Customer Reviews

passport to peril

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

(3 & 1/2 stars) The first (and important) thing to note is that the author of this book is NOT the Robert B. Parker of the Spenser series. This author has the same middle initial but a different middle name. The cover refers to him as "The ORIGINAL Robert B. Parker" because his work predated the Spenser Parker's. At the end of Passport to Peril, there's an interesting afterword by this Parker's daughter where she talks about his life and work.

Anyhow, this tale was a fast-paced and exciting spy story involving Cold War intrigue, being caught behind enemy lines, romance, gunplay, etc. The plot has some holes in it that surface periodically, but I didn't find them too annoying. There's a mysterious manila folder that everyone seems to be looking for that's a bit of a McGuffin, but really, it's the situations and scenes that come along one after the other that kept me going. Despite any minor flaws, I found this book to be entertaining. While not quite a "page-turner," I remained interested until the end.

For those who see Passport to Peril by Robert B. Parker, the first impression would be it was by the author of the popular Spenser series. Both front and back covers, therefore, make it clear that this is a different author by the same name, a minor pulp fiction writer who came out with just a couple novels in the early 1950s before dying at the relatively early age of 49. Fortunately, the publisher Hard Case Crime specializes in re-releasing these long out-of-print novels, giving Parker a new, if posthumous, audience.

The narrator of Passport to Peril is John Stodder who is on his way to post WWII Budapest on the Orient Express. He is traveling on a false passport, intent on sneaking into the city to track down his missing brother. Into his train car bursts Maria Torres, in fear for her life after her boss has been killed. As Stodder quickly realizes, the murdered man has the name on his fake passport, putting him at risk from both the law and the killers. He jumps off the train with Maria, but his effort to avoid capture is only briefly successful; soon, they are the captives of the evil Dr. Schmidt, a former Nazi who is after a list that Maria's boss had and which Stodder hid before his capture.

The two are separated, and Stodder soon is able to escape with the assistance of a husband-and-wife team of American Intelligence agents. They are interested in the list, while Stodder is interested in saving Maria and finding out what happened to his brother. Fortunately, their interests coincide, and the three will team up to try and stop Schmidt and his cohorts.

Published originally in 1951, Passport to Peril is one of the earliest Cold War thrillers. It is a decent enough book, though the plot can sometimes be a little muddled. Overall, however, Parker's book is a nice lightweight thriller: not necessarily a book worth waiting almost six decades to be reprinted, but at least a pleasant diversion.

This month's Hard Case reprint is a 1950s' espionage thriller set in post-war Hungary. The author's name is Robert B. Parker, but not THAT Robert P. Parker. This Parker, as we learn from the book's afterword (penned by the author's daughter), was a wartime correspondent and quite possibly an OSS operative. He lived fast and died relatively young. We therefore see that "Passport to Peril" is somewhat autobiographical in nature.

The plot is rather heavily dependent on coincidence. The narrator, John Stodder, is a reporter and World War II veteran trying to smuggle himself behind the Iron Curtain -- not on any official American business, but rather to find out his brother, MIA since the war. That's the back story, anyway. Stodder's ill-gotten passport turns out to belong to a murdered Swiss businessman who had connections to A) Russian authorities, B) conspiring ex-Nazis, and C) Stodder's missing brother. That's a lot of balls in the air for Parker to juggle, and perhaps the three plot threads turn out to be a little too closely connected.

Still, the characters we meet are colorful, and Hungary in the 1950s is not a locale on which we've already burned out from too many Ian Fleming novels. The book reads fast and the ending is appropriately bloody for a novel steeped in this much intrigue.

This exciting, fast-paced thriller is set in the time after World War II during the Cold War. John Stodder goes to the Russian border to determine what happens to his brother. After an unfortunate accident, he acquires the passport of a dead man and a manila envelope. Without preamble, he suddenly rescues a young lady named Maria, is later captured, tortured, escapes, and seeks to find the stolen manila envelope. Learning what happened to his brother, Stodder realizes that getting the envelope back is secondary to saving Maria from the clutches of Dr. Schmidt. Helped by a couple and another spy, Stodder causes mayhem and destruction, recovers the envelope, saves Maria, and gets vengeance.

