Gavin Lyall’s Judas Country

Judas Country, published in 1975, was the last of Gavin Lyall’s aviation thrillers.

Englishman Gavin Lyall (1932-2003) had established himself in the 60s as one of the best thriller writers in the Alistair MacLean mould. His books up until Judas Country were all first-person narratives. His heroes were men who were moderately honest (although sometimes skirting the lines of what was strictly legal) who get caught up in intrigue and/or espionage. After Judas Country he changed direction and wrote the four Harry Maxim contemporary spy thrillers with third-person narration and then changed direction again, turning out four historical spy novels.

Judas Country follows the story of Roy Case, a pilot somewhat down on his luck. His partner Ken Cavitt ran into some legal unpleasantness in Israel, spending two years in prison there. As a result they lost their aircraft and their business. Roy took a one-off job for a man named Kingsley, flying a twin-engined Beechcraft Queen Air into Cyprus for Kingsley’s Castle hotel chain. Roy has to fly a dozen cases of champagne to the Castle Hotel in Nicosia. Perhaps Roy should have wondered about this - champagne is not something you normally send by air. But he needed the job and in Nicosia he can meet up with Ken again (Ken having been just released from prison).

Unfortunately the Castle hotel chain has run into financial difficulties and receivers have been appointed. This means Roy isn’t going to get paid and he’s stranded in Nicosia and he finds himself helping out the receiver in the management of the now bankrupt but still operational Castle Hotel. This is all rather inconvenient and irritating but Roy isn’t too worried by it until he opens one of the cases of champagne. What the case contains is definitely not champagne.

He’s a bit concerned about the middle-aged Austrian mediæval archaeologist Ken befriended in gaol. Professor Spohr had had some misunderstanding with the Israeli authorities over the matter of an excavation he was making and the professor had, perhaps unwisely, tried to matter to settle the matter by drawing a gun on the Israeli cops.

Roy is not entirely happy about the Mossad agent who has been tailing him.

He is however mostly worried about the dead body in one of the rooms of the hotel, a matter that is also of interest to Inspector Lazaros. Roy is not particularly fond of getting involved with policemen. He certainly doesn’t want to have to explain the contents of that champagne case because he doesn’t have an explanation.

Roy Case is a fairly typical Lyall hero, a fairly good-natured guy who doesn’t really want trouble but keeps finding it. Like most Lyall heroes he’s intelligent but gets into spots that perhaps he should have avoided. More often he gets into situations for the simple reason that he needs the money. Roy and Ken obviously have pasts that are colourful and maybe a just a little bit dubious. Their aviation business had been quite legal, in theory. Well, mostly legal. The paperwork was always in order. Whether the goods described in the paperwork matched the cargoes they were actually transporting was another matter, a problem they solved by never checking the contents of any crates they loaded aboard their aeroplane.

When they do find trouble they’re philosophical about it. It’s something to which they’ve grown accustomed.

Now they’re mixed up in a situation involving weapons both ancient (or at least mediæval) and modern, weapons the ownership of which is doubtful. There’s the possibility of big money which might be obtainable without breaking the law. Or at least without technically doing anything illegal, or at least without doing anything that could be proved to be illegal. Also mixed up in this is the professor’s daughter Mitzi and Eleanor Travis from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Eleanor has the chance of getting hold of something the museum wants, in a way that is almost ethical if you look at it from the right angle and you don’t look too closely and you squint a bit.

Having possession of something that is worth a great deal of money is a fine thing, if you can figure out a way of selling the item without tiresome interference from the authorities. When you don’t actually have the item but you might know where it might be found the difficulties tend to increase. Roy and Ken could be rich men, but it’s a big could be.

And items that are worth a lot of money attract the interest of other parties with flexible attitudes towards the law. In this case there are quite a few parties interested.

There’s plenty of action, there’s some airborne excitement and there are plot twists in abundance. 

Maybe not quite as good as Lyall's earlier and truly excellent Shooting Script but still very highly recommended. I've also reviewed Lyall's The Most Dangerous Game and Midnight Plus One and I recommend them as well.

Gavin Lyall's Midnight Plus One

Midnight Plus One was the third of the successful thrillers written by Englishman Gavin Lyall (1932-2003). It was published in 1965.

