Eric's Review:
Perhaps if U.S. President John F. Kennedy had been spotted reading Matt Helm instead of James Bond, the mainstream public would have elevated Donald Hamilton to a household name. Instead, Bond's creator Ian Fleming enjoyed the fame and fortune, and Hamilton settled for mid-tier literary status – royalties earned from a 27-book series that inspired five feature films and a failed television series. Not bad in a lifetime of work. The Matt Helm series kicked off in 1960 with Death of a Citizen. I found it lukewarm at best, but was anxious for the espionage eruption promised in the series' second installment, The Wrecking Crew, published by Fawcett Gold Medal the same year.
After the events of the series debut, Matt Helm has now returned to full-time work in the U.S. Intelligence community. His 15-year span as western author, photographer and family man was washed away in a bloody bathtub. Now, his wife and family have moved to Reno, Nevada, and Helm finds himself once again as a kill-on-command agent for the government. This is where we find Helm in the opening pages of The Wrecking Crew, hunting a Soviet leader/hit-man who's terminated a lot of U.S. agents and allies in and around Sweden (the author's birthplace).
The story has Helm teaming with two women, an American operative and a widow named Lou. The cover story is that Helm will be a very American tourist – cowboy hat, southern drawl, long-lens camera – touring the northern portion of Sweden with Lou. Her husband was killed by communist forces in East Germany and she is working with Helm to find the villain. There's some reflective interludes with Helm discussing his training at the farm, re-entry interviews with longtime boss Mac, and his thoughts on dropping the family act (although that will be a main theme in the series' next book).
I was enthralled with Hamilton's opening act, 50-pages explaining the mission, warring factions, key personnel and the candidates for Helm's sexcapades. Unfortunately, the momentum is swept away over the course of the next 70-pages. Helm interacts with the two women – scores with one – and traipses over Sweden taking pictures that he purposefully overexposes. He meets with a gorgeous female cousin who plays a part in the book's finale. There's a car wreck, a brief knife fight, and a woman is murdered. There's also a lot of dialogue that finds Helm no closer to his assassination target on page 51 than he is on page 151. The finale finds Helm being hand-delivered to the villain in a fight that's written the same length as a gas station coffee menu – short with few options.
Overall, I love Hamilton's writing style. It is an easy narrative to devour and the opening act is strong enough to warrant further reading. After finding Death of a Citizen average, I can't help but think The Wrecking Crew was more of the same. The series has a devout following and heaps of praise. At the end of the day, maybe my problems with Helm reflect my selfish desire for a speedy and explosive narrative. Hamilton knows his audience and his hero far better than I do. Who am I to judge? Read it and decide for yourself.
Tom’s Rebuttal:
Eric, I’m seeking a court injunction to keep you at least 300 yards from further installments in the Matt Helm series. You’re certainly permitted to like what you like, but The Wrecking Crew is one of the best Matt Helm installments. If you didn’t enjoy it, there’s not much forthcoming that’s going to change your mind about the series.
Readers, for the love of all things holy, please read and enjoy this paperback. I promise that you’ll destroy your bedtime flipping the pages to learn what happens next in this literary masterpiece. I also promise that Eric is a fundamentally good man who has just lost his way. With love and support from the community, I know we can bring him around on this pivotal series.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
Lionel White (1905-1985) was an unsung hero in the world of crime caper fiction. His first novel was The Snatchers from 1953, a thin paperback later adapted into the film The Night of the Following Day in 1968 starring Marlon Brando and Rita Moreno. The book has also been re-released as a double (along with his Clean Break) by Stark House Books.
Cal Dent is a planner. Like Richard Stark’s Parker, Dent is the guy who conceives a caper and brings a crew together to get it done. This particular job involves the kidnapping of a seven year-old rich girl on New York’s Long Island. The abduction itself happens off-page in chapter one and seems to go well. The assigned crew members bring the little girl and her sexy nanny to the hideout to begin the ransom negotiations.
Of course, the FBI and the media get involved, and the kidnapping becomes one of the biggest stories since the Lindbergh baby case. Meanwhile, there’s sexual tension at the hideout with the crew’s only female member and a couple of the hoods on the job. Add an affable local cop sniffing around, and you’ve got a tension-filled, high-stakes thriller.
White takes the time to draw a vivid picture of the individual members of the five-person kidnap and ransom crew. Some are sympathetic while others are twisted and dangerous. There’s a lot of waiting around in the hideout dealing with obstacles that arise. I found it suspenseful and fascinating, but it wasn’t exactly a breakneck bloodbath of an adventure until the final act. Rest assured, the climactic ending was absolutely worth the wait.
It’s hard to believe that The Snatchers was a first novel for Lionel White as he really was something special right out of the gate. Moreover, his body of work that followed was consistently excellent. Don’t sleep on this debut paperback. Place it in the “must read” pile.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
Ian Kennedy Martin, born in 1936, was a prolific British screenwriter with a career spanning four decades. His most notable work is police drama The Sweeney (1975-1978), a television show that was critically acclaimed for its realism. Along with shows like The Onedin Line, The Capone Investment and Parkin's Patch, Martin also authored a dozen or more novels including the 1977 action-adventure paperback novel Rekill, published in the U.S. by Ballantine. It was issued as a $3 ebook in 2012.
