The Violent Enemy

The Violent Enemy

Whenever I’m in the mood for a quick, entertaining men’s adventure story involving shadow warfare, my go-to author is Jack Higgins; he never disappoints. The Violent Enemy, published in 1966 (originally titled A Candle for the Dead), is no exception. Featuring two of my favorite plot elements–a prison break and a heist–and a backstory about the Irish Republican Army, the novel sounded right up my alley.

Protagonist Sean Rogan is similar to several other Higgins protagonists (most notably Liam Devlin of The Eagle Has Landed): an ultra-tough, dangerous Irish shadow warrior who led special operations in World War II and the guerrilla war against British rule in Ireland. He has spent twelve of the last twenty years in prison, and is now doing hard labor in a maximum security prison in England.

Rogan is denied early release as the novel begins, which sets up a plot element that Higgins used in several other early novels (Hell is Too Crowded, Dark Side of the Street, Hell is Always Today): a prison break. During his latest stay, escape artist Rogan has figured out a complicated route of the prison that involves cutting through wire cages, climbing up beams, crawling through ventilation ducts and roping down walls. But the real challenge is figuring out how to get through the desolate moors that surround the prison and find a safe haven, a clean identity and transportation away from the scene. When all of that is offered by a former top IRA man on the outside, who apparently wants Rogan out real bad but doesn’t say why, Rogan can’t refuse.

Rogan executes the jailbreak and soon finds himself back with his old IRA boss, named O’More, who has a job that calls for Rogan’s special talents. O’More wants Rogan to rob an armored car as it is delivering a large sum of cash to a train at a stop in a small village. He has assembled a crew which, as per usual in a Higgins novel, includes some rather nasty and treacherous characters and an attractive young woman who quickly becomes Rogan’s romantic interest. This leads to personal dramas and betrayals that threaten to derail the plot, but Rogan is a true alpha warrior and he asserts his authority on the unruly gang.

As Rogan and his crew are planning and executing the heist, a parallel police investigation is going on, led by a Scotland Yard detective who Rogan rescued from the Germans back in ’43. The detective doesn’t consider Rogan a real criminal, but a political prisoner, and since the troubles that landed Rogan in prison are no longer hot, let’s just say that he’s not a very motivated pursuer. The story moves quickly to a satisfying climax in the usual Higgins style, with the heisters on the run from the coppers, double-crossers on the run from both, and one or two twists along the way.

This was a fast-paced, entertaining read, with no wasted verbiage, simple but compelling characters and action that never goes over the top — all very typical of Higgins’s early work. This is basically a prison break, heist and getaway novel, much like the novel Breakout that I reviewed here. I was a little disappointed by the lack of IRA-style shadow warfare, but overall I have no complaints.

Get a copy of The Violent Enemy here.

Ned Hill

Ned Hill

I like unpopular, forgotten trails, and hikes to higher elevations in my area that I can do in January. Ned Hill fit the bill, so I decided to check it out.

The trail starts about a third of a mile past the Deer Ridge trailhead; it’s on the right, marked by a post that’s easy to miss. The trail is narrow and steep, with a dusting of snow. It climbs 900 feet in about 1.2 miles, so it’s a good little workout. There aren’t a lot of views, but I did catch some glimpses of Mt. Baldy and other peaks to the south.

A glimpse of Mt. Baldy through the trees.

At the top there’s a very rickety lookout which has somehow been standing since 1933. The main poles are trees that still look pretty solid, but the cross poles and platform look very rotted out and ready to fall. I started to climb it but changed my mind; it looked like the whole thing could have come tumbling down on my head. This page by lookout expert and scout extraordinaire Will Hite has a lot more history and details about the site.

The rickety remains of a lookout built in 1933.
Another shot of the makeshift lookout.

The only other thing of interest on this hike was a set of tracks in the snow most of the way up. I’m not sure what animal made them; a large dog or a cougar?

Cougar track on the trail?

I ran most of the way down, except for some steep sections where you need to be careful not to slip in the snow. Not a bad little workout in quiet mountain surroundings. Worth checking out if you’re in the area.

Blood Oath

Blood Oath

Canadian author David Morrell stormed onto the adventure thriller scene in 1972 with his debut novel First Blood, which was made into a blockbuster 1982 film starring Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo. I first encountered Morrell’s work through his 1984 effort The Brotherhood of the Rose–a riveting, action-packed Ludlumesque espionage adventure about twin assassins who are hunted by their former bosses in classic Jason Bourne fashion. I’ve read a few later novels by Morrell over the years, and while they were good, they never reached the heights of Brotherhood. I decided to try his 1982 offering, Blood Oath, to see if his earlier work was similar.

