DEATH OF A CITIZEN by Donald Hamilton

Matt Helm is a solid citizen. He is married with three children. He makes a living writing popular novels (western’s mostly), and lives with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His picture perfect American dream is mangled when Tina, an operative he briefly worked with in Europe during World War II, walks through the front entrance of a cocktail party. She passes an old signal to Matt—“I’ll get in touch with you later. Stand by”—and in an instant (and without much fuss) Matt’s idyllic existence shatters.

Death of a Citizen is the first (of 27) Matt Helm novels, and it is absolutely terrific. In the opening sequence Helm is an everyman; likable and stable with a pretty wife and a family, but it only takes a few hours for his old habits to take over. It starts with a dead woman in his writing room, and then a confrontation with Tina who, after some convincing from Matt, weaves a fantastic story about a Soviet agent hunting a nuclear scientist working for the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos.

The action is convincing, the prose is smooth and cool—

“Suddenly I was feeling fine. You can stay tense only so long. I was over the hump. I was driving ten miles out of the way, with a corpse in the bed of the truck, just to take a worthless alley cat home.”

And the plot is as tight and smooth as a guy wire. There is more than the usual backstory about Helm’s World War II exploits, and post war life, but it is done without interrupting the forward momentum of the plot. Even better, Mac—the leader of the “organization” Matt worked for, and is once again working for—makes an appearance in the field, and Helm’s doubt and operational rust give him an element of believability. 

Death of a Citizen is the first of the Matt Helm novels, but it is as convincing, urgent, and well written as any. In a sense it is the primer. It introduces Helm, the organization, and everything it is, which is essentially a kind of counter intelligence wet work squad. It is the cold war on a small field. The best part, the citizen who lost his life (from the title) is Helm himself, and what he gains is a certain freedom, his code name Eric, and an outlet for his violent nature.

Death of a Citizen was originally published by Gold Medal in 1960, and it was recently reissued as a paperback by Titan Books.

OVERHEAD by Jack M. Bickham

Overhead is the third novel featuring Brad Smith. It was published in 1991 by Tor, and it is something of a transitional novel in the series. It is longer than the first two—as are the three that follow—and it permanently moves Brad from Richardson, Texas to the fictional Elk City, Montana.

Brad’s old tennis pal, Ted Treacher—who helped Danisa escape Yugoslavia in Tiebreaker—purchased a tennis and golf resort outside of Elk City. There is local opposition, and he is leveraged to the eyeballs. Ted wants Brad’s help to set up a small professional tournament. He has $60,000 purse money and the tournament would bring welcome publicity. Collie wants Brad to do some snooping while he is there. A civilian employee of a nearby Air Force research facility was caught removing classified data, but murdered before she could talk. The FBI thinks the Soviets are behind both spying and murder. It also thinks the killer is Brad’s old nemesis Sylvester. A little loyalty—to Ted, mostly—and a quarrel with the new head tennis pro at the resort Brad works, persuades him to load his Bronco and go to Montana.

Overhead is the weakest of the Brad Smith novels. It is longer than the first two, and several subplots run through its length; specifically, a corporate corruption scandal and an unexplained high rate of child death in Elk City. It is busy, and all of the intrigue distracts from the main focus of the novel—Brad’s and Sylvester’s ever growing annoyance with each other. It isn’t a bad novel at all, but it isn’t quite as good as the other novels in the series.

The good stuff is the setting, characters, and suspense. Mr. Bickham develops the cloying small town atmosphere of Elk City nicely, and does an even better job with the resort. The characters are never without believable motivation. There is the bully-psychopath Elk City cop, Ted who is falling apart under the financial pressure of the resort, Ardis Allen, a cutthroat businesswoman, Sylvester, and Brad. It is also structured to achieve a high level of suspense. It is written in first—Brad’s perspective—and third person, and the alternating perspective allows the author to prolong suspenseful scenes across more than one chapter (and it works very well).

