Into the Volcano: A Mallory & Morse Novel of Espionage [Hardcover]

Forrest DeVoe Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2004

The year is 1962. John Glenn is in orbit, Audrey Hepburn is breakfasting outside Tiffany's, and Elvis is recording "Bossa Nova Baby." The Gibson and D#233;tente are both in fashion, and both are served icy cold. And in the Foreigners' Quarter of Istanbul, a middle-aged Dutch spy has just met a fiery death.

Enter Mallory and Morse. Jack Mallory is a laconic ex-soldier from the oilfields of CorpusChristi. Laura Morse is a frostily beautiful Boston Brahmin adept at Floating Hand karate. Both are top operatives for the Consultancy, a shadowy covert-services network run by the enigmatic British ex-commando known as Gray. The Consultancy exists to execute those missions too dangerous or too dirty for the world's conventional intelligence agencies. The murdered man was their friend and colleague, and Gray has ordered them to take revenge.

It won't be easy. All signs point to athlete-turned-arms-dealer Anton Rauth, a man of vast means, refined tastes, and questionable sanity, currently holed up in his HQ inside an extinct South Seas volcano. His minions include two battle-hardened ex-GRU assassins: the dour Sasha Kurski and the genially murderous Piotr Nemerov, both rigorously trained and utterly remorseless. It's Mallory's job to let himself be captured. It's Laura's job to help him fight his way free again. With what they learn, they must penetrate the "nightclub" called Club Europa and then -- armed with little but scuba gear and nerve -- Rauth's island fortress itself.

But as they know all too well, Rauth is expecting them. He may even have factored them into his plans. And his plans -- for both Mallory and America -- are literally earthshaking ...

Into the Volcano is an homage to James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and the golden age of the spy thriller, a time when America was more innocent and its enemies possessed a dash of Space Age style. It takes the reader from bustling New York to steamy Istanbul, from Cannes' balmy breezes to the island known as the Dragon's Throne, and at last into the molten heart of the Cold War.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Bond fans will delight in this stylish spy thriller that takes us back to 1962, introducing the team of tomcatting Texan Jack Mallory and the willowy, aloof martial-arts master Laura Morse (think Emma Peel played by Gwyneth Paltrow). Sent to Istanbul when a fellow agent of "The Consultancy" has been flambeed in his shower, the duo mixes it up with bearish Russian assassins and doe-eyed belly dancers before finding themselves on the island fortress of the diabolical Anton Rauth, a megalomaniac with a twisted hand, a twisted mind, and a master plan involving a giant mechanical earthworm and the world's largest egg slicer. With just the right blend of substance and style, DeVoe pays homage to the Fleming school without arch commentary or camp--but with native girls, cool retro-futuristic gadgets, loutish henchmen, and hungry sharks. This is escapism at its finest and most fun, to be purchased along with the enticingly illustrated reprints of Fleming's original Bond books and Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise series. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

“[A] stylish spy thriller … This is escapism at its finest and most fun.” (Booklist )

“As much fun to read as watching a stack of Bond DVD’s.” (Mississippi Clarion-Ledger )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper (September 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060723769
• ISBN-13: 978-0060723767
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,801,124 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent spy drama, September 7, 2004

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Into the Volcano: A Mallory & Morse Novel of Espionage (Hardcover)

Hired by the Consultancy, Van Vliet is in Istanbul where he believes that the Club Europa is being built as a cover for something else. Before he informs Gray, the head of the Consultancy, a profit-making black-ops organization, he is killed in his shower by a head that emits flame instead of water. It is 1962 and the cold war is fought by the Consultancy who the CIA hires to find out what is going on in Istanbul.