The first six-pages of Rekill set the tone for much of the novel's first half. Readers are spectators as an unknown man, possibly foreign, arrives on a rural Kansas farm to await a family's arrival. When a woman and two small children arrive, the stranger executes them in brutal fashion. Many hours later, the woman's husband comes home to find his family slaughtered and the intruder waiting. In later pages we learn he was tortured and executed and the farm house burned. This same style of execution repeats for three more families before readers are thrown into the thick of the narrative.
When a former North Vietnamese solder is identified as the killer, American brass orchestrate a plan to find and terminate the assassin. The man they choose for the mission is Leeming, a former U.S. Colonel who ran a special forces camp combating the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. Leeming faced a court-martial and was later removed from service prior due to a particular incident. Now, Leeming, a widower, lives with his brother on a North Dakota farm. The military asks Leeming to train a special forces soldier to seek and destroy the foreign assassin. If he agrees, the government will remove the court-martial from his records. Leeming agrees and soon the narrative thrusts readers into espionage and intrigue in Paris.
The author had a number of great ideas for the book's plot design. Leeming's protege is interesting and the character allowed the author to create a really unique chemistry – the old warhorse training the younger soldier for a deadly mission. But by the book's second half, most of that story-line is wiped clean. The plot’s emphasis shifts to scouting and researching a known criminal to learn the whereabouts of the assassin. This part was rather redundant and dull after the enticing first half. The book's closing chapters were exciting, but nothing I haven't read before in international spy novels.
If you like slower, more developed international mystery and intrigue, Rekill might be for you. It's distinctively British – slower story, emphasis on planning, dry romantic encounter, high-adventure (there's rock climbing) – that recalled the work of Hammond Innes or a deep-discount Desmond Bagley story. Otherwise, I found Rekill retreading much of the same ground that we’ve all read before. The end result is an average action-adventure novel that should please most readers depending on their reading experience and frequency.
If nothing else, the paperback has a great cover.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
In the 1950s, Richard Himmel (1920-2000) wrote five books in the Johnny Maguire series about a lawyer who functions as a hardboiled detective and all-around troubleshooter. I loved the series debut, so I was excited to tackle the second installment, The Chinese Keyhole from 1951. The book was originally a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback and has been re-released by Cutting Edge Books.
The novel opens with Johnny telling the reader something he neglected to share in the first book. During World War 2, Johnny was recruited into the OSS, the wartime precursor to the CIA, and he’s periodically called upon to set aside his law practice to engage in espionage at the request of the U.S. State Department. Yes, our favorite hardboiled Chicago lawyer is evidently a spook as well. It’s almost as if the author had a cool idea for a spy novel and decided to slot Johnny Maguire into the lead role because he had an extra protagonist just lying around with no immediate plans.
Anyway, Johnny’s handler instructs him to go to the Chinese Keyhole, a strip club in Chicago’s Chinatown, to deliver a coded message to an Asian stripper. One thing leads to another, and Johnny has a bloodbath on his hands. The only way to get close to the killers is to, well, sleep with a stripper. A part-time spy’s work is never done.
Meanwhile, Johnny’s childhood friend Tom was recently plugged in the back six times with no leads as to the killer’s identity. Tom was a walking saint on earth, and who would want to kill a guy like that? If you’re familiar with the way 1950s plotting works, you’ve probably already guessed that Tom’s death is somehow tied into the nudie bar spy situation. A central mystery develops regarding the identity of the enemy spy ring boss, and the solution - a big reveal at the end - was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. That said, the series of final confrontations with Johnny’s adversaries was pretty outstanding.
Himmel was a great writer who knew how to keep a story moving, and The Chinese Keyhole is a sexy and exciting thin paperback. Readers should know that this 1951 work of disposable fiction has some retrograde things to say about Asians and gays. It didn’t bother me, but consider yourself warned that 1951 was, in fact, nearly 70 years ago.
Richard Himmel deserves to be remembered, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that The Chinese Keyhole was the high-mark of his writing career. It’s a romantic and exciting bit of domestic spy fiction, and I’m thrilled that Cutting Edge Books has made the series available to a new generation. I’m also excited to read what Johnny Maguire is going to do next.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
How does the revival of an obscure western book series lead to allegations of criminality and fraud? Find out on Episode 52 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast. Also: Vintage finds in the wild! We review Dead Wrong by Lorenz Heller and Jack Higgins' A Game for Heroes! And much more! Listen to the show wherever you get your podcasts, stream below or download directly HERE.
Listen to "Episode 52: The Morgan Kane Fiasco" on Spreaker.
