Raga Six (Doctor Orient #2)

Raga Six, by Frank Lauria

December, 1972  Bantam Books

The second volume of Doctor Orient picks up some time after the events of the first volume; indeed, it appears that a whole novel’s worth of stuff has occurred in the interim. When last we saw him, Dr. Owen Orient was taking down a Satanic cult in New York City, in between meditation sessions with his colleagues in his swank, three-floor townhome. But here in Raga Six, author Frank Lauria dispenses entirely with the setup of that first volume. 

But as mentioned, Orient has had another adventure since we last saw him; working with another doctor, one named Ferrari, Orient apparently cured the Vice President’s daughter of her lifelong paralysis of the legs and the girl can now walk again. But this is only infrequently mentioned in the narrative or in dialog; it all has happened after Doctor Orient ended and before Raga Six begins. Humorously, this material – which was never even covered in the first novel – is brought up more often than the actual plot of the first volume. In fact the events of Doctor Orient are only referred to once, in passing. 

The bigger focus here is that Dr. Orient has decided to let go of all of his worldly trappings: the three-floor home, the deluxe antique car, etc. Wanting to get back in touch with the world, Orient dispenses of all his wealth, as well as his retinue. In the previous book I remarked that there was certainly the vibe of a 1930s pulp to this series, with Orient the wealthy occultist leading a Doc Savage-esque team of followers. 

But that setup is now gone; Frank Lauria proves himself fearless of smashing apart what came before and starting anew. Which essentially is the vibe that drives this second volume of the series. I should note however that Dr. Owen Orient is not a driven protagonist, particularly not in this installment: his focus is more on “following his fate” and taking it one day at a time, with no exact goal or objective that he is working toward. 

This certainly lends Raga Six a laissez-faire vibe so far ast the plotting goes. After reading mostly men’s adventure novels for the past several years, it was a bit hard for me to adapt to a protagonist who was not driven to save people, or to get revenge, or who had some other goal he was working steadfastly to achieve; Owen Orient is driftless and aimless, and this extends to how the novel plays out. 

For example, even when he encounters evil, Orient is not driven to stop it. Like early in the book, he comes across a Satanic cult that operates out of the Lower East Side. Instead of smashing it, like your average men’s adventure protagonist would, Orient instead bides his time to figure out what is going on, and only gradually decides to perform an exorcism to save the two people who have been possessed by a demon. So yes, he does save these people, but what I mean to say is that he is not driven to do so; it takes him a while to figure out what is going on, mostly because Orient once again seems curiously incapable of noticing signs of the supernatural, a plot contrivance that stymied him in the first book. 

In a way Raga Six can almost be read as a standalone. Most of the characters who were so important in Doctor Orient aren’t even in this followup, and Orient himself is a different man. And as mentioned Lauria does not refer back to that previous book. Orient walks away from everything, and on a whim heads to the Lower East Side. It’s been five years since I read the first book, but I recall it did a phenomenal job of capturing all the details of the Groovy Age, complete with a psychedelic nightclub in Manhattan. 

In Raga Six, however, the Groovy Age is replaced by the Hippie Age; Orient, in his early 30s, spends the first quarter of the novel in the company of a group of Lower East Side hippies. Lauria really takes his time with the narrative – it runs to 277 pages of small, dense print, and is not a quick read by any means – and allows these characters to breathe. In many ways Raga Six has more in common with the low-simmer potboilers of Burt Hirschfeld and other contemporary popular authors than it does with horror; this is not a fast-moving horror tale in the least. 

While he might not be the most action-prone series protagonist, Dr. Orient still at least gets laid. This is courtesy Moon Girl, a sexy hippie chick Orient encounters during an East Side music festival that quickly devolves into a riot, with cops tear-gassing the hippies who refuse to leave the area. Curiously, Lauria makes it clear that the hippies are the ones who start the riot, refusing to comply with the police and then throwing things at them. I found this quite prescient in our post-“summer of mostly peaceful but fiery protests” world. 

