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Jason Love


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#1 chrisno1

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Posted 07 March 2014 - 10:12 PM

I recently acquired a few of the nine novels written by James Leasor featuring the country doctor - turned spy Jason Love.

The covers are excellent. The books aren't bad either.

 

PASSPORT TO OBLIVION (1964)

 

James Leasor created Dr Jason Love, the Cord car loving, country living, medical practitioner in 1964, just as Fleming’s Bond was vanishing and a host of imitators were invading the literary and cinematic worlds. While Jason Love hasn’t aged particularly well, it’s fair to say this is probably due to the lack of a successful film franchise - no secret agent from the sixties can better Bond in that regard, excepting perhaps the television outings of The Man from UNCLE. A film was made of PASSPORT TO OBLIVION, starring David Niven, and retitled ‘WHERE THE SPIES ARE’. I haven’t seen it. Having read the novel, I can understand why it was an attractive option for a film studio: exotic locations, exotic women, a Cold War plot, terrorism, assassination, fast glamorous cars, cocktails; you name it, Leasor has crammed it into the format. He also has a nice turn in wit and the dead pan delivery of the prose never falters throughout the narrative.

 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is the reactions of the main protagonist. Jason Love is not a spy. He’s a GP, with a solid genial background, thrust into espionage by the desperate Deputy Head of MI6, an establishment figure called MacGillivray, a man more concerned with fighting off his superiors, maintaining his profile and setting up a retirement nest egg than the life or death of his special agents - Dr Love included. Jason Love is settled into the bachelor lifestyle, anticipating a holiday in France, when he is seconded into the Secret Service essentially to do no more than make contact with an agent, here called simply K (for Kuwait), who has vanished in Tehran. Curious and a little bored, Love accepts the assignment and finds himself embroiled in a Soviet plot to launch a Communist takeover of Arab states, seizing the oil assets and ruining the UK economy, making it also ripe for revolution. There is some strange stuff about exploding H-bombs and Flights of Peace which seemed irrelevant, but overall the story stacks up remarkably well, even if it is a trifle complicated. The novel doesn’t really need to be so clever, there are plenty of twists in the tale already, but I sense Leasor was attempting to give his adventure an international sweep, and he definitely does that.

 

I was reminded that Faulks’ Devil May Care was set in sixties Iran and while Leasor’s hero occupies much the same space, I found Jason Love’s adventure much more interesting and realistic: the easy bribery, the lazy atmosphere (even the ceiling fans are on siesta), the dodgy filthy bazaars, the grand monuments ancient and modern and an old world now populated by a nest of spies and an angry proletariat. These angles are hardly touched on by Faulks and while Leasor doesn’t dwell on them either, he offers enough to make you believe Iran really is this hot bed of political intrigue, a place where East and West collide and play out their conflicts in the hotels and avenues and ruins of tourist Persia. It does date the book. Times have changed for secret agents too and you couldn’t write of it now as Iran no longer has a pro-western regime.

 

However, even accepting the period-piece nature of the story, it has enough tension and action to keep a reader interested. The novel opens brilliantly, with K confronting his future killers in a hotel lobby, and ironically reflecting on ‘the built in survival mechanism of the professional spy.’ He, of course, dies, while the non-professional Jason Love remains alive, although he constantly questions his ability to do so. There is one sequence where, mistaking an ally for an enemy, he brutally dispatches him with a broken nose and proceeds to analyze the result: ‘all had gone so smoothly [and] gave him a curious, rather pleasant, feeling of power and superiority.’ Time and again, Leasor allows his lead character to think through his actions and tell the audience his conclusions, which sometimes amount to very little, and this aids the fleshing out of a rather mundane hero. Love likes cars and holidays, is practical and methodical, and has a high degree of self-control; other than that, he’s rather unexceptional, which I expect was the idea. Thrown into exceptional circumstances his ability to remain aloof allows clarity, both for the reader and eventually for him. It’s a clever dramatic idea and if it occasionally breaks down, that’s probably because the pace is picking up too fast for Leasor to control it or he’d risk dampening the suspense.

 

The central villain is a French-Russian, Andres Simmias, a powerful man who engages in similar thoughts to MacGillivray, while also being a sexual sadist. The latter angle is hardly explored; in fact, while Leasor initially paints his antagonist’s portrait in fascinating detail, as the novel progresses Simmias is less interesting. For instance the hook that binds him to his willing mistress, Simone, and hence both K and Love, isn’t exploited at all and that’s disappointing having made such an initial fuss of it. Equally the novel’s climax is a bit of a letdown, resembling Bond’s protracted flight and escape from Goldfinger’s private jet. Here, unlike Fleming, Leasor’s hero uses an ingenious secret gadget to foil the bad guys; he’s also reliant on other people making the correct assumptions about his plight, and unlike the early sections of the novel, he is very static.

 

However, I can’t let the final chapter completely ruin my enjoyment of PASSPORT TO OBLIVION. It whips by with a fast easy style that features guns and girls, gadgets and glamour. It has a much more cinematic view of the spy world than Fleming, but the naivety of its central character ensures the broad strokes don’t overshadow the detail. Jason Love is a man who is scared of dying, over cautious and a little serious, despite his throwaway quips. He feels very real, even inside the unreality of his situation.

 

This is a very thorough tale. I’d recommend it.

 

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Edited by chrisno1, 07 March 2014 - 10:28 PM.


#2 saint mark

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Posted 08 March 2014 - 08:58 PM

The movie is not too shabby either, and well worth a view and it feels closer to Connery's early 007 outing, and like the early 007 outing the women are just gorgeous and the scenery is exciting.

Too bad there never was a sequel in the movies.

