ENDGAME by James Elliott

A couple fishing buddies—both former Delta Force operators—are camped by a remote lake in the Canadian wilderness. They are old friends, but their lives have drifted apart and this trip is the first in six years. It’s been two great weeks of fishing, hiking, leisure and lot of catching up. As the sun begins to set on the final evening of their trip they spot the flicker and glare of a Lear jet approaching hard and steep. Its engines are silent and it appears to be making an attempt to land on the small mountain lake. It hits the lake’s surface fast and bounces back into the air and then hits hard several hundred yards into the forest.

The pair of former operators swiftly move to the crash site and find the crew dead along with a very unexpected cargo—three large black nylon bags stuffed with $20,000,000. The two men—Eddie Barnes and Ben Stafford—make an easy decision. They decide to keep the money and split it even. Unfortunately the money belongs to some pretty unsavory characters who will go to any length to retrieve their property and it doesn’t take them long to discover who took the money and execute a plan to get it back.

Endgame is one of the better straight thrillers I’ve read in the past few years. The plot is exciting and it is loaded with tradecraft and technical spy and tracking stuff without being burdensome. The action is nicely paced—it doesn’t have the low and slow spots that inhabit many thrillers—and the prose is swift and very much in the style made popular by Tom Clancy in the 1980s; although a little more solid and just a shade more literate.

The characters are exactly as are expected from this type of novel: tough, lightly developed with just enough backstory—most of it military experiences—to raise the characters from straight cardboard to interesting and likable. The novels major flaw is its climax—it diffused the storyline into a strange oblique web that was not quite satisfactory. But the journey was one hell of a ride, enough so that I could forgive the ending and wish that Mr. Elliott were still producing novels.

The British publisher Piatkus originally published Endgame in 2000; as far as I know it was never published in the United States. It was written by J.C. Pollock as by James Elliott. I’ve written several posts about the Pollock-Elliott connection:

J.C. Pollock Update
J.C. Pollock Update 2

J. C. Pollock Update # 2

A little over a year ago I reviewed the novel Threat Case by J.C. Pollock—a writer I devoured as a teenager in the early-1990s—and while I was re-reading Threat Case I did a little research and found a hotly contested pseudonym that possibly belonged to Pollock. The pseudonym is James Elliott and the majority of information around the Internet suggested it belonged to the writer John Case—which is the pseudonym of husband and wife team Carolyn and Jim Hougan. They have written several successful novels over the past decade including The Genesis Code and The First Horseman. Unfortunately I’ve never read any of them, so I can only assume they write a tight and gripping thriller.

Now back to Pollock. I’ve been exchanging emails with Mr Pollock for a few weeks and he confirmed the James Elliott novels are his. He wrote three novels using the Elliott nom de plume from 1996 to 2000. The titles, Cold Cold Heart (1996), Nowhere to Hide (1997), and Endgame (2000). He has since turned his attention to Hollywood and screenwriting. He wrote the screenplay for the straight to DVD film End Game—no relationship with his novel of the same title—that starred Cuba Gooding, Jr and James Woods, and was directed by Andy Cheng. Mr Pollock wasn’t impressed with the finished product and warns against making an effort to find it. He is currently working on a New Line Cinema project titled The Venus Fixer—a project he says, “I am having a much more pleasant experience with [than End Game].”

I have found only one of the James Elliott novels so far, the Pinnacle Books edition of Cold Cold Heart, and I haven’t read it yet. It’s on my stack of “to-be-read” books and I need to move it up a little. Heck, maybe tonight. And I can’t wait to see what his most recent film project turns out to be.

Here is a complete list of novels written by J.C. Pollock:

The Dennecker Code (1982)
Mission MIA (1982)
Centrifuge (1984)
Crossfire (1986)
Payback (1989)
Threat Case (1991)
Goering’s List (1993)

As by James Elliott

Cold Cold Heart (1996)
Nowhere to Hide (1997)
Endgame (2000)

My favorites are: Threat Case, Payback and Centrifuge, but all of them are great.

Click Here to read the first J.C. Pollock Update. (This has proven to be one of the most popular posts here at Gravetapping. It gets several hits a day and even though it was posted more than a year ago I still get quite a bit of email about it.)

J.C. Pollock Update

To read an updated post about J. C. pollock click Here

A few Internet searches—one site was in Japanese and another had a racket to sell me porn protection, whatever that is—a few misleads, and a little advice from a reader have led me to a pseudonym used by J.C. Pollock in the mid-1990s.

The pseudonym: James Elliott.

