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Monday, November 28, 2005The Blackbirder
By Dorothy B. Hughes. Copyright 2004 (reprint), The Feminist Press at CUNY.
The modern definition of a "strong female character" is to basically take a beautiful woman and make her act and talk exactly like a man, to have her fly around and do kungfu and whip about heavy weaponry in a nonchalant fashion fully incongruous with the fact that the actress in question probably barely weighs a hundred pounds. Hughes' older work, however, is a far more believable and far more complex approach to the strong female protagonist. The character at the center of the action in The Blackbirder, Julie Guilles, behaves and thinks largely as a woman of the era might -- a psychological realness that comes, no doubt, from the fact that the character is being written by an actual woman, rather than by a twenty-something male screenwriter with very little life experience. Julie Guilles is feminine, but there's nothing in that, that makes her the least bit weak. She gets tired, confused, and makes wrong decisions, but all of that has more to do with being an actual, believable human character than it does with gender. Julie has been living a modest but comfortable existence in New York City, and no one around her knows her true identity, or that she was previously being raised by a wealthy French family and had to flee the country as the German army swept through it. Although she has American parents, she is functionally French and without any American passport or papers, so she does her best to keep a low profile amid the growing paranoia over Axis spies in the United States. Her simple life falls to pieces when she runs into an old acquaintance from Paris, who after their meeting, ends up dead outside her apartment. Afraid that whoever killed him might be interested in her, and doubly afraid of going to the police for fear of showing up on the FBI radar and ending up in an internment camp or deported, Julie decides to go on the run. The appearance of her old acquaintance also puts her on to the fact their long lost love is still alive and, it seems, involved in some way with a "blackbird" operation -- flying European refugees clandestinely into America over the Mexican border. She decides to travel across the country to Santa Fe, to a location she finds in the dead man's address book, presumably that of the blackbirder who can reunite her with her lover and spirit them to safety before the police and FBI link the murder to Julie and uncover the thin veil of disguises she's employed to protect herself. Unfortunately, it looks like someone might be following her as she makes her way by train, bus, and car across America, and before too long, she discovers that there's a lot more going on around her than just a murder. Hughes' characters are expertly drawn, and the author creates an incredibly submersive feeling of desperation and paranoia in the story. Everyone is believably sinister, and Hughes' exploration of Julie's mental state as she attempts to navigate the murky waters of subterfuge, secret identities, and espionage in which she finds herself is razor sharp. It doesn't take too long for the reader to become just as wary and just as suspicious of every pair of eyes the story introduces. Julie is a wonderful protagonist, competent and determined, but also prone to despair and simple weariness -- traits that make her both likeable and believable, far more so than the gun-toting comic book characters of today's entertainment. Hughes relies on one of the most effective tricks -- that of putting a very normal person into an extraordinary situation, then allowing the reader to watch the character rise to the occasion. The supporting characters are excellent as well, as are the various locations Hughes employs as her heroine flees the snowy streets of New York City for Chicago, and ultimately, the rustic streets of 1940s Santa Fe and surrounding desert and mountains. Everyone, from the man in the gray suit to the nurse on the train, from the weird weasly guy to the blackbirder himself, are believably written to invoke suspicion without being clumsy or obvious. To obviously make someone suspicious in a thriller is to practically telegraph their eventual innocence, but Hughes plays things on a more subtle level, and as a result, the tension never relents. Who's FBI? Who's a German spy? What's the sinister secret that has led everyone to the nondescript house of a meek man on the outskirts of Santa Fe? This is the very definition of a page-turner, and Hughes executes it with panache, originality, and an unfaltering sense of excitement and danger. It would have made an excellent Hitchcock movie, though I don't know if Hitch would have been as keen on being sympathetic to the female lead as the story demands. I'd say it's a shame the story was never adapted for the screen, but it really isn't, since we have the book, and that's even better. There is a definite and detectable difference in the way a woman writes this story as opposed to how a man may have written it. The book was recently reprinted by the Feminist Press, who recently began a campaign to resurrect a whole host of pulp novels by female writers and thus highlight the important but often ignored role they played in the pulp scene. Most of these stories, as I said earlier, are lesbian romance novels that aren't of much interest to me. Turgid romance novels are