The Eyes Around Me by Gavin Black ~ 1964. This edition: Harper & Row, 1964. Hardcover. 216 pages.
My rating: 8.5/10
Okay, why have I never come across this writer before? This murder mystery novel set in Red-era Hong Kong was pretty darned fabulous. Instant fan, I am. Now I must track down more…
From his obituary notice in The Independent, August 6, 1998:
Oswald Wynd was a modest man who had little to be modest about. As Gavin Black he wrote superior and literate thrillers – school of Stevenson and Buchan – which were at the same time witty and clever, and moved at a by no means gentlemanly pace…
A “superior and literate thriller” describes this fast-paced novel exceedingly well.
Middle-aged, recently divorced, lush living Scottish shortbread heiress Ella Bain lives in Hong Kong, in a lavish seaside mansion. An outside staircase to her bedroom allows her to receive gentleman callers without offending the sensibilities of old family retainer Kirsty, and by all reports it is a well-used piece of domestic architecture.
Ella is loud, she drinks too much, and though she has proven herself an astute businesswoman, enlarging her already substantial fortune by her occasional managerial visits back to the family factory in Scotland, she occasionally raises eyebrows by her larger than life actions. Long-time platonic friend Paul Harris views Ella with sometimes-exasperated affection; he has turned down her marriage proposal, but remains in Ella’s will as her chief beneficiary, cutting out Ella’s only brother Angus, who enjoys a fortune of his own.
So when Ella is found dead in her bed on New Year’s Day morning by Paul, who squired Ella about town the night before and stayed over at her house, both the police and the intimately entwined Hong Kong society crowd look at Paul with more than a little speculation.
Paul Harris, wealthy in his own right through a series of past speculations and questionably legal activities which I shan’t reveal to you here, resents the assumption that he murdered his friend, and sets out on a quest to clear his name.
This is a vividly atmospheric mystery novel, with a finely detailed setting and memorable (if occasionally rather unlikely) characters. One forgives the over-the-topness because the thing is so gloriously well written for this type of light fiction; Oswald Wynd/Gavin Black spins an exceedingly readable tale.
Paul Harris comes across as a greatly improved version of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Paul is suave, fast on his feet, good in a fight, exceedingly attractive and attracted to gorgeous women, and (one feels) truly a good guy at heart, despite his somewhat shady backstory. The arrogance which emanates from his fictional counterpart Bond is completely missing; one likes Paul Harris, despite our doubt that he is now a purely lily-white boy, gone all straight and narrow.
I guessed the murderer with surprising ease; I foretold the romantic clinch at the end; as a mystery the thing is decidedly clichéd and predictable, but despite these drawbacks I greatly liked this book.
The author wrote a rather respectable number of novels and thrillers, most set in Asia. I am keen to follow up on my introduction to Paul Harris, who apparently features in all of the Gavin Black-authored thrillers; the Oswald Wynd novels sound intriguing, too, if perhaps a bit “deeper” in theme.
1977’s The Ginger Tree was made into a well-received Masterpiece Theatre 4-part miniseries, and Wynd’s depiction of cross-cultural and mixed race relationships is spoken of very highly in reviews.
For future investigation:
As Oswald Wynd:
- Black Fountains (1947) (1st novel, winner of $20,000 Doubleday prize for fiction)
- Red Sun South (1948)
- Friend of the Family (1949)
- The Stubborn Flower (1949)
- When Ape is King (1949) (Wynd’s lone speculative fiction, very rare )
- The Gentle Pirate (1951)
- Stars in the Heather (1956)
- Moon of the Tiger (1958)
- Summer Can’t Last (1960)
- Death, the Red Flower (1965)
- Walk Softly, Men Praying (1967)
- Sumatra Seven Zero (1968)
- The Hawser Pirates (1970)
- The Forty Days (1972)
- The Ginger Tree (1977)
As Gavin Black:
- Suddenly at Singapore (1961)
- The Devil Came on Sunday (1961)
- Dead Man Calling (1962)
- A Walk in the Long Dark Night (1962)
- A Dragon for Christmas (1963)
- The Eyes around Me (1964)
- You Want to Die, Johnny? (1966)
- A Wind of Death (1967)
- The Cold Jungle (1969)
- A Time for Pirates (1971)
- The Bitter Tea (1972)
- The Golden Cockatrice (1974)
- A Big Wind for Summer (aka Gale Force) (1975)
- A Moon for Killers (aka Killer Moon) (1976)
- Night Run from Java (1979)
- The Blazing Air (1981)
- The Fatal Shadow (1983)
- A Path for Serpents (1991)
Leaves & Pages 
Give me an intelligently sexy hero any day! This sounds very tempting, even for someone like me who usually isn’t drawn to thrillers.
