A bit about Buchan, new and old

I've turned to the comfort of old-school spy stories in the form of John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels: The Thirty-Nine Steps and, next up, Greenmantle and Mr. Standfast. These novels. a century old now, can seem familiar and comfortably archaic for Hannay's bluff attitude, occasionally shocking (to today's sensibilities) social attitudes, and, at time, acute and even prescient. I'm listening to the books now; here's a post back from when I read them. 

(Buchan, who served as governor general of Canada from 1935 through 1940, will be on the program as "ghost of honor" at Bouchercon 2017 in Toronto.)

  ==========================  
Greenmantle is greatly enjoyable as it enters the homestretch. It's full of disguises, last-second escapes, hair-raising dangers, and all the other things a good thriller is made of. It also feels surprisingly up to date with its assessments of Germany's war aims and its discussions of religious revival in the Muslim world.

Its contemporary feel is all the more noticeable because the book is in so many respects a thoroughgoing product of its time. Without necessarily expressing contempt for commoners, it is shot through with the attitude that war is really a contest between those few, rare men of noble soul and exceptional ability. The German Col. von Stumm is brutal, thuggish and depraved, for example, but the kaiser is a high-minded man whose responsibility weighs heavily upon him.

Buchan is also acutely sensitive to the joys and sorrows of travel. Exhausted and depressed when he reaches Constantinople, the protagonist, Richard Hannay, finds the city "a mighty disappointment. I don't quite know what I expected -- a sort of fairyland Eastern city, all white marble and blue water, and stately Turks in surplices, and veiled houris, and roses and nightingales, and some sort of string band discoursing sweet music. I had forgotten that winter is pretty much the same everywhere. It was a drizzling day, with a south-east wind blowing, and the streets were long troughs of mud. The first part I struck looked like a dingy colonial suburb -- wooden houses and corrugated iron roofs, and endless dirty, sallow children."

Later, however, refreshed, in new clothes, and after an unexpected rescue by an unexpected colleague, Hannay makes this sage observation: "What had seemed the day before the dingiest of cities now took on a strange beauty ... A man's temper has a lot to do with his appreciation of scenery. I felt a free man once more, and could use my eyes."

And the novel's humorous touches, particularly in the form of the American, Blenkiron, are delightful. His bluff manner of speaking will awaken readers to the joys and peculiarities of Americans and the ways they talk.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Donald Hamilton, The Ambushers, and books with veterans in them

The Ambushers (1963), sixth of Donald Hamilton's many Matt Helm novels, is a weaker book than his non-series Line of Fire, in part because two, and perhaps all three, of its last-chapter plot twists seem arbitrary.  One of these is arguably out of character for a competent hit man/espionage operative of the kind Matt Helm is supposed to be.

Still, the two books got me thinking about how badly Sylvester Stallone. Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal have damaged the reputation of the men's adventure story, specifically the kind whose protagonist is a veteran. Lazy liberal that I am, I had come to regard the genre, rightly or wrongly, as a field where lazy right-wingers could live out action fantasies they would never come within a million miles of in real life.  From the other side of the political spectrum, I'd begun to fear that any story featuring a veteran was thin disguise for anti-war polemic.

Paul Davis, a few years older than I am and a veteran, has given me a schooling on the shifting depiction of Vietnam veterans in popular culture. For Paul, the Tom Selleck TV show Magnum P.I. marked a turn away from depictions of Vietnam vets as damaged psychopaths. And my recent reading has convinced me that thrillers and adventure novels need not be marred by polemics, whether from the left or the right, just because their protagonists are veterans, at least not if the writer is as good as Donald Hamilton.

Of course, the two Hamilton novels I have read recently appeared in 1955 and 1963. I will be eager to see if the political tone changed in the Helm novels that appeared after public anger against the Vietnam Wat began to build.
  
© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Frederick Forsyth and the day of the talking point

Frederick Forsyth famously wrote The Day of the Jackal in thirty-five days and, he says, the book was published without changes. Assuming my fortieth-anniversary edition of the 1971 novel was produced from the original printing plates or prepared from Forsyth's own typescript, the book shows occasional signs of haste: minor punctuation errors, an infelicitous word choice or two, and, on Page 286, Columbia for Colombia, though that might reflect English usage common in 1971.

But these don't rise even to the level of annoyances; that's how highly I think of the novel, which I'll probably have finished reading before I put up my next post.

One unexpected linguistic touch is Forsyth's use of talking point, which I did not know had entered the language as early as 1971, though he uses it somewhat differently from the way American political handlers and reporters do: "The President's instructions were that it must not become a press sensation and public talking point."

Forsyth is fine at handling the rivalries and enmities among French security officials, and his lampooning of the most pampered or self-seeking of them is over the top but great fun to read.

And now, the Jackal has just eaten a magnificent meal of speckled river trout grilled on a wood fire and tournedos broiled over charcoal with fennel and thyme. Let me join him, why don't you, before he trots off to shoot the president.

***

Carlos the Jackal got his nickname because a copy of Forsyth's novel is said to have been found near his belongings. What other real people have been named or nicknamed for characters from crime or spy fiction?

***

N.B. My apologies to readers who read transcript in the first version of this post's opening paragraph. I had typed, as I intended to do, typescript, but auto-correct overrode my correct choice. That's one curse Frederick Forsyth did not have to worry about in 1971.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Frederick Forsyth at Crimefest: Thirty-five Days of the Jackal

Crimefest 2013 in Bristol, England, is coming up next month, and I plan to make my fourth appearance in the festival's six years. So this is a good time to start reading a classic thriller that I first got excited about at Crimefest 2012.

The opening hundred or so pages of The Day of the Jackal offer measured, chilling background to fanaticism from two French sides in the Franco-Algerian War. (The Jackal is an assassin hired  by right-wing military figures to kill French President Charles de Gaulle, incensed by De Gaulle's grant of Algerian independence after having declared "Vive l'Algerie Francaise!" De Gaulle proclaimed "Long live French Algeria!" then granted the country its independence, and "Vive le Quebec libre!" or "Long live free Quebec!" without, however, wrenching my native province out of Canada--at least not yet. He had a bit of a problem with this liberation thing.)

Now, why not listen to some Franco-Algerian music, read about the real aborted Algerian military coup against De Gaulle, and join me in The Day of the Jackal?

 ===========================

 Thirty-five days. That's how long Crimefest 2012 honoree Frederick Forsyth said it took him to write his classic 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal. And he said the novel was published as he had written it, without changes.

This and the rapidity of the book's composition earned him the good-natured jealousy of Peter Guttridge, who quizzed Forsyth in the first of the festival's six guest-of-honor interviews.

I had seen and liked the 1973 film version of The Day of the Jackal, but I had not read a word of Forsyth's work before today. His interview turned me into a fan, though, and I bought the book. My favorite bit of the interview was probably Forsyth's response to Guttridge's question about whether the world had grown more complicated since the Jackal's Cold War days.

"Very much so," Forsyth replied. "Al-Qaeda is here, there, everywhere. ... It's a weird world. It's a dangerous world. It's a bewildering." (And yes, Forsyth's tendency to speak in threes lends his speech a pleasantly rhythmic effect.) He also, by his own account, has led a fortunate and engaging life, so yes, I'm a Forsyth fan starting today.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012. 2013

More on Alan Glynn; plus What's your favorite thriller?

I've finished Alan Glynn's Bloodland, and I'm ready to seek out more thrillers, first among them Glynn's own The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless, title of the movie based on it).

Can a good conspiracy thriller really wrap all the loose ends? I think not; that would leave readers too comfortable. Bloodland does not quite tie everything up, and Glynn promises in an interview that accompanies the advance reader's edition of Bloodland that a major character who appears in that book and in Winterland will return.

