First up: James Mayo's Charles Hood in HAMMERHEAD: Hood is not an official agent of the British Secret Service, like Bond, but rather what I call a stringer. Someone whose job puts them in places in which the SIS (in this case Special Intelligence Security) would like to have a man there. He's an art connosieur and dealer and that gets him next to a rather unpleasant man by the name of Lobar or as his compatriots called him once Hammerhead. I say once called because after Hood's SIS boss George Conder mentions the nickname it isn't used again throughout the book! Lobar, however, is the scientific name for the hammerhead shark'ss distinctive noggin. Very cute.
Hoods background really isn't really fleshed out. Perhaps in later books it's gone into more in depth. Its not clear if a military man during the war but from the writing one gets the feel that maybe he served in the navy. No mention is made of any intelligence work he had done in the past, other than SIS occasionally uses him. He knows how to use a gun and carries an Israeli Yassida .38 caliber revolver. This is nitpicking I know, but I tried a search for the Yassida in various handgun data bases and came up nil. Perhaps it wasn't a very popular gun, or maybe Mayo made it up. In the 60's the Israelis were just becoming known as makers of reliable and sometimes innovative weapons. The UZI for example. I am sure there is some gun company in Israel that makes revolvers but we're used to seeing semi-automatics in that part of the world. The Egyptian Helwan 9mm, a Beretta knock-off, and more recently the IMI Desert Eagle. Things like that interest me because they make the character more real. James Bond's shaken and stirred martinis, his Sea Island cotton shirts, and the chamois holster holding his .25 Beretta or 7.65mm Walther PPK. So when I couldn't find anything about the Yassida I was dissapointed.
The villain Espiritu Lobar is requisitely unpleasant; Starting with a Flemigesque mongrel heritage born from Portugese father and his mother Arakanese from Borneo. Lobar has swtiched citizenship from German to Russian and Indonesian. It's beleived he was actually born in Sakhalin, Russia. Hood's SIS boss Conder tells him "Lobar is a destroyer and active evil...........He's destroyed innumerable women. Loyalty perished wherever he lays his hand on it." He is repugnant and formidable to look at like any good spy villain. He's built like a sumo wrestler without any of the associated fat. His massive head is shaved and he shows three gold teeth in the side of his mouth. A bright red weal enciricles his neck where some South China Sea pirates had unsuccessfully hung him with fishing line. His left eyelid was also sliced off in the incident leaving it bulging and staring. A villain with an all seeing eye?
Lobar has amassed great wealth with his shipping firm and appears to be the typical millionaire crusing the French Riveira on a massive private yatch the Triton But one of Her Majesty's submarines has clocked the Triton going over 35 knots. It also has a strange bow and the ship hasn't made port in months. Something is up. Hood finds the bows contain a special tracking sonar. Is Lobar keeping tabs on Allied subs for the Russians or the Chinese? Who knows this never fleshed out. To me it was a much better plot point then the actual one. Lobar is planning to steal some important documents from a diplomat using one of the stewards, who is an innate and consumate mimic, to impersonate the British Consul Richard Calvert who happens to be Hood's friend. Hood later comes across a crook named Tookie Tate who tells Hood that Lobar's men are after him. He tried burgling one of Lobar's places and found out too much. He disappears into the night and Hood next finds him in Lobar's Riveria mansion, tied, beaten. His captors have sealed his lips together rather ghoulishly with a heavy staple gun.
Hood's "in" with Lobar is that the man is pervert who collects classic nude paintings. Maybe in 1964 that was scandalous behavior. Nowadays most museums have wings of nudes and whole sections dedicated to anatomically enchanced fertility idols from all civilizations, vases and frieses with all manner of the Kama Sutra being acted out in full relief. Lobar is sufficiently evil and charming. Hood's gun is found the first night from his rather pedantic hiding place of an air conditioning vent. Lobar gives it back him at breakfast. saying "We found this in your cabin. " Hood picks up the gun explains that he had been told by the French Police that there were art thieves about the Riviera and had the gun for protection. "I don't know much about guns. Show me how you would shoot it." Lobar asks. Hood discovers the gun won't fire. Lobar digs into his breakfast and shakes his big head."I'm so sorry. I' afraid that when my men found it they were clumsy in their handling. Tthe firing pin has broken off, you see." Nice bit of tet-at-tet, not unlike 007's banter with some of his villains.
The women are hit and miss. Hood's first hours on board Lobar's yatch he finds a drunken but of course gorgeous eurasian woman named Ivory in the ships lounge. She of course is taken with the dashing Englishman has a few more drinks and performs a libidinous strip show for him. Hood has several chances to bed her but never does. Instead he goes after Lobar�€™s latest girl a ditzy blonde English girl named Sue Trenton. She's of the damsel in distress mold, and really not worth Hood's effort. Hood hooks up with a stripper in the South of France named Kit who appears to be a throwaway conquest. She's another of the kind whose clothes fall off the minute Hood introduces himself, which is fine fare in 60s spy paperback.
Lobar's mimic steward Andreas has a fetish for women in corsets, garter belts and stockings. Again probably titilating and shameful in the 60s not so in 2008 when young women appear in those garments spread across the cover of Maxim magazine. Lobar has requisite hulking henchman named Golos who uses his over-large hands to crush the skulls of pigs and anyone else Lobar needs crushed. But the character is really thrown away occupying only a few scenes and rarely with menace. There is an attempt at a torture scene with a surgically gowned sinister Chinese named Ching who wants to drill Hood's teeth from the outside, through his cheeks!. But he gives up after barely scratching one. Hood dispatches Lobar's low ranking lackeys with ease and some unusual methods including choking the chauffer in his garage by shoving a grease gun in his mouth and filling the man's airway with thick lubricating muck.
Hood of course escapes and challenges Lobar at the moment of his deception. Lobar's plot is foiled and Hood sends him to a suitably ignominious death. Hood ends up in the arms of the stripper conquest, Kit, at the end.
Though not as thrilling as I had hoped, but then again what is? But all in all a cracking spy story that certainly qualifies for a vacation or beach read. I rank it at three stars, with five being the highest.
NEXT: Joaquin Hawks in The Spy In Bangkok.
Edited by Von Hammerstein, 01 July 2008 - 09:59 PM.
