Donald Hamilton’s The Ambushers

The Ambushers, published in 1963, was the sixth of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm spy thrillers.

Donald Hamilton (1916-2006) was an American writer who worked in various genres but is best known for his spy novels. The Matt Helm books bear no resemblance to the Matt Helm movies (which are great fun in their own way). Matt Helm is a US Government assassin.

It’s important to note that it’s best to read the early Matt Helm novels in publication order. It’s certain essentially to start with the first book in the series, Death of a Citizen, which gives vitally important backstory information that explains Helm’s motivations.

The Matt Helm novels definitely belong to the gritty realist school of spy fiction. These are hardboiled spy thrillers. Helm is not James Bond - he’s much more ruthless. He doesn’t particularly like being a secret agent but he carries out his assignments with brutal efficiency. He is not a thug. He has complicated feelings about the job. But if ordered to kill he will do so without hesitation.

He also has a pragmatic approach when it comes to other American agents. If it’s necessary to sacrifice an American agent in order to achieve the mission Matt won’t like it but he’ll do it. They’re professionals. They knew the risks when they signed on. It’s a tough dirty game.

The Ambushers begins in a small South American republic. The ruling regime of President Avila is fairly corrupt and fairly vicious but they’re America’s allies. Helm’s assignment is to assassinate the rebel leader Santos. The rebels might well have justifiable reasons for opposing Avila’s regime but in the world of espionage and intelligence right and wrong don’t matter. The US Government wants Santos dead.

Helm finds himself with a secondary mission - to rescue Sheila. Sheila is an American agent. Her job had been to get herself into the good graces of Santos by getting herself into his bed. It all went badly wrong. Sheila did however discover something, something concealed in the jungle. Matt discovers it as well. It’s a nasty surprise.

There was another surprise for Matt. He certainly did not expect to see von Sachs among Santos’s cronies. His presence there may be connected to Sheila’s disturbing discovery.

Matt thinks his mission is over but his boss Mac has a new mission for him and he doesn’t like the sound of it. He has also acquired a partner - Sheila. Sheila is all messed up after having been held captive in the jungle for months. She was starved and tortured and it’s strongly implied that she was raped. The intelligence agency’s doctor figures she’ll take a year to recover, if she ever recovers. She tells Matt she wants to be his partner on the new mission. Matt understands. The last thing Sheila wants is to be treated like a victim. He persuades Mac to let her go along.

The objective is to kill von Sachs. First they have to find him. They have some leads - some people who may have been in contact with him. Matt has no way of knowing whether these people are von Sachs’ associates or his enemies. He therefore has no way to know if he should consider them to be allies or enemies. If they’re allies, they may have their own agendas.

So there’s plenty of potential for just about everybody to be double-crossed by everybody else. And in fact there are double-crosses aplenty.

Matt also has to worry about Sheila - will she crack up and let him down?

The Matt Helm novels are excellent hard-edged spy thrillers and this is a good one and it’s highly recommended although I do slightly prefer The Silencers and Murderers’ Row.

I’ve reviewed most of the previous Matt Helm novels - Death of a Citizen, The Wrecking Crew, The Silencers and Murderers’ Row. They’re all excellent.

Matt Helm: The Removers

The Removers was the third of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm spy thrillers. The first thing you need to understand when approaching the Matt Helm books is that they bear little or no resemblance to the films. The films are great high camp fun but the Matt Helm novels are serious spy fiction and very hard-boiled.

Swedish-born American writer Donald Hamilton (1916-2006) published twenty-seven Matt Helm books between 1960 and 1993, as well as writing crime fiction and westerns.

One of the interesting features of the early Matt Helm novels is that they absolutely must be read in sequence. It is assumed that the reader is aware of crucial background information on both the hero’s professional career and personal life contained in the previous books in the series. The events of the earlier books have a significant impact on the hero’s life and on his attitude towards his job. If you haven’t read the first two books (Death of a Citizen and The Wrecking Crew) then for one thing you’re not going to comprehend the relationship between Matt Helm and Beth in The Removers. You’re also not going to understand most of Helm’s motivations.

