Tag Archives: Jack Higgins

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Side of the Street,’ by Jack Higgins

Leave a comment

There was a time when I was a great fan of the late Jack Higgins’ books. (His real name was Henry Patterson.) In time I began finding him repetitive, and I gave up on him. But I don’t mind picking one up for old times sake, now and then, if I happen to find one I haven’t read before. Such was the case with Dark Side of the Street.

Higgins explains in a foreword that this book was one of his early ones, written with the idea of competing with the James Bond franchise. His character Paul Chavasse is a very Bond-ian British intelligence agent. In this outing, Chavasse is called in on a special assignment to help the police, based on his experience in undercover work. They want him to commit a crime, get caught, and go to prison in order to ingratiate himself with a prisoner.

The background is this: The criminal he’s supposed to befriend, Harry Youngblood, was one of three men convicted of a major theft, and the money has never been recovered. Both his partners have already been sprung from high security prisons and have utterly disappeared. What nobody knows is that these men have not been spirited off to anonymous lives in foreign countries. They were in fact murdered for their loot. When Chavasse befriends Youngblood in prison and joins him in his escape, they will both be walking into a waiting death trap.

Dark Side of the Street benefits from some decent characterization – author Higgins humanizes the ruthless Youngblood, without romanticizing his essentially selfish and brutal nature. There’s also a sad subplot involving an unattractive, lovestruck girl.

The story includes a scene involving a mortuary and the embalmment of a beautiful young woman. It seemed familiar because it was – I’ve encountered the same scene twice in other books by Higgins – one of his weaknesses was a tendency to recycle material.

The layout of the book was marred by a lack of double spacing between chapter sections – meaning the reader frequently finds himself in a new scene with new characters, with no warning. This is the sort of error that happens increasingly in e-books these days, and it’s annoying.

But otherwise, Dark Side of the Street wasn’t bad as light entertainment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Graveyard Shift,’ by Jack HIggins

Leave a comment

Back in the 1960s, before he became a bestselling thriller writer (The Eagle Has Landed, etc.), the English author who wrote under the name Jack Higgins produced mysteries under his real name – Harry Patterson. Among them was a short series featuring London police detective Nick Miller. As The Graveyard Shift, the first entry in the series, begins, our hero has just been promoted to detective, after some special training. He is young for a detective, and well-educated. He’s also rich and likes to dress fashionably. Not a natural fit for the Crime Squad, but his extreme self-confidence never wavers, and he operates with a James Bond-like cool.

Meanwhile, Ben Garvald, a convicted robber, is being released from prison. He’s barely on the street before a couple of thugs attack him with a message to stay away from his ex-wife, now married to their boss, a crime lord. It takes more than that to intimidate Ben, who casually cripples them both and leaves them with a message for their boss. He has business to attend to, and then he’ll be on his way. If they want to stop him, they’ll need to kill him. Which they’ll try to do.

The ex-wife’s sister asks the police to find Ben and warn him off. This will lead to a trail of mayhem and death.

I was a big fan of Higgins/Patterson back in the day. He was a good storyteller, and set a good scene. His prose was adequate. As time went on (in my opinion), he got formulaic and predictable in his storytelling. But this is early work, and pretty fresh.

The book definitely shows its age in many ways. The cops are all men. Most everybody smokes, and they smoke in the office. The language is assuredly un-PC. I generally liked all that. I feel at home in that world.

I did figure out whodunnit, though.

The Graveyard Shift was intended to be dark and gritty by the standards of the time, depicting the hopelessness and desperation of the denizens of the rougher districts of London. Little did they know that it would only get worse with the coming years.

Not a bad book. Cautions for violence and insensitivity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Comes the Dark Stranger,’ by Jack Higgins

Leave a comment

Back in the late Jack Higgins’ heyday, I used to buy all his novels as they appeared, because he wrote a tight, compelling story, and when Christianity came up it was generally treated respectfully. As time went on I got the feeling he was starting to phone it in, telling the same story over and over with different settings and only superficially different characters.

But it had been a while since I’d read a Higgins, so I took advantage of a bargain on one of his early books, Comes the Dark Stranger. I don’t think he’d found his stride yet at this point in his career, but the book was entertaining.

Martin Shane shows up in the English town of Burnham, looking for an old army buddy. But not in a good way. He’d been with a commando group in Korea, all from the same town, and he and his friends were taken prisoner and tortured. One of them, under threat of execution, had broken and given the interrogator what he wanted. Then Martin’s best friend was executed. Martin vowed revenge, but then suffered a brain injury that kept him hospitalized for eight years. Recently he got his memory back. He needs brain surgery to remove shrapnel before it kills him, but before he goes under the knife, Martin is going to identify the Judas and kill him.

Of course, it isn’t as easy as that. Everyone has a story. Somebody’s lying. As Martin endures recurring, crippling headaches, he questions and threatens and gets people angry, hoping the culprit will give something away. At some points, he’s not even sure the things he remembers actually happened. In the end, he’ll get an answer he doesn’t want.

Comes the Dark Stranger touched all the bases as far as thriller plotting is concerned. My problem with the book is that I didn’t really believe in the characters. I didn’t think some of them were responding naturally, but were just doing what was necessary to advance the plot.

Still, the book wasn’t bad. Moderately recommended.