THUNDER POINT - Book review

 

Jack Higgins’s thriller Thunder Point was published in 1993 and is a credible page-turner.

It concerns serious incriminating documents from 1945 locked away in a metal Nazi briefcase located in a sunken U-boat in the Caribbean.

The U-boat is discovered by accident in 1992 but when the diver learns of the contents inaccessibly locked in a watertight compartment he consults friends in London. This escalates, ultimately involving Brigadier Ferguson who runs a clandestine unit only answerable to the PM. Ferguson inveigles Sean Dillon, Irish assassin and hard man to penetrate the submarine and recover the briefcase.

Other people learn of this and want the contents either to be destroyed or for potential leverage in a political power-game.

It’s colourful, well-researched and the reader becomes invested in the characters.

A first-rate fast-paced Higgins thriller.

Editorial comment:

In most cases my comments are not criticisms but hints about writing.

There are a couple of contrived episodes involving imprisonment in Yugoslavia and a nun outside Paris, the latter of no real relevance; nothing to spoil the reading experience, however,

This section is from Dillon’s POV:

‘... He recognised Algaro at once... and then Santiago came out of the wheelhouse. “Who’s the guy in the blazer and cap?” Dillon enquired.

“That’s Max Santiago, the owner...”’

Instead of ‘Santiago came out...’ it should have read ‘a man in a blazer and cap came out’. (p179)

Several characters sit or lie and ‘think about things’...

Dillon’s favourite handgun – Walther PPK with a Carswell silencer...

Fact:

The skeletal remains of Martin Bormann were discovered in the 1960s and identified in the 1970s, though not conclusively until 1998 following genetic testing.

SOLO by Jack Higgins - Book review

Solo, by Jack Higgins, was published in 1980 and even at this distance in time is still a good page-turner thriller.

An intriguing concept: an internationally renowned concert pianist who also happens to be a hired assassin. Mikali showed promise as a pianist when young, but didn’t seem fulfilled, so, as you do, he decided to join the French Foreign Legion. In this elite fighting force he found a purpose – and learned to kill. After being invalided out, he took up the piano again and was soon popular – not only with audiences but with women. Yet women did not provide the excitement he gleaned from killing. He hooked up with an unsavoury lawyer who guided him towards his first targets – men who deserved to die. However, as time passed, not all those he killed were villains or deserving.

Asa Morgan was a killer, too, though officially sanctioned in the British armed forces, and sometimes working for the British Secret Intelligence Service (DI5). And then Asa’s daughter is killed by a hit-and-run driver who was fleeing a professional hit.

Inevitably, Morgan’s search brought him to the paradox that was Mikali. 

We meet one of Higgins’s regular characters, Brigadier Charles Ferguson, manipulator of men and women, director of DI5.

And of course there’s a female complication: Dr Katherine Riley, a psychologist, who has become infatuated by Mikali and is also, strangely, attracted to Morgan. There will be a confrontation and a reckoning...

I don’t know why Higgins insists on referring to MI5 as DI5 in his books. Maybe he wants the fictional department to be part MI5 and part MI6 (respectively national and international espionage). 

EXOCET - Book review

 

Jack Higgins’s 1983 thriller Exocet was fresh off the press roughly a year after the Falklands War and presciently deals with Argentina’s search for additional Exocet missiles, as at the outset of hostilities Argentina only possessed very few.

Brigadier Charles Ferguson is head of an adjunct to the British Secret Intelligence Service, Group Four, directly responsible to the PM. Ferguson’s top man is Major Tony Villiers in the Grenadier Guards, attached to the SAS.

Villiers is divorced; his wife was Gabrielle Legrand. They used to work together undercover. She is tasked by Ferguson with getting to know Colonel Raul Carlos Montera, Special Air Attaché at the Argentinian Embassy in London. She must find out what the Argentine intentions were regarding the Falkland Islands.

Galtieri and Dozo figure in the story, as you’d expect.

Businessman Felix Donner is successful – and an illegal arms dealer. He has links with Russia. And he is hired by the Argentinians to obtain a ship-load of Exocets, weapons that could win the war. As the weapons are manufactured in France, that seems a likely place to make a deal...

Villiers is pulled out of the Falklands – he’s part of a four-man reconnaissance team and sent to France to thwart Donner.