turgid romance novels, regardless of the sex of the primaries. But Dorothy Hughes explored territory that was ordained the property of male writers, and her take on the subject of World War II espionage is both thrilling and acutely personal. I don't know that a man writing the same story would have explored the psychology of the female lead quite so successfully. Julie becomes a very real character, and the danger around her is also very real. There is no sense of the fantastic, no outrageous moment of derring-do, although the book is certainly packed with thrilling chapters and plenty of action. I don't want to indulge too much in the "what if" scenario of comparing and contrasting what a woman did write to what a man might have written. What matters is that, regardless of gender, Dorothy Hughes wrote a thriller that measures up admirably to any standard, male or female, by which you'd care to measure it. Labels: Espionage posted by Keith at 5:35 PM | 0 Comments Assignment: Moon Girl By Edward S. Aarons. Copyright 1967, Fawcett Publishing.It's been a long, long time since I dug into another Sam Durell adventure from Edward S. Aarons, which mkes no sense at all, seeing as the first two I read (Assignment: Nuclear Nude and Assignment: Ankara) were spectacular. Well, high time to rectify that. Aarons' "Sam Durell" novels, about the adventures of operative Sam Durell, a.k.a. The Cajun, often get compared to and lumped in with the legion of James Bond imitators that came in the wake of Ian Fleming's success. I myself have no doubt done this, but that was because I wa sad and ignorant and shameful. After learning a little more about Aarons and the history of the Sam Durell books, it becomes evident that, despite the fact that Bond and Durell share a remarkable number of traits, it's unlikely that Fleming's books were much of -- if any -- influence on Aarons when he was writing his first Sam Durell novel, which came out in 1955, less than a year after the initial publication of Fleming's Casino Royale. Both Bond and Durell are expert gamblers. Both work for special "problem solving" departments in their respective organizations (MI6 for Bond, the CIA for Durell). Both have tough bosses behind big desks (something that would become a staple of just about all spy novels, good and bad). In terms of physical appearance, both men are described similarly. Durell is a little earthier, a little more rogh and tumble, while Bond is a little more refined and playboyish. It would seem that the one had to come from the other, but keep in mind that Aarons' first Durell novel (Assignment to Danger) came out well before Casino Royale and James Bond made any sort of impact. Fleming's stories weren't instant successes. It took a while for the Bond train to build steam, and while it's possible that Aarons read Casino Royale, it's just as likely that it was simply a case of two different men looking at the world and coming to a similar litarary conclusion. It's not nearly as rare or unlikely as it might sound, especially since both men were likely influenced by the same crop of noir writers from earlier decades. Aarons was definitely the more experienced writer of the two. Born in Philadelphia, 1916, he attended Columbia University, where he received a degree in history before serving as a chief pett officer int he Coast Guard during WWII (Fleming himself served in WWII in a similar homeland capacity for Naval Intelligence). Aarons also began a steady career as a writer for pulp magazines, including contributions to The Avenger and Angel Detective, collections of stories about a Saint-style character that were also adapted for comic format by Timely (later known as Marvel) Comics. Aarons worked frequently as a mystery writer throughout the 1940s, until publishing Assignment to Danger in 1955, which established the character of Sam Durell and the writer Edward Aarons as major forces in pulp action novels. By contrast, Casino Royale was the first novel for Ian Fleming. But the dice often roll in an unpredictable fashion, and while Fleming went on (deservedly so) to become one of the most popular espionage/action novel writers of all time, Aarons' stories -- which are generally just as or even more accomplished than Fleming's -- remained in the pulp/potboiler ghetto. It wasn't a bad place to be, all things considered, and Aarons managed to write some fifty titles featuring Sam Durell, but as with Donald Hamilton and Matt Helm, it's a shame that Aarons never acquired a following outside the pulp/genre cult following, because his books definitely deserve to be just as highly lauded and celebrated as Fleming's (while Donald Hamilton, at least in the 60s and 70s, deserves to stand above both of them, in my opinion). But it hasn't worked out that way. While Fleming enjoys continued mass popularity and recognition and gets his books reprinted in new editions from Vintage Books with dazzling, sexy covers, Edward S. Aarons remains all but forgotten save by a core of dedicated readers who keep holding out hope that some day he'll get the recognition he deserves. Assignment Moon Girl is a solid example of just how good the Sam Durell novels can be. When a beautiful Russian cosmonaut pops up in Iran, half out of her mind and babbling about having just returned from the moon, Durell is called in to join the race to find her. The Russians want her because she's half Russian, and her father is a significant player in the Russian