Helen MacInnes, “Assignment in Brittany”

Oh, so retro! These Helen MacInnes thrillers were everywhere when I was a teenager — she might even be comparable to the Lee Child of the era, which says a lot about cultural changes in the last 50 years. I never read them because they moved pretty slowly and because the proportion of romance to action was low for the teenage me. But Assignment in Brittany was a laundry-room acquisition and it fit the bill perfectly when I was laid low by a migraine. (That’s the good kind of illness, when you feel too sick to do anything but lie in bed and read!)

Love that cover art.

Plot: an English military intelligence guy named Hearne parachutes into rural Brittany in 1941 to spy on German troop movements. He adopts the identity of a wounded Dunkirk evacuee, Bertrand Corlay, who is his physical double. Hearne speaks perfect French, etc. etc. and gets a complete briefing so the substitution while suspenseful is not the main motor of the plot. So far, the novel reminded me of a minor but wonderful Daphne DuMaurier called The Scapegoat: English guy drops into rural French setting and discovers that the French guy he’s pretending to be is a real jerk. The spying plot proceeds with slow, methodical detail which I quite relished, but which certainly dated the book as an entertainment. Though the biggest shock came when our hero Hearne is looking at his double Corlay’s bookshelf and says to himself, “Books are half of the man.” At which point I could not help thinking, “Not anymore, pal.”

Of course Helen MacInnes was a moonlighting librarian, married to an academic, so she would consider books an index to character. I knew that her husband was the Columbia University classicist Gilbert Highet, but I did not know until I checked Wikipedia that he had been in MI6. Nor that Assignment in Brittany “was required reading for Allied intelligence agents who were being sent to work with the French resistance against the Nazis.” Actually now that I think of it, MacInnes‘ books seem to cover a lot of the same territory as Alan Furst’s — but she’s earnestly informative, while he’s performing all those smoky, romantic riffs on the same themes.

It turns out that MacInnes‘ books are being reissued this spring in a spiffy new uniform edition. I wonder if their sincere pedantic quality and their relatively stately pace will appeal to contemporary readers. On the other hand, I can’t wait for Decision at Delphi, Message from Malaga, and the like.

Lee Child, “A Wanted Man”

I cheated on Patrick O’Brian, with Lee Child. But anybody can tell this is a momentary diversion — for the long haul, who would select Jack Reacher over Stephen Maturin? (For one thing, the movie stars who play them? Tom Cruise or Paul Bettany? I rest my case.)

Mitchell County, Iowa. Lots of roads like this in “A Wanted Man,” only it’s winter.

And I do mean momentary. A Wanted Man is one of Child’s brisk and efficient entertainments. So brisk and efficient that it’s almost robotic. If I hadn’t read the 16 previous Reacher novels, I would have little sense of him as a human being. Here’s a snippet of late-book dialogue, as Reacher tries to estimate the number of bad guys he’s up against:

Reacher said, ‘Do you have an accurate headcount?’

McQueen said, ‘Twenty-four tonight, not including me.’

‘Six left, then.’

‘Is that all? Jesus.’

‘I’ve been here at least twenty minutes.’

‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Just a guy, hitching rides.’

Well, good work, whoever you are.’”

I don’t know, maybe that’s satire. And certainly so close to the end, Child isn’t going to gum up the action with touchy-feely stuff. But I don’t read these books just for the gun battles. Nor do I read them entirely for the suspense, though I do think Child is one of the best writers ever at pacing a thriller: slowing down and speeding up to keep you in his grip. I also like Child’s sense of the geography of this country. I don’t know how accurate it is — this book is set in Nebraska and Iowa and Missouri — but he conjures a sense of history in his descriptions of the landscape. Boom and bust, old motels, former farms, the land as a palimpsest of economic and social changes. Like his creator, Reacher is observant. He notices details in both landscape and people, and draws his conclusions. Best yet, he’s been a surprisingly empathetic hero over the course of this series. But in A Wanted Man, his badly broken nose has to stand in for all of his previous sympathy, kindness, humor, and, yes, even a certain vulnerability.

Looking back I realize that my favorite Reacher novels have been the ones where Jack is on a kind of crusade, or where the motivation for his mayhem is personal. Maybe the real flaw of A Wanted Man is that the enemy is … well, who, exactly? The target keeps shifting as Reacher peels back layers of deception or cover identity. The FBI gets involved, and then maybe the CIA (I sort of lost the thread). By the end Reacher is shooting heads popping out of doorways, or shadows. Fundamentally, this book might function better as a video game.

Patrick O’Brian, “The Mauritius Command”

Pierre Julien Gilbert, “Combat de Grand Port,” a contemporary painting of the actual battle described in the book.