Here's a bit more from the interview, Glynn on the difference between the thrillers of the 1970s and their present-day successors:

"Back then it was genuinely shocking for people to realize that their government was lying to them. But you can't lose you innocence twice, and now we're not surprised if our governments and corporations lie to us, we expect it even, and often expect them to do much worse, so the key feature we remember from back then — that creepy frisson, that dawning realization of the truth — is no longer what animates the conspiracy thriller. ... But these days, perhaps, it's a question of scale — corporate power, for example, has grown exponentially in the last thirty years. Perhaps it's a question of the inescapable and controlling nature of power in the modern world. These stories, consequently, are as relevant now, it not more so, than ever before."

Finally, here's a discussion of Glynn and the golden age of paranoia, with a link to Glynn's further thoughts on the subject.

***

If you read thrillers as well as crime fiction, what are your favorite examples of the genre? What makes a thriller memorable?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

"This point in time" to "regime change": What are your favorite weasel words?

I wrote yesterday about Alan Glynn's recognition in his novel Bloodland of narrative as a contemporary weasel word. Two further examples from the book make the word's ominous associations clearer:

"In fact, since the entire Buenke operation is under his command, he'll be the one responsible for shaping and disseminating the official narrative of what happened here."

and

"Of course, the high-visibility brace on his hand leaves no one in any doubt about the narrative subtext that's being peddled here."

What's so ominous about narrative? Couldn't Glynn have substituted story with equal effect? I don't know. Narrative, especially as a noun, is a vogue word, and vogue words, especially ones with lots of syllables, are good for concealing an absence of thought or conveying an illusion of seriousness. I may have more to say on this subject going forward.

But Glynn's ear for contemporary Orwellianisms goes further:

"`...your best chance with these people will actually be down to something else entirely, something quite intangible.'

"Conway looks at him. `What's that?'

"`You. The Conway Holdings brand.'"

and

"I've got to take it to the next level, you know, keep the traction but change the conversation."

The speakers of the boldface word are, respectively, a lawyer advising a client on evading the consequences of a shady deal, and a politician trying to capitalize on a monstrous lie. Be very, very skeptical of people who talk or write like that.

***

Most Americans would likely associate Richard Nixon ("This point in time") and the second George Bush ("Regime change") with truth-deflecting political euphemisms, but the Bill Clinton years ushered their own creepy phrases into popular speech, "national conversation," to name one, a weirdly bogus attempt to create an illusion of community in a fragmented culture.  What euphemisms and evasions do you find especially nauseating? What authors have especially sharp eyes and ears for them? 

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Alan Glynn writes the best chapter I've read all year

On the one hand, you have the journalism professor who has been quoted as saying that "Anyone who is realistic will know that we will have printed paper products from now till eternity."

On the other, you have Alan Glynn, the first chapter of whose novel Bloodland has this to say:

"It's the unread paper.

"He bought it on the way here, in the SPAR on the corner, but the truth is he'd already read most of it online earlier in the day.

" ... He worries for the health of the printed newspaper.

"Unfortunately, his own direct experience of the business was cut short by an industry-wide epidemic of falling ad revenues. But even in the few years prior to that things had started feeling pretty thinned-out. Some of the senior reporters and specialist correspondents still had good sources and were out there on a regular basis gathering actual news, but as a recent hire Jimmy spent most of his days in front of a terminal recycling wire copy and PR material, a lot of it already second-hand and very little of it fact-checked."

I don't find eternal existence of "printed paper products" a reassuring prospect, nor do I find the declaration's smug, condescending tone endearing (though all I have is that brief quotation; I don't know the context.) Glynn is unprepared to accept the giddy assurances of boosters and innovators that online news heralds the path to a bright new world. His worries about the state of my profession are just a small part of a chilling, brilliant first chapter in which no one is sure of anything, so everyone is alert to everything, antennae twitching at the slightest whisper of disturbance:

"Jimmy stops in his tracks. A group of American tourists walks past him, one of them talking loudly, a big guy with a beard saying something about `this giant Ponzi scheme.'

