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Michael Jagger


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#1 chrisno1

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Posted 06 April 2016 - 11:12 AM

OVERKILL (1966)

 

I’m not sure if author William Garner was trying to make a topical joke by naming the hero of this opus after the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, but if he was, it falls somewhat flat. The literary Jagger is nowhere near as interesting and rebellious as the 1960s popstar version. The sleeve jacket might suggest he's 'over reckless, over eager and over trained to overkill' but that's just advertising. In fact he’s quite a strait laced dude: well-moneyed due to an inheritance, idle, ex-army, ex-intelligence agent, judo expert, dull as ditchwater. I mean, he spends most of the novel in the company of a pert twenty-something secretary, but declines to bed her because she’s a virgin – which shows some decorum but is really an excuse for the author to exclude any love interest from his story – consequently cheery Bryony becomes a sort of nagging ward, which doesn’t endear her to Michael Jagger or to the reader.

 

Overkill replays one of the themes we’ve witnessed before in Bondian rip-offs: the deadly world threatening virus. This one has been developed by Professor Seeleigh-Binn, a broken man as bonkers as you could get who has inadvertently supplied the crafty Communist Chinese with a fertilizer that will infect and decimate the world’s wheat crops. The premise is okay, but its execution is all over the place, chiefly because Garner loses faith in the virus angle and turns it into a grand MacGuffin, preferring the nuclear destruction of the US Sixth Fleet as his climatic ruse.

 

When we meet Jagger, he is a man in need of adventure and he signs up with Seeleigh-Binn’s cremation service R.I.P. for some free foreign travel spreading clients ashes in far-flung locations. Yet all is not what it seems and when Jagger gets cold feet and is almost killed in a manipulated airplane disaster, he decides to uncover the shady life and business of his oddball employer. That th Professor turns out to be playing for the other team comes as no surprise.

 

Garner injects just enough action to keep the narrative interesting. For the most part the novel is set in and around London, and the early sections were quite fun as the author lists a series of streets, places and routes which I tried to picture in my head as they genuinely exist. It gets progressively dull and convoluted during trips to Cambridge, northern France and Paris – the latter of which does include a chase up the Eiffel Tower a la OO7 – and thankfully picks up dramatically in Naples for the final quarter. This features a very satisfyingly revealed murder of the femme fatale and a lot of messing about on the nameless villain’s luxury yacht. I love that Garner throws in the big boat thing – Charles Hood, Katy Touchfeather, Jason Love, Michael Hawk, Modesty Blaise et al all spend time chasing baddies on luxury yachts, it’s the most Bondian thing many of these imitators ever do.

 

So the denouement has to take place on board and it’s a good tension filled few pages, quite cinematic in many ways, and is only spoiled by the feeling that the best characters had all been killed off way before we got here. For all that, the central character is a believable, if ordinary, hero whose past life / lives often affects his present one. The occasional flashbacks to torture and incarceration allow us to inhabit his nightmares and understand why he struggles with relationships, authority and real life. Overall though, Overkill is a little disappointing. It’s a short novel and almost feels like an experiment, as if the author was testing his skills before the real examination. So, on that basis, let’s rock on, Michael Jagger…

 

 



#2 chrisno1

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Posted 15 April 2016 - 11:11 PM

THE DEEP, DEEP FREEZE (1968)

 

William Garner’s follow up to Overkill is a Le Carre-esque thriller which embroils our hero Michael Jagger into a secret service escapade of East German defections and Nazi war criminals, all taking place in the sunny climes of Le Cap Ferrat, Southern France.

 

The Deep, Deep Freeze tries to be something important, but it’s really just a mighty long trawl through the demise of swinging London and the rise of the cold, very cold war, which in the late sixties and early seventies seemed to reach a zenith of suspicion and rivalry, fueled by the feuding nations’ patriarchs revisiting their war rivalries. This has a familiar feel to it. We’ve seen this sort of thing many times before and even if it’s dressed up and framed around a three-dimensional game of ‘Go’ it’s still an escaped Nazi story. I found John Michael Brett’s A Cargo of Spent Evil more gripping and less confusing. Unlike here, that tale didn’t bother with extraneous background details and long snakelike narratives.

 

Jagger is an annoyingly obnoxious hero this time out. He was brusque in the first outing and has turned quite nasty and unchivalrous. Characters refer to him as a violent near-psychopath unable to control his temper and emotions. This is exploited by the cryptically named Master, head of the unnamed branch of the British Secret Service Jagger is surreptitiously employed by. He’s not alone. The villain, Hieronymus Drieter, is a lunatic unsympathetic brain surgeon who operated on Jews in concentration camps to attempt electronically stimulated response. His only success is a brain damaged personal bodyguard. Drieter has been funding an exotic lifestyle under the noses of the Interpol thanks to betraying his former colleagues, but one ex-scientist, Von Treysa – and equally crazed disfigured berserker – has lived under an alias in East Germany for twenty years and finally plots an escape and revenge. Throw in a couple of double agents and a KGB assassin and Jagger’s got his hands full of Cold War baddies. 