The story is non-stop, switching scenes and countries at a fair lick, and never lets up, in the usual Higgins manner. The relationship between the pilot Raul and Gabrielle is handled well and creates tension. Of course history tells us that the additional Exocets were never obtained.

The manipulative General Ferguson appears in other books by Higgins. Interestingly, in Port Stanley, FI, there’s a Villiers Street. Having recently read The Falklands War by the Sunday Times Insight Team (1982), it is quite evident that Higgins read this account for background verisimilitude, and uses the facts convincingly.

Editorial note:

Higgins mentions a Smith and Wesson Magnum revolver with a Carswell silencer (p3). I could be wrong, but I thought it was very rare for a revolver to have a silencer fitted. A Magnum pistol, fine.

His character Dillon’s favourite handgun is a Walther PPK with Carswell silencer...

DAY OF JUDGMENT - Book review

 Vintage Jack Higgins! Day of Judgment was published in 1978. This is the third and final Simon Vaughn novel, as originally written under the pen-name Martin Fallon.

It’s 1963. The story mainly centres on Berlin and East Germany. Father Sean Conlin, a survivor of the concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Dachau, was responsible for smuggling people out of Communist East Germany. Unfortunately, on one such mission he was betrayed, captured and taken to the nearby Schloss Neustadt. The Communists intend to employ a rogue American, Harry Van Buren to brainwash the old priest so he could reveal he was working for the CIA; he would announce this publicly at the time of President Kennedy’s visit to Berlin, thus creating massive embarrassment and public humiliation for the West.

Secret agent Vaughn, ‘the beast of Selangor’, is tasked with rescuing Father Conlin from the seemingly impregnable schloss before the president’s visit in a few weeks’ time. Vaughn brings together a formidable team, including Lutheran monks, an American Jesuit, an ex-Luftwaffe ace, a Jewish undertaker, and the ex-SS caretaker of the schloss itself.

The method of penetration into the schloss is imaginative, quite unique and particularly unpleasant and fraught with danger. The map provided actually gives away the means of access, but does not detract from the actual drama and difficulties encountered.

Towards the end there’s a poignant sequence involving Father Hartmann, a man who has found his purpose in life at last.

Higgins effortlessly creates the claustrophobic communist environment the characters have to contend with; as Kennedy remarked at the time: ‘Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.’ 

Sadly, even now, freedoms we take for granted were – and are – crushed or perverted in certain communist states.

Day of Judgment is An exciting, fast-paced page-turning adventure. (But this copy has a very poor dust jacket.)

Editorial comment.

Oddly, in the text ‘judgement’ is spelled with an ‘e’ – unlike the book title.

A female character ‘wore a man’s trench-coat and a scarf tied peasant-fashion round her head’ (p12). I’ve lost count of the Higgins books where the ‘scarf worn peasant-fashion’ is used.

THE KEYS OF HELL - Book review

 

This Jack Higgins novel was first published in 1965. However, in 2001 Higgins revisited the book (which had long been out of print) and tacked book-end chapters, the first and last taking place in Manhattan, 1995. The rest of the book is shown as occurring in 1965, which he also revised, though it could have been improved more, I feel.

It’s Higgins’s third novel featuring his ‘super-spy’ Paul Chavasse, following from The Testament of Caspar Schultz (1961) and Year of the Tiger (1963).

Only recently returned from a hair-raising adventure in Albania, Paul is meeting his boss, The Chief of the Bureau, in the embassy in Rome. Though due for leave, Paul is tasked with going back into Albania and assassinating a double agent, Noci.

Shortly after disposing of Noci, he saves an attractive woman who is being assaulted in the street. It’s Francesca Minetti – he met her at the embassy. She’s Italian-Albanian and works for the Bureau. She has a private problem – her village’s Black Madonna was spirited away before the secret police could steal it. Unfortunately, it sank with her brother and his boat in the marshes and she barely escaped. Would he help her retrieve the statue? It is a symbol of faith against the repressive Communist regime.

He can’t resist the offer.

Higgins paints an interesting picture of the politics of the period, and the search amidst the marshes is masterfully evoked. Inevitably, there is betrayal, courage, capture and escape, the pace rarely letting up.

The tacked-on end chapter works well, too – cleverly done.

I could not find any reference to the keys of Hell in the text; there is a quotation at the front, an Arabic proverb: There are no keys to Hell –the doors are open to all men.