Blood Oath was the first example of what would become almost a formula for Morrell: an innocent couple find themselves caught up in a sinister conspiracy, hunted by assassins while travelling across countries trying to unmask their enemy and defeat them. His style owes much to mega-selling author Robert Ludlum: he loves the surprise attack (assassins burst through a window, a building suddenly explodes, etc.), melodramatic dialogue, outlandish twists and the “man on the run from an all-powerful, unknown enemy” plot device. Morrell’s writing is very cinematic; I suspect that he was heavily influenced by Hitchcock and always had movie deals in mind.

The novel starts slowly, as writer Peter Houston and his wife are visiting a military cemetery in France, trying to locate the grave of his father, a soldier who was killed in action in 1944. Finding no grave and no record of his father, he inquires in the local village and discovers that the man who volunteered to tend his father’s grave was a notorious traitor who assisted the Germans then disappeared at war’s end. The present-day intrigue begins soon after, as Houston’s car is run off the road by unknown assailants and his wife drowns in a river. Swearing to avenge his wife and determined to find out who is after him and why, Houston continues his investigation with a French translator named Simone, who also has a personal connection to the mystery. They quickly find themselves caught up in more intrigue and targeted by unknown assassins. Further investigation uncovers more American soldiers whose graves mysteriously disappeared, all connected to the same French traitor and mysterious entities known only as “Verlaine” and “Charon”. More people are killed, mysterious characters give ominous warnings with their dying words, and the plot twists and thickens.

The first two-thirds of this novel were pretty engaging; a 37 year-old wartime mystery, an increasingly ominous conspiracy, and two innocents trying to survive on the run while discovering the true nature of their adversary and taking revenge kept the pages turning. But things get increasingly implausible as the story goes on, and novelist Houston transforms into a full-on ninja, killing men with his bare hands, rappelling down cliffs and scaling castle walls with a monomaniacal determination to defeat the evil organization that killed his wife. The action is non-stop for the last fifty or sixty pages, as Houston and Simone infiltrate the enemy compound and learn the sinister secrets of the entity code-named “Charon”. The bad guys prove to be as cartoonish as James Bond villains, but with less charm or style, and the whole thing becomes a little absurd.

If this was a James Bond or Mack Bolan novel this would all be par for the course. But when the story starts out as a Hitchcockian mystery-thriller, then a protagonist whose knowledge of commando skills come from researching his novels suddenly starts applying it in a manner that would make Mack proud, it all becomes too much to swallow. Which is too bad, because this was an entertaining page-turner for most of the way.

One interesting detail about this novel is how it was inspired by the author’s own life. Apparently Morrell’s father was a pilot shot down over France during the war, and his body was never recovered. So this book is a kind of “what if?” story and a tribute to the father he never knew.

Overall, this was about on par with other Morrell’s other novels I’ve read, but definitely not as good as The Brotherhood of the Rose. If you like his work or the thrillers of Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins, you’ll probably enjoy this one.

Get a copy of Blood Oath here.



Flashpoint is yet another obscure thriller from the 1970s remembered only because it was made into a film–a 1984 adaptation starring Kris Kristoffersen which, I vaguely recall, was quite good.

This novel is intriguing in the way it connects two fronts of the Shadow War that are usually distinct: the Border War and the Assassin War. The protagonists, Logan and Ernie, are two good ol’ boy Texas border patrolmen who enjoy nothing better than patrolling the very desolate “section 7” of the U.S.-Mexico border in their jeeps, tracking down illegals across the desert and taking them back to Mexico. They don’t do this out of any spite toward the illegals, but simply for the challenge, solitude and outdoor adventure the job affords them. Both men are military veterans with experience operating in dangerous territory–Ernie in Korea and Logan as a Green Beret in ‘Nam–and patrolling the Mexican border is a good peacetime use of their skills. Author La Fountaine does a good job of fleshing out their backgrounds and motivating their behavior; while they may be obnoxious “bubbas” at times who like to get drunk and visit Mexican whorehouses in their spare time, they are full of life and love adventure in a way you can’t help but respect.

As the story opens, the patrolmen learn that a new high tech border security system is going to be implemented in their region, which would turn these border cowboys into glorified desk jockeys, watching for beeping lights on computer screens instead of riding out under the sun looking for “Indians” to apprehend. This puts them in a depressed and desperate state of mind, but that soon changes when Logan, taking a shortcut through an untravelled desert wash, discovers a crashed jeep buried deep in the sand. Digging it out, he finds a skeleton and a box full of cash–$850,000 in small, sequentially numbered bills. At this point the novel becomes a detective story, as Logan and Ernie try to discover the identity of the driver, the source of the cash, and whether it is safe to spend it without alerting authorities.

