Gustav Hasford: crime novelist, war chronicler and book thief

Part 1

I have a weakness for writers who, having overcome odds of one kind or another, produce something worthwhile, even if just a single novel. The end result might even be flawed, but, then, these days I’ve become increasingly less interested in perfection, while, on the other hand, having developed a wild-eyed aversion to anyone touted as the latest “great writer.” I’ve got a particular fondness for writers who can’t help but bite the hand that feeds them, or who impulsively criticise the spectacle of everyday life. It hardly matters how effective they are, so long as they go at it with a certain flair. The infamous Gustav Hasford fits this bill perfectly. Not only did he take on, and get the better of, one of the great megalomaniac directors in modern cinema history, but he even managed to write two excellent novels, at least one of which was a crime novel, and the other a Vietnam War novel.

Hasford is, of course, best known for the latter book, entitled The Short-Timers, which Stanley Kubrick would turn into the film Full Metal Jacket. When it was published in 1979, Newsweek called the novel "The best work of fiction about the Vietnam War." Though Hasford, Kubrick and fellow-Vietnam war writer Michael Herr would share screenwriting credits, it was basically Hasford’s script. As well as The Short-Timers, Hasford also wrote A Gypsy Good Time (1992), a Southern California crime novel which is thankfully a far cry from Raymond Chandler. The product of a disturbed but engaging intelligence, it remains, for me, an unforgettable book, which, despite its flaws, I instantly took to. In fact, it was that book, which I read some ten to twelve years ago, that prompted me to look into Hasford’s life. What I found was not only a writer of considerable talent- and a crime writer at that (even Short-Timers, since it’s about one of the great state crimes of the twentieth century, qualifies, as far as I’m concerned, as a crime novel)- but a harmless, small-time criminal persecuted far beyond the call of duty.

A Gypsy Good Time centres on Dowdy Lewis, a man who deals in rare books, consumes large amounts of alcohol and is haunted by memories of a war which, for some ten years, divided America. Books, alcohol, Vietnam: these are subjects that obsessed Hasford, a man who could not help but wear his heart on his sleeve. Have a look at the following quotes with their world-weary romantic dissection of the modern condition:

“In California people toss the word love around like a frissbee. You lose your faith in love, I guess. You meet somebody, you think- she’s so nice. But you’ve been there before. You know that in the end she’ll turn out to be just another neurotic man hater, gold digger, or emotional black hole. Loving somebody who can’t love you back is like pouring yourself into a hole. So after a while, you figure, why get your hopes up? Why not cut yourself some slack? You owe it to yourself. Why not save yourself the wear and tear?”

“All of the regulars are in the bar tonight, the walking wounded, moaners, bleeders, and nonstop talkers, the consumptives, syphilitics, and nickel-and-dime underworld slime, the drifters and weepers and hawker of church-bell scrapings and pieces of the one true cross (imported from Taiwan), the chain smokers and chronic masturbators, the tweakers, the bikers, the loan sharks and costumed extras from The Night of the Living Dead, the hookers and the hitters, the hungry, the hurting, the dying and the lying and the dry-eyed crying. Half of these people look like they just came back from the moon, and all of them are sworn witnesses for the prosecution on the charge that Earth serves as Hell for some other planet.”

Has anyone, save Nathaniel West or Myron Brinig (Flicker of an Eyelid), penned a more venomous analysis of Hollywood

“Hollywood is still the cannibal’s kiss. Hollywood is the town where your chips get cashed, and your parking stub is validated for every single day remaining in your life, or your exit visa gets stamped real hard and in black....In Hollywood, life is hard, then it turns into television and you die for thirteen weeks. My father used to deal with these movie people. Movie people lie when they talk in their sleep. Movie people swim around Catalina Island with a knife and a fork, hoping to meet a shark. In Hollywood, people walk up and steal the food right off your plate. Movie people will suck the marrow out of your bones for a penny, then they give you a bad check for the penny. Then they dig up your dead grandmother and sell her for a souvenir.”