"At the taxi rank to his left a young couple appear to be having an argument.

"`I told you, he's from work.'

"Beyond them, are lights, colours, a kaleidoscope, traffic stopping and starting."

***

(Glynn, author of Winterland, is also properly scornful of the voguish use of the word narrative by political manipulators. He surrounds the word with inverted commas and exposes it for what it really means in its current incarnation: manipulation of events to say just what the teller (or the subject) wants.)
   
© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Augustus Mandrell is back!

Frank McAuliffe greets readers from beyond the grave, and we laugh our keisters off:

"Before Clifford Waxout died escaping my arms, he screeched, `...bastard...you lousy bastard...' It was a farewell fraught with genealogical inaccuracy, but one of enviable vigor, under the circumstances. (The brisk descent from the picturesque cliff; the sudden, definitive embrace of the rocks...)"

That's the opening of Shoot the President, Are You Mad?, the very long-awaited fourth book about the amazing international hit man Augustus Mandrell. (How long awaited? The first three in the series, Of All The Bloody Cheek, Rather A Vicious Gentleman and For Murder I Charge More, appeared in 1965, 1968 and 1971. The usual explanation for the delay is sensitivity over President John F. Kennedy's assassination. McAuliffe himself died in 1986.)

I raved about the first three Mandrell books in the early days of this blog, and I'm pleased that the opening of Shoot the President ... lives up to one of my early remarks, namely that:

"I'd assumed from Mandrell the narrator's cheeky tone and Mandrell the character's cool demeanor that Frank McAuliffe was British. ... Then I looked at a biographical note and read that McAuliffe was born in New York — and worked as a technical writer for the Navy. The surprise was delightful, just another of the joys of reading these stories."

Mandrell has the sang-froid and heated libido of a well-known British fictional spy, only no Bonds for him, just cash. He's an American creation, after all, and his main worry is money. He has to earn his living, and his worries about getting paid are yet another of the surprises that contribute to McAuliffe's absolutely unique voice.

Read all my raves about Mandrell and McAuliffe here (scroll down). Read a short biographical sketch about the author here. And give a hearty high five to JT Lindroos and The Outfit for getting McAuliffe back into circulation. This is an event, folks.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Chandler in South Africa

A year and a half ago I published a short international list of crime writers indebted in various ways to Raymond Chandler or who paid tribute to him. The list included Matt Rees, who is from Wales and who sets his novels in the Palestinian territories, Ireland's Declan Burke and Declan Hughes, Bolivia's Juan de Recacoechea, Algeria's Yasmina Khadra, Australia's Peter Corris and Garry Disher and, in his delightful social history of English crime fiction, Colin Watson.

Readers' comments added to the list, and this week I've come across a clever tribute in Roger Smith's Mixed Blood. Here's the famous opening of Chandler's "Red Wind":

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

Here's Smith's opening:

"Jack Burn stood on the deck of the house high above Cape Town watching the sun drown itself in the ocean. The wind was coming up again, the southeaster that reminded Burn of the Santa Anas back home. A wind that made a furnace of the night, set nerves jangling, and got the cops and emergency teams caught up in people's bad choices."

Smith repeats the motif throughout the novel, as here, on page 226:

"The wind howled across the Flats, picking up the sand and grit and firing it at Zondi like a small-bore shotgun. He felt it in his ears, up his nostrils, and it sneaked in and found his eyes behind the Diesel sunglasses."

This and other bits like it may describe accurately the brutal Cape Town Flats, but they also constitute an extended homage to one of Chandler's best-known passages.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Fresh spies

The pace of geopolitical change must make thriller writers tear their hair out. The Soviet Union is gone, and terrorism, as wise commentators point out, is not a country. What does the fight against it mean, and what is a fictional spy to do in this multipolar world?

