Thursday, November 30, 2023

Reading Those Classics #22

Classic Set in a Place you Want to Visit. Borneo has reefs, rainforests, swamps, mangrove stands, and wildlife such as elephants, sun bears, clouded leopards, proboscis monkeys, orangutans, and pangolins, as well over 400 species of bird, including hornbills and mountain serpent eagles. The main draw is the relative humidity, always about 80%. High humidity feels good even euphoric but if prolonged can lead to dehydration, confusion, fatigue malaise lethargy and for heart patients, arrythmia .

You Want to Die, Johnny? – Gavin Black

In the 1960s, Gavin Black wrote more than a dozen spy-adventure thrillers featuring a series hero named Paul Harris. This one is set in one of the last British protectorates, the fictional Bintan on the northern coast of Borneo.

Canny Scotsman Paul Harris owns a company that manufactures and sells engines for marine craft. He has moved from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, where he has taken Malaysian citizenship.

The novel opens with Paul being on a plane returning to Bintan his old friend John, the British resident, and his 18-year-old daughter Lil.

Widowers can deal with hordes of communist infiltrators or a teenage daughter but not both at the same time. John has gone to California to rescue her from the clutches of a Cockney rock star named Boots. This gives the author a chance to deliver old-guy commentary on These Kids Today. Remember it was 1966, this was a chance not passed up by old-guy writers like Desmond Begley and Andrew Garve, who were old guys writing for other old guys.

The plane is wrecked upon landing because somebody took shots at it, putting out the tires. In the ensuing car chase, the three would-be assassins are killed in a wreck. Paul and John suspect that sinister forces, perhaps Communist in origin, are fomenting trouble for the oil-rich Bintanese family that run the place like the ex-pirates that they are.

They are also shaken when a bomb goes off in Paul’s rest house.

Convincing characterization and an authentic background make the 250 pages, longer than I like for a thriller, go by in just a couple of nights. Paul Harris has a background that makes him a tough, clever and resourceful action hero. During World War II he and his family were interned when the Japanese occupied Singapore. He had to become hardened and smart to deal with deprivation and violence in the camps. After the war, he and his brother started an import/export business that included capers on the edge of world of espionage.

Like William Haggard novels, this is James Bond for adults. Black is a much better writer than Ian Fleming who tended to stilted prose, baffling digressions, and a brazenly imperialist misogynist jerk for a hero. Granted, hero Paul Harris is rather an apologist for those topee-wearing days, but he doesn’t have any illusions about the constant moral dilemmas of the minions of imperialism (see Shooting an Elephant).

The real name of Gavin Black was Oswald Wynd (1913 – 1998). He is most well-known for the excellent novel The Ginger Tree, a novel about a young English girl dealing with an unsettled personal life and turbulent times in China and Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. That novel was made into a Masterpiece Theater production in the late Eighties.

Wynd was familiar with Asia because he was born a missionary child in Tokyo. He was captured in the early days of WWII in Malaya and interned in a camp run by the Japanese. He has keen insight into the psychological effects of captivity, semi-starvation, torture, and prolonged stress have on its sufferers.

 

Click on the title to go to the review.

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