This is a book which covers modern day Vietnam and the War. Let me start off by saying I’m a big fan of Mr DeMille, even though I’ve only now read four books of his, and this one delivers yet again.
The story follows Paul Brenner, a former combatant then who became a military policeman in the Vietnam War, before he retired/was kicked out as an investigator from the army’s Criminal Investigation Division and who is now being sent to investigate a murder of an US Army lieutenant during the War. Note:I haven’t read The Generals Daughter where he was first introduced. In Vietnam his contact is the very beautiful CIA officer, fluent in Vietnamese Susan Weber and together they try and solve the murder and understand why it is so relevant to today. However, their actions are watched carefully by the very well written and effective former North Vietnamese soldier Colonel Mang who works for Section A, the Vietnamese equivalent of the CIA.

This book raises in the reader certain issues and these include:
1) In war, you have to do whatever it takes to stay alive and kill the enemy. War is no place for rules and any action is excusable on the battlefield, even if it is seen as reprehensible in civilian life. Even if you go a bit chicken oriental (mental for the non cockney readers) you stick to the golden rule of I kill you before you kill me.

2) This then creates a state of mind which can later, if successful, be put back into its box. However every so often it can slip out and only massive amounts of self control can stop your actions. If you are psyched up for 12 months, you can’t suddenly flick a switch and be normal. Characters in this book who fought on opposite sides during the war now interact with an understanding of each others experiences, however in some cases they have trouble holding themselves back from having a street brawl.

3) The US soldiers of the Vietnam War felt completely unsupported by the media, the civilians and by the politicians, however that didn’t matter as they trusted each other, it created an internal code of conduct and made them stronger as a corps. I must admit that I’ve used this tactic in real-life where I’ve became responsible for badly performing teams at work, and you then create a culture at the start where you say everybody hates us, lets work together and prove them wrong. Some sporting managers use it, the most notable being Alex Ferguson from Manchester United. However, this makes you, and on a a far larger scale in Vietnam, angry and shocked when one of your own later turns against you. In this book, the soldiers don’t mind everybody is against them, so long they stick together, but what they find is the lowest of the low is soldiers using the war for their own personal monetary gain and thereby helping the enemy. This covers things such as selling shipments of goods to the black market which are then later used against you by the VC (referenced in Steel Tiger review coming soon) or in this book stealing money and killing your fellow combatants to cover up your theft.

4) Ambassadors and their hangers on. They are a drain of the public purse and all that time is wasted on ass-kissing by their courtesans. I detest that rubbish where ambassadors are excused and thus take no responsibility for spy missions. Ambassadors should be accountable for all the state sponsored actions of their countrymen, else why are you there unless it’s just a junket. A few months ago I did some quotations from Ion Pacepa’s Red Horizons and I liked how the Romanian ambassadors were also intelligence agents and that should be their job, none of the endless tea parties and fact finding missions that they do as a reward for being a failed politician.

5) How we in the West harp on and constantly feel the need to excuse the actions of the US soldiers during the war. Yes, there were some acts which were reprehensible and are war crimes, however we gloss over and willfully forget the atrocities committed by the VC against civilians and enemy combatants. Is there an element of racism where we classify our actions as being beyond the pale, yet we excuse the North Vietnamese actions as this is what you would expect from what we deem to be uncivilised savages? The Vietnamese clearly won the propaganda war, and this allows them to hide their atrocities and subsequently make us forget them.

6) In an ideal world, the leader of your country is supposed to be the best-est and fairest of all, instead what happens is that we have the best politician representing us with all their flaws. I wont go into what I think of Royalty, especially the UK Royal family, as simply they are just a bunch of inbred, money wasting, unaccountable oxygen thieves, and as for those who dote on them and lick their boots, well viva la revolution and off with all their heads. In this book, you wonder what immoral act should rule you out from having high office, and if others know your secret, doesn’t that make you a compromised and ineffective politician and therefore you can’t perform and respect the duties of your Office.

7) Urban planning after a war. Seriously this is a fascinating subject, as it is always interesting when friends or conquerors impose their town designs on another country. In this book East Germany re-builds Vinh in their ghastly concrete style which looks out of place in Vietnam and I remember years ago passing through Le Harve in France which was rebuilt after the Second World War and that was just a city made out of concrete and the street widths were huge giving you the impression that you were in a American town built by the East Germans and the people spoke French as they ignored the British ferry travelers. I quote from wikipedia “UNESCO declared the city centre of Le Havre a World Heritage Site on 15 July 2005, in honouring the “innovative utilisation of concrete’s potential.”

Cold War fiction has always been dominated by the names of le Carré, Deighton and Clancy, however since starting the stasi.com I’ve found that I have enjoyed the books of DeMille and Allbeurey far more. John le Carré books have lost their relevance and his writing hasn’t stood the test of time, Deighton hit some very high highs (the very well written Funeral in Berlin and maybe some of Michael Caines ’60s coolness adds to its appeal), but I found re-reading his Game, Set, Match a bit dull, and Clancy should have stopped writing when the millennium started, yet I think I could pick up a DeMille or an Allbeurey and enjoy the story-telling no matter how old I get.

DeMille writes highly enjoyable remove your brain, settle into a comfortable position for hours, very readable novels, he does use the odd cliché and in this the most obvious one, and my pet hate, is the one where the stunningly beautiful female operative, killing machine extraordinaire, falls in love with the protagonist and goes against her orders and her nature and subsequently follows the new righteous path dictated by the man. However, that doesn’t distract from what is a very good book and DeMille skilfully uses his Vietnam experience, as he did in Word of Honour.

Fabulous book, well worth its rating.

Recently my spirit for the site has been flagging. When I started I thought this site would be more interactive, people would write in the forums, I would have at least one other person writing a blog on the site, and out of all the absolute dross on the internet people would recognise my genius, take me to task on some of the political views I’ve written or stand up for le Carre and his truly awful writing or even one person would write a comment….. Instead it makes me think that my passion isn’t shared by many people out there, even though that doesn’t explain the volumes that Clancy et al sell, maybe my site is a lot of rubbish and my negativity towards some of the books are putting people off. I do get loads of comments on selling cigarettes, selling Viagra, sites where you can see hot photos of some person you never heard of or the opportunity to take part in some financial insurance scam but these spammers are just f**kwits, but at least they take the time to write. Recently some of the books I’ve read have been pretty poor, so bad that I couldn’t bring myself to write reviews – it’s not that the plots are bad, but rather it’s the writing and the feeling you get from some writers is that they are going through the motions and their lack of passion destroys the pleasure you get from reading their book. Woe is me!!

However, my faith in cold war fiction has been restored by Black Ice as it was an absolute pleasure to read, especially after reading the soap opera-ish The Company and the dour, but not bad, Armageddon. For your pleasure I’ve attached the first page

If you’ve never come to in the middle of the night to find yourself approximately halfway between New York and Moscow, right up on top of the world, standing outside a block of flats wearing nothing other than a ladies’ silk dressing-robe – and that decorated with large scarlet kisses – allow me to describe the sensation.

Confused. That’s the word, I think. Confused, and cold around the knees.

I shivered, yawned and did a few push-ups with my eyelids while I applied my brain to some basic questions: like was it night or day? That isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. In the summer, about the only way you can tell is by the life in the city. From where I was standing, outside the flats high up on Vesturbrun, the place looked like early-closing day on the Marie Celeste.

