Posted 09 December 2009 - 12:13 PM
Dear Harry,
As promised, I am reading my way through your back catalogue and over the course of the last few evenings, I completed Trouble Shooter. May I first congratulate you on an excellent title, one I have always considered a brilliant headline for a movie / book and suits the world of 007 perfectly. Does the rest of the novel live up to the expectation of that succinct title? Well, yes and no.
Firstly, the issues I had with Nobody Cheats Death regarding excessive violence and story structure seem to have been solved. You had a clear linear timeframe and while you may have concentrated too much on the villain of the piece, it didn’t hurt the overall impression, but gave the novel a solid foundation. I wasn’t surprised by Sabine’s (Jano’s) reappearance, but her character is underdeveloped. You don’t add anything new to her persona and in fact you repeat to a greater or lesser extent everything we already saw from her in the first novel. Other than Bond, I felt she was the only significant character, but while Sabine/Jano gallivants around London at breakneck speed, Bond seems restricted to a mixture of desk duty and ‘trouble shooting.’ M pulls him in at a time of crisis, but Bond spends a lot of time going for showers and reading data documents.
Thankfully, there is remarkably less action in this novel and when it does come rather than extending the scenes, the fights and gun battles add to the scenario. I still felt there was an over reliance on killing or maiming. I didn’t do a body count, but it did seem rather high, although the impression I had was that Bond himself only disposed of a handful of villains. What intrigued me most was the suggestion that Bond’s demeanour, his very stare and ‘black market’ interrogation technique, would be enough to achieve the required result (witness Cacciatollo’s hopelessness).
Generally though I didn’t feel I was reading a James Bond novel. Here, even more so than your previous effort, Bond is part of a team. Indeed he doesn’t even appear until something like page 50. This has its pluses and minuses in that it can enable a writer to draw out the significance of other characters, but this can be at the expense of the central one. I don’t think you succeeded in either.
The second part of the novel ‘007’ was, on the whole, the most successful section of the book. You gave a wonderful evocation of Jamaica and Bond’s retired life in it, his sadness over Sam and the restlessness of his station. There’s a little affair for Bond, but its significance to the story is lost on me. Like the ‘death’ of Sabine in Nobody Cheats Death, I wondered if you were concocting your own ‘stalking horse’ for a future novel. During this section, you veered very dangerously towards plagiarism. At some points the writing wasn’t so much Fleming-esque as his ‘greatest hits and bits.’ Some sentences felt lifted from the very pages of Dr No or From Russia With Love and while this provided you with some insight and wonderful atmosphere, I began to question whose novel I was reading. Flattery is fine, theft is not. These pages were so markedly different to the opening gambit, where the Sean D’Arcy character is experiencing similar second thoughts. The plight of the SAS officer felt very real, Bond’s mental agonies slightly forced in construction. I felt there was more than a touch of personal experience regarding Sean D’Arcy’s situation and that needed to be brought into James Bond’s world.
(Incidentally, I thought a Shamelady was a Nigerian flower that stayed closed until you tickled it? That’s what Charles Hood and James Mayo told me....)
The kidnap plot was intriguing and you executed the rescue mission superbly. There was good research (insider knowledge?) on surveillance techniques and SAS/military procedures here. But you made the mistake of telegraphing the success of the rescue by telling us the guards were going to die from their oversights. You repeated this with Sabine / Jano in a later chapter and on both occasions it kills the suspense you are building.
It was after this point I started to lose interest in the novel and it slid a very slippery slope from here. The scenes became shorter and lacked the earlier attention to detail. One chapter (‘Bullet Catchers’) was particularly poor. Parts of it, like Bond and Kylie’s flirtation and the PM briefing, read as though your characters were sharing afternoon tea. I also struggled to believe no-one had followed up that photograph before Bond found it (had the files just been sitting around without anyone researching them? Seems rather remiss of M) and your lead into its discovery was glib and short. The public accosting of Cacciatollo was badly executed, certainly your least interesting piece of action. When you sit this demeaning public scuffle next to Bond’s beautifully executed escape from Karl and his henchmen, I had to swallow a big dose of salt. Was I reading the same novel? By Jano’s demise I had given up on the endless interrogations and running around London. Everything was starting to get repetitive and I wasn’t convinced you had the confidence in the tale either, Harry. Me-thinks you might play it differently now.
You did, however, end the story on a high, and I thought the Epilogue was well constructed and thoughtful. You combined the best of what you achieved in Part One and Two and brought something quite new and different to your take on James Bond. The care worn exterior longing for the soft life still struggled under the guise of the hardened killer, the drudgery of the day-to-day was taking over and making him lazy, his eventual downfall. This was writing of a high standard, Harry, and you needed more of this throughout Trouble Shooter to lift it.
Yours in readership, Chris