Ratcatcher
Kindle Edition, 2012
I have to admit, when
it comes to reading pulp-type fiction, I am a sucker for a good series. There
is something so comfortable about slipping into a yarn with familiar characters.
I have always been that way; when I was a kid, I warped my mind permanently by
reading everything in the public library by Andre Norton, Edgar Rice Burroughs,
and Robert Howard. (At least this shows that my predilection for pulp series isn't
associated with a slide into age-onset senility!)
So it was with pleasure
that I picked up the John Purkiss novels written by Tim Stevens, a physician in
England who cranks out just about as good a spy tale as anybody in the racket.
I first learned of
Stevens when I read and reviewed his most recent novel, Severance Kill, for my
other blog, Lurid Tales. It featured a neatly drawn and fully-rounded hero
named Martin Calvary who is a professional assassin tasked with eliminating the
bad actors of the British secret services: moles, double-agents and other
unsavory types. At the time, I described Calvary as "the most secret kind
of secret agent that exists in spy fiction: a guy who works for a British
agency, The Chapel, that is so obscure even the people in British intelligence
have never heard of it."
I liked the book
inordinately and learned from Dead Drop, Stevens' blog, that he
had written two earlier novels featuring another counter-intelligence agent named
John Purkiss. As I said at the time, I looked forward to reading them, too.
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| Ratcatcher author Tim Stevens is the Real Deal -- read his stuff! |
But life gets in the
way and I never got around to looking at the two earlier books -- until this
month, when I found myself ripping through a Purkiss short story and two novels during a 60-hour reading jag that didn't end until I had consumed the last page of
the second book.
I will review all three
over the next couple of weeks, but let me start with Purkiss Number One, a tasty
little confection called Ratcatcher that introduces the
character and lays out part of his back story for readers.
Purkiss is a "ratcatcher,"
a sort of super Internal Affairs officer for British Intelligence. He works "off
the books" -- the Queen pays the bills and drafts the checks that cover
his salary, but his official records in England show only that he formerly
worked for the Special Intelligence Services; his counter-intelligence position is not officially affiliated with MI5
or MI6 or any other British intelligence agencies.
His job is simple, at
least from a superficial point of view: he is charged with tracking down
corrupt members of the secret services, getting the evidence necessary to prove
their guilt, and taking them out of circulation so they can be tried and
imprisoned.
In Ratcatcher, Purkiss is sent
to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, to look for a former colleague who murdered
another intelligence agent but was inexplicably released from prison after serving
only a tiny part of his sentence. The supposition is that the baddie is engaged
in some heinous plot, and the evidence early on is strong that it involves the
disruption of a ceremonial meeting between the presidents of Russia and Estonia
to announce a rapprochement and cooperative agreement between the two
countries.
What complicates the
situation is that the spy Purkiss is chasing is a former friend -- and that the
agent he killed was Purkiss's fiancé. In addition, British intelligence already
has a team already working in Tallinn that seems likely to get in Purkiss's way,
and he is also countered by a secret militia of former Soviet military who
appear to be pursuing their own plot to disrupt the meeting.
Like any good espionage
thriller, the book piles triple crosses on double crosses and nobody appears to
be who they say they are. Bad guys can
be unmasked as good guys and even the people least likely to be twisted can
turn out to be traitors. Until the final pages, everybody but Purkiss could
conceivably be a villain out to wreck the ceremony, assassinate one or both of
the statesmen present and kill John Purkiss in the process.
Stevens has a sure hand
for the cliffhanger and is deft at keeping the reading flipping those pages.
Unlike some other thriller writers, his stuff is harder to fit into one of the
subgenres that tend to dominate the field (see the essay below). His agents frequently engage in hand-to-hand
combat, but he doesn't lard his books with a lot of martial arts terminology or
drift into "Gray's Anatomy" style discussions of the effect of each
blow or shot.
Descriptions of
military technology -- and a humdinger is featured in Ratcatcher -- are kept
mercifully short and succinct. I'm no expert of spy equipment but the
surveillance techniques he has his agents use are basic and authentic, and his
understanding of gadgets such as GPS tracking and night vision seems to this
amateur to be either accurate or at least plausible.
In fact descriptions of
all sort are tight and forced to carry their weight in the narrative. This
works fine, because Stevens can sketch a scene better in a sentence or two than
other writers can with an entire chapter.
On top of his skill at
turning out a solid technical spy yarn, Stevens has something you can't get by
sitting in the military reading room at the library and studying Jane's
Infantry or Naval Weapons: excellent timing. His stories zip right along at
a clip spritely enough to keep the reader's mind from wandering in a search for
weak plot points, characterization flaws, physically impossible action and
other roadbumps that can show up on the road to the last page.
And while many
page-turners depend on plot or a quirky protagonist to hold a reader's interest,
Stevens does us the old-fashioned favor of putting some damn nice writing in
his stories. The first chapter of Ratcatcher provides an excellent example. It opens with the phrase "His world
turned on its head for the second time at precisely ten eighteen p.m.,"
then dives immediately into his arrest while working undercover in Croatia and
on his way to a meeting with a crooked arms dealer in Croatia.
To avoid spoilers,
suffice to say Stevens returns to the world-turning event in the last few
paragraphs of the chapter, closing the distance between the beginning and end
of the section neatly and propelling the reader into the second chapter in the
process. It's a technique he manages to
bring off time and again in this book, and it not only increases a reader's
engagement in the story, but also keeps the plot unfolding smoothly and
quickly.
And watch the last
three paragraphs when you get there.
Stevens has left the careful reader an Easter egg of sorts in a passage
that ties directly back to the title of the novel.
Tim Stevens is the real
deal. I can't recommend Ratcatcher and his other John
Purkiss thrillers strongly enough.
