, Anthony Boucher’s Fergus O’Breen, Bram Stoker’s (and Chris Roberson’s—but not Stephen Sommers’) Van Helsing, The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully, Jeff Rice’s (and Dan Curtis’, Richard Matheson’s, Darren McGavin’s and David Case’s) Carl Kolchak and a run of comic book or strip characters famous (Dr. Strange, Batman in a certain mood), middling cult (the Phantom Stranger, Zatanna) or obscure (Cursitor Doom, anyone? Dr. Thirteen?).

Steve asked me to contribute to the book. I’ll let him describe what happened next. “After I had explained to Kim that the book would be themed along a loosely assembled chronology, we came up with the concept (probably over glasses of wine and beer) that it would be fun to have one serial-like case that would be investigated across the centuries by many of the characters he had created in his earlier novels and stories. These episodes would then be interspersed amongst the contributions from other writers to the book.” Since part of the point of doing sleuth stories is that you can do a whole series—unless, like E. C. Bentley, you kick off with a book called Trent’s Last Case—my plan was to have the serial that wound up being called “Seven Stars” feature detectives I’d written about in earlier stories or novels. The Victorian section (“The Mummy’s Heart”) revisits adventurer Charles Beauregard and journalist Kate Reed, who were in Anno Dracula; a WWII-set Los Angeles interlude (“The Trouble with Barrymore”) uses the anonymous narrator (plainly, a version of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe) who’d been in a Lovecraft-Chandler pastiche called “The Big Fish”; the “contemporary” 1990s section (“Mimsy”) is a semisequel to my novel The Quorum, featuring London private eye/single mum Sally Rhodes, etc.

“The only problem,” Steve says, “was that Kim did not have a psychic investigator for the period covering the 1970s. Of course that was no problem for Kim, who simply went back to his very first efforts at fiction while still a schoolboy and revived the character of ostentatious amnesiac Richard Jeperson, along with his striking associate Vanessa and ex-police constable Fred Regent. Inspired by such TV characters as Jason King, The Avengers, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who and the novels of Peter Saxon and Frank Lauria, Jeperson made his official debut with the novella ‘The End of the Pier Show’ in my 1997 anthology Dark of the Night: New Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.”

It was with the creation of Richard Jeperson that the Diogenes Club really takes off, I think. Since "Seven Stars" Newman has returned to Jeperson time and again, with nearly all of the stories to date collected in the pages of MonkeyBrain Books' The Man From the Diogenes Club (and check out the spiffy John Picacio cover below).


Here's Newman again, on the origins of the character of Jeperson in particular:

When I created Richard, I gave no thought to him as a “typical” character of the 1970s. This wasn’t just because I was eleven: I didn’t think of Sally Rhodes as a 1980s/90s character when I created her, but the stories she appears in now seem to me rooted in those decades. When I went back to Richard, I saw that he was a very 1970s fellow, and I spotted all the influences Steve later pointed out, and made an effort to work in even more. A few remain well-enough known to need no further explanation: The Avengers, a 1960s show well-remembered in the ’70s (and sequelised in The New Avengers), and various incarnations of the Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who or James Bond franchises (even Scooby-Doo’s Mystery, Inc.). But also in the mix that informs Jeperson and his world are less-often-repeated UK TV series: psychic detective efforts like Ace of Wands (little Neil Gaiman’s favourite—about a mystery-solving magician named Tarot and his owl Ozymandias) and The Omega Factor (ESP and spy stuff from 1979—now out on DVD) and Victoriana like The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (with Donald Pleasence in one episode as Carnacki) and Robert Muller’s Supernatural (about a tale-tellers’ institution, the Club of the Damned). While Columbo, McCloud, Kolchak, Rockford, et. al., were busy in America, British television had ’tecs, cops and spies like Jason King (played by Peter Wyngarde in Department S and the sillier sequel series Jason King), Marker (Alfred Burke in The Public Eye), Callan (Edward Woodward—Best Spy Show Ever, it’s official!), Barlow and Watt (Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor, who started in realistic shows like Z Cars and Softly Softly, then moved to poring over historical evidence about Jack the Ripper and Richard III), Paul Temple (Francis Matthews), The Incredible Robert Baldick (a terrific one-off by Terry Nation, starring Robert Hardy), Eddie Shoestring (Trevor Eve) and The Professionals.