Gray sends his two best operatives, Jack Mallory and Laura Morse to Istanbul where they learn that their old nemesis Anton Rauth hired mercenaries to kill them. Still alive, the duo find an earth digging machine in the cellar of the Club used to construct a tunnel into the Turks equivalent of Ft. Knox. Jack and Laura are sent to the volcanic island of He' Konau where Rauth has his base of operations inside the volcano. There assignment is to gather intelligence but they are caught snooping and only a miracle will save their lives and that of millions of people when Anton unleashes his master weapon.

No doubt about it, the team of Mallory and Morse are the equal of 007 and other spy heroes that graced the pages of the spy thrillers of the 1960's. There is action, action and more action but like James Bond there is much tongue in cheek humor that lessens the tensions when it threatens to become overwhelming. Forest DeVoe Jr. has written an excellent spy drama and one can only hope he writes more starring the intrepid protagonists Mallory and Morse.

Harriet Klausner

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cool Retro Spy Fun, August 11, 2007

By 

EddieLove "EddieLove" (NYC, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Into the Volcano: A Mallory and Morse Novel of Espionage (Paperback)

This 60s era cold war throwback is admirably played straight, and not for Austin Powers style laughs. There are even a few nicely drawn whacked-out thugs in the Elmore Leonard mode. Let's hope the true blue heroes are given a little more substance in the follow-ups.

3.0 out of 5 stars Anatomy of a Borrowed "Volcano", September 6, 2011

By 

J. Ennis "countjason" (Dayton, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Into the Volcano: A Mallory and Morse Novel of Espionage (Paperback)

Into the Volcano is like a mosaic that borrows a lot of bright pieces from past spy genre works and pastes them together in hopes of creating something that might pass as a forgotten gem. It is almost impossible to read this first Mallory and Morse novel and not think about The Avengers, James Bond, and Modesty Blaise. A partially American version of The Avengers, the aborted Avengers International series, is particularly reminiscent whenever reflecting for very long upon Laura Morse, an American Mrs. Peel. Jack Mallory, on the other hand, is no gentlemanly John Steed. He is closer perhaps to a more independent Willie Garvin by way of a young James Coburn. While it may be helpful to make all these comparisons to popular and well-established pillars of the genre on the book cover, readers may at first feel slighted by the obviousness in the writing itself. To the author's credit, though, there is enough uniqueness in Mallory and Morse for readers to come away from the novel thinking of these characters as ultimately being separate from their influences.

The villain's set pieces described are obviously influenced by Ken Adam's work on the James Bond films. Some of the gadgetry is also suggested by the Bond films. Others, like the water sleds, seem more akin to Hasbro's GI Joe toy line. Anton Rauth's sexual dysfunction is very much in keeping with Ian Fleming's villains and I also couldn't help but to think of (the Modesty Blaise villain) Gabriel when reflecting upon Rauth. Rauth's plan is unique and well thought-out, but implausible in a comic book fantasy way and at odds with the realism of torture scenes in a way that only this genre allows for.

Into the Volcano avoids kitsch while reaching back and remains tensely serious, putting its protagonists through some very rough, gritty realistic torture scenes comparable to Fleming's Casino Royale.

The writing is well done and is never as bad as some of the slapdash Bond-clone pulps that were being churned out in the 60s by authors who had previously written crime fiction. This is far better planned. The writer does overuse the expression "hunker down" way too much in the final chapters and certain details like describing a telephone line as a "land line" is somewhat inauthentic for the 1960s.

The work itself is divided into two connecting "books" or novelettes, with the events of one adventure directly leading to the other.

I found myself able to stop reading at times, but the final chapters are suspenseful (and inventive at times - as with the egg slicer) and I am pleased with the novel overall. I might have been more pleased had it had more of the witty tongue-in-cheek humor of some of its source influences. We have a bit in the afterword, but not much in the narrative. I'm not sure how the author manages not to really. I do look forward to reading the second novel and hope that the end product of that novel will not leave me wondering so much about the glue binding these all these borrowed pieces together. I'm hoping for a more original experience and Into the Volcano strives to distinguish itself often enough that one can certainly have hope.