Lots, according to Olen Steinhauer's The Tourist, in whose world the collapse of the Other Side has given birth to a range of Other Sides: Chinese industrialists, Russian mafias, Islamic insurgents among them.

This fractured geopolitical scorecard is just one of the things that make The Tourist seem new, at least to this infrequent reader of thrillers. Here are a few more:

1) Frequent mention of characters' ages, many of those characters in their twenties or early thirties. This has an internal purpose, but I suspect it's also Steinhauer's way of reminding the reader that the international thriller is alive, well and still a young man's and woman's game two decades after the U.S.S.R.'s collapse.

2) An occasional wryly mocking attitude:

"Milo decided that while his coworkers devoted themselves to finding the Most Famous Muslim in the World somewhere in Afghanistan, he would spend his time on terrorism's more surgical arms."

3) An amusing poke at one of the dumbest songs of the last thirty years:

"`Why `the Tiger'?'

"`Precisely! However, the truth is a disappointment. I have no idea. Someone, somewhere, first used it. Maybe a journalist, I don't know. I guess that, after the Jackal, they needed an animal name.' He shrugged—again it looked painful. `I suppose I should be pleased they didn't choose a vulture—or a hedgehog. And no—before you think to ask, let me assure you I wasn't named after the Survivor song.'"

Do political and spy thrillers have a shorter shelf life thanks to events such as the end of the Soviet Union and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001? What does it take to keep such a story fresh? What are your favorite classic spy stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Thrillers and character

I may be back later with a more detailed post about Identity Theory by Peter Temple (also published as In the Evil Day.) For now, though, a question for thriller readers:

How unusual is it for a thriller to focus as much attention, if not more, on the personalities and problems of the protagonists as on the plot?

Here, an intelligence dealer, a mercenary, and an ambitious reporter become involved with a piece of film that could have worldwide repercussions, in the time-honored thriller manner, but we come to know the characters better than we do the politics of the piece. I haven't read many thrillers, but this struck me as novel.

As always with Peter Temple, the book is full of gorgeous prose, such as:

"Once Gastarbeiter from Anatolia, Anselm thought, now wealthy. Their teenage boy and girl followed, citizens of nowhere and everywhere. The pair were listening to music on headphones, moving their heads like sufferers from some exotic ailment."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

The Accident Man

The good folks at Viking Penguin were kind enough to send along a copy of The Accident Man by Tom Cain. The novel has drawn attention for its fictionalization of a certain British princess' death, but that's not what caught my eye in the opening pages.

Rather, I have in mind Declan Burke's definition of crime fiction in a current discussion on Crime Always Pays, which reads, in part, thus:

"If a writer understands that the fictions of crime in books or movies serve as a lightning rod to the inevitable fears and paranoias of the modern world, and has wit enough to render our most primal instinct entertaining, then he or she is a crime writer and the book is a crime novel."

Entertaining? The title refers to the protagonist's profession. Sam Carver is an international hit man who arranges the demise of those who deserve it and in such a way that their deaths appear accidental.

Fears and paranoias? Here's how Cain describes one target in a prologue that sets the novel's tone: "The official term for Visar's business was people-trafficking, but Carver preferred a more traditional job description. As far as he was concerned, the Albanian was a slave trader."
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Read an entertaining, wide-ranging interview with Tom Cain on Bookslut.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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"Modesty Blaise," the movie, or, something from the '60s that really sucked

1966, and Batman was on the air, Fellini had turned surreal, and James Bond was all the rage. Joseph Losey's movie version of Modesty Blaise has affinities with all three, combining the worst of each in a pretentious and weirdly dated period piece.

I'm no expert on the Modesty Blaise comic strip and novels, but I did appreciate the first book's low-key humor, its aching portrayal of Willie Garvin's devotion to and chaste love for Modesty, and its occasional touches of chilling cruelty and cold, nocturnal ambiance. Among other things, these features made the novel, Modesty Blaise, something more than a sex-and-gadgets spy caper.