Lyall’s first two thrillers had aviation backgrounds. Midnight Plus One stays firmly on the ground but there’s no shortage of action and excitement.

Lewis Cane (the narrator) had been a renowned secret agent for the British in the Second World War, working behind enemy lines in Occupied France. After that he was a spy with the British Secret Intelligence Service. Now he describes himself as a business agent. He solves ticklish business problems. His solutions are never illegal but they do require a certain ethical flexibility. He likes to think of himself as having moral standards. He doesn’t work for criminals and he’s not a hired killer but if someone shoots at him he’ll certainly shoot back.

An old acquaintance, a French lawyer named Merlin, has offered him a lucrative job. All he has to do is to drive a businessman named Maganhard from Brittany to Liechtenstein. It sounds simple but there are complications. It’s quite possible that business rivals may try to stop Maganhard from reaching Liechtenstein. They may try to stop him by killing him. And the police are after Maganhard as well (although Merlin assures him that Maganhard is entirely innocent). Cane can handle himself pretty well but for this job it seems advisable to have a professional gunman/bodyguard along as well. Cane would like to have Bernard or Alain, regarded as the two best gunmen in Europe.  They’re not available but Harvey Lovell is. Lovell is an American and he’s considered to be Europe’s third best gunman. He’s a former member of the US Secret Service so he certainly has had the right training to be a bodyguard and he seems like the ideal man.

Another complication is that Maganhard insists on bringing his secretary along. Helen Jarman is a young, pretty, very upper-class Englishwoman and she regards Cane and Harvey as being little more than glorified gangsters. This happy little party sets off in Maganhard’s Citroën DS. The first signs of trouble had already appeared when they picked up the car. The man from whom they picked it up died rather suddenly, possibly as a result of the three bullet-holes in his body.

It soon becomes apparent that somebody knows about their little excursion to Liechtenstein and that the somebody in question has employed quite a few very nasty and very well-armed thugs to stop them from reaching their destination.

It’s a thrilling chase across western Europe, a chase that leaves an impressive trail of mayhem and dead bodies behind it.

It doesn’t take long for Cane to discover that he has another problem. Harvey Lovell is very good at his job but he drinks a bit. In fact he’s a full-blown alcoholic. Harvey’s problem is that his job as a bodyguard requires him to be prepared to kill people if necessary, and to be prepared to get himself killed to protect his client. He’s OK with the risking his own life part of the deal. He definitely is not lacking in guts. But he’s not quite so OK with the killing people bit. If he drinks enough he can deal with it. When he’s sober he’s very very good at his job. The question is whether he can stay sober.

While this is very much an action thriller it’s also an interesting psychological study of men who live by violence. Harvey has his troubles but Lewis Cane has his own demons to wrestle with as well. The war never did really end for Cane. In the course of this adventure he will be brought face-to-face with unfinished business from the war and he will encounter old Resistance comrades for whom the war also never ended. Lyall combines the action and the psychology with consummate skill. There’s a psychological dimension but also a moral dimension as well. Cane and Harvey are not mere thugs or strong-arm men. Maybe life would be simpler for them if they were but they are what they are and they have to learn to deal with it.

There are some splendid and original action set-pieces, including trench warfare (in 1965) with a vintage Rolls-Royce. There are the expected double-crosses but Lyall throws in some pleasing surprises.

This is an intelligent complex thriller. Lyall was one of the best thriller writers of his generation and Midnight Plus One sees him at the top of his game. Highly recommended.

And definitely check out Lyall's aviation-themed thrillers, The Most Dangerous Game and Shooting Script.

Gavin Lyall’s Shooting Script

Shooting Script was the fourth of Gavin Lyall’s very successful thrillers. It appeared in 1966. 

Gavin Lyall (1932-2003) had been an RAF fighter pilot before turning to journalism. He was for a time an aviation correspondent. Not surprisingly aviation plays a very major role in several of his early thrillers including the superb The Most Dangerous Game.