Also, the racks at W. H. Smith’s were loaded with 30p-a-throw paperbacks mingling mystery and the occult, often with a vaguely counterculture tinge and under 120 pages: Robert Lory’s Dracula series (which began, like Richard Jeperson, with an instalment called Dracula Returns), Frank Lauria’s books about Owen Orient (Doctor Orient, Lady Sativa), Philip José Farmer’s racy Image of the Beast and Blown, Peter Saxon’s Guardians series (The Haunting of Alan Mais, The Killing Bone, etc), Richard Tate’s lone “Marcus Obadiah Mystery” For the Dead Travel Fast, anthologies edited by Michel Parry and Peter Haining, Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell (who’d started writing when he wasn’t much older than I was then—and was much better at it), and pulpy New English Library one-offs like Night of the Vampire or Village of Blood. These were the things I read in the 1970s, and which percolated—along with fashions, music, food, politics, jokes, interior design (we had inflatable chairs in our living room, which was papered with pictures clipped from Sunday supplements), attitudes, haircuts, scandals, slang—in my subconscious for the years I wasn’t thinking of writing about Richard Jeperson. When I came to him again, all this stuff bubbled up, and filled out his world. Most of the stories started with me thinking about aspects of the 1970s or vintage occult mystery fiction I wanted to play with—leftover seaside arcades (I remember working dioramas exactly like the execution collection in “End of the Pier Show”) and the brand of hooliganism found in NEL books popular at my school (Skinhead, etc., by Richard Allen—author, under another name, of Count Dracula and the Virgins of the Undead), the changing tone of British smut, brainwashing camps in picturesque countryside retreats like in The Prisoner, something set on a train (a 1960s TV serial had Laurence Payne as Sexton Blake solving a mystery on a train), the huge underground installations blown up at the end of every Bond film, etc.

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed a few familiar references in there. The Guardians, perhaps? Or maybe Omega Factor?

But the casefiles of the Diogenes Club have not been closed with the 70s adventures of Richard Jeperson and crew. Newman has continued to write stories about Beauregard and the other operatives of the Diogenes Club, and also visited Jeperson in later years and shown the agency in decline. Many of these were collected in MonkeyBrain Books second Newman collection, Secret Files of the Diogenes Club (and below Lee Moyer's amazing cover below), and there are still more coming out all the time. The novella "Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch" in Marvin Kaye's new SFBC anthology, A Book of Wizards, is arguably one of the best of the sequence to date.


As I say, Newman's Diogenes Club stories are a particular favorite of mine, and a significant influence on my own work. I've cited them many times as one of the proximate inspirations for the Bonaventure-Carmody stories, for which reason Newman is one of the three authors to whom the forthcoming End of the Century is dedicated. And one of the principal motivations for starting up MonkeyBrain Books in the first place was so that I could publish collections of some of my favorite stories, the Diogenes Club tales among them. If you're looking for terrific stories about clandestine government agencies that investigate the occult, you'll not find better than Kim Newman's.

Labels: secret_services

Anyone following along with my rundown of "clandestine government teams of occult investigators" may have noticed that I'm skipping a few well known examples. Am I being arbitrary? Probably, but it's my list, so sue me. I included the Guardians because I think they prefigure a lot of what came after, but they weren't a governmental agency, like most of the other examples on my list. But I skipped over "Mystery, Inc." (better known as Scooby Doo and friends) because they (a) aren't a government agency, (b) aren't "clandestine", and (c) don't really investigate the occult, but are instead a publicly known independent outfit that debunks the supposedly paranormal. (And don't quote me later examples of the team actually finding monsters or ghosts or whatnot. To me, that's just rank heresy.) I've left out Ghostbusters because Doctors Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler for similar reasons.

I'm also leaving out things like the MIB from the Men in Black films, because they really don't do much "occult investigating," but instead simply police aliens on Earth. And I'll be skipping over anything from The X-Files, since a pair of FBI agents working on their own doesn't really constitute a "team" (though I suppose a case could be made for including the shadowy government conspiracy from the series).

Why, then, am I including 2000 AD's "Vector 13"? Because I'm arbitrary, I suppose.


Vector 13 is kind of a corner case. The series which ran intermittently in the pages of 2000 AD from 1995 through 1998 is presented as the "Case histories of Vector 13," a clandestine goverment agency (just which government is never specified) that investigates the paranormal. There's a real kitchen sink approach in the stories, ranging from aliens to demons, from time-travel to cryptids. As Shaky Kane scripts in their first appearance in Prog 951, "Pay close attention. Everything strange is true."


Here's how the outfit was described in later issues.