 

The two characters most removed from this world are the women. Anna, a Swedish medical nurse who seems employed by the villain only as sexy window dressing, for she is neither deadly dame nor seductive siren; the signs are there for both, but she is frustratingly chaste. Bryony, Jagger’s nominal squeeze who returns from her encounter in the previous adventure for more ego and neck bruising; God knows why, but at least she’s still an assertive individual who ensures the hero doesn’t get everything his own way. Because of this these women are also the most interesting, displaying courage and fear, intelligence and foolhardiness. The male characters are an interchangeable bunch, determined, single minded and brutal.

 

The staging locations have an air of the mundane mixed with the fantastic – Drieter’s Roman temple has the hallmarks of Bosch’s madness, the Master’s Covent Garden HQ is fittingly drab – and there are occasional bouts of violence which distract from the prose for short periods but don’t hold up the talky plot. If anything, it feels about fifty pages too long. The resolution is a drawn out affair that relies too much on good fortune and not enough on operational spy craft. While Jagger is the central character, an awful lot of this novel takes place without him present and you almost have to shake yourself to believe he manages to piece the puzzle together from his quarter side view of the action.

 

The Deep, Deep Freeze is a more than competent write, but it lacks even more bite than its predecessor and for that reason, intelligent thriller or not, it falls rather flat.

 



#3 chrisno1

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Posted 15 May 2016 - 12:12 AM

The Us Or Them War (1969)

 

William Garner’s third opus to feature Michael Jagger is a political thriller which has plenty of intrigue but not an awful lot of thrills. It’s a well written narrative which switches chapter by chapter between various protagonists: Jagger; his ex-employer and head of a branch of the British Secret Service, the Master; a KGB agent Schramme; a young hippy floosy Patti; her father Sir Ben Pargeter, an industrialist; a computer genius, Jack Tinn; and a host of American characters who are mostly holed up in Langley and the White House endlessly discussing espionage techniques.

 

The plot revolves around an unseen future nuclear arms summit between the USA and the USSR. The CIA have developed a hacking system called Starcom, which infiltrates the Soviet nuclear capabilities computer and feeds back to the USA the military data necessary to predict the outcome of a nuclear war at any given time. The problem is, the hacking machine has been hacked and they think it’s the Russians – except it isn’t. The answer could lie in a mysterious murder committed at an intelligence data system project outside Leatherhead. The CIA sends in its undercover boys. The SIS sends in Michael Jagger. Cue tension, bluff and double bluff.

 

The main problem with the novel is that while the premise is fine and the construction immaculate, the story lacks any drive. It takes an awful lot of procrastination before anyone decides to take any measures to prevent the diplomatic blunders which appear likely and because everything is done by proxy, it has to be related again and again to the reader to the point it becomes dull and over convoluted. The novel only picks up in the last fifty or sixty pages when Jagger is finally allowed to do some proper spying. It feels as if Garner had a good short story which he’s expanded into an over blown novel.

 

The characters are a dreadful conceited and superior bunch. They are, in that respect, less like the caricatures one would expect in a thriller, but consequently they are dull and static, hardly leaving office or car or house. There are no exotic locales for this Jagger; the best he gets is a trip to Geneva and that ends badly, with the deaths of the innocent justifying the safety of millions. In fact it’s fair to say that the climax sums up the novel neatly: it is bitter, it is confused in the telling and it is frighteningly real. Espionage is not a glamourous game in Garner’s world; it is downbeat, serious stuff.

 

The prose is competent and the arc of the tale well-constructed and thought-through. You believe in the characters and their foibles. The nominal villain Schramme, a sleeper agent, appears permanently torn between his real work and unreal work; the girl, Patti, is a genuine spoilt brat with an attitude to match. Jagger growls his way disaffectionately through the proceedings, ruing everything good and detesting everything bad. He’s quite obnoxious. You feel most sorry for Jack Tinn, a probable Asperger’s child prodigy unable to communicate on normal levels at all and caught up in a heap of trouble he never bargained for. 

 

Overall, like the previous entry, The Us or Them War is a sophisticated, complicated read which will reward some but disappoint many. While I appreciate what is good, I feel the narrative lacks an obvious threat and suffers from a bewildering cast-list who discuss no-end of barmy theories. For most of this read, I longed for a little simplicity and when it finally arrives in the latter stages of the book, it’s as if the nuclear weapons have already been dismantled: all that is left is the shell of violence.

 

Disappointing.

 

NB. There is a fourth novel A Big Enough Wreath, but as it is only available in hardback, I shan’t be purchasing it.