Review: "Domino Island" by Desmond Bagley

Domino Island by Desmond Bagley HarperCollins, 2019   Domino Island is Desmond Bagley’s “lost” novel. The manuscript (ms) was discovered by the researcher Philip Eastwood at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center where Bagley’s papers are housed. Along with the ms—titled Because Salton Died—were letters between Bagley and his editor at Collins, Bob Knittel, and handwritten notes on the ms, identifying planned changes for publication, but Bagley pulled Because Salton Died from Collins and the changes were never made. There are a couple hypotheses about why Bagley stopped work on the book. The first and most obvious is Bagley decided it was a hopeless project and there is some evidence supporting this. In the letter to his editor accompanying the ms, Bagley wrote, “I had a bad case of ‘writer’s block’[.]” He had started and abandoned four “standard Bagleys”—adventure thrillers—and he decided to try something entirely new to get his creative energy going. So, in the early days of 1972 he began working on an Agatha Christie-style traditional mystery, or whodunnit, but Bagley wanted to rework the novel into his usual fare because: “My method of writing is singularly ill-adapted for the writing of a whodunnit. I begin with a situation and let it develop, and the plot follows where the development leads; whereas a whodunnit should be meticulously worked out in a synopsis before a key on the typewriter is touched.” The second hypothesis—and my favorite of the two—involves the film, The Mackintosh Man, which was based on Bagley’s 1972 novel, The Freedom Trap. Doubleday, Bagley’s American publisher, wanted a novel like The Freedom Trap that could be marketed in tandem with the film’s release in 1973. Bagley’s next novel, The Tightrope Men (1973), seemed to oblige this request since it is similar in theme to The Freedom Trap. But both thoughts are purely conjecture since, as far as I know, no one has uncovered any direct evidence to support one theory over the other for Bagley’s motive for ditching Because Salton Died in favor of writing The Tightrope Men. Now on to the review: Bill Kemp, a former Royal Army officer, is a highly competent and well-paid insurance consultant working for Western and Continental Insurance Co. Kemp is sent to the Caribbean Island nation, and former British colony, Campanilla, to investigate the death of the well-heeled David Salton. Salton’s decomposing corpse was discovered in a small boat off Campanilla’s coast, and the local coroner ruled the cause of death as a heart attack. Kemp’s investigation is supposed to be nothing more than a simple “check-the-box” operation, but things start unwinding when he arrives on the island. According to a police captain, Kemp’s body was too far gone for a cause of death to be determined. And Salton had enemies everywhere. He was involved in island politics, and he’d been railing against the island casinos—rumored to be owned by an organized crime syndicate—the banking industry, which specialized in moving money discreetly for wealthy clients without paying much local tax, and the current and very corrupt government. Domino Island’s origins as a whodunnit are visible in the finished book. The mysterious death of David Salton. The wide spectrum of suspects. Kemp’s observations of the police’s inadequate original investigation and his developing and then discarding of suspects and murder theories. But the climactic resolution of the mystery is far from traditional—although a portion is set in something like a drawing room—with a bunch of action and a conclusion that would be difficult for any reader to guess because there simply aren’t adequate clues in the narrative. Which is okay, because Domino Island works well as an adventure thriller through its exotic location, bullet-flying action, and Kemp’s tough guy persona. Domino Island isn’t Bagley’s best, but it’s a welcome addition for any of Bagley’s regular readers. *                   *                   * This is a slightly updated version of a review published on Feb. 17, 2022.

a little more about Domino Island…   After Because Salton Died was found, Bagley’s literary estate allowed the screenwriter Michael Davies to make the changes identified in the manuscript notes and from the correspondence between Bagley and Knittel and Domino Island was born. According to Philip Eastwood’s Afterword, Bagley’s “typescript, of approximately 89,000 words, bore on its title page: NEW NOVEL BECAUSE SALTON DIED (if you think of a better, please do) And more than 47 years after it was written, the publisher did find a better title with Domino Island. *                   *                   * Check out Amazon’s page for Domino Island  For more information about Desmond Bagley and his work, check out The Complete Desmond Bagley at Amazon

 