This makes The Removers tricky to review since I have to avoid spoilers not only for this novel but also for the previous ones. I’ll do my best to make this review totally spoiler-free but this does mean that I’ll have to be extra vague about elements of the plot.

Matt Helm is a US counter-espionage agent of a rather specialised kind. In fact he’s more or less a professional assassin. He had been involved in very secret, and very deadly, operations during the Second World War as part of a unit run by a man known as Mac. After the war he had returned to civilian life and made his living writing westerns. One day his past caught up with him and he found himself back in the world of espionage again. He thought this was going to be a strictly temporary thing but it’s not an easy world to walk away from.

The Removers begins with Matt being asked for help, quite out of the blue, by Beth. He’s due for a vacation anyway so he sets off for Nevada. He’s a bit curious as to why Mac wants him to make contact with another agent there. This is supposed to be a vacation after all.

As one might expect it proves to be a very eventful vacation. When he gets to the ranch he meets a girl. Her name seems familiar. This is not surprising since she’s the daughter of a notorious racketeer. The very specialised agency for which Matt works does not usually concern itself with mobsters but perhaps there’s something more going on here? The alert reader will already have noticed references to some curious accidents in the area.

What Matt has walked into is not just a situation involving spies and gangsters but also a complicated series of interconnecting family squabbles and one of the families involved is his own.

One of the many differences between the Matt Helm books and the Bond books is in the settings. Hamilton did not go in for exotic locales to the extent that most of his contemporary thriller writers did. The Removers takes place entirely in Nevada, in cheap motels and cabins and on remote horse trails. Hamilton wrote westerns as well as thrillers so perhaps it’s not surprising he’d pick a setting that would have worked fine in a western. And can you imagine James Bond being in Nevada and not gambling? Matt Helm simply has no interest in gambling. 

Matt also does not drive a typical secret agent car. He drives a battered Chevy pickup truck.

The tone is remarkably brutal. Matt Helm is not a glamorous spy and he’s also entirely lacking in chivalry or honour or any romantic notions whatsoever. He’s a professional. He gets the job done. If other people get hurt that’s very unfortunate. He tries not to get innocent bystanders involved but sometimes it happens and he doesn’t lose any sleep over it. The US government pays him and he leaves it to them to worry about any ethical concerns. He is also not into the noble self-sacrificing hero thing. He does his job but he sees no reason why he should take unnecessary risks.

While the Matt Helm books do not subscribe to the kind of moral relativism that became fashionable among some 60s spy writers they do not shrink from the fact that both sides in the Cold War espionage game played by the same rules. The KGB has its cold-blooded killers but they’re no more coild-blooded than Matt Helm. This gives the book a very modern feel. Matt Helm is not an anti-hero but he is an uncompromisingly tough and brutal hero. Overall the tone is much closer to Greene and Ambler than to Fleming, but with generous helpings of the sex and violence that Fleming had added to the genre.

The Removers is violent and cynical but it’s also exciting and well-crafted. This is a gritty realist noir spy novel and Hamilton does it well. If you’re a fan of spy fiction the early Matt Helms are essential reading. Highly recommended.

Donald Hamilton's The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew was the second of Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novels. Matt Helm is a US spy, he works for an ultra-secret intelligence agency, his boss is named Mac and he uses his work as a photographer as a cover. Those are the only real resemblances between the novel and the movie of the same name, in fact they’re the only resemblances between the Matt Helm novels as a whole and the Matt Helm movies.

Not only is the plot entirely different, the tone of the novel is a million miles away from that of the films. The Matt Helm novels were intended as serious hardboiled spy stories and on that level they work pretty well. They were obviously influenced by the success of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels - there’s plenty of sex, plenty of violence and also plenty of glamour. Both Fleming and Hamilton were surprisingly successful in combining glamour with hard-edged and often brutal stories. Hamilton’s novels might not be quite as good as Fleming’s but they’re certainly not without interest.