But The Short-Timers is the book for which Hasford will be best remembered. As far as I’m concerned, it ranks up there with Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage and Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories when it comes to portraying the horrors and insanity of war. It was also, as I think I said in my book Neon Noir, the short of book that would influence crime fiction during the 1980s, and writers such as James Crumley, Kent Anderson, and George Pelecanos. For The Short-Timers is, with the possible exception of Dog Soldiers and Cutter’s Way, the darkest Vietnam tale of them all. It begins in 1968:

“Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is. Nobody asks why we’re smiling because nobody wants to know. The ugly that civilians choose to see in war focuses on spilled guts. To see human beings clearly, that is ugly. To carry death in your smile, that is ugly. War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere. Ugly is the face of Victor Charlie, the shapeless black face of death touching each of your brothers with the clean stroke of justice.”

After Full Metal Jacket’s release in 1987, Hasford, Kubrick and Herr were, not surprisingly, nominated for the best screenplay adaptation of 1987 by the Writers Guild of America and a week later they were nominated for the Academy. Despite the film’s notoriety, and the director’s reputation, it would be Full Metal Jacket’s only Academy Award nomination. Though Hasford suddenly became a celebrity, he would within a matter of months be arrested and sent to prison for harbouring anything from 800 to ten thousand library books in a rental locker in San Luis Obispo, California.

Hasford had never hid the fact that he had over 10,000 volumes in the rental locker. He called it his “research library.” For this was a man who not only loved books, but had various projects in mind, including a biography of Ambrose Bierce. He loved Bierce, particularly his story “Chickamauga.” He also planned a mutli-volumed saga on the Civil War, and books on Twain, Van Gogh, Lincoln, and the Alamo. He was also planning a sequel to his novel The Phantom Blooper, a series of crime novels, and a novel about an American woman president, and which, when it appeared, really did live up to its name, blooping in the hands of any reader unfortunate enough to read it.

Hasford had grown up in the South where he began writing at an early age. While still a high-school student in backwoods Alabama, he published a nationally distributed magazine for writers called Freelance. At 18, to escape the South and his mother, who, even at his funeral, maintained that she had never really understood her son, he joined the Marines where he gained the experience that would go into “Shorty”, as he called his Vietnam novel. As anyone who has read the book knows, Hasford manages to convey in that book a burning antipathy for the military hierarchy and power as such. When he finally returned from Vietnam, he moved up and down the West Coast taking one dead-end job after another, all the while writing and rewriting the book that would change his life. With his anarchist leanings, Gustav felt out of place in America, claiming to like only its used book stores and Sizzlers, a chain of formica infested coffee shops. His long term plan was to move permanently to Australia.

Hasford had already written a film script for The Short-Timers when Kubrick decided to buy into the project. But it wasn’t Kubrick who would approach the writer. Hasford was living in his car when a businessman from Munich appeared out of nowhere, and with seemingly no connection to the movie world, optioned the screen rights to the book. Of course, the businessman was secretly working for Kubrick. Realising he stood to make a substantial amount of money on the royalties to world-wide literary rights alone, not to mention the prestige from being involved with Kubrick, Hasford signed on. He celebrated the occasion by buying a one-way ticket to Australia.

Hasford eventually met Kubrick in London, and, having done so, returned to California in May, 1983, moving into a run down motel in San Louis Obispo so he could be near his books. It was at this time that Hasford fell in love. Like every other venture in his life, it would prove to be a messy experience. For the woman in question did not quite share Hasford’s feelings. This did not stop him from writing long letters to her and showering her with gifts. Around this time he befriended Sam, a small-time con-man who was so enamoured with Hasford’s prowess as a writer that he offered to go to England to sort out a recalcitrant Kubrick once and for all. Hasford and Sam traded books and, as it would turn out, competed for the same woman. In the meantime, fame had hit Hasford with a vengeance; he now had to decide whether he should purchase a Rolls Royce or go on welfare. He sensed that fame might ruin him as a writer.

