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…