Middlin' Spies

The recent death of Sean Connery brought a blip in attention to his James Bond movies as examples of mid-60s attitudes and imagery, leaving co-authors Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens a prime debut point for their Bond homage about British MI6 agent John Sand, Come Spy With Me.

Sand, they suggest, is the actual spy on whom Ian Fleming -- who goes unnamed in the book -- based his Bond novels. The renewed notoriety of the books accompanying the major box office success of the movie series raised his profile and ruined his usefulness as a secret agent, seeing as how he wasn't all that secret anymore. So he retired and settled down with Stacey Boldt, the Texas oil heiress whose life he saved in his final adventure. As an executive with her company, Sand's time is taken up with deals and boardrooms instead of caper and bedrooms -- until the President of the United States sends an invitation to a meeting. Rogue elements of the CIA plot deadly and destabilizing moves in the Caribbean, and the President doesn't know who among his own people he can trust. Can John Sand, retired, happily married and rather averse to upsetting his wife by getting into the gunsights of enemy agents, help him? After all, nobody does it better.

Come Spy With Me takes a lot of great ingredients -- the swagger of mid-60s popular culture, the chance to take on a Bond-type character without the layers of icon varnish, the nostagia-strengthened moral certitude of honest American and English good guys vs. authoritarian and megalomaniacal bad guys -- and from them creates a pretty bland entrée. The book title riffs of a Frank Sinatra album and promises some good old-fashioned Rat-Pack 'tude that never really comes across, even though Frank and the boys make a swinging cameo early in the story.

The central plot of Sand trying to uncover and thwart the rogue CIA and organized crime elements who want the region open for their kind of business never really gets into high gear, almost seeming like a prologue to the personal dangers Mr. and Mrs. Sand may yet face from villains thought buried. Collins and Clemens reach for Fleming's energy but don't re-create it even with all of these kinds of meta-narrative touchstones at their disposal. In the same way that a program for a museum exhibit may show pictures of artwork that may be very well-done but aren't the work themselves, Come Spy With Me is a well-done homage to a character and an era while only being so-so done itself.

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National Review writer Jim Geraghty had some moderate success with his initial spy thriller, Between Two Scorpions. In it, he introduced us to the Dangerous Clique, an ad hoc team of United States agents aimed at only the most dangerous international baddies. The book did well enough that Geraghty was writing a sequel, set to be released in 2020. Then a worldwide pandemic happened, and the plot of the novel didn't work right in a world of COVID-19. So Geraghty shelved the story he had to that point and began a new one, this time taking the pandemic into account as he wrote Hunting Four Horsemen.

The Clique learns of a rogue biological weapons expert going by the name "Hell Summoner" who is offering his services to the highest bidder. Those services involve tailoring a virus to a population with shared genetic characteristics, even down to a single shared gene. The list of evil people who would love to possess a plague that would kill their enemies and not endanger their own population -- or at least, not endanger more than a small percentage of them -- is long and the only reason that someone hasn't gone ahead and hired this mysterious fiend is because he wants more money than all but a few players on the world scene have to hand. But a couple of them may get together and the Hell Summoner may lower his price, so the Clique have to move fast to track him down and learn who's hired him if they want to stop his horrifying plan.

Plenty of thriller authors will probably not write the pandemic into their storylines, but Geraghty is smarter than a lot of them are and he not only includes the reality of COVID into his fictional world but also into his plot. Unfortunately he does so with massive sections of tell-not-show infodumps that stall out the narrative almost to a dead stop. Obviously a world of travel limitations and widespread sickness and death would have an impact on everyone, including spies and operators. Among the Clique, the devil-may-care Alec has always been the group comic relief, but the weight of the devastation wrought by COVID leaves him uncharacteristically quipless for most of the book. Again that's not at all unusual, but Geraghty just tells the reader this rather than showing it.

Geraghty did an immense amount of research into the pandemic and possible causes for the viral spread during its early days. Unfortunately more than one chapter of Hunting Four Horsemen reads more like a good magazine or newspaper article than a suspense thriller. Horsemen has some good action sequences, a great in-joke nod to listeners of Geraghty and Greg Corombos' podcast The Three Martini Lunch and a marvelously inventive twist. Perhaps more time could have helped Geraghty work his extensive research more naturally into the other elements.

Even though Horsemen isn't as much of an improvement over Scorpions as a reader might want, it still gives some reason to look forward to the third outing of the Clique and not give up on them yet.