All very fun stuff in a kind of serious old school drama. The writing is smooth, quick, without extraneous description but pointed enough to share in the excitement. While additional characterizations would make the people come alive, there is enough to know who to trust and who to disdain along the way. This causes a real connection with the story and synchronization of the emotions and action by the reader. Confusing details of the cities and the politics are overcome by the quick action and the constant energy of the story.

An enjoyable book in the tradition of Graham Greene or Alfred Hitchcock, Passport to Peril deserves its place among the exciting thrillers written about the Cold War. Owning a first edition hardback, I was not deceived by the confusing picture on Amazon of the wrong Robert B. Parker; yet it is hoped that this detail can be fixed at some point. Easy to read and exciting, this book is recommended for thriller enthusiasts wanting to trace an earlier form of the genre.

As I opened this book I told my girlfriend that if I didn't like the first sentence, I was going to put it aside and read no further.... the pressure was on.

"It wasn't until the Orient Express was nearing the Hungarian border, about two hours out of Vienna, that I found I was traveling on the passport of a murdered man."

Brilliant! Needless to say, I continued onward, enjoying the book to the end.

Passport to Peril is a lot of fun, and offers an interesting perspective on circa 1950 Hungary, at the time a mysterious place few Americans had hope ever to visit or to know, the author exploiting his particularly adventurous career as a reporter. It's a window into a past age, as well as a wonderful read.

This is an old reprint of a 1951 Cold War thriller. It tells the story of John Stodder who with a fake passport tries to enter into post WWII Budapest to find out what happened to his deceased brother, and take revenge. What happens is the fake passport he bought happens to be a real passport of a man who was killed that very same day, and this man had an envelope of names that the Russians, the Americans, and the Germans are all looking for.

So John gets drawn in as he is originally mistaken for this man. Along the way he falls for a woman named Maria, who gets captured, along with John, by a German named Dr. Schmidt. Two American agents get John away from Dr. Schmidt as they are looking for the envelope. John doesn't want to give up on Maria and wants to save her, so he teams up with the Americans.

The story ends in the usual fashion, and we also get a few sub plots revealed like what happened to John's brother. This was an entertaining and easy read, and was kinda fun going back to a Cold War book from the early 50's, but overall this wasn't rocket science. It's a fun book, nothing more.

With so many Hard Case Crime books in print now, I guess sooner or later I was bound to be disappointed by one. Which is not to say "Passport to Peril" is a bad book. On the contrary, it was enjoyable. It just doesn't stack up to the other books in the series that I've read.

This is another of Hard Case's "finds from the vault," so to speak, a spy thriller that has been out of print for more than 50 years. I'm glad HCC brought it back in print, and I honestly hope they'll bring Parker's other spy novel, Ticket to Oblivion, back as well. This lesser known Robert B. Parker has a good style overall. (This is Robert Bogardus Parker, who only wrote two novels before his untimely death, as the afterword by his daughter explains. He's not the Robert B. Parker of the more well-known Spenser novels.)

Without spoiling anything, what I think did not work for me with this novel was the narrator's constant repetition of certain facts ad nauseum. It's one thing to remind the reader of a pertinent clue or unanswered question once in a while, but it's a bit annoying when those items are brought up repeatedly -- especially when one is eventually dealt with in such an off-hand manner that you can't help wonder if the author got as bored with the subplot as you did.

On the other hand, the repetition drives home the fact that that narrator, while a good strong-willed individual, has been pushed beyond his limits and is perhaps beginning to lose his grip. So what annoyed me might not be the author's usual narrative style but might instead have been an actual character trait he gave the narrator. (A good reason to want to read his other book, actually.)

Long before Smiley and other Cold War characters took the stage, Robert B. Parker wrote a spy story set in Russian-occupied Budapest just after World War II. No, not the Parker who created Spenser, but an adventurous wartime foreign correspondent of the same name. It was published in 1951 and has now been reprinted by Hard Case Crime.

It tells the story of John Stodder, a newspaperman whose brother was lost in an air raid over Budapest toward the end of the war, and he wants to find out what happened to him. However, the Russians wouldn't allow him a visa, and he enters the country with a supposedly forged passport of a Swiss watch-and-clock exporter and even purchases the man's seat on the Orient Express when he doesn't show up.

From this point, the complications grow and the confusion mounts with competing interests attempting to gain access to information they think the protagonist brought with him from Vienna, the starting point for the trip. Russians, Americans, even defeated Nazis vie in an exciting chase to the end. Written with verve, the book certainly set a standard for those of the genre to follow, and is recommended.