There is also a nice touch of social commentary, and something about the human experience. My favorite—

“Hemingway liked to talk about how life sometimes bent people, sometimes in such a way that they healed and went on, stronger because of the hurt. He said life sometimes broke people, too. But he never really came to terms with that. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe at the very end Hemingway understood being truly broken, beyond healing, and that was why he went down to the hallway that fine sunny morning outside of Ketchum and put both barrels of the shotgun to his forehead, just above the eyes, and pulled both triggers.”

Overhead may not be the best of Jack Bickham’s Brad Smith novels, but it is still an exciting, entertaining, and very worthwhile read.

DROPSHOT by Jack M. Bickham

Dropshot is Jack Bickham’s second novel featuring Brad Smith. It was published in 1990 by Tor, and it is one of the best titles in the series. It opens with Brad in a crazy grief; his wife, Danisa, died in a plane crash, and Brad has little to live for. He is doing leather work trying to forget, struggling to keep sanity enough to muddle through his zombie-like days. On an October afternoon he receives an invitation to Al Hesser’s Tennis College in St. Maarten—free room and board with no strings attached. Brad files it in the “too hard” category, and immediately throws it out.

A few days later Collie Davis, Brad’s CIA contact, arrives in Richardson. Collie wants Brad to accept the invitation and snoop around the resort. Brad rejects the idea outright. As he does again when his old friend and doubles partner Pat Reilly asks Brad to accompany him to the island. A decision Brad later regrets because Pat dies in a suspicious scuba accident after sending Brad a desperate letter and a signature card for bank safe deposit box. Brad goes to St. Maarten—off the radar of both the CIA and the tennis resort—to investigate Pat’s death. What he finds is much larger and more dangerous than he expected.

Dropshot is a clever, twisty suspense novel. One of its major themes is death. Brad’s wife is only one of the ghosts, and there are some powerful moments. An example is an early scene when two tennis hackers are preparing for a charity tournament, and one of the men tells Brad his wife died of cancer—

“There are times like that when you want to say you notice. I’ve never known how to say it in a way that will make sense. We walk around, making our social noises, and occasionally someone opens the shutters over his eyes and we see that glimpse, that we share something crucial. But it always seems to come out wrong, and everyone ends up being embarrassed, or mystified. And so we don’t try to say it.”   

It is also a novel of recovery. The investigation breaks Brad’s grief, and a new woman enters his life. But most importantly it is exciting, suspenseful, and exotic. There are a handful of distasteful villains including Sylvester—who acts as Brad’s Moriarty in three of the novels. There are also several well-designed characters; a predatory nymph, an overextended resort owner, an angry teenager whose body as outgrown his emotions, a gambling computer programmer. The plot is devised perfectly. There are seemingly small, almost inconsequential moments that payoff big in later chapters.

Dropshot is a cold war novel and it has held up well since its publication 25 years ago. The reason has less to do with the plot and setting than it does with Brad Smith’s narration. He is sympathetic, tough when he needs to be, and a proclaimed coward. He has a realistic view of the CIA—a necessary evil—and he is likable as hell.          

TIEBREAKER by Jack M. Bickham

In 1989 a midlist writer named Jack Bickham published the slim suspense novel Tiebreaker. It was the first of six novels featuring aging professional tennis player, current teaching pro, sometime magazine writer, and former CIA asset Brad Smith. Brad is a step beyond the tail of his career and, after investing his prime years’ winnings unwisely, earns a living as a teaching pro at a club in Richardson, Texas. The novel’s opening is too good not to share—

“The last thing I had on my mind was somebody breaking into my condominium and dragging me into the past.”

It wasn’t on his mind because he was playing the finals of his tennis club’s first annual Richardson Charity Tournament against a hotshot college player acting like John McEnroe and threatening to clean the court with Brad. A battle between age and arrogance. When Brad makes it home, so both he and the reader can discover who and what is going to drag him into the past, he finds his old agency contact, Collie Davis, watching a western on television with a beer in his hand.