 

I enjoyed the first three books quite a lot as they were easy and fun to read.



#3 chrisno1

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Posted 10 March 2014 - 10:45 PM

PASSPORT TO PERIL (1966)

 

The second adventure to feature Dr. Jason Love has him travelling to Pakistan and the mountains of the Karakoram, essentially to help an old friend whose son is suffering temporary blindness. But life is no longer that simple for Dr. Love: the arc of James Leasor’s story takes his middle aged dapper hero from the ski slopes of Villars to the valleys of Shahnagar and finds him up to his neck in death, blackmail and political intrigue.

 

PASSPORT TO PERIL isn’t as instantly likeable as its predecessor. The opening chapter is bookended by two vividly described assassinations and the middle by a series of serendipitous meetings which stretch credulity. Not an initial problem, yet the whole novel has a tendency towards unlikely encounters, with people turning up whenever it suits the author’s narrative and not when it necessarily suits the story, all bookended by sharp successful action, of course. These sorts of coincidences kept occurring in Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise epics, only Leasor treats them with unfortunate scant regard and the two mens’ history is barely explored. Love seems to take a lot of risks for little obvious reward. The novel lacks the wry humour of the original, gains some blood and thunder and sex, but overall feels a trifle half-baked and far fetched.

 

Jason Love retains his aloof persona, coupled now to an authorative slant when describing the machinations of the spying machine. MacGillivray, his sometime boss, continues to read Country Life while allowing the country GP to put his life and limb on the line, aware the good doctor may just be treading on MI6 territory but disinclined to let him know the facts, instead following his every step from the safety of his office. The Nawab of Shahnagar is a hopeless playboy, who has a son but apparently no wife and no intelligence, allowing himself to be blackmailed for over £2million by a group of terrorists obviously holed up in a cave directly in sight line of his summer palace. It shouldn’t take a visiting medical practitioner to highlight the danger. There is a lonely, double crossed governess, an amnesiac assassin, a vile Chinese undercover agent and a host of creepy locals after money or death or both. None of the characters convince and worse many of them sound like refugees from Kipling or the old Empire and not from new brash independent Pakistan.

 

The action veers back and forth along a mountain pass between Gilgit and Shahnagar and ends in spectacular fashion on a cable lift across a rushing ravine. It was unclear what the villain’s motives were; indeed it was unclear who the chief bad guy was. There is a closing scene which explains what we couldn’t fathom from the narrative..

 

For all that there is some nice detail. The novel begins exceptionally well and while I wasn’t drawn by the opening conversation between Love and Ibrahim Khan, the ensuing murder and its aftermath are well constructed. Occasionally Leasor’s hero reflects on his life before and after MI6, even referring to himself as a ‘quixotic fool’, which sounds entirely appropriate. These scenes have an ironic quality missing from most of the prose. The minor details convince more than the overall sweep: Chin’s need for parental approval, Mercedes’ coquettishness, Sarita’s wanton sensuality, Bahadur’s hatred. The story unfolds slowly until its rattling climax atop mountain and then cable car.

 

PASSPORT TO PERIL isn’t a bad novel, but it isn’t a patch on Leasor’s initial stab at the espionage thriller. Dr. Love needs a little more authorial TLC.

 

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Edited by chrisno1, 12 March 2014 - 10:55 PM.


#4 glidrose

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Posted 11 March 2014 - 06:55 PM

Looking forward to you reviewing the entire series.

#5 Yellow Pinky

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Posted 25 March 2014 - 08:29 PM

Excellent reviews!  I own both of the ones you reviewed (plus Passport in Suspense) and had virtually identical takes on them.  I particularly like the amateur spy angle of the character, although despite Love's internal monologues regarding his not being a trained spy, I found that as the books progress he sure seems increasingly adept at the game (particularly the more violent aspects) than his character wants to give credit.



#6 chrisno1

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Posted 02 April 2014 - 09:01 PM

PASSPORT IN SUSPENSE (1967)

 

PASSPORT IN SUSPENSE starts with the mysterious capture of a West German nuclear submarine, the Seehund. Tension fills the pages. People are killed. A false trail is laid. We, the reader, are uncertain who has committed this abominable crime. We have little time to ponder as Dr. Jason Love, relaxing on holiday in Nassau, is witness to an assassination, is compelled to help the puzzling old lady Senora Alcantara return a rare book to her husband and is almost beaten up by a bunch of street toughs hired to strong arm him. Dr. Love treats all these eventualities with amiable nonchalance. Meanwhile MacGillivray continues to read Country Life in his little office above Covent Garden.

 

Love travels to Mexico where he plans to attend a car rally in addition to dropping off the aforementioned book, but he’s already under observation by a Cuban hit man, an unknown double agent and a sinister sightless millionaire who prowls the oceans in his enormous luxury yacht. Who all these people are, how they link to Senora Alcantara and how she is linked to the disappearance of the Seehund forms the basis of this fun and fast thriller, which fairly pounds along, incident piling on incident, eerie following eerie, suspicion cast, comradeship accepted, death and lust interchangeable, the bullets as rapid as the pages turn.

 

I really enjoyed this novel. Partly it was the non-stop nature of the narrative, but also the telling. Unlike Love’s previous adventure, which was thin plot wise and seemed to repeat itself with all those endless mountain pursuits, this story has a sound structure, utilizing its locations effectively, melding its characters so we believe in their aspirations and empathize with their plight. The villain is Paul Styer, a Nazi death camp commandant who, having ferreted away millions during the war, changed identity, turned ‘respectable’ and founded a multinational business conglomerate - his front for a devilish plan of world changing terrorism. To that purpose he’s tracked down and recruited a hive of ex-Nazi’s, holed up in fictional Delgueda, a tiny independent island republic off the coast of South America, but they, like Dr. Love simply are not playing ball.

