Route of the Red Gold

Route of the Red Gold, published in 1967, is a lesser known novel by the great crime fiction writer Dan J. Marlowe. Here Marlowe, no doubt capitalizing on the 1960s spy craze, brings some Cold War intrigue and James Bond flavor to his usual hard-hitting, hard-boiled writing.

Red Gold concerns the mission of Roy Weston, a Yale grad and US Marine captain assigned by the CIA to investigate a suspected Communist banker in the Virgin Islands. Weston has spent time on the island training troops and already has contacts there; his expertise in combat swimming, infiltration and spycraft also prove very useful.

Weston doesn’t know exactly who his target is, but one suspect is a lush named Menard who soon becomes his regular drinking buddy. Another is a rich old man named Carrington, who lives in a secure coastal compound, complete with vicious bodyguards, guard dogs, a beautiful daughter named Joan and a drunken wife named Sophie—both of whom have the hots for Captain Roy.

Lots of drinking, romance and intrigue soon ensue, as Roy infiltrates Menard’s office, Carrrington’s estate and Joan’s bedroom. He also has to make regular dead drops to his CIA handlers and avoid the wrath of his military superior for his suspicious nocturnal antics. All this while training marines by day in demanding commando skills. This guy has nothing but energy.

There’s a decent amount of action, involving Roy swimming long distances at night, picking locks, cracking safes, and getting in two or three serious fights. The characters are well-drawn, the spycraft is believable, and the climax is violent and exciting. Roy Weston doesn’t have a lot of personality, but he’s as tough, competent, energetic and smooth with the ladies as James Bond or Matt Helm, and that’s all this story needs.

This was a good read; there’s no grand dramas about saving the world, just realistic human scale operations to take down a Communist spy ring in America’s backyard. Marlowe’s writing is efficient, informed and engaging as usual. What’s not to like?

Get a copy of Route of the Red Gold here.

Centrifuge

J. C. Pollock is a mysterious figure; he published seven special forces/spy thrillers between 1982 and 1993 that are well-regarded by fans of the genre, then disappeared from the scene without a trace. I read his 1985 book, Crossfire, a while back and thought it was very good (note to self: post a review). He brought an insider's technical knowledge of special ops and espionage that strongly suggests he worked in those fields himself then decided to write fiction about it, sort of like an American Andy McNab for the 1980s. As Pollock's goodreads profile puts it:

He is a topic of speculation on the Internet and many suspect that he was a CIA agent attached to the SOG during the Vietnam War, but this has had not been confirmed or denied. It appears that his life is like the novels he wrote.

I decided to try Pollock's 1984 offering, Centrifuge, to see if was of a similar quality. 

As the story opens, Mike Slater is flying his small amphibious plane to a wilderness lake in northern Maine. He has been summoned there by his former special forces commander in Vietnam, colonel Brooks, who Slater hasn't seen since the final days of that war eight years earlier. Slater quickly learns that he was not invited there for the fishing, but to help Brooks with a potentially very serious national security problem. Brooks, who now works as the chief of security for a top secret defense research facility, can't reveal any details to Slater; he simply wants to show him some photographs and ask him if he recognizes the man shown. But just as Slater is about to look at the photos, a hidden assassin shoots the colonel with a sound-suppressed firearm and Slater never gets a look at them. Brooks does warn Slater before he dies that someone will come after him too, along with the other two survivors of his special forces unit in 'Nam. Slater instantly goes into survival mode, using the skills he learned as a Green Beret to evade, track and kill the assassins armed only with his survival knife. He manages to eliminate three of them, but one gets away and takes the photos with him. He finds German passports on the dead men, and as he is flying back to civilization, wonders what kind of dark shadows from his past have come back to stalk him.

It's an exciting start to the novel, suggesting a larger conspiracy and containing a level of detail about special ops procedures that was rare in thrillers of that era. Unfortunately, this opening scene is probably the best part of the book. After that we are introduced to some key players at Chestnut Ridge Farm, the facility where Brooks worked, as they try to discover who killed Brooks and tried to kill Slater, and why. We learn that Slater has retired from special forces and now runs a kennel where he trains attack and guard dogs. We also meet the Soviet mole inside the Farm, learn about his background, his history with SOG ("studies and observations group", a highly classified spec ops unit in Vietnam), his motivations for defecting to the Soviets, and his connection to Slater's last mission in 'Nam.

When one of the two remaining survivors of that mission is killed, Slater has no doubt that the other man, named Perkins, will be targeted soon. So he travels to Mexico to try to persuade him to join forces and fight back. Perkins is very skeptical and doesn't want anything to do with his shadow warrior past, but after they come under attack right on Perkins's boat he agrees to join Slater and leave Mexico immediately. The two men decide to make their stand at a remote cabin Slater owns on a lake in the Quebec wilderness. They stock up on automatic rifles, grenades, claymore mines and survival gear and fly to the lake. This sets up the novel's climactic confrontation between the two Green Berets and whoever is trying to kill them—presumably KGB assassins but possibly hostile elements of their own side as well. We're given a detailed account of how they prep the battlefield by setting booby traps, scouting escape routes and planning ambushes around the lake. 

The action scenes are interspersed with intrigue at the Farm, where the investigators are closing in on the suspected mole, the mole is making emergency contact with his handlers, the mystery of the mole's connection to Slater is being solved, devious schemes are being hatched, and everything hinges on whether or not Slater and Perkins win their war with the assassins. We also meet the elite twelve man Soviet commando team that is assembled to end Slater and Perkins once and for all. The final showdown at the cabin is tense and believable special ops action, with a twist ending that highlights a running theme of the book: when duplicitous spooks get involved in the wars of honorable soldiers, the soldiers usually lose.

This novel was about half special forces action and half espionage tradecraft and intrigue, showcasing Pollock's technical knowledge of both domains. But that was also its main flaw: at times it felt like I was reading a special forces or spycraft manual that had been turned into a novel. It got a little too by-the-numbers, predictable and technical, and lacked drama, personality and surprises. Fans of realistic, technical 1980s-era spec ops, spycraft and survivalism should enjoy the book, as long as you're OK with its limitations.

Get a copy of Centrifuge here.

Seven Days to a Killing

During the Cold War, Great Britain very much played second fiddle to the USA as a geopolitical power, but in the world of spy-fiction they reigned supreme. From the pulpy adventures of Ian Fleming's Bond to the tense action of Elleston Trevor's Quiller to the cerebral dramas of LeCarre and Deighton, the Brits set the standards for the genre. In addition to such well-remembered authors, there were many more who wrote quality spy-fi that are largely forgotten today—men like James Mitchell, Gavin Lyall, Ted Allbeury, Oliver Jacks (Kenneth Royce), Robert Charles, Desmond Cory, Christopher Nicole (Andrew York), Alan Williams, and the writer I'll be reviewing today: Clive Egleton.