The agency has an assignment requiring Brad’s specialized credentials; a young Yugoslavian tennis star named Danisa Lechova wants to defect to the west, but her passport has been confiscated, and the UDBA (Yugoslavia’s version of the KGB) is openly watching her. Brad agrees, reluctantly, to act as Danisa’s go-between for the defection, using his cover as a tennis writer.

The Brad Smith novels rank as my favorite featuring a serial character. Brad is uniquely American. He does odd jobs for the agency due to a perceived debt he owes—

“ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”

—but he often doesn’t like the assignments, or the agency’s work overall. In a sense he is supporting the lesser of two evils—meaning the CIA against the KGB and the Soviet Union. He is a patriot, but it stops somewhere short of murder, coups, criminality, and E. Howard Hunt. He has a conscience and a well-defined ethical awareness that is unique to spy thrillers. He is also likable, admirable, mostly, and has more trouble with women than imaginable.

The novels, and Tiebreaker is no exception, are written in both first and third person. Brad’s perspective is in first, and an assortment of characters, including good guys and bad, are in third. The alternating perspectives give the novel a hybrid feel—Brad’s narration is more closely related to a private eye novel with social commentary making it more personal, and the third person expands it into a broader and larger suspense-spy story.

The tennis is an integral element to the story, and it is described so well it becomes a secondary character—

“Somehow I got my Prince composite on the yellow blur and bounced it down the line, hitting the back corner, close. He glided over to get it and I thought I saw the angle and guessed, chuffing up toward the net.”

The suspense is expertly designed around the story questions—a clue is identified, but its impact and relevance is not revealed for several pages. It is done without any annoying tricks or contrivance. The characters—both Brad Smith and the secondary folks—are well defined without any doubts about motivation or outcome. There are no crazy monsters, or unexplained actions. Everything is logical and smooth.

I like Tiebreaker and its five sequels so well that I re-read the entire series every few years, and if I was any more weak-willed I would probably read them more often.

TROTSKY'S RUN by Richard Hoyt

Trotsky’s Run is my first experience with the work of Richard Hoyt.  It was published in 1982 by William Morrow, and I ran across the mass market edition released by TOR in 1983.  It is an espionage novel with a cleverly devised plot, humor, a little tradecraft, a bunch of history—both now and then—and a somewhat satirical view of cold war paranoia.

Two of the major players in the novel are historical figures.  Leon Trotsky and Kim Philby.  Trotsky’s role in the novel develops slowly as the novel unfolds, but Philby’s role is central and obvious.  Philby wants out of the Soviet Union—where he defected in 1963—and he has information to trade with the United States for safe passage. 

Philby’s claim is bombastic.  The likely victor of the upcoming presidential election is an officer of the KGB.  The information is received a few weeks before the election, and the CIA is in a quagmire.  Is Philby’s intelligence factual, or is it nothing more than Soviet disinformation.  A quick and dirty plan is hatched; two CIA officers will extract Philby from Yalta, where he is vacationing, and interrogate him to determine the validity of the evidence.

Trotsky’s Run is as smooth an espionage novel as you will read.  The prose is sparse and economical.  It is long on narrative and short on dialogue.  The plot is crisp, complicated, and at times outlandish—although not in bad way, but rather in a mildly satirical manner that feeds off extreme cold war paranoia. 

Kim Philby’s historical narrative is interesting and, what I know about his activities before he defected, even accurate.  His role in the capture and execution of dozens of agents in communist Albania, and in the capture of Soviet defector Konstantin Volkov are two of the more interesting, but also detailed—if briefly—Philby’s early marriage to a young Austrian communist in Vienna, and his later pro-fascist stint as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War.

Trotsky’s Run is an excellent novel.  It is witty and humorous—in the manner a suspense novel should be humorous, through the dialogue.  It is both intelligent and entertaining, and while the overarching plot is somewhat fantastical Mr Hoyt is able to make it seem believable by infusing the storyline with historical events and peoples—think Trotsky and Philby—that give it a certain plausibility.