Okay, I give up. There’s any number of things that I could/should write about now, given that there’s been tomatoes growing, kids saying cute things, dogs misbehaving in the most creative ways and all the rest of it.
There’s even a Bad Movie Night entry I’ve not finished.
Nonetheless, it seems as though the time has come, as the walrus said, to speak of the things which has been on my mind a lot lately.
The spy thriller – novel and film. It’s a genre rampant with bad writing, silly characters and throwaway books, but they occupy a large place on my shelf right next to the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels and I’ve devoted many a happy hour of pre-sleep dozeries to perusing the purple-prosed peregrinations of the PPK-pistol-packing set. Here’s a few of my favourites, in no order whatsoever.
Robert Ludlum’s written the helluvalotuv (sounds like a Molotov cocktail, doesn’t it?) material, some good, some indifferent and some ohholynightthat’sawful. Among my favourites are The Matarese Circle, in which American and Russian spies put aside their differences to go on an historical quest for the roots of an assassination/terrorist ring whose origins are rooted in a turn of the century Corsican madman. The sequel, The Matarese Countdown, is terrible. Also good is The Holcroft Covenant, about Nazi treasure, Israeli commandos and elusive assassins, with a architect protagonist. Apocalypse Watch is all about Nazis, neo- and otherwise, and the pummelling thereof.
His Bourne trilogy, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, recently made into films with Matt Damon as the title character represent the best and worst of Ludlum’s writing. Identity introduces us to a injured amnesiac, the source of whose violent skills and espionagical knowledge are as much a mystery to us as to him. Niftily, Ludlum takes us through to the redemption of Jason Bourne, while leaving enough of his past still a mystery to fill one more book. Supremacy is fascinating in that we get to see a different side of the character as he chases through Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. Ludlum really should have stopped there. Unfortunately, he didn’t, and we get Ultimatum, a tiresome bore of a book in which the author drags us through well-plowed ground, stopping every once in a while to remind us that Bourne’s getting old.
The films are loosely based on the books, each one having less to do with its literary progenitor than the last. They’re fun though and worth a look-see, if only for some of the most well-choreographed fight scenes put to film. Watch though, for the moment when Bourne takes a cop’s baton away and beats him with it. The weapon woogles in a way that clearly shows it’s made of rubber!
Moving right along, let’s dive into Ken Follett. He’s a Brit with a talent for WWI and II spy stories, often set in Britain or North Africa. Best of the lot are Eye of the Needle, The Key to Rebecca, The Man from St. Petersburg, Triple and The Jackdaws. His writing is spare and direct, very simple, which in his better work is tight and gripping and in his worst, bland and irritating.
Staying with the stalwarts of Merrie England, here’s Frederick Forsyth. You need to be in the right frame of mind to read Forsyth. He’s extremely good at description and exposition, falling down a little in characterisation. His characters all seem just a hair shy of three-dimensional. That said, you will not be disappointed in his Cold War era novels of The Deceiver, The Fourth Protocol, The Devil’s Alternative and The Dogs of War. His masterpiece is The Day of the Jackal, a tale of an assassination attempt on French President General Charles de Gaulle. Watch the 1970s film version and then the Bruce Willis/Richard Gere adaptation.
Oh look! Here’s David Morrell, a Canadian (!) who gave the world the unforgettable character of John Rambo. Yes, there was a book before Stallone got ahold of the films. I’ve never seen any of them, so I can’t comment. On the ascendant, however, are wonderfully crafted tales of spies, counterspies, assassins and religion, such as The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Fraternity of the Stone, and The Covenant of the Flame. Lesser, but still good, are The Protector, The League of Night and Fog and Extreme Denial. Of especial note is The Fifth Profession, whose story turns on the adventures of a couple of high-level professional bodyguards, one American and one Japanese.
Clive Cussler deserves a special mention. His millions of Dirk Pitt novels are all exactly the same. The characters never develop or even change at all from book to book and the writing is, at best pedestrian. His plots however, are so cheerfully outrageous that you can’t help but enjoy his stories. Whether it’s invading an Antarctic terrorist base in a 1920s polar-tractor-explorer just freed from 70 years of entombment in a glacier or raising the Titanic, Cussler always has an historical hook into Pitt’s adventures that keep me buying his books just to see could what possibly outdo the last one. Oddly enough, he usually succeeds.
Finally, there’s the great Ian Fleming. The man who created James Bond wrote a delightfully tough-as-nails, macho hero who rarely lost his cool, even under the most trying of circumstances. Products of their times, 007’s adventures nonetheless are as entertaining as anything written in the last 40 years. My personal favourites are From Russia with Love, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Moonraker.
Well there you have it. Spies, lies and private eyes. Anybody got any other recommendations? I’m always looking for something new. . . .
I did read First Blood and found it to be okay if not great.
Regarding Frederick Forsyth, I have two comments. First, of all the thrillers I found his to be the best researched and accurate for their time. In particular, The Dogs of War is extremely accurate about how arms were procured, people were recruited, and how mercenaries were used. Second, he deserves special attention as the author of The Shepherd , which I heard on many CBC Christmas renditions by Alan Maitland and Barbara Budd.
I like Forsyth a bit better than Follett, but I loved the ones you mentioned, and I can’t really complain much about the author of Pillars of the Earth .
Other authors?
John le Carre has a great reputation, but I’ve only read The Little Drummer Girl and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold . I’ve seen The Russia House and have enjoyed it. His background has some similarities with Fleming, in that he was in MI6 (Fleming was in Intelligence during World War II), and a lot of his work is extremely realistic. My favourite by him is The Little Drummer Girl, both the book and the movie. It is gripping, tense, scary, and really reflects the fanaticism of both sides of the Israeli-Palistinian conflict. The characters also have great depth.
There’s also Len Deighton (his non-fiction is excellent, and SS-GB feels eerily real). I enjoyed Jack Higgins and The Eagle Has Landed . And of course there’s Tom Clancy and his avatar Jack Ryan; his books are interesting, usually disturbingly accurate as to technology and procedures (at least as far as the CIA and the US Armed Forces is concerned), and easy to read. However, I disagree with many of his views.
I believe you get bonus points for the use of the word “espionagical”.
I remember liking the Destroyer books by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir for a fun read.
And for Bad Movie Nights, there looks like some good options here: http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/night_of_the_killer_lamp_23