Like most of the authors just mentioned, Egleton served in World War II, and this experience gave his writing a realistic edge that few peacetime writers can match.  No doubt it was this shared wartime background, along with the high English literary standard and cultural affinity for spycraft, that produced a golden age of British espionage fiction in the post-war era. Egleton actually served in the army for thirty years, until retiring to become a full-time writer in  the mid-1970s. His debut novel, published in 1973 and titled Seven Days to a Killing, was made into a movie called The Black Windmill starring Michael Caine the following year. The movie trailer looked interesting enough that I decided to track down the novel and give it a read.

As the story opens, a man named Andrew McKee, dressed in a paratrooper uniform, confronts two boys who are playing at an abandoned military airfield. Using a ruse, the boys are quickly knocked out, bound, gagged, put in crates and taken away in a Land Rover with military precision. A little later, as two of his hired heavies are driving away with their payments, McKee calmly presses a button on a radio transmitter, detonating a bomb in their vehicle and blowing them to smithereens. It's a chilling and well-done opening sequence that lets us know what kind of ruthlessly efficient villains we'll be dealing with.

One of the boys is soon released, but the other, named David, who is the son of an MI6 officer named John Tarrant, is held in captivity at a farmhouse. The kidnapper, who goes by the name "Drabble", calls Tarrant with a simple demand: deliver 500,000 pounds worth of uncut diamonds in two days time, or his son will come to harm. Tarrant must deliver them himself to an address in Paris according to Drabble's instructions. To show that he means business, he plays a recording of Tarrant's screaming son being tortured.

Drabble's demands bring in an intelligence officer named Cedric Harper, whose title is "Director of Subversive Warfare". Harper is highly suspicious by nature, and he wants to know why a man with Tarrant's modest resources would be the target of such a high-priced kidnapping plot. Tarrant seems to be an upstanding officer with a clean record, but is he somehow involved in the plot? Is it just a criminal extortion scheme, or is the KGB or other enemy agency involved? Harper agrees to provide the diamonds for delivery, but in return he puts Tarrant under close surveillance and a background investigation in hopes of finding out the answers.

What follows is part crime/espionage procedural, part race against time, and part the psychological struggles of Tarrant, his estranged wife, Harper and the kidnappers. The narrative got a little confusing at times, as so many characters were introduced that it became difficult to keep track of them, and the procedural parts of the story dragged a bit. But the final stretch of the book made up for all that, as the diamonds are en route for delivery, the kidnappers prepare to make their exchange and getaway, Harper prepares a team for a raid, and Tarrant desperately races to find his son, not trusting Harper to have his best interests at heart. The suspenseful and violent climax was absolutely riveting, one of the best I can remember in an espionage thriller.

The writing style and plotting of Seven Days brought to mind the classic work of Frederick Forsyth, particularly The Day of the Jackal. It has that sophisticated, sinister edge and realistic detail about espionage procedures that he and other British spy-fi greats excel at. The detailed backstories of the kidnappers, their operations and motivations, were quite plausible and very well done. This is apparently the first of a four book series featuring the cynical counter-intelligence man Cedric Harper. Based on the quality of this book, I will definitely be checking out further installments of the series and other novels by Clive Egleton. Highly recommended.

Get a copy of Seven Days to a Killing here.

The Shadow in the Sea

Like the the previous book I reviewed, The Shadow in the Sea is an obscure Cold War spy thriller from the early 1970s about a Soviet super-weapon and a daring mission to infiltrate Soviet territory to investigate and sabotage it. Written by the forgotten Welsh author Owen John and published in 1972, this is the fifth novel in John's series about Scottish super-spy Haggai Godin. No suave James Bond knock-off or grim Quiller-like killer, Godin is a giant oddball of a man who eats to excess, loves brandy, laughs often and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of everything related to his profession. The son of a Russian émigré, he speaks Russian like a native and is a master of disguise and social manipulation.

The first thing that grabbed me about this book is the cover. The beautiful illustration, of a man dangling from a rope just below the edge of a cliff, a grappling hook barely holding him, rifle strapped across his back, with a huge, menacing submarine lurking in the sea far below, is the kind of classic men's adventure cover art that Fawcett Gold Medal paperbacks were famous for. If you like this kind of artwork, browse all the Gold Medal covers by clicking the book numbers on the left side of this page.

As Shadow opens, a lighthouse operator reports seeing a huge black submarine briefly surface off the coast of Wales. Based on the unusual description and the fact that British Intelligence thought they had accounted for the whereabouts of the entire Soviet fleet, this leads to concern that the Soviets have a new sub prowling around U.K. waters of an unknown design. To solve the mystery, the agency's top operative, the ultra-confident and -competent Haggai Godin, volunteers to undertake an infiltration mission into northwest Russia to investigate a submarine base and find out what's going on. Accompanying Godin as usual will be super-spook Colonel Mason of the CIA.

The dynamic duo infiltrates Soviet waters by fishing trawler from Norway, Mason hiding the boat in fjords to avoid Soviet patrols while Godin goes ashore alone to reconnoiter the base. Godin's first challenge is to climb the four hundred foot cliff (!) up from the sea pictured on the cover, which he does by firing a grappling hook attached to very long rope over the cliff edge, then climbing without any special gear—just sheer strength and willpower. It's an exciting scene, but one which let me know early on that this wouldn't be a highly realistic espionage adventure.

Godin dons the winter uniform of a Soviet soldier and proceeds east toward Murmansk by bus, using his genius for disguise and socializing to gain information and blend in with the locals. So bold and confident is Godin that he prefers to draw attention to himself, using his mastery of "yo-nin" overt infiltration to walk right into the base, rather than "in-nin" covert creeping around in the shadows. Without providing any spoilers, let's just say that the way Godin infiltrates the base and gets information about the top secret sub is rather far-fetched, but entertaining. He does manage to discover the nature of the sub and the insidious mission it is embarked on.

The most tense and exciting part of the novel was Godin's escape from the naval base and exfiltration from Soviet territory. Walking many miles cross-country in the bitter cold of a Siberian winter, evading security forces, attacking them only when necessary, using deception to get assistance from local villagers—I like how Godin applies the "make war by way of deception" motto of real spooks and ninjas, rather than taking on large armed forces single-handedly and defeating them without taking a scratch in the manner of Mack Bolan and other over-the-top shadow warriors. While Godin's methods weren't always totally believable, and he was a bit too confident and competent for real life, they didn't quite turn the book into a cartoon for adults like some men's adventure/espionage series.

Meanwhile back in the UK/USA, spooks are working overtime to decode intercepted signals to and from the sub, and a desperate strategem is devised to attempt to avert the dastardly intentions of the vessel. I won't say any more, except that, like The Tashkent Crisis, the climax was a bit of a letdown compared to the infiltration and exfiltration scenes, and the super-weapon seemed a bit science-fictional and far-fetched for 1972.

All in all, this was an entertaining but not stellar read. I may try more Haggai Godin novels if I run across them, but I probably won't go out of my way to acquire them. Recommended for fans of old-school spy/adventure fiction.

Get a copy of The Shadow in the Sea here.

