The Black Gang

There is an organised and well-financed conspiracy to preach Bolshevism in England and most manufacturing towns in the country had a branch therein. In an attempt to discover who was the leader and to wipe out the organisation The Black Gang was formed with a huge, ugly man as its leader. His name was kept secret but it became clear to the inner circle that he was Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond.<br /><br />Drummond visits The Ritz and notices a couple of characters who he feels that he knows, one of them seemingly a vicar. Careful study of the features and characteristics of the vicar convinces Drummond that he is none other than his arch enemy Carl Peterson in disguise. And his lady companion is another former opponent, Irma.<br /><br />A game of cat and mouse follows, with neither revealing what they know of the other. A series of high speed chases, subterfuge moves and various killings follow as Drummond tries desperately to bring Peterson and his cohorts to justice.<br /><br />He very nearly loses his life, and also his wife Phyllis, who is there to assist him, before he finally nails the gang, either killing them off in an exciting climax or arranging their arrest by his police colleagues. However, somehow Peterson and Irma manage to escape and live to renew their battle with Bulldog Drummond another day.

<br />What ho! Those dastardly foreigners want to turn jolly old England into a commie state and that bounder Carl Peterson has reared his ugly head again, good job those mysterious fellows "the black gang" seem to have everything in hand, especially that big chappy their leader, good old Drummond!<br />Drummond here has found his calling in life and has got things more organised than in the first book, where he blundered about more, but he is still very much the same character and once again the story provides as many laughs as thrills.

Read aloud to the same audience as the first one, a year and a half later. :D It was grand.

If you want a good crime/fiction, adventure/story without gratuitous sex, Bulldog Drummond is for you. I like it! He's a 'clean' James Bond. Lots of humor and funny situations, but actual nail-biting adventure as well. Throw back to the days before animation when actors did their own stunts--that's what this series is like. Bulldog Drummond is a bored ex-soldier who still wants to aid King and Country, so he goes undercover as a rogue in The Black Gang. It's a great ride!

More Bulldog Drummond.

I am enjoying this book.<br /><br />"No—I am not. I am not the police, you wretched thing: I am the leader of the Black Gang."<br /><br />This was a good story although modern readers should be aware that it contains some antisemitic passages.