 

Some of the best of the writing here isn’t the action or the suspense [oddly] but the reflective paragraphs. For instance in a moment of calm Love ponders his new life ‘a labyrinthine world of half-truths and hidden microphones… doomed to become involved everywhere he travelled, like some refugee from a Greek myth’; Weissmann ponders his youth in Kitzbuhel; Kronenbourg revisits his first marriage; Steyr glories in the indignities he could once inflict on his prisoners, remembering most vividly the scent of human fear. These are neatly juxtaposed with the equally desperate modern refugee Garcia, a restless, nervous Cuban in ‘the unhappy position of having no country he could call his own’ who longs to return home for simpler pleasures. PASSPORT IN SUSPENSE is given added pathos by Shamara, a concentration camp survivor whose memories of the inhumanity of warfare still have the power to shock, especially when it is clear evil men like Steyr, Weissmann and the chief interrogator Kernau have no regrets and have lost none of their demented, devious skills.

 

I unknowingly borrowed the basic bizarre plot for my Fan Fiction Gulfstream. [I’ve never owned Passport in Suspense until now nor read it before or even researched it - but both villainous schemes are almost identical]. A bonkers storyline should be a drawback, but James Leasor has crafted this one so tight, so deft, so damnably readable, that it doesn’t really matter. Indeed the overall arc of the tale is lost among the small details: the Nassau backdrop, the death of a beautiful female water skier, hidden microphones in poppies and book jackets, the Mexican heat, a torture beneath the burning Aztec sun, Love’s escape from a cellar, a gorgeous Israeli accomplice, intrigue off the coast of Brazil, Styer’s horrific mutilated face, the Ying and the Yang which ultimately saves the day for Dr. Love. For once the endless patter about cars and car parts is kept to a discreet minimum.

 

Perhaps the only genuine sour notes are the London sections, where MacGillivray and his boss [originally referred to as ‘C’, but now merely Sir Robert] are strangely detached, following the unfolding impending disaster at distance, aware Jason Love has become accidentally entrapped but refusing to assist him. The novel could do without these scenes or if they must be retained a harder edge should necessitate, something suggesting Love was as dispensable to them as the next agent, for in reality their action or non-action are as callous as the ex-Nazis.

 

The novel is extensively, yet not tiresomely, detailed through nine long involving chapters. For the tenth and final furlong, as the climax approaches and the race runs its course, Leasor shortens his scenes dramatically. As a narrative devise this doesn’t quite work. Part of the joy of the novel is in its detail and to remove it at the apex seems shortsighted. Having said that, there’s no letup in the action and the story delivers not one but two vivid denouements. And on a side note, it was nice to see Jason Love bedding the girl and keeping her for a change.

 

This is a very good thriller. Highly recommended.

 

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#7 chrisno1

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Posted 06 April 2014 - 10:42 PM

PASSPORT FOR A PILGRIM (1968)

 

Once again a simple, harmless request from a near acquaintance sends Dr. Jason Love on a perilous adventure - this time into Syria, where he digs up a grave, sets off an air-raid, kidnaps a hospital patient and breaks a road block, all on the first day of his visit.

 

PASSPORT FOR A PILGRIM starts in Albania, where father and son scientists the Krasna’s are trying to defect, hoping their freedom can be achieved during a conference in Cairo. Their plan goes awry, but we don’t learn how until the very end of the novel, instead we meet the erstwhile Dr. Love reveling in the elegance of the Air France in flight passenger service. He’s also attending a conference, but has agreed to locate and photograph the grave of Clarissa Head, the daughter of one of his patients who died recently in a road accident near Damascus.

 

As always with poor Jason, things are not quite as straightforward as they appear: the hospital officers (Doctor Suleiman and Khalif) are a suspicious pair, the car hardly resembles a fatal wreck, the grave contains a monk dressed in saffron robes and, most curious, Clarissa appears to be alive and recuperating at the People’s Clinic. Aided by Parkington, who fortuitously appears in the same way he did in Love’s debut adventure, the Doctor rescues the girl and uncovers a bizarre scheme by Jakob Steinmann, another ex-Nazi, to develop a brainwashing mind control serum.

 

The action starts at a brutal pace, the souks and alleys of creepy Damascus are brilliantly represented, and I enjoyed the interplay between the characters, which is both shifty and officious. Every person Love meets has the air of suspicion about them, even the cab driver and the embassy adjutant. Of course, it’s Love himself who is acting the most suspicious! Leasor handles the early chapter’s well, building tension and throwing red herrings at us left, right and centre. This doesn’t help clarity, which is probably the point. The visit to the Clinic is startling and the grave robbing scene gruesome and effective - I liked the lack of detail, leaving the true horrors up to the reader’s imagination. The escape from the cemetery was particularly gripping, so too the kidnap of Clarissa. Later on there is an excellent chapter set in an underground lake as Love and Parkington go amateur cave-diving in an attempt to escape the baddies. These sequences show the author at his best.

 

Unfortunately there is a dreadful rushed climax and the epilogue, which reveals Steinmann’s plan through the mouth of MacGillivray, who once more sits on the sidelines reading Country Life and tut-tut-ting, is barely believable. A little tightening of the actual gambit might have helped, it does seem overly complicated. This is disappointing as the novel for the most part functions well. It’s a picaresque sort of thriller, jumping rapidly from one scene, location or incident to the next, with little explanation, yet leaving a trail of clues to the eventual denouement. Some of the clues are a bit obvious or obviously forced, such as Clarissa’s sudden departure from a hotel, but this doesn’t hurt the telling. It’s only the fragmented nature of the plot device which hankers.