Are you getting bored with Patrick O’Brian yet? Because I have to warn you, I’m not. I’ve got Lee Child’s new novel on my Kindle, but what’s in my purse when I leave the house? Yes — that would be the South Seas. (I think. I’m not one of those readers who keeps the atlas handy. In my experience those tend to be men.) Sloshing around with my phone and my wallet, I’ve got the Boadicea and all who sail with her. In The Mauritius Command, Jack Aubrey is commodore of a squadron, so O’Brian can  show Jack shouldering wider duties and commanding other captains, some of whom we come to know well. This becomes one of the great strengths of the series; time and again we’ll meet substantial secondary characters who are fully rounded, puzzling, charming, exasperating, admirable, infuriating, or all of these at once. Lord Clonfert is that character in this novel, and one of the most indelible; a vain, dashing Irish peer who causes Jack no end of trouble in the scheme to capture the islands of Mauritius and La Réunion from the French. Stephen, as so often, is more perceptive about the subtleties of the man, who is very popular with his sailors. In his journal (an invaluable writerly device) Stephen writes about this attachment,

“…a continued affection over a long period must be based on the recognition of real qualities in the man, for a ship at sea,… is an enclosed village, and whoever heard of the long-matured judgment of a village being wrong? … And the qualities valued by a community of men are commonly good nature, generosity and courage.”

Wisdom, don’t you think?

Monetizing My Fiction Habit?

I have to love a blog post from the Harvard Business Review that mentions Lee Child in the first paragraph. Evidently social scientists have found that habitual readers of fiction are better-attuned to the emotional states of their co-workers than folks who don’t indulge in the fiction habit. And this leads to greater productivity. Actually, since my co-workers are mostly in my head, I’m already pretty well in touch with them. But if the commercial classes take to fiction as a productivity tool, I can’t complain.

Besides, the author of the blog post quotes Trollope. And any day you read even a snippet of Trollope in the Harvard Business Review is worth celebrating.

 

April Smith, “Good Morning, Killer”

April Smith’s Good Morning, Killer has made me think hard about the creepiness factor in crime novels. Actually, it might have been reading Smith back to back with Lee Child — I have just experienced a lot of mayhem at second hand.  But the issue lingers for all of us who turn to mysteries or thrillers for escape reading — bad, violent things happen to characters. And the better the writer, the more convincing the badness is. For instance, Ruth Rendell is fabulous, and at her most sinister, she is really disturbing. Some of her writing on family structures, and especially motherhood, is downright chilling. And, sure, it’s fiction, but while reading you experience it as real — don’t you?

Maybe not. Somewhere in my reading mind, there’s a constant awareness that these books are artificial, and that’s what makes it possible not to grieve or be terrified by the stories they tell. It’s a fine line, the distinction between the artificial and the naturalistic, and where the writer positions that line is going to be different for every book. Of course this theme of artificiality vs. naturalism rewards discussion when applied to all kinds of literature, but I’m sticking to my point here: escape fiction.

Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, important setting in "Good Morning, Killer"

Which brings me back to April Smith. She’s a wonderful writer. Elegant, humorous, evocative, clever, vivid. Good Morning, Killer opens with a description of swimming laps in a California rain storm that was, all by itself, worth the price of the book. But Smith’s heroine, FBI Agent Ana Grey — wow. I’m beginning to think Ana is seriously nuts. Good Morning, Killer is full of very poor emotional choices. For instance, imagine you are the lead agent on a case involving a kidnapping. Pretty good odds you should not be taking 3 a.m. phone calls from the kidnap victim when she’s released. Or, let’s say you’re dating your opposite number in the Santa Monica police department. And you’re his boss on this kidnapping case. Think that could get awkward? Then what if you get taken off the same case after a really unfortunate incident involving gunfire; was it really a good idea to keep pursuing leads on your own?

Despite my qualms I kept reading, because Smith is a good story-teller, and maybe I have more tolerance for this stuff — or did yesterday, anyway — than I thought. The thing is, Smith can’t let Ana become so crazy that she’s annoying. Strangely enough, that’s the quality that would be truly off-putting.

Lee Child, “The Affair”

There’s always been something especially satisfying about Lee Child’s thrillers. Child writes good, clean prose and he’s a master with the pacing. He understands how much we love inside information (my favorite is still Without Fail, the one set in the Secret Service) but his sympathy is with the ordinary. He abides by the bargain of the thriller — bad deeds are punished, order restored — but his inspired creation of hero Jack Reacher gives his novels extra appeal. And I have to take this chance to say that, no I have never imagined Reacher looking anything like Tom Cruise. (My impossible casting choice is Ciarán Hinds circa 1995, when he was in Persuasion. Anybody else?)