bid for a moon landing. The Chinese want her because she is half Chinese and can potentially give them valuable information for their own space program. Certain rebel elements in Iran want her so she can be used as a bargaining chip. And Durell things the whole moon trip thing is a lie, but he still wants to find her first so she can be questioned then returned to the USSR. The assignment leads him from the streets of pre-revolution Tehran into the deserts of Iran and, so it would seem, even to the moon at one point. Aarons' novels are heavy on action and intrigue and very light on gratuitous sex and sleaze -- which again makes them more in line with the works of Fleming and Hamilton and less so with series like the Nick Carter books. Though the book does use the phrase "proud breasts" as soon as the first page, and although there is some nudity both male and female and when the cosmonaut, Tanya, and later Durell himself find themselves prisoners in a tiger pit, there is no sex in the book, although in classic Bond formula, the hint of a little fun to come s squeezed into the last page as Durell decides to show a lovely former Chinese agent the glories of the free world. The Chinese woman is a disgruntled servant of one Madame Hung, who is a recurring character in the books and Durell's sour-faced arch nemesis (we last saw her in Assignment Nuclear Nude -- which I believe takes place directly after this story even though I read it first). Why are all evil Chinese women called Madame so-and-so? In fact, most of the time, regardless of the race of the person, if they insist on being referred to as Madame Something, you can bet they're probably up to something nefarious. Aarons' description of Hung is truly harrowing -- faded beauty twisted by age and wickedness -- and although she's slight of build and not physically imposing, Hung's manipulation of situations to her advantage and her cruelty when she has the upper hand make her a formidable nemesis. Aarons was also one of the most racially progressive of the espionage writers of the era, at least in the books I've read. His cast of foreign characters is always sprinkled with a few rotten eggs, but for the most part, they're an assembly of decent and sometimes even heroic supporting characters. The Iranian officer Hanookh is a solid hero, noble and dedicated if a bit naïve, and the Chinese agent, despite being named Lotus and acting demurely for most of the book, is never pictured as anything less than dependable and competent. We also get a decent glimpse at pre-fundamentalist Ira, when it was on its way to being a jewel in the Middle East. My how the times have changed. Moon Girl isn't a book for exploring Middle eastern politics -- too much has changed since its original publication, but it does remind one that the civilizations of the Middle East were, at one time, the apex of civilization in the world. While Europe wallowed in filth and ignorance, it was the kingdoms of the Middle East who protected and preserved the classic works, sciences, and histories of the Greeks and Romans, which would quite possible have been forever lost if entrusted to Europe during the Dark Ages. But Islam is still a young religion, comparatively speaking, and such religions have a tendency to follow historical patterns. So just as Christianity endured an era in which ignorance and violent fanaticism dominated its landscape, so now Islam has entered its version of the Dark Ages, whence the vestiges of its former glories and enlightened nature are lost amid the flow of bloodthirsty and greedy manipulators who strive to keep the people ignorant, suspicious, and oppressed. There's no doubt that Islam will emerge from this era, the same as Christianity did, but the question remains: will it be a centuries-long process, as it was in the Dark Ages, or will the spread of modern technology and society accelerate Islam's entry into their eventual Renaissance? Let's hope it the latter. At best, that's hinted at in this book, as characters from time to time mention the astoundingly glorious past of Persian Iran. The better espionage novels are always informed by such reflections on history and modern society. But such tapestries are always the backdrop for action, and Durell really goes through the ringer on this one. He's frequently beaten, bashed on the head, and drugged. In fact, he may get smashed in the back of the head in this book almost as often as Philip Marlowe drinks scotch in Farewell, My Lovely. Like any espionage thriller, there's a fair amount of luck and coincidence helping Durell along, but Aarons creates a solid, realistic framework for his story and thus makes the coincidences easy to accept. Assignment Moon Girl is both straight-forward and smart. There are some twists and turns, but no real shockers. Aarons spins a streamlined action-adventure yarn that remains relatively clever while still being easy to digest. I don't sail through a Sam Durell novel at the same speed as a Nick Carter novel, but that's because there's more to savor. I'm not acquainted enough yet with Aarons' overall body of work (though a towering stack of his books on my shelves will help rectify that quickly) to declare Assignment Moon Girl to be Aarons at his best. But it's a damn good book. Bloody, action-packed, and swiftly-paced. posted by Keith at 1:25 PM | 6 Comments Monday, November 14, 2005Farewell, My Lovely
By Raymond Chandler. Copyright 1998 (reprint), Vintage Books.
