The
Freedom Trap is the eighth novel published by
Desmond Bagley. Its United States debut
was a hardcover published by Doubleday in 1971, but it is the Fawcett Crest
paperback edition that caught my eye. The
cover art has everything an adventure novel should—a frogman, a bikini clad
beauty, an exploding boat in the background, and the tide breaking onshore. The artist, as far as I know, is unknown, but
it is a fine example of a 1970s Fawcett paperback.The novel itself is pure adventure. Reardon is a high class criminal who is hired by a man named Mackintosh for a simple job—knock over a postman delivering a shipment of uncut diamonds and hand them over to Mackintosh and get paid. But like everything, nothing is as simple as it seems and Reardon finds himself in prison serving 20 years. And all this in only the first 38 pages; and it astonishingly gets better.
The opening paragraph:
“Mackintosh’s
office was, unexpectedly, in the City. I
had difficulty in finding it because it was in that warren of streets between
Holborn and Fleet Street, which is a maze to one accustomed to the grid-iron
pattern of Johannesburg. I found it at
last in a dingy building; a well-worn brass plate announcing innocuously that
this Dickensian structure held the registered office of Anglo-Saxon Holdings,
Ltd.”
The
Freedom Trap was translated to film as “The
Mackintosh Man” starring Paul Newman as Reardon. The plot, and it has been several years since
I have seen it, follows the novel quite closely. It was directed by John Huston and written
for the screen by Walter Hill.
Although for all
excitement, action and even history of the novel, it is the cover on that 1973
Fawcett Crest paperback (M1789) that made me pick it up in the first place. It’s a shame these lurid covers and well told
stories are relics limited to thrift shops and forgotten used books stores.
This
is the first of a new series of posts featuring the cover art and miscellany of
books I find at thrift stores and used bookshops. It is reserved for books I purchased as much for the cover art as
the story or author.
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