Hasford’s relationship with Kubrick turning prickly. At first, Hasford was over awed by the director, and taken in by his notoriety. He compared Kubrick to Moses and spoke of himself as the burning bush. As for Kubrick, he was already renown for the cavalier manner in which he treated writers, whether Jim Thompson, Calder Willingham or Terry Southern. He would court them, dangle substantial amounts of money before them, squeeze them for what he could get, before throwing them away. If the writer was lucky, they received an “additional dialogue” credit, but, more often than not, they failed to get any credit at all. This is no doubt how he envisioned treating Hasford, who, as no one’s idiot, quickly realised what was happening. Fortunately, Hasford was obsessive enough to fight Kubrick every inch of the way. This dynamic first surfaced when Hasford saw that Kubrick had a different conception of the book’s narrative. While the director wanted a satisfactory ending, i.e., something that wouldn’t be too upsetting for audiences, Hasford was forced to point out that the war did not end all that satisfactorily, so anything else would be a lie. While Kubrick threatened to abandon the project, Hasford countered by refusing to sign his contract. He was adamant that, if this was his screenplay, he was going to receive credit for it. And, as long as he was on the project, the film would have to remain faithful to his book.http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php

Ross Thomas
Part 2

Unfortunately, no one seems to have ever had the nerve to ask Thomas about the murkier side of his past. But Thomas was apparently not someone to whom you could easily address such questions. Though by all accounts polite and generous, with a dry sense of humour, there was a diffidence about him more reminiscent of a habitué of a London gentlemen’s club or refugee from an E.M. Forster novel than a writer of tough guy novels. With pale skin, piercing eyes and, in later years, thinning hair, Thomas spoke with a mid-American Oklahoman accent. He never particularly cared for the limelight, to the extent that when he attended the annual Bouchercon, he passed conference time playing poker with his fellow renegades. Then it was back to his writing desk in Malibu, where he and his wife, Rosalie, lived for most of their twenty-five years together, having met in Washington at the Library of Congress where Ross did his research and Rosalie worked as a librarian. In Malibu they were mainstays of the local Democratic Club.

Thomas’s comedy of manners existed in what might be termed a world that was post-Chandler but pre-Ellroy. After all, Thomas had lived through McCarthyism, the California real estate boom, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the rise of the middle class, inflation, recession, stagflation, consumerism, Watergate, Reganomics, and decades of American greed. Yet Thomas was smart enough to coat his politics with a surreal humour, which sets him apart from Le Carré, whose sombre tales of agents wrestling with their demons, self-doubt, loneliness and adversaries crippled by the pointlessness of it all. For Thomas’s characters, if not for the author himself, the Cold War and its immediate aftermath, whatever its effect on the culture, was little more than a series of obstacles to be overcome. As for Chandler, Thomas credits him with helping save his life. According to Thomas, a little over an hour after landing on an island in the Philippines in 1945, his first scout handed him a copy of Farewell, My Lovely. He was eighteen, and was surprised to find the book was set on the mean streets of L.A.. However, the scout was killed, after which Thomas lost the book on the beach. Taking over his job, Thomas spent the next 109 days wondering who Velma was. “I decided,” said Thomas in an article he wrote for the Washington Post in 1984, “I needed to be Philip Marlowe safely back in Los Angeles in that palmy year of 1940- in a time that would never change. It was a harmless enough notion that probably kept me sane.”

Regardless of how unsung he might have become, Thomas was able to exert considerable influence, if not in the US, then in France where the late great polar writer Jean-Patrick Manchette fell under his spell. After meeting at a writer’s conference in France during the last decade of Thomas’s life, the two men quickly became friends. As well as extolling his work in various periodicals, Manchette was to translate Thomas’s work into French. Moreover, his reading of Thomas contributed to Manchette’s decision to abandon crime fiction in favour of a type of espionage novel, perhaps not as humorous as Thomas’s, but even more political, exemplified by the excellent, unfinished and posthumously published, La Princesse du sang.

And Thomas also had his admirers in the world of cinema. Though, film-wise, he is still best known for co-writing Wim Wenders’s 1982 film, Hammett. In putting together what would become a worthy failure, Wenders went through some thirty screenplays before settling on Thomas’s and Dennis O’Flaherty’s. Through no fault of Thomas’s, whose script is workmanlike, the film contains none of the narrative drive, and only a fraction of the energy of Joe Gores’s novel. Yet the film contains some memorable moments and remains one of the few films to tackle the subject of writing on any level other than the most mundane. Thomas also had a small role in Hammett, playing a corrupt local politician. A decade later, in 1995, Thomas was credited with writing Damian Harris’s Bad Company starring Ellen Barkin and Lawrence Fishburn. Again, not exactly Citizen Kane, but an interesting effort, particularly when it comes to Thomas’s labyrinthine script. Six years before Hammett, there was also St. Ives, starring Charles Bronson and Jacqueline Bissett, adapted from a story by Thomas’s alter-ego Oliver Bleeck. But for the most part, Thomas’s heroes seem to be too duplicitous, his narratives too ironical and convoluted for most directors to easily adapt for the screen.

