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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Meal of a Mystery,
By R. Sundquist (Madison, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Rotten with Honour (Hardcover)
Derek Robinson is known mostly (inasmuch as he's known at all) as the author of several books about fighter pilots in both world wars. There are six of them, three for each war. Besides those he's also written several hugely entertaining spy novels, each with a heavy dose of slapstick and black comedy. Luis Cabrillo is his most successful character, beginning his career in Madrid in 1941, moving to New York in 1953, and ending up in Las Vegas a few years later. ROTTEN WITH HONOUR has neither airplanes nor Germans (nor Luis), but it does have British and Soviet agents trying to make fools out of each other in the middle Cold War London.The story is smaller and shorter than the average Robinson novel. David Hale is a likeable hero, a thoroughly decent man ("rotten with honour," according to his Soviet nemesis), devoted to doing what's right, who discovers just how unsuited he is to life as a secret agent. He loves his country with a sort of naive, outmoded patriotism, and explains to his girlfriend Carol that he's willing to do what needs to be done to "keep the country clean for people like you". He may be willing, but he's not very good at it. Most of the action takes place in London, following Hale's encounters with a ruthless Russian agent, Starin, as both of them try to get their hands on Project 107, which may or may not be the groundbreaking work of a genius scientist. Hale is a bungling, earnest amateur watched over by his boss and various other British agents; Starin is a coldblooded professional whose greatest problem is that he never expected his adversary to be so incompetent. Being a spy is enough trouble when everyone knows what they're doing; Hale's interference makes Starin's life even harder. The plot chugs along, riffing on generic spy-novel tropes with Robinson's usual satiric wit. His ear for sharp dialogue is in full effect, and his characters are as keenly-observed as ever. He has always had an economy of language, and he manages to evoke even very minor characters with only a few well-picked words (the doorman "who only ever smiled to show the dentist where it hurt" is one of my favorites). The climax takes our heroes to Bristol, where the Soviet agents are stymied by incomprehensible road maps, street signs, and unhelpful natives. ROTTEN WITH HONOUR is a modest novel, but it's always fun to see a tired genre cleverly subverted by a great writer.
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