Farewell, My Lovely finds Chandler's iconic Los Angeles private eye, Philip Marlowe, working on a go-nowhere case that doesn't interest him in the least and doesn't even go that far to paying any bills. Marlowe happens to be walking out of one joint at precisely the same moment a giant of a man is walking into another, which catches Marlowe's attention since the giant is white and the establishment into which he's walking is for blacks. Marlowe can't help but let his curiosity get the better of him, and before too long he's caught up in a case that involves a murdered black club owner, a sumo-sized ex-con, a jewel heist that leads to murder, and the usual assortment of seedy characters, dandies, dangerous women, crooked cops, and con artists. Chandler delights in plots that twist and turn and become convoluted and disorienting, and Farewell, My Lovely is one of his most insane. It features rich gigolos, sleazy psychics, pungent smelling shamans, and dope peddling doctors, among other seedy characters But no matter how outlandish the story becomes, no matter what bizarre avenue Chandler chooses to send Marlowe down, he keeps everything tethered to believability through the sheer force of his prose, which as with The Big Sleep, emerges as some of the best, most elegant, poetic, and evocative writing in the history of American writing. I said it before, and I'll say it again, Chandler can write circles around any other guy in the game, including heavies like Hemingway (who emerges as the butt of one of Marlowe's jokes in this story) and Faulkner, even though they enjoy positions as intellectually lauded literary giants while Chandler often remains confined to the genre fiction ghetto, which in a way is a perfect reflection on the life of his signature character. The first-person narrative bristles with wit and world-weary smart-assness. Chandler chooses to handle Marlowe's narration as a series of self-deprecating jokes and wry observations, always with the underlying hint of a lonely, tired man who struggle son to make the world a better place despite the ugliness he sees every day. Marlowe is never as tough or as cold as he likes to think he is, and the wide streak of humanist compassion that runs beneath his crusty exterior is what makes him such a dynamic character. He certainly takes his lumps in this story, too. Aside from drinking heavier than usual -- and Marlowe always drinks a lot -- he gets sapped too many times to count, choked and thrown around by a giant Indian, beat up by crooked cops, and shot full of dope. Marlowe is definitely abused and rumpled as his raincoat in this book. But the real strength of Farewell, My Lovely, which does have a plot that meanders perhaps a little too leisurely for some readers, is the power behind Chandler's description. When Marlowe pays a visit to a drunken widow who might be able to help him figure out a piece of the puzzle, the description of her sordid existence is so vivid, so strong, that you can literally feel a heavy, drunken crust forming in your sore eyes, can feel the film of greasy sweat on your face, smell the stagnant air thick with smoke and the fumes of cheap booze. When the chapter finally draws to a close and Marlowe comments on that fact that leaning against the woman's door frame made him want to take a shower, all you can think about is how much you need to take a shower, too. It's vile and unappealing, but good lord, what powerful writing. Farewell, My Lovely is a steady processions of such exercises in literary power. It's as close as you can get to riding shotgun with a melancholy private dick through the underbelly of southern California circa 1940 without actually traveling back in time to do it. Marlowe is helped out along the way by a truly grotesque cast of supporting characters, almost all of whom are either deceitful, rotten, or at the best, pathetic in some fashion. His dame this time around is Ann Riorden, a red-headed Irish girl who claims to be a reporter and can't seem to keep her nose out of the jewel heist-murder any better than Marlowe can. Farewell, My Lovely is also informed by a simmering racial tension that, despite being expressed in the terms of the day that wouldn't fly with contemporary audiences, shows that Chandler had his finger -- and his main character -- on the pulse of steadily growing dissatisfaction among the black population of America. When Marlowe accidentally bears witness to ex-con Moose Malloy murdering the black owner of a black club, he finds he's the only one with much interest in solving the case. It's only when the case expands, and he figures out that it's connected in some way to the theft of a priceless jade necklace and the murder of a rich white man who turns out to be a gigolo that the authorities take an interest in what Marlowe's doing. And Marlowe observes several times himself that if you kill a black man, no one seems to care, but if you kill a white man, it's all over the news. Chandler's handling of the racial aspects of the story isn't exactly delicate -- Marlowe doesn't do anything delicately -- but his relationship with the black characters who appear in the book is certainly friendlier and more progressive than most. For Marlowe, color doesn't much matter. He knows people of all colors are equally capable of being rotten. I don't think Farewell, My Lovely is as accessible a story as The Big Sleep. It's not as quickly paced and, at least on the surface, not quite as engaging. But if you spend more time with Farewell, My Lovely, the genius behind it becomes blazingly evident. The narrative is as complex as the plot it attempts to relay, and there's a tremendous feeling of being, like Marlowe, caught up in a series of events that are just too out of control and too weird to ever fully grasp. And as melancholy as the story is, it's also very funny. The focus here is less on the plot and more on developing Marlowe's personality and his twisted sense of humor, which sometimes seems to be all that he has left to keep him from just killing himself. At the same time, we get glimpses into Marlowe that are far more nihilistic and morose than anything we got in The Big Sleep. He's the wounded soldier, smirking even though he's bleeding, dulling the pain with another class of scotch and moving forward even though the world around him is dying. Farewell, My Lovely wasn't as easy or as exciting to read as The Big Sleep, but it's definitely going to haunt me and have me pondering it for a longer time. What a completely stunning book. Labels: Espionage posted by Keith at 4:17 PM | 2 Comments Friday, November 11, 2005Moonraker
By Ian Fleming. Copyright 2002 (reprint), Penguin Publishing.