Imagine trying to explain the plot of The Black Gang to a person with a sketchy knowledge of early twentieth century history. It is a book written in the 1920s about a secret gang that works outside the law, rounding up left-wing agitators. The gang has a particular hatred for foreigners and Jews, and they make sure that prominent enemies ‘disappear’. <br /><br />“Ah,” says the friend thoughtfully, “It’s a book about the SS in Germany.” I shake my head, and explain that the organisation, named after the black outfits they wear, are not Germans. “Then you must be talking about Mussolini’s blackshirts,” interrupts my friend. I again shake my head, and explain that this book is set in Britain and deals with the beloved English hero and leader of the gang, Bulldog Drummond.<br /><br />If the politics of Bulldog Drummond, the first book to feature Sapper’s eponymous hero, were dubious, then they are nothing compared to The Black Gang, a sequel that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Once more Drummond does battle with his arch-nemesis, Peterson, and a number of dubious ideas are cloaked in a veil of frivolous badinage.<br /><br />I said in my review of Bulldog Drummond that our hero treats the whole adventure as a bit of sport. This is true, though to a slightly lesser degree, in The Black Gang. Drummond takes an amused pleasure in rounding up and intimidating left-wing agitators, and his Wooster-esque language prevents us from taking him too seriously. <br /><br />The extent to which Drummond treats this as some kind of upper-class game is shown in a scene where Drummond has a conversation with a nasty Russian operative, and it ends with Drummond applying a little corporal punishment to his enemy. He could kill Zaboleff or seek information from him, but he would rather treat Johnny Foreigner to a good kick in the pants.<br /><br />At the end of the book Drummond agrees to dismantle the gang when the game is up, but he considers doing so earlier because his feeble enemies are no longer affording him any fun. What makes the difference is the presence of another master player, Carl Peterson, which increases the challenge for Drummond.<br /><br />Peterson is a ruthless operator who seeks to undermine British labour to help his foreign business friends. However he is also essentially a game player, albeit one who plays by different rules than Drummond. We see this on more than one occasion where Peterson could easily have killed his enemy, but instead wastes time with more elaborate plans that give Drummond time to escape. <br /><br />It is hard not to scoff at these two doltish antagonists who could have ended their duel of wits (such as they are) a lot sooner. This would not be as bad if there was not a risk to the lives of other people involved here. The longer Peterson stays alive, the more innocent people he can kill. However, Drummond never has to worry about making any great sacrifices, as his friends remain safe throughout. <br /><br />There are only two moments when the gravity of the situation seems to hit home with Drummond. The first is when his burglar ally is murdered by a bomb thrown by one of Peterson’s lackeys. Drummond is annoyed by this, but does not spend too much time grieving the death of his crooked friend. <br /><br />The second occasion is a rare serious moment where Peterson intends to murder Drummond’s wife in a brutal manner. When Drummond gets the upper hand, he nearly chokes the life out of Peterson and his wife has to intervene. At no point during either incident however is there any sense that Drummond’s schoolboy adventurism may be putting his loved ones at risk, and this is not a factor in his decision to disband the Black Gang. We can be sure that in the next book he will be taking on a new sporting adventure with the same cheerful disregard of the potential cost to those around him.<br /><br />Insofar as Sapper has any serious intent, it is to expose the evils of Bolshevism. Sapper was disgusted by the murder of the Tsarist royal family, and this is alluded to in the book. Of course Sapper sees the issue in black and white, as he always does. The murder of the royal family was certainly an ugly affair, but the Tsar was no benign leader, and he presided over a cruel and authoritarian state.<br /><br />When we look at the characteristics that Sapper applies to his left-wing enemies, we hear the same tired stereotypes that are used by conservatives today. We are told that they are envious of the rich, told this by people who have no understanding of want, and who have more money than they can ever hope to spend. We are told that left-wing people have poor hygiene, this by people who have never lacked access to instant hot and clean water. We are told that left-wing working-class supporters are money-obsessed, this coming from people who never had to worry about feeding or clothing their families.<br /><br />Indeed I find it hard to believe that Sapper spent any time in the company of people with left-wing values. He seems determined to hold onto his pristine prejudices in which everybody who wishes to change society is actuated by vile or selfish motives. This demonising of his enemies ensures that the reader is never allowed to sympathise with any other viewpoint than that of Sapper's proto-fascist bully hero. You do not have to be a socialist to find Sapper’s presentation of the issues unfair or repugnant.<br /><br />Worst of all, the left-wing agitators include a good many foreigners and Jews, something that is anathema to the jingoistic Drummond. Indeed the whole movement may be funded by foreigners who want to see Britain weakened economically. Sapper makes a good deal of the ‘foreign’ nature of many of Drummond’s enemies. In one scene Drummond is more anxious to get his hands on Fritz, the German man who tries to murder him, than he is on the British accomplice. This ends with Drummond gleefully murdering Fritz. Drummond attributes this to the other man showing some appreciation of his car, but why does Sapper not allow the foreign villain to appreciate Drummond’s car instead?<br /><br />A similar spitefulness is shown towards Jewish agitators. At the beginning of the book, the Black Gang descend on a meeting of troublemakers. They allow the craven British members to leave unharmed, but they flog two Jewish members with a cat o’ nine tails. Again another reason is given for Drummond’s ill-treatment of the Jews. He says he does not care for their method of livelihood. It is not clear what this is, but a later allusion to White Slave Traffic would suggest that they are pimps. Well this may be a reason for giving them a flogging, but why do the only pimps in the room just happen to be the only Jews in the room?<br /><br />Is Drummond a Fascist? His methods are certainly those employed by Fascists – terrorising his enemies, incarcerating them and employing violence. He holds similar opinions to Fascists – a supremacist interpretation of nationalism, combined with a hatred for foreigners and Jews. However the Black Gang are not the same as the Black Shirts. They imprison their enemies for a short spell, but only kill in self-defence. They see themselves as working against criminals in ways that the police cannot do, and they are willing to cheerfully disband when their aims are complete. They are not a private army. Drummond and his friends are Fascistic on a tiny scale, but they do not seek to create a permanent Fascist militia in Britain.<br /><br />The Black Gang is better-written than Bulldog Drummond. It has a better storyline, and there are one or two moments that finally offer a more serious challenge to our hero. However it is still a carelessly-written work of pulp fiction. It seeks to spread reprehensible ideas, and it advocates ugly methods for dealing with those people whom its author does not like.

