Donald Hamilton's Night Walker

Night Walker is an early (1954) spy thriller by Donald Hamilton. At this time he was a moderately successful writer of paperback originals in the crime, spy thriller and western genres. Then in 1960 (with the excellent Death of a Citizen) he created Matt Helm, the toughest most ruthless of all fictional spies, and from that point on he concentrated on writing Matt Helm thrillers.

Night Walker has some of the grittiness of the Helm novels, and it has an intriguingly not-totally-heroic hero.

David Young is a youthful Navy lieutenant on his way to report back to active duty. We will soon find out that he has very mixed feelings about this.

He hitches a ride and gets knocked on the head with a wrench. He wakes up in a hospital bed with his head entirely covered in bandages and discovers that everybody thinks he is Larry Wilson. Larry Wilson was the guy who hit him with a wrench.

In hospital he is visited by his wife Elizabeth, or rather Larry Wilson’s wife Elizabeth. For some reason she is anxious to believe that he is her husband. Or to have him believe that she believes he is her husband.

He also meets Wilson’s cute young girlfriend Bunny. For some reason David feels he should go along with the deception although he’s not sure why he agrees to do this. He can’t explain to himself why he doesn’t just reveal his true identity to the doctors.

This is one of the interesting things about the novel. David has some personal demons to wrestle with and he doesn’t always understand his own motivations. Or rather, he isn’t always honest with himself about his own motivations.

He and Elizabeth settle into a bizarre and uneasy married life. They sleep together. David doesn’t think he’s in love with her.

Elizabeth knows that this is not her husband. She offers David a detailed explanation of what happened to both David and her husband and why these things happened, and of her own part in it. David doesn’t believe a word of it, but he continues to go along with the charade.

There are definitely some hints of noir fiction already becoming apparent. A flawed hero allowing himself to be manipulated by a woman even though he knows he shouldn’t trust her. An atmosphere of deception and paranoia. Elizabeth will certainly strike the reader as a potential femme fatale. And there are hints of slightly odd sexual obsessions.

And then there’s Bunny. Everybody treats Bunny as if she’s a young girl but she’s a young woman. Her relationship with Larry Wilson is a bit mysterious. They were obviously lovers, but there’s something not quite right about the picture.

Another complication is that Elizabeth has a lover, a middle-aged doctor.

There’s a spy fiction plot developing as well. That list of boats that David found is the sort of list a spy might make. It could be a list of rendezvous points. And before bludgeoning him with the wrench Larry Wilson had admitted to being under suspicion as a communist spy.

You can see some of the early plot twists coming but I think that’s intentional on Hamilton’s part. He wants us to think that we’re starting to figure things out. Then he hits us with a series of plot twists. And then some more plot twists.

Things are getting out of control for David. He’s a fairly sympathetic hero. He does some dumb things. His judgment isn’t great when it comes to women. He is haunted by the past. Overall he’s not such a bad guy and we’re inclined to give him some slack. He’s a very imperfect hero but he’s believable enough. His mistakes make sense in view of what we know about his past. He’s a protagonist who could go either way - he could spiral down to destruction into a noirish nightmare world or he could pull himself out of the hole he’s in. We can’t predict which way things will go.

This is a grown-up spy thriller, with people who do foolish or wrong things for entirely understandable reasons. They’re real people.

Night Walker is a fine spy thriller. Highly recommended.

Night Walker is available in paperback from Hard Case Crime.