Losey and screenwriter Evan Jones jettison almost all of that and exaggerate the rest. Where author Peter O'Donnell sharpened the humor by applying it sparingly, mostly in the person of a fastidious but irrepressibly wise-cracking assistant to the villain of the piece, the movie hits us over the head with a ha-ha, hilariously clueless government minister, too. Where O'Donnell gives the villains a Bondian hideout in an isolated monastery, Losey turns the sinister fortress into a cheap, swinging-London-style outtake from Blow-Up, a rather better movie released the same year. (A more accurate comparison, though anachronistic by two years, might be a Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In sketch, but without the humor.)

Plot? Modesty is a mysterious character, a war orphan who has retired from a lucrative criminal career until called in by the British government to foil a diamond robbery. But she pulls some tricks of her own. Forget all that, though. It's probably not the main reason you'd enjoy the novel, and you won't be able to make much of it in the mess of a movie.

Four decades on, the most puzzling aspect of this film is that so many big names and, apparently, an at least adequate budget were involved. Amsterdam's streets and canal houses are gorgeously photographed, and just look at some of the people involved in the movie: Losey as director. Monica Vitti as Modesty. Terence Stamp as Willie Garvin. Dirk Bogarde as the villain Gabriel in a role that one might regard as an amusingly camp deviation from O'Donnell's original if it were in the least amusing.

I can't entirely blame the makers and participants of Modesty Blaise. 1966 was probably a heady time, with producers willing to throw money after this and other hip, glamorously decadent projects. I wonder how long it took all involved to regard the movie as they would a bad hangover.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The man who came in from reading Fred Vargas

The Oz Mystery Readers group is discussing John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a classic espionage novel and an occasion for some lessons in history.

You know the history I mean, don't you? The history of the fictional spy, which meant, at that time, James Bond. Le Carré's protagonist, Alec Leamas, is an anti-Bond. His life, according to the article to which I link above, "is far from the glamour of James Bond's world: he has a love affair with a lonely, unpaid librarian, not with a fashion model."

Then there's that other history, that of the Cold War, of us vs. them, with its harsh symbol of division, the Berlin Wall. And us vs. them, Le Carré tells us, is decidedly not good vs. evil. It was probably easy to call the book a classic back in 1963, and the dust jacket of my handsome old hardback edition trots out a lineup of superstar blurbsters: Daphne du Maurier, Alec Waugh, J.B. Priestley and Graham Greene, the last of whom called the book "the best spy story I have ever read."

But that was then; this is now. How does the book's laying bare of the amorality of espionage hold up today? Pretty well, even when the prose seems tendentious by current standards:

"Ashe, Kiever, Peters; that was a progression on quality, in authority, which to Leamas was axiomatic of the hierarchy of an intelligence network. It was also, he suspected, a progression in ideology. Ashe the mercenary, Kiever the fellow traveler, and now Peters, for whom the ends and the means were identical."

I'll report back later on a bit of plot manipulation that just might be shocking or even offensive, depending on the next thirty or so pages. In the meantime, sit back and reflect on the vanished days of the rivalry between Russia and the West, that golden era of international spying.

Say, who was that Alexander Litvinenko guy, anyway?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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John Buchan

Having just seen the weird stage production of The Thirty-nine Steps, I thought I'd look into one of John Buchan's later novels. Greenmantle, published in 1916, a year after The Thirty-nine Steps, again throws Major Richard Hannay into wartime intrigue.

The opening pages set a pleasantly bluff, breezy tone, but I make this comment because of Buchan's politics. One character -- one of the good guys -- offers less than flattering opinions about two groups against whom Germany took rather firm action in the war after the one during which this novel is set. The same character, though, offers an assessment of the Ottoman Empire that seems fresher than one might expect in a novel written more than ninety years ago: "The ordinary man again will answer that Islam in Turkey is becoming a back number, and that Krupp guns are the new gods. Yet -- I don't know. I do not quite believe in Islam becoming a back number."