In 1993 Thomas lost his manuscripts, his books, including various foreign translations of his novels, as well as his typewriter (he hated computers) in the Malibu fire. Undaunted, he and Rosalie moved to Point Dume where, despite their loss, life continued as usual. For Thomas, that meant writing everyday. It was a persistence that marked his fiction- “I rewrite virtually everything, even notes to the guy who delivers the bottled water”- as well as his fictional creations. When he wasn’t writing Thomas liked to go to the movies. He once said that one of the benefits of being a writer was that he could go to the movies in the afternoon. Two years after the fire, and a few months after finishing his novel, Ah, Treachery!, Ross Thomas, age 69, died of lung cancer. It was the usual story; within a couple years most of his work had gone out of print and would remain so for the better part of a decade. Fortunately, over the last year St Martins has begun to reprint his work, beginning with Out on the Rim, Briarpatch, The Cold War Swap, The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, Out on the Rim and Twilight at Mac’s Place, each accompanied by introductions written by the likes of Donald Westlake, T. Jefferson Parker, Robert Parker, Sara Paretsky and Lawrence Block. Perhaps we are about to go through a period of Ross Thomas revisionism. It’s nothing less than he deserves. When a writer asked Rosalie what it was like being married to a writer, she said, “Very quiet.” And when she was asked if her husband was ever a spy, she simply smiled and said, “Not that he ever told me.”http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php

Ross Thomas: Are The Fools in Town Are Still On Our Side?

Part 1

It’s not uncommon these days to stumble across the odd mainstream broadsheet critic in the process of travelling downmarket to extol the merits of some crime writer they’ve recently discovered. Perhaps I’ve grown a bit cynical, but whenever I come across such an article I can’t help myself from thinking that the newly anointed is close to reaching his or her sell-by date. At the same time, as any avid reader of the genre knows, outside the realm of journalistic hype there exists any number of excellent noirists who have been forgotten or, for one reason or another, remain unrecognised. For instance, there’s 1950s pulpist Gil Brewer, and, in recent years, Loren Estleman. And what about Jim Nisbet? Then there’s Ross Thomas, surely one of the best crime writers of the last thirty years. There can’t be many crime novels better than his 1978 Chinaman’s Chance. Having written some twenty-five books, including five under his well-chosen nom-de-plume Oliver Bleeck, Thomas, even at his worst, is no less interesting than Elmore Leonard, though not nearly so self-conscious or style-obsessed.

Born in the 1926 in Oklahoma, Thomas cut across social and political classes, writing with equal ease about those at the top or at the bottom of society’s ladder. So class-ridden are some of his characters that they appear to have leapt from the pages of a British spy novel smack into the rarefied atmosphere of Malibu, California, Washington D.C., small-town America, or some foreign country unfortunate enough to have been infiltrated, whether covertly or overtly, by U.S. advisors and their camp followers. Other Thomas characters could be described as self-made, raised in the midst of the American nightmare and schooled in cheap bars and shady deals. An old-school liberal with a provocative CV, Thomas was, of course, well-qualified to write about political intrigue and the trickle-down theory of crime, by which I mean the notion that corruption starts at the top of the culture and floats downwards, moving, as one particular Thomasite put it, from the suites to the streets.

But at some point during the 1990s, not long before his death, Thomas seems to have fallen out of favour. It’s hard to understand why. After all, his books always sold reasonably well. Moreover, he had been a favourite of such diverse readers as John D. MacDonald, Eric Ambler, Bill Clinton, and that bifurcated rightwing cultural critic, Lynne Cheney, whose worse-half happens be to be the US vice president. And didn’t Stephen King, having stated that Thomas was “the Jane Austen of the political espionage story,” once compare him favourably to Don DeLillo? I sometimes wonder if Thomas’s interregnum in literary Siberia had something to do with the publishing industry and all those dark and reality-obsessed narratives that began to appear in the 1990s, which, in many case, read more like reportage than fiction. Stylistically free and easy, Thomas swung more in the direction of, on the one hand, well-structured and humorous plots, and, on the other, eccentric and unpredictable characters, regardless of whether they held down jobs as diplomats, spies, politicians, activists, lobbyists, cops, or con artists. Not only did Thomas cover a wide range of criminal types, but he would punctuate his work with references to political finagling, trade union machinations, and the effect of various social movements. He once said, “I weave historical facts and observation… What is eavesdropping to others is research to the novelist.” Ross Thomas was certainly no idiot. And maybe that too counted against him.

