Edition: William Collins, 1977
Review number: 720
At its beginning, Agent in Place is about the leak of a NATO memo to the American press. However, it becomes clear that the Russians have orchestrated the leak of the comparatively innocuous first part of the memo to get hold of the second and third parts, which detail the reasoning behind the first part and so provide information which will enable them to unmask important Western agents.
As the investigation into the leak proceeds, and the action of the novel moves from New York to the Riviera resort of Menton, it keeps becoming clear that the situation is more serious than the reader and the investigators suspected. This is how MacInnes raises the tension and keeps up the suspense in what is a good Cold War thriller.
Showing posts with label Helen MacInnes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Helen MacInnes. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 January 2001
Tuesday, 10 October 2000
Helen MacInnes: The Snare of the Hunter (1974)
Edition: William Collins, 1975
Review number: 650
The Snare of the Hunter is a competent Cold War thriller with minor literary aspirations (one of the characters, at the centre of the plot even if he never appears on stage, is an amalgamation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel). Successful American music critic David Mennery is on the point of packing to travel to the Salzburg festival when an acquaintance turns up whom he hasn't seen for a few years, with a strange request. As a student, David had travelled to Prage, where he had got to know Irina, daughter of dissident novelist Jaromir Kusak. In the intervening years, she has married a senior secret policeman, but now she has fled from Czechoslovakia, wanting to see her father again. (He is living in hiding somewhere in Western Europe.)
Because of her connection with the Czech secret police, she is considered too dangerous for any of the Western secret agencies to aid her, and so it has fallen to a group of amateurs to try to get her out of the flat in Vienna where she is hiding. This leads to a chase across Austria, Czech agents only just behind David and Irina, and it soon becomes clear that one of those supposedly trying to help her is in fact betraying their movements to her husband.
It's quite a complicated plot, but the main interest is the chase, and that is straightforward. More could have been made of character - resuming a relationship that had been abruptly terminated by the Russian invasion of 1968 could be far more interesting than it is here - but The Snare of the Hunter achieves suspense and excitement, precisely what a thriller is meant to do.
Review number: 650
The Snare of the Hunter is a competent Cold War thriller with minor literary aspirations (one of the characters, at the centre of the plot even if he never appears on stage, is an amalgamation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel). Successful American music critic David Mennery is on the point of packing to travel to the Salzburg festival when an acquaintance turns up whom he hasn't seen for a few years, with a strange request. As a student, David had travelled to Prage, where he had got to know Irina, daughter of dissident novelist Jaromir Kusak. In the intervening years, she has married a senior secret policeman, but now she has fled from Czechoslovakia, wanting to see her father again. (He is living in hiding somewhere in Western Europe.)
Because of her connection with the Czech secret police, she is considered too dangerous for any of the Western secret agencies to aid her, and so it has fallen to a group of amateurs to try to get her out of the flat in Vienna where she is hiding. This leads to a chase across Austria, Czech agents only just behind David and Irina, and it soon becomes clear that one of those supposedly trying to help her is in fact betraying their movements to her husband.
It's quite a complicated plot, but the main interest is the chase, and that is straightforward. More could have been made of character - resuming a relationship that had been abruptly terminated by the Russian invasion of 1968 could be far more interesting than it is here - but The Snare of the Hunter achieves suspense and excitement, precisely what a thriller is meant to do.
Friday, 22 January 1999
Helen MacInnes: The Double Image (1965)
Edition: Collins, 1965
Review number: 193
The Double Image is a competent spy thriller, not the chauvinist action of Ian Fleming nor the convoluted plotting of John le Carré but more straightforward and down-to-earth than either.
John Carey, an economist, in Paris while travelling to Greece to research the history of trade routes, meets his old teacher Professor Sussman by chance. Sussman has just returned from Frankfurt where he has been testifying at the trial of some former guards from Auschwitz. Their leader, Heinrich Berg, who grew up with Sussman, is believed to be dead - and yet Sussman has just seen him here in Paris. This would have seemed to Carey to be hallucinations brought on by the trauma of testifying, were it not for the fact that Sussman is murdered in his hotel room that same night.
Carey is now drawn into a world of seedy espionage; Berg is now posing as the Russian Insarov - with the explicit implication that the Communist states of Eastern Europe were harbouring many former Nazis. The climax of the book occurs on the Greek island of Mykonos, where just about everyone involved turns up, to take part in or to attempt to foil a plot by Insarov/Berg (the double image of the title) to kidnap a Western electronics expert from an American base in Smyrna.
The Double Image never really rises far above the commonplace, black and white world of the minor thriller; the author it reminded me of most strongly was Alastair Maclean. Accepting without question the commonplaces of the Cold War - East is worse than West, less moral, more unscrupulous - MacInnes never questions what is going on.
Review number: 193
The Double Image is a competent spy thriller, not the chauvinist action of Ian Fleming nor the convoluted plotting of John le Carré but more straightforward and down-to-earth than either.
John Carey, an economist, in Paris while travelling to Greece to research the history of trade routes, meets his old teacher Professor Sussman by chance. Sussman has just returned from Frankfurt where he has been testifying at the trial of some former guards from Auschwitz. Their leader, Heinrich Berg, who grew up with Sussman, is believed to be dead - and yet Sussman has just seen him here in Paris. This would have seemed to Carey to be hallucinations brought on by the trauma of testifying, were it not for the fact that Sussman is murdered in his hotel room that same night.
Carey is now drawn into a world of seedy espionage; Berg is now posing as the Russian Insarov - with the explicit implication that the Communist states of Eastern Europe were harbouring many former Nazis. The climax of the book occurs on the Greek island of Mykonos, where just about everyone involved turns up, to take part in or to attempt to foil a plot by Insarov/Berg (the double image of the title) to kidnap a Western electronics expert from an American base in Smyrna.
The Double Image never really rises far above the commonplace, black and white world of the minor thriller; the author it reminded me of most strongly was Alastair Maclean. Accepting without question the commonplaces of the Cold War - East is worse than West, less moral, more unscrupulous - MacInnes never questions what is going on.
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