Crime compendium
The .
1„ sadism tag which has for so
1,s'aR been attached to James Bond of course, woefully inaccurate: Would be much more correct to `'escribe Ian Fleming's hero as a sochist, and in that he is very Ch in the tradition of the tough VY heroes. But Fleming was a great admirer of 11;;Yroond Chandler, and Bond ornaged to pick up some d the characteristics of the Istinctively American tough 13rivate eye hero, who is still going strong indeed, and 4sile of whose outstanding abilities to take an enormous amount of tqsical punishment and come ,aek slugging. Further, like the "aracters I wrote about in the tast Crime Compendium, the h guy makes his own rules, (t))1e)erating outside, or at least 1,,Yond the range of, the formal n'z‘v. In The Last Heroes by John :III (Collins £1.80). the heroes are '-soldiers, drawn partly by greed rei Partly by a loss of purpose in r lives into a criminal adven, litre
of great daring, simplicity,
-"‘-' potential profit, under the Riddance of an American master'Nfld. Each hero is chosen for a Particular skill, which he is called uvrion to use in situations nicely aried from the original plan. QM's Plotting is immensely skilful anU exciting; blood flows like Water, and some of the concluding action is horrendous. Indeed — t,.rtd this is rather a pity — the chapters are something like 15.."'e Bond films rather than the ,",und books, and escape thus from ,"T Probability so carefully main',allied earlier in the book. Still, a ..1.k1ng good read. „ much more in the straight 2raerican tradition is Ross Macuonald's latest Lew Archer adc"1oture Sleeping Beauty (Collins i '70). Macdonald has become reasingly accepted as ;-11an1ler's successor, but this latest book has already run into a pod deal of critical fire, notably H. R. F. Keating and Ed Are Crispin. True, the usual iler plot is repeated — interPnerational fights within families Ice,c1 inelectably back into hidden t,r,Itties of the past as Archer tries `.! trace a missing heroine deeply ;oul-scarred, especially by her off. M I Y's ruthless exploitation of ,shore oil resources, leading to a huge spill — which dominates the imagery of the book — off the California coast. There isn't much action, and Archer suffers from exhaustion rather than violence. It's far from the best Macdonald, and it may be that the repetitive plot is wearing thin, but as a stylistic example of the American genre it's well worth looking at. „ Also, to grasp how really good Macdonald is you have only to look, at the appalling work of his namesake, John D, whose Travis McGee adventure A Tan and Sandy Silence has just come from Hale at £1.70. An old girl friend of McGee's disappears and her husband, a property developer, comes a-looking for her. McGee starts to investigate, finds more than appears on the surface, chases tt* girl to the West Indies and becomes involved in a web of business intrigue, murder, skullduggery, sex, beatings and torture including near the end, his own escape, bound and wounded, by floating out to sea. The writing and the tough-guy sentimentality are both truly appalling, the most sick-making moments coming when the already pseudo-Hem-. ingway Macdonald actually invokes the spirit of the dead Papa in a deliberate parody of his own parody of Hemingway. Ugh.
And the same epithet, alas, must be thrown at Geoffrey Jenkins's A Cleft of Stars (Collins £1.80). There was a time when Jenkins, who is a South African ' journalist, was a good adventure story writer, notably in his first book A Grue of Ice, another praised by Fleming. In the latest story a man framed for illicit diamond buying goes to The Hill, a mysterious source of African culture where may be found the second half of the Cullinan Diamond (that which forms an important part of the Crown jewels) to track down his enemy. He suffers a lot, of course; badly bashes up his enemy; sees the. arrival of his girl friend and the death of her pilot; is trapped by a sadistic German with a pet hyena; suffers again, and again, and again — and it, is all a terrible bore, especially the excruciating love-makiqg of the hero and heroine. Sample: "A dozen strides covered the space which separated us. The tiny living muscles at
the corners of her deep eyes spoke a world of obvious and emphatic messages as well as nuances of doubt about her nakedness, a host of nerve-tingling ambiguities. expressing all things since woman was woman."
The trouble is about the tough guy genre is that it encourages this kind of pseudo-high writing. At its best there is an element, unavoidable, of pretence about it, something that seeks deliberately to give a mythic quality to adventure in seedy circumstances. That something is best conveyed in Chandler's famous formula, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is himself neither mean nor afraid." Very few writers can get away with the style implied in that formula. In the rather flatter British tradition, however, is James Mirchell's Callan, the tough, lonely, embittered Secret Service killer, ex-con, ex-commando, dignified only by his subterranean emotions and his friendship with the stinking Lonely. Callan has been justly praised as a television character, and the Callan books, therefore, constantly under-rated. The latest, Russian Roulette (Hamish Hamilton £1.95) is superb. In it Hunter (the code name for the Secret Service chief) hands Callan over to the Russians in order to re-acquire a more valuable agent they have captured. Callan is sent out into the streets of London
without a gun ("No gun for Callan " is the message sent to the underworld and it would, in cidentally, have made a far better title than the one Mitchell has given his book). The whole story is about the hunting down of Callan by two expert Russian assassins.
All the action is splendidly economical and convincing.
and the moments of rest the hero snatches — with Lonely, with the black nurse who is treating him for an eye disease which is seriously handicapping him, with other flotsam and jetsam of Lon don are likeThose terrible winter breathers between stages of the wars of long ago. This is one of the best, most gripping, straightforward thrillers I have read for a long time, and Mitchell deserves as much success with it as he has gained on television.
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