Written in 1922, not that long after the Russian Revolution and clearly at a time of panic verging on hysteria in Britain about the fear of Communist revolution or infiltration, this book is an old-fashioned boys own adventure where our hero and his pals are in a secret battle with international revolutionaries trying to destroy the British way of life and indoctrinate our children with their evil ideology. These villains are described as weak, physical malformed, cowardly and my favourite, unwashed. Their ideology isn’t actually about social justice and getting a better deal for the working man but entirely built on selfishness and lining their own pockets regardless of how many women, children and innocents they have to brutally murder on the way.<br /><br />Bulldog Drummond and his mates however are brave, strong and the sort of clean-cut intelligent and loyal young men any perspective mother-in-law would be pleased to entertain to afternoon tea. The irony of course is that these public school educated heroes don’t seem to have to work and presumably fund their Savoy lunches and glamorous cocktails by independent means of some kind.<br />…That said, I love it! I have always liked these old-fashioned adventure stories and you have to take the plot very much with a pinch of salt and also try not to get angry about some of the blatant prejudices and even outright racism. This story, like the others in the series, is very much of its time, but still good fun and pure gold if you are trying to get into the mind of a 1920s reader or to get a glimpse of how British society worked and how some people thought in those post World War One years.<br /><br />I would have given it more stars, but frankly I’d be embarrassed to because of the right-wing politics which could have almost come from Nazi Germany.<br />

<b> 'Whether it was lawful or not was beside the point. It was just or Hugh Drummond would not have done it.' </b><br /><br />Another ‘gem’ from my Popular Fiction and Film in the interwar years course all those years ago. The Bulldog Drummond books were an extremely popular series in the inter war years, selling hundreds and thousands of copies. Reading them really opened my eyes what sort of things were thought in that period. ‘The Black Gang’, probably the most famous of them, involves the upper class Hugh Drummond creating a secret group who dress all in black and go round keeping Britain safe from cowardly Jews, who cower and snivel in corners when confronted, and red bearded Russians who are trying to incite the workers to revolution even if they themselves are doing it because they are being paid and not because of any ideological beliefs. The gang even transport their captives to a ‘camp’ on an island off the coast of Scotland where they are subjected to forced labor so they can really experience what living under communism is like. Your everyday working class Joe is OK, however, well, as long as he doesn’t have any ideas above his station. It was interesting to reread (listened to this time) after such a long time. It is just unbelievable that the then readers weren’t outraged by the views within, but maybe those views were in tune with those of a lot of the public back in the 1920s. Curiosity value only!

Worth mentioning that even though I started on book 2, I still thoroughly enjoyed this. Despite being published in 1922 it has aged well and doesn't suffer from the sometimes painful pacing that I've come to expect from books published during the same time period. I didn't think most of the first act, I was at times bored, but things really started picking up in the second act with much more action, and it was from there I was hooked for the rest of the book. <br /><br />I read somewhere that Sapper's Drummond stories served as partial inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond character, and it's not hard to see why during some of these cinematic set pieces. They were probably decades ahead of their time when first written. Will I pick up the other books in the series? Not completely sure yet, but I wouldn't deny it a possibility either. Recommended.