 

The unravelling of the plot really ought to come earlier. There’s a tense scene at the Monastery of the Sacred Flame where Love is introduced to Steinmann, but the confident German reveals none of his plans and the reader is left frustrated. A chapter on we are re-introduced to Krasna, and again an opportunity for revelation is missed. This doesn’t help the climax, which is resolved by accident, and initially makes little sense. It also slows the narrative whenever Leasor switches the action to MI6 who are constantly deciphering communiques that don’t really matter to the story itself.

 

Another gripe, if a small one, is that once again Jason Love is involved purely by chance. His first adventure had him deliberately employed by MI6, yet the next three all have an adventure thrust on him by circumstance. This makes them little more than the standard ‘fish out of water’ thriller. Inserting Parkington into the mix only serves to highlight that Love should be working undercover for the Secret Service, not on some genial mercy mission for a pal. In fact Parkington isn’t necessary to the story at all and Love could easily have carried out everything he does with the help of, say, the taxi driver. That would also allow more local flavor to penetrate the prose.

 

At the end, the hero is uncertain his forty eight hour nightmare has really happened - ‘the legacy of some unwise mixture of lobster thermidor and double whiskies’ - we know different and despite a few misgivings, I’m hoping Jason Love’s adventures continue in a similar fast moving vein.

 

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#8 chrisno1

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Posted 08 April 2014 - 08:29 PM

A WEEK OF LOVE (1969)

 

James Leasor’s A WEEK OF LOVE is a slight selection of seven short stories featuring his hero Dr. Jason Love. Each one deals with deception and stealth.

 

Using the days of the week, Leasor guides us through these tales with maximum brevity. The book is shorter than short, coming in at no more than 45000 words. I read it in one evening. I wasn’t overly impressed. While there is a dash of interest to each episode, the simplistic structure, the obvious resolution, the lack of background detail and the almost nonexistent tension prevented me from entirely immersing myself. Indeed there’s little to be immersed in. Agreed the stories all move swiftly, which is a bonus, and occasionally Leasor provides an insight into Love’s persona or a tantalizing detail about a location, historical fact or item of curiosity, but because of this the stories are only partially successful.

 

It doesn’t help they share the same basic plot line: Jason Love is witness to an event which intrigues him and leads to a much more substantial problem to the one he witnessed. So we have four fresh coffins in Giglio, Italy; vanishing water skiers in Praia de Luz, Portugal; a magician’s act in Amsterdam; an industrial accident in Scotland; mistaken identity in Spain; a lost priceless necklace in Kent; and finally a man from MacGillivray’s past who turns up at Love’s surgery in Bishop’s Coombe, Somerset. Each story involves smuggling and / or theft and while MacGillivray’s department is indirectly involved a few times, usually to ensure the co-operation of the local police, Jason Love essentially acts like a modern day Poirot, except murder is rarely involved, only deception, betrayal and contraband.

 

I won’t go into great detail. The first two stories are probably the best, allowing us to wallow in the sloth of foreign lands, but the perfunctory prose begins to dull the senses from here on, pricked only when the narrative provides an overriding, fatalistic sense of the inevitable. Right from the off Love is brooding over his Campari, reflecting on ‘the human condition… living on borrowed time’; later he muses on ‘the futility of human effort, of the unimportance of the individual when measured against the endless mists of eternity’; ultimately he is witness to a dying man’s suicide.

 

The tales lack genuine excitement. Occasionally violence rears its head. Sex is missing altogether, except for an odd assignation Love makes with an American teenager which appears, but may not be, chaste - surely the reason why ‘Love hated goodbyes’. The bad guys are an uninvolving lot, perhaps the most effective being Dr. Esteban, a heroin smuggler who lives aboard his luxury yacht and entertains the bright young things at his luxurious mansion, but Leasor doesn’t make enough of the decadence and Esteban passes us by, much like the yacht. One of the tales involves a classic car garage just off Elephant and Castle and this allows Leasor to relate yet again details about Dr. Love’s Supercharged Cord Roadster. Unusually for once the technical babble didn’t baffle. I don’t have much else to comment.

 

Overall, A WEEK OF LOVE is a disappointment.  

 

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#9 chrisno1

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Posted 21 April 2014 - 09:29 PM

LOVE-ALL (1971)

 

Supported by a phial full of Benzedrine, Dr. Jason Love jets his way to turbulent Beirut on the hunt for a patient’s missing husband and becomes involved in a political assassination which proves deadly for more people than just the intended victim.

 

From its opening gambit on a baking skyscraper as two sharpshooters plan and plot the kill, to its climax days later as Jason Love attempts to foil the crime, LOVE-ALL, the sixth adventure from the pen of James Leasor, hardly lets up. It is packed full of incident and intrigue, much of which doesn’t make any sense, a lot of which still feels relevant today, what with the tensions in the Middle East gaining and gaining. Once again Love shows remarkable kindliness towards one of his patients, jetting to far foreign climes on a whim – you’d think he’d have learnt his lesson by now – and once again he is indebted to Parkington, MI6s man in the Arab region, for getting him in and out of the scrapes.

 

I enjoyed the action in this novel. Much like the first and fourth tales, it has a great sense of atmosphere. You can almost taste the Lebanese air along with the food and the sweat and stench. There are several excellent dramatic highlights: Love is grimly tortured, he escapes from a cellar using plastic explosives, he is witness to a tense dry-run for the central assassination attempt, an edge of your seat flight through Beirut, a real killing, a creepy assignation with a foreign agent in a shop full of papier-mâché puppets, a brilliantly described moment when said puppet shop is fire bombed ‘the dawn sky suddenly peppered with tiny bodies, arms, legs, faces’.

