European RC #5

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

The Hard Sell – William Haggard

This short 1965 thriller is set mainly in Vittorio, Italy, which I think is supposed to be Naples, the city of litter and Duh Mob. Haggard’s series hero, Colonel Charles Russell, works in British military intelligence, in an obscure office that undertakes delicate jobs that defy easy classification. Russell is asked by a childhood friend informally to visit his company’s plant in Vittorio in order to investigate a series of slow-downs and accidents. Alone the incidents could be explained by happenstance, but the series says something is fishy. After Russell arrives in Italy, the perp ups the ante with sabotage and an attack on the owner’s son.

Haggard, a firm believer in national traits, characterizes Southern Italians as lovers of intrigue, mindful of face and reputation and status, ridden by unsavory family connections, prone to outbreaks of temper, romantic, loud, chaotic, violent. The villain in this novel is a Swede and thus prone to ups and downs. When he’s up, a formidable adversary, but when down, unstable and unpredictable.

As the hero, Russell transcends stereotypes. He is a rare bird: Anglo-Irish but Catholic, not stubborn or inflexible. He is ever on guard lest his emotions and feelings cloud his cool, logical judgement. At about sixty, Russell does not engage in James Bond-like action scenes or love affairs. Instead, he fishes and plays golf.  He flirts with a forty-something courtesan - in a combination of schoolboy classical Greek and rough dialect learned during the war; could anything be cooler than speaking a foreign language fluently but imperfectly?

Russell works with not only the local police commissioner, but the local communist agitator. A conservative of the old school, Haggard has his series hero take communists as the hard right – in short, communists are serious, purposeful, resolute, resourceful and in touch with ordinary people and their troubles, just like men of the right. Contrasting the dark days of the present with the golden age of the past, Russell thinks that the Europe worthy of the name “committed suicide” when he was nine – i.e. in August 1914.  

Like most old-timey conservatives, Russell loathes demagogues and mobocracy, abhors socialism, and shits on democratic socialism (remember what Stalin did to democratic socialists -  see The Case of Comrade Tulayev). Russell will fight a worthy adversary or work with him, depending on circumstances. Russell is too practical and results-oriented to fuss over moral judgments. Russell believes in moral principles since without them people are slaves to passion and irrationality. But Russell does not expect – much less demand – moral judgement to help him in a world dominated by evil, flux, chance, repute, money, power, and other fleeting, ephemeral rubbish.

The  Hard Sell is an intricate novel that capture the usual real-world situations of people assuming they are making cogent decisions based on correct assumptions, but in fact their premises are wrong. Anybody who has worked in an office know assumptions are often fatal, valuable as they are. The Hard Sell is still worth reading though it lacks the sheen of threat and ruthlessness of earlier novels such as The High Wire, The Antagonists, The Arena, or The Unquiet Sleep.