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The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew is the second book in the brilliant Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton, published in 1960. It takes place not long after the events of Death of a Citizen, in which World War II assassin Matt Helm was reactivated after 15 years of quiet family life for a new assignment: eliminating America's Cold War enemies. At this point Helm's wife Beth has separated from him, taking their three children and filing for a divorce. Apparently her shock at learning that Helm was a brutal professional killer before he became a photo-journalist was too much for her to process--particularly after the horrific events of Citizen. 

As the story opens, Helm arrives in Sweden on a dangerous new mission: to draw out a notorious Soviet assassin known as "Caselius" and if possible, take him out. His contact in Sweden, a young woman from another agency named Sara, objects to his mission on moral grounds, prompting Helm to get philosophical in his Shadow Warrior's way:

Well, we’re all capable of deeds we can barely imagine. Beth’s attitude still had the power to annoy me a little, because I was quite sure she’d never have dreamed of breaking up our home if she’d merely discovered, say, that I was the bombardier who’d pushed the button over Hiroshima. I must say that I don’t get it. Why honor and respect a guy who drops a great indiscriminate bomb, and recoil in horror from a guy who shoots a small, selective bullet? Sara Lundgren had had the same attitude. She’d been perfectly willing, presumably, to collect data, as part of her job, for the use of the Strategic Air Command-that might lead to the eventual obliteration of a city or two-but she’d balked violently at the idea of feeding information to a lone man with a gun.

This difference in mindset between Daylight Warriors and Shadow Warriors is a recurring theme in the series--as is the fact that when Daylight methods fail, leaders will always look to men like Helm to do the dirty jobs in the shadows that moralists are unable or unwilling to do.

Matt and Sara are soon attacked by unknown assailants and she is shot from the trees, presumably by Caselius--providing a lethal lesson in the necessity of Shadow Warriors. The stoic Helm shrugs it off and continues with his mission, posing as a a photo-journalist to accompany an American woman named Lou who is doing a story on mines in northern Sweden. Lou's husband, who published an expose that brought Caselius into public awareness, was gunned down in Germany, and Helm hopes to draw the assassin out through her. There is also a beautiful young Swedish girl who claims to be Helm's distant cousin, who turns out to be the story's most fascinating character.

In typical Helm fashion, the characters' motives and allegiances are unclear and treachery is an ever-present danger. Also in typical fashion, he beds down or lusts after some of them and this complicates his work. There is a long stretch of intrigue, deceptions and twists along with several killings, before the identity of Caselius is finally revealed and Helm moves in for the kill. The final stretch moves fast toward the climax, as Helm tracks Caselius across the desolate moors of northern Sweden.

The thing to realize about Matt Helm books is though they might look like just another pulp spy series to the uninitiated, they are very smart, well-written, realistic thrillers that have more in common with hard-boiled crime novels than James Bond or Nick Carter spy stories. If you're looking for over the top action, explicit sex, cutting-edge technologies or cartoon villains, this series will probably disappoint you. Like the equally brilliant Quiller series, this is a spy series for a literate adult reader who likes realism, tight writing, wit and the occasional philosophical insight with his tough-guy action. But make no mistake: Matt Helm is as tough as they come; a stone-cold killer who won't hesitate to carve you up with his knife, torture your wife or shoot you in the head if honor and duty require it.

I found this installment slightly less riveting than the other two Helm novels I've reviewed to date, Death of a Citizen and The Betrayers. The writing was just as good, but the story and setting weren't quite as interesting. Sweden seemed like a duller setting for a hard-boiled espionage adventure compared to the American Southwest or Hawaii--at least until the final confrontation in the arctic moors. Nevertheless, this was a solid entry in a brilliant series, and well worth your time.

Get a copy of The Wrecking Crew here.

The Violent Enemy

Whenever I'm in the mood for a quick, entertaining men's adventure story involving shadow warfare, my go-to author is Jack Higgins; he never disappoints. The Violent Enemy, published in 1966 (originally titled A Candle for the Dead), is no exception. Featuring two of my favorite plot elements--a prison break and a heist--and a backstory about the Irish Republican Army, the novel sounded right up my alley.

Protagonist Sean Rogan is similar to several other Higgins protagonists (most notably Liam Devlin of The Eagle Has Landed): an ultra-tough, dangerous Irish shadow warrior who led special operations in World War II and in the guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland. He has spent twelve of the last twenty years in prison, and is now doing hard labor in a maximum security prison in England.