That made it night. Still.

I looked and listened. Nothing. Only, in the distance, a car chugging and spluttering. An early worker. Or, here in Reykjavik, more likely a late reveller.

I called out her name, then stood there feeling silly. Solrun isn’t the sort of name you can go round shouting, not unless you’ve strayed into one of those operas where all the women look like sixteen-stone milkmaids. In any case, my cry fell into that damp silence like a stone down a well.

Then it struck me. If this was my debut in international espionage, I wasn’t doing too well. I mean, how would it look on my c.v.? ‘On his first operation, Craven actually lost the subject of his surveillance while she was in bed with him.’ Roger Moore never seemed to have these problems.

This book was narrated with a flippancy and an irrelevancy that appealed to me. The language was of a far higher standard than most books, and I include Deighton in this, that I have read recently. Also, kudos for describing my wife:

“When I come to think about it, I’ve never actually known a woman who rushed off home to mummy in moments of emotional crisis. My wife used to rush out and spend. To her, the cheque-book was a weapon of retaliation: it gave her a strike-back capability that was awesome”. - I am safe in the knowledge that my wife doesn’t read this blog.

The book is about a journalist who has been asked by the British Foreign Office on a one time mission, to go and catch up with his ex-girlfriend the stunningly beautiful Icelandic model Solrun. Yes, pet hated cliché that she is most gorgeous woman on earth, but the story would have suffered if she looked like Kelly Osbourne or some other fat ugly woman who is famous for no apparent reason and the strength of the writing allowed me to forgive this faux par. Sohrun is caught in a political public relations war between the USA and the USSR. If she defects to the Russians, this will drive up feelings of anti-Americanism and drive them out of their strategic base in Iceland.
Solrun has went on the run and is pursued by some journalists, two mad ex-US soldiers, a charming Russian with bad taste in furniture, a novelty toilet salesman, the Icelandic Intelligence Service and a man who speaks Esperanto.
It all sounds very flippant and irrelevant, but that would not do it justice as there is a very tight plot, the main character is very well described, there is constant action and the book manages to remind us that the Cold War wasn’t fought just in Berlin or Moscow, but everywhere that held a strategic importance to one side or the other. The book builds up very nicely before an ending that is brutal and leaves you a bit shell-shocked, so very well done Mr Dunne.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: This book leaves you know doubt that both sides are as bad as each other, and we are all pawns who get easily distracted by reading about sexy Eskies.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : A scalping, a Russian gets beaten up, a man freezes to death, some unsafe bungee jumping, and a geyser gets angry.

Believability of the goodies: Sam Craven, believable as an under achiever and if you believe that old adage “it’s easier to laugh a woman into bed” to explain his success with Solrun. His background and his upbringing helped explain his motives and how he reacts to situations and at no point did you feel that his actions or his thoughts were out of character.
This book was narrated by Sam (no relation to Jon of newsround) and like the Quiller books or Deightons unnamed spies, he doesn’t go into detailed backgrounds on who he meets, rather he judges them on their actions and their reactions to events.

This book is good for the soul as it allows the reader to enjoy the English language in a cold war setting and the story never let go as the plot revealed itself over the course of the book. For once I wholeheartedly agree with the quotes on the back “Crisp characters, amazing pace. every low punch in the book on target” and “Sharp, funny and stylish”

Buy it from Amazon, or you can read it online (not really recommended as you can’t enjoy a book on a monitor) at Open writing or you can read the author write about his days at The Sun at Ranters

Google analytics always show that one of the search terms that my site falls under is CIA fiction cold war. However, I rarely read books about the CIA, as I think the European spies are better. European spies, are grubbier, more inventive, more morally ambiguous where the American cold war fiction books are more military. For instance, Jack Ryan, the books are great, but he isn’t a spy, rather he is an analyst who gets caught up in military fights. It’s a sense of identifying with the characters and I struggle with some CIA books. It is like Nina Simone – I love her voice, her songs, the rawness but I don’t like the song Young, Gifted and Black. Not because I’m racist, far from it, but rather I’m not young nor black and that songs audience isn’t a middle-aged guy writing a blog about cold war books as he drinks some Château de Cardboard.

So I tried to put my prejudice against American CIA books aside as I read The Company, however from the start I had trouble identifying with the three main characters as they were a bunch of Yale rowers, getting involved in the Great Game, and they knew that they were fighting the good fight on their side and this rubbed me up the wrong way. I like my characters to have a bit of class war in them as I detest when it’s the gentlemen spies from Oxbridge or they are doing it for God, Queen and Country. On a side note, I though the Matt Damon film The Good Shepherd was absolute rubbish and this book had the same air as the film.

This book then follows the divergent paths this troika follow and charts the successes and failures of the three principal characters and the CIA in Hungary, Cuba, Soviet invaded Afghanistan and Russia under Gorbachev. The book mixes real events with real characters and in the end you don’t care what happens rather you begin to set yourself the mental goal of finishing this book. This isn’t a reflection of the books length, for instance I would say Leon Uris’ Armageddon has far more words and it makes you think, where The Company just made you groan.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: The novel doesn’t allow you to make a guess as it tries to follow the real time-line.
Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Hungary rebels, Cuba gets invaded, Russia has a revolution, Afghan kidnapping and escape, some fake East German police shooting, trawler blows up, pope gets knocked off and Yeltsin explains how he lost his fingers.

Believability of the goodies (CIA):
John J. McAuliffe, was the central character of the Yale rowing troika. He was supposed to represent the fighting Irish immigrants, he had the red hair with red moustache and the lothario personality to match, and was the American taking the Soviets on in East Berlin and landing with the Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs. He was a man who knew God was on his side, and whatever actions he takes are justified as he is fighting for the right side. He had everything going for him, yet he just didn’t come alive, maybe the author had too many central characters and their effectiveness was diluted?

Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt II. a.k.a. Ebby was a good character, however what made him unbelievable was the massive change in personality in the book. This was a man who fought against the Nazis for the OSS, came back to civilian life, missed the excitement and the sense of patriotism or purpose and decide to join the CIA. However, he gets captured by a Russian trawler captain and when he goes to Hungary you sense that he doesn’t know what he is doing or how he should act. As an OSS veteran you would expect a certain type of personality and the intelligence to to do things, where as the book progressed he became more and more an apparatchik making his back-story questionable.

Harvey Torriti a.k.a the Sorcerer was the most interesting character in the book. He was the hard-drinking anti-political correctness Man in Berlin. He had the rawness, the peasant cunning and the thirst to take on the Russians and win. He knew the rules of the Game and was probably the most fleshed out character, not just in girth, in the book, however sadly he seemed to be a bit of a sideshow to the shallow boring Company men. I would hope Littell brings out books on Torriti, however they might have a problem conveying any fear for the reader on the survival rate of the hero as in this book he ends up fat and constantly drunk in a nursing home.