Review: "Domino Island" by Desmond Bagley

Domino Island – published in 2019 by HarperCollins – is Desmond Bagley’s “lost” novel. The manuscript (ms) was discovered by the researcher Philip Eastwood at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center where Bagley’s papers are housed. Along with the ms – titled Because Salton Died by Bagley – were letters between Bagley and his editor at Collins, Bob Knittel, and handwritten notes on the ms, identifying planned changes for publication, but Bagley pulled Because Salton Died back from Collins and the changes were never made. There are a couple hypotheses about why Bagley stopped work on the book. The first and most obvious is perhaps Bagley decided it was a hopeless project and there is some evidence supporting this. In the letter to his editor accompanying the ms, Bagley wrote, “I had a bad case of ‘writer’s block’[.]” He had started and abandoned four “standard Bagleys” – adventure thrillers – and he decided to try something entirely new to get his creative energy going....

[For the rest of the article/review click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

Thrift Shop Book Covers: The Freedom Trap



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.

It is widely believed The Freedom Trap was inspired by Soviet spy—or more accurately British double agent—George Blake’s October 22, 1966 escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison.  He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 42 years in 1961.  The plot is similar to Jack Higgins’ 1967 Paul Chavasse novel The Dark Side of the Street, which was also likely influenced heavily by the George Blake story (due to the timing of its release) and is an excellent adventure novel in its own right.       

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.  

Desmond Bagley News

I have more proof that the Internet is a very small place. I received an interesting email about a week ago from Desmond Bagley's sister-in-law and she told me a few things about Mr Bagley and also that several of his novels are being re-released in England in 2-books-in-1 format.













The most interesting thing she told me, and if I had read the Wikipedia post about Bagley I would have already known, is that his final two novels--Night of Error and Juggernaut--were left unfinished at his death in 1982 and both were finished by his wife. She declined the publishers offer of a ghost writer, and she really did a great job. I read Night of Error in the early-1990s and I enjoyed it. It's too bad she didn't choose to write a few more titles on her own. She obviously had the knack for it.













There is also an informative website about Desmond Bagley online. Click Here

To read my obvious fanboy post about Desmond Bagley click Here.

Desmond Bagley

Desmond Bagley was one of the first thriller writers I discovered. I found his terrific novel Flyaway in a paperback exchange as a teenager and devoured it in only a few sittings. I can still remember reading it on a warm August afternoon on the back porch of our house; a gentle breeze in the air and the quiet thrum of classical music in the background. I was in the African desert right along with the protagonist, and I absolutely loved it. I spent the next several years hunting—pre-Internet era—down copies of his other thrillers and while I didn’t find them all, I found enough to know that his work was one of the standards by which all other thrillers of his generation should be judged.

Desmond Bagley was born in England in 1923 and spent nearly twenty years of his adult life in southern Africa—the better part of it in South Africa where he worked as a journalist and wrote his first novel The Golden Keel. He wrote sixteen novels, each made appearances on best-seller lists around the world, before his death in 1983. His work was well received from the 1960s to well into the 1980s. Then he disappeared.

I only saw the final two of his sixteen novels on the shelves of new bookstores and one—Night of Error—was on the discount rack of Walden Books for a dime. (I also found Joe L. Hensley’s Robak’s Fire, and two The Destroyer novels that day. It was a good day for bargain hunting.) Bagley’s work was wildly popular in its day, but as I write this he is mostly remembered—if he is remembered at all—as a minor writer of the old style thriller: The older and more literate stuff that was written without any bells and whistles. The prose was straight forward and simple without the edge of over-dramatic and outlandish plotlines that have made many modern thrillers nearly unreadable.

The thriller genre was dominated, in the 1960s and 1970s, by the work of Alistair MacLean, and Bagley’s work was very much influenced by it and is favorably comparable with the best of what Alistair MacLean produced. In fact MacLean blurbed Desmond Bagley’s 1975 The Snow Tiger—“I’ve read all of Bagley’s novels. I think he is better than me.” That is a sentiment I don’t necessarily agree with, at least not so far as MacLean’s early work is concerned, but much of what Desmond Bagley wrote was pretty damn good.

