All posts tagged 1975

Yesterday’s Spy by Len Deighton (1975)

I looked at him for a long time. ‘The days of the entrepreneur are over, Steve,’ I told him. ‘Now it’s the organisation man that gets the Christmas bonus and the mileage allowance. People like you are just called “heroes”, and don’t mistake it for a compliment. It just means has-beens, who’d rather have a hunch than a computer output. You are yesterday’s spy, Steve.’
(Yesterday’s Spy, page 49)

Backstory

The improbably-named Steve Champion was a successful British spy in Nazi-occupied France during World War Two, where he ran one of the few resistance networks that lasted, based in Nice, in the south of France. A 19-year-old newbie SIS agent was secretly landed from a British submarine to join the group and work undercover, eventually witnessing the arrest of Champion and other key members, who are tortured or killed.

The present day

Thirty years later, that newbie is the narrator, Charlie, who is meeting Champion for drinks in a London club. All very sociable and chatting about the old times – but from there he goes to report to his superior, Major Schlegel, an American seconded to British Intelligence. (This is the same Schlegel who we met in this novel’s predecessor, Spy Story, but this narrator, with his war spent in the French Resistance, is definitely different from the narrator of the Ipcress novels and Spy Story.) For whereas Champion left the Service, the narrator didn’t, and he has been tasked with investigating rumours which have begun to circle around his old idol.

The first half of the novel consists of a series of encounters with figures from Champion’s and Charlie’s pasts:

  • Charlie travels to Wales to meet Champion’s ex-wife, Caty, and son Billy (Champion married her partly out of guilt because she was sister to Marius, the Catholic priest who was in their cell but who was eventually caught, tortured and murdered by the Nazis).
  • In Champion’s London flat he joins Schlegel and Special Branch men stripping it for evidence that Champion has killed and disposed of his girlfriend, Melodie Page…

Then, traveling to the south of France, specifically Nice, location of their wartime cell, Charlie meets:

  • Pina, the embittered daughter of one of the members of the cell, whose husband and two children were murdered in Algeria
  • Claude l’avocat, part of the wartime cell who is revealed as having been a German spy all along, and has continued on into peacetime, now working for German Intelligence
  • Serge Frankel, a passionate Jewish communist

Through this network of characters Deighton is able to explore the way wartime loyalties have evolved and changed and cost their characters very dearly. Frankel in particular has made the long journey from committed communist to avowed Jew and supporter of Israel, prompted by the vicious antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the USSR’s support of the Arabs in their wars against Israel. Now, he tells a surprised Charlie, Champion is working to supply the Arabs with a nuclear warhead. He has even accepted a military rank in the Egyptian Army; a fact apparently confirmed when Charlie travels to Geneva to meet a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat who is, in fact, a double-agent for British Intelligence.

So far, so rational but, in a confusing sequence, Charlie is ‘arrested’ by two French Security policemen who drive him to the abandoned quarry a) where the wartime cell used to hide out b) which Champion bought, along with the neighbouring house, after the war and has made his home. As they pull into the quarry, there’s an unexpected shoot-out between Pina, who was being held hostage in a quarry building, and her captors. The French ‘security’ men join in, at which point Charlie pulls his gun and shoots them. Pina and Charlie survive, hide the bodies, and beat a hasty retreat in the car. The whole thing was a set-up but why? Were they going to frame Charlie for murdering Pina? Why?

Barely has he returned Pina to her flat, than, back at his hotel, Charlie is arrested by real French police but – in the deus ex machina manoeuvre which we’ve encountered in numerous previous Deighton thrillers – an authority figure (either good old Colonel Stok or, as here, his boss Major Schlegel) intervenes to persuade the French that Charlie is wanted for the murder of Melodie Page back in London.

