“I was through being a model citizen. I was myself again.” Matt Helm is at a party with his missus when an old flame shows up on the arm of some pituitary case. Most of us ordinary chaps (or any character in a Nick Hornby or Helen Fielding novel) would confine ourselves to getting drunk, being bitterly sarcastic and slamming doors behind us. Not Matt Helm. Before the night is out he’s swapping secret signals, dumping dead bodies in mines and blowing the dust off his collection of rifles, all of which makes me strongly suspect the Matt Helm novels are the sort of tough-guy fiction our current right-wing bogeymen de jour (Trump, Clarkson et al) would cite as their favourite bed time read, or be described as a guilty pleasure by leftie reviewers. This first one definitely has its pleasures. Donald Hamilton is fond of passing you what looks an awful lot like irrelevant padding only for it to become painfully relevant down the line. Then, once you get used to that game, he escalates hostilities most satisfyingly. At one point Helm patiently follows a thug under a bridge for what you expect will be a negotiation, only to shoot the guy five times in the chest before he gets a word out. Now there’s a character with “success” written all over him. There are 26 novels in the Matt Helm series. Should keep me going for a while.