Do you disbelieve?
Vector 13 is a covert Government agency which protects Earth from the truth of the universe. Stored in the Vector 13 case files are accounts of strange phenomena, ranging from the paranormal to the impossible. Every week V13's operatives, the legendary Men in Black, present a fresh case from these frightening files, full of declassified terrors. But whats is the truth and what is mere disinformation? That's for the Men in Black to know and you to find out.

As much territory as Vector 13 covered, though, they were never really much more than presenters, on the level of Cain and Abel in the old House of Secrets and House of Mystery comics, or even Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. The Men in Black only rarely had any kind of agency (if you'll forgive the unintentional pun), seldom appearing in the stories themselves, and most often relegated to sitting in darkened rooms reviewing the actions of others. Each of the outings were self-contained shorts, in the tradition of the old "Future Shocks" and "Time Twisters" series, written and drawn by a Who's Who of mid-90s British comics creators--Dan Abnett, Peter Hogan, Nick Abadzis, Gordon Rennie, Shaky Kane, John Ridgway, Steve Yeowell, Chris Weston, et cetera, et al. Many of the stories are no better than you'd expect, but there's some real gems hidden in there, as well.

Labels: secret_services

Next up in our list of "secret services" is a big one. The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, or just BPRD for short, first appeared in the first issue of Mike Mignola's Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, published in 1994. Originally serving primarily as a narrative device, a mechanism to get Hellboy into the next scenario, the BPRD has since expanded far beyond that remit.


The in-story origin for the BPRD is that it was founded in the waning days of the Second World War by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm (pronounced "Broom," of course) to investigate paranormal phenomenon. The actual relationship between the BPRD and the government is a little unclear, I think. In the earliest appearances it seemed to be a branch of the United States government, but with ties to the British government as well. Since then connections to other nations and governments have been hinted, that the Bureau is perhaps related in some way to the United Nations or that it is a private organization that receives funding from various sources, governments included. (In the film version, this is simplified by having the BPRD be a clandestine branch of the US government, founded by FDR at Bruttenholm's suggestion.) Regardless, it is clearly a "governmental agency" of some kind.


In the earliest stories, the BPRD served primarily as Hellboy's supporting cast. Other field agents included the aquatic Abe Sabien and pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, along with regular humans like Kate Corrigan and any number of red shirts that fell before the claws of various and sundry monsters. Later miniseries introduced the homunculus Roger, and the ectoplasmic Johann Kraus.


At the end of the Conqueror Worm miniseries, Hellboy quits the BPRD, in part out of protest that Roger the homunculus was being treated shabbily, and in part in reaction to some of the secrets he'd discovered about his own origins. With Hellboy going off to have solo adventures in a variety of shorts, one-shots, and mini-series, the BPRD was spun off into it's own series of mini-series, scripted by Mignola, Chris Golden, and others.

Eventually the creative team coalesced, with Mignola cowriting with John Arcudi and the incomporable Guy Davis providing the art. With the introduction of hard-bitten former Marine Benjamin Daimo (who goes the eyepatched Nick Fuy one better by having a huge open scar running from the corner of his mouth to his left ear) and the relocation of the team to an abandoned military facility in the mountains of Colorado, the BPRD had really come into its own as a series.


The "series of mini-series" of BPRD, with the contributions of Mignola, Arcudi, and Davis, has developed into one of the most satisfying ongoing comics currently on the stands. The success of the book has lead to the launch of additional spin-offs. Lobster Johnson, featuring scripts by Mignola and art by Jason Armstrong, recounts the WWII-era adventures of the pulp hero, and was soon followed by BPRD: 1946, in which writers Mignola and Joshua Dysart and artist Paul Azaceta recount the earliest days of the agency with Professor Bruttenholm in post-war Berlin. More recently, a whole raft of miniseries and one-shots spotlighting the various agents of the Bureau have been released, including Abe Sapien: The Drowning, Johann Kraus in BPRD: The Ectoplasmic Man, and Roger the homunculus in the first issue of BPRD: The War on Frog, with successive issues spotlighting other characters.

Impressively, all of these various series and stories, by various hands, all cohere together to form a much larger tapestry of story, gradually revealing a small number of much larger threats that have been slowly building in the background. That is thanks in no small part, I think, to the contributions of still another group of writers, Steve Weiner, Victoria Blake, and Jason Hall, who under Mignola's direction have compiled The Hellboy Companion, a one-volume encylopedia of the Hellboy universe that also serves as a kind of "series Bible" for the franchise.

