Michael Crichton's Scratch One

Michael Crichton is best remembered for his novels in the science fiction/techno-thriller genres but early in his career he wrote quite a few straightforward thrillers using the pseudonym John Lange. Scratch One, published in 1967, was his second novel.

The basic concept, a poor innocent schmuck who gets drawn into a web of espionage and has no idea what is going on, has been used often but here it’s done with real style and energy. In this case it begins with a case of mistaken identity.

Roger Carr is an American lawyer who is in Nice to buy a villa for a client. He really is just a lawyer. And he really is in France to be a villa. Unfortunately he looks just enough like Morgan to be mistaken for him by someone making an identification solely from a photograph. And he’s arrived on the plane on which Morgan was expected to be travelling. Who is Morgan? Morgan is an assassin employed by the US Government. By the CIA in fact.

Morgan had been assigned by the CIA to kill every member of an Arab organisation known as the Associates. The five members of the Associates have found out about an arms deal involving Israel. It’s an arms deal that the Americans wanted kept secret. There were various options for dealing with the Associates but in order to avoid embarrassing publicity the CIA felt the best method was simply to kill them all.

The Associates know about Morgan. They want him dealt with and they have mistaken Roger Carr for the assassin. The local CIA people are also under the impression that Roger Carr is Morgan.

Roger Carr isn’t a great lawyer but he’s rather a success with the ladies. And then Anne comes along. Anne is an Australian model. He really likes her and he starts to fall for her, hard.

Anne gets captured. Poor old Roger gets captured and tortured by the Associates. He gets arrested by the French cops as well. And interrogated by the CIA. Nobody believes anything he says. This is the world of espionage. There are endless layers of deception. He could be a simple lawyer pretending to be an assassin pretending o be a regular lawyer. Everyone assumes that everyone else is lying. The most confusing thing you can do is tell the truth. If you genuinely seem to be telling the truth then you must be lying.

Roger is a bumbling amateur. But the truth is that the Associates are bumbling amateurs as well. They make a mess of even the simplest assassinations. And the CIA guys are bunglers as well. The guys who take all this espionage stuff most seriously and think of themselves as professionals are the worst bunglers of all. Roger really is a compete amateur but he’s not as foolish and incompetent as the professionals.

The French cops actually do know what they’re doing but they’re hamstrung by their reluctance to get embroiled in a major CIA fiasco.

The Associates are the bad guys but the whole CIA operation is sleazy and immoral. There aren’t really any straightforward bad guys. The arms deal is essentially a MacGuffin. Crichton isn’t interested in the politics. He’s interested in the amount of mayhem that can be caused by spy agencies and spy rings who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are, and he’s interested in the duplicity of the entire word of espionage. He handles this subject with style and wit.

And he gives some fine action and suspense and thrills as well.

This may seem odd but this book reminds me a bit of John le Carré’s The Looking Glass War, a great novel (probably le Carré’s finest) about a hopelessly bungled British intelligence operation. Both le Carré’s novel and Scratch One have more than a touch of absurdism. The le Carré book is darker but both have touches of black comedy.

I enjoyed Scratch One so much that I’m now anxious to read all of Crichton’s early thrillers. Highly recommended.