Moon Girl has a five-year-old son named Julian, and soon enough the two are living with Orient. This seems to set up an entirely new cast for the series, but Lauria will change his mind and drop both Moon Girl and Julian for the majority of the text. More focus is placed on Cowboy, a drug dealer who puts Orient to work, having him manage the various deals and payoff schemes and whatnot. As mentioned, the plotting here would be more at home in a piece of hippie lit than a book with “horror” labelled on its spine. 

Through Moon Girl, Orient finds out about a strange group operating out of a storefront on the East Side. Moon Girl has a friend who has been acting weird lately, and Orient goes to visit her – and gradually suspects she is being inducted into a Satanic cult. He also meets the mysterious man who runs the place, a guy who goes around in a black rubber suit and carries a whip, along with the guy’s wife, a beautiful young woman who during seances will channel the voices of dead people for a paying clientele. 

There follows a great sequence where Orient gains the employ of an acquaintance, a heavyset woman who is famous for giving readings in the city, and the two contrive to perform an excorcism on the possessed husband and wife without their knowing it. Lauria has certainly done his occult rituals homework, and as with the first book, Raga Six is filled to the brim with arcane lore, particularly here where Orient banishes the demon that has possessed these two. 

But here’s the thing – what would have been enough for a single novel is over and done with in a few chapters, and never mentioned again! Instead the wily-nily plotting has it that Orient is soon off on a ten-day voyage via freighter to Tangier(!), sent off by Joker, who for plot-contrivance reasons has flown the coop and left Orient with a ticket for this ocean voyage. And, because he has nothing else to do, Orient just goes along with it. 

It’s quite brazen how Lauria jams so many separate plots together into the novel; soon enough the previous quarter of the novel is immaterial, as everything now focuses on Orient’s fellow passengers on the ship, in particular the mysterious Dr. Aleistar Six and his retinue. Among them is the titular Raga Six, Dr. Six’s wife: a lovely woman with pale skin, yellow eyes, silver hair, and “full breasts.” The latter concession surprised me, as Frank Lauria is not the most exploitative of authors; as with Doctor Orient, lurid and sensational details are minimal, the author going for more of a reserved tenor in his narrative. 

There’s also Pia, a beauty who seems to be a “potential,” meaning she harbors latent psychic abilities. Orient is interested in her, but the overbearing Dr. Six seems to have a firm grip on Pia. Regardless, Dr. Orient enjoys himself a good ol’ three-way; one night Pia calls him telepathically and Orient goes to her, but ends up in bed with both Pia and Raga. Again Lauria does not dwell on the sleaze, instead doling out lines like, “he sunk into her honeyed depths” and whatnot. (For some reason I’m suddenly hungry for Honey Nut Cheerios!) 

There is a great liberal vibe to Raga Six, and of course I mean the traditional definition of “liberal,” in that Orient approaches everything with an open mind and a lack of judgment. I miss liberals like that, don’t you?? So Orient’s three-way with Raga and Pia is just another event in his easy-going, wherever-fate-takes-me life, with no hangups or judgment or condemnation. This extends to Orient’s drug usage, but that is minimal in this volume. We do however get more scenes of Orient and others staring into the tips of their cigarettes as they smoke, something we were told incessantly in the previous book. 

Only gradually does Lauria bring any kind of tension or “horror” into this interminable sea voyage. It’s mostly centered around Dr. Six and his possessive attitude toward Pia. This comes to a head when Orient’s young cabin mate, Presto, runs off with Pia in Tangier, and Six goes off in rage-filled pursuit…and Orient shacks up with Raga for several days. Again we are more in Burt Hirschfeld territory, as Lauria focuses on their growing love and their plans to be together, once Raga divorces Dr. Six. 