I’m not too keen to talk about James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby and the rest of the historical characters who appeared in this book as the book wasn’t really about them unlike Shadow of Shadows where George Blake was a central character. However I will quickly say that Angleton, if he was a smart as he was, he ruined it by having such poor presentation skills. If you are going to destroy the careers of serving officers and put the CIA into civil war, at least be able to explain your decisions, allow substantive investigations and be open and transparent when you convict someone. How can you be open and transparent in a secret service? You need to be with personnel issues, else you will create a cancer that will destroy your organisation. After all there are more 9-5 bureaucrats compared to those out sneaking Soviet scientists out. Do you think he felt such a fool when his alleged best friend Philby was a mole and you wonder how many secrets Angleton inadvertently passed over?
Also, the author of the last book I reviewed Mongoose R.I.P William F. Buckley Jr had a mention which was nice.

Believability of the baddies (KGB):
Yegeny Alexandrovich Tsipin: He was the Soviet member of the troika. He had the most interesting job as he was a deep cover Soviet spy in the USA, however the book wasn’t named the KGB rather The Company so out of the three of the original trio, he featured the least and in compensation he was given a small starring role during the Soviet coup in 1991. Typical lovers story where he falls in love with a Russian woman, but he finds out that she is Jewish, therefore not allowed to KGB serving officers, and worse than that she investigates Stalin’s crimes and dismisses the argument that Stalin was a mistake, rather she believes communism is a crime. Yegeny has to choose between serving his country and her, so he picks his country and she fades out, but like all soap opera-ish fiction, Yegeny stills carries a torch for her and they meet under the more outwardly enlightened regime of Gorbachev and to this readers astonishment, they both still love each other. Also, the revelation that Yegeny was an unofficial spotter, who spotted Leo just didn’t fit with the rest of the story.

Leo Kritzky: Leo was one of the original troika, and all along was a Soviet agent. Like the other characters there was a wooden-ish to his character and his unmasking as traitor wasn’t too much of a surprise. It was a lack of surprise as in fiction whenever three people are involved two are on different sides and one is a traitor. What was well written, was how he became a spy, how he met his wife and his interrogation by Angelton. Leo justifies his conversion to communism with all the usual idealism about the brotherhood of man, and then when he defects to Soviet Russia he finds the barbaric-ness of the system and how the leaders have betrayed communism and that communist salvation and his own, can be found through the armed support of Yeltin during the Coup of 1991. I know the author tries to follow historical precedent where the mole in the CIA starts with K, names ends with ski, but this is a work of fiction, you do have a licence to be inventive. Why does the mole always have to the emigrant from the East, and whose father failed under the capitalist system and killed himself. Why not make the mole like Robert Hanssen (who is mentioned in the book) without the sexual deviancy, a god fearing Christian. Yes, Hanssen has some Polish in him, but my point still remains valid.

Starik, the old man and puppet master. Either Stalin or Beria or one of the gang used to be a paedophile, but why make this character one? Does it add anything to the story? No! Why can’t the main adversary just have normal tastes? Seriously I could easily run the KGB and order my operatives to kill the Pope without my down time needing to filled by my “nieces”. This American trait to constantly de-humanise the bad guys always annoys me. For instance, I love the old black and white movies which were made during and just after the second world war. There was always a clear distinction between the UK and the USA produced films. The American ones always had the Nazis portrayed as evil to the core, raping nuns and killing babies, where the British films showed the enemy as Germans with the odd Nazi, with his black-hearted ways in charge. Evil is more convincing when it’s somebody like Himmler, a small normal looking man, who kills millions and set the world alight with a stroke of a pen, rather than a paedophile who climbs to the top. Maybe it is because to be a leader within a bad guy cabal, for lack of a better description, you must be socially accepted by your peers and share similar personality traits, didn’t Hitler remove Roehm, the brown shirt leader, to primarily consolidate his grip on the party, but also because his homosexuality and the rest of the leaders of the S.A. was alien to him and the goals of the Third Reich?

Starik, had a master plan codenamed Kholstomer, which was to bring about the capitalist destruction of the USA by destroying the dollar in the currency markets. This was plan which was featured in the very first pages of the book, and necessitated the killing of the Pope and so this is a central plot. This plan was warned by Angelton and Starik was planning for this for decades, First Secretarys of the Communist Party were frightened of implementing it, yet the author choose to wrap it it up in a page or so and all behind the scenes – all this build up for a lame fizz. Also, the other thing that annoyed me about the Kholstomer plot was that Starik hired a top assassin to carry out the killing of the Pope, and once he does the deed Starik easily kills him. Why not give the assassin some sense of professionalism, and give him an insurance like how some of the characters who supplied the matériel in The Day of the Jackal were untouchable by the sniper.

I’m one of these people that never liked Alice in Wonderland, I have no intention of ever seeing the new movie, and yet it must be the most referenced book in fiction. This is the book that Starik choose to read to his pre-pubescent harem every night for a minimum of 40 years and I’m just wondering whether cardboard characters in a spy novel would be bored of the same book.

As I was reading this novel I thought it’s written like a TV movie or one of those TV series/special events starring Robert Mitchum and then I discovered it is a TV mini-series starring a failed Robin, the man who is starring in the worst spin-off of all time – Chris O’Donnell, yet admittedly he played well a woman in Two and a half men, and I wasn’t surprised. There is a blandness and a softness to these TV series and this book conveys the same tones.

The book never evoked any feeling in the reader. For instance the book is set during the Hungarian uprising and the Invasion of the Bay of Pigs and Littell doesn’t make the reader care. Any other author would make you feel the tension of the uprising, the rumblings of the Soviet tanks along the cobblestones, the fear and confusion as one of the main characters is trapped in a barracks surrounded by the Soviet oppressors, even throw in a bit of propaganda where it makes it clear to the reader that the West is fighting a good fight and the communists are evil, or alternatively make you feel disgusted that the West egged on the Hungarians, the Cubans and the Iraqis at the end of Gulf War One and then didn’t follow through and left them be massacred by their oppressors.

Littell also went Tom Clancy post 2000, where he makes the main characters for awhile the sons of the main protagonists, and like The Teeth of The Tiger, you think why are you wasting my time with these clearly inferior characters, let’s just focus on the main ones and give them a natural conclusion. This part of the book, (book written in 2002) allows the author to warn about bin Laden and the backfiring of giving stingers and support to the Afghans and mujahideen, and it comes across as the authors smugness and maybe to show that the book has relevance to today. Yet it feels out of sync with the characters and the mood of the times that helping them to beat the Soviets was the right thing to do.

In summary, it could have been so much better, all the ingredients were there, it had a good enough plot, it had some fantastic backdrops, it appeared well researched and then it just didn’t come together which was such a pity.

One very last point, as I was getting the picture for the book from the amazon store I read how many people think this is a massive book at 900 pages. 900 pages isn’t a lot and the font is big enough and in my opinion it is just stupid to judge a book on it’s length rather than its enjoyment. Come on people you don’t get a badge of honour or need a health warning for reading a book longer than 300 pages and length doesn’t justify calling a book epic.

My biggest communist novelty mistake was not realising Castro was in Hanoi the same day I was. Instead of having the joy of listening to the man ramble on for X amount of hours, I did the sights and the tomb of Ho Chi Minh. ‘Uncle’ Ho’s mausoleum was quiet, respectful and you had to dress neatly which was a huge comparison to Chairman Mao’s in Beijing which was just a free for all, tacky, especially at the end of it when you are assaulted by the street vendors, all within the grounds of his mausoleum. I still have to see Lenins, however I’m hoping Castro when he dies, must be soon-ish, gets embalmed and stuffed and put on public display. It’s not out of respect for Castro, rather some people collect snow-globes, I just want to have a full suite of dead embalmed Communist leaders. On a side-note I think using a jackhammer and breaking into Stalins concrete protected tomb would be too much, however if I was seriously drunk and I was one of those Russian oil-barons, I wouldn’t rule it out.

