More Deadly than the Male

Rating:
Summary: Dreams
Review: George Fraser is bored and lonely. He prefers his dream world to his real, ordinary life so he begins to boast about it, pretending that he is, in fact, a hardened and ruthless gangster. But George Fraser boasts to the wrong people and suddenly his dream world becomes all too real. But he has exciting dreams. In his dreams, he lives in a thrilling world of gangsters, guns, fast cars and beautiful women. And of course, in his dreams, he is the toughest gangster of them all. Obviously, when a dream comes true, the dreamer is expected to be happy, but tragically, Fraser has to be worried and sad for his dreams coming to limelight because he never knew things could turn sore even as a gangster living in a gangster paradise; he forgot to ask Coolio before consult chase for his dreams. It is an intelligent and harshly revealing piece of work with not a little serious penetration and power.

Rating:
Summary: Strange and terrifying
Review: MORE DEADLY THAN THE MALE ****, 1946
A strange character, unusual... George Fraser is a big guy, with large shoulders but very shy. He lives alone, very alone, his only companion is a cat, timid and wild, like him, maybe his reincarnated soul.
George is selling children encyclopediae, a little job which allows him to survive. With a good training and a lot of work, he manages to develop his sales talk with some skill.
At night he escapes from his lonelyness dreaming he is a tough american gangster : Al Capone and Dillinger are afraid of him...
This frenzy is turning into sheer mythomania : he tells his exploits to the house maid who is a good listener...
But this little narrow world is going to change !
George has got the mission to train a new recruit. The young man is in fact a very tough boy who is hiding... For the matter of selling children encyclopediae he learns fast, he has a natural talent, he is a born salesman with no scruples. Very soon, he drags George on a very bad slope... him and his sister, another Chase heroine as we like them ! Cora is a young tigress who is been afraid of nobody, she is living like an animal : beautiful, savage, wanton and very filthy.
George is in love and blinded like a big insect who burns his wings to a street light. He is manipulated and crushed... until the day when Cora has killed his cat.
This novel is a terrifying trip in the London suburbs, which has something reminding of the well known classic "Les mystères de Paris" (Eugène Sue).
And this door to door job was the first job of James, so we are given an intensive course of salesmanship, with all the bad tricks. What a lesson ! All commercial manuals are beaten.

Book presentation :
George Fraser, a lonely, timid fellow, lived in a dream world of gangsters, gunfights and fascinating women, and to bolster up his inferiority complex he began to imagine himself as the toughest gangster of all of them. But he boasted once too often, and to the wrong person. From that moment, harmless George Fraser was ensnared in a net of intrigue and became a cat's-paw for murder.

" Flawless professionalism here too. In this Chase thriller, the same compulsive readability and sheer hard story-telling as in every other. Mr. Chase, as always, is for me. "
SHEFFIELD TELEGRAPH

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