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.