Rogan is denied early release as the novel begins, which sets up a plot element that Higgins used in several other early novels (Hell is Too Crowded, Dark Side of the Street, Hell is Always Today): a prison break. During his latest stay, escape artist Rogan has figured out a complicated route of the prison that involves cutting through wire cages, climbing up beams, crawling through ventilation ducts and roping down walls. But the real challenge is figuring out how to get through the desolate moors that surround the prison and find a safe haven, a clean identity and transportation away from the scene. When all of that is offered by a former top IRA man on the outside, who apparently wants Rogan out real bad but doesn't say why, Rogan can't refuse.

Rogan executes the jailbreak and soon finds himself back with his old IRA boss, named O'More, who has a job that calls for Rogan's special talents. O'More wants Rogan to rob an armored car as it is delivering a large sum of cash to a train at a stop in a small village. He has assembled a crew which, as per usual in a Higgins novel, includes some rather nasty and treacherous characters and an attractive young woman who quickly becomes Rogan's romantic interest. This leads to personal dramas and betrayals that threaten to derail the plot, but Rogan is a true alpha warrior and he asserts his authority on the unruly gang. 

As Rogan and his crew are planning and executing the heist, a parallel police investigation is going on, led by a Scotland Yard detective who Rogan rescued from the Germans back in '43. The detective doesn't consider Rogan a real criminal, but a political prisoner, and since the troubles that landed Rogan in prison are no longer hot, let's just say that he's not a very motivated pursuer. The story moves quickly to a satisfying climax in the usual Higgins style, with the heisters on the run from the coppers, double-crossers on the run from both, and one or two twists along the way.

This was a fast-paced, entertaining read, with no wasted verbiage, simple but compelling characters and action that never goes over the top -- all very typical of Higgins's early work. This is basically a prison break, heist and getaway novel, much like the novel Breakout that I reviewed here. I was a little disappointed by the lack of IRA-style shadow warfare, but overall I have no complaints.

Get a copy of The Violent Enemy here.

Blood Oath

Canadian author David Morrell stormed onto the adventure thriller scene in 1972 with his debut novel First Blood, which was made into a blockbuster 1982 film starring Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo. I first encountered Morrell's work through his 1984 effort The Brotherhood of the Rose--a riveting, action-packed Ludlumesque espionage adventure about twin assassins who are hunted by their former bosses in classic Jason Bourne fashion. I've read a few later novels by Morrell over the years, and while they were good, they never reached the heights of Brotherhood. I decided to try his 1982 offering, Blood Oath, to see if his earlier work was similar.

Blood Oath was the first example of what would become almost a formula for Morrell: an innocent couple find themselves caught up in a sinister conspiracy, hunted by assassins while travelling across countries trying to unmask their enemy and defeat them. His style owes much to mega-selling author Robert Ludlum: he loves the surprise attack (assassins burst through a window, a building blows up, etc.), melodramatic dialogue, outlandish twists and the "man on the run from an all-powerful, unknown enemy" plot device. Morrell's writing is very cinematic; I suspect that he was heavily influenced by Hitchcock and always had movie deals in mind.

The novel starts slowly, as writer Peter Houston and his wife are visiting a military cemetery in France, trying to locate the grave of his father, a soldier who was killed in action in 1944. Finding no grave and no record of his father, he inquires in the local village and discovers that the man who volunteered to tend his father's grave was a notorious traitor who assisted the Germans then disappeared at war's end. The present-day intrigue begins soon after, as Houston's car is run off the road by unknown assailants and his wife drowns in a river. Swearing to avenge his wife and determined to find out who is after him and why, Houston continues his investigation with a French translator named Simone, who also has a personal connection to the mystery. They quickly find themselves caught up in more intrigue and targeted by unknown assassins. Further investigation uncovers more American soldiers whose graves mysteriously disappeared, all connected to the same French traitor and mysterious entities known only as "Verlaine" and "Charon". More people are killed, mysterious characters give ominous warnings with their dying words, and the plot twists and thickens.

The first two-thirds of this novel were pretty engaging; a 37 year-old wartime mystery, an increasingly ominous conspiracy, and two innocents trying to survive on the run while discovering the true nature of their adversary and taking revenge kept the pages turning. But things get increasingly implausible as the story goes on, and novelist Houston transforms into a full-on ninja, killing men with his bare hands, rappelling down cliffs and scaling castle walls with a monomaniacal determination to defeat the evil organization that killed his wife. The action is non-stop for the last fifty or sixty pages, as Houston and Simone infiltrate the enemy compound and learn the sinister secrets of the entity code-named "Charon". The bad guys prove to be as cartoonish as James Bond villains, but with less charm or style, and the whole thing becomes a little absurd.