The Tashkent Crisis

The Tashkent Crisis, published in 1971 and written by William Craig, is an obscure Cold War thriller that brings to mind classic Alistair MacLean adventures of the 1960s and Tom Clancy "techno-thrillers" of the 1980s. Based on a few positive online reviews and a cover blurb by Donald Hamilton, I picked up the hardback for six bucks and gave it a quick read.

As the novel opens, an American scholar on his way to the Moscow airport is approached by a Russian journalist, given a package and implored to deliver it to an old friend in the State Department. The American doesn't know it, but the package contains technical documents describing a devastating new Soviet weapon system, the existence of which Washington only dimly suspects. Apparently the Soviets have successfully tested an energy weapon that will enable them to incinerate any city on the planet at will. To make matters worse, a hardline general has covertly seized power in Moscow and is preparing to force America's surrender by demonstrating the awesome power of the new death ray. He soon issues an ultimatum to the President: surrender to Soviet forces in 72 hours, or Washington D. C. will be annihilated.

Desperate for an alternative to surrender or mutual nuclear destruction, the President authorizes a seemingly suicidal sabotage mission into the heart of Soviet Asia to destroy the secret weapon before it destroys them. A four-person team is quickly assembled, consisting of a bad-ass Russian-speaking Green Beret of Czech heritage, a KGB defector who had plastic surgery and is now working for the CIA, an ex-Soviet tank commander with experience running cells behind the iron curtain, and a five foot tall Jewish female assassin who grew up near Tashkent.

The sabotage mission was the heart of the story, and the most exciting part by far. The quick assembling of the team; the stealth, low-altitude insertion by helicopter from Pakistan over the Hindu Kush mountains into Uzbekistan; the tense jeep ride across the steppe, dressed as Soviet soldiers, to the vicinity of the secret base; the hideout at the ruined mosque; the intrigue as a traitor in their midst is revealed; the scouting of the secret base; the desperate attempt to complete the sabotage mission despite heavy security—while it's highly implausible that such a mission would be attempted on such short notice with such a team, it made for a gripping tale.

Meanwhile in D.C., the president masterminds a grand deception that involves setting off natural gas explosions throughout D.C. to provide cover for his emergency evacuation of the city, while Soviet provocateurs manage to convince anti-war protestors that the president is on the verge of launching an all-out nuclear attack on Russia. The ultra-hawk Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is pushing for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Tashkent base, there is still no word from the sabotage team, and the President, under intense pressure from all sides, holds the fate of America and the world in his hands.

It was fascinating to read how many of the American political divisions described in this book are still going strong after more than 50 years, as well as the international tensions. While this is definitely a snapshot of America in the early 1970s, with an unpopular war winding down, war-hawks rattling sabers and anxious to prove that the military can still win, paranoia about mutually-assured mass destruction, governments deceiving their populations and protestors being manipulated by shadowy powers, in many ways it is still very relevant to our time.

This was a good read, but I think it would've been even better as a more streamlined men's adventure novel focused on the sabotage mission, with less of the political intrigues, drama with the protestors, government cover-ups, etc. Also, the Soviet death ray and the weapon the saboteurs brought to destroy it both seemed rather unrealistic and science-fictional, and took me out of the story a bit.

Apparently Craig only wrote one more novel, which is surprising because this was an entertaining debut effort that, despite some far-fetched elements, had all the ingredients of a successful espionage thriller. Recommended for fans of the genre.

Get a copy of The Tashkent Crisis here.

Russian Roulette

Russian Roulette, authored by James Mitchell and published in 1973, is the second in a series of novels about British government assassin-spy David Callan. Callan works for The Section—a shadowy agency of the UK government responsible for eliminating threats to the nation. He's a working-class answer to James Bond: cynical, streetwise and antagonistic to his upper class bosses. Unglamorous, not a ladies man, he takes his drinks straight without any "shaken, not stirred" nonsense, lives in a modest flat in London with his prized collection of war game miniatures, keeps a passport, gun and cash in a box under a floorboard, and never trusts anyone—least of all his bosses. He's also a master of his trade: lethal with firearms, deadly with karate-trained hands, skilled at lockpicking and adept at disguise. An orphan whose parents died in the London Blitz, veteran of the Malay Uprising guerrilla war, ex-thief, Callan has the kind of backstory that makes him almost ideally suited for the job of gray man government killer.

As the story opens, Callan's ruthless boss, Hunter, informs Callan that he has made a deal with the Russians that will get his most prized agent in that country, who has been captured, returned to the UK. In exchange, he will give them Callan. But to avoid a demoralizing scandal, he won't be apprehending his top operative and handing him over to the Soviets. He'll just be cutting him loose, giving him no support, taking his gun, freezing his bank accounts, and making it almost certain that he'll be taken out by enemy agents in short order. He further informs Callan that three of the KGB's top assassins have been sent to London to do the job, and wishes him good luck. To make Callan's plight even more dire, he suffered an eye injury on his previous mission that causes double vision, and needs special eye drops administered regularly to keep from going semi-blind.

Callan soon learns just how bad his predicament is, as he returns to his flat, pulls up the concealed floorboard and finds his gun, passport and cash gone. He obviously can't stay at his flat, and with no weapons, only a few pounds in his pocket and some spare clothes, he has to face the KGB killers alone, unarmed, homeless and nearly broke. It's a fantastic setup for a cat-and-mouse, assassin vs. assassin thriller that will test Callan's skill, resilience and resourcefulness to their absolute limits.

The loner Callan does have one ally in this awful predicament: an old friend, lovable loser and petty thief called "Lonely". Lonely is absolutely terrified of, yet loyal, to Callan; he provides hideouts, money and contacts in the underworld that prove very useful. He also tries to get Callan a gun, which in firearm-phobic England in those days was apparently very difficult indeed. Unfortunately, the Section has put out word to gun dealers that they are absolutely not to do business with Callan or Lonely, so he has to find some other way to arm himself.

What follows is a fascinating man-on-the run narrative, as Callan moves around London discreetly, trying to obtain a gun, looking out for tails, utilizing disguise, wary of both the KGB men and his own agency—all punctuated by brutal violence as he encounters the assassins or the bodies of those who crossed them. Callan also makes one other contact: a beautiful nurse from Barbados who administers his eyedrops and becomes his romantic interest. There's plenty of action, tradecraft, suspense, twists and personal dramas as Callan navigates the dark underbelly of London and has to kill or be killed.

This was a great read. I absolutely loved this character Callan; he's like a cross between the working class smart-aleck Harry Palmer of Len Deighton's famous novels and the ultra-competent and lethal Quiller of Adam Hall's brilliant series. If you took Quiller and gave him more backstory and personality, along with a firearm, you'd basically get Callan. I also liked the setting: the swinging sixties are over, and it's now the grim world of economically depressed and demoralized 1970s England—a world tailor-made for the cynical tough guy Callan. I will definitely be tracking down the other books in this series, and maybe even watching some episodes of the popular TV show where it all began. Highly recommended.

Get a copy of Russian Roulette here.