 

As always Jason Love retains a curious unruffled air, as if he is a tourist dipping his toe into the ocean of espionage, only to try and pull away at the very moment of immersion, yet finds he rather enjoys the danger of swimming in open water. He won’t make a fuss; the doctor hardly ruffles a hair. Leasor keeps the tension high. LOVE-ALL has intrigue, red herrings and loopholes. The plot is implausible. There is a very hard to comprehend clue about radio wavebands being tattooed onto a man’s scalp which while inventive would need its recipient to be very well educated in ecclesiastical matters, and I didn’t believe that for a minute, as well as is the need to apportion blame on the state of Israel becoming a complete irrelevance, for the scheme is really an elaborate land grabbing exercise by a megalomaniacal freeholder. For all that, in the main, the story succeeds.

 

My major reservation (and I know I am laboring the point) is that again McGillivray is party to information Love is not, he is investigating aspects of the case from afar and the hero becomes detached from the resolution. Additionally it becomes over familiar that Parkington is on hand to help Love through the middle section of the novel. Parkington is Felix Leiter to Love’s OO7, disabled by his health problems he leaves all the really rough stuff up to his pal, but is always on hand to deliver the important messages, to share a gin or two, to be on hand with the cavalry when necessary and too late.

 

More perplexing is the long winded final chapter which has McGillivray explaining the plot to Love’s patient, Mrs. Wilmot, a sort of McGuffin character, and thus filling in the gaps the reader has missed or has never been told. This sort of epilogue always tells me the plot was too convoluted from the off, as if Leasor recognized he had brilliant opening gambit and a good villain in Carlos Diaz (both of which he does) but neglected to think through the whole narrative.

 

Overall though it’s a cracking read that once again shares with the reader the fear and loneliness of its hero as he becomes entangled in a web of madness. Towards the end, as Love and Wilmot struggle to reach the Lebanese border, there is a brilliant treatise on life and death: ‘Life itself was as inconclusive as these questions without answers. There were no happy endings, for there were no endings: old problems and flashes of happiness were continually being rekindled against new backgrounds, for new generations.’ Against this sort of writing the final pass about life being nil, love-all, seems hopelessly unimaginative.  

 

LOVE-ALL is a very good, if over complicated thriller.

 

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#10 chrisno1

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Posted 08 May 2014 - 08:45 PM

So I didn't have a lot on over the Bank Holiday except the garden, so I filled my time with a host of extra reading and three further novels of James Leasor.

 

HOST OF EXTRAS (1973) and ARISTO AUTOS

 

When taking breaks from Jason Love, James Leasor created the wise cracking, dodgy dealing vintage car salesman of Aristo Autos. The chief protagonist’s name is never mentioned, which isn’t odd when a novel is written in the first person, but it seems strange no other character even calls him by his name. Let’s call him Aristo for purposes of the review.

 

Aristo first appeared in THEY DON’T MAKE THEM LIKE THAT ANY MORE (1969) written between Love’s adventures Passport for a Pilgrim and A Week of Love. In fact there is brief mention of Aristo’s garage lock up in the fifth installment of the latter’s short story compilation, but it isn’t clear whether the two protagonists strike up a friendship. As we know Leasor has a great love of vintage vehicles and Aristo is the perfect creative outlet to write about his hobby and here the prose often veers to the pretentious when discussing cars, even more than with the amiable Dr. Love’s romantic musings on the Cord Roadster. Leasor mentions makes and models and technical specifics that to the uninitiated mean next to nothing. They were certainly well beyond my limited knowledge. For all that the novel does have a consistent thread and theme: Aristo loves cars and the money they make him. It is this twin devotion that leads him into chasing a stolen Mercedes across France, Spain and Switzerland, uncovering a secret cache of Nazi wealth and getting into a couple of nasty scraps along the way.

 

So there’s a lot of chat about cars, some sporadic violence and a beautiful heroine who does very little, but the plot doesn’t quite add up. Aristo takes on the dubious contract of buying, restoring and delivering a vehicle from an equally dubious source and does so with unlikely incaution, not even taking registration details of the car from the vendor or learning the exact name of the purchaser. His pursuit of the car once it is stolen seems equally unlikely, but from here the plot takes shape and the reader is subjected to less of the mechanical jargon and less implausibles.

 

For the most part the novel lacks suspense. The hero does have a nice line in pithy humour which probably detracts from the intrigue. When the action comes it’s very swift and sharp and occasionally feels perfunctory, as if the author and his hero can’t be bothered. Towards the end there is a gunfight which passes in a single paragraph. It isn’t a particularly sexy novel either and my paperback copy has a distinctly sexy cover, so that’s a bit disappointing too. Overall this novel is one of those 1960s curios, the kind of thriller that lacks thrills.

 

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NEVER HAD A SPANNER ON HER (1970) followed, crammed between A Week of Love and Love All.

 

Once again I got lost with all the car stuff. I had the distinct impression James Leasor was writing about automobiles which were rare even in the late sixties, yet Aristo is confronted with sellers almost every day, which I didn’t believe. For all that, the tale has a better structure and relies less on coincidence and more on plan and execution. This time Aristo is doing a deal to purchase three antique cars from dodgy sources in Egypt, but one of his partners has an ulterior agenda which puts the whole enterprise in jeopardy.