If this was a James Bond or Mack Bolan novel this would all be par for the course. But when the story starts out as a Hitchcockian mystery-thriller, then a protagonist whose knowledge of commando skills come from researching his novels suddenly starts applying it in a manner that would make Mack proud, it all becomes too much to swallow. Which is too bad, because this was an entertaining page-turner for most of the way. 

One interesting detail about this novel is how it was inspired by the author's own life. Apparently Morrell's father was a pilot shot down over France during the war, and his body was never recovered. So this book is a kind of "what if?" story and a tribute to the father he never knew.

Overall, this was about on par with other Morrell's other novels I've read, but definitely not as good as The Brotherhood of the Rose. If you like his work or the thrillers of Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins, you'll probably enjoy this one.

Get a copy of Blood Oath here.

Flashpoint

Flashpoint is yet another obscure thriller from the 1970s remembered only because it was made into a film--a 1984 adaptation starring Kris Kristoffersen which, I vaguely recall, was quite good.

This novel is intriguing in the way it connects two fronts of the Shadow War that are usually distinct: the Border War and the Assassin War. The protagonists, Logan and Ernie, are two good ol' boy Texas border patrolmen who enjoy nothing better than patrolling the very desolate "section 7" of the U.S.-Mexico border in their jeeps, tracking down illegals across the desert and taking them back to Mexico. They don't do this out of any spite toward the illegals, but simply for the challenge, solitude and outdoor adventure the job affords them. Both men are military veterans with experience operating in dangerous territory--Ernie in Korea and Logan as a Green Beret in 'Nam--and patrolling the Mexican border is a good peacetime test of their skills. Author La Fountaine does a good job of fleshing out their backgrounds and motivating their behavior; while they may be obnoxious "bubbas" at times who like to get drunk and visit Mexican whorehouses in their spare time, they are full of life and love adventure in a way you can't help but respect.

As the story opens, the patrolmen learn that a new high tech border security system is going to be implemented in their region, which would turn these border cowboys into glorified desk jockeys, watching for beeping lights on computer screens instead of riding out under the sun looking for "Indians" to apprehend. This puts them in a depressed and desperate state of mind, but that soon changes when Logan, taking a shortcut through an untravelled desert wash, discovers a crashed jeep buried deep in the sand. Digging it out, he finds a skeleton and a box full of cash--$850,000 in small, sequentially numbered bills. At this point the novel becomes a detective story, as Logan and Ernie try to discover the identity of the driver, the source of the cash, and whether it is safe to spend it without alerting authorities.

Things soon become even more confusing--and deadly--as shadowy forces and corrupt players converge on the patrolmen's turf. People connected to the cash are being killed off, and the patrolmen feel the noose tightening around them. Should they take the money and run for the border, or play it cool and deny everything? Who exactly is looking for the money, and why? Who can they trust? What was a jeep doing loaded with cash in the south Texas desert, who was the mysterious driver, and why is someone willing to kill anyone who knows anything about them? Everything is answered in the final pages, as the narrative gets increasingly dark, violent and desperate and a sinister conspiracy is revealed. While some of the plot developments seemed a little far-fetched, I think the shock ending was appropriate and should come as no surprise to veteran Shadow Warriors. 

Flashpoint is one of those cynical, paranoid, pessimistic stories that could only have been written in the 1970s--a period I love because I think it dealt more realistically with the nature of society and humanity than what came before or after. It was a unique era, in the wake of the 1960s, when Americans were free to be simultaneously politically incorrect, sexually liberated, and very cynical of the powers that be. Logan expresses the spirit of the times well when, after Ernie denies that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy, responds:

"Ernie," Logan cried in anger, "how can you say that after all the shit that's come out about Watergate and the CIA and the FBI and the assassination plots over the world? How can you still say that?"

Everything that happens subsequently in the story only vindicates Logan's cynicism. If you enjoy novels like Six Days of the Condor and films like Parallax View, where ordinary people are caught up in the machinations of sinister forces that go right to the top of the power structure--which is revealed to be hopelessly corrupt--you should add Flashpoint to your reading list. This book is a good reminder that the Shadow War is not just a war on the ground between spies, criminals and covert operators, but a war of the mind against the vast apparatus of lies and illusions that daytime society runs on.

While I wouldn't call La Fountaine a great writer, and some of the plot twists were a little implausible, overall he's spun a very compelling tale here that kept me turning the pages until the end. If you like good old adventure thrillers with a heavy dose of 1970s paranoia and political intrigue, you should enjoy this as much as I did.

