I was in the embarrassing situation of having Larry Correia as a Facebook friend but never having read any of his stuff, even though he seemed to have his head on pretty straight. So I remedied that by downloading Hard Magic, Book One of the Grimnoir Chronicles series. It’s pretty good.

The story is set in the 1930s, in an alternate universe where people with magical powers (known as Actives) starting appearing spontaneously among the population sometime in the mid-1800s. This led to some changes in the world – primarily in the balance of power. World War I was ended by the Peace Ray, an invention of Tesla’s, resulting in the virtual annihilation of Berlin, which became a miserable city of zombies. Russia was defeated magically in the Russo-Japanese War, making Japan the dominant power in the east. It’s known now as the Imperium, and is effectively controlled by a ruthless magician.

In the atmosphere of complacency permitted by the Peace Ray, only a small order of Actives, the Grimnoir Knights, carries on an asymmetrical resistance under the leadership of Gen. Pershing, John Moses Browning, and others. This book centers on two new recruits – Jake Sullivan, an ex-con who worked for the FBI for a while but was cheated by J. Edgar Hoover, and Faye Vierra, an adopted child raised by a secret Grimnoir Knight on a farm in the San Fernando Valley of California. Jake and Faye are two of the most talented Actives in the world, and all their powers will be needed when the Imperium makes its sneak attack.

The characters were very good, very believable in relation to the supernatural situations. In general the values were good as well (Correia is a Mormon), although there is some rough language. Lots of violence.

I look forward to reading the second novel in the series, Spellbound.

I reviewed one of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels, newly reissued, a few days back. I’ve now read two more of the series, The Death of a Citizen and The Wrecking Crew, and I’ll do a brief review of them as a unit.

The first point to get out of the way is that this isn’t Dean Martin, and this isn’t a Dean Martin movie. In a way you could say that the Matt Helm novels (which had their heyday in the 1960s) are less violent and sex-saturated than the thrillers we read today. But that would be misleading. There’s a sense in which these novels are more brutal than any I’ve ever read, not in terms of explicitness but in terms of emotional (even spiritual) violence done and suffered. I’m not an expert on contemporary action novels, but I don’t think Jack Ryan or Mitch Rapp ever pay the kind of price Matt Helm does.

At the beginning of The Death of a Citizen, the first book in the series, Matt is a happy husband and father, older and softer than he was when he served as an assassin in World War II. He’s content with his life as a journalist and photographer in New Mexico.

Then, at a party, in walks a woman he worked with—and slept with—in the war, and she gives him the old recognition signal. And for all his efforts to hold back, he gets drawn into a dangerous murder and espionage plot. The lengths to which he is willing to go to save his family from a threat bring a price—separation from that family forever. The “citizen” who dies in this book is Matt himself.

The next book, The Wrecking Crew, takes Matt on assignment to his ancestral homeland, Sweden (his old family name, we learn, was Stjernhjelm), where he’s expected to work with domestic agents to thwart a Russian espionage operation. He meets a couple women to whom he’s attracted, but the things he does for a living come between him and them, a moral (or judgmental) barrier that will separate him from other humans for the rest of his days.

Though the language, violence, and sex are less explicit than in more modern books, these novels pack an impact that may surprise you. Matt’s 1960s attitudes toward sex, and women, will certainly be troubling to some readers.

But if you like your spy stories straight up, these are very good. Excellent of their kind.

It made me feel kind of cheap The man was sincerely trying to kill me in a fair fight, and I was just setting him up for a bullet. Well, it’s not a chivalrous age, nor is mine an honorable profession. I wasn’t about to risk turning loose a wild man with an army and a nuclear missile because of some boyish notions of fair play.

For some time a cadre of readers has been clamoring for the re-release of Donald Hamilton’s 1960s Matt Helm novels, which have suffered from neglect, probably due in great part to the memory of those lame old movies with Dean Martin, which are as much like the original books as Paris Hilton resembles Conrad Hilton. Aside from the hero’s name and his cover identity as a photographer, the movies are nothing like the books. Matt Helm was often called an American James Bond in his day, and the comparison is a good one. He’s a tall, blondish fellow, a Scandinavian-American born in Minnesota(!). He works as an assassin for a super-secret American spy agency. My impression, on the basis of reading this one book, The Ambushers, is that the Helm novels are a little grittier than the Bond books (no tuxedos or casinos here), and just a tad more humane.

In this outing, we find Matt in a fictional South American country, setting up a sniper shot to kill a rebel leader, at the invitation of the local government. In the aftermath of his success, the government forces liberate a prisoner of the rebels, a female American agent who has been tortured. Back in the states, he finds himself ordered to go to Mexico to clean up a loose end from the previous job, and through a train of circumstances finds himself teamed up with the same female agent he helped rescue, almost reluctantly helping her to recover from the trauma.

I enjoyed The Ambushers very much, and have already bought The Death of a Citizen, which is the first in the series. Donald Hamilton was a writer of solid prose with a good sense of character and a mordant wit. Some mature content, but due to the age of the book it’s pretty mild by contemporary standards. Recommended.

“He sort of looked mean, but in a hygienic, Minnesota way.”

Just recently I reviewed John Sandford’s more recent Virgil Flowers novel, Storm Front, and noted that that book’s light tone, and the fact that nobody got killed in it, typified the less serious quality of the Flowers books, as compared to Sandford’s hugely successful Prey novels.

After reading Mad River is a story about a killing spree in south central Minnesota towns, perpetrated by a trio of young losers – a couple on their way to nowhere and a slacker friend. Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agent Virgil Flowers is tasked with heading up the effort to stop them, and he’s desperately trying to keep them from getting killed by the local cops, not so much out of professional ethics as because he suspects a murder-for-hire angle, and he needs them to tell him who paid them.