Things soon become even more confusing–and deadly–as shadowy forces and corrupt players converge on the patrolmen’s turf. People connected to the cash are being killed off, and the patrolmen feel the noose tightening around them. Should they take the money and run for the border, or play it cool and deny everything? Who exactly is looking for the money, and why? Who can they trust? What was a jeep doing loaded with cash in the south Texas desert, who was the mysterious driver, and why is someone willing to kill anyone who knows anything about them? Everything is answered in the final pages, as the narrative gets increasingly dark, violent and desperate and a sinister conspiracy is revealed. While some of the plot developments seemed a little far-fetched, I think the shock ending was appropriate and should come as no surprise to veteran Shadow Warriors.

Flashpoint is one of those cynical, paranoid, pessimistic stories that could only have been written in the 1970s–a period I love because I think it dealt more realistically with the nature of society and humanity than what came before or after. It was a unique era, in the wake of the 1960s, when Americans were free to be simultaneously politically incorrect, sexually liberated, and very cynical of the powers that be. Logan expresses the spirit of the times well when, after Ernie denies that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy, responds:

“Ernie,” Logan cried in anger, “how can you say that after all the shit that’s come out about Watergate and the CIA and the FBI and the assassination plots over the world? How can you still say that?”

Everything that happens subsequently in the story only vindicates Logan’s cynicism. If you enjoy novels like Six Days of the Condor and films like Parallax View, where ordinary people are caught up in the machinations of sinister forces that go right to the top of the power structure–which is revealed to be hopelessly corrupt–you should add Flashpoint to your reading list. This book is a good reminder that the Shadow War is not just a war on the ground between spies, criminals and covert operators, but a war of the mind against the vast apparatus of lies and illusions that daytime society runs on.

While I wouldn’t call La Fountaine a great writer, and some of the plot twists were a little implausible, overall he’s spun a very compelling tale here that kept me turning the pages until the end. If you like good old adventure thrillers with a heavy dose of 1970s paranoia and political intrigue, you should enjoy this as much as I did.

Get a copy of Flashpoint here.

The Scorpion Signal

The Scorpion Signal

The Scorpion Signal, published in 1980, is the ninth entry in the brilliant Quiller spy fiction series by Trevor Elleston (writing as Adam Hall).

In this installment, “shadow executive” Quiller is called back to London after only two weeks of recovery time from his previous mission, due to an international emergency that calls for his special skills. Apparently a fellow Bureau operative named Shapiro was captured in Russia and taken to the notorious Lubyanka KGB headquarters in Moscow, but somehow escaped only to be abducted again in Germany, presumably by the KGB. Shapiro has intimate knowledge of various top secret Western projects, including a highly successful Russian spy network code-named “Leningrad”. Quiller’s mission is to find Shapiro, rescue him if possible, and if not, make sure he stays silent for good before he is forced to spill the beans.

Quiller at first declines the mission, but as someone who is not motivated by money, power, glory or duty so much as by personal excellence and the challenge of life on the edge, he soon relents. He is infiltrated into Moscow, and quickly finds himself playing tense cat-and-mouse games with enemy forces. Elleston excels at describing the mental side of spycraft; we get a running commentary of Quiller’s mental calculations as he tries to avoid being captured or killed by border guards, police, KGB and rogue agents. There are long stretches of very detailed descriptions of Quiller’s driving tactics, evasion maneuvers, martial arts strikes, physical condition and thought processes as he tries to stay alive. These stretches are my only real criticism of the series: they sometimes get a bit tedious and you start wishing the super-spy would stop his autistic streams of thought and move the narrative forward.

Elleston also does a great job evoking the paranoia of late Brezhnev-era Moscow, where dissident groups are protesting, police are stopping people randomly, and the KGB are always threatening to break into your flat or safe house and haul you away to Lubyanka. In fact, Quiller finds himself there at one point, facing brutal interrogation. But he manages to get free, then gets to work tracking down the people who turned him in and taking them out of action.

As is usually case in these novels, Quiller is kept partially in the dark by his London controllers, which creates misunderstandings and failures that become lethal dangers in the field. After a lot of intrigue where it’s not entirely clear where things are going, the narrative kicks into overdrive when Quiller finds Shapiro, now half-deranged from his stay in hotel KGB, and discovers what’s really going on. The story then becomes a classic race against time to stop a deadly mission before it sparks a superpower conflagration.