By Moonraker, the third of Fleming's books detailing the adventures of commander James Bond, he'd really hit his stride. His prose his sharp, his characters well-drawn, and the pace is breathtaking. Fleming continues to explore his main character while, at the same, time forging to of the literary series' most memorable supporting characters: larger-than-life Hugo Drax and the sharp, capable police woman Gala Brand. This is also the book that gives fans of the movies something they never got from any of the cinematic incarnations of Bond: a look into his daily routine. Based solely on the films, you'd think Bond was forever on flashy, dangerous assignments, a man with no home and no break from his routine of espionage and globe-trotting adventure. Moonraker, however, opens with Bond dealing with the mundane daily tasks of his job. We find out that he's really only on book-worthy assignments a few times a year, and the bulk of his time is occupied with reading through dossiers and doing paperwork. Ha! I knew it! Of course, it takes a very clever movie to deal with this reality of the spying game and still make it interesting. Watching your lead character fill out forms and file paperwork isn't normally thrilling cinema, even if that's the reality behind much of what goes on. It's much more fun to watch Sean Connery get a fat man sucked through the window of an airplane, and so far only the Ipcress File starring Michael Caine and produced by Bond producer Harry Saltzman has managed to make the mind-numbing tedium of spying as a day job seem interesting to watch. Saltzman originally made that movie, or so I hear, to give audiences a more down-to-earth version of secret service work than he was dishing out in his Bond films, where he was constantly calling for giant things to explode or that elephants stampede through downtown Bangkok, or whatever crazy idea he'd dreamt up at the time to cause his co-producer, Albert Broccoli, headaches. Although The Ipcress File is adapted from the Harry Palmer stories by Len Deighton, I can't help but wonder if Fleming's exploration of Bond's non-adventure daily routine in Moonraker might have had some influence as well. We also get a chance to see Bond's home, which I'm sure wasn't a big deal at the time, but again, coming from a background in which I was (and still am) more familiar with the movies than the books, it's novel to glimpse Bond just sitting around at home -- or to even hear that he has a home. Now if we can just get a passage where he has to go grocery shopping or cook himself up some beans, he'll be just as homey as Harry Palmer. Naturally, these quaint moments of "just another day at the offices of MI6" don't last long. Bond is soon called in to M's office for, he soon discovers, a purely personal matter (or so it seems until the very end of the book): M is a member of an exclusive gentleman's club, back when those were clubs for gentlemen to sit around, smoke, drink, and play cards I a dignified and classy fashion, rather than what they are today, which is a place where loud-mouthed yuppies and arrogant investment bankers go to buy overpriced champagne and look at silicone boobs. I have no problem with nudity, but I can always do without loud-mouthed yuppies and arrogant investment bankers (non-arrogant investment bankers, I assume, will mostly help me plan for the future, which isn't bad). Also boasting membership at the club, called Blades, is one Sir Hugo Drax, a recent British media darling who is spearheading the Moonraker program that will give England its first long-range missile defense system. Little is known about Drax. He was wounded in the war and suffered amnesia, but eventually managed to rejoin society and make millions by investing in rare metals. Despite his position of respect, however, he is also loud-mouthed and arrogant -- so hey I guess those guys have always been in gentlemen's clubs. And he cheats at cards. This is what's causing M some problems. Why would such a wealthy and respected businessman, the hero of England, do something as silly as cheat at cards? M asks Bond, the secret service's best gambler remember, to help him put an end to Drax's cheating without actually making it known that Drax is a cheat. They want to avoid besmirching England's valiant protector, after all, since the Moonraker program is of paramount importance to everyone. Another of Moonraker's wonderful traits is that M plays a much larger role in the action than simply being "the man behind the desk." In this, he's also "the man behind the bridge table" and "the man behind the dinner table" and I think he sits behind a few other surfaces as well. Much is made out of the fact that the Fleming books present a more believable and human Bond. In one sense, this is misleading. I don't find the character of James Bond himself to be too terribly different than the Bond we're familiarized with through the portrayals by Sean Connery and George Lazenby (and to some degree Timothy Dalton, though he was too stiff for my taste). Granted there's very little of the Roger Moore Bond in the books (save perhaps for some of Moore's work in the film version of Live and let Die -- and don't mistake me. Moore is the Bond with whom I grew up, and though I prefer Connery, I love many of the Moore films and really found his performances to be entertaining, campy though they were), but for the most part, Connery catches the hard-edge and wit and while Lazenby and Dalton both captured some of the underlying pathos and loneliness. Where the books succeed at creating a more human Bond is in their effectiveness at creating a more human world for him to inhabit. Rather than a jet-setting superman with no home and nary a dull moment, the books give us a Bond who sits around at home and does paperwork at the office. And it gives us supporting characters that actually