Not Spenser, but good in its own right. 5*

Passport to Peril
Robert B. Parker 1951

OK, this is not the flip and fluent private eye we've come to know and love. To those who give this a 1* or 2* rating because they failed to heed the numerous warnings that this is by a *different* Robert B. Parker (Bogardus, not Brown, as pointed out on the cover) -- get over it.

That said, I can see why this book might not appeal to those drawn by the expectation of another light outing with one of the better known RBP's serial characters. I happen to like both, but the historical setting and more "literary" style of the 1950's novel is definitely different from the Spenser (or Jesse, or Sunny) tales of the 1980's et seq. RBP. Also, the protagonist is not a Spenser-like superman, but a resourceful "everyman" of the era.

I found this one quite enjoyable on first reading ... and on second reading a few weeks later, which I just completed. It's set shortly post-WWII in Eastern Europe, and should appeal to those who liked the setting and atmosphere of The Third Man (the movie; I have to admit I haven't read the Graham Greene novel, but it's on my short stack;-). John Stodder is on the Orient Express from Vienna to Budapest, when he discovers that he's "traveling on the passport of a murdered man," which he had bought as an innocent forgery. Within the first chapter, he and the beautiful Maria Torres are fleeing for their lives across the snowbound Hungarian landscape. By the second chapter we discover that John is looking for traces of his brother Bob, shot down over Budapest in WWII. Soon, Stodder and Maria are running from and with an array of characters -- the sinister Nazi trying to restart the Third Reich, the sultry countess working for whoever is in power, the oddly courteous Russian major, the bizarre American "diplomats" -- and caught up in an intricately choreographed plot that drags the reader, as well as the characters, first one direction then another. (I find that the plot .. almost .. all holds together quite well. Some of the relations are a bit subtle, though, and easy to mistake for dei ex machinae.) The tension builds palpably through the very end.

The claustrophobic, paranoid, atmosphere and local color are well done, which makes sense as the author was a foreign correspondent in Europe prior to and during WWII, and also worked for the intelligence services (OSS). There's a bit of Robert Bogardus in John Stodder, I'm sure. (This is from the useful afterword by Parker's daughter.)

Without any Robert Brown Parkerian quippiness or otherwise drawing attention to itself, the first person narrative is smooth and clear. Just a sample: "I had good reason to fear the Russians and the Hungarians, the masters in this country. There was no reason whatever to get mixed up with Herr Doktor Wolfgang Schmidt, a German who sat under a portrait of Adolf Hitler in a Budapest warehouse." (p. 74).

Hard Case Crime is to be commended for bringing this one back into print. I only wish Parker's other two books, 1944's "Headquarters Budapest" and 1950's "Ticket to Oblivion" were more readily available.

As to the rating, I'd put this somewhere between 4 and 5*'s. Not perfect, but certainly holds together as well as most spy novels I've read, with interesting characters and a fascinating glimpse at a then-exotic locale. I could go either way, but will break from the pack and give this one 5*'s to counteract the numerous 1 and 2* reviews by people who were expecting another Spenser novel.

John Stodder is a former foreign correspondent whose "beat" was Budapest, Hungary before World War II had broken out. Now, it's after the war and he's back, traveling on a forged passport which belongs to a recently murdered man (oops!), trying to find the answers to his brother's disappearance, missing since the war on an Air Force mission against the Nazis. Funny thing: he bears an uncanny resemblance to the previous owner of the passport, which leads to the tale between the covers of Hard Case Crimes' latest forgotten read. John meets and falls in love with the beautiful and mysterious femme fatale, Spain's own raven-haired temptress, Maria Torres (that didn't take long!) falls foul of the evil, grotesque Nazi(old habits die hard!)Dr. Schmidt, and falls in with an unlikely American couple, the Carrs. Hiram is the agricultural attache to the American Embassy, Teensy, his amazon(and long-suffering) wife and then there is Walter, the Carr's butler and "man Friday". Everyone needs something to make a mistaken identity unfortunate and in this case, it's... "the envelope!" Mayhem ensues, also murder, torture, Nazis, Russians, Hungarian underground(ers), exotic locations and persons (hummina,hummina!)and a story which is the progenitor of every Frederick Forsyth, Alistair MacLean and Ian Flemming which followed. Frankly, I LOVE this imprint and wish Charles Ardai a long and successful treasure hunt!