Hiatus in prison

What happens now is a little improbable. The Department agrees with Charlie that he will be prosecuted for Melodie’s murder and sent to prison, but in a case so badly managed that his appeal lawyer should be able to get him released. And this is what happens. He outs up with a few weeks in Wormwood Scrubs before his (frustratingly incompetent) lawyer gets him release. And then Charlie goes on the tramp, sleeping rough, hanging out with other vagrants.

Why? Well, this unconvincing charade is designed to signal to Champion that Charlie has now well and truly severed his ties with the Department. Hmmm. a) I don’t believe it, it seems a wildly elaborate and unconvincing strategy b) Champion does contact him after a week or so, but he doesn’t believe it either c) the whole agent-going-to-prison-to-prove-he-no-longer-works-for-the-Service thing was done much better by John le Carré in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold ten years earlier.

Working for Champion

So Champion picks him up in his chauffeur-driven car and says, ‘Right boyo, do you want to come and work for me?’ The narrator melodramatises this as him ‘disappearing from view’ and ‘going off the grid’ which also doesn’t make much sense because as soon as Charlie is ensconced in Champion’s base (the big house by the Tix Quarry outside Nice) he immediately starts using his days off to pop in on his old mates – Serge, Claude, the Falstaffian restaurateur Ercole and, of course, his boss and ‘control’, Major Schlegel. All in all, the opposite of disappearing.

Charlie spends his time running low-level chores for Champion, the most interesting of which is handling low-grade intelligence from a worker at the nearby French Army test range; playing with Champion’s son, Billy; and screwing the nanny with the James Bond name Topaz, who one night came to his bedroom wearing only a skimpy shift which, in James Bond fashion, fell to the floor…

It’s on one of these visits that Frankel surprises Charlie by announcing Champion is scheming to get hold of a nuke and sell it to the Arabs. Can that be right? Or is it Frankel’s anti-Arab paranoia? Either way, travelling back from Nice in the chauffeur-driven car with Champion and Billy, the car is pursued by a motorbike rider with a pillion passenger who abruptly shoots the driver, causing Champion et al to have a very high-speed crash. Charlie crawls from the wrecked vehicle, rescues Billy, then saves Champion’s life by unobstructing his windpipe and giving him the kiss of life. Who the hell did it? And why?

Few days later, and back at the mansion where the comatose Champion has been transferred, Topaz arrives in Charlie’s bedroom at dusk and offers sex but when Charlie demurs pulls a gun and keeps him under guard while lots of Arabs clump around the house. Are they kidnapping Champion? Removing precious documents or jewels or what? Into the darkened room comes an Arab and when Topaz talks to him, he opens fire with a shotgun and blasts the sexy Topaz in half, while Charlie keeps absolutely still in the blacked out room…

When things have quietened down he sneaks down to the garden where he finds Billy hiding, and drives the back way into Nice, where he deposits Billy with Pina and tells her to fly to London then travel to Wales to be with Caty.

Then Charlie continues on to Frankel’s flat, where he finds Claude l’avocat in attendance as French police deal with Frankel’s corpse. And that of the low-level contact from the Army base. More murders. By who? And why? It is here that Claude tells Charlie that although he, Claude, was a double agent within the wartime cell, it wasn’t him but Champion who betrayed them all, the betrayal which led to the arrest and death of Marius.

Finale

The ending is also confusing. Charlie finds himself summoned and flying by helicopter to the German border, there to find Schlegel interrogating two hitch-hiking hippies who are carrying detonators and ammunition across the border. After some chat they realise this is a diversion. Schlegel tells Charlie five heavy-duty superlorries unloaded a large consignment from Nice docks and are driving up the Autobahn into Germany. Is the hitch-hiker thing a ploy by Champion to distract from that? Is there a plot to carry out some kind of Arab terrorist outrage in Germany? They helicopter over to where the trucks have been pulled over by French police at the border. No. The trucks are empty.