 

Featuring intrigue in London and Cairo and a desert bound car chase with a climatic showdown, this succeeds more readily than Aristo’s debut. Marie, a young Frenchwoman, is using her boss’s car deal to smuggle her father out of Egypt. Having made a corrupt fortune during King Farouk’s reign, her father is now under house arrest in a former palace outside Alexandria and the trunk of a Type 47 Bugatti is his only means of escape. While the plot stands up despite a few curious turns, it still defies belief that Aristo would involve himself in the scheme especially given the flimsy evidence and the barrage of lies he’s originally fed. He justifies it by pleading an undeniable love for money, but I wasn’t convinced.

 

The characters have more depth this time around, although the villains are still a bit cardboard-cut-out. Aristo’s banter ripples nicely off the page, a neat counter strike to the violence which materializes in fits and spurts. Overall the balance is about right and I got a nice feel for the Egypt of 1970, a fledgling Arab nation attempting to westernize.

 

I enjoyed the book. It’s not overlong (I read it in two sittings) and is easy to digest with probably about the right mix of violence and humour, although the one liners tend to mar the tension; for the most part it isn’t a gripping thriller, more a subtle one. Most curious again is the lack of sex. Aristo has plenty of patter, but never seems to follow it through. It is implied that ultimately he succeeds with Marie, but the reader doesn’t witness it, not even a kiss. The promising naked girl on the cover is telling us lies.

 

th_050_zps43f883c2.jpg

 

HOST OF EXTRAS (1973) does have some sex in it, which is welcome, and also features Leasor’s earlier creation Jason Love, which is the reason why I’m reviewing these three novels.

 

The doctor-come-spy accompanies Aristo on a trip to Corsica, driving two vintage Rolls Royce’s for Pagoda Films, a half-baked film company with a shifty producer and a gorgeous secretary. Naturally the film shoot is an elaborate cover, we’re pretty much aware of that from the off as Aristo’s neighbour and underworld grass Jacko Jackson has already told him, but it would spoil a good story if Aristo did the right thing and stayed at home.

 

Instead he doesn’t and Aristo and Love get involved in an elaborate hoax to recover a cache of stolen diamonds from a sunken plane. The book has more thrills than the previous two put together and packs them into a narrative noticeably shorter too. While the prose is full of the usual wisecracks and proceeds at a whip crack pace, Leasor fills the pages with stories about Aristo we’ve already heard. This tendency to repetition may be for the benefit of Jason Love fans, but the novel is hardly a Jason Love adventure at all, which is strange because in structure HOST OF EXTRAS bears uncanny similarities with most of Leasor’s early Love books, all those ‘Passport To…’ outings. Indeed other than the classic car angle, the novel could easily manage without Aristo; he’s doing all the same things Jason Love used to do, while the good doctor performs the sidekick role. After a superb introduction at a grim faced funeral, Love does very little, spends most of his time driving and drinking and consoling. He’s hardly the hero at all. That role has now gone decisively to the wisecracking dodgy dealing Aristo. Leasor, it appears, has gone soft on the country doctor.

 

There is some good news for this novel is a much more potent cocktail of death, seduction and destruction. The action is punchy, well described and occasionally quite brutal; the death of one henchman is particularly barbaric as he’s torn to pieces by wild boars. Elsewhere characters have depth and motives and the plot makes sense, although I do wonder why Aristo continues to hang out with his protagonists when abandonment seems more sense - the reader must accept this flaw as the author never properly tells us.

 

For all that all I enjoyed it immensely, much more so than Aristo’s other books. The detail about cars takes something of a backseat to be replaced by some fine descriptive passages, particularly a confrontation with a mad and blind Vicomte in a decaying mansion that had overtones of Great Expectations and gothic horror and would not have been out of place in the world of Ian Fleming. There’s even a place and time for Aristo to get it on with Victoria Bassett, the nominal heroine and aforementioned secretary, who hides all the secrets.

 

Despite hardly featuring Jason Love, I’d give this one a big thumb’s up. It’s sinister, fast and great fun. I rather wish there’d been a bit more of this blood and guts approach to some of the early adventures of Dr. Love. Leasor seems to have learnt his trade too late.

 

HOST OF EXTRAS is a great thriller which hints at a host of missed opportunities. 

 

th_051_zps3bb2e85b.jpg

 

N.B. I am aware that Leasor wrote another three adventures featuring Dr. Love, but these seem very hard to get hold of. Host of Extra effectively ends Jason Love's contribution to the immediate post-Fleming era of spy craft.

 



#11 glidrose

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Posted 08 May 2014 - 11:37 PM

Leasor also wrote a tough, punchy thriller called "Ship of Gold." Has a strong Bondish feel, so much so, I wish IFP had picked him and not John Gardner.

N.B. I am aware that Leasor wrote another three adventures featuring Dr. Love, but these seem very hard to get hold of. Host of Extra effectively ends Jason Love's contribution to the immediate post-Fleming era of spy craft.


Damn! I was really looking forward to your reviews of those three books. If you ever do get ahold of them please review them here.

#12 chrisno1

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Posted 10 May 2014 - 10:47 PM

Leasor also wrote a tough, punchy thriller called "Ship of Gold." Has a strong Bondish feel, so much so, I wish IFP had picked him and not John Gardner.
 

N.B. I am aware that Leasor wrote another three adventures featuring Dr. Love, but these seem very hard to get hold of. Host of Extra effectively ends Jason Love's contribution to the immediate post-Fleming era of spy craft.


Damn! I was really looking forward to your reviews of those three books. If you ever do get ahold of them please review them here.

 

 

I certainly will. I've seen them second hand a few times on Amazon but usually for exorbitant prices. Just have to watch the space !

