Dead Skip by Joe Gores

First published in 1972

Barton Heslip has had a good day, repossessing three cars for his employer, DKA. Back at the office, he calls his friend and co-worker Larry Ballard, then steps outside to collect some paperwork from his car. Someone emerges from the shadows and hits him with a sap. Now Heslip is in a coma, having been pulled from a car that went over a cliff, and Dan Kearny, founder of DKA, has given Ballard 72 hours to find the man who tried to kill Heslip. As time begins to run out, Kearny joins the hunt.

Dead Skip is a fast-paced, carefully plotted detective story. Joe Gores has a sharp eye for the people who walk San Francisco's streets and a finely tuned ear for dialog. He writes with an economical style, providing just enough detail to give personality to his characters and authenticity to his settings. The mystery of Heslip's assailant isn't easy to guess but the resolution is credible. The process of detection, as practiced by Ballard and then by Kearny, is fascinating. Each comes to the same conclusion by independent means, a plot device that makes the story even more interesting.

It's a shame Dead Skip isn't still in print. It deserves the status of a genre classic.

RECOMMENDED

The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

First published in 1975

To pursue his theory concerning the assassination of JFK, Paul Christopher resigns from the spy agency that employs him and with the tacit approval of his boss begins an investigation that takes him to Italy, France, and Vietnam, among other places. What he learns may seem a little far-fetched, but McCarry writes convincingly, and his story is a refreshing respite from the more conventional fictionalized views of the Kennedy assassination.

McCarry provides wonderful descriptions of the places to which Christopher travels; the reader can feel danger in the atmosphere as Christopher walks into a Vietnamese alley. McCarry deftly mixes politics with a stirring tale of investigatory intrigue to create a well-paced spy thriller that actually thrills.

I liked McCarry's first novel, The Miernik Dossier, slightly better, but this one is nearly as good.

RECOMMENDED

Project Pendulum by Robert Silverberg

Published by Byron Preiss in 1987

Project Pendulum is one of the Millennium series of books published by Byron Preiss. Each book dealt with a different science fiction theme. The subject of Project Pendulum is time travel. The story (really more of a novella or long short story than a novel) is reprinted in Cronos along with two more of Silverberg's time travel stories.

Eric Gabrielson is sent 5 minutes into the past while his twin brother Sean simultaneously moves 5 minutes into the future. Then Eric moves 50 minutes into the future while Sean moves 50 minutes into the past. The next swing of the pendulum sends them each 500 minutes in opposite directions; the swing after that moves them 5000 minutes, and so on. If this first experiment in time travel is successful, the brothers will explore 95 million years in each direction. Silverberg explains the basis for this time displacement in language that sounds reasonable enough to those of us who don't know a singularity from a tachyon particle. Eric doesn't understand it either; he's a paleontologist who is more interested in the past than the mechanics of the journey. Sean, on the other hand, is a physicist.

Each time jump for each brother comprises a chapter. There isn't much of a plot; the book consists of snippets of the past and future. Silverberg's depictions of the unspoiled past are rich with detail. The future scenarios are vividly described and wildly imaginative, although they aren't always explained. This makes sense, since Eric and Sean don't hang around long enough to get explanations of what they see, but it's nonetheless a source of minor frustration. The more significant drawback to telling a story through vignettes is that Eric and Sean are observers more than actors. They don't spend enough time in any era to allow a story to develop beyond their ride on the pendulum: they see this, they see that, they plunge into a sticky situation but are rescued by the next swing of the pendulum. It's an interesting ride and while there's a certain sweetness to the ending, the story is far from absorbing.

Byron Preiss (1953-2005) was known for his efforts to marry the printed text with visual art. The Millennium series furthered that ambition by pairing stories with illustrations. The black and white drawings in Project Pendulum are by the artist Moebius. They didn't excite me but I'm no art critic; all I can say is that there aren't many of them. The hardcover is printed on bright white, heavy, probably acid-free paper, so if you can find a copy, it should last a long time.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Home Run by Gerald Seymour

Published by The Harvill Press on May 30, 1989; published in the US in 1991 under the title The Running Target

Writers of espionage novels are inevitably compared to John Le Carré, particularly if the writer is British. Gerald Seymour's writing style isn't as polished, and the characters in Home Run lack the multi-layered depth of Le Carré's best characters, but the plot and pace of Home Run are worthy of the master.