Quiller Meridian

Quiller Meridian is the 17th installment of the brilliant Quiller series—in my opinion the best spy fiction series of all time. It's now the 1990s; although the Soviet Union has fallen and the Cold War has ended, there are still missions to accomplish, operational excellence to be achieved, and life to be lived on the edge of death. Those have always been what drives Quiller, not the ambitions of the powerful or the causes of fanatics (in fact the latter are Quiller's enemies in this story, as in most others). 

I was particularly interested to read this installment, since it takes place in a setting I'm familiar with. I've actually ridden the Trans-Siberian Express in 1990s, in the dead of winter, and visited some of the cities mentioned in the story. I've experienced the sauna-like heat on the trains, the crowded quarters, the bad food, the good tea, the corrupt employees, the brutal cold and the poor, frozen Siberian villages—which in winter are surely among the bleakest inhabited places on earth.

The story opens in Budapest, where Quiller has been rushed to try to clean up a botched rendezvous with a Russian informant named Zymyanin, who has some kind of critical intelligence to transmit to the Bureau (Quiller's shadowy agency). Unfortunately the meeting was blown, one agent has been decapitated on the train tracks, and the informant has fled to parts unknown. But the thread soon picks up in Moscow, where Zymyanin is boarding the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Vladivostok, and Quiller follows him aboard. On board Quiller does his usual tense, hyper-aware tradecraft, and soon discovers that three powerful Russian generals are on the train, along with a beautiful young woman named Tanya who is friendly with one of them. He also discovers Zymyanin, who warns him that the generals are members of the Podpolia—the hard-line underground that wants to end Russia's experiment with democracy and bring back the Soviet Union—and tells him to keep them under close surveillance. Unfortunately, Quiller never learns anything else from the informant, because he is soon found dead in a bathroom with a gunshot to the head. Worse, Quiller has been framed for the killing by one of the general's bodyguards.

From here the story goes into overdrive, as the train car where the generals had been staying is bombed, derailing the train, and Quiller has to escape the authorities who seal off the train and get to safety in the frozen city of Novosobirsk, the most wanted man in Siberia. More classic Quiller tradecraft follows, as he evades surveillance, employs safe houses, and makes contact with his favorite director in the field, Ferris. At this point Quiller has to wing it to continue the mission, which becomes personal after Tanya is taken into custody by the authorities on suspicion of involvement in the killing of one of the generals.

There follows a rather far-fetched gambit by Quiller to free Tanya from the militsiya (police), which seemed too Hollywood and over the top by the usually realistic standards of this series. There are also car chases, killings, and two new key characters are introduced: an unhinged rogue agent who is out for revenge against the generals, and Tanya's brother, a captain in the Russian army, who becomes Quiller's key ally in his mission to discover what the generals are up to and foil their plans. The story races to a climax as Quiller reaches the site of the generals' big meeting, where he uncovers a vast conspiracy to establish a "new world order" that echoes forward to our time. However, the ending seemed a bit rushed and again, a bit unrealistic for this series.

All in all, this was a tense, entertaining, intelligent read, not in the top tier of the series but still highly recommended for all shadow-fiction fans.

Get a copy of Quiller Meridian here.

The Peking Target

After the over-the-top novel Chant, I was in the mood for something more realistic and better written, but with many of the same elements: 1980s action, a sinister Eastern mystic, martial arts assassins, and an ultra-skilled Western shadow warrior who takes them on. The Peking Target, published in 1982, fit the bill nicely; it's the tenth installment in the brilliant Quiller series by Elleston Trevor (writing as Adam Hall).

As the story opens, "shadow executive" Quiller is watching a body being fished out of the Thames river, which we learn is that of a fellow Bureau operative who had just arrived from Peking with a most urgent and sensitive message for his superiors. Unfortunately, the agent was murdered on his way from the airport and his secret message died with him. Quiller himself is nearly killed when a car rams him as he's leaving the murder scene. It's apparent that something very sinister is going on in Peking, which someone is willing to kill British agents on their home soil to protect. So the Bureau sends Quiller, still banged up from the hit attempt, to China to investigate.

The assassinations escalate dramatically after Quiller arrives in Peking under cover as a security man for the British delegation. The British Secretary of State is blown sky high right next to Quiller during the funeral of the Chinese premiere, his body absorbing the blast and saving the agent from serious injury. Then the American ambassador is taken out, and Quiller evades another murder attempt on the street—only his superior martial arts skill saving him from death at the hands of his skilled assailant. Two more agents are killed just before Quiller can get the information they had about the assassins, one found dead in the coils of his own pet boa constrictor. While all this is going on, Quiller learns that a mysterious figure named Tung Kuo-feng is involved—a Triad leader who commands a team of elite assassins but whose whereabouts is unknown. After the beautiful Li-fei is sent to kill Quiller, thinking that he killed her brother, a Triad assassin, Quiller learns that Tung is holed up in a former monastery on a mountain in a remote part of South Korea.

The novel shifts into overdrive for the final third as Quiller begins his set piece mission: to air-drop near the mountain before dawn, make his way stealthily to the monastery, infiltrate the grounds, take out Kuo-feng and get out without getting killed by his retinue of assassins. It's a tall order, but Quiller is the late 20th century British equivalent of a ninja, so if anyone can do it he can! The mission is further complicated by the assignment of a female guide who is a skydiving expert, mountaineer and fluent Korean speaker, as Quiller normally works alone. As usual with Quiller missions, things go sideways almost immediately and the executive is forced to improvise. Without providing too many spoilers, Quiller faces some brutal adversity but manages to get to the monastery, where he discovers that other world powers are involved who are using the assassinations to spread chaos for a nefarious geopolitical purpose.

This was probably the most fast-paced, action-packed Quiller installment I've read. Quiller is a real ninja in this one, who showcases his impressive range of skills: he kills men with his bare hands (he never carries a gun), evades pursuers by floating under debris on a river, air-drops into enemy territory by night, evades and ambushes a sniper, sends cleverly coded messages to deceive his captors, escapes a cell, sneaks around a well-guarded enemy compound, creates a diversionary explosion, flies a helicopter, and gets into an incredible mental battle with Kuo-fong in which the Triad leader showcases his impressive "ki" powers to try to control Quiller. Though never cartoonish, this one is slightly over the top by Trevor's standards. I suspect he was influenced by the success of Eric van Lustbader's blockbuster 1980 novel The Ninja and similar works of that era, and decided to turn up the ninja elements in this one. There was something in the zeitgeist of the early 1980s that produced a lot of great spy/assassin/ninja thrillers, and this is another one to add to the list. Great read.

Get a copy of The Peking Target here.

Night Boat to Paris

The 1950s were well before my time, but it must have been a golden age for readers of paperback spy, crime and adventure fiction. That decade had so many elements that make for exciting stories: the Cold War at its most intense, the CIA and KGB waging unfettered shadow wars across the globe, the American empire rising, the British empire falling, the Mafia's invisible empire at its peak, and thousands of veterans of World War II and Korea still young and looking for action. It's not surprising that the decade introduced so many genre greats, like Jack Higgins, Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, Donald Westlake, Dan J. Marlowe and Lionel White. A more obscure author who got his start in the '50s was Richard Jessup; I recently picked up his 1956 novel Night Boat to Paris in a lot of vintage spy paperbacks and gave it a quick read.

