Depopulating My Library, Part III: Len Deighton, Robert Heinlein, and maybe Adam Hall

I guess I started reading spy novels in high school when I grabbed any James Bond book that showed up in the row of paperback books sold at Knupp’s Drug Store in Larned, KS (yes, complete with cherry cokes at the fountain). The only Ian Fleming work I still have is his best Bond book and the best movie From Russia with Love. I might as well keep it.

My favorite spy author is John LeCarre and I have all but his most recent work. The writing is superb, the tales captivating and what wonderful movies were and are being made from them. I have 13 hardback copies (including a First Edition American one of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold complete with book jacket in nice condition that I got for $3) and 9 paperback copies, some of which replicate the hardback edition. Rereading them is like putting on a comfortable sweater. Not that his prose is easy, but it’s so fluid and it ages well, like wine. No doubt I’ll go back and take sips.

I also liked Len Deighton and have all his works. I’ve reread them a couple of times and very much admire his plotting and character developments. His tryptich of trilogies about the English spy Bernard Samson in Berlin were captivating. Ian Holm played that spy in a 1988 Granada Television excellent adaptation of the first trilogy, entitled Game, Set and Match, transmitted as twelve 60 minute episodes. I don’t know if they can be found these days because Deighton got into something of snit about them. Anyway, I’m not going to revisit his works. They are now in the hands of Wise Blood, a soon to open used bookstore here in KC's Westport.

Adam Hall’s Quiller series and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series present something of mystery to me. There were several times in my life when I was just down. I won’t call it a depression, but certainly a blue period complete with anxiety about my life, what I was doing, and what would happen to me.

I often turned to reread the Quiller or the MacDonald books, loving to do so in the order they were published. Why? Well, they’re good action reads and that takes you out of yourself. With Travis McGee it wasn’t so much the story as the character. You just wanted to be around Travis again. Adam Hall, the pen name Elleston Trevor adopted for the Quiller books, really knew how to do action. He knew when to stop a scene at its most dramatic and keep you on the seat of your chair. They are page turners, but I don’t need to turn those pages anymore. So Deighton is now gone and Hall may follow. I’m still undecided. I’ll keep my Travis McGee books. I might want to have a drink with him again (he turned me on to Boodles gin). These are books I’d more wish to give to a friend.

Which is what I did with my Robert Heinlein paperback collection. (Heinlein fans, if you haven’t read is The Door into Summer, I highly recommend it. Great use of time travel and looking at the book cover reminded me that in this 1957 book he uses a piece of equipment that won’t be invented for decades, the Cad Cam.) A new bartender at  Chez Charlie’s, my Midtown watering hole in KC that I’ve been patronizing for more than 30 years, has become a reader of my fiction and likes sci-fi, so I plopped my Heinlein collection on the bar top, said they were hers, and ordered a Bombay Sapphire and tonic (they don’t carry Boodles).

In any of these musings of mine make your curious about my own smorgasbord of fiction genres, visit the buffet here.