To my way of thinking, the BPRD has really become the gold standard for "secret services," the preeminent example of the "clandestine government agency of occult investigators." Having been introduced as the supporting cast for Hellboy, it is perhaps telling that the book really takes off after Hellboy leaves. I can't recommend the various series highly enough.

Labels: secret_services

Taking things roughly chronologically by publication date, the next "secret service" after The Omega Factor's Department 7 to appear might have been Richard Tucholka's "Bureau 13," from the role-playing game Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic (Tric Tac Games), first published in 1983.


I know of the Bureau 13 game only by reputation, as I never played it myself. I think I first encountered the name in connection with JM Strackzinski's Babylon 5, that featured in the episode "A Spider in the Web" a clandestine organization by that name. As he later explained it, JMS had been unaware that the name had previously been used in Tucholka's rpg, and when he was told about the earlier use, he left off using the name. (Though I know I'm not the only one to hear echoes in Star Trek's "Section 31," which first appeared a few years later.)

Tucholka's Bureau 13, which was also featured in a series of novels by Nick Pollotta, was apparently a somewhat tongue-in-cheek version of the "secret government occult investigation agency" idea, and interestingly predated nearly all of the most popular variations on that theme.


Here's the description of the outfit from the official site (where PDFs of the original game and modules are available, should anyone be interested):

The history of the human race is filled with evidence of eerie and unexplained happenings. Our myths, legends, and fairy tales consistently reaffirm that the supernatural exists. This knowledge of the "supernatural" has been with mankind since before the dawn of history. Mostly these occurrences were misunderstood and greatly feared by the general populace. With no organization, it was usually the small mobs of angry peasants that stalked the creatures of the night, and, more often than not, exterminated the supernatural, good and evil.

Always, though, there have been a few who were capable of discerning the passing difference between good and evil.

In the early 1860's, the government of the United States established a secret supernatural investigative agency under the cover of the Civil War. Only a few top officials knew of its existence and it became known simply as "Bureau 13." For the next century, the few employees of the Bureau went quietly about their business of secretly ferreting out and eliminating the destructive aspects of the supernatural.

So successful were their efforts that the memories of the public dimmed and the fear of the unknown was replaced by awe (and suppressed fear) of new technologies. Foreign branches of the organization were established in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The years have passed and worldwide memories have failed. The public has come to believe that magic and the supernatural are the stuff of children's dreams and nightmares. They are wrong.

Bureau 13, now an ultramodern force, more secret than before, fights to stem the growth of ancient magic and the supernatural that threatens the innocent.

Wherever the supernatural waits, good and evil, the Agents of Bureau 13 will be there but...evil is growing.

Bureau 13 is one of the earlier examples of an organization dedication explicitly to occult investigation was tied to a government agency, following The Omega Factor's Department 7. Marvel Comics's SHIELD got up to similar occult shenanigans as early as the 60s, as I recall, but their basic remit was espionage and law enforcement--Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division--so they don't really count in my book. Interestingly, though, the introduction recently of SWORD--Sentient World Observation and Response Department--a sister organization devoted to extraterrestrial threats, suggests the intriguing possibility that an occult variation is at least possible. As for British agencies in the Marvel Universe that handle such matters, such as RCX, WHO, Black Air, and the current MI-13--and with a familiar prime numeral in the name, to boot--I'll be coming back to them eventually...

Labels: secret_services

Roughly a decade after The Guardians, audiences in the UK were treated to a surprisingly intelligent tv series about another group of paranormal investigators. The series was Jack Gerson's The Omega Factor, and the group was "Department 7."

I came to The Omega Factor late, only discovering it in December of 2006. The series ran an all-too-brief 10 episodes between 1978 and 1979, but thankfully the whole run is now available on DVD. The cast includes Louise Jameson, "Leela" from Doctor Who, and really, what else do you need to know?

The back cover of the show's 1979 novelization describes Department 7 thus:

There is a highly-secret government organisation called Department 7. Its existence is known only to the Prime Minister and some members of the Cabinet. Its brief is to investigate the Supernatural: to discover the Omega Factor. Journalist Tom Crane has been given the same brief by a Sunday newspaper and suddenly finds himself confronting inexplicable and even terrifying situations.

A confirmed sceptic, he insists on finding out why. The enigmatic members of Department 7 are equally interested. For Tom Crane the search for psychic phenomena leads first to a discovery about himself which he is unwilling to face.