If I had one issue: I lost count of the number of times Paul – and others – lit cigarettes; a veritable commercial for tobacco or a lazy method of breaking up speech or having the protagonist just do something.

A fast read.

Here's a review of the first Paul Chavasse book:

http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com/2015/04/ffb-testament-of-caspar-schultz.html

Here are some thoughts on Jack Higgins, with a quotation from his final Chavasse book:

http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com/2010/12/editors-pet-peaves-01-whats-empty.html

 

BAD COMPANY - Book review

 This is Jack Higgins’s eleventh Sean Dillon thriller published in 2003 and overall it is, sadly, a bad book.

I have read very few Dillon novels so found the rehashing of earlier escapades helpful, notably his involvement with the Rashid family, but really for any fans it must have felt dire to have it all regurgitated again as filler. The most interesting aspect for me was the background to von Berger’s wartime German past, because Higgins did his wartime descriptions very well. 

The idea of a secreted diary dictated by Hitler which reveals negotiations between the US President and the dictator was essentially a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. Len Deighton did something similar with a secret meeting between Churchill and Hitler in 1981 (XPD).

Even the action is fleeting without giving any sense of 'being there'.

Disappointing. For Sean Dillon completists.

Jack Higgins - Review of two early thrillers

 

HELL IS TOO CROWDED

This is an early Jack Higgins novel, originally published under his real name Harry Patterson in 1962, reprinted by Fawcett in 1976 and reissued here in 1977 with the name-change and the strap-line ‘by the author of The Eagle Has Landed’.

It’s a pot-boiler and reveals that Higgins was learning his trade.

Matt Brady was inebriated when he met the woman; he was ‘caught between the shadow lines of sleep and waking when strange things fill the mind’ (p5). One wonders if Higgins was alluding to the Joseph Conrad book The Shadow Line (1917) which depicts the threshold of a young man entering adulthood at sea. The woman was wearing a trench-coat and a scarf ‘peasant-fashion’.

‘A ship moved down the Pool of London sounding its foghorn like the last of the dinosaurs lumbering aimlessly through a primeval swamp, alone in a world that was already alien.’ (p5) Here, Higgins might be referencing Ray Bradbury’s classic short story ‘The Foghorn’ (1951).

Once in the woman’s apartment, he accepts a drink and abruptly passes out. When he comes to, the police are in the room and the woman is dead – her face brutally damaged… Brady is sent to prison for life. He must escape, however, to prove his innocence, which he does manage with some inside help. The trail leads him to several individuals, one of whom is Das who is a proud owner of a Ming vase among other items. In his desperation to get answers, Brady threatens to destroy the valuable vase. (This will be echoed in The Dark Side of the Island when the doctor Van Horn is threatened by the Nazi’s in a similar way).

Brady is befriended by Anne, a young woman, the daughter of a friend who has died. She believes in his innocence. The story behind the woman he was accused of murdering is revealed about three-quarters through the book; after which it’s a case of tracking down the real murderer.

There are several deaths before the denouement is reached.

The book was originally published in the US, I assume, since there were references to ‘color’, ‘hood’ of a car instead of ‘bonnet’, and ‘sidewalk’. Higgins may have been attempting an American point-of-view since Brady was from the States; however, there were other instances of the spelling ‘colour’. These were the days when publishers actually employed people to change the trans-Atlantic vocabulary as appropriate; now, they tend not to bother. None of this spoils the story-telling, which is page-turning.

 

THE DARK SIDE OF THE ISLAND

This is another early Jack Higgins novel, originally published under his real name Harry Patterson in 1963 and reissued here in 1989.

It’s a pot-boiler and reveals he was still learning his trade.

Seventeen years after fighting in the Second World War Hugh Lomax returns to the Greek island of Kyros. The last time he was here he’d been on a secret mission to destroy a vital Nazi radio station. Betrayal and capture followed and he barely escaped with his life. Now, he was back to find out the truth.

The Greek islanders haven’t forgotten him and indeed blame him for talking under Nazi interrogation and costing many innocent lives…

The book is split into three parts: 1) Lomax’s return and being confronted by antagonistic islanders; 2) Flashback to the actual landing on the island and the sabotage and escape and capture; 3) Lomax’s life threatened by the islanders while he seeks the truth.