Shooting Script is another aviation thriller. Keith Carr is an ex-RAF fighter pilot who makes a precarious living as a charter pilot in the Caribbean, flying his own twin-engined De Havilland Dove. He is both surprised and annoyed when he is jumped by two Vampire jet fighters from the air force of Republica Libra, a mythical tinpot dictatorship. He is even more surprised when he discovers that he has attracted the attention of the FBI. They apparently believe he is involved in flying arms to rebels in Republica Libra. This is rather odd. He is a British subject and in any case why is the FBI interested in goings-on in Republica Libra - surely that would be a matter for the CIA?

An encounter with an old flying buddy, an Australian, from the Korean War deepens his mystification. Ned Rafter now runs the air force of Republica Libra (a grand total of twelve ancient De Havilland Vampire jet fighters). It appears that the joint dictators of Republica Libra also believe Keith is aiding the rebels but Ned offers him a job (an extraordinarily well-paid job) as his second-in-command. The most puzzling thing of all is that Keith is determinedly non-political and has no involvement whatsoever with rebels in Republica Libra or anywhere else. He declines the job.

He does get another fairly lucrative job, with a film company operating in Jamaica. The company is run by Walt Whitmore, an ageing but very successful cowboy/action movie star universally referred to as the Boss Man (and bearing more than a passing resemblance to John Wayne). They want Keith to fly a camera plane, an old B-25 medium bomber, for Whitmore’s latest  action epic. In the meantime Keith is to fly them to Republica Libra to scout locations. He has another encounter with a Vampire jet fighter, this time with much more serious consequences. 

Keith might not be interested in Caribbean politics but it soon becomes clear that Caribbean politics is interested in him. In fact he finds himself right slap bang in the middle of it, and there are some very unlikely players in this particular political game. And an extraordinary scheme that is more like something from a Walt Whitmore action movie.

Lyall was exceptionally good at incorporating aerial action into his thrillers. The dogfight between Keith’s lumbering unarmed Dove and a Vampire jet fighter is imaginative and exciting, made all the more tense by the fact that it’s a deadly game of chicken with no-one quite sure just how serious the dogfight is.

Gambling scenes in thrillers were the specialty of Ian Fleming but in this novel Lyall proves himself to be equally adept at using gambling as a metaphor for much more dangerous games.

The single greatest strength of this novel is the way Lyall uses both gambling and movie-making not just as colourful background but as the central engines of the plot (along with aviation of course). Keith Carr is caught up in an adventure that really does play out like a shooting script for a movie.

There are some fine and very imaginative action set-pieces. There’s plenty of sardonic humour and wise-cracking dialogue with more than a hint of the hardboiled school. There’s  romance, there are unexpected betrayals and equally unexpected loyalties.

Keith Carr is a fine and somewhat complex hero, a man who has found that killing is the one thing he’s really good at which is why he doesn’t want to do it any more. He was too good at it and started liking it too much. There are plenty of colourful larger-than-life characters but no real villains - all the major players in this story are a bit cynical but they all have some honour in them somewhere.

This really is a superb tautly-plotted thriller, possibly even better than his earlier The Most Dangerous Game (which was superb). Very highly recommended.

Gavin Lyall’s The Most Dangerous Game

Gavin Lyall (1932-2003) was an English writer who made his reputation with a series of thrillers between 1961 and the mid-70s, all featuring first-person narration and often with an aviation theme. After this his work went through several dramatic changes of style and direction. At the moment we are concerned with his second novel, The Most Dangerous Game, which appeared in 1963.

Lyall had served in the Royal Air Force and had worked as an aviation correspondent for the Sunday Times so it’s hardly surprising that flying plays a crucial role in so many of his books. It plays an absolutely central role in The Most Dangerous Game.

Bill Cary makes a somewhat precarious living as a floatplane pilot in Lapland, the northernmost province of Finland. The reason he came to be living in Finland will prove to be rather important. In fact Cary’s past, about which he is extremely vague, will prove to be very important. He does all kinds of flying jobs but mostly he does mineral survey work - searching primarily for nickel which a certain company is convinced is to be found in commercial quantities although so far no-one has succeeded in actually finding any. The reason the company believes there is nickel to be found will also play an important part in the story.