The Omega Factor is a stunning new thriller based on a BBC 1 TV series, which explores the eerie world of the occult and the paranormal.

The Omega Factor is about the mysteries behind the seeming normality of everyday modern life; the night and darkness of human experience.

The Omega Factor will appeal to the nervous child in all of us, determined to conquer fear, and find out what is hidden inside a darkened room.

The summary from the show's entry on Wikipedia offers a bit more detail:

The series concerns journalist Tom Crane (James Hazeldine), who finds that he possesses psychic powers which in turn bring him to the attention of the team of scientists who comprise Department 7, a secret "need to know only" government off-shoot investigating paranormal phenomena and the potential of the human mind. The phenomena explored include hypnosis, brainwashing, extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, poltergeist phenomena, out-of-body experiences and spiritual possession.

Crane joins Department 7 as a means of finding and revenging himself on Edward Drexel (Cyril Luckham), a powerful rogue psychic who is in part responsible for the death of Crane's wife in an automobile accident. His work with the department, and his own psychic gift, lead Crane to suspect a deadly conspiracy by a mysterious organisation called Omega to take over the world using mind control. The members of Department 7 include physicist Dr. Anne Reynolds (Louise Jameson), an old friend of Crane's wife; and the shady head of the department, psychiatrist Dr Roy Martindale (John Carlisle). Most episodes see the driven and impetuous Crane in impatient conflict with the cautious and secretive Martindale, with Anne (who falls in love with Crane, though she also has a brief relationship with Martindale) caught in the middle. Various subplots develop over the course of the series - notably Crane's hunt for Drexel, his growing suspicions about the Omega conspiracy and his developing relationship with Anne.

The Omega Factor marks the first time I can think of that a team of occult investigators was explicitly linked with a clandestine government agency. There may have been some influence by the earlier Doomwatch, about a government agency tasked with monitoring various (ostensibly real world) scientific threats, or by Doctor Who's UNIT, for that matter, who mostly shot at aliens--and missed.

The show was years ahead of its time, which is probably best evidenced by the fact that it lasted only a single season. Of course, it's early demise can also be blamed on a public outcry about the show's supposed indecency--moralist Mary Whitehouse reportedly called the show "thoroughly evil," which is a ringing endorsement in my book.

I've only watched the first third of the series, and keep meaning to find time and go back and finish off the series, but the episodes that I watched were well worth it.

Labels: secret_services

In tackling the subject of "secret services," teams that investigate the occult and strange, there might not be a better place to start than with one of the earliest examples of the idea I've come across. Since the earliest days of the horror and science fiction genres in their modern forms, there have any number of characters who investigate the unknown--from William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki and Algernon Blackwood's John Silence, to Nigel Kneale's Professor Quatermass and Kolchak: The Night Stalker--but what I'm interested in here are teams, not individual investigators. And the earliest team of occult investigators I've come across are The Guardians.


I have the Groovy Age of Horror blog to thank for introducing me to The Guardians, a series of novels published by Berkley Medallion in the 60s under the housename "Peter Saxon." (Only after reading about it on the Groovy Age did I remember an early 80s interview with Chris Claremont, in which he discussed how the duel on the astral plane between Gideon Cross and an aboriginal shaman served as the inspiration for the psionic duel in "Psi War," which John Byrne illustrated in the pages of Uncanny X-Men #117.)

The Guardians were a team of occult investigators based in London of the swinging sixties. As the back cover blurb of the first volume in the series, The Killing Bone, puts it, "Sorcery, Voodo, Satanism, Witchcraft, Necromancy, Vampirism... wherever and whatever the agents of occult Evil are, THE GUARDIANS are there to combat them with their own more-than-mortal powers." First published in 1968, the Guardians are an independent team, not part of any government agency, clandestine or otherwise, but their basic setup prefigures many of the government-backed secret services that would follow.


In particular, the Guardians sets the standard for later secret services in being composed of quirky individuals with their own powers and short-comings. Not a million miles away from DC Comics' Doom Patrol and Marvel Comics' The X-Men in that regard, both of which featured teams of superpowered individuals brought together by mysterious wheelchair-bound figures; both comics first appeared in 1963, five years before the publication of the first Guardians novel. I don't know enough about the circumstances of the Guardians' creation to say there was any direction influence, but the team functions very much like a comic book super-team, recast in pulp-occult terms. (This may not have been the first time this was done, for all I know, but it most definitely wasn't the last.)