So of course I was excited about The Affair and I did gulp it down pretty swiftly. But… sigh. It’s melancholy. These books have been set mostly in the present or the recent past but The Affair dates back to 1997. Reacher is narrating at some distance in time:

‘Talking to a man with a gun is a risk. Asking questions isn’t.’

I believed that then, back in 1997.

As you’ve realized if you’re a fan, this is the story of how Reacher became “separated” from the Army — the only community he’s ever known. And the tale has to do with corruption in high places, compromised values, cover-ups. Reacher has always explained his leaving the Army as a pragmatic matter but here we find out that there was a lot of pain involved.

The Pentagon: keep this image in mind for the opening chapter

When you think about it, that makes sense. What besides pain creates a loner? What else makes a man take off across the country with nothing but a toothbrush in his breast pocket?  (Watch for the original disposable toothbrush here.) And what else makes a big strong fella who can kill people with his bare hands so sensitive to the plights of the helpless? But there was something almost arch about the ex-military Robin Hood on a perpetual road trip that made Child’s earlier books more obviously artificial, and thus possibly more fun.

Nor, I have to say, is The Affair quite as polished as I expected. The opening is one of those annoying frames that are trendy right now, a tense moment lifted from the center of the novel that’s supposed to keep us on the hook while we loop back and pick up the essential exposition. But the frame itself requires so much exposition — why is Reacher in uniform at the Pentagon, with scruffy hair and a 5-day beard, evidently walking into a trap, and what the heck does Kosovo have to do with it? — that the technique backfires. In fact the setup is generally slow. I like it better when Reacher just stumbles over trouble.

All in all, The Affair is perfectly competent and exciting. It’s just kind of… well, sad.

Lee Child, “Worth Dying For”

“He had never taken aspirin and wasn’t about to start. He had been banged up in the hospital a couple of times, with IV morphine drips in his arms and he remembered that experience quite fondly. But outside of the ICU he was going to rely on time and willpower. No other option.” Got that? We’re back in the world of Jack Reacher, the Big Guy with the Moral Compass, and aspirin is for pantywaists.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Reacher, Lee Child’s prototypical American loner. Furthermore Worth Dying For compensates for the weakness of Child’s last book, 61 Hours. I was disappointed by that sketchy and underwritten tale, then confused to find another Lee Child for sale only 6 months later. Maybe 61 Hours is a barely-fleshed-out screenplay. Maybe it was a kind of stopgap, written to tide readers over while Child’s annual production got onto the Fall Best-Seller schedule (like a hop to get you marching in step with your neighbors). But from the very beginning, Worth Dying For demonstrated the artful pacing that may be the real secret to Child’s success. About a quarter of the way through the book he stops the action for the following paragraph:

“Our ship has come in. An old, old phrase, from old seafaring days, full of hope and wonder. An investor could spend all he had, building a ship, fitting it out, hiring a crew, or more than all he had, if he was borrowing. Then the ship would sail into a years-long void, unimaginable distances, unfathomable depths, incalculable dangers. There was no communication with it… No news at all.” Child goes on in this vein for a couple of hundred words before returning to winter in rural Nebraska where the story is set. It’s another one of those situations Reacher stumbles into, the small town where things seem faintly askew and no one will answer his questions, and then someone turns up bleeding. And Reacher, despite being more than usually dinged-up (from the grand finale of 61 Hours), swings into action.

Nebraska winter: nowhere to hide

However. Child overstepped two boundaries for me with this book. One was the violence. For the first time in 15 books, I actually had to skip pages. True, I’m very squeamish. Also true that when your hero is notable for his size, marksmanship, and fighting experience, these qualities need to be unleashed. It’s part of the deal with the reader. But this time it went too far for me. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get there.

Also too far: when Child has one of the innocent bystanders in the novel take justice into his/her own hands. In truth, Reacher is a vigilante. But in Worth Dying For the crimes are so evil and the punishments so grotesque that I was disturbed. I would much prefer to think of Reacher as a near-caricature, the big guy with the muscles who sets things straight and doesn’t take pills.

Thomas Perry, “Strip”

Yes, he’s done it again, in time for summer vacation. With Strip, Thomas Perry has brought us another hypercompetent and actually thrilling thriller. It may be a slight flaw that the most exciting scene takes place first, as Joe Carver (not his real name) lurks in a construction crane 250 feet above earth, watching five men in two black Hummers search the building site for him. Curiously the height factor amplifies the suspense of the scene — maybe by adding an extra level of menace to Carver’s situation?

Afraid of heights?