I read on this site recently that Leasor might have been considered for one of the authors to continue Bond under the Robert Markham pseudonym, this I guess would be around about 1968/9, but it never came to fruition, possibly because by then Leasor was too closely associated with his own character. I suspect, judging from the enthusiasm he gives to the final Aristo Autos novel, that Leasor was tiring of Jason Love. I know he wrote many more novels than just that series, perhaps, like a typecast actor, he wanted to break free from his bonds, so to speak. He may well have turned down OO7 anyway 


Edited by chrisno1, 10 May 2014 - 10:52 PM.


#13 glidrose

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Posted 12 May 2014 - 10:59 PM

I read on this site recently that Leasor might have been considered for one of the authors to continue Bond under the Robert Markham pseudonym, this I guess would be around about 1968/9, but it never came to fruition, possibly because by then Leasor was too closely associated with his own character. I suspect, judging from the enthusiasm he gives to the final Aristo Autos novel, that Leasor was tiring of Jason Love. I know he wrote many more novels than just that series, perhaps, like a typecast actor, he wanted to break free from his bonds, so to speak. He may well have turned down OO7 anyway


Um, not quite. Leasor claims that IFP contacted him after Fleming's death but before they signed Kingsley Amis. Leasor wasn't interested. My own theory was that Peter Fleming (Ian's older brother) and Leasor had given each other kind reviews and were both staunch Tories. Peter Fleming may have thought Bond would be in better hands with Leasor than an arch-socialist boor like Kingsley Amis.

And, again, I gotta say that "Robert Markham" was never meant to be a house pseudonym. That was Kingsley Amis's own idea. This whole "house pseudonym" idea is yet another fanboy rumor that gets treated as fact.

#14 chrisno1

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Posted 13 May 2014 - 12:24 AM

I bow to your judgement - myth and reality - hard to shake



#15 glidrose

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Posted 13 May 2014 - 12:54 AM

I bow to your judgement - myth and reality - hard to shake

 

BTW, I was the one who originally mentioned the Leasor for Bond author claim on these message boards last year!



#16 Dustin

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Posted 13 May 2014 - 08:10 PM


I bow to your judgement - myth and reality - hard to shake


BTW, I was the one who originally mentioned the Leasor for Bond author claim on these message boards last year!

Indeed, I remember that. It was reason for me to take a look at Leasor. But I'm afraid for some reason I can't relate to Jason Love.

#17 glidrose

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Posted 13 May 2014 - 08:48 PM

I'm the same way. He leaves me cold. Too much the toff.



#18 chrisno1

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Posted 27 May 2014 - 12:53 AM

 

I bow to your judgement - myth and reality - hard to shake

 

BTW, I was the one who originally mentioned the Leasor for Bond author claim on these message boards last year!

 

 

 

I bow to your judgement - myth and reality - hard to shake

 

BTW, I was the one who originally mentioned the Leasor for Bond author claim on these message boards last year!

 

 

I just re-read that thread to get my facts straight.

Fully straightened now thanks.

I don't think Leasor would have made a good Bond writer. His novels are not nearly as richly descriptive as Fleming's or even as irritatingly imitation as some of Gardner's, the narratives often lack tension and the hero lacks charisma and sex appeal. Taken in context (as Bond knock offs) they aren't bad thrillers, but I think Leasor knew they were Bond knock offs and as spy fiction got increasingly grimy/violent/pornographic [delete as appropriate] I think he rather lost interest.

   

I have obtained copies of Frozen Assets and Love Down Under and will be reviewing them some time next month. The 1975 opus Love and the Land Beyond seems very very hard to trace. Mind you, the title is crap, so I don't hold much hope for the story.



#19 chrisno1

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Posted 12 August 2014 - 08:53 PM

FROZEN ASSETS (1989)

 

The rear sleeve of my paperback edition of FROZEN ASSETS proudly states: ‘Jason Love is Back!’ Unfortunately, despite the exclamation mark and the best intentions of the linear notes, I found very little to get excited about in this novel.

 

James Leasor hadn’t been idle since his last novel to feature Dr. Love back in 1979 [‘Love and the Land Beyond’] but these adventures need a serious shot of something form the good practitioner’s medical bag to sustain it, maybe some Benzedrine or one of the endless tooth mugs full of whisky - or maybe just a little originality. Across the whole of FROZEN ASSETS there hangs a sense of seen-it done-it. We have a historically significant Cord Roadster worth millions holed up in a garage in Pakistan; we have Jason Love agreeing to assess said motor car on a whim as a favour to Parkington, the same SIS agent who got him in and out of all those scrapes in the sixties and seventies; we have a tricky plot or two or three; we have a delectable heroine who does very little; we have incidents but little action; people die; people talk and drink; people keep appearing suddenly in hotel rooms. It all felt rather tiresome.

 

I didn’t understand the plot. It was far too complicated. As I gather, a Pakistani arms dealer called Sharif has blackmailed a British agent to deliver a secret communications gizmo to the Soviets. Meanwhile an elderly Pashtun, Ahmed, has discovered a seventeenth century map revealing the whereabouts of a strain of valuable mineral deposits in Afghanistan. His American daughter in law, Stevie, is giving medical aid to the Afghan refugees and has been promised a ten percent share of the sale of Sharif’s Cord Roadster if she helps sell it on. Somehow the three plot lines converge, but I can’t remember how. Some of the clues were very clever, some a bit obvious, but the three threads never seemed to entwine until the last pages when Douglas McGillivray attempts to explain all. 

