The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on April 18, 2017

“Evil does not betray you” is the theme of The Good Assassin. Like all good spy novels, betrayal is at the novel’s heart. Betrayals pop up at regular intervals as the story moves forward, taking many forms.

The Good Assassin takes place five years after An Honorable Man. George Mueller, now retired from the CIA, is sent to Cuba in 1958 as an “outsider” to take a reading on Toby Graham, a CIA agent with whom Mueller is acquainted. It is feared that Graham might be unduly sympathetic to Castro’s revolution (as opposed to the Batista dictatorship that the CIA clandestinely supports), and that Graham might be funneling weapons provided by the CIA to Castro rather than Batista.

Mueller is met and instantly disliked by the FBI’s man in Havana, Frank Pryce. He’s also disliked by Graham, with whom he has a dark history that includes a woman who is also a key character.

Cuba in 1958 is not a safe place to be unless you’re Ernest Hemmingway. The story places Mueller in jeopardy from Castro’s rebels and Batista’s troops, but danger may also be lurking closer to home. Mueller has plenty of things to worry about in this relatively brief but captivating story.

Is Graham a traitor? Or is he simply a realist who follows orders but complains about the hypocrites who issue them? Graham is clearly tired of “the persistent contemplation of evil,” an occupational hazard that “weakens the soul.” If he is a traitor, what should be his fate? In the game of espionage, the novel suggests, it is impossible to separate the white hats and the black hats. There are only shades of gray. There are no innocents, no souls untainted by corruption.

Paul Vidich handles those themes adeptly, as he did in An Honorable Man. The apparent simplicity of the story masks its depth. The novel ends in ambiguity, and while that’s how most things end, readers who like stories to wrap up neatly might be affronted by the lack of clear answers. I think the ending fits the story and its themes.

I am drawn to spy fiction in part because of the moral questions that characters so often confront, at least when the themes are deeper than “patriotic Americans kill bad people.” Vidich confronts moral issue in a thoughtful way. The Good Assassin is not as surprising as An Honorable Man, but Mueller continues to be a surprising, morally complex character.

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An Honorable Man by Paul Vidich

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on April 12, 2016

An Honorable Man is set in 1953, against a backdrop of the Cold War and the McCarthy hearings. One of the characters is loosely based on James Speyer Kronthal, a CIA agent who was blackmailed by the NKVD. He submitted to the blackmail, and thus became a traitor, rather than risking the exposure of his homosexuality. Kronthal committed suicide before he had to answer McCarthy’s questions, which would have focused on his sexual history rather than his (still unknown) betrayal of the CIA.

In the novel, George Mueller works for the CIA. He is disgruntled and everyone knows it, so he is perfect bait. The agency dangles him before Vasilenko, a Russian agent who wants to recruit him. Mueller, of course, is playing the same game, hoping to get information from Vasilenko about a Soviet mole in the CIA known as Protocol.

When a Russian embassy driver runs him off the road as he’s bicycling, Mueller doesn’t know if he was the victim of an accident or an attempted homicide. However, the accident gives him a chance to meet Beth, who picks him up and tends his wounds. Beth is Roger Altman’s sister. Their father, a former IMF secretary, is caught up in the communist witch-hunt. Roger Altman recruited Mueller to the CIA. Small world, isn’t it?

That set-up introduces a plot that is a staple of spy fiction. The reader (like the main character) is challenged to find the mole. But that really isn’t a challenge since the book must conform, at least in a general sense, to history. The story therefore moves toward a destination that the reader can easily foresee.

The characters lack complexity, which makes me chuckle as I take note of the blurbs that compare Paul Vidich to John Le Carré. Still, a novel shouldn’t be judged by how well it lives up to its blurbs, nor should a fledgling novelist be compared to a master. Taken on its own merit, An Honorable Man manages to generate a reasonable amount of dramatic tension.

The novel is relatively short, sacrificing an intricacy of plot for bare-bones storytelling. Paul Vidich’s depiction of the Cold War atmosphere is a key to the novel’s success. Vidich’s prose is above-average and is peppered with literary references. Given the limits imposed by the novel’s length, Vidich also does a better than average job of exploring the implications of espionage, the tendency to treat it as a game without considering the morality of using human game pieces that die (or worse) when they are sacrificed or captured. There is a reasonable amount of meat in this slender novel. It works better as a novel of psychological suspense than as a spy novel, but however a reader might classify it, the novel contributes something to the espionage genre, if only as a window that allows the reader to glimpse a true story.

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