The novel's protagonist is Duncan Reece, an ex-World War II British Intelligence operative who fell out of favor with the class-oriented Establishment after the war and turned to criminal work. He is approached by his old intel chief, who considers Reece the perfect man for a very sensitive mission. It seems that an ex-Nazi engineer has developed a nuclear satellite technology for the Reds, but the microfilmed blueprints have wound up in the possession of a wealthy Spaniard and a purchase has been arranged at a charity bazaar at his French villa later that month. Several intelligence agencies, most notably the Reds, are in hot pursuit of the film and are expected to be closely watching the villa. Reece's mission is to stage a robbery at the bazaar, taking the party-goers' valuables as well as the microfilm in order to fool the Reds into thinking it wasn't enemy action. Reece agrees to the job for the very tidy sum in 1956 dollars of one hundred thousand, plus half the loot, an import-export license and his Scotland Yard file and fingerprint records.

Reece's first task is to travel to France and assemble a crew for the heist. He enlists an old associate and all-around shady operator named Tookie, a desperate German gunman named Otto, a French muscle-man named Saumur, and two American mafiosi operating out of Marseilles named Gino and Marcus. There is considerable intrigue leading up to the main event, as Reece is pursued by mysterious assailants in black suits, and he suspects that one of his own men is an informant for the Reds. Several enemy operatives are killed, and there's some interesting introspection from Reece about why he is doing this that speaks to the inner plight of the shadow warrior:

You're a different man, Reece, from when you first started thinking for yourself. A man who has no principles, ascribing to no morality, who has perhaps had the morality knocked out of you. You're a killer; a procurer and thief; a man who has great wit and wisdom when it comes to saving your own neck and feathering your nest. You see that the world is mad and are playing along with it.

Can such a man slip into the comfortable rut of a middle-class merchant?

Another question.

And no answer for it.

Finally the crew gets to the locale of the op and sets themselves up in a farmhouse, where they begin training for their commando-style raid on the villa. From here on out it's a riveting thriller, as the crew, clad in identical black coveralls, berets, face paint and bandanas, assault the party with a rope ladder, grappling hook and Tommy guns, get the loot and the microfilm and try to make their escape. They get to the border and desperately try to find away across, while more men in black show up and they are forced to take drastic action in a mountain village. Conveniently, a village girl unhappy about her arranged marriage joins the crew and leads them on a secret route across the mountains. This finale is a bit less believable than the rest of the story, but it races to a suitably noir ending as the traitor is revealed and Reece makes a run for it into the shadows.

This is just the kind of novel I like: an old-school, hard-boiled adventure that combines espionage, a heist, desperate criminals and ruthless shadow operators. There's plenty of action and intrigue, but with a more sophisticated style than you get in a typical men's adventure novel. All in all, this was an excellent little thriller, and a glimpse back to a time when spy stories could be told in 158 pages instead of 400+, without all the bloated writing, technological gimmickry and over-the-top action that would plague the genre in later decades. I will certainly be reading more novels from this era, and can recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the early hardboiled spy work of authors like Donald Hamilton, Jack Higgins, Dan Marlowe and Edward Aarons.

Get a copy of Night Boat to Paris here.

Operation Fireball

Dan J. Marlowe is one of the giants of hard-boiled crime fiction; his 1962 novel, The Name of the Game is Death, is an all-time classic of the genre, as riveting as Donald Westlake's debut Parker novel, The Hunter, published the same year. In that novel Marlowe introduced the sharpshooting heistman known by the alias "Earl Drake", and Drake's lover and partner in crime, a fiery six-foot redhead named Hazel.  Drake returned in a 1969 sequel called One Endless Hour, written with input from a convicted bank robber named Al Nussbaum who was impressed with Marlowe's work. That novel tells how Drake got his face reconstructed after the hellish climax of Name of the Game--hence the series subtitle "The man with nobody's face".

Marlowe published a third Drake novel in 1969 called Operation Fireball, which began Drake's transition from an independent hard-boiled criminal like Parker to a government-affiliated adventurer-spy more like the Jack Higgins protagonist Sean Dillon. As the novel opens, Drake is reuniting with Hazel, who he hasn't seen since he got a new face early in the previous novel. There's some drama at her ranch with some nasty local kids who are abusing Hazel's father, but Drake punishes them rather violently and has to make a quick exit.

Back in San Diego, bored and looking for action, Drake is contacted by a criminal associate named Slater and a six foot four ex-navy Viking of a man named Karl Erikson, who tell Drake an exciting story. Apparently two million dollars sent by the U.S. government to the Batista regime in the last days before Castro's revolution is still at large. The cash was hijacked by Cuban gangsters, and Slater, who was in on the heist, is the only man who knows where it is. Erikson is assembling a crew to go get the money and he invites Drake to be on the team. But the mission is a formidable one: to infiltrate paranoid, revolutionary Cuba, find the cash, and get off the island without getting killed or thrown into Castro's prisons. Drake accepts, on the condition that Hazel is included on the team.

The novel builds slowly as the crew gathers in a hotel in Key West and prepares for the mission. Gear and weapons are purchased, boats are test-driven, shortwave radios are assembled and plans are made with Erikson's military precision. Meanwhile, the lecherous Latin boat captain Chico Wilson is making aggressive overtures toward Hazel and Slater is being a reckless drunk, scheming to cross the rest of the team. But Erikson is a commanding presence and he manages to keep the motley crew in line.

In the final third of the novel the narrative finally kicks into overdrive, as Drake's crew sails to Cuba posing as navy men aboard a U.S. destroyer, Slater finds himself in the brig, and they have to free Slater, get off the heavily guarded Guantanomo Bay base and into Cuban territory. This is where Marlowe really excels: fast, tense action, with flawed, desperate, violent men letting nothing stop them from making a big score. For me he's right up there with Donald Westlake in this regard, and the international intrigue only adds to the excitement. Because Cuba in the 1960s was a very tense place, controlled by fanatical revolutionaries, its population highly paranoid following the failed CIA-sponsored "Bay of Pigs" invasion in 1961 and on the look-out for foreign saboteurs. Marlowe does a great job of capturing the war-time feel of the mission, as the men have to move deep behind enemy lines to Havana and the location of the hidden cash. Once there, Drake takes the lead, using his talents as a thief to break into the facility and get to the loot. There's a tense climactic scene as they try get off the island, their radio broken and unable to signal to their boatman to be picked up. Then there's a final twist at the end, as Drake learns who Erikson really is and he doesn't get what he bargained for from the mission.

After a slow opening, with a little too much time devoted to the setup of the mission, this book was riveting stuff. I questioned sometimes how four Americans, particularly a six foot four Viking, could move through paranoid Cuba without more problems, but Marlowe makes it fairly believable. While not an instant classic like The Name of the Game is Death, this was a great read. If you like the Parker series and the work of Jack Higgins, you should love this. I look forward to reading further installments of the Drake series.

Get a copy of Operation Fireball here.