So readable is Thomas that you’d think he’d spent a lifetime honing his literary chops. But, like Raymond Chandler, Thomas began writing at a relatively late age. In fact, The Cold War Swap, which won an Edgar for Best First Novel in 1967, was written when Thomas was over forty years old. In-between jobs, and having never previously thought about writing fiction, he gave himself six weeks to churn out a book. After finishing it, he sent the manuscript off to a publisher and within two weeks it was accepted for publication. Given its plot, which revolves around scientists trapped behind the Iron Curtain, The Cold War Swap holds up quite well. This is largely due to the book’s setting, Bonn, where Thomas had been based while working as a diplomatic correspondent for the Armed Forces Network, and his skin-tight characterisations, including his two protagonists, saloonkeeper “Mac” McCorkle and the erratic onetime OSS agent Mike Padillo, who team up to get a pair of defectors through Checkpoint Charlie. Like other Thomas protagonists, they resurface in later novels. But even in the early stages of his literary career, Thomas had a more cynical and less heroic view of spying than Eric Ambler, or, more recently, Alan Furst. As far as Thomas was concerned, spying is just one more pathetic folly, as comic as it is dangerous. It could be said that Thomas believed that espionage was no different than any other trade, nothing more or less than something that different sorts of people do with varying levels of skill and dedication.

Anyone who reads Thomas with any attention soon realises that he is extremely au courant with the world of spookdom This invariably leads to the question: was Ross Thomas, in fact, a spy? Had he been, he would have been part of that honourable tradition of novel-writing spies, one that includes Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and John Le Carré. And his biographical details give plenty of room for speculation After serving as a U.S. infantryman in the Philippines during the Second World War, Thomas finished his studies at the University of Oklahoma, then became a public relations operative for the National Farmers Union and then VISTA, the latter culminating in his only non-fiction book, Warriors for the Poor: The Story of VISTA. Then he worked as the representative of Patrick Dolan and Associates Ltd in Nigeria, where he became the campaign organiser for tribal chief, Obafemi Awololo, in his efforts to become Nigeria’s first post-colonial Prime Minister. He would later use Nigeria as a setting for his novel The Seersucker Whipshaw. After Nigeria, Thomas was employed as a political consultant in Washington, followed by a stint as a diplomatic correspondent in Bonn. He also put in stints as a reporter in Cajun country as well as Washington DC, and as chief strategist for two ageing trade union presidents seeking re-election. In 1956, he handled two campaigns simultaneously, one for a Republican nominated for the Senate and the other for a Democrat running for governor of Colorado. The Republican lost, but the Democrat won. He is also reputed to have worked for Senator and future Presidential hopeful George McGovern. Eventually, the union presidents would be turfed out of office, while the Nigerian prime minister lost his next election and was promptly thrown in jail. As for McGovern, he, of course, became President Nixon’s target in the Watergate burglary.

While Thomas, tongue firmly in cheek, would only admit to being a “former civil servant”- which, in itself, can be interpreted however one wants- he clearly had no problem putting his job related knowledge into his fiction. And when that needed to be supplemented, he was quite willing to put in the necessary research- yet another skill picked up in his “civil service” days- to add that extra bit of verisimilitude. This was definitely the case in his 1970 The Fools in Town Are on Our Side. The title, which comes from Huckleberry Finn (“Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”) says it all. Moreover, it might also have referred to his own experience, particularly when it came to his political work. The Fools In Town... introduces another one of Thomas’s protagonist, former espionage operative, Lucifer Dye. Unemployed, Dye forms an alliance with an ex–call girl in the Gulf Coast city of Swankton. One of the most unforgettable images in the book occurs near the beginning, in which, during the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1937 a four-year-old Lucifer Dye clings to the severed hand of his dead father. A small but important recollection, but one that was written only after Thomas had consulted numerous accounts of the bombing of Shanghai. Less about war than small-town corruption, The Fools… contains one of those unforgettable characters that Thomas excels at, in this case the tough and aptly-named ex–police chief Homer Necessary, a man with one brown eye and one blue eye, “and neither of them contained any more warmth than you would find in a slaughterhouse freezer.” But even though Homer is thoroughly corrupt, when it comes to personal matters he is completely trustworthy. This apparent contradiction in behaviour crops up time and time again in Thomas’s work, where everyone is fallible and moves between extremes, their situations mirroring Thomas’s ambivalence regarding the Cold War, and the way it could so easily corrode the culture.