The Desmond Bagley protagonist tended towards the solitary and ordinary—they were rarely involved with a government or other large organization, but they were always tough, resourceful and capable. In The Golden Keel Peter Halloran teams up with two other men to find a treasure that was found and hidden at the end of World War Two in Italy. Halloran is the ideal Bagley hero for the simple reason that he is an ordinary man who rises to face an impossibly difficult, terrifying and life-threatening situation; a situation the hero solidly planted himself through his own actions.

The plotlines are uniquely 1970s—the lone adventurer finding a maze of death, deception and betrayal in exotic locations with beautiful women who often turn dangerous. The kind of plots that when done well, as most of Bagley’s work was, launch the reader on an adventure that is larger than life and exhilarating escapist fiction. Flyaway is an example of Bagley’s tremendous plotting—Max Stafford owns a corporate security company and on a whim decides to look into the disappearance of an accountant who works for a client firm. The adventure takes him to the Sahara and across the southern part of Africa in a race to find the accountant before a dark and sinister group get to Max, or the man he is looking for.

The prose is unhurried and simple. Bagley did use clipped and short sentences to build tension, but for the most part he builds tension and suspense with plot, setting, and character. An example of his simple style and unrushed prose in a scene that builds suspense is the following paragraph from High Citadel where the protagonist—O’Hara—is being forced to land his passenger liner on a too-short high altitude runway in the Andes Mountains.

“O’Hara looked at the black hole staring at him like an evil eye. He could see the rifling inside the muzzle and it looked as big as a howitzer. In spite of the cold, he was sweating and could feel rivulets of perspiration running down his back. He turned away from Grivas and studied the strip again. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he asked.”

Desmond Bagley’s stories are similar in both tone and storyline, but he used different methods to tell it. A sampling of his work will show the use of both first person and third person perspective. A few of his better first person narratives are Landslide, Running Blind and Bahama Crisis. High Citadel, The Spoilers, and The Tightrope Men are all in third person, and each of them is successful. He did have a habit of starting novels with the protagonist in bed sleeping past the alarm, but a few repeats are expected and forgivable.

The work of Desmond Bagley is worth discovering. It was influenced heavily by the success of Alistair MacLean and a line can easily be drawn from it to the thriller writers of the 1980s and 1990s; specifically the early work of Tom Clancy (Patriot Games, especially), Greg Dinallo, J.C. Pollock, and even the early work of David Morrell. Its roots are firmly planted in the traditional of Geoffery Household and it is comparable to many contemporary writers of Bagley, including Jack Higgins, Hammond Innes, and Gavin Lyall.

Desmond Bagley's published novels are: The Golden Keel (1962), High Citadel (1965), Wyatt's Hurricane (1966), Landslide (1967), The Vivero Letter (1968), The Spoilers (1969), Running Blind (1970), The Freedom Trap (1971), The Tightrope Men (1973), The Snow Tiger (1975), The Enemy (1977), Flyaway (1978), Bahama Crisis (1980), Windfall, (1982), Night of Error (1984), Juggernaut (1985).

RUNNING BLIND by Desmond Bagley

Bookgasm runs a weekly column called Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs written by Bruce Grossman I read faithfully--he writes about those old fashioned thrillers that told one hell of a story in about 200 pages. You remember those, don't you? The good old days of Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, Jack Higgins--before the bestseller list ruined him--and a bevvy of other talented writers who knew how to tell a story at breakneck speed and keep you thrilled the entire time.

Today Grossman has a small review of one of my favorite Desmond Bagley titles: Running Blind. Bagley wrote adventure and spy novels in--mostly--the Sixties and Seventies, and they were tough, raw, sparse and a hell of a good time. I can still remember reading Running Blind, I found it in an old paperback exchange and kept it in the glove box of my car for about a week. Everyday I would leave for work an hour early. It only took me fifteen to get there, so I had a good forty-five minutes to get lost in Bagley's world of hijinx, espionage and paranoia. I loved it.

Grossman sums up Running Blind perfectly: "I can’t stress how much of a blast this book is. If you’re a fan of this type of spy fiction, dig through your used stores for it. You won’t be disappointed at all."

You should read the review--maybe catch the one about Hopscotch by Brian Garfield as well, and then get your hands on anything Desmond Bagley. You won't regret it.

Go Here to read the review.