play roles beyond those prescribed by their jobs. M does more than sit behind a desk and dole out assignments, and these are the touches, the attention to supporting detail, that make the books "more human" in my opinion. Three books in, and readers will be aware of the fact that Fleming enjoys spending several pages expounding on weird bits of esoterica. Some of it may be things with which he's been familiar with for years; others may be recently learned things that he found so intriguing that he decided to throw them into the book. In Casino Royale, he goes on for pages about everything from the finer points of baccarat to a detailed analysis of Bond's roulette system. In Live and Let Die he indulges in lengthy descriptions of voodoo's history and rituals. For Moonraker he's back to rambling on about gambling, and Moonraker may represent the first and possibly only instance in literature that can boast a truly gripping bridge-playing scene. Now like many people, I know bridge primarily as the game my grandmother and her friends used to play when they got tired of playing bunko (don't know if Bond has ever engaged in a showdown with a crafty enemy agent over a thrilling game of bunko). It's not really, in my mind, fodder for an interesting couple of chapters. But Fleming -- and this is a testament to how far along his writing had come by Moonraker -- not only makes it interesting, but also makes it one of the tensest showdowns in the whole book -- even better than Bond's baccarat duel against Le Chiffre from Casino Royale, just as Fleming's exploration of the minutiae of the game is presented in a more engaging fashion than his ruminations on gambling from the first book, which often came across as a little long-winded and textbookish. Casino Royale makes you want to go out and play a high-stakes game of baccarat or roulette, but that's not so impressive, because those games have always seemed cool. That Moonraker can make me forget my grandmother and her friends and think to myself, "Yeah, I should learn to play a little bridge," is really something else. Too bad Fleming wasn't as charitable with shuffleboard in Live and Let Die. Predictably, though still exciting, Bond bests Drax at the table and send the message that the outlandish character best retire from the practice of scamming his fellow Blades members. But this hardly ends his involvement with Drax. When a murder-suicide results in the death of the head of security for the Moonraker project, Bond is called in to replace him, and along with undercover policewoman Gala Brand, Bond must unravel a conspiracy to sabotage the Moonraker program, which is staffed largely by German rocket scientists with funny moustaches. Or so the case first appears. That the entire story is set in England is another unique aspect of the book -- Fleming points out that, like the American CIA, Bond's organization is not sanctioned to operate on their home soil. That he is given special permission to operate in England is a sign of the Moonraker program's importance. Knowing what we do with hindsight, of course, the twist that reveals more about Drax isn't much a surprise, but that doesn't hinder the book in any way. Ian Fleming has crafted a nearly flawless adventure here. Drax is cartoonish but not so over-the-top that he becomes difficult to swallow. Bond is in top form. Sure, he gets tricked, and he gets tied to a chair, and a cliff falls on him, but that's just par for the course. Bond has been tied to a chair in every book so far. I think he might have been tied to a chair on four or five separate occasions in Live and Let Die alone. But his character is really coming along well in this book. And Gala Brand is one of the best female characters in any of the books. She defers to Bond eventually, needless to say, but she's also written very smart, brave, and competent. She's the one that discovers the true purpose of the Moonraker project and the true nature of Drax's character. And when Bond figures that he's going to have to blow himself up to save England, Gala's the one who comes up with the better plan. And perhaps most delicious of all, she represents the one who gets away. Bond gets a kiss from her, but that's it, much to his disappointment on a final page that, without being at all obvious about it, does a lot to highlight the cord of loneliness and melancholy that runs beneath Bond's bravado and playboy visage and keeps him firmly attached to the classic noir literature protagonists who were Fleming's inspiration. But my favorite part of the whole book -- and in case it's not clear, I absolutely loved this book -- comes during the final meeting between Bond and M, in which Bond reflects on the bizarre series of circumstances that lead to his becoming involved with stopping Drax and saving London. Fleming handles this bit wonderfully. Of course, tremendously fortuitous coincidences and strokes of luck are the stock and trade of Bond, and we simply role with them because what they lead to is usually so much fun. But in a few paragraphs of thought, and without ever stating it outright, Fleming leads Bond and the reader to think that maybe M was interested in more than convincing Drax to stop cheating at cards, that perhaps he already harbored suspicions that Drax was up to something, and that it was Drax, not unknown saboteurs, who posed the real threat to England. And, as I said, Fleming communicates this all with wonderful subtlety, and without ever stating it outright. It's one more example of the attention he's giving to supporting characters, but it's also a testament to how clever and sharp his writing has become by Moonraker. Labels: Author: Ian Fleming, Espionage, Scifi, Series: James Bond posted by Keith at 12:54 PM | 7 Comments Thursday, November 03, 2005Live and Let Die
By Ian Fleming. Copyright 2002 (reprint), Penguin Publishing.