This was another exciting installment in the superior Quiller series. It’s basically a series of tense chases, evasions, interrogations, investigations and killings, all with big geopolitical implications–which is what a great spy novel should be. Highly recommended for fans of thinking-man’s spy fiction.

Get a copy of The Scorpion Signal here.



Continuing with novels in my current favorite genre–espionage and assassin fiction from the paranoid 1970s–today my selection is Telefon, published in 1975 by Walter Wager. Like The Killer Elite, this book would probably be forgotten today had it not been made into a Hollywood movie two years later, starring Charles Bronson.

I was intrigued by the novel’s premise, that dozens of Soviet sleeper agents embedded in American society at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s were still active in the mid 1970s, and could be activated by a simple telephone call. Wager gives this an additional Manchurian Candidate twist by making the agents unaware of their own status and mission. Through deep hypnosis and drugs, the sleepers have been programmed to forget that they are Russian agents, and given specific sabotage missions that they will perform robotically when they receive telephoned code phrases. The missions are designed to destroy key military-industrial facilities so as to spread chaos in the United States in the event of total war.

The plot hook is that a maniacal Stalinist traitor within the KGB has gone rogue, made off with a book containing the sleeper agents’ phone numbers and activation codes, and is systematically activating them in an attempt to provoke World War III. The novel’s protagonist is a KGB super-spy named Tabbat, who has been sent to the States to stop the maniac before he brings nuclear retaliation upon mother Russia. Tabbat is like a Russian James Bond but better: smooth with the ladies, deadly with handguns, tactically brilliant and possessed of a photographic memory. He’s also hip to American culture, loves Frank Sinatra and exchanges witty banter and plenty of sex with his beautiful female KGB assistant “Barbi”.

The novel is basically a manhunt story, as Tabbat and Barbi race across America trying to catch the maniac before he destroys more targets, without arousing the suspicion of American authorities or getting taken out by hostile Russian agents. There’s a twist or two along the way and some amusing cultural commentary on 1970s America that keep things interesting.

Overall, this was a competent and a stylish Cold War thriller, reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth and Trevanian. Though the plot was somewhat far-fetched and it read more like a screenplay than a novel at times, I found it a fast and entertaining read.

Get a copy of Telefon here.



After reading many novels about professional assassins targeting civilians, it was fun to read a thriller where the tables are turned: amateurs target a professional killer for death. That’s the plot of Wilderness, published in 1979 by mystery writer Robert B. Parker (creator of the Spenser: For Hire series).

The book hooks the reader from the first page, as protagonist Aaron Newman witnesses an execution-style murder of a woman while out jogging on the railroad tracks. He notifies the police, and learns to his horror that the killer is a well-known gangster and murderous psychopath named Adolph Karl. Karl soon lets Newman know in the strongest possible terms that he shouldn’t testify about the murder, by having his thugs tie up his wife, sexually abuse her and threaten further retaliation. Newman decides that rather than cowering in fear or allowing a killer to walk free, his only honorable option is to go on the offensive and kill Karl himself. He recruits his neighbor, a big, tough Korean War vet named Chris, and they start stalking Karl and his gang.

It was funny reading how these amateurs plan and execute their hit. Some of Newman’s tactics were ridiculous, like posing as a deaf beggar and walking right into Karl’s office to reconnoiter his defenses. Since Karl had immediately fingered Newman as the rat despite the police report being confidential, why would Newman not assume that Karl knew what he looked like? Also, targeting his entire gang seems a little ambitious for amateurs; wouldn’t they at least consider going into a witness protection program?

This is really a story about the relationship between the emotionally needy Newman and his rather cold and domineering wife, and how Newman feels the need to prove his manhood by standing up to Karl. I didn’t like either character that much, but Parker paints a believable picture of their personal drama and dysfunction. The only likeable characters were a sexually charged hitman and wife sent to take out Newman; they would have been right at home in a Quentin Tarantino film.

The novel really gets exciting about halfway through, when Newman, his wife and Chris decide to hunt down Karl and his gang while they’re on a hunting trip to a lake in the Maine wilderness. It becomes a tense tale of wilderness survival, manhunting and sudden death that was gripping all the way to the end.

Overall, I enjoyed Wilderness; it was a fast-moving, fairly believable tale of how ordinary people might become ruthless killers if put in a horrific enough situation. And that’s why I enjoy shadow-fiction so much: because it lets us imagine how we might be if we ever fully embraced our shadow selves.

Get a copy of Wilderness here.