Islam, the character says, just might be a force in world politics. He just might be right.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The 39 Steps on stage

The 39 Steps has been a novel, three movies and now, as winner of a Laurence Olivier Award for best new comedy, a farce.

The current production, at London's Criterion Theatre, offers clever staging, deft character and costume changes on the fly from the cast of four, and a lead actor whose mustache is strikingly similar to Robert Donat's in Alfred Hitchcock's great 1935 film version.

It also offers a corpse that keeps waving one of its arms, Scottish and other accents milked for laughs, gay and straight sexual winking and nudging, and an old man running around in boxer shorts. What it does not offer is any but the slightest hint of the suspense that marked either John Buchan's 1915 novel or Hitchcock's very different movie. (I haven't seen either the 1959 or the 1978 movie versions.)

The show, crafted with apparent affection from the important bits of the Hitchcock, turns those bits into a long Benny Hill sketch. The mix works, to judge from the explosive horselaughs and deep, rich and rasping snorts of merriment from the two men who sat right behind me. But it has little to do with crime fiction despite the influential novel and superb movie from which it borrows its name.

=======

An essay in the play's program proposes Buchan's hero, Richard Hannay, as one of the most enduring and influential heroes from the Golden Age of the thriller. Hannay, according to the article, "formed the blueprint for a whole gallery of similar characters," including Bulldog Drummond, the Saint, and, as the type mutated, James Bond, Len Deighton's unnamed hero and John Le Carre's disillusioned protagonists.

It's a stimulating article that may interest readers of my recent comment about the most influential crime writer ever.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Meet the real Modesty Blaise

Crime Time, source of that excellent interview with translators that I've cited before and will keep citing every chance I get, offers this interview with Modesty Blaise's creator, Peter O'Donnell. In it, O'Donnell recounts his memorable meeting with the child who became his model for that memorable ex-criminal and supremely talented operative, Modesty Blaise.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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One of these days I'll shut up ...

... about Frank McAuliffe's Augustus Mandrell stories, but not yet. The stories themselves as well as comments from readers keep striking interesting chords and suggesting enticing tangents.

Mandrell is an interesting omission from T.J. Binyon's excellent Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction. Binyon's discussion of "gentleman burglars and Robin Hoods" includes the observation that "By the 1960s ... the gentleman-adventurer had become an anachronistic figure, and he was replaced by a character who was his opposite in every respect, Richard Stark's Parker."

Binyon is right; Parker is no Saint. Neither, though, is Augustus Mandrell, at least in one major respect: He's no gentleman; he works for a living. But Mandrell does have affinities with a figure Binyon cites as a pinnacle of the post-war gentleman burglar, Leslie Charteris' Simon Templar. Here's Templar, quoted by Binyon, speaking words that Mandrell might have uttered:

I'm mad enough to believe in romance. And I'm sick and tired of this age -- tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest -- battle, murder and sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn't be life as we know it, but ought to be.

I don't know why Binyon omitted Mandrell. On the one hand, it's hard to believe that the widely knowledgeable Binyon didn't know McAuliffe's work. On the other, despite McAuliffe's having won an Edgar award in 1972 for For Murder I Charge More, the third Mandrell collection, his books are hard to find today. (I'd never read a word of him a month ago.) Perhaps McAuliffe's work had already begun to slip below crime fiction readers' radar by 1989, when Binyon's book was published. Or maybe Binyon had to draw the line somewhere. As it is, he packs an amazing amount of information into a thin book.

But perhaps Binyon simply didn't know what to do with a character who combined British sensibilities with American preoccupations.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Augustus Mandrell vs. Modesty Blaise

Back in the days when this blog had readers, I posted a comment about Modesty Blaise, Peter O'Donnell's gadget-toting 1960s super spy. More recently, I've been discussing Frank McAuliffe's books about that non-gadget-toting 1960s super hit man, Augustus Mandrell.