Circus

Alistair  MacLean is one of the greats of old-school adventure fiction and one of the best-selling authors of all time. Though most of his novels involve shadow operations of some kind, I've found them a bit less compelling than those of his fellow great, Jack Higgins, and haven't read too many. I recently picked up MacLean's 1975 novel, Circus, which combines a "mission impossible"-style op with Cold War espionage, and gave it a quick read.

The story's protagonist is Bruno Wildermann, a superstar trapeze performer, tightrope walker and mentalist. Bruno is an immigrant to America from an undisclosed eastern European communist country where members of his family were killed by the regime. Not only can he perform seemingly superhuman feats of balance and agility on the high-wire, but he has a photographic memory. This makes him the perfect candidate for a daring CIA operation: to penetrate a top-secret laboratory in Bruno's homeland where a scientist is developing a devastating anti-matter weapon, take "mental photographs" of the technical documents contained therein and then destroy them.

The first part of the novel sets up the operation, as we're introduced to Bruno, some of his talented circus mates--including the strongman Kan Dahn, the knife-thrower Manuelo and the lasso-master Roebuck--and his CIA handlers, which includes the beautiful Maria, whose role is apparently to look pretty, admire Bruno and occasionally get hysterical. A couple of murders early on let us know that treacherous parties have infiltrated the circus and are on the scent of the CIA plot.

Things start to get interesting around 100 pages in, as Bruno is finally let in on the details of the mission he is being asked to undertake. He's to infiltrate the Lubylan laboratory and prison facility where the scientist works and lives. There's a power line stretching from a power station 300 yards away to the top of the Lubylan building, which Bruno is to walk across without getting fried by the 2000 volts of electricity. If he manages that, he then needs to get into the building without getting shot by guards or eaten by killer Doberman Pinscher guard dogs. His challenge is nicely illustrated in a two-page schematic at the beginning of the book:

As the circus sails across the Atlantic and rolls toward the target country the intrigue ramps up: spies are killed, sleeping compartments are bugged, shady characters are seen tailing Bruno and his mates, and a nasty secret police chief named Colonel Sergius learns of Bruno's scheme and schemes to take him down. Meanwhile, Maria's cover as Bruno's love interest begins to get all too real--a corny romantic sub-plot that I could have done without.

Finally they get to the destination, where Bruno, who has more skills than you would expect of a trapeze artist, pulls off an absurd deception to fool Sergius and throw him off his trail. Then Bruno and his three circus mates undertake the audacious heist, each using his particular skills to climb, walk, rope, knife and muscle their way into the building. This was definitely the novel's highlight, though the realism was a bit lacking; Bruno and his crew subdue the guards and get inside too easily to make it a really tense scene.

But all of this is just a setup for what MacLean really excels at: not Shadow Op believability, but plot twists, treachery and shock endings. Without spoiling it for you, let's just say that there are traitors close to Bruno, surprise guests in the Lubylan building, and Bruno's operation and he himself are not as they appear to be. It's all a bit too much, like a murder mystery where you're not entirely clued in and everything ends too tidily to be believable. My other criticism is that MacLean doesn't bother giving his characters different voices and personalities; they all speak like cynical Oxford-educated Englishmen, including the Eastern European immigrant Bruno and the American CIA men.

It's too bad, because MacLean had a clever "Mission Impossible" story idea here, the execution was just a bit lacking. This is probably why I haven't read many of his novels and prefer Jack Higgins, though I understand that MacLean's best work came years earlier. It wasn't a bad novel, just very old-school and not as good as it could have been. Get a copy of Circus here.

100 Megaton Kill

After the rather subdued, cerebral novel of my previous review, I was in the mood for some good old pulpy spy-adventure fiction, and I found just the ticket on my bookshelf: 100 Megaton Kill, by Ralph Hayes. Published in 1975, it's the first in a series of six novels about "Check Force": an unlikely pair of spies who team up to take down a sinister global cabal.

That this was not going to be a highly realistic novel of shadow warfare was made clear at the outset, when a bad guy, having nearly killed a secretary who surprised him while he was burgling some documents after-hours, decides that the expedient thing to do is to feed her body into a paper shredder. It's apparently a very heavy-duty paper shredder, though he acts surprised when there's a lot of blood and he has a little trouble with the job. And when he's confronted a few minutes later by a co-worker, instead of killing him so there's no witnesses, he plays it cool and claims he just saw two strangers leave the office, then proceeds to throw paper shreds over the human hamburger, wipe off his fingerprints and pretend like nothing happened. This is the kind of zany stuff that makes men's adventure fiction from that era so much fun!

The spared witness turns out to be Alexander Chane, an ace agent and crack shooter who was already thinking about leaving the Agency due to its corrupt and war-mongering ways. When Chane's boss tries to frame Chane for the gruesome office killing, and Chane learns that the boss is connected to a mysterious conspiracy called "Force III" that involves Russian missile bases, Chane goes on the run from the Agency until he can sort everything out. Meanwhile, a top Russian agent named Vladimir Karlov has defected from the KGB for similar reasons as Chane and is hiding out in the British embassy in Paris.

The globe-trotting action is fast and furious from here on out. Karlov is attacked in Paris, Chane in New York, and both flee to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to hide out. Realizing that they have no allies and a common enemy in Force III, the two join forces to defeat the cabal. More assassins show up, more information about the conspiracy is uncovered, and Chane even finds time for meaningless sex with two horny hotties, because it's 1975 and it's a men's adventure novel, so why the hell not? The action then shifts to Russia, where the dynamic duo have to infiltrate a missile base to stop a Force III agent from launching a devastating thermonuclear ICBM attack on New York City. This was easily the highlight of the book; the way Karlov infiltrates the base and the dramatic scene at the missile silo was tense, exciting and almost believable.

We also go inside a few meetings of Force III, who, like any self-respecting evil cabal, have a massive secret complex from which they're plotting world domination. Their base is underground in the Argentinian outback, where they're working to unleash nuclear terror on the USA and trigger World War III. Their leader is a nasty Nazi-like character named General Streicher, whose junta has recently taken over Argentina. The Brazilian President, the Chilean Defense minister, a Greek shipping magnate and a very rich Arab are also involved. While this all sounds very cartoonish, it may have been inspired by a real conspiracy called Operation Condor that was going on in South America at the time. The novel's climax takes place at this complex, and the ending strongly suggests that Force III is not defeated, but like SPECTRE will return to haunt the world and our protagonists again soon.

100 Megaton Kill reminds me of a Robert Ludlum story stripped down to its essentials and told in 200 pages instead of 600. In particular, it brings to mind Ludlum's 1979 novel The Matarese Circle, with its idea of an American and a Russian intelligence officer teaming up against a third global force that is sabotaging both sides and trying to provoke world war; it also has (pre-)echoes of The Bourne Identity and The Aquitaine Progression. While I rather doubt that Ludlum read this novel, for me it shows that he was really just a puffed-up pulp/men's adventure novelist who somehow became a mega best-seller.