Maybe both were ploys, two levels of distraction, to decoy away from the real scam which is happening back in Nice? Cut back to the Tix mansion which Schlegel and Charlie find full of lights and activity. Charlie creeps in, using his knowledge of the house, and discovers a secret lift in a room he was never allowed to enter. It goes down into the old mine workings. After a few scrapes, Charlie follows a tunnel which emerges into the main bowl of the old quarry to find it filled with the inflated body of an airship! Melodie Page had sent messages back to the Department on postcards with images of airships crashing in flames. Topaz, the randy nanny, had a PhD in thermo-chemistry. Lots of pieces of the puzzle start clicking together. Sort of.

In a very James Bond climax, the floodlights go on and Charlie is caught like a rat in a trap. ‘Put down the gun, Charlie.’ Champion then comes forward and, while his minions make the final preparations to the airship, explains the whole plot. They have tunnelled under and up into the French Army base stores and stolen nuclear shells (not bombs). These they are going to load into the airship which will carry them across the Med to an Arab country. ‘It is too late, Mr Bond, nothing can stop me now.’

Charlie suddenly realises Champion has been bluffing him, they have already loaded the shells and are about to take off. With sudden desperation he pushes Champion down the stairs and empties all the bullets from his gun into the petrol tanks of the engines of the airship, then runs as fast as he can back into the tunnel and up the mine workings before he hears an enormous explosion and the blast and flames follow him up the tunnel, lifting and burning him. The airship is destroyed, all the Arabs and Champion incinerated.

Epilogue and explanation

Recovering in hospital (just as the narrator of the previous novel ends up recovering in hospital) Charlie explains it all to Schlegel. Champion never even broke into the French Army store, never touched a nuke. He was going to fly to an Arab country and claim to have sold them to Egypt, which would confirm the sale. The more the French authorities denied it, the more no-one would believe them. Champion would technically have committed no crime and been free to return to France, but the Egyptians would have gained a big psychological bargaining chip with Israel.

I don’t believe a word. It just isn’t convincing, in a world and a milieu which thrives on real threat and violence, I don’t believe Champion’s plan was feasible. To put it mildly, Israel would check. And the French would devise some way of throwing Charlie in prison. All this cunning and violence has been expended on what seems like a very dumb scheme.

I think the complex of double crosses, the description of the way wartime loyalties had been compromised, the revelations of past and present betrayals, as well as the deaths of Topaz and Frankel, were meant to move the reader. But they don’t. They feel like lifeless tokens being moved about on a Monopoly board.

Deighton’s novels have many virtues – namely his understated humour and technical expertise – but genuine tension and psychological depth are not among them.

I opened the car door, and began to get out. I said, ‘I’ve no inclination for all this play-acting, late-night TV spy stuff.’ (p.140)

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by Simon on March 19, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Novel, Spy novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on March 19, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/yesterdays-spy-len-deighton/

The Snow Tiger by Desmond Bagley (1975)

Unlike its two predecessor spy novels, The Snow Tiger is less about suspense and more of a prolonged account of legal and administrative procedure, making it read more like one of Hammond Innes’ sober, factual adventure yarns – right up till the detailed and gruesome avalanche at the book’s climax, at which point it becomes quite a hard-core ‘disaster novel’.

The Snow Tiger

The entire text takes the form of an official Commission of Inquiry into a major catastrophe – a massive avalanche which destroyed the mining town of Hukahoronui in the south island of New Zealand, killing 54 people and injuring many more. The first two-thirds remind me of the slow documentary lead-up to a pre-announced disaster which characterises several Hammond Innes novels, such as the catastrophic sinking of the landing craft (also with loss of life of some 50 people) in Atlantic Fury, the lengthy Board of Inquiry which forms the core of The Wreck of The Mary Deare, or the detailed description of the Court Martial in Maddon’s Rock.

Similarly, this book is divided into the thirteen consecutive days during which the Inquiry into the avalanche sits. Each chapter starts with a detailed and pedantic account of the cross-questioning of key witnesses, then segues into a presentation of the scene itself.