Live and Let Die finds the Bond literary franchise on firm footing, and it should be a far more familiar type of story to Bond fans previously only acquainted with the movies than Casino Royale, which confronted readers with a sort of proto-Bond, an emotional and sometimes petulant agent who was far less ruthless and efficient than one might expect -- at least until the final sentence, when we witness the birth of James Bond as popular culture would come to know him. It is this James Bond -- brash, witty, and deadly ruthless -- that appears in Live and Let Die, and the story is all the better for it, though the continuing evolution of the Bond character is only one of several aspects that make Live and Let Die a much more accomplished and enjoyable read than the previous book. Bond must hunt down Mr. Big, a genius operative who is heading up most of the Russian SMERSH activity from a headquarters in Harlem, where he utilizes the vast network of blue collar black workers largely eschewed by white America. It's the perfect set-up for Big: his people are taxi drivers, porters, hotel clerks -- eyes and ears that can track anyone, anywhere, and at any time without arousing the slightest bit of suspicion. Bond is put on the case when a number of antique coins start showing up in pawn shops and coin dealerships in New York. Some of the coins point to them being from the legendary lost treasure of a pirate who supposedly left a major bundle hidden somewhere in Jamaica. MI6 and the CIA both suspect that Big has found the treasure and is using it to finance his branch of the SMERSH organization. Working alongside CIA agent Felix Leiter once again, Bond must locate the treasure and put an end to Big's operation -- something no agent has been able to do. Complicating matters, as they so often do, is the woman Solitaire, kept by Mr. Big because of her ability to tell the future and glance into the minds of Big's adversaries. She's not happy with being Big's kept woman, though, and she sees Bond as her ticket to freedom. The action moves from the streets of New York to the beaches of Florida, and finally to the island of Jamaica. The Florida sequence, in particular, is notable for boasting possibly the most terrifying description of St. Petersburg ever committed to the page. It's obvious that Fleming must have witnessed and been horrified by the dull, witless lifestyles of America's retirees who moved down to Florida to play shuffleboard and eat awful food. He instills a similar horror at the "oldsters" in both Bond and Leiter, who find themselves in St. Pete after tracing Big's smuggling operation to an exotic fish import company in the city. I can't say my opinion of the oldster lifestyle is very different. I wish them happiness and grant them their retirement, but my God I hope that's not it for me. Juxtaposed with appalled yet humor-infused look at life in St. Pete is one of the series' most grisly scenes -- a mauling by shark that wouldn't show up in a Bond movie until the Timothy Dalton entry, "License to Kill. In fact, this story has much in it that would show up in the Bond films, though not necessarily in the one that shares the title. The character of Quarrel, familiar to fans of the film, Dr No, first appears here. And there is a scene in which Bond and Solitaire are dragged by Big's boat through shallow water and over coral reefs which producers couldn't figure out how to film realistically until For Your Eyes Only. Fleming's prose has been greatly sharpened between his authorship of Casino Royale and this book. He's improved both his command of writing in general and his ability to pace a story. Live and Let Die rarely lets up, and even when Fleming indulges himself in verbose exposition on esoteric topics (in Casino Royale it was is frequent descriptions of the finer points of gambling, which often went for pages; in Live and Let Die it's historical background information on voodoo), he does so in a way that doesn't lose any of the fast pace and tension of the overall story. He also employs use of black slang and vernacular with far more accuracy than you'd expect from an old British guy n the 1950s. For many people, the racial aspect of Live and Let Die is a stumbling block, but for the most part, Fleming handles it with a more progressive view than the majority of his contemporaries. He is careful to point out that the rise of a black criminal like Mr. Big was inevitable. Black culture, despite all it had endured in the past couple hundred years, was very quick to produce geniuses in every walk of life. It was only a matter of time before it also produces a criminal genius. And Fleming's idea of having Big use a network of black informants who are at once everywhere and yet, in the eyes of many whites, practically non-existent was both a clever way to move the espionage forward in a believable fashion while also taking a shot at the way white culture disregarded black even though black culture had contributed so much to the overall culture. Fleming -- through Bond -- is also vocal in expressing his admiration for Mr. Big, a complex villain who emerges as one of the smartest and most efficient villains Bond has ever faced. Big doesn't rely on brute strength alone, and Bond frequently comments on the frightening brilliance of the man's mind. In the end, as I've stated elsewhere, I don't have many hang-ups about race relations handling in old books. Fleming's not perfect in his dealings with it, but all things considered, he's more on top of things than many, and what racism there is in Live and Let Die is mild, comparatively speaking. Live and Let Die definitely picks up the pace and sets the bar higher than was done in Casino Royale. For me, looking back, it seems as if the success of Casino Royale was almost lucky. It was a good book, but not great, and James Bond was sort of irritating. It was a look at Ian Fleming's potential, where as Live and Let Die is an example of the author living up to that potential and turning in a thrilling, complex adventure novel that is much better at showing you why the character of James Bond has endured for so many decades. Labels: Author: Ian Fleming, Espionage, Series: James Bond posted by Keith at 5:03 PM | 2 Comments Tuesday, November 01, 2005Operation Moon Rocket
1968, Universal Publishing.
