Book Review - Death of a Citizen by Donald Hamilton

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Many readers of this blog are already familiar with Hamilton's Matt Helm novels, a series of books that set the gold standard in many people's minds for the "hard-bitten secret agent", Matt Helm.

Rather than writing a long lead-up explaining the series, I'll offer up this link to a website dedicated to the series.

Recently, the Matt Helm books have begun to see a reprinting facelift, including ebook versions. I've got a couple of the vintage paperbacks, and I read the seventh book in the series, The Shadowers (my review can be found here). While I have Death of a Citizen in vintage paperback now, I decided to buy and read the new ebook version, since my paper copy is definitely old and a bit fragile.

The ebook was well-formatted, and I don't recall any really glaring formatting or OCR-related errors. There might have been a couple, but they clearly didn't stand out so blatantly as to make me take undue notice. And, while the covers are pretty generic on these new reprints, they are at least stylish and professional-looking.

In short, the story behind Death of a Citizen is simple. Matt Helm was a special operations agent who carried out assassinations and other "black ops" during World War Two. Now, he's a family man, with a wife and small children, a "citizen" living an ordinary life until an old acquaintance, a former fellow agent and lover, comes back into his life. Literally overnight, Helm is dragged kicking and screaming back into the world of covert operations, and by the end of the book, we've seen - ta daaa - the "death" of citizen Matt Helm, and the re-birth of counter-espionage agent code-name Eric. 

Overall, the writing is excellent, the pace is quick but not sloppy, and the action is decisive and brutal. Hamilton writes with a blunt economy, and as the story is told from the first-person perspective of Helm, we can see almost immediately that those predatory killing instincts were not lost - they were only sleeping. Helm left his soul shredded and discarded on the battlefields of Western Europe years ago; he's now as ruthless and unrelenting as The Terminator.

If you like hard-bitten Cold War-era espionage thrillers that pack a lot of character and action into short, fast reads, you need to get your hands on these Matt Helm novels. The ebooks and paperbacks are reasonably priced, so treat yourself to Death of a Citizen and enjoy.

Book Review: THE SHADOWERS by Donald Hamilton

I've had a pair of Matt Helm thrillers on my pulp paperback bookshelf for several years now, but I never too the time to give them a read. For one, both of the books are fairly well worn, and I always get nervous reading paperbacks that are too brittle or stiff for fear of damaging them. Of course, if that's the case, they're just taking up space, right? Sooner or later you have to take the chance and give it a delicately-handled read.

After James Reasoner, in his blog review of my novel Killer Instincts, compared my main character in some ways to the earlier Helm adventures, my curiosity was definitely stirred. So, having some free time recently, I grabbed the earlier of the two books, THE SHADOWERS, and gave it a read over the course of two evenings.

Boy, am I glad I did.

THE SHADOWERS is the seventh of the Matt Helm stories written by Donald Hamilton. The main character is a "counter-agent" for an unnamed, shadowy branch of the US government, tasked with finding and eliminating or neutralizing enemy spies. In this book, Helm returns to work after a tragic accident ends the life of his current occasional love interest. He's assigned the task of guarding a female scientist from a possible assassin, and in order to do so, Helm will have to "fall in love" with her and get married, since it is unknown how long this bodyguard duty will last. The nonchalant manner in which Helm agrees to this romantic charade - even when he is informed that they will legally become wedded to each other - speaks volumes to the character's total commitment to his profession. I won't give away any spoilers, but let us just say that the insights this book gives us into the mind of Matt Helm, secret agent, are very revealing.

Overall, I found THE SHADOWERS to be an excellent read. Hamilton's use of the first-person perspective works perfectly because the book is so character-centric. We are subsumed into Helm's consciousness, dunked headfirst into the cold, hard, brutal world of Cold War-era espionage. Helm is a man of ruthless violence, who will do anything and commit to it wholeheartedly if it will see the job done. He is cruel, he is calculating, and he is without scruples. That he is ultimately human, with a human being's feelings and regrets, is something that we are shown because we have the unique perspective of living in Helm's head with him during his assignment, but to the outside world, he is little more than a clockwork machine controlled by the toymakers in Washington.

Although out of print for a long while now, it appears that most of the Helm books can be found online for a reasonable price through Amazon or other booksellers. I've also seen a report that they'll be reprinted starting sometime next year. If you can get your hands on them, I definitely recommend doing so. I've just ordered the first novel in the series, DEATH OF A CITIZEN, and hope to pick up more as time goes on.