This corrosion is also a theme in Chinaman’s Chance, which, in my opinion, is one of Thomas’s best novels. Its complicated, and morally ambiguous plot revolves around a female singing group, money supposedly left in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, and corruption in a seaside LA community that’s on the verge of being turned into a small-scale Las Vegas a decade before Las Vegas was itself turned into a Walt Disney wet-dream. Chinaman’s Chance also introduces two protagonists: the pretender to the Chinese throne Artie Wu and fellow adventurer Quincy Durant. They also feature in Thomas 1987 Out on the Rim (Durant and Wu also appear in a third novel, Thomas’s 1992 Voodoo, Ltd.). While Chinaman’s Chance is set in Southern California, Out on the Rim takes place in the Philippines just after the fall of Marcos, at a time when no one knew what or who would take the old dictator’s place, and various parties were seeking to cash-in before it was too late. Thomas knew the Philippines well, having served there in World War II, and having visited the country just after Marcos was deposed. Out on the Rim is not only a darkly comic story, but with America currently trying to sell Iraq to the highest bidder, it remains extremely pertinent.
Then there are those who consider Briarpath to be Thomas’s best book. Stylistically, this might be the case. It takes place in Texas or Oklahoma, though one is never quite sure. Wherever it is, it’s hot.
“The redheaded homicide detective stepped through the door at 7:30 A.M. and out into the August heat that already had reached 88 degrees. By noon the temperature would hit 100, and by two or three o'clock it would be hovering around 105. Frayed nerves would then start to snap and produce a marked increase in the detective's business. Breadknife weather, the detective thought. Breadknives in the afternoon.”
The heat permeates the novel, slowing down its inhabitants, but not the plot. Situated in the centre of this unnamed town is a giant clock that the narrator constantly refers to, recording the time and pacing the novel. With five grand in the bank and a used Volkswagen, Ben Dill finds himself in Washington DC, unemployed, trying to figure out what to do with his life. He returns home to investigate the car-bombing murder of his sister, who, prior to her death, was a homicide detective. It’s another one of Thomas’s corrupt town novels, not far removed from the work of Sinclair Lewis or Robert Penn Warren, and populated with the kind of petit-bourgeois greed merchants one finds in Dodsworth and Babbitt. Awarded an Edgar in 1985, Briarpatch contains characters whose moral ambiguity adds to the novel’s humanitarianism; for, as is often the case, Thomas’s heroes only slightly less tarnished and tainted by corruption than his villains, who remain vulnerable, half-ludicrous, half-deadly and all too human.

Published in 1989, The Fourth Durango sounds like it might be set in Mexico or Colorado, but, instead, it takes place in a small town in California that functions as a hideout populated by a businessmen, scamsters and predators attempting to avoid their designated hitmen. Picture a slightly less frenetic and surreal version of Jim Thompson’s Kingdom of El Rey in The Getaway, and you get the idea. With inhabitants paying large sums of money to keep their killers at bay, a former state Supreme Court chief justice arrives, followed by his son-in-law. The latter becomes an emissary to the beautiful and streetwise mayor. A phoney priest follows the former chief justice and his son, leaving behind a trail littered with corpses. A year after The Fourth Durango, Thomas’s Twilight at Mac’s Place came out. This one concerns the memoirs of a recently deceased spy which contain some Cold War secrets that certain people would prefer not to be put in the public domain. When the son of the spy is offered a hundred grand for the rights to the memoirs, he becomes suspicious and seeks out the help of Thomas’s old protagonists McCorkle and Padillo, who have by now seen fit to invest in a bar that bears the book’s title. Small-time entrepreneurism invariably appeals to Thomas’s protagonists, only for them to be dragged back into the world of spooks and scams.http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php