After reading the first 11 books of the Matt Helm series, I was starting to lose some of my enthusiasm for the series. It was getting a little too formulaic, too cute, too much of a spy soap opera and not enough of a hard-edged espionage-adventure series. Helm is at his best when he is playing the rugged American outdoorsman and stone-cold killer, not when he is going from hotel room to hotel room engaging in flirty banter with an endless series of attractive young ladies like a lower-class cowboy James Bond. Fortunately the series got back on track with the 12th installment, The Interlopers, published in 1969.
As the story opens, Helm is making his way down to the Columbia river before dawn, the lights of the Hanford Nuclear Site glowing in the distance, dressed as a fisherman and accompanied by a black lab. He has adopted the identity of a recently deceased Communist courier named Nystrom and is en route to a rendezvous with someone who will be passing him microfilmed documents about a top secret technology called the "Northwest Coastal System". This opening really hooked me, because I've been in a similar spot across from the Hanford site on a stealth mission myself (in fact I've paddled across the river and infiltrated the restricted zone—but the less said about that the better). Anyway, Helm soon encounters a leggy blonde fisherwoman who doesn't quite get the recognition phrase right and doesn't have any documents for him, but she does lure him to a place where he becomes a target for a sniper. Apparently there is a third party, in addition to Helm's side and the Communist spies; unknown interlopers who are also trying to get the secret documents Helm is after.
It turns out the operation to receive the microfilm is actually a gambit; Helm's cover was intentionally made shoddy in order to let the opposition know that Helm is operating as Nystrom. The main mission is to lure a top enemy assassin named Holz onto his trail so Helm can take him out. Helm's agency has learned that Holz is in the states on a deadly mission: to assassinate the winner of the upcoming presidential election with a sniper rifle, thus sowing further chaos in the assassination-plagued USA of the 1960s (recall that in 1968 both presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were shot and killed).
Helm proceeds with his courier mission, travelling west to Seattle, where he has a violent encounter with some of the spies and meets another femme fatale whose motives are unclear (Hamilton has at least one or two of these in every novel). Helm then proceeds north into the interior of British Columbia to make his next pickup of microfilm, has another violent encounter, takes a ferry up the Alaskan coast, makes another pickup, has more violent encounters, meets more attractive women whose motives are unclear, and so on. Instead of describing the rather complicated plot in detail, let's just say that there is a lot of confusion as to who is working for whom, what their motives are, and which woman is the deceiver and backstabber. There is also more violence and a higher body count than usual. As always, Helm deals with every threat as it comes, relying on his wits and skill with a knife and gun to dispatch them like the cold professional killer he is.
Eventually Holz is lured into Helm's orbit, and the menace and violence ramps up to a crescendo. The climax was especially good, as Helm and Holz hunt each other in the wild Alaskan mountains with rifles. A third party enemy agent from a previous novel even makes a brief appearance, giving this the feel of an episode of an ongoing story arc rather than just a stand-alone adventure.
The Interlopers is one of my favorite installments of the series so far. I liked seeing Helm back in his truck, travelling across the wide open spaces of the west, hunting and being hunted by spies and assassins, never sure who is a friend and who is a foe. The black labrador "Hank", Helm's trusty companion on this adventure, was a nice addition to the story. Not only did his collar make a convenient hiding place for the microfilm, but he added some comic relief and even some critical assistance during the mission.
Like most of the books in the series, the plot got a little too clever and convoluted with the schemes and deceptions of various characters, and there were an unrealistic number of attractive women popping up at regular intervals. But this is not meant to be ultra-realistic spy-fiction; it's somewhere between Bond and Quiller or Callan on the realism scale, with romance and style to go with the gritty espionage action. Helm has the personality of a classic hardboiled crime novel tough guy, and there's a strong Western flavor in this one, as Helm drives through small frontier towns in pursuit of a dangerous outlaw, sleeps in his camper, hikes and rides horses in the mountains, carries a high-powered rifle and kills men with his hunting knife. It's a mix of genres that makes Matt Helm unique, and made this a very entertaining read.
Get a copy of The Interlopers here.
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