 

Given that the plot was nonsensical, I hoped the action might be worth the price of admission. Sadly there was a complete lack of tension. Jason Love’s bedside manner of dealing with every occurrence doesn’t help. There is none of the panicky inner thoughts or the soul searching Leasor gave us in previous efforts. This older Dr. Love is very bland indeed. So much so that when he declares his adoration for Stevie I cringed. It seemed completely out of character, came with no warning or expectation and was written in such a way as to suggest middle aged desperation rather than romantic inclination. Leasor needs to invest more time in his characters if he wants scenes like this to read well

 

Romance aside, and it’s a very thin love story, the story switches back and forth between hotel rooms, a refugee camp and the border roads of the North West Frontier. There is a lot of talking. People die in one sentence. The descriptions are vague. Thankfully the pace picks up towards the end. Love is kidnapped and taken to Sharif’s mansion where he perfects an ingenious escape from a firing squad. Trapped in the mansion's grounds he’s inexplicably saved by the mysterious ‘Go-Between’. This character drops handily into the action with no explanation. He’s very pleased to see Dr. Love, seems to know all about him and asks our hero to put a gentlemanly word in for his drug addicted daughter. This is enough to gain trust and a route back to Peshawar. This was one of several moments in the narrative which defied logic as well as the unraveling narrative.

 

Leasor doesn’t dwell on it, which is just as well, and instead his protagonists return to steal the Cord Roadster and get captured again. There’s a car chase, a gruesome torture and a pretty effective ending. The climax fairly bundles along and I enjoyed that quite a bit. The trouble was with the rest of the novel which simply wasn’t involving, unhampered or concise enough.

 

FROZEN ASSETS is deadly cold disappointment. One to avoid.

 

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Edited by chrisno1, 12 August 2014 - 09:35 PM.


#20 chrisno1

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Posted 26 August 2014 - 08:58 PM

LOVE DOWN UNDER (1992)

 

James Leasor starts his final adventure to feature Wiltshire’s finest General Practitioner Dr. Jason Love in much the same place he bases most the others - in old Empire India / Pakistan. This time mind it’s fair to say he’s constructed an excellent and intriguing prologue which is both visually captivating and literally compelling. The opening two chapters, set a decade before the main action and based around a fire at Bombay's container port, fairly rattle along, introducing characters and circumstances in spectacular fashion which a reader can begin to speculate on.

 

Once the action reaches chapter three and the modern day we are subjected to all manner of absurdities which sometimes make sense, but often don’t.  For instance I am still amazed by the ability of strangers to gain unexplained access to Dr. Love’s hotel room at appropriate moments, the propensity for circumstance and coincidence to invade Dr. Love’s life, the knack of Parkington to appear and disappear at handy moments in the narrative [I was also amazed he's still in his mid-thirties - how old was he in 1964? 12?], Dr. Love’s unflappability, I could go on. Suffice to say whether the narrative makes much serious sense or not hardly becomes an issue, as the story continues at some speed and provides a series of highlights which distract the unconcerned reader.

 

I sort of enjoyed the novel. Essentially about a Russian GRU officer who stole a few million dollars of Triad cash before defecting and making good in Australia. Every one of his past nemesis is chasing either or him or his money. Poor Robinson, née Radinsky; with all the worry you almost wish he’d never stolen the money.  There are some neat moments of tension and terror, such as a fight atop Ayres Rock, a keel hauling, a mysterious midday abduction by Chinese villains and the murder by camera-pistol of a spy, but too often these moments appear slotted into the narrative and hardly bristle our hero, who remains aloof from most of what happens. Even during the climactic battle on a rusting hulking container ship jammed full of molten gold, he seems more bothered about burning his own skin than escaping hordes of Triad henchmen. Admittedly this time there is more violence, but it passes in a fairly amicable style and isn’t helped by the to-and-fro between Love’s visceral adventure and McGillivray’s detached London musings, in fact they rather reinforce the old fashioned manner of the telling.

 

LOVE DOWN UNDER sort of works. It was nice to have the hero relocated to Australia, but nothing really changes. He still enjoys Cord cars - they seem to be the car of choice of megalomaniac villains in Leasor's world. Love meets beautiful women but doesn’t chase them. There are fights. People drink lots of gin. Jason Love accepts a curious request from a patient. People die every so often. A lot of time is spent driving backwards and forwards along highways, this time coastal not mountainous. Parkington helps then becomes and encumbrance. McGillivray yearns for a Scottish estate. Everything is resolved in a coda of monumental boredom.

 

Not a bad send off, but the formula had reached its zenith over twenty years earlier with Passport for a Pilgrim and it feels distinctly and repetitively dated by 1992.

 

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#21 saint mark

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Posted 30 August 2014 - 06:54 AM

Thanks for reading this series, I quit after the fourth book or was it the fifth. Anyhow I like the first three books and the movie with Davis Niven and Catherine Deneuve her sister an awefull lot. I always wondered if Faulks did try and get that Persian vibe from the movie for his 007 book.



#22 glidrose

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Posted 30 August 2014 - 08:51 PM

The 1975 opus Love and the Land Beyond seems very very hard to trace. Mind you, the title is crap, so I don't hold much hope for the story.


Amazon.co.uk has used copies for as little as £0.01

http://www.amazon.co...n=used&sr=&qid=

#23 chrisno1

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Posted 02 September 2014 - 04:07 PM

 

Amazon.co.uk has used copies for as little as £0.01

http://www.amazon.co...n=used&sr=&qid=

 

 

Ah yes - I've been aware of that offer for some time. However in a case of reverse snobbery, that is a hard cover copy and I only collect paperbacks (barring the occasional prestige release) Despite only costing one penny, I don't love Jason Love that much....



#24 glidrose

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Posted 02 September 2014 - 05:23 PM

Despite only costing one penny, I don't love Jason Love that much....


I hear you. Having read your reviews I have even less desire to force myself through the Leasor/Love output.

Maybe the author himself had a low opinion of these books and only kept coming back to them because his readers/publishers demanded it?