Briefly, Ian Ballard returns from England to New Zealand, to the town where he grew up, sent there to take control of the town’s struggling gold mine, which is owned by his strong-willed, patriarchal grandfather, back in London. Ballard encounters all sorts of opposition, not least from the Peterson family, a powerful clan in the little town (population 800) who reckon they own the land the mine is built on and were swindled out of it by Ballard’s grandfather. What’s more they also hold an ancient grudge that Ballard was responsible for the death by drowning of one of the Peterson brothers 20 years ago – so they pick fights with Ballard whenever possible.

But when the friend Ballard made skiing in Switzerland a few years earlier, a snow expert, Dr Mike McGill, turns up to visit, he immediately points out that the steep hillside covered with snow which sweeps down to the mine entrance, and to the town itself, is dangerously unstable, a problem exacerbated when all the timber was cut down to build the mine and new houses.

While the various characters are bickering about whether to contact the authorities a minor avalanche takes place, blocking the narrow entrance to the valley, trapping all the townspeople and knocking out the electricity and phone lines. McGill takes charge of the Town Council and begins planning emergency accommodation, food and heating, and is in the middle of detailing people to find safe shelter and training some of the men in snow rescue, when the Monster Avalanche suddenly occurs.

Two strands

Around the middle of the book the contemporary strand – the description of the Inquiry slowly working its way through the evidence of the eyewitnesses – gets a new angle, a new overlay of meaning, when an old lawyer friend of Ballard’s mean grandfather flies in. This man, Stenning, announces that the grandfather sent Ballard back to Hukahoronui as a test, to see if he could handle the antagonism of the locals and the shabbiness of the mine operation. For the mean old man had – astonishingly – consigned all his shares in the parent company to a Trust. If, in Stenning’s opinion, Ballard does show himself to be man enough, the trustees will vote him onto the Board and, since this has the largest single block of shares in the corporation, at a stroke Ballard would take control of a multinational corporation valued at around £232 million! Far from being the black sheep of the family despised by the old man, he turns out to have been the old man’s last hope!

Thus the two strands – past and present – significantly pick up pace for the last 100 pages (of this 250-page book):

  • In the present Ballard has to decide whether he wants the money – and, if so, prove that he has the balls to take on the Peterson brothers and the lawyers for the union and the local management of the mine, who are all manoeuvring to make him the scapegoat for the disaster. Spice is added when Ballard falls in love with the Petersons’ winsome sister, Liz, and the most thuggish Peterson brother, Charlie, threatens to murder Ballard if he keeps on seeing her…
  • In the flashbacks (which are also proceeding in chronological order, reflecting the accounts given in the courtroom). Even though we know the outcome ie the disastrous avalanche, nonetheless the scenes become increasingly tense as catastrophe looms. From the first avalanche and the power being cut, I found it genuinely hard to put this book down, in fact I kept on reading it into the early hours.

Disaster!

When the avalanche comes it is described at length and in detail. As in the ‘disaster movies’ which were so popular in the 1970s, the creator lingers in loving detail over the range of macabre, cruel and sadistic deaths he has contrived for his character:

Rawson is getting medical supplies when the avalanche smashes through the wall smashing a big jar of hydrochloric acid all over him.

Rawson was buried about twenty yards away and was dying slowly and quite painfully as the acid ate at his flesh. Fortunately, when he opened his mouth to scream it filled with soft snow and he died mercifully and quickly of asphyxia. (p.191)

Tastes have changed. I found the relish with which so many deaths were described revolting.