Anyway, this was a fun, quick read. It's not going to win any literary awards, but if you like Nick Carter/Mack Bolan style men's adventures and aren't overly concerned with realism, there's no reason why you shouldn't enjoy this one. It's also apparently a collectible, judging by the price in excess of $50 on the used market (I lucked out and got it as part of a large lot at a buck a book). And note the cover, a masterpiece of 1970s men's adventure pulp--I'll be damned if the villain isn't a dead ringer for Laurence Olivier/Szell from Marathon Man.

Get a copy of 100 Megaton Kill here.

Pay Any Price

Ted Allbeury was a prolific British spy novelist who, before becoming a writer, actually lived the life of a Shadow Operative as a secret agent behind enemy lines in World War II. I'd never read his work before, but when I saw the description of his 1983 novel Pay Any Price I was immediately intrigued. It deals with a fascinating front of the Shadow War that is arguably the most important of all: the war for the mind.

The novel's premise is that Lee Harvey Oswald and other notorious assassins were actually under the hypnotic control of rogue psychiatrists working for the CIA. That might sound outlandish, but when one studies some of the historical assassins and mass shooters up to the present day, many of them do seem rather disconnected from their acts, as if they were committed by alter egos not under their control. Having read a few things about the history of CIA mind control (The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is a classic) and MKUltra, I find the premise of this novel chillingly plausible.

The book begins in the early 1960s, as we meet the psychiatrists, intelligence officers, criminals and dupes who will carry out the Kennedy assassination. Mafia leaders, incensed by the Kennedy brothers' aggressive prosecution of their activities, and CIA men, equally incensed by JFK's failure to back the overthrow of Castro, conspire to have the president whacked. They find the perfect patsy in Lee Harvey Oswald, an early subject of a secret CIA mind control program. Two psychiatrists have discovered how to hypnotically create multiple personalities in their subjects and program them to obey commands when code phrases are spoken (readers of classic spy thrillers will be reminded of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate and Walter Wager's Telefon). Meanwhile, a sexy British nightclub singer named Debbie Rawlins is recruited and programmed--her gig as a travelling entertainer for military personnel providing a convenient cover for her programmed personality's more lethal vocation.

The narrative jumps ahead several years as the two psychiatrists, wanting to get away from the heat of Congressional investigations, media attention and public suspicion that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, relocate to a house in the northern English countryside to lay low and continue their research. But when two suspicious British MI6 agents break into the house of their CIA handler they discover incriminating papers connecting the doctors to the assassination program. Being shady operators, the MI6 men take full advantage of the situation by blackmailing the American psychiatrists into employing their hypnotic assassins to take out some troublesome IRA leaders in nearby Northern Ireland. So a corporal named Walker is recruited and programmed for the hits, and Debbie Rawlins is reactivated.

The story finally gets a clear protagonist when an MI6 agent named James Boyd is asked to investigate a psychiatrist's report of a patient who is having dreams about political murders that he should have no way of knowing about.  It seems that the patient (Walker) is experiencing a mental breakdown, as memories of the hits performed under his alter ego begin to leak into his daily life via disturbing dreams. Boyd's sleuthing uncovers some disturbing facts about both Walker and Rawlins, the psychiatrists who programmed them, their connections to the MKUltra assassination program and the IRA hits. What are CIA assassin programmers doing in the UK, and why are they having people offed for MI6?

Boyd is faced with a moral dilemma: does he go along with his superiors' desire to bury the scandal in the interest of transatlantic spook relations, or does he seek justice for the pawns of the hypno-assassin program whose lives they ruined? The story has the sort of cynical ending that you find in a lot of British spy fiction, which you'll never get in more popular spy fiction novels but no doubt has more resemblance to the realities of shadow warfare. Anyone imagining that shadow warfare is some kind of morality play, where there are clear good guys and bad guys and the former always win, is surely living in a fantasy world!

While the set up of this story is excellent, the execution was a bit off. The narrative is very disjointed in the first half; it jumps from location to location, introducing characters and plot threads that don't seem connected. It's hard to maintain any narrative tension when you're not sure who the protagonist is and you're bouncing around every page or two, though this gets better in the second half as Boyd's investigation becomes the focus. My other complaint is that the story lacks action and intensity; it's a bit too political and cerebral, more John le Carré than Jack Higgins, which is not how I prefer my spy thrillers. There were a few short, intense scenes of violence and a bit of shadow operating, but not enough for my liking.

I don't know if this is typical of Allbeury, but for now I'll put him in the category of interesting authors who are worth reading further when I'm in the mood for less pulpy spy fiction.

Get a copy of Pay Any Price here.

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 threat. 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 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.

A Fine Night for Dying

In the spy-crazed 1960s, an obscure author named Henry Patterson wrote a series of six novels under the pseudonym "Martin Fallon" about a spy named Paul Chavasse. These books would probably be all but forgotten today had Patterson not gone on to become the world-famous, mega-selling author "Jack Higgins", thanks to his smash hit 1975 novel "The Eagle Has Landed". Fortunately, the Chavasse series was republished under the Higgins name and are easy to find, so we can all enjoy these entertaining espionage adventures from a simpler time.

Paul Chavasse is basically a brainier, less rakish version of James Bond; he has several university degrees, speaks numerous languages, excels in spycraft, firearms and hand-to-hand combat. He works for a small, secret department of British intelligence called the Bureau (just like Quiller), has a boss called Mallory and a secretary named Jean, who send him around the world on difficult and sensitive jobs that require his special talents.

In the sixth entry in the series, A Fine Night for Dying, Chavasse is called in to investigate a human trafficking operation after a London underworld boss is found dead in the English Channel, wrapped in an anchor chain. This might sound like a modest assignment for a super-spy, but Chavasse soon uncovers an international connection, as the ringleader turns out to be a Communist and his associate a Colonel in the Red Chinese army. Most of the action takes place at sea, as Chavasse, with the assistance of the Jamaican brother of the slain underworld boss out for revenge, track down the leaders of the murderous ring of infiltrators.

The novel's main villain is a compelling character named Rossiter--a blonde ex-Jesuit priest who, after being imprisoned in North Korea during the war, switched faiths from Catholicism to Communism and became a ruthless killer. Korean brainwashing was a popular theme in that era, explored in the classic novel The Manchurian Candidate and in Higgins' early novel Comes the Dark Stranger. Rossiter's conversion is symbolized by his preferred weapon: a razor-sharp dagger with a handle carved in the likeness of the Madonna (see cover above).

 

Like every Higgins novel I've read, this one is lean, linear and moves along at a breakneck pace. You don't get much filler in a Higgins story--no excessive description, graphic sex, technical specs or unnecessary sub-plots of the sort that would plague the genre by the 1980s, when writers like Van Lustbader and Clancy were best-sellers. You do get well-drawn characters, narrative tension, plot twists and plenty of action; Higgins is a master at keeping the pages turning and telling an exciting story without turning it into a comic book.