The early novels in this series have to be read in sequence. Matt Helm had been a wartime operative (with the code-name Eric) for a very hush-hush US agency that the Germans nicknamed the Mordgruppe. They were also known in some quarters as the Wrecking Crew. Their boss was known only as Mac. They operated behind enemy lines and their speciality was assassination. After the war Helm retired into civilian life, moved to New Mexico, married and had a family and made a living as both a photographer and an author of western novels. How he came to find himself working for Mac’s outfit again well over a decade later is told in considerable detail in the first novel in the series, Death of a Citizen. That novel provides essential and detailed background information on the kind of man Matt Helm is and on his wartime career and the beginnings of his new career as a Cold War spy.

The Wrecking Crew sees Helm is Sweden, tracking a shadowy Soviet agent named Caselius. An American journalist named Taylor had uncovered some facts about this Soviet spy and as a result had been gunned down with a machine pistol in East Germany. His wife Louise survived the attack and she’s now the best lead they have. She’s writing an article about industrial and mining developments in northern Sweden for a magazine so Helm is off to Sweden where he will be taking the photographs to accompany the article. His mission is to kill Caselius.

There’s no namby-pamby nonsense about bringing Caselius to justice. Mac’s agency doesn’t work that way. They deal with people who are much too dangerous to be allowed to live. Helm accepts this as part of his job. He killed in the cause of freedom during the war and he sees no problem in killing in the cause of freedom in this new undeclared war, the Cold War. The stakes are just as high, the dangers are just as real, and his targets are just as much of a threat to civilisation.

Helm got the assignment because his cover as a photographer is perfect for the job and he speaks Swedish (he is in fact of Swedish ancestry).

First Matt has to make contact with the resident American intelligence agent in Sweden, or rather she makes contact with him. Sara Lundgren doesn’t like Helm and she doesn’t approve of his methods. Working with her is going to be a challenge. Working with Louise Taylor will be a challenge of a different sort. Both are, in their very different ways, dangerous women. And they’re not the only dangerous women Matt will encounter. There’s also Elin, a very very distant cousin of his.
 
Helm will also encounter some very dangerous men, some of whom may or may not be on his side. In fact it becomes more and more difficult to tell who is on his side. Everyone seems to have their own agenda and everyone he meets could turn out to be really working for the Russians. The ones who are simply working for the Soviets aren’t the problem. Much more difficult are the people with personal agendas. Most difficult of all are the starry-eyed idealists who think they are saving the world. Matt doesn’t trust anyone who thinks they are saving the world, and it’s a sound policy.

Matt Helm is a professional assassin and he’s a tough guy. He has his own personal problems to deal with and compared to many fictional secret agents he’s a remarkably well-rounded character. He has a personal life and he has emotions, and he doesn’t always enjoy the things he has to do. He is not troubled by killing; he believes that the people he kills are being killed for good reasons and he doesn’t lose any sleep over it. He’s not a conscienceless killer; he simply believes that sometimes it is necessary. But in operations of this kind other people can get killed as well, and that does sometimes bother him.

These novels lack the kind of tedious nihilistic cynicism that started to afflict spy fiction during the 60s. They don’t have that “both sides are just as bad as each other” kind of attitude. Matt Helm moves in a world where there are good guys and bad guys. The good guys aren’t perfect but they’re still the good guys and the bad guys aren’t necessarily psychopathic monsters but they’re still the bad guys. Personally I find that refreshing.

It has other things going for it, but most all all, The Wrecking Crew is fast-paced action-filled fun. Recommended, but if you read Death of a Citizen first you’ll appreciate The Wrecking Crew even more.