Mongoose R.I.P is the story of three of the missions where the Kennedy brothers are trying to kill Castro. In later editions it is billed as a Blackford Oakes book, but in this he has a secondary role, as Castro is the main character and it follows him as he tries to avoid being assassinated, how he positions Cuba in the eyes of the Russians and how to strike back at the main enemy i.e. the USA.

As this is an alternative history, Buckley uses the three (out of the 638) most publicised assassination attempts on Castro in the course of the book:

1) Wetsuit with toxins – This is an idea by the CIA/ OSS legend Wild Bill Donovan. In this Donovan comes across as a soldier who was very brave in combat, yet when it came to trying to remove Castro he came across like an excited schoolboy with impractical ideas.

2) The lover, Maria. After a year in Miami she returns to Cuba and tries to poison him by hiding pills in her cold cream. Another idea by Donovan. Good idea, but poorly executed and planned. On the first night this woman is back, she tries to poison him, however Castro security detail has already discovered the pills. Hindsight is great, but what should have happened was that she comes back, embeds herself with Castro for a few months and then the CIA slips her the pills. To try on your first night and to smuggle the pills in yourself is just stupid.

3) An old comrade of arms, Rolando Cubela, tries to shoot Castro. This attempt is the one where Blackford Oakes is involved in, as he supplies the rifle, the reward money and the co-ordination for a new provisional government. Cubela misses.

With his mistress trying to kill him and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion a few years before, Castro plans a revenge on America and Kennedy. This revenge is helped by the discovery that a missile was left hidden behind by the Russians after the missile crises, which the Russians ‘forgot’ to tell the Cubans about. Castro also has problems with the USSR as he feels his country is not being respected enough by the Russians, so he plans to hurt the Russians and the Americans at the same time as he will launch a nuclear missile at the Americans and blame it on the Russians. For this to work, Castro needs a Russian missile specialist to defect and the best way is through the specialists family, however these are all held ‘hostage’ in Russia awaiting for their non-defecting husbands to return from overseas. Castro starts dropping hints on how much he respects the Chinese, and in Khrushchev’s fury/appeasement he invites Castro to the May Day celebrations in Moscow, thus giving Castro the opportunity to carry out his plan.

Blackford Oakes is now in Cuba. Blackford like the James Bond from the book Casino Royale, is unlucky in love and his life as an agent comes across like Bonds as very bleak with a deep sense of loneliness. Events control Blackford and Bond rather than being the cause of events. In Casino Royale, the woman Bonds loves is a traitor and kills herself, in this book, Oakes longtime lover runs away and marries a man, who in a surprising coincidence gets killed as he and Blackford plan Cubela’s attempt.

A disillusioned young man enters the scene and approaches the Cubans and says he will kill Kennedy from the book depository in Dallas. The Cubans give him unofficial support and plan, as backup, to drop the bomb on Dallas if the man misses. Either way Kennedy is dead, but does he take Dallas with him? Eventually Blackford has to make the choice between the president he deeply cares for and the people of Dallas.

This book also touches on the Cuban revolution that Castro led and how he promised Cubans free democratic elections when they overthrew Batista. However, in the end Castro, like most dictators, created a cult of himself and destroyed his country. The only difference between dictators and politicians is that dictators kill the population, where politicians ruin the population. Normally I would write about US politics, the corruption of all politicians, but I thought this time I should write sweeping statements and make Spanish stereotypes.

The Spanish and thus their colonies, have never had true freedom of expression of the people. They have always been dominated by their Royal family, by the State or by the doctrine of religion. Other lands imported new ideas, new thoughts and expanded upon them where the Spanish seem to conform to whoever is in charge. Some countries have had reformations which drastically change the way the people act and think, where the Spanish had an Inquisition that consolidated the power of the Church. (Spain, as we know it, never became democratic till the very late 1970′s and in 1981 there was still a coup attempt.) This culture of repression or dominance is in the Spaniards soul (even now they have problems defining what is Spain and what should be autonomous), creates an environment which allows Caudillos to take root and flourish. With that in mind, transfer the above broad sweeping statements to Cuba, which was a Spanish colony, and in steps Castro the only* modern day Caudillo – charismatic, civil war winner and disciplinarian with his brand of Communism – Impossibilism, with a Cuban flavour.

To legitimise a true caudillo, you need to have an event where against all odds he wins and shows his total command, not just of his forces but also hints at spiritualism where an unseen greater force is helping. And what better for Castro to exploit than the shameful Bay of Pigs episode.

Mongoose R.I.P hints at Castro’s spiritual luck, as he has premonitions of danger and thus takes step to avoid it and his people are left in awe of his gift. In the book compared to Castro, Kennedy and Khrushchev are seen as weak unintelligent leaders, Kennedy is seen as a girl-banging, childish thinking president, where Khrushchev is seen as a vain old man. The author, Buckley seems not to have a love-hate relationship with Castro, but rather a bitter love-spurned relationship as on the love side he seems to respect Castro and builds up his intelligence above his own president, and he supports the ideals of the revolution but Castro’s refusal to enact the polices that he fought for and the steady elimination of all his rivals allows Buckley to demonise Castro at the same time.

And a very small last point, the bad guys i.e the Cubans drink coke and the Americans drink pepsi.

William F Buckley Jr had a supremely gifted intellect, and some of his other non-fiction writings are superb, where this book is well written, very good storyline and the nice use of alternative history, yet there is something missing which stops the reader being fully engrossed in the book. In simple terms I wouldn’t miss my stop on the train, as I have done with other books, as the book doesn’t make you exclude all else going on around you. Anyway, very good book, well worth a read.

* Chavez and the rest don’t count. The only other man that could be called a caudillo, even though he is not latin would be Gaddafi.

In the past I’ve been critical of John le Carré and I have never really understood why he has been held in high esteem. I have questioned whether his popularity is due to his name as it’s easily remembered and so I must admit I approached one of his classics tomes with some trepidation. Even though I hadn’t read The Honourable Schoolboy in about 15 years, I felt like a middle-aged man who has been approached on a social network site by a long forgotten school-friend, and invited out for a drink – full of trepidation as I was sure that there is a reason we have not kept in touch all these years.

This book is not an easy one to enjoy and it’s best read in as few of sittings as possible so that it does not get put down and forgotten.
John le Carré has seemed to write 3 or 4 different stories in this book and the narrative does not remain consistent and so as a reader you fail to get engaged with the story and the characters and by the end you think to yourself what a waste of time that was.

At the start, you think you reading an Emily Bronte meets James Clavell and the language is a bit stilted and unnatural. For instance the hacks at the Hong Kong club are almost speaking Shakespearean, where you would expect the rough as guts, war weary reporters of that era would be using more of a courser and colourful language.

