OPERATION NIGHTFALL by John Miles (Jack M. Bickham) & Tom Morris

Berkley Medallion Edition

Operation Nightfall is the final of four suspense novels Jack Bickham wrote for Bobbs-Merrill’s Black Bat Mystery imprint.  It was published as by John Miles with a coauthor named Tom Morris.  I’m not familiar with Mr Morris, and to my knowledge this is Bickham’s only coauthored novel.  It was published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1975, and reissued as a mass market in April 1976 by Berkley Medallion (K3087).

Operation Nightfall is a caper novel.  It features six men—three pilots and three crew—who plan a high jacking of Atlanta International Airport.  Not an airplane departing AIA, but the entire airport.  The novel opens as a minor scam ends, and while the getaway is flawless Tom Keel is less than satisfied with the take.  It netted only a few thousand, and he wants a big score.  The kind of haul that will allow him to disappear, which is how he gets from small time crook to big time criminal.

The novel is developed in three acts, and it is executed so concisely it could easily, and should be, translated as a screenplay.  The first act is measured in days, and it slowly develops the scene, setting, and characters.  Each is introduced, with an emphasis on the three pilots, and the audience is ushered quickly to the point where the protagonists, pushed by Keel’s sense of alienation and inequity, encounter the catalyst of story—the team will either be successful in its attempt to highjack the airport, or it will fail.

The final two acts are measured in minutes beginning with the team’s arrival at AIA.  The meat of the action is in these final two acts, which makes up slightly less than 2/3^rds of the novel.  The original question—succeed or fail—is in doubt throughout the climax.  And, while the structure of the novel is simple and straight forward, it doesn’t harm the story a bit.  In fact it is the purity of the plot and the targeted character development, particularly motive, which elevates Operation Nightfall from the generic to the excellent.

Although everything else works, too.  The prose is simple and sparse, which lends credibility to a plot on the outside edge of believability.  The dialogue is concise and surprisingly believable.  The characters interact with each other with a believable ease; the underlying distrust, fear, and anger shimmers with each word, but so does the reliance of each on the other.  The flying sequences tingle with a sense of reality:

“Easing over on the yoke and rudder, he cleared the tower on yet another pass and hurled the Cherokee east and then southeast.  He could see Keel out in front of him, turning over the far runway.  A little close.  Abercrombie touched the power, easing off perhaps 50 rpm; no time to look at gauges; it had to be all feel.” 

Operation Nightfall is the real deal.  It is a tightly spun suspense novel, which is entertaining and thrilling all at once.  It is an example of Jack Bickham’s best work, and it is a shame it, and much of Bickham’s other work, never obtained a larger audience.  And if there are any filmmakers in the ether, it would make a terrific film. 

A listing of Jack Bickham's Black Bat titles are here.

Jack M. Bickham's Black Bat Mystery Titles

Bobbs-Merrill Edition

In the early- to mid-1970s Bobbs-Merrill, as part of its Black Bat Mystery line, published four early suspense novels written by Jack M. Bickham.  The four titles were published as by “John Miles”, a pseudonym Mr Bickham used primarily for his early crime and suspense novels, and later for his whodunits.  The publication of the Black Bat Mystery titles was a landmark in his career.  It represented the change of Bickham’s writing focus from westerns to mystery and suspense.

The John Miles nom de plume was first used by Bickham on his nifty little 1961 crime novel Dally with a Deadly Doll (Ace, D-489).  Over the next decade he used the Miles brand sparingly, choosing instead to write westerns under his own name and as by “Jeff Clinton”.  The titles published with the Clinton moniker featured a brawling red-headed series character named Wildcat O’Shea.  He later published a handful of non series westerns under the pseudonym, and a single science fiction novel titled Kane’s Odyssey (1976).

Detective Book Club Edition

In 1973 the Miles brand was dusted off and used for a slim hardcover titled The Night Hunters.  It was the first, and best, of four Bickham titles to be published by Bobbs-Merrill over the next two years.  The Black Bat titles fit squarely in the suspense mold—not necessarily traditional mystery, but with a crime aspect, which tended towards amateur criminals.  Two are heist novels—The Silver Bullet Gang (1974) and Operation Nightfall (1975)—and another, an entertaining, but standard extortionist tale titled The Blackmailer (1974).

While all four titles are entertaining, The Night Hunters is a masterpiece.  It is a rural suspense story built around a young woman named Ruth Baxter.  Ms Baxter stops in the small town of Noble, Oklahoma to research family genealogy for her uncle, but the place is less than friendly.  A local cop threatens her off, and the townspeople act strangely hostile towards her.  The plot is built perfectly to maintain the slow build of tension, and the mystery is strong.  It has the teeth to have been a bestseller in 1973 when it was released, but for whatever reason it didn’t get the push from the publisher it needed.

Berkley-Medallion

It’s a shame the titles are all out-of-print, and to my knowledge have been for decades, because each has held up well over the passing years—The Night Hunters is the strongest and The Blackmailer is the weakest.  Jack Bickham’s Black Bat Mystery titles would make a terrific addition to a small publisher’s catalog of classic e-books and maybe even POD.          

Jack M. Bickham’s Black Bat Mystery novels:

The Night Hunters (1973)
The Blackmailer (1974)
The Silver Bullet Gang (1974)
Operation Nightfall (1975) - Read the Gravetapping review.  

Jack M. Bickham’s “John Miles” novels:

Dally with a Deadly Doll (1961)
Trouble Trails (1963)
Female Animal (1970)
A Permanent Retirement (1992)
Murder in Retirement (1994)
A Most Deadly Retirement (1995)
Tenoclock Scholar (1996)