Finding Hoseyn by Colin MacKinnon

First published in 1986

Jim Morgan, the main character in Finding Hoseyn, is a war correspondent. He loves war, loves writing about it. In 1977 he's assigned to cover the Mideast from Tehran. While snooping through stories filed by other reporters on a slow news day, Morgan comes across an account of a man (Shlomo Givon) who was gunned down in the street. The reporter who wrote the story is immediately deported. In an off-the-record conversation with an American intelligence officer, Morgan learns that Hoseyn Jandaqi, a member of Shohada (an operational branch of the Mojahedin), is one of the suspected assassins, and that Hoseyn has been spirited out of the country. Morgan suspects the assassination is tied into recent killings of American military personnel, and wonders if Givon was targeted because he was on a strategic mission for the Israelis. Unable to obtain information from official sources about the reasons for Givon's presence in Iran, Morgan travels to Paris, Munich, and Beirut to interview sources in an attempt to puzzle out the reason for the killing and to track down Hoseyn. Meanwhile, an Israeli agent named Ari Netzer is trying to learn what Givon discovered that got him killed, a quest that soon has him searching for two Hoseyns--the man who killed Givon and Hoseyn Kiani, manager of a mysterious project, code named EAGLE, that Givon had been investigating before his death.

The name Hoseyn in the title potentially has a triple meaning. It could refer to either of the shadowy characters in the novel named Hoseyn or to Hoseyn ibn Ali, Muhammed's grandson, who led the Battle of Karbala against Yazid I in 680 AD, and whose memory is invoked by a mullah in the novel as he exhorts a crowd to "become Hoseyn" in a modern battle against the shah. In that and in other respects, Finding Hoseyn is an impressive and knowledgeable portrayal of a tension-filled Iran in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini, shortly before the 1979 revolution which overthrew the shah. Colin MacKinnon's knowledge of the area, derived from six years of living in Iran and working as the Tehran director of the American Institute of Iranian Studies before pursuing a career in journalism, is evident in his rich descriptions of the land and its peoples.

Every now and then, MacKinnon tosses in an awkward, disjointed, run-on sentence; not the sort of writing one expects from a journalist. This was MacKinnon's first novel; perhaps he overcompensated a bit in making the transition from journalist to novelist. For the most part, however, MacKinnon writes fluidly, with a good sense of pace. The plot, while a bit convoluted, is filled with intrigue. The sense that one hand never knows what the other is doing -- within the American, Iranian, and Israeli governments -- has the feeling of reality. In short, this is an enjoyable novel, more an intellectual guessing game than an action packed thriller, although McKinnon flavors the novel with enough action scenes to keep the plot moving.

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