Some people might consider these early Higgins' novels a bit dated or politically incorrect, but for me that's part of their appeal. Here, technology and politics take a back seat to old-fashioned grit, courage and heroism. Men are men, for good or ill--driven by traditional masculine values like honor, bravery, greed, lust, violence, brotherhood and patriotism. Women are more traditionally feminine, but they're no shrinking violets--being often as virtuous, heroic, brave and passionate as the men. Higgins isn't trying to push a political agenda, but to tell a fast-paced, entertaining story, and he does that as well as anybody in the business. For a great overview of Higgins's early novels, see this post over at the Gravetapping blog: Jack Higgins: The Golden Age Novels.

A Fine Night for Dying is a typical novel from Higgins's "Golden Age", which means it's a fun, quick read that fans of adventure and espionage fiction should enjoy. Get a copy here.

River of Darkness

James Grady stormed onto the spy fiction scene in 1974 with his debut novel Six Days of the Condor (basis for the classic film Three Days of the Condor), a novel I greatly enjoyed for its paranoid take on America’s shadow government, its memorable characters Ronald Malcolm and the French assassin Joubert, and its brilliant concept of “Section 9, Department 17” which I have written about previously here.

Grady wrote a sequel to Six Days of the Condor called Shadow of the Condor the following year, which I read years ago and found rather forgettable. I recently decided to give Grady another try with his much meatier offering from 1992 called River of Darkness (aka The Nature of the Game). This is Grady’s attempt to write a sweeping, epic novel about American shadow wars from the 1960s to the 1980s, as told through the experiences of ex-Green Beret and CIA operative Jud Stuart.

The narrative switches frequently between Stuart’s current travails as a Jason Bournesque agent who has become expendable and is on the run, to the efforts of an honorable ex-marine tasked by shadowy D.C. players with tracking Stuart down and taking him out, to flashbacks to Stuart’s earlier adventures as a shadow operative. The first flashback is especially intense, as Jud is air-dropped behind enemy lines in 1960s Laos and has to survive a close encounter with Pathet Lao guerrillas. By the early 1970s Stuart is working for a shadowy outfit run by rogue American generals, taking part in everything from the Pinochet coup to spying on the Nixon White House, raiding Russians in Afghanistan, drug-running and assassinating VIPs. But Stuart eventually becomes a liability who knows far too much, so he becomes a hunted man as the novel opens.

The flashbacks to Jud’s covert operations were the novel’s highlights for me, both for the riveting action sequences and the authentic, historically relevant nature of the ops. This is where Grady, a former investigative journalist, shines: he gives the reader a sense of what really goes on behind the headlines, in the deep shadows where America’s secret wars are won and lost.

Unfortunately, there is a lot more going on in this novel than just Jud’s black ops, such as banal romances, family dramas, dull D.C. intrigues and fairly generic characters. It feels like Grady was trying to emulate best-selling spy novelists of the time like Ludlum, Clancy and Van Lustbader, who favored sprawling, complex, bloated epics over the leaner, more focused thrillers of yesteryear (like Six Days of the Condor). While I’ve enjoyed more than a few fat thrillers over the years, I thought this one had a little too much going on, and too many characters and machinations that just weren’t very interesting. 

All in all, I’d say River of Darkness is about half a riveting novel with authentic detail and gripping action, and about half a rather plodding and padded effort to make the novel more epic and Ludlumesque. It’s still a cut above run of the mill and comic book spy thrillers, and worth reading if you’re interested in a realistic fictional take on some of the dark goings-on during the Vietnam to Iran-Contra era in the name of American freedom and security.

Get a copy of River of Darkness here.

The Mandarin Cypher

The Mandarin Cypher is the sixth book in the brilliant "Quiller" series by Elleston Trevor (writing as Adam Hall). Quiller is a "shadow executive" who takes on dangerous missions for a deep black agency within the British government known only as "the Bureau". Quiller is basically a Cold War British ninja: expert martial artist, driver, pilot, scuba diver; adept at secret communications, stealth and spycraft.

In many ways Quiller is the anti-Bond and anti-Helm. Almost monk-like in his pursuit of shadow op perfection, he doesn't gratuitously womanize, drink, or lose his temper; he's always highly technical, introspective and controlled on his assignments. Where James Bond is a stylish playboy, Quiller is an introverted geek; where Matt Helm can be a cowboy and a thug, Quiller is a model of forbearance and professionalism. He's like a spy version of Donald Westlake's "Parker" character: a "grey man" with little personality or personal baggage; all business, totally focused, disciplined and stoic during ops, and absolutely formidable at his chosen profession. The major difference being that Parker is a criminal out entirely for himself, whereas Quiller is a Queen and Bureau man who has to play by other people's rules.

In this installment, Quiller is sent to Hong Kong to investigate the death of a fellow agent in a supposed fishing accident. Quiller quickly finds himself targeted for assassination by a cell of Red Chinese agents and romantically entangled with the beautiful but needy widow of the murdered agent. Quiller learns that things are not as they seem, and something fishy is afoot out in the South China Sea. It's all related to an operation code-named "Mandarin" about which Quiller is being kept in the dark by his controllers in London. After about 125 pages of Hong Kong intrigue that some readers might find a bit tedious, the climactic action sequence begins: Quiller must infiltrate an oil rig in international waters owned by the People's Republic of China and find out what it's up to. This leads to some intense scenes, as Quiller must survive long scuba dives, naval mines, hand-to-hand combat, hostile Chinese forces and bombshell directives from his London controllers. The surprise ending is highly dramatic, if a bit improbable.

As always with this series, the action is tense and realistic, and the stream-of-consciousness calculations of the computer-like Quiller put you right inside the head of the savant-spy. Here's a passage that nicely sums up both the writer's style and Quiller's philosophy of "the edge":

So all you can do is settle for the situation and check every shadow, every sudden movement, and try to make sure there'll be time to duck. And of course ignore the snivelling little organism that's so busy anticipating what it's going to feel like with the top of the spine shot away, why don't you run for cover, trying to make you wonder why the hell you do it, why you have to live like this, you'll never see Moira again if you let them get you , trying to make you give it up when you know bloody well it's all there is in life: to run it so close to the edge that you can see what it's all about.

Having read six or seven Quiller books now, I have to concur with the widely held opinion that it is one of the very best spy fiction series ever written. The Mandarin Cypher is another fine installment in a series that no fan of the genre should miss. Highly recommended for fans of thinking man's spy fiction.

Get a copy of this book here.

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Department 17 Entry (warning – slight spoilers):

Title: The Mandarin Cypher
Author: Elleston Trevor
Writing As: Adam Hall
Publication Year: 1975
Category: fiction
Genres: espionage
Op Types: assassination, infiltration, scuba diving, evasion
Plot Elements: oil rig, missiles, submarine
Governments: Great Britain, China
Locales: London, Hong Kong
Series: Quiller
Series #: 6
Plot Synopsis: Quiller is sent to Hong Kong to investigate the death of a fellow agent and finds himself targeted for assassination by a Red Chinese agents and romantically entangled with the agent's widow. Something fishy is afoot in the South China Sea; Quiller must infiltrate a Chinese oil rig, carry out a seemingly impossible mission and get back alive.
Reviews: https://shadowwarjournal.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-mandarin-cypher.html