  • The drinkers in the local hotel are all killed, devastated by flying bottles and broken glass.
  • A lot of the town’s old people have gathered in the mayor’s house half way up the slope opposite to the danger one: nonetheless, the 200-mile-an-hour pressure wave makes the house explode as if hit by a ten-ton bomb, and survivors describe it as a butchers’ shop covered with blood and slabs of flesh.
  • Cameron, the mine manager, is trapped in the cab of his lorry which rolls over and over in the avalanche, his foot caught between pedal and brake until he comes to rest hanging upside down, with numerous broken bones, a position he stays in until he hears the water of the river, blocked by avalanche snow, beginning to fill the cab to drown him.
  • Nice old Mrs Sawnton who manned the telephone exchange is told to make for safety but as she’s getting up the phone rings, she stays to answer it, and the entire mine building, lifted by the hurtling snow, falls on the exchange crushing her.
  • Dave Scanlon is caught in the open, hit by a flying truck which mashes him ‘to a bloody pulp’.
  • Len Baxter is killed by flying bricks then buried by snow.
  • Phil Warrick is thrown against the red-hot stove he’d been feeding all morning, forced to embrace it and burned alive.

And so it goes on, a long list of ‘innocent’ townspeople – fictional characters – killed, tortured, eviscerated, mashed, crushed, burned to bloody messes. It is compelling, gripping but not pleasant reading.

Even when the avalanche has subsided and mountain rescue teams arrive, led by a squad of notably efficient and helpful Americans, accidents still occur. An American tourist, Newman, had taken shelter in a small cave in the avalanche’s path, and is trapped in it with half a dozen others, most of whom lose hope in the claustrophobic dark. But he heroically tunnels out of the cave using a ballpoint pen, and it takes 24 hours of relentless digging for him to make it almost to the surface of the sow, a full 60 feet above him, when one of the rescuers treads through the narrow layer of snow just as he approaches the surface, stepping directly onto his head, making him lose his grip and fall the 60 feet back down the narrow twisting tunnel, breaking his neck. The others, still left in the cave are rescued alive.

These closing pages are full of vignettes like that, which are – I suppose – somehow intended to make the reader feel horror at the randomness of Fate. Perhaps you’re meant to feel more manly, because you’re tough enough to read all these horrors. Perhaps it has the same appeal as gruesome horror movies.

What makes it a disaster movie

As mentioned, a number of Hammond Innes novels describe major disasters and loss of life, but only when I read this Bagley novel did I for the first time think that there might be a category of ‘disaster novels’ like there are ‘disaster movies’. I think the difference between an adventure novel with a catastrophe in it, and a ‘disaster novel’ would be the lip-smacking voyeuristic descriptions of gruesome individual deaths. In Atlantic Fury the sinking of the landing craft and loss of life is essentially a backdrop to the narrative, and we mainly read about just the narrator’s experience: here in The Snow Tiger, the detailed description of a lot of grotesquely horrible deaths is at the imaginative heart of the enterprise, and the plight of the main protagonist (Ballard and his love affair) pales next to it.

The narrator takes a kind of sadistic pleasure in pointing out that, even after the avalanche has finished, tragedy continues, the striking example being the mid-air collision of a rescue helicopter – loaded with injured survivors – which takes off vertically into the path of a light airplane overflying the valley. Both plummet to the ground in flames. Pye, the local policeman, and Quentin, the union official, rush forward to open the helicopter doors and try and free the trapped passengers.

It was at that moment that the petrol ignited. He saw a white flash and felt searing heat, and when he inhaled his next breath he drew flaming petrol vapour into his lungs. He felt no pain and was dead before he knew it, and so was Bill Quentin, Mrs Haslam, Harry Baker and his co-pilot. (p.230)

Bagley’s prose style

The prose style is clear, factual Bagley. Despite being set in the stunning mountain scenery of New Zealand, there are few if any extended descriptions. Instead Bagley is interested in the minutiae of the exchanges in the court room, or in the hotel at Hukahoronui. Just before the avalanche occurs he devotes several pages to a Wikipedia-style explanation of the complicated physical processes snow undergoes which make an avalanche happen. And when the catastrophe happens and scores of people die in garishly gruesome ways, Bagley’s flat, police-record-style descriptions make the suffering all the more vivid, disgusting and compelling.

