Phil Sherman in SECRET MISSION:MOROCCO by Don Smith.
I snapped up this used paperback solely due the cover blurb. It reads: “Sherman must stop the murders of US agents - Prime suspect a bizarre duplicate of James Bond’s Goldfinger who has already robbed Fort Knox!” and above the title “Don Smith’s novels are a breakneck rollercoaster ride through the world’s most dangerous places.” -Adam Hall, author of the Quiller espionage novels.
So with that startling recommendation I plunged into the story. Phil Sherman is another of the CIA stringer types that occupy many of the 60’s spy novels. He runs his own international business machine company, based in Paris and occasionally does jobs for the CIA. He’s another of the hard drinking, fast loving two fisted types from the mold of Matt Helm and Joe Gall.
This story begins with a woman named Gail rear-ending his car at a traffic light in Paris, she apologizes profusely and Sherman says she can make up for the damage by going to dinner with him. This is a 60’s spy novel so dinner leads to sex at her place, then Sherman is back to work and forgets about her until Gail calls him a week later asking to meet again, he agrees. At their meeting place he finds her dead, murdered with a golden handled dagger sticking out of her chest.
Sherman eliminates any trace of him and goes to ground only to be found by his CIA liaison Ross McCullough (there’s that M name again) who informs him that Gail was actually an undercover agent for the US Treasury investigating a character named Berno Steigendorf a rich Swiss banker with a lust for, you guessed it, GOLD.
He runs a scheme which collects US dollars from international transactions to sell them back to America for payment in gold. But there’s something else going on, Steigendorf seems to have access to more gold and more greenbacks than is in circulation. It could be plot to collapse the US economy!
Sherman agrees to take the case. He’s got an in with Steigendorf, he had overseen the modernization of his main bank in Luxembourg. He jets there and meets with the bank manager to “feel out” Herr Steigendorf. He takes the manager to lunch and he learns that everything is on the up and up. To verify this he asks to purchase a gold ingot as a gift for a lady friend. When they return to the bank to get his ingot he comes face-to-face with Steigendorf himself. He is Fleming villain grotesque, six feet tall, perhaps three hundred pounds, shaved head, hands the size of small hams. The meeting is cordial and Steigendorf appears to forget Sherman seconds after meeting him. Sherman takes his ingot and has it checked through the Treasury Dept- it’s solid 24 carat gold.
The CIA’s hunch is a dead end, but Sherman feels guilty over Gail’s death and checks out Steigendorf’s mistress who lives in Morocco, a red headed German girl Giselle Schrieber who does bronze sculptures and owns a foundry.
Sherman snoops around, finds a secret passage in an old furnace outside the foundry itself leading to a series of caves that conveniently edge the Mediterranean Sea. Inside he finds bronze molds and scores of gold ingots. Before he can snag one, he’s caught and taken to Giselle’s house who strings him up naked and has her monstrous eunuch whip him while she kisses and fondles him. For 1968 this bordered on being X-rated. Sherman sticks to his cover story and eventually she believes him.
Giselle visits his cell in the night and of course they have sex. After she leaves, Sherman makes his way out only to find that Steigendorf is here, waiting for him, sweating like Sydney Greenstreet in the oppressive heat.
Steigendorf does the arch villain routine: “I am so superior to you and have you so completely at my whim that I’ll lord it over you by telling you my plan.” Steigendorf has been manufacturing ingots of lead coated in gold with US markings on them. He has seeded them in every major bank in the world. He will announce his discovery of the fake bars in his bank. The world banks will find that America has been cheating them and our currency will be devalued to nothing. After that he plans to disrupt every major currency in the world leaving him as the sole provider of actual wealth and real gold.
He takes Sherman down into the caves which are rigged to blow, removing any trace of Steigendorf’s operation and burying Sherman as well. Sherman gets the upper hand soon the day is saved and Steigendorf is dead.
You may have noticed that nowhere in the above story did Fort Knox get robbed and Steigendorf though huge and bald and evil was not a duplicate of Auric Goldfinger. For that misinformation alone I struck this book down a star
I respect Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor) tremendously his good words about Don Smith’s rollercoaters ride writing describes his own Quiller series, not unfortunately, this novel. Smith's wrtining is slam-bang to be sure but he's nowhere neear Hall's caliber. Sure, Sherman gets in an out of scrapes, but unlike Quiller whom you’re sure will be caught and killed any second, Sherman just slugs his way through story. Smith makes Sherman likeable, but he's not the type to sip girly martini's in an Armani tuxedo, he's found in a dirty strip club in the Casbah, swilling whiskey and smoking from a hoohkah pipe. Imagine Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer as a spy and you get the idea.
All in all another harmless diversion and at 153 pages didn’t consume too much of my time. Smith penned twenty-two Phil Sherman novels from Secret Mission Peking to The Strausser Transfer. I’ve managed to pick up a few more of his paperbacks and plan to read them before levying my final decision about Phil Sherman.
I rate SECRET MISSION:MOROCCO at two out of five stars.
More PAPERBACK SPIES to come!
Edited by Von Hammerstein, 19 April 2009 - 02:21 PM.