The second story of the book is simply the boring story of an old man, Smiley, who has suffered a bad marriage breakup and is trying to manage this and has been drafted in to his old job. Smiley has confidence issues, tries to re-organise the Service, but he is still obsessed with Karla and surrounds himself with the most dysfunctional characters in spy fiction. Smiley is simply Colin Forbes Tweed without the personality or the team. Would I have enjoyed the book more if there was no Smiley? Hell yes.

The story of the protagonist Westerby and his travels round Asia are Graham Greene-ish without the language skills before he returns to Hong Kong where the story switches to Romeo and Juliet. When Westerby is in Phom Pehn and even though the author mentions it in his introduction that he did similar things, you feel that Carré toured the war zone in a stretch limousine as it all feels a bit disengaged from the action and you don’t feel the heat or the grubbiness of Asia. At no point was any suspense injected into the story making you fear for Westerby’s safety, and his romance and eventual swan song was just dull.

I would like to write more on this book, but I have lost enough time that I will never get back, so here are some bullet points:
Referencing other writers and philosophers – what’s the point? didn’t help the story or the character development
Slowness of the story building up to nothing
Was le Carré getting paid per word as seriously a lot of this was just inane drivel – A good editor could have reduced this book by 90%.
The femme fatale was just stupid (top secret mission for the SIS, but I’ll write to my dad and let him know all about it) and her pilot ex-lover was a waste of words
Not a spy story, but rather a mixture of stories, interspersed with the authors travel anecdotes, with a flimsy spy background.

In summary, John le Carré’s Tailor of Panama was ripped off from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, and this time le Carré tries to outdo himself by ripping off both Tai-Pan by James Clavell and The Quiet American by Greene and with the added bonus of a really long boring pointless story on Smiley. This results in a book that has no real structure and no narrative flow. Why he is still regarded as one of the greats still baffles me.

I think I will stop reading le Carré now and maybe let Red Banner do reviews on his books from now on.

Honestly, a lot of Bond movies are a bit rubbish, no matter how good their soundtracks are. Moonraker, the Bond movie where they go off to space to gas the whole world and Jaws meets the girl with the pigtails was rather dire, and it was just a camp-ish, badly acted unsophisticated parody of the ideals of the Third Reich as the evil master-plan was for his world to be populated by these beautiful humans and yet their leader was the ugly kid. Seriously, I never understood how the Nazis mad a big deal of having a blond, blue-eyed super-fit master race when they were led by Hitler, Himmler and Göring. Was there no understanding of irony in Germany?
The book Moonraker, (review following soon-ish) has Nazis at the core but with a better plot than the awful Bond film.
I’m a big fan of submarines, and space shuttles are just submarines in space, so when I re-found this book I was happy as a leper who has won the lottery – very happy but no one to share my joy with.

This book is set in 1989, in a world where Gorbachev was killed and thus glasnost, perestroika and demokratizatsiya never happened and the Cold War lives on. The Russians are having problems with their space programme, the KGB has a young evil-chessmaster genius in charge and the General Secretary needs a huge stroke of luck to keep his seat of power.
In the USA, they have two captains of industry as President and Vice-President which have sorted out their country and are just about to complete their Star Wars project which will give them an unassailable advantage in the Cold War.
The shuttle Intrepid takes off with Americas number two pilot (number one fell mysteriously ill just before launch) at the controls and a payload that will complete the Star Wars platform and contains the most advanced military secret the US holds, which if it falls into the Russians hands will swing the Cold War to the Russians.

Iceberg, the pilot, is actually a Russian (long story short – parents pretended to be Polish refugees from the Second World War and made their way to the USA and there they raised a son which became a deep cover mole – sort of a Russian Lebensborn programme, which instead of racial purity created ideological purity). Iceberg kills the other two members of the crew, but in doing so damaged the shuttle so that he can’t land and it is now a race between the Soviets to fly up and fix the shuttle and the Americans who want to destroy it. There is also the sub plot of internal Russian politics and who will lead the Party and the country after this bold move by the Russians.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: Draw, with all Americas technological might, controlling space, economy working and with Russia where they can’t feed themselves and can’t afford their absurd levels of military spending, yet the Russians will fight dirty and successfully to stay the same.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Some cockpit killings, bad health and safety inspections, stealth bomber/ secret space-fighter jet/ MIG fighting, some political aeroplane tyre problems and sacrifices, yellow jersey getting wiped out by a truck, a satellite killer and two best friends dying alone above the Earth.

Believability of the goodies and baddies: In fairness to the author Harrison, the characters all had a backstory, you knew who they were, the writing throughout the book was well done, but the characters missed a spark of life. It’s like watching a movie that’s very good but you know that they are famous actors and that just stops you believing in them completely .

I enjoyed how this book had the backdrop of late 80s technology. The big NASA centres with all those screens, the Cheyenne Mountain complex (home of Stargate) , the fantastic newness of the Stealth Bombers, how people had to fly across country for meetings and things were done over the land-line rather than emails or mobiles or video conferencing. There was also a sense of the American 80s innocence, where a man in a forged laminated id can stroll into a shuttle launch site and plant bombs, where nowadays you get strip searched and shoes smelt just to get on a late-running or more probably cancelled cheap airline. Even though the book mentions The Walker Spy Ring, you feel that the US mainland and its sense of isolationism still prevails even though they are locked in a major conflict with the Russians.

Stealth bombers are cool, and with Russia now developing stealth fighters, it reinforces my own personal belief that the Cold War is still alive and kicking and the West has forgotten about it as they are distracted by the Chinese and terrorists. It also makes you wonder on whether we need to start thinking outside the square on radar technology as soon there will be no role for radars in an air war if everybody is stealthed.

Robert McNamara is also mentioned in this book and how he ordered the destroying of the tools of the SR-71 Blackbird in order to support the building of his preferred plane, and the more I read of McNamara (currently reading a lot of Vietnam books), and his bean-counter-ish attitude the more I dislike him. Yes, it was important to control spending, but it seemed that he didn’t care about lives or getting the job done when it was unusual circumstances, rather he seemed to have a price on everything and the wars had to fought in certain prescribed manner.

Space, Russian politics, defectors, the ghost of Stalin, the threat of nuclear war, even a small mention of a submarine, what more do you want in a Cold War book? Well written, proper airport cold war fiction.

Last week started off with a shocker as I swore in front of my two year old daughter and she spent the next hour saying “fawk…fawk…fawk..” and then our house sale fell through, I get criticised by a Quiller-snob in the Quiller yahoo group for not doing a complete listing of all the agents of The Bureau in relation to last weeks post and two gum trees fell down, but these were a bonus as it was chainsaw time.