Before he became a popular author of quirky crime fiction bestsellers, Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) was a working author of gritty, well-crafted westerns. He started with short works in the western pulp magazines and transitioned seamlessly to paperbacks in the 1950s. Last Stand at Saber River was released by Dell in 1959, and the subsequent British edition was re-titled Stand on the Saber. Somewhere along the way, the novel was also released in hardcover as Lawless River. Over 60 years later, the book is still in print as a paperback, ebook and audiobook.
Our hero is Paul Cable who fought for the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War for over two years and is returning home to his ranch on Arizona’s Saber River to be with his family. The war had been rough on Cable as he took bullets in his hip and thigh and was sent home to Arizona before the outcome of the war was determined.
Upon arrival back in Arizona, Cable finds that things have changed in his absence. Specifically, there are men living in his house that he and his wife built themselves. While Cable was at war, a man named Vern Kidston came to town with a sizable crew of men and set up a business supplying horses to the Union Army. He took over the Cable house and has been housing his men there while Vern’s horse herd grazes on Cable’s land. As you can imagine, Cable isn’t thrilled with this arrangement. Likewise, Vern and his men are not interested in negotiating with or taking any guff from a former rebel soldier.
At times, the book felt like a home invasion horror novel with a lot of cat-and-mouse suspense. Other times, it was a straight-up combat adventure tale with lots of gun-pointing stand-off scenes. As the title of the paperback indicates, all the disrespect and mini-skirmishes along the way lead to a series of showdowns where Cable defends his property rights against Vern’s men.
Elmore Leonard was a master at plotting and dialogue, and this knack is on full-display in Last Stand at Saber River. The characters are vividly drawn and they always seem to say the right thing at the right time in the right way. The author wisely steers clear of the relative merits of the Confederacy vs. the Union and uses the divide to explain the mutual distrust and hostility between the novel’s combatants.
The short paperback’s resolution was intelligent and unexpected - if a bit abrupt, and it was a testament to Leonard’s superior storytelling abilities. If you like westerns filled with moral dilemmas and smart character development, Last Stand at Saber River is definitely for you. Recommended.
Movie Night:
In 1997, Last Stand at Saber River was adapted into a TV movie starring Tom Selleck on the TNT cable network. It remains a available as a $2.99 rental on all the major streaming services. You won't be surprised to learn that the universal consensus is that book is better than the movie.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
Author Jack Bennett (1934-2000) was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He became a cadet reporter in 1957 and later joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1974. One of his first novels, Mister Fisherman, was published in 1964 and examined racial tensions. In 1981, Bennett wrote Gallipoli, a war novel based on the Australian film of the same name. Of the eight novels I can identify by Bennett, it appears the author's literary work was mostly outdoor/nature fiction that examined social or environmental issues. Those themes are the heart of Bennett's 1967 novel The Hawk Alone, published by Bantam.
The book examines the life of Gord Vance, an elderly man who lives in South Africa with his wife, Julia. Vance is a former soldier, serving in a number of military campaigns including the South African War (often called Boer). Over the years, Vance has worked a number of professions, but his life's work has been as a safari hunter. After years of struggle, Vance now finds himself impoverished due to the environmental changes that have impacted the hunting industry. Living hand to mouth has made Vance disgruntled with his “golden years” and regretful regarding the decisions he's made throughout his life.
Bennett's narrative is written in the past and present with Vance remembering key events in his life – crippled in a bar skirmish, his military experience, prior hunts and various interactions with his friend Roy. These events are sometimes mirrored by present failures like a horse dying, his derogatory credit at the town store, his truck's engine stoppage and the inability to hunt. Vance's skill-set is shooting, but he doesn't own a large parcel of land and his ability to hunt other lands has dwindled. Bennett conveys these emotional defeats perfectly.
As an adventure novel, The Hawk Alone fails. But, this isn't a disappointment credited to the author or the story. Bennett's storytelling is steeped in Hemingway and exhibits primitive simplism. Bantam's marketing strategy was to present the book as an adventure novel, complete with a misleading cover and the exciting premise of “an aging white hunter takes four teenagers on his last and most dangerous safari.” This is only partially true. The book is an emotional, end of age tale about regret, failure and purposeless life – essentially Vance is “the hawk alone.” The promise of a dangerous safari and four teenagers arrives twenty pages before the book's end. While the finale is riveting, it's credited to Vance's disappointments and Bennett's strength as a story-teller, not a dangerous, savage safari.
The Hawk Alone is brilliant. After the last page was turned, I felt emotionally moved. What you may feel will be in the eye of the beholder, but the novel will certainly make you feel something. The ability to convey some sort of emotional experience on to the reader or listener is the cornerstone of good storytelling. The conversational style of Bennett's narrative had me entranced, but again readers should control their expectations.
Paperback Warrior fans should realize this is a different novel than the usual action-adventure shooter or vintage crime-noir. However, this literary variation was a rewarding change of pace that I think you should experience. I can't say enough good things about this pleasant surprise of a novel. Highly recommended.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