Horror material does not return until Six comes back into the narrative and retrieves Raga, a submissive Pia in tow, and off they go to Six’s clinic in Italy. Now as we’ll recall, Orient is in love with Raga Six and knows something strange is going on with her husband. He also suspects some misdeed has happened with his young cabin mate; Dr. Six claims he left Presto in a drug coma in Marrakesh. So Orient goes there to check on him…and ends up spending a month working on his meditation skills and such with a guy there who is one of the Nine Unknown Men, and who trained with Orient’s own master, Ku. 

This is what I mean about the laissez-faire plotting. You’d expect Orient would be gung-ho to find out what the hell was going on with Dr. Six and to claim Raga as his own, but instead the next chapters are all focused on Orient astrally voyaging to find out what happened to Presto, who truly is in a coma, but one that does not seem to be drug induced. 

The plot changes again when Orient finally goes to Italy and hooks up with Sordi, his former chaffeur. A girl in Sordi’s village has come down with a “sleeping sickness,” which of course made me wonder if Stan The Man Lee read this novel and copped the idea for The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. Orient tries to figure out if this could be a supernatural menace, then at great page length tracks down Dr. Six’s clinic – and there’s a rushed action scene as Orient frees Pia and Raga from the now-maniacal Dr. Six. 

Again, a normal novel would end here, but instead Orient receives a telepathic message from one of his students, Argyle, a black American who factored into the previous book and is an actor; he’s in Rome shooting a cowboy movie, and what’s more Moon Girl and her son Julian are with him. Dr. Orient heads there…and learns that little Julian is lost, having disappeared a few days before while they were visiting the Coliseum. 

So what does Orient do? He starts meditating while Raga offers to make sandwiches. It’s kind of impressive how Lauria consistently refrains from injecting any kind of tension or drama into his tale. Instead of freaking out and canvassing the city, Moon Girl is content to wait while Argyle and Orient voyage to the astral plane to see if they can locate her son. There’s even a part where they discover they have more success in the morning, so they decide to break for the rest of the day and start again the next dawn! 

I admit, this leisurely approach to the plot can be a little wearying, especially if one wishes for a more proactive protagonist. Also, it must be mentioned that Orient is very much a master of the metaphysical; the extent of his physical abilities would be meditation, and it’s not like he happens to be a karate master on the side or anything. He’s not tough at all, is what I mean to say, and the finale is especially grating because it consists of Orient sleeping due to the psychic attacks of the monster who turns out to be behind everything. 

Yes, sleeping – Orient spends the final pages either in bed or struggling to keep his eyes open. That is when he isn’t turning on faucets or throwing around salt as banishing rituals to ward off the psychic attacks. It might be “legitimate” so far as the occult stuff goes, but it makes for a very lame “action finale.” Indeed when you visualize what Orient does in the finale – struggling not to sleep, even so lethargic at one point that he passes out while trying to chase a villain into the woods – it becomes quite clear why there was never a Doctor Orient movie. 

I won’t ruin the surprise finale, but it becomes clear who the main villain is, and Orient alone must face this villain. That said, the “thrilling conclusion” is again sort of uninententionally humorous, as it features Orient – again trying not to fall asleep – muttering some words as he stares at a ring on his finger. At least Bantam Books did not market Raga Six as an action thriller, but still. The reader kind of expects a little more. 

The leisurely plotting extends to the final pages, as despite the book ending, Lauria keeps writing, and eventually Orient heads back to New York, where it turns out he still owns his three-floor home. We’re told he spends “months” getting back into the swing of things, working at a hospital and opening up his own practice. Presumably this is all setup for the next volume, Lady Sativa, which came out the following year – and I’ll try to get to it sooner than I got to this second volume. 

Overall I enjoyed Raga Six, appreciating Frank Lauria’s strong writing and his determination to let the characters breathe, but at the same time the lethargic plotting got to be a drag. But then, if you want action with your ‘70s occult sleaze, you’d probably be more happy with the concurrent Mind Masters series (which I think I might read again one of these days).