However, I take comfort in the fact that it wasn’t as bad as Slater’s from this novel by J.C. Polllock. Slater’s background is your typical heroic stereotype of the late 1970s early 1980s – Green Beret in Vietnam, later CIA Covert Ops, left the Agency after becoming disgruntled with it and is now enjoying life as an attack dog trainer.
His dog training days are shattered when his ex-boss from Vietnam contacts him as he believes there is a mole in the CIA and it relates to a mission that Slater and his team did during the War. They meet in the middle of nowhere and as they are conversing a sniper shoots and kills the ex-boss leaving Slater none the wiser of who the traitor is, yet leaving Slater as a marked man as the KGB will do anything to protect their mole. This killing of the boss starts the CIA investigating their officers at their top secret training base, and the man leading the investigation, as you would expect, doesn’t like Slater and the feelings reciprocated as Slater has trust issues with this man and the CIA.
The KGB hires local mercenaries to take out Slater and his old team, however Slater deals with them, and the reader is introduced to the rest of Green Beret team from Vietnam. One of his old team, Mulvahill, detests Slater as Slater heroically saved him, however it left Mulvahill as a quadriplegic instead of dying a heroic death in battle with the smell of cordite in his nostrils. The rest of the team is wiped out apart from Slater and one other and they finally decide to hideout in Slaters cabin in the Canadian wilderness. By this time the KGB has had enough with the failures of the local hired help and decide to send in the Vysotniki, a Russian unconventional warfare unit trained in special operations. As you would expect this Vysotniki team has something to prove and will do everything to complete their objective.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: I think this could be an American win as the CIA always gets their man

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Vietnam memories, wilderness deaths, dog kennel deaths, scuba diving deaths, wheelchair death followed by more wilderness deaths.

Believability of the goodies and baddies. Who cares as this book was heavy on the action, with a strong enough plot to have the action scenes. I’m not saying the characters were cardboard cut-outs, but rather they just explained enough in order for the fighting to happen and for you to understand their fighting skills.

Three thoughts floated about in my head as I read this book.

1) The CIA in fiction is evil. Sacrifice everyone and everything to get it done. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in a book or in a blockbuster movie, the CIA is always the guys on our side, but with questionable morals. I’m glad that we fight dirty to win sometimes as in war winning is everything.

2) Defectors during the Vietnam War – I have to think about this longer and when I’ve gathered my thoughts on Garwood, Operation Tailwind etc.. I might include it during the Vietnam War month (looking like April at the moment, but lot of work to do). However, you do feel that a soldiers defection during combat is purely self preservation and then later they justify it as ideology. Like the four American soldiers who defected to the North Koreans and became movie stars there, they were just glad they weren’t shot in the head, and the price was a kidnapped Japanese bride and a daily small bowl of rice.

3) In Bill Bryson’s book, Down Under, he says that a Japanese terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in the remote wilderness of Australia, and in this book the fighting happens in the wilderness of Canada and as we know hippies are idiots as world peace will never happen – man loves to fight, I think I can provide an alternative to wars fought in populated civilian areas to minimise civilian deaths.

If I become Prime Minister of Australia I will provide the Northern Territory and the middle of Australia, after I’ve made sure its minerals are dug out and make this the worlds fighting zone i.e a massive boxing ring. Lets say the USA wants to invade Iran, then as PM I allocate an area the size of Iran, both send their armies over and who destroys the other or reach certain objectives within a certain time frame wins the real country for 5 years. Iran can build villages in the fighting zone, but the USA has to know that in those places the chances of roadside bombings are very high. However, some ‘armies’ are now made up of foreign volunteers and I will allow flights and boats carrying these combatants into Australian airspace and territorial waters, however the US has the right to identify these flights/boats and intercept them. (For my Australian reader -David F, Today Tonight/A Current Affair would love this as the Indonesian people smugglers and illegal fishing boats would stop overnight knowing they were entering a war zone and the Indian problem we have in Melbourne would disappear as they wouldn’t be sending their students here to study. And without sounding like a racist, but it’s hard nowadays to criticise anyone without being branded a racist, the Indians have a damn cheek complaining about Melbourne, where if they put their house in order you wouldn’t need to send students here, you would have your own dodgy/fake universities, as we do here. It’s always a good political distraction to blame others whilst you don’t provide your own infrastructure).

As an incentive to get my idea off the ground, I’ll throw in Adelaide as an urban fighting zone, but the wine region remains neutral territory. A big fence would be needed and policed to make sure the fighting stays in its area, and soldiers R and R areas would have to be fully thought through,but it’s an idea.

Sometimes with Cold War books, you feel that a great spy book is like poached quail, delicate and aromatic and you expect so much from it as there is a mythology about spy writing but very often you end up with a small tasteless overpriced dead bird on your plate, where this book is comparable to the burger or kebab you buy from a van as you stagger home from a drunken night out as you don’t expect much, but it hits the spot so well. (Best burger van – 10 years ago on the top of Blackheath Common in London – did the monster burger – perfect after walking through the Greenwich foot tunnel and up the hill to Blackheath). It’s easy to dismiss this book as just Vietnam Veterans killing machine against KGB killing machines, but it’s a very good read, constant action and the story is simple and straightforward allowing you to get stuck into the action.

December is the month where I get the most new books, the rest of the year I’m happy to get to spend hours hunting through boxes in the garage or visiting second hand book stores (there aren’t that many new cold war novels coming out at the moment) and this December these are some of the books I got:

The Tiger Man of Vietnam – review coming later in the new year – ok-ish

The Paris Vendetta by Steve Berry – one of those books you put down after 30 pages and you keep meaning to pick it up again, but instead you pick up an old Calvin and Hobbes book or something else and I fear I may never finish this.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale – not being ungrateful but why did Santa put this in by stocking? Yes, I have quite a narrow range of reading at the moment, but this? It has a review by John le Carre saying “A classic” and Ian Rankin “Terrific”. Will give it a shot.

Up Country by Nelson de Mille – borrowed from an ebay seller that I know, who may now have to sell this book second hand. Will it be as good as de Mille’s Honour?

Commando collection – All guns blazing – Santa knows what I want. When I was a child I lived next door to a boy who was the same age and he was a spoilt brat, you know the sort of spoilt brat who shouts and stamps his feet at his parents when he is 15 years old, however his only redeeming feature was that his parents bought him the whole back catalogue of Commando comics and the old subbuteo teams. His parents, apart from that, were horrid, he was a brat and his younger brother was worse in every way. They were the sort of people that you understand what Mr Smith talks about in The Matrix that people are like a virus, but these were an orange bigoted stupid and totally pointless type of virus. I do like how you can be nasty to people through the internet and never see them again.

However, I opened Red Omega and the more books I read, the more I question reviews, especially by authors, that appear on covers of book, so it was with trepidation that I started reading this novel by John Kruse (Did he do The Saint too or is it another John Kruse? David Foster?). This book has the following quote:

“What a book. Ingenious. Original. Spellbinding. My heartfelt applause for several hours of magic” William Diehl author of Sharky’s Machine.

I read a William Diehl book recently called 27, which was about a super-Nazi actor, a master of disguise who is in deep cover in America waiting for the signal to launch a master-stroke and keep the Americans out of the war. That book was awful, and it left me feeling a bit grubby as Diehl seemed to try and write his teenage masturbatory fantasies which clearly involved violence towards woman. In Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho you became tolerant or de-sensitised towards the violence and sex and after awhile it became a bit passé and clinical, where 27 was just a bit icky. Has anybody seen American Psyco 2 with Mila Kunis and William Shatner? Any good?

Yet surprisingly, I actually enjoyed Red Omega. It was one of those novels where the author presents an alternative version of history, in this case the death of Stalin and the subsequent promotion of the American agent Beria. There are good and bad alternative histories out there, some like Seven Days to Petrograd by Tom Hyman are a bit rubbish to be honest, where John Birmingham’s WW2.0 are very good (I found 2.1 a bit confusing during the merge and maybe there were too many central characters in that book, before they were subsequently culled in the later books).