Home Run begins with the 1982 execution of a teenage girl in Iran. The rest of the novel takes place several years later. Point of view shifts frequently as two storylines unfold. One concerns a drug investigation that follows the death of a 19 year old heroin addict who overdosed. Her father, an important public official, pressures the police to make the heroin importer's arrest their top priority. The cops diligently pursue the task, grumbling all the way. The other story focuses on Matthew ("Mattie") Furniss, Head of the Iran desk at the SIS, who is being pressured by the new Director General to increase the quality of intelligence coming out of Iran. Fortunately, Furniss has cultivated a new Iranian spy, a family friend who happens to be the brother of the girl who was executed.

Home Run gets off to a conventional start, particularly with the drug investigation, where Seymour employs off-the-shelf drug cops who give the usual tiresome speeches about the evils of illicit substances. The main cop character is filled with anger and moral outrage -- traits that turn out to be necessary to the plot -- but he has the standard fictional cop's "driven by duty" personality. Seymour provided him with the familiar neglected wife who is no longer tolerant of his "job first" priorities and is making her displeasure known.

Mattie Furniss is a stronger and more interesting character; thankfully his story is at the heart of the novel. At the Director General's insistence, Furniss travels to Turkey to give a pep talk to his agents. Things do not go well for him. Back at home, bureaucrats and politicians are busily abusing their power or wielding it unwisely. There's a fascinating turf war between the self-righteous drug agents, who view the "faceless wonders" of the SIS as impeding their all-important drug investigation, and the smug SIS officers who view the drug agents as "glorified traffic wardens."

Both storylines are filled with action and tension. The pace picks up considerably by the novel's midpoint, moving with furious speed as the characters encounter realistic threats in dangerous places. Torture scenes are vivid without going too far.

Seymour uses too many comma splices, leading to awkward sentences, but that's a minor gripe. For the most part, the writing is adequate to its purpose, even if the prose doesn't soar. Stylistic lapses quickly become secondary to storylines that captivate the reader's attention.

I would enthusiastically recommend Home Run to most fans of espionage fiction, but it isn't for everyone. If you like novels in which the good guys are pure and the bad guys personify evil, this is not the book for you. There are plenty of evil bad guys, but the three main characters -- Furniss, his Iranian spy, and the drug cop -- each make questionable moral decisions. Seymour's construction of the characters and plot makes it easy to understand why they act as they do. Seymour doesn't judge them; the reader is left to decide whether each character's actions were right or wrong under the circumstances. The answers aren't necessarily clear -- I liked that, but some readers won't appreciate the moral ambiguity. As the novel's end approached, I was drawn into each character's world, fascinated by the choices they made, understanding and sympathizing with them even when I disagreed with their decisions. For all these reasons, I regard Home Run as one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking spy novels I've encountered.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys by Chris Fuhrman

First published in 1994

This coming of age novel has been compared (for its style and bravado) to A Confederacy of Dunces. Unfortunately, Fuhrman's novel takes few chances, offers few insights, and reflects none of Toole's caustic wit. An altar boy named Francis and his friends get in trouble at his Catholic school for drawing an explicit comic book. Francis and his friends devise a plan to capture a bobcat and set it loose in the school to make the principal forget about punishing them. Along the way, Francis makes faltering attempts to have a relationship with a girl who seems to like him. In the end, Francis grows up a bit. Yawn.

To be fair, this is a novel that has appealed to many, particularly to younger readers. Even though it's the sort of book I generally enjoy (and one I looked forward to reading), it just wasn't the novel for me. The story neither moved nor entertained me. Through most of the novel, nothing happened that seemed to be of any consequence. The humor seemed childish. I will grant that the last few pages are quite good but the journey to get there was tedious. Fuhrman's prose style is adequate but unexceptional. This novel did nothing for me and I can't recommend it, but again, your mileage may vary.

NOT RECOMMENDED