There’s Katina, a local girl, who wears a scarf ‘peasant-fashion’. She’d been a teenager when they’d met in the war; now she was a mature woman who believes in Lomax’s innocence. Resident ex-pat Van Horn is a successful author and doctor; he’d been useful doctoring during the war. Van Horn was also an archaeologist and had a valuable collection, some of which was broken by the Nazi Steiner. Then there are the few Greek men who survived the Nazi depredations: Alexias, Dimitri, Nikoli, among a few others – any one of whom might have been the traitor…

The story is fast-paced, workmanlike, but the denouement is no great surprise.

Definitely, one for the Jack Higgins completists.

Editorial comments:

Some of Jack Higgins’s favourite words and phrases that are often repeated: ‘somehow’, ‘somewhere’, ‘moment’, ‘a frown on his face’. And: ‘heavy’ – ‘He pushed open the heavy glass door, crossed the heavy carpet soundlessly…’ (TDSOTI, p112).

These were early novels and his apprenticeship eventually paid off with his thirty-sixth novel, The Eagle Has Landed in 1975. The lesson here is blatantly clear: keep writing and improving.

Book review - Wrath of the Lion

This thriller was first published by Jack Higgins under the penname Harry Patterson in 1964. This copy published by Signet in 1996.

Set in the early 1960s, it features Neil Mallory, once known as the Butcher of Perak. It begins with a French submarine surfacing near a freighter. The submariners board the ship and murder a passenger. The motive is ‘death to all who oppose the OAS’. The Organisation armée secrète was composed of French dissident far-right paramilitaries who began an armed opposition to the independence of Algeria (the Algerian War spanned 1954-1962) from French colonial rule. OAS was formed in Spain in 1961 and assassination attempts were made on French politicians and even General de Gaulle. Algeria became independent in 1962.

Mallory teams up with French Deuxieme Bureau agent Guyon to track the submarine to the Channel Islands. They have to contend with the OAS commander Phillippe de Beumont. In the process, Mallory finds love. The best part of the book is a lengthy flashback to the Malayan conflict, where Mallory earned his nasty sobriquet.

Not one of his best, but it is a fast read, delivering plenty of pace and action; and of course there is the occasional betrayal. The ending was rushed, I felt, but satisfactory.  

The Eagle has Landed

Wikipedia commons

Forty-six years ago today, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The Command Module was christened Columbia, not after the New York university or the many places in the US, but in a reference to the Columbiad, the giant shell cum spacecraft fired from a cannon from Florida in Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon. The Lunar Module was called Eagle, referring to the bald eagle, the symbol and national bird of the US. This lent more gravitas than the Apollo 10 naming of Charlie Brown and Snoopy for the two Modules!

Neil Armstrong's voice crackled from the speakers at NASA's Mission Control in Houston. He said, ‘The Eagle has landed.’

President John F. Kennedy’s dream, expressed in 1961 – of putting humans on the Moon by the end of the decade - had come true, with five months to spare!

Of course the author Jack Higgins was to use the same phrase to great effect for the title of his first big best-seller published in 1975, The Eagle Has Landed.

FFB - The Testament of Caspar Schultz

Real name, Harry Patterson, Jack Higgins' early novels were written under his own name as well as under the pseudonyms James Graham, Martin Fallon, and Hugh Marlowe. One of the reasons for several names is that he was prolific and publishers are reluctant to bring out too many books by a single author. His early books were thrillers that typically featured hardened, cynical heroes, ruthless villains, and dangerous locales. He published thirty-five novels of this type (sometimes three or four a year) between 1959 and 1974, ‘learning his craft’. Then he wrote The Eagle Has Landed…

A number of his books feature several recurring characters – Nick Miller, Sean Rogan, Martin Fallon (no less!), Liam Devlin, Sean Dillon and Paul Chavasse.

 

The Testament of Caspar Schultz was first published as by Martin Fallon in 1962. It was republished in 1979 under the name Jack Higgins; my copy is the 2011 edition. The book was originally entitled The Bormann Testament but, for various reasons and at the publisher’s behest, the character of Martin Bormann vanished from the book and Patterson created a fictional Nazi leader, Caspar Schultz.  As with some of his other books, Higgins re-released an early version with updates, and so in 2006 this book was republished as The Bormann Testament (thereby restoring much of the earlier version, and adding more too.) I have not read this updated version.

Reading this, you have to bear in mind that it was set in 1960 – only fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. There were plenty of Nazis hiding in the woodwork, succulent meat for thriller writers’ plots. And some ex-Nazis were in reality in positions of authority and trust in the world of commerce and politics.