In Red Omega it follows the story of General Joaquin Cabezza, who was a General in the defeated Communist/Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and I know my ignorance of the Civil War is showing here, but did they have a proper army or was it just loose brigands and reporters like Philby watching from the sidelines? I still find it amazing that Spain was a fascist country till the 1970s, where now they are a bit third world in places and suffer constant invasions from the British holiday makers and their seaside culture. My idea of hell is ending up in a crowded beach in Magaluf surrounded by drunken sunburnt idiots called Shazza and Bazza, wearing their en-gur-lund football tops and I can only eat in a British style fish and chip shop and if I happen to bump into a local I must speak slowly and loudly in English as that is the way you speak to these stupid foreigners. These holidaymakers have a type of mindset that I can’t understand, just like my Brother-in-Law who wears a certain UK football strip in Australia as he is proud to be “showing the colours”.

Anyway, the Civil War is over and Cabezza smuggles himself back into Spain to find his family, but he gets captured by the Spanish and gets locked up. He escapes, but only gets as far as the prison car-park construction site, with a gun with very few bullets and is surrounded. The Americans step in and save him on the proviso that he agrees to assassinate Stalin. Cabezza obviously agrees, and who wouldn’t if you were surrounded and to add extra motivation it’s a chance for pay back to what happened to Cabezza when he was last in Russia. Cabezza gets re-built by the Americans through some brain washing and intricate planning and goes off to Moscow to try and kill Uncle Joe, the mad man of steel.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: I think this could be an American win.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : Some miners strike as a minor strikes, prison break, MKB gay death or is it?, a rough game of squash, some Kremlin sneaking about, fights in alleyways, apartments and train stations.

Believability of the goodies: Joaquin Cabezza Well sketched out, didn’t posses too many super-human powers as some protagonists seem to have, yet he still managed to have the greatest spy lover cliché, very good back story and it was good how the author seemed to justify where he fits in the story and how he got there.
Gail Lessing: Took a few beatings for the team, mostly believable, but suffered from the female fiction disease where she falls easily in love with the protagonist, bit moralistic, but not enough to be jarring, and well worth her star on the Wall.
David Kelland: He was your puppet-master, master of disguise type. Absolute git, but his sole objective was to get mission success so he would happily sacrifice everything and everyone to get it done. Not a nice man, but you need these lack of empathy or sociopaths to win the Cold War. Believable.
Holtz: This was you Dungeons and Dragons elf-like CIA executioner. Like Kelland, had no empathy, and slept like a baby after killing. He too is not a nice man, but he too is indispensable in the Cold War fiction fight.

Believability of the baddies: Grechukha. Not really a baddie, rather he was on the opposing side. He wasn’t demon-ised too much as your cold heartless Soviet killing drone, rather you felt the system created him and thus his actions. It’s always refreshing when the Soviets aren’t simply cardboard cut-outs who only act a certain way, where at least John Kruse made the effort in introducing the character and explaining his motives..

Very good book, well worth putting aside a good few hours and reading it. It’s more of your winter type reading novel, rather than Australian summer, however I found drinking Pimms and wearing sunglasses as the book described the snow in Moscow didn’t distract from enjoying it. It also makes you think what really happened in the the days after Stalins death, I’m not saying Cabezza was successful in his mission, but the fall-out and the in-fighting within the Central Soviet system would have been immense. If I was the Americans, would I have risked flooding East Germany with tanks in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death? Maybe, it’s tempting.

After this enjoyable read, I’m off to wallow in Commando’s “Donner und blitzen”, “Achtung”, “Gott im himmel!”.

I got an email the other day criticising my ratings of books and my generally negative attitude towards some of the authors and “these books are all crap anyway” (Also had emails before saying I’m a Commie loving b… and another saying I’m a fascist racist anti-Obama c…..) and seriously I do appreciate the emails, at least you take the time to write and more importantly have a viewpoint, but please leave comments instead (click on a google advert would be cool too) as I want to have an open conversation and get others involved. I am happy to publish all comments, apart from those ones I get on a daily basis about pharmaceutical goods that I supposedly need. So if you have a viewpoint, let me and the rest of the world know.
As I’m a sensitive soul, who bites hard to protect my lack of confidence, my {insert supposed self criticism here} and thinks everybody is against me, I’ve decided to take the Fox News route, which I do enjoy watching, especially how here in Australia I can watch Glenn Beck followed immediately by John Stewart on The Comedy Channel. (Do you think Stephen Colbert wasn’t that good this year too?) This Fox news defence means I:

1) Dumb down to my audience level with a hatred for people who are cleverer or different from us.
That means I think you are stupid and that you are too stupid to see that I’m pretending to be stupid so that we can be buddies. The only problem is that I don’t even have an audience. However, I write about Cold War Fiction which is what the literati, the elitists and probably Big Government look down their nose at. Those elitists in {insert your capital city here} would rather I wrote about books such as Vernon God Little (happy to start a collection to pay for someone to hunt down and kill Finlay and professional reviewers. Has there been a good Booker prize in the last 20 years?), Yellow Dog (wtf was that about? How could it even get published?) anything by Dan Brown (why is he published however in fairness you know it’s bad when you pick it up) or Salman Rushdie (Fatwa was too extreme, just cutting off his hands to stop him boring us would be enough), Ian McEwan or Zadie Smith or Gore Vidal or Will Self or Martin Amis or Tom Wolfe (these last six are so far up their own arse that they could not do a decent book between them. Shame on you McEwan as your early stuff was good) or Ben Elton (should have stuck to writing Blackadder you talentless little unfunny man. The amount of money and time I’ve wasted trying to like his stuff. Todays comedy writers need Bush, Elton needed Thatcher as after she left he seemed to have no spirit and became one of those soulless drones chanting “Things can only get better…”) or Ian M Banks (I’m too stupid to have a clue what’s happening in your books)…..
The Nazis ruined the social acceptance of a good book burning party.

2) Become pro-military.
Sometime next year, The Stasi will be donning on some black pyjamas for a month.

3) Becoming pro-God.
God only comes in the Cold War Fiction realm when it’s books written by Tom Clancy and Graham Greene or those books about psychics staring at goats. I’ve neglected Tom Clancy this year, but will do week or so of Tom sometime next year.

4) Take every opportunity to moan about Obama, and raise our fear level on the terrorist threat that all Muslims pose us and the economy.
Simple enough, Obama would never be president during a Cold War and he is probably only a one-term president unless the Republicans pick some complete loony to stand. Muslim terrorists – there are lots of books of state sponsored terrorists during the Cold War, but I shall try and pick a few ones, but to heighten the fear I’ll do a couple of IRA ones so that we are in fear of Catholics too. I’ve covered terrorism before but only briefly as General Midwinter from Billion Dollar Brain was a terrorist, in every sense of the word, but he was a god-fearing patriot so I looked the other way from his shenanigans.
The economy – I’ve made no money from Amazon or those silly google adverts and with the server costs and the costs of keeping in second hand book heaven has left me bankrupt just like the US or the UK.

