Yellow Peril: The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe: A Novel

by Richard Jaccoma

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399900071
• ISBN13: 9780399900075
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Richard Marek Publishers
• Length: 383 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Before "Indiana Jones", there was.....

Sir John Weymouth-Smythe! (book review) He was the globe-trotting English adventurer of Richard Jaccoma's novel "YELLOW PERIL" (Richard Marek Publishers, New York, 1978). Forget the "Fu-Manchu" stuff. I love reading about the Nazi characters in this book set in the mid-late 1930s. Just as Smythe tries to conceal his identity, so do the Germans. They consist of a middle-aged university professor and his oversexed sister Clara, traveling the Indian outbacks with a couple of thinly-diguised bodyguards (obviously SA thugs in civilian clothes). Outwardly, they are searching for ancient artifacts, but are actually on a quest for the "Heilige Lanze" (the fabled Spear of Destiny) on orders from the Fuhrer himself! Add to this the fact that the Nazi brother-sister duo are into private occult rituals featuring Aryan symbols painted on their nude bodies, knives, sex and human sacrifice and you've got Big Time Show Biz as far as I'm concerned. :-) While much of the book is about Smythe's run-in with a Chinese "Fu-Manchu" type villain (and his daughter), it always returns to the Nazis, including the blood-splattered climax in Berlin! Here is an excerpt when Sir John first runs into (literally) the Germans on an Indian riverboat: //////////////////// And first proof of our strategy's wisdom came to me at the very gangplank of the riverboat! My car made the quay with but moments to spare. I shouted the Moslem porters into tossing my luggage in the hold, then raced myself for the first-class ramp, trampling my way through the ever-present hordes of massing Asiatics. Just as I gained the ramp's bottom, I collided with another passenger likewise racing, and near sent that person sprawling. In the last instant I reached out, caught a flailing arm just in the nick, and suddenly found myself staring full in the face of the most beautiful blonde goddess I had ever seen! "SO sorry!" I panted. "After you, madam..." The gorgeous creature that I had nearly bowled over was near as tall as I. A broad, white smile danced on her open face, crinkling her small, fine nose. "Danke, mein Herr," she said, and at once turned her attention to a figure lounging on the railing above. "Hans!" she called, and waved a long, suntanned arm vigorously. The man who was the object of her attentions was dressed impeccably in white summer suit with wide-brimmed hat. He was well over six foot tall and well muscled. ...his handsome, fine features spoke loud and clear of Teutonic aristocracy. And then, the Valkyrie was striding up the gangplank in front of me. I caught myself gazing with much appreciation at those deliciously firm flanks which flared beneath her loose, ankle-length brush skirt. I remember feeling, in my damp and dust-coated traveling suit, quite the inferior to these crisp Nordic superhumans who strolled obliviously away from me and down the deck." /////////////// Try it, you'll like it.

Quite A Tale, With Barbs

This is essentially an erotic over-the-top thriller, sort of in the Indiana Jones and Sax Rohmer mode but with a very kinky and humiliation-inducing sex scene, and where the hero gets to do terrible things to a pro-Nazi German and his gorgeous similarly-minded daughter. Jaccoma gets to indulge his animosity towards not only the pro-Nazi pair, but also slighly attack the idea of white solidarity and the notion the whites have a legitimate concern about their survival. The German villain, in a scene before he gets his teeth knocked in by the hero, speaking of MEIN KAMPF, if I remember correctly, speaks optimistically about "the survival and triumph of the white race." Notice how a legitimate goal, white survival is linked with a less legitimate one, white triumph, from the mouth of this odious proto-Nazi. The effect is to link legitimate self-defense with racial triumphalism, and this the reader is subliminally encouraged to think is that white self-defense is really no better than Nazism or proto-Nazism. So those of us who are white and can recognize an assault on us, will probably see one here. The book is enjoyable in its conte cruel way, but, besides it being a good story well told, it also is part of a rather unkind and perverse assault on all of us who happen to be white.

A really smart book

This was really great, like nothing I've ever read before. It's got action, adventure, war, lots of sex, and the characters are very interesting. I enjoyed this book a lot.

One of the Best Books I've Ever Read

This novel is so brilliant in its many facets and so rich in interlocking ironies, it's a totally fascinating book to read. The "hero" is soon enough revealed to be an unreliable narrator in the tradition that includes such great books as Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier. He is also an anti-hero, or anti-villain, in the tradition of the greatest pulp fiction -- an adventurer whose exploits are daring in pursuit of enemies who are our friends and friends who turn out to be our enemies -- yet Smythe, in his foolish arrogance, never quite realizes who he is or what the stakes really are. All this tells us so much not just about the terrible times in which the book is set, the 1930s, but our own times too, when, as Yeats wrote,"the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." The book is truly high-minded in exposing racism and sexism and those who are tempted by fascism and every other evil that exalts power; that this is all portrayed through the structure of a the pulp novel form is yet another expression of the book's rich genius. The muscular action is so much fun, and yes there is sex, which is also fun, and there are scary events too, but then, Nazism was scary, and racism is scary, and the inability to recognize evil is scary, as this book so vividly shows. Perhaps because the book is so entertaining, it's possible to miss its deep seriousness; yet this is no surprise, because this too is what the book is about. YELLOW PERIL is like the intelligent older brother of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK -- every bit as much fun but genuinely, morally smart. I can't wait till my nine year old is about 18; I'll insist that he read it.