I'll quote Curt Purcell's description of the characters from the Groovy Age blog:

GIDEON CROSS: The founder, the oldest member, and the most powerful in his occult talents. He is the only member who actually lives in their building, in top-floor chambers that are strangely insulated from the bustle of modern London just beyond the windows. He almost never joins the Guardians in the field, and sometimes even declines to volunteer knowledge that might prove valuable on a case. But when circumstances force his hand and leave him no choice but to intervene . . . whoa! I don't think any of the others actually like him, and most feel a vague distrust of him--an uneasy uncertainty about his motives.

STEVEN KANE: The leader. Picture a man who would look like a "Steven Kane," and you've got him: dark hair and eyes, athletic and fit, a bit taller than average, refined but with a touch of ruggedness. He's generic enough to invite easy identification from a mostly-male popular audience, but individualized enough to sustain interest throughout the series. Formerly a professor of anthropology, he has modest psychic abilities, and a wide-ranging knowledge of the occult.

FATHER JOHN DYBALL: The obligatory priest, "Anglo-Catholic." Of course he handles the exorcisms, and his prayers are as spectacularly, ridiculously efficacious as they must be in a high-octane horror-action series like this. His stint as the chaplain for a commando regiment gave him the training and toughness to pull his own weight when the rough stuff starts.

ANNE ASHBY: Dark lady, femme fatale. I think that's her on the cover of Dark Ways to Death. At least that's how I like to picture her! Of the active members (that is, not counting Cross), she's the most formidable psychic, and her jewelry consists of artifacts that enhance her natural powers. Naturally, she also kicks ass with martial arts. She has some weird connection with Cross that disturbs the other Guardians. A sexual relationship is hinted at, though she professes a distaste for him. He and she may even have known each other in previous incarnations--and he may have burned her as a witch in one of those!

LIONEL MARKS: This rotund gentleman rounds out the group with his superb talent for mundane investigation. He can get the facts on anyone, tail them anywhere, work his way into their circle, and figure out in his own world-weary manner what makes them tick. He's the most hardheaded and "normal" of the bunch, with no psychic abilities whatsoever. Still, he's one of the best at what he does, and the Guardians couldn't do without him.

I've read only the first of the Guardian novels, The Killing Bone, and found it surprisingly good. A clean narrative style and clever characterization rises the text above what its more humble pulp roots might suggest. And the covers by Jeff Jones are particularly striking. I've been meaning to hunt down the other three novels in the series, and after diving back into all of this occult investigator stuff the last few weeks, I may just do so, sooner rather than later.

Labels: secret_services

Saturday morning, Georgia and I watched the premier episode of Jay Stephens's The Secret Saturdays, which was every bit as good as I'd hoped. And I was delighted to see that the four-year-old Georgia was as taken with the show as her 38-year-old dad. We ended up watching the episode twice over the course of the weekend, at her insistence.

Saturday night, after Georgia had gone off to bed, I watched the pilot episode of JJ Abrams's new series, Fringe. I'd put off watching it because one of my Rules of Television (along with "No doctor shows, no cop shows, no lawyer shows") is "Watch nothing on Fox until it comes out on DVD." After the experience of Firefly, Wonderfalls, and too many others to mention them all, I've been burned by Fox more times than I care to remember, with episodes of new series aired out of order, series bounced around the schedule week after week, until finally being cancelled before all of the completed episodes have been aired. But I've been hearing from a lot of folks whose opinions I trust that Fringe was worth checking out, and after watching the first episode I'm inclined to agree. Allison was out of town for business over the weekend, so I'm tempted to make her watch the first episode, so she and I can watch the others that we have recorded together. It's an Abrams show, so I'm fully prepared for it to fall apart at any minute, but after watching the first episode I'm willing to give it a bit of rope.

In any case, seeing two shows about a team of quirky "secret scientists" who investigate the strange and unknown got me thinking about other treatments of the same concept. I've recently reread all of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and related titles, and have been doing some work on my own "Bureau Zero" for a few projects in the early stages of development. This kind of "investigators into the odd" thing is something that really resonates with me, and it's probably not surprising that I find on the shelves of my personal library a lot of different interpretations on the theme.

I considered doing a post on the topic, but just putting together the images I could use as illustrations suggested that it would make for a long post. So I've decided to tackle it in several parts. I'll try to group them thematically, but fully expect them to become pretty hodgepodge as I go along.

Consider this fair warning, then, that I'll be doing a few image heavy posts on the topic of "Secret Services" over the course of the coming days.

Labels: secret_services