5) Dumb down.
Mentioned that already but repetition helps it become accepted as fact, and this leads nicely on to where you read a book as it makes a big difference to its enjoyment. For instance, when I was backpacking around Asia years ago, I would have a few Tom Clancys as they were weighty, easily available from second hand book stores and you could pass hours poolside or beach side reading them. Da Nang Diary by Col Tom Yarborough, I will always remember reading in our private swimming pool in Koh Samui and thoroughly enjoying the book, the weather and the lifestyle. Some books deserve a great bottle of red wine as you lie on the over-sized beanbag next to the fire, others are for commuting, where Destroyer by Roy W. West is for reading on the toilet. (We all do it). This isn’t a criticism of the book, it’s the same length of The 39 Steps and follows Buchans classic of a man who is on the run and trying to uncover a spy ring and the toilet is most suitable place to read it as the book is an easy read.

The story follows Victor Kolnikov, a man who was a legend within the US Naval Intelligence as an outstanding investigator, however when he was working on a case to expose his inter-departmental rival Gelman as a mole, the tables were turned and Kolnikov and his two assistants, were framed as Russian spies. Kolnikov, Gruber and Lowell were convicted and has spent the last nine years in prison. Kolnikov is approached by his ex-boss, who needs Kolnikov to find out where Gelman is as for the last nine years Gelman and his two assistants have quietly merged into the background and have completely disappeared just as the USSR are about to swarm over the Turkey border. Kolnikov is the Wests last hope, however he wants payback on the US for putting him falsely behind bars and does that override any loyalty he may feel?

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: Draw, but the Russians should take Turkey.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : All the fighting happened at the end, instead Kolnikov was more interested in stealing and loving rather than fighting.

Believability of the goodies (Kolnikov and his two assistants): This book was all about Kolnikov and his ego. His assistants (Gruber and Lowell) were there just to give Kolnikov a platform to show how great he was and that he knew the answer to everything. Kolnikov, like the majority of spies, was the worlds greatest lover, so good that the woman who prostituted/ honey-trapped for the US Intelligence Services thought so and was happy to give up her ‘patriotic’ duties to stay with him.. It’s a cliché or maybe just lazy penmanship that nearly every protagonist who is a spy is also the greatest of lovers, I exclude Burnside from The Sandbaggers from this as he is a sexually immature creep and I can see him when he retired from ‘bagging that he became The Paedofinder General from Monkey Dust.

Believability of the baddies (Everyone else): Everybody else has a simple back-story summarised in a few paragraphs, but they never really materialised as characters as the book was about Kolnikov.

In summary, I enjoyed the book as it was a simple story and there was no mucking about as he did this and then they did that and they are going to do this… where if you read say Horse Under Water by Len Deighton, it’s also a very simple story but it has a lot of unnecessary literary window dressing and this makes it less enjoyable (or plug and play-like) than Destroyer. Cheap trashy novels are always good for the soul and this book is certainly that.

The front cover I have on my copy is all ripped, but imagine DESTROYER written in a slant from top left to bottom right with 3 Soviet missiles and the words “The missiles are primed. The countdown has begun. Only one man can prevent the holocaust”

Destroyer

Lets start with the cover.
At the very top there is this description: “A sea-and-submarine thriller to match Tom Clancy’s best! The fuse to World War III has been lit — and one man’s life is on the line to stop it”
There is a Soviet and an American sub facing each other, both are painted in gold beneath the exciting prose quoted above.
Then below the picture the quotes “A griping thriller complete with believable characters, bullet-splattered action, and an exceptionally clever plot”.
A quick skim of the back cover, with a smaller version of the submarine pictures and random words used are “nuclear war..maverick ex-CIA…to send the superpowers’ top submarines…heart stopping tense…ultimate thrills..naval experts”, honestly I was literally salivating as I dug this out, because my favourite single word in fiction is “submarine”, double word is “Nazi Gold” with the three word combination obviously being “Cold War Fiction”.
First page of the story sets the scene, an US submarine during the Second World War torpedoes a Japanese ship carrying gold, not Nazi gold but still filthy lucre, the book is definitely on the right heading and I’m ready for some Cold War action as the books shifts to the present day.
The next 9/10ths of the book has very little naval action, never mind submarines as it follows the ex-CIA agent as he, being the employee of a Japanese businessman tries to raise the gold laden sunken ship off the depths of the ocean and into his bank account.
People always say never judge a book by its cover, but I do enjoy buying books where there are missiles, submarines, fighter planes, the swastika, the hammer and sickle, some shifty looking spies at border crossings etc.. on them, as I know this is what I’ll get. I’m not looking for great literature, I just want the cover to reflect the story.
So back to the Ship of Gold, the book where every so often, I’m looking at the back cover summary and wondering whether the reviewers were given a plot outline rather than the book and I’m getting slowly annoyed as I continue reading.

Overall:
According to the book, who would win the cold war: The Russians as they were more likely up for a fight when the time came and would have no hesitation in attacking the West, whilst the US were under prepared. The Soviets, in Cold War fiction always seem to be on a war footing and spoiling for a fight where the Americans usually are more trying to work things out before they have a brainsnap by their president and launch the missiles.

Explosives/fight scenes etc.. : World War II sub kills a boat, hit and run ‘accident’, mid-air murder in a helicopter, snooping agents were killed, Chinese destroyer takes out a Korean pirate ship and an American rogue torpedo goes swimming.

Believability of the goodies (CIA): Jessen was a peripheral figure in the book, he activated, then tried to shut down the operation of raising the World War II from the sea, however he was the only goody in the book before he was bumped off.

Believability of the baddies (Everyone else): Harry Gunnison was the main character in the book. This was a man who looking for an easy way to make money, and to give him some moral reasons to do it by saving his sister from her thieving husband and the social stigma of being married to a thief, joined forces with a shady Japanese businessman, went to a geisha place so that he could cheat on his partner and cement his relationship with the Japanese businessman, then to fool his country and his paymasters at the CIA he struck a bargain with a Korean pirate before trying to save the world. The world was in need of saving as he was the one put the world in danger. When you save the world, usually you can hear a dramatic soundtrack and there is a timer counting down something that will go off with a big bang, or you need hand to hand combat to stop an assassin, where Harry’s way of saving the world was that he tried to get the gold, took too long, fell in the sea, was picked up by the Russians and over coffee and vodka tried to explain to them that they weren’t under attack, and that it was all one big mistake (2 and half pages). Peace then breaks out again. At the end of the book, Harry, who according to the CIA director “wants to shoot, and who the president wants to pin a medal on”. If I was the CIA director, I would use one of my fictional wet teams and make Harry “very sadly accidentally brutally cut his head off while combing his hair”.
Harry has a long suffering girlfriend Chia Min, who he cheats on, then abandons and leaves her at the mercy of the CIA as she is of secondary importance to getting the gold. She manages to escape the US, and when she becomes a captive of her uncle, the Korean pirate, Harry takes the opportunity to insult her. Once the pirate ship is at sea, she is on board when it gets harpooned by a missile from a Chinese destroyer, but being the girlfriend of Harry she unluckily survives and it appears she will be re-united with Harry the man who saved the world. Maybe the authors masochism was reflected in their writing.
Everybody else was of secondary importance and like the primary characters, none of them were believable.

In summary, this week has started with a fizzle from a book with such an exciting jacket, as it had very little submarines, and for that please suffer a small part of the pain I experienced when I read this.

Here is the amazon link, with a different cover, but still with a fantastic blurb.