Here’s what Perry’s best at, besides plotting. (Which I don’t deny he does really well.) He puts the reader in the consciousness of sundry slightly scuzzy characters and makes them sympathetic. For instance, Manco Kapak, proprietor of several LA strip clubs, has his problems and his sadnesses like any other 64-year-old businessman. “Joe Carver” is a decent guy caught up in a case of mistaken identity and he just has to defend himself, using a fairly unusual set of skills involving firearms and hand-to-hand combat. And the police chief has his own problems which Perry can’t really expect us to take seriously. There’s maybe a faint ironic sheen on some of this, but it’s all pretty good-natured. Perry knows he’s entertaining us so he doesn’t waste much time on character development or scene-setting, preferring to concentrate on the double-cross. No honor among thieves, you know.

I wonder why Perry isn’t as successful as Lee Child. This was a more satisfying read than 61 Hours. I suspect it’s that Perry hasn’t stuck to one iconic character. It makes his books slightly less predictable. You would think that was a virtue, but with escape literature, maybe the preferred range of difference from one iteration to another is pretty narrow.

Lee Child, “61 Hours”

For someone who has to crank out a book every year, Lee Child continues to keep the quality high. Apparently this is the fourteenth Jack Reacher novel and all 14 have been optioned for film. I’m wondering what the holdup is — were they waiting for Kiefer Sutherland to get free? (He’s not big enough for Reacher, and Christian Bale is too handsome. Ciaran Hinds is too old but I always imagine Reacher as the younger version of him.)

The Reacher books have always moved with the swiftness of screenplays. You might even say that they walk a fine line between that stripped-down storytelling and the more elaborate description of a novel. Description in 61 Hours is confined mostly to weather, since the book takes place in a South Dakota winter. And despite some pop-psych phone conversations — which I assume are supposed to enlighten us as to why Reacher is the way he is: for me it was like art-historical analysis of Mt. Rushmore, entirely beside the point — and the usual quirky array of secondary characters, this novel is basically a race against time. Hence the title. The narrative kicks off exactly 61 hours before It Happens. And Child finishes each morsel of storytelling with an update: 10:45 a.m.: 43 hours to go.

It’s a weird way to structure the book and does nothing to heighten the suspense, because these books are always headlong gallops to the final confrontation with the bad guy — in this case a South American drug kingpin. In retrospect, it also feels weird that the Event is not something that was fixed in time at the beginning of the book. Not a ticking time bomb, just something that ended up happening. Yeah, it is a big deal, but you also see it coming a mile away.

So overall, this would not be my favorite Reacher novel. The plot felt very linear and the relationships among the characters are barely sketched in. I’m not looking for Henry James here, but I’d like the sense that these imaginary people would at least recognize each other on the street once the book was over.

When I last posted about Lee Child (Gone Tomorrow) I complained that he had no computer skills. I said I wanted him hacking into the Pentagon. Child got around that problem by having him call a mole in Washington. She’s the one who does the computer work for him; she’s the one who does the pop-psych on the phone… maybe in the next book they will actually meet up. Unless Reacher got incinerated at the end of this book, which would be too bad.

Lionel Davidson, “Kolymsky Heights”

A find, by gum! A friend with good taste recommended Lionel Davidson. Sight unseen, I bought Kolymsky Heights and found it quite satisfying. It’s as if someone had put John Le Carré, Lee Child, and Michael Crichton in a Cuisinart together. True, they didn’t get completely blended, and also true, the best things about each author didn’t quite make it into the recipe. But you know, a literate B+ thriller is definitely good enough for me.

It starts out with Le Carré — why, now that I think of it, in Oxford! What’s present: spycraft. What’s missing: that dark tidal pull of melancholy. We crank the story up very slowly with a great deal of circumstantial detail about the mysterious mail of an Oxford don. Eventually we shift into Lee Child territory, with the introduction of Dr. Johnny Porter, the sulky but brilliant Canadian Indian who has an astounding gift for languages. He gets recruited for a spying task and it turns out that like Child’s Reacher, Porter is up to pretty much any task, including buildng a four-wheel drive vehicle from scratch and casual bare-handed manslaughter. Davidson’s pace — as befits an Englishman born in 1922 — is less heart-pounding than Child’s. But that’s basically OK, we’re having fun with the spycraft.

The Michael Crichton section — and it is a discrete section — is the least interesting. Porter ends up infiltrating a secret Siberian scientific station (I swear there was no way to avoid that alliteration), where groundbreaking experiments have been hijacked for military purposes. My interest flagged. I don’t read Crichton for the science.

Then we’re back into what is effectively an extended chase scene across eastern Siberia at the winter solstice. Need I say that the weather is as much of an enemy as the bad guys?

It’s all very professional. I don’t feel obliged to read another one of Davidson’s books right away, but I’m delighted to know that they exist.