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Back Up Men

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During his lifetime, Ross Thomas embarked on 3 specific series.This book might be the high point of the second, the Mac's Placebooks. Mike Padillo is the vaguely foreign rake who is the silent partner in a bar & grill run by Mac McCorkle, a former foreign correspondant. Usually told from Mac's point of view, these stories involve missions that Padillo, a former spy, is drawn into. This one involves protecting a Middle-eastern king from an oil conglomerate that needs him dead by a certain date. As is usual for Ross Thomas, the emphasis is on character, dialoge and irony, not necessarily in that order. In this, he displayed why he was considered the mystery writers' favorite storyteller by layering his tale with an authenic mystery along with the wanton sex and violence.

This highly improbable tale, originally published in 1971, is best categorized as a tongue-in-cheek dark comedy. It features Mac McCorkle and Mike Padillo, recurring Ross Thomas characters first introduced to the world in The Cold War Swap and its sequel Cast a Yellow Shadow.

The Backup Men finds McCorkle and Padillo reluctantly taking a break from being saloonkeepers in Washington DC in order to provide bodyguard services for an incognito Arabian potentate as he travels from New York to San Francisco. McCorkle provides the narration.

As is the case with all Ross Thomas fiction, The Backup Men overflows with an urbane style of humor that is very appealing. The novel's strongest feature is its plentiful dialogue: reliably clever and often taking the form of no nonsense, "Dragnet" style verbal exchanges that move things along at a fast paced clip.

This short, over-the-top, easy to read novel is clearly a lesser entry in the Thomas canon. Nevertheless, the great dialogue alone makes it a worthwhile read.

This is one of a series from Thomas about the co-owners of "Macs Place " a well regarded restaurant in Washington D C .They are McCorkle ,who is also the narrator of the book , and his partner Michael Padillo ,who is the pivotal figure of the novel .Padillo , in the past , had been an agent and a hit man for the US government and still has connections with influential figures in the espionage and political world .

They are asked by a male/female pair of Swiss twins to act as backup men on a job the twins have accepted ,to guard a young Arab prince who is about to inherit the wealth of an oil rich state and who is the target of assassins who wish to stop him from signing over key oil leases to the West .They decline .Events take a darker turn when the male twin ,Walter Gothar ,is found starngled in McCorkle's apartment and the partners are pressured by Washington to take the assignment of guarding the Prince

The tone up to this point has been polished and urbane -with a distinctly English type of ironoic detachment .This serves the book well until it reaches its violent climax shootout at which innocent bystanders are killed and betrayal is heavy in the air .Here the tone undercuts the gracity of the subject and the novel loses its grip

Thomas was a polished writer whose tone was always rather remote and disinterested ,sacrificing involvement for detachment in his literary "voice "

and this is quite evident in this book

One for the espionage novel mavens among us