A couple Internet articles made the assumption that the James Elliott pseudonym belonged to husband and wife writing team Jim and Carolyn Hougan who write under the name John Case, but I found an article on Variety that made the connection between Pollock and Elliott. The pertinent portion of the Variety article said:

Pollock's credits include the novel "Mission MIA," which was the basis for the film "Uncommon Valor," starring Gene Hackman; and "Cold Cold Heart" (written under the pseudonym James Elliot), which was optioned to John McTiernan. Pollock has also optioned part of his forthcoming novel "Sometimes When We Touch" to Quentin Tarantino.

J.C. Pollock published two novels under the Elliot moniker—Cold, Cold Heart in 1994 and Nowhere to Hide in 1996. I vaguely remember the covers—especially the cover of Cold, Cold Heart—but I have never read, or even considered reading, either of them. Hopefully one of the few remaining used bookstores around here has a copy of one or both so I can at least take a look at them. Now I just need to figure out what happened to the Sometimes When We Touch novel that was optioned to Quentin Tarrantino. Hmmm. Any ideas?

There is also a film—End Game—starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Anne Archer, and written by J.C. Pollock released straight to DVD in 2006. The same guy? Maybe.

If any of you see any errors with my analysis, or have any new information, please share.

UPDATE. (4-Aug-2008). Good news. I received an email from J. C. Pollock over the weekend and he confirmed the James Elliott pseudonym is his, that he wrote the screenplay for the film End Game (he was disappointed with the end result), and (here comes the really good news)he has a new feature film being produced by New Line Cinema titled The Venus Fixer, and there is another published novel under the Elliott moniker; End Game. There is no relationship with the film other than the title.

THREAT CASE by J.C. Pollock

I have been a voracious reader since I was a kid—I started with the Hardy Boys and moved on to Encyclopedia Brown and then somewhere between then and now found the espionage, thriller, and techno-thriller genres. And what a find it was. As a teenager my reading diet consisted of Tom Clancy, Jack Higgins, David Morrell, J.C. Pollock and a bevy of other thriller writers, which brings me to my point. I just finished J.C. Pollock’s Threat Case, and it was everything I remembered it to be. Cool, fast and engrossing entertainment.

Threat Case is Pollock’s second novel to feature former Green Beret and Delta Force Operator Jack Gannon. In it we find Gannon smack in the middle of a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. The drug war is having its affect on the cartels, and they want a little vengeance, so they hire a professional hitman to send Western leaders a message: no one is safe. Gannon is dragged into the mess when he learns of the murder of a friend who helped him through hard times, and it turns out her killer and the assassin are one and the same, and Gannon can’t believe it when he realizes he is hunting an old enemy who he thought had been dead for twenty years.

Threat Case was published in 1991, and its plot is reminiscent of the era—there are street gangs, cocaine, and Vietnam vets behind every tree. The protagonist—Jack Gannon—is tough as nails, and an all around great guy who not only has a sense of duty, but also has a very strict definition of justice and fair play. He is willing to kill, but the killing does not define him—corny sounding, but in its own literary sense very comfortable.

The plot is large: It begins in the Caribbean, but quickly moves to the Peruvian jungles and then on to Washington, D.C. and New York City with plenty of stops in between. The cast is large also, but the novel is at its best when Gannon is on stage struggling to stay in the game and stop the madness before it can change the world. He is a protagonist that, while not well developed, the reader can cheer for because he is representative of everything that is right with the world. He is bold, brave and honest as the day is long.

This is my second reading of Threat Case, and I enjoyed it as much, maybe even a bit more, than the first. It is the perfect length for a thriller, clocking in at 356 pages in mass market, and while it suffers the usual weaknesses of the genre—a little bloat, too much character description, and too much space to set-up the storyline—it makes up for it with heady you-are-there action, and a story that has just enough realism that it could maybe be happening right now. J.C. Pollock was one of the better thriller writers working in the Eighties and early-Nineties, and Threat Case is probably his best.

A little extra: J.C Pollock authored seven novels between 1982 and 1993. Then he disappeared from the world of fiction. His work disappeared at about the same time the genre imploded—one week there were dozens of new military-type thrillers, and the next they were gone. The short biography included with his books says, in part, that he: is a member of the Special Operations Association and the Special Forces Association and a contributing editor to the National Vietnam Veterans Review.

My question: what happened to this guy? He was an above average seller—most of my local bookstores carried everything he wrote up through the mid-1990s—and his work was a notch above most of the thrillers being written at the time. Is he still around? Does he write under a pseudonym—hell, was J.C. Pollock a nom de plume? If anyone out there knows anything about what happened to Pollock—and I know someone does—please send me an email. I would love to hear the story.