It was great fun! The Gavin Black thrillers made it into paperback; I’ll bet you can find these in the Vancouver bookshops for a reasonable price. Maybe a good excuse for a visit to Lawrence Books? I can envision stacks of Gavin Black/Oswald Wynd in that musty back room full of paperbacks. 🙂
Good lord, this sounds amazing. Why have we not heard of this person? And where do you get all these incredible finds? I wish you’d stop, and save me some money 🙂
I know! I was all like – “Hey!!! Why have I never heard of this guy before?!” Good stuff.
As far as acquisition of interesting books – well – I do rather tend to haunt the used-book shops locally and when I travel, and our local Rotary Club (a “service club” with charitable aims) puts on several massive book sales every year; as many of our elderly citizens pass away their libraries are ending up on the sales tables; I have found the same names in so many of my prize finds; grand personal collections sadly dispersed.
And then when I discover a great new-to-me writer either through online referrals by other bloggers 🙂 or by finds like this, I seek out more of the same, to the detriment of my own finances! I justify it on the “average price” system – it sounds convincing enough to let me continue with this most enjoyable pastime with a minimum of budgetary upheaval. 😉
I’m not a James Bond girl, but I remember loving The Ginger Tree many years ago. The memory combined with a warm recommendation is definitely going to start me book-hunting.
I dipped into an Ian Fleming last night- Casino Royale, 1953-ish – to see if I could handle reading it for a proper comparison to Gavin Black’s efforts in that line, and by page 2 I had remembered why I mostly leave Mr Bond on the shelf. B-o-r-i-n-g. Oswald/Gavin is an immensely more readable writer. In my opinion. 🙂 (But I do thoroughly enjoy the Sean Connery Bond movies; a vast improvement over the stilted, acronym-laden novels.)
I really want to be a shortbread heiress. This is my new ambition.
Ella was wonderful. I knew she was doomed because of my reading of the flyleaf blurb, but I almost sobbed when she predictably got herself bumped off. The author has a lot of fun with the shortbread heiress thing; he has Ella creatively add to the family business’s line with things like genuine Scottish woodcock (or was it snipe?) tinned up and imported to New York for the luxury market. An abundant dash of tongue-in-cheek humour to nicely balance the thriller-ish-ness of the building action after the murder.
(I’m going to mention Amazon here, apologies, but I see this book is a silly, silly 98 Australian *cents* on Amazon, so I am a happy person about to find out more about shortbread.)
Yes it’s 99p in the UK too and I have bought it! Though as I don’t much like reading e-books (on my iPad as I don’t have a kindle) it may be a while before I get to it. Or not.
I wonder if it is time to get an e-reader? I’ve noticed quite a crop of recent re-releases which I’m hoping to acquire in paper book form, but are exceedingly costly. The electronic versions are however ridiculously cheap. Still debating…I suspect I’ll cave in fairly soon. Might be good for travelling, especially for reading at night in shared hotel rooms when one feels really bad about having the reading light on when the other occupant(s) are trying to sleep.
Anyway, if you get around to reading Gavin Black I do hope you enjoy him. I’m definitely following up on this first read.
I’m incredibly conflicted about e-readers — I hate the whole concept, and find the little machines deeply unattractive. And I love real books. BUT — as I have an iPad and can download kindle books onto it, I do find it useful for just the things you say Barb — travelling, not disturbing people in shared rooms, etc. And of course the prices can be very tempting. So I crack from time to time.
Yes, I feel much the same. But…well…at some point I generally cave and adopt the new technology, though usually very much on my own cranky terms. 😉
Oh, I do hope you enjoy this! And 98 cents is certainly a reasonable price to pay for a bookish gamble. 🙂
I am interested! I have never been a James Bond fan — Matt Damon one time referred to him as an imperialist misogynist asshole, which I think covers it very nicely — but I do enjoy a suave crime-solving man in fiction!
I’m now halfway through Casino Royale, the very first James Bond novel, and yup – Matt Damon pretty well nailed it. Paul Harris is much more intriguing; I am very keen to meet him again to see if the charm holds. I suspect it will. 🙂
[…] thrillers written under the non-de-plume of Gavin Black. As The Ginger Tree most pleasurably did, The Eyes Around Me kept me absolutely […]
[…] readability, having enjoyed the two prior Oswald Wynd novels I’d serendipitously bumped into, The Eyes Around Me and The Ginger Tree. I thought that Black Fountains would meet that standard, in particular since […]