It's been a while since we last saw what sort of trouble our favorite sleazy spy, Nick Carter could get himself into, so I figured it was high time we caught up with the man. Since I have an impending trip to Florida come this winter, I went with one of Nick's Florida-based adventures, Operation Moon Rocket, in which Agent N3, Killmaster for AXE, must foil a dastardly plot to derail America's Apollo space program through the judicious use of blackmail and sabotage. All clues point to agents of Communist China as the villains behind the string of harrowing accidents that have plagued the program, but Carter soon learns that there's something much more sinister going on than the mere meddling of Red China. I'm a sucker for anything involving spying and the space program, and then also a sucker for anything involving spying and guys running around 1960s Florida. It delighted me when Matt Helm spent some time in one of my old home states, and I figured on being doubly delighted by Carter engaging in shenanigans involving Cape Canaveral, Cocoa Beach, and various tacky Florida locations. For the most part, the book does not disappoint. It's yet another fast-paced story that can be finished in a single sitting -- or trips in to work on the B train for me. There's also a remarkable level of restraint shown through much of the book. Though our first glimpse of Carter finds him reclining on the beach with a tan Florida cutie, he doesn't actually get laid until halfway through the book, which must be some sort of a record for a series of espionage novels where, most of the time, the lead character can't seem to go half a dozen pages without finding himself in between some willing young woman's thighs. And it's always been a source of amusement for Nick Carter fans to see how long it takes before we find him in such a situation. Some books even open that way on page one. Operation Moon Rocket is, however, decidedly unsleazy, at least as compared to some of the other Carter adventures. There are only two sex "scenes," and although the author (yet another nameless, faceless contributor to the ongoing series) lingers on some "as graphic as you could get at the time" passages, the fact that he only indulges twice is remarkable. Remember, once again, this is a series of adventures in which a female agent in one book is captured and tortured with an electric-dildo-orgasmo machine by a lascivious Communist Chinese mad scientist. But what really sets Operation Moon Rocket apart from some of the lesser entries in the series is that it's a well-written and snappy book. Nick Carter adventures don't exist so the anonymous authors can indulge in flowing prose and feats of literary genius. They exist to provide readers with maximum thrills and action in an easy-to-digest format, with very little fat to get in the way of a lean, A-to-B thriller. And while Operation Moon Rocket doesn't boast poetic tough-guy prose on the level of a Chandler or Hammett, it's still solidly written, even when it sticks close to the formula authors were required to follow to crank these things in a timely fashion. Not everything is nice and breezy, though. The finale falters in a major way, made all the more disappointing by the fact that the rest of the story is so enjoyable. Nick gets caught and tied up about ninety thousand times in this story, but his final captures end sup with him alone, tied up in a control room while the villain taunts him from a remote location and trots out the hoary old, "I haven't killed you yet because I want you to witness the fruition of my evil genius plan!" And of course, not only has he tied Nick Carter up and left him alone, but he then leaves him in a room that happens to have a radio linked directly to some NASA security guys who can help Nick stop the fateful countdown that, if completed, will send an Apollo rocket spiraling out control and straight into the heart of Miami. I don't mind the application of the old "countdown" routine, but the "only you can appreciate the genius of my scheme" cop-out for having Nick be alive and in a position to save the day was almost too much to swallow, especially again, since the author, whoever he may have been (I hope some day one of these guys will emerge and reveal himself to me after stumbling upon one of these reviews), proved himself a very capable writer throughout the rest of the book. I'm sure he could have come up with something much more plausible and much less irritating than the "monologuing villain leaves the hero alone" routine. Luckily, the rest of the book is enjoyable enough to make that bitter pill go down. The supporting cast of characters is decently developed. The background of the main villain (his eventual uncovering as the main villain isn't exactly a surprise) is especially believable and even, dare I say, almost complex. Well, OK, maybe not complex, but as far as espionage potboilers go, it's a pretty well developed background. And Dr. Joy Sun, despite the introduction of an embarrassing naughty photo of her, is one of the closest things to an innocent and decent woman that the series has ever introduced. But honestly, the most important aspect of any of these books is the adventure, and Operation Moon Rocket has plenty to go around, including a zero-G knife fight in space suits, exploding rockets, remote controlled helicopters, violent poker games, cigar chomping, and lots of sneaking around and punching guys in the face. Carter gets captured a lot, as is par for the course, but he doesn't really behave as stupidly or carelessly as he has in many past books. Everything moves at a brisk clip, and the action rarely lets up. Operation Moon Rocket is a delight, all the way around, even with the idiotic "now I shall leave you alone to contemplate my evil genius" finale. Labels: Espionage, Scifi, Series: Nick Carter posted by Keith at 1:06 PM | 0 Comments |
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