At the time of my Modesty Blaise post, a reader commented that Blaise, James Bond and other popular spy/caper heroes of the time were products of pure wish fulfillment. "I think readers were a lot more naive then, and the heroes and plots of these books impossibly suave," my intelligent correspondent wrote. The first Modesty Blaise novel and the first Augustus Mandrell collection appeared the same year, 1965. Each in its own way seems both a reaction to James Bond and an illustration of my reader's point about wish fulfillment. The differences between the two heroes are at least as interesting as the similarities.

Both are projections of fantasy. Modesty Blaise is impossibly rich, impossibly fit, impossibly talented and impossibly accomplished. Her impossible dexterity in martial arts is supplemented by impossibly elaborate, impossibly miniaturized gadgets cooked up by her assistant, Willie Garvin.

Augustus Mandrell, on the other hand, has impossible sang-froid and an improbable skill with disguises (though the running comments he offers on the practice and the psychological effects of disguise render him a more accessible and less remote hero than is Modesty Blaise. He lets the reader in on his thinking). Mandrell gets by on guts and guile; Modesty Blaise's currency is raw skill.

Blaise works for the forces of good; Mandrell, though his sympathies are usually in the right place, works for the forces of money. Blaise has all the luxury goods that an upwardly aspiring reader in the consumer culture of the mid-1960s could wish for. Her apartment is decorated expensively but with taste, and her liquor is the best. At the age of thirty, having made her pile in ways only hinted at, she has risen above the need to work for mere money.

Augustus Mandrell cheerfully embraces the quest for cash, and his difficulty collecting the fees he charges for his "commissions" are a delightful running theme of all the stories. Could these contrasting attitudes toward money be due in part to the authors' nationalities? O'Donnell was British, McAuliffe American.

And then there's sex. Had Modesty Blaise and Augustus Mandrell ever wound up in the same story, they'd likely have been adversaries who eventually wind up cooperating. They also would have wound up in bed, where both would have performed extremely well. For her, the sex would have been a release of tension, fully enjoyed, expertly accomplished, leaving her prepared to resume her work. For him, it would have been a romp. They'd both have derived pleasure from it, but Mandrell would have experiened more joy.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Ahead of his time again

I remarked here that Frank McAuliffe's amazing international hit man Augustus Mandrell had made a daring wisecrack in Of All the Bloody Cheek. There, the subject was American attitudes toward sex. In the second Mandrell book, Rather a Vicious Gentleman, published in 1968, McAuliffe delivers at least two jabs as fresh as a Paris Hilton nightclub wrangle and as up to date as the newest Bluetooth/zoom lens/Internet and TV capable/voice-recognition cell phone.

Here, a gossip columnist gives a protesting Mandrell a lesson in the technique of manufacturing celebrity:

"They didn't know your name six weeks ago," he gloated. "Now they do, thanks to `Rochey's Roundup.' When I first started mentioning you I had to identify you as `the mysterious Augustus Mandrell.' ... Gradually, using your name at least once a week, I feel I have established your identity. Thus, in yesterday's column my readers had no difficulty flashing up a mental image when they read: `Insiders of the Green Room set say it was a dispute over who would throw the upcoming Augustus Mandrell birthday party that caused that unholy din in the Poe Park Tavern powder room last P.M. ... A new art form, old man."

And here's Mandrell in a philosophical mood on the eternal demand for his services:

Ah well, like so many old fashioned business firms, Mandrell, Limited but serves an existing market. Mandrell does not, as is the new business approach, create the market and then sustain it.

Sure, McAuliffe smoothly pulls off leaps of time within his stories; perhaps I'll discuss his backward and forward narrative technique in a future comment. For now, though, here's the important thing: By God, are his books fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Augustus Mandrell
Frank McAuliffe
humorous crime fiction