This is Higgins’ first Paul Chavasse novel. Half-French, half English, Chavasse works for a branch of British Secret Intelligence, the Bureau. The book begins very much like many of that period, the super-spy being called in by the nameless Chief to undertake an assignment.

Chavasse is tasked with tracking down a former Nazi, Schultz, and the man’s recently completed manuscript that explosively names ex-Nazi people currently in high places. Certain neo-Nazis are reluctant to see that manuscript published and are willing to kill to ensure its destruction.

This is early Higgins, with its attendant word-repetition, and yet the seeds of his subsequent thrillers can be glimpsed – pace, humour, a brave heroine, dastardly loquacious villains, not too graphic violence (but enough of it), a McGuffin (the manuscript), suspense, swift scene-change, betrayal and morality.

If you want a fast-paced read, then this will satisfy.

 

The other five Chavasse thrillers are:

Year of the Tiger (1963), The Keys of Hell (1965), Midnight Never Comes (1966), Dark Side of the Street (1967) and finally A Fine Night for Dying (1969).

Strong female protagonists-01

Do you like reading novels with strong female protagonists? Then try the Tana Standish psychic spy e-book series.

There couldn’t be a better time than now, as the first in the series, The Prague Papers is available at a special reduced price (for a limited period only!)

THE PRAGUE PAPERS

#1 in the Tana Standish psychic spy series

Reading this excellent novel is a bit like an extreme sport. The pages fly by at a pace… in this relentless flow of exciting action and carefully researched information which lasts right up to the climactic denouement—in itself, both satisfying and rewarding—because Nik Morton’s writing is very smooth and totally believable. The Prague Papers gave me that feeling of “being there myself”, rubbing shoulders with his characters, and for quite a while after finishing it, I found myself thinking about them and all they had been through.

– William Daysh, author of Over by Christmas

As well as creating memorable characters (Tana Standish will stay with me for a long time), Morton captures the essence of Prague and the Czech soul, educates us into the world of Eastern Bloc politics, and tells an intricate tale of espionage. As if this weren’t enough, he explores the fields of psychics and telepathy, adding intriguing depth to his story.

– Maureen Moss, editor and travel writer

Interestingly, Morton sells it as a true story passed to him by an agent and published as fiction, a literary ploy often used by master thriller writer Jack Higgins. Let’s just say that it works better than Higgins.

–Danny Collins, author of The Bloodiest Battles
 
THE TEHRAN TEXT
#2 in the Tana Standish psychic spy series

… Male readers may find themselves enchanted by the lovely Tana… not only can Tana kick arse very well indeed, she's also psychic. Do you really want a relationship with an older woman who can not only read your thoughts but can also throw you around the room for having them? In addition to the nasty males running the Middle East terrorist groups, the book has scary women in droves… But masterful Morton handles them all very nicely and serves up a ripping read with a plot clever enough to stand up with the best of them.

– Danny Collins, author of The Bloodiest Battles

Nik Morton has the ability to use a factual background whilst infiltrating dynamic, larger-than-life characters that deal with seemingly real situations with a devil-may-care attitude that makes the reader wonder what is fact and what is fiction. In the spy thriller genre, Morton is certainly emerging as a very convincing spine-chilling storyteller.
– Malcolm Smith, Costa Blanca News
 
There are not too many books that stay with you long after you finish reading them, not too many characters who are so alive it seems like you recently met them. And so it is with Tana Standish, the psychic spy in this page-turning thriller. We travel to Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and England and meet a variety of brilliantly portrayed characters – some of them torturers, others who control a team of remote viewers, others traditional British MI6 agents. The locations are so finely drawn we can almost reach and touch them, the atmosphere so vivid that we can shut our eyes and sense ourselves there.
– Maureen Moss, travel journalist

For those who like their plots laid out skilfully and with painstaking research, Nik Morton's latest Tana Standish thriller is where you should be… Morton's novel evokes memories of the dangerous period during which the Shah of Persia was removed from power and replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini. This is evil personified, and in amongst it, battling for her friends and her country, Tana Standish stands out as a heroine worthy of the pages of this compulsive spy novel.

– Michael Parker, author of The Boy from Berlin et al

THE PRAGUE PAPERS

Amazon UK here

Amazon COM here

 

THE TEHRAN TEXT

Amazon UK here

Amazon COM here