Title

The title doesn’t refer to the animal, the white tiger – but to a proverb by the snow expert Matthias Zdarsky: ‘Snow is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing – it is a tiger in lamb’s clothing’. Similarly misleading, I thought the cover image (below) might refer to some kind of chase, as if this were an espionage novel – but it is not, it is a disaster novel, and the image depicts the gruesome moment, described above, when the helicopter and plane collide.

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1970s Fontana paperback edition of The Snow Tiger

1970s Fontana paperback edition of The Snow Tiger

Bagley’s books

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by Simon on February 10, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on February 10, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/the-snow-tiger-desmond-bagley/

Circus by Alistair MacLean (1975)

‘What is it, Bruno? What drives you? You are a driven man, don’t you know that? You don’t work for the CIA and this damnable anti-matter can’t mean all the world to you. Yet I know, I know you’re willing to die to get inside that damnable prison. Why, Bruno, why?’
(Circus, page 90)

The setting is, well, a circus, one of the most famous in America, whose top attraction is the renowned trapeze artist Bruno Wildermann, an emigré from an unnamed East European country. The novel opens with two agents from the CIA going to the circus to enjoy the show but mainly to see Bruno and his two brothers, the ‘Blind Eagles’. Afterwards, they approach Bruno and the circus-owner, Wrinfield, to ask if they will cooperate with the CIA and take the circus on a tour of Eastern Europe. One of the stops would just happen to be near a particular prison-cum-research laboratory in the city of Cranau, where our spies tell us that the dastardly communists are working on some kind of anti-matter weapon. Bruno’s mission would be to break into it. Bruno and Wrinfield agree. What could possibly go wrong?

Almost immediately the ‘MacLean mayhem’ begins, namely both the agents we met in the opening pages are murdered: one gets an ice pick through the neck in his apartment; the other is lured back to the circus where he is thrown into the cage full of tigers which tear him to pieces.

Wrinfield and Bruno are visited by the man who appears to be in charge of the operation, discreetly referred to as ‘the Admiral’ and, despite these unfortunate deaths, they assure him they want to go ahead. So the Admiral hustles things along: getting them to cancel their American tour so as to crack on to Europe; inserting a doctor, Harper, into the circus to act as contact; and giving Wrinfield a new ‘PA’, the pretty young Maria. Bruno is told to pretend to fall in love with her. Astonishingly, the pair find themselves falling in love for real.

The circus plays a few more American dates then loads onto a cargo ship and crosses the Atlantic. Wrinfield’s nephew, Henry, has come along for the ride and because he’s taken a fancy to pretty young Maria. Maria and Bruno put up with his harmless flirting, until his snooping discovers that some of the crew are bugging her cabin – and they realise that he’s discovered them – at which point he is coshed and thrown overboard.

In other words, this side-plot shows that someone is seeking to undermine the mission before it’s properly started, though it is never really revealed who. (In fact, by the book’s end I’d completely forgotten that I was meant to be interested in finding out who murdered the two agents, Pilgrim, Fawcett, and loverboy Henry. These earlier sections just don’t hang very well with the later sections: the text as a whole lacks the joined-up narrative suspense of the earlier, successful novels. It feels more ‘bitty’.)

A part of the book’s comic strip superficiality is the way everyone takes this and the earlier murders in their stride ie they have zero emotional impact. Instead, the circus unloads in Italy onto a long, specially-built circus train, and commence their European tour which brings them across the Iron Curtain into the unnamed East European country.

Here there’s a lot more palaver, with the two ‘Blind Eagles’ of Bruno’s act going missing, presumed kidnapped from the circus train. We meet the Head of the Secret Police, Sergius (who has only a sinister hole where his mouth should be, the result of some horrible wartime injury) who visits the circus, greets all the performers warmly, then listens to Bruno’s bugged conversations with Maria (everyone’s phone is bugged in this novel) and is generally shown to be one step ahead of the conspirators. We witness a scene in which Sergius and his deputy eavesdrop on everything Bruno is telling Maria about the upcoming heist, then turn away chuckling, thinking they have these poor American agents completely under control.