A Fine Night for Dying

A Fine Night for Dying

In the spy-crazed 1960s, an obscure author named Henry Patterson wrote a series of six novels under the pseudonym “Martin Fallon” about a spy named Paul Chavasse. These books would probably be all but forgotten today had Patterson not gone on to become the world-famous, mega-selling author “Jack Higgins”, thanks to his smash hit 1975 novel The Eagle Has Landed. Fortunately, the Chavasse series was republished under the Higgins name and are easy to find, so we can all enjoy these entertaining espionage adventures from a simpler time.

Paul Chavasse is basically a brainier, less rakish version of James Bond; he has several university degrees, speaks numerous languages, excels in spycraft, firearms and hand-to-hand combat. He works for a small, secret department of British intelligence called the Bureau (just like Quiller), has a boss called Mallory and a secretary named Jean, who send him around the world on difficult and sensitive jobs that require his special talents.

In the sixth entry in the series, A Fine Night for Dying, Chavasse is called in to investigate a human trafficking operation after a London underworld boss is found dead in the English Channel, wrapped in an anchor chain. This might sound like a modest assignment for a super-spy, but Chavasse soon uncovers an international connection, as the ringleader turns out to be a Communist and his associate a Colonel in the Red Chinese army. Most of the action takes place at sea, as Chavasse, with the assistance of the Jamaican brother of the slain underworld boss out for revenge, track down the leaders of the murderous ring of infiltrators.

The novel’s main villain is a compelling character named Rossiter–a blonde ex-Jesuit priest who, after being imprisoned in North Korea during the war, switched faiths from Catholicism to Communism and became a ruthless killer. Korean brainwashing was a popular theme in that era, explored in the classic novel The Manchurian Candidate and in Higgins’ early novel Comes the Dark Stranger. Rossiter’s conversion is symbolized by his preferred weapon: a razor-sharp dagger with a handle carved in the likeness of the Madonna (see cover above).

Like every Higgins novel I’ve read, this one is lean, linear and moves along at a breakneck pace. You don’t get much filler in a Higgins story–no excessive description, graphic sex, technical specs or unnecessary sub-plots of the sort that would plague the genre by the 1980s, when writers like Van Lustbader and Clancy were best-sellers. You do get well-drawn characters, narrative tension, plot twists and plenty of action; Higgins is a master at keeping the pages turning and telling an exciting story without turning it into a comic book.

Some people might consider these early Higgins’ novels a bit dated or politically incorrect, but for me that’s part of their appeal. Here, technology and politics take a back seat to old-fashioned grit, courage and heroism. Men are men, for good or ill–driven by traditional masculine values like honor, bravery, greed, lust, violence, brotherhood and patriotism. Women are more traditionally feminine, but they’re no shrinking violets–being often as virtuous, heroic, brave and passionate as the men. Higgins isn’t trying to push a political agenda, but to tell a fast-paced, entertaining story, and he does that as well as anybody in the business. For a great overview of Higgins’s early novels, see this post over at the Gravetapping blog: Jack Higgins: The Golden Age Novels.

A Fine Night for Dying is a typical novel from Higgins’s “Golden Age”, which means it’s a fun, quick read that fans of adventure and espionage fiction should enjoy. Get a copy here.

Burnt Hill

Burnt Hill

Burnt Hill is just down the road from my house, a foothill of the beautiful Olympic mountains to the south. I didn’t see any trails listed for it at WTA or other sites, but looking at topographical maps I saw some trails or forest roads that looked worth scouting.

Driving to the end of Johnson Creek Road, I found a gated trailhead where Discovery Passes are required. From there it’s a straight, steep climb up a forest road for about 1.5 miles to a fork in the road and a clearing with views of the Sound to the north.

The view north to the Sound, Miller Peninsula, Protection Island and Quimper Peninsula.

Go left to nice vistas of the mountains and valleys to the south. Go right to the summit of the hill at 2400 feet, where there are more limited views and the road ends about 2 miles in.

The view from the clearing near the top of the hill.
Another view of the Olympics.

Most people will turn around here, but I’m not most people. I continued on a dirtbike trail then bushwhacked down the west side of the hill, eventually connecting to trails and coming out on River Road, about 8 miles in total. The trails are mostly unmapped and it’s tricky to avoid an active mine on the west side of the hill (I snuck through it), but that’s all part of the adventure. You can also connect to roads around the north side of the hill and loop back to where you started for a longer hike if you’re not deterred by minor annoyances like “no trespassing” signs.

I only saw a few people on a sunny Sunday in January, including a woman who had pushed a bicycle up the hill and two guys in a four-wheeler. I am very pleased to have discovered this scenic year-round hike in my backyard, and will be returning for further scouting.