A few weeks ago, I posted about a virtually forgotten heroine from the golden age of pulps (the appropriately named Golden Amazon), and more recently my ongoing efforts to chip away at the backlog on my shelf of shame have led me to another unfairly – I think – overlooked heroine, this time from the groovy 1960s. I’m talking about Sibyl Sue Blue: a petite, 40-ish, deceptively tough and resourceful cigar-smoking police detective in the swinging, far-flung future of 1990. She juggles her duties, which often involve going undercover, with her responsibilities as a single mom to her teenage daughter.
She only ever appeared in two novels by Rosel George Brown, Galactic Sibyl Sue Blue (originally published under the title Sibyl Sue Blue, 1966) and The Waters of Centaurus (1970). In the first novel, Sgt. Blue is initially working undercover to track potential drug trafficking on Earth by the scaly, yet humanoid aliens from the planet Centaurus, but then several unusual deaths, possibly murders disguised as suicides, lead to a voyage to the mysterious planet where Sibyl’s scientist husband disappeared a decade ago. In the sequel Sibyl is on the planet Centaurus with her daughter Missy on an assignment that’s disguised as a vacation. She eventually stops a plot to conquer and possibly destroy the planet.
Sibyl is a fascinating character, with a definite Modesty Blaise or Emma Peel vibe to her, and a little Barbarella mixed in for good measure. She’s smart, capable and sexy – in a very sex-positive way, with a healthy libido and active sex life. (An additionally interesting detail is that her main lover, a navigator for an interstellar transport company, is in an open marriage with several kids of his own.)
However, although they contain a fair bit of humor and quirkiness (like the fact that women rouge their knees, something that was apparently also done in the 1920s by flappers), these two books are not campy, tongue-in-cheek romps. Brown kept her prose pretty straight and occasionally wove in a number of interesting high SF concepts. And if you read between the lines, there is also quite a bit of social commentary on societal ills as Brown saw them in the 1950s/1960s, puritanical sexual mores and racism being the most obvious ones.
I think one of the main reasons why Sibyl Sue Blue did not take off and become a fixture of pop culture is that Brown unfortunately died of lymphoma in 1967 at the very young age 41 – the second novel was in fact published posthumously. So she never had a chance to write any more books that might have attracted the attention of the wider reading public, as well as potentially moving Sibyl to other media (i.e., TV, movies or maybe even comics). Her widower, who had control over her estate, apparently kept a pretty tight rein on the property, so that until recently there have not even been any editions later than the early 1970s. However, the first novel has more recently become available in Kindle format.
Looks interesting and it’s something I’ve not come across before.
I may well attempt to track down copies, depending on how much they are going for.
I found the two paperback editions (covers pictured above) for surprisingly reasonable prices. Of course, that was about a decade ago.
I have the Kindle edition though I haven’t cracked it yet.