Except that, in the big twist of the book, Bruno and his team of experts from the circus (Kan Dahn the strongman, Roebuck the lasso expert, Manuelo the knife thrower) break into the prison/laboratory one day earlier than everyone expected. Ha!

The plan depends on Bruno’s ability to walk – balancing with a trapeze artist’s pole – the 300 yards along a power cable (turned off) from the power station over the barbed wire fence & walls into the prison/lab. Which he does in quite a tense scene. Once there he disables the guards with a poison gas squirter (very Man from UNCLE), helps the rest of the gang shimmy up ropes and then they:

  • move systematically around the watch-towers, disabling & tying up the guards
  • break quietly into the lab
  • find the bedroom of the evil scientist, van Diemen, and extract from him the formula for the dastardly secret weapon
  • move on to the prison where they find not only the two missing acrobats – presumed kidnapped earlier in the story, in fact held by the State Police – but also Bruno’s parents, locked up in his youth. It was their arrest which prompted his escape to the West all those years earlier. Aha. For him, the whole mission has been about releasing them.

BUT – it’s at exactly this moment of triumph that the voice of the Head of Secret Police, Sergius, says ‘Drop your guns.’ Oops. He is standing there with a gun, next to none other than Dr Harper. Hang on! Isn’t this the Dr Harper who ‘the Admiral’ asked the circus to take along as the CIA contact? Does this mean that – Dr Harper is a fiendish double agent? Was it Dr Harper who arranged the murder of Fawcett and Pilgrim back in the States, and of poor Henry on the ocean liner? The cad!

For a moment things look bad for Bruno and our boys. But only for a moment. In a split second of distraction, Manuelo throws a knife at Sergius, Dr Harper shoots van Dieman (who Bruno was using as a shield) at the same moment as Bruno fires one of his poison darts which hits Harper in the neck. Wham! The three baddies – Sergius, Harper, van Diemen – are dead. Quick!

Our boys leg it. As more or less all the guards are gassed and tied up, they simply shin down the rope to street level, and jump into various cars. Bruno and Maria head for the woods where they rendezvous with a helicopter which flies them to a US ship waiting in the Baltic, and so back to the States. The three performers motor back to the circus in time to carry out their performances and thus have the perfect alibi. While the deputy head of the Secret Police is distraught to come across the prison and lab full of tied-up guards and – horror of horrors! – the corpses of his boss (Sergius), the American double agent (Harper), and their leading scientist (van Diemen).

These later MacLean novels all end very abruptly with only a few sentences of wind-up. Same happens here, as Bruno and Maria walk into the office of ‘the Admiral’ back at CIA headquarters, where they announce they got married on the ship back from Europe. Bruno also reveals that he tore up the plans for the dastardly weapon without even looking at them (good chap) and the Admiral is so cross he threatens to fire him. Fire him?

Because of course, dear Reader, Bruno Wildermann is not only the world’s greatest trapeze artist – he is also one of the CIA’s best agents 🙂

This makes a bit of a nonsense of the opening scenes where the CIA agents go along to check Bruno out and ask if he’ll undertake the mission. But this isn’t a book which encourages too much thought, you’re just meant to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Comment

In MacLean’s classic novels (Night Without End to Puppet On a Chain) the tension is ratcheted up so high you can hardly breathe while you read them. This one, like the previous couple of novels, mostly lacks that element of nailbiting tension because you know all too well what is going to happen: some brutal murders set the tone, and there may a number of tense and exciting scene – but we know our hero will turn out to know, or to be, more than he lets on and – after handling a few, sometimes quite brutal, setbacks – will manage to defeat the baddies and emerge from the climactic confrontation to the cheers of the crowd and kisses from his new girlfriend. Or wife. This is more or less what happens in Caravan to Vaccarès, The Way to Dusty Death, Breakheart Pass and this one.

Alistair MacLean reviews

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by Simon on February 5, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 5, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/02/05/circus-alistair-maclean/

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