James Eastwood’s The Chinese Visitor

The Chinese Visitor was the first of James Eastwood’s three Anna Zordan spy thrillers. It belongs to the sexy spy thriller sub-category.

It was published in 1965. This was at the height of Bond Fever but it was also a time when lady spies were becoming very much the in-thing. Cathy Gale had become a pop culture icon in The Avengers TV series while another pop icon, comic-strip heroine Modesty Blaise, made her first appearance in print in 1963. So a series of novels about a female spy was almost guaranteed to attract a readership.

I have been able to find out virtually nothing about James Eastwood. He was almost certainly English and appears to have been born in 1918. I suspect he’s the same man as the James Eastwood who wrote some extremely interesting movies such as Devil Girl from Mars, Urge To Kill and The Counterfeit Plan.

The Chinese Visitor provides us with Anna’s backstory.

It opens with the assassination of a top Chinese politician while on a visit to London. In the ensuing confusion the police naturally arrest anyone they don’t like the look of. One of those arrested is young Hungarian-born Anna Zordan. They can’t pin anything on her apart from resisting arrest. She spends a couple of days locked up.

She returns to her flat to find she has a sinister visitor. A visitor who has some disturbing things to tell her about the murder of her parents in Vienna some time earlier, a trauma from which Anna has not fully recovered. The visitor informs her that her father was a spy for the Chinese. She doesn’t believe him but she does believe that he was the one who killed her parents and that she’s about to be killed. Fortunately her would-be killer didn’t expect to encounter any serious resistance from a harmless-looking girl. She does more than resist. She puts a couple of bullets into him.

A dead man in her living room is a bit of an embarrassment. Then she remembers a very nice middle-aged Englishman who was very sympathetic to her in Vienna after her parents were murdered. His name was Sarratt and he worked for the Foreign Office. He told her to contact him if she ever found herself in trouble. She contacts him and that’s how she finds herself recruited to an ultra-top secret British counter-espionage agency.

Her first assignment is to check on a man named Steiner, an American who runs a virulently anti-communist aid organisation for refugees. He seems clean, but Sarratt isn’t convinced. He’d have been less convinced had he known of Steiner’s recent trip to Albania, Albania being China’s loyal ally.

Anna will have to get close to Steiner and there’s a race against time element. Sarratt knows of a Chinese plot to assassinate important western leaders, including the British Foreign Secretary. He has a hunch that Steiner is involved.

Anna is new to the spy game but she’s a natural. Even without training she had been able to dispose of a professional assassin. She’s demonstrated that she’s a girl who keeps her cool in sticky situations. She speaks five languages. She likes playing games, the more dangerous the better. She’s intelligent and she’s an expert seductress.

Anna is a very 60s heroine. She likes sex and she gets plenty of it. She’s not overly fond of rules. She likes her independence.

There’s not as much sex as there is in the later books in the series but there’s some, and as in those books there are hints of perversity. Anna picks up a nice young Italian stud at a party only to find that his favourite hobby is torture.

The violence is low-key. There’s suspense and Anna has a few hair’s-breadth escapes.

The plot is serviceable enough. Atmosphere is more important than plot in spy fiction and this book achieves the right mood of duplicity and ruthlessness.

The Chinese Visitor is a solid competent spy thriller with a likeable heroine. Recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the third Anna Zordan thriller, Come Die With Me, which is very clever and a lot of fun (and in my view superior to The Chinese Visitor).