Matt Helm: Death of a Citizen, Donald Hamilton

Death of a Citizen, published in 1960, was the first of Donald Hamilton’s many Matt Helm spy novels. The character is better remembered these days from the four 1960s movies staring Dean Martin as the super-cool super-spy.

The movies were tongue-in-cheek romps and great fun. If you only know the character from the movies then Death of a Citizen will come as quite a surprise. There is some sly humour but mostly it’s a gritty and rather dark tale of espionage. The only connection between the Matt Helm of the book and the Matt Helm of the movies is that both are photographers, but the book’s version of the character earns his living as a writer with photography being a sideline.

During the Second World War Matt Helm had served in a very shadowy US branch of the US intelligence services. They had no official existence (plausible deniability and all that) and worked undercover in Occupied Europe. A bit along the lines of the British Special Operations Executive, but with a difference. Matt Helm and his fellow agents were essentially assassins. The name of the organisation is never mentioned at any stage in the book.

The war is now long over and Matt Helm is now happily married and living a quite and generally unobtrusive life in New Mexico, earning a good living as a writer of westerns. He has three kids and family life agrees with him. He’s still in pretty good shape but he’s just a little heavier than he had been during those wartime days, and with a bit less hair. He’s almost forgotten that he was once a spy and an assassin.

So it comes a bit of a shock to him when Tina turns up at a cocktail party in New Mexico. Tina had been one of his fellow agents. She’s sort of an old flame as well, except that their very brief relationship during the war had been based purely on lust. It’s even more of a shock when she gives him one of their old recognition signals, a signal that means he should pretend not to know her and that she has important information for him. He’d assumed that all of his fellow operatives had been put out to pasture like him. Tina is apparently still an active agent in the field.

Matt wants none of this. He’s a happily married man. He’s retired from the spy business. Now Tina wants to tell him that Russian agents are planning to assassinate a neighbour of his, an atomic scientist who works nearby as a place called Los Alamos. And that he’s been reactivated. He’s unpleasantly reminded of the fact that their boss, Mac, told him after the war that they could never retire from an organisation that officially didn’t exist. His happy assumption that the organisation would have been long since closed down is apparently false. He’s still determined to have no part in any of this, until the dead girl turns up in his study. Tina has killed her and tells him the girl was a Russian agent, an assassin who works for the Soviet counterpart to their organisation.

Now he has no choice, and is drawn back into the world of the professional spy. And nothing is what it seems to be.

The novel packs a lot of action into its 140 pages. There are no gadgets. This is a world of deception and danger where spies rely on their wits and their training. And of course guns. It’s a world where killing is an unpleasant necessity. Matt Helm is a very good killer.

Anyone writing a spy novel in 1960 was going to be influenced by Ian Fleming whose reputation had by this time spread from Britain to the US in a big way. Fleming’s James Bond novels, unlike the Bond movies, were dark and surprisingly realistic spy thrillers (and they also featured no gadgets). They differed from earlier spy fiction in having a lot more violence and a lot more sex. Fleming did for espionage fiction what Mickey Spillane did for crime fiction. Death of a Citizen follows the same formula - plenty of fairly graphic violence and plenty of sex.

Matt Helm is not unlike Bond, although he’s a less polished version. He doesn’t drive a vintage Bentley, he drives a beat-up ’51 Chevy pickup truck. But he’s just as ruthless. He has perhaps more of a conscience than Bond but both characters understand equally well that their job is vitally necessary even if the more squeamish members of their society would prefer not to think about such things.

The main difference is that Matt Helm no longer wants to be part of this world. He doesn’t want to go back to killing for a living.

I can’t confirm this since this is the first Matt Helm book I’ve read but I’m told that the early ones at least have to be read in sequence. I liked it enough that I’ll probably seek out the second book, The Wrecking Crew. If you enjoy spy fiction from the era before it became bogged down in moral relativism and cynicism you could do worse than check out Donald Hamilton’s work.

Matt Helm's adventures continue in The Wrecking Crew, The Removers and Murderers’ Row.