Get a copy of Flashpoint here.

The Scorpion Signal

The Scorpion Signal, published in 1980, is the ninth entry in the brilliant Quiller spy fiction series by Trevor Elleston (writing as Adam Hall).

In this installment, "shadow executive" Quiller is called back to London after only two weeks of recovery time from his previous mission, due to an international emergency that calls for his special skills. Apparently a fellow Bureau operative named Shapiro was captured in Russia and taken to the notorious Lubyanka KGB headquarters in Moscow, but somehow escaped only to be abducted again in Germany, presumably by the KGB. Shapiro has intimate knowledge of various top secret Western projects, including a highly successful Russian spy network code-named "Leningrad". Quiller's mission is to find Shapiro, rescue him if possible, and if not, make sure he stays silent for good before he is forced to spill the beans.

Quiller at first declines the mission, but as someone who is not motivated by money, power, glory or duty so much as by personal excellence and the challenge of life on the edge, he soon relents. He is infiltrated into Moscow, and quickly finds himself playing tense cat-and-mouse games with enemy forces. Elleston excels at describing the mental side of spycraft; we get a running commentary of Quiller's mental calculations as he tries to avoid being captured or killed by border guards, police, KGB and rogue agents. There are long stretches of very detailed descriptions of Quiller's driving tactics, evasion maneuvers, martial arts strikes, physical condition and thought processes as he tries to stay alive. These stretches are my only real criticism of the series: they sometimes get a bit tedious and you start wishing the super-spy would stop his autistic streams of thought and move the narrative forward.

Elleston also does a great job evoking the paranoia of late Brezhnev-era Moscow, where dissident groups are protesting, police are stopping people randomly, and the KGB are always threatening to break into your flat or safe house and haul you away to Lubyanka. In fact, Quiller finds himself there at one point, facing brutal interrogation. But he manages to get free, then gets to work tracking down the people who turned him in and taking them out of action.

As is usually case in these novels, Quiller is kept partially in the dark by his London controllers, which creates misunderstandings and failures that become lethal dangers in the field. After a lot of intrigue where it's not entirely clear where things are going, the narrative kicks into overdrive when Quiller finds Shapiro, now half-deranged from his stay in hotel KGB, and discovers what's really going on. The story then becomes a classic race against time to stop a deadly mission before it sparks a superpower conflagration.

This was another exciting installment in the superior Quiller series. It's basically a series of tense chases, evasions, interrogations, investigations and killings, all with big geopolitical implications--which is what a great spy novel should be. Highly recommended for fans of thinking-man's spy fiction.

Get a copy of The Scorpion Signal here.

Telefon

Continuing with novels in my current favorite genre--espionage and assassin fiction from the paranoid 1970s--today my selection is Telefon, published in 1975 by Walter Wager. Like The Killer Elite, this book would probably be forgotten today had it not been made into a Hollywood movie two years later, starring Charles Bronson.

I was intrigued by the novel's premise, that dozens of Soviet sleeper agents embedded in American society at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s were still active in the mid 1970s, and could be activated by a simple telephone call. Wager gives this an additional Manchurian Candidate twist by making the agents unaware of their own status and mission. Through deep hypnosis and drugs, the sleepers have been programmed to forget that they are Russian agents, and given specific sabotage missions that they will perform robotically when they receive telephoned code phrases. The missions are designed to destroy key military-industrial facilities so as to spread chaos in the United States in the event of total war.

The plot hook is that a maniacal Stalinist traitor within the KGB has gone rogue, made off with a book containing the sleeper agents' phone numbers and activation codes, and is systematically activating them in an attempt to provoke World War III. The novel's protagonist is a KGB super-spy named Tabbat, who has been sent to the States to stop the maniac before he brings nuclear retaliation upon mother Russia. Tabbat is like a Russian James Bond but better: smooth with the ladies, deadly with handguns, tactically brilliant and possessed of a photographic memory. He's also hip to American culture, loves Frank Sinatra and exchanges witty banter and plenty of sex with his beautiful female KGB assistant "Barbi". 

The novel is basically a manhunt story, as Tabbat and Barbi race across America trying to catch the maniac before he destroys more targets, without arousing the suspicion of American authorities or getting taken out by hostile Russian agents. There's a twist or two along the way and some amusing cultural commentary on 1970s America that keep things interesting.

Overall, this was a competent and a stylish Cold War thriller, reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth and Trevanian. Though the plot was somewhat far-fetched and it read more like a screenplay than a novel at times, I found it a fast and entertaining read.

Get a copy of Telefon here.