Cary flies a battered De Havilland Canada Beaver. Battered is putting it mildly. A Finnish Air Force pilot had crashed the plane. It was put back together again which is why Cary was able to buy it cheap. Unfortunately it wasn’t put back together again very well and the fact that it actually flies is a matter of some surprise to everyone, not least to Bill Cary.

With his mineral survey work having come to an end for the season Cary is happy to get any work he can. So he is happy enough to fly Frederick Wells Homer off into the wilderness to hunt bear. Frederick Wells Homer is a wealthy American, a true southern gentleman from the state of Virginia. Homer apparently spends his entire life hunting big game. Bill Cary doesn’t really approve of hunting but a job is a job. He also doesn’t entirely like the idea of having to fly into the prohibited zone - an area of Lapland close to the border of the Soviet Union where the Finnish government prohibit flying in order to minimise the risk of border incidents.

Having flown Homer off into the forest to hunt his bears Cary gets another job. Homer’s sister has suddenly arrived from the US and she is anxious to find her brother although Cary has the impression that her brother would prefer not to be found. Cary’s life starts to get even more complicated when he responds to a distress signal - a British Auster floatplane has crashed. Cary is able to rescue the pilot and his passenger but there are a coupler of things that bother him. Firstly, the Auster was equipped with a radar receiver - a device which tells a pilot when he is being tracked by radar. Hardly standard equipment, and not the sort of thing you would need unless you were doing something that was perhaps not quite legal. The second thing that bothers Cary is that he is quite sure that the passenger of the Auster is an SIS man - a British spy. 

Other strange things start to happen. Lapland seems to have become rather a dangerous place for floatplane pilots, and the Finnish security police are taking a great deal of interest in Bill Cary’s activities. There’s also the matter of gold sovereigns minted in Bombay, and the famous Volkof Treasure (supposedly a fabulous hoard of jewels hidden by a White Russian exile shortly after the Russian Revolution). And there’s the little matter of the Messerschmitt 410 at the bottom of a remote lake. Suddenly people who normally never carry guns seem to feel the need to do so and people start getting killed. Bill Cary seems to be at the centre of it all which is rather annoying since he has no idea why any of this is happening.

Bill Cary is a character almost as battered as the plane he flies. He is only just holding himself together, mostly with the aid of whisky and black coffee. He is not the happiest of men but he is even more unhappy to find himself caught in the middle of a web of double-crosses, family dramas, murder, criminal conspiracies and espionage. His biggest cause of unhappiness is finding that the past that he hoped he had escaped from has come back to haunt him.

Lyall is sometimes considered to have been influenced also by the American hardboiled school and there is perhaps something in that although it seems to me that by far the biggest influence on his work is Alistair McLean. This is very much a thriller in the MacLean tradition and in fact in this book Lyall makes use of a particular technique that MacLean was very fond of (I won’t say any more for fear of revealing spoilers). In general the structural similarities to MacLean’s work are quite striking.

The avoidance of graphic sex and violence is also very much in the MacLean mould. MacLean was (justifiably) confident enough in his story-telling abilities not to have to resort to such things. Fortunately Lyall is also a sufficiently competent spinner of adventure yarns to be able to dispense with these elements.

One of MacLean’s greatest strengths was his mastery of atmosphere, especially if the setting of a story happened to be the sea or some cold remote hostile place. Lyall has rather boldly chosen exactly the kind of location that MacLean favoured - a land of bleak snowswept forests and remote lakes. Lyall might not have quite the same gift for making the reader actually feel the cold in his bones but he does a fine job nonetheless. 

Lyall’s plotting is complex but assured and has a very pleasing symmetry to it. He ties together a mass of apparently unrelated mysteries and does it with commendable skill. His style is lucid and there’s some nicely hardboiled and cynical dialogue, with generous touches of sardonic humour. There’s also no shortage of action. 

If you’re an aviation geek you will love the way Lyall handles the flying elements - with a mixture of high excitement and technical detail which manages to be fascinating without being baffling to those of us who are not flyers. You’ll also appreciate the fact that there’s a great deal of flying in the book. Even if you’re not an aviation geek this is a superb suspense thriller. It might be in the Alistair MacLean mould but Lyall is no mere imitator - he has his own style and The Most Dangerous Game has its owen distinctive flavour. Highly recommended.