Stephen D. Rodgers (from the archives)
Donald Hamilton's DEATH OF A CITIZEN changed my life.
I was brought up to be polite and courteous, to put others first, and -- if I had nothing good to say -- to say nothing at all.
Then, as a young teen, I opened DEATH OF A CITIZEN. Read it, flipped it over, and read it again. And again.
Matt Helm was a no-nonsense protagonist who thought for himself and did what needed to be done. If he was polite and courteous, he was polite and courteous because he'd decided to be, not because someone else how told him how to behave.
Some may say I'm splitting hairs here, but DEATH OF A CITIZEN taught me not only self-awareness but self-determination.
Sure, Helm killed people, but nobody's perfect.
No book is perfect. DEATH OF A CITIZEN comes very close.
Take the following exchange. Helm and his ex-lover Tina are traveling together. Teasing has lead to a game of tag, and the longer-legged Helm eventually brings her down.
"'Old,' she jeered, still lying there. 'Old and fat and slow. Helm the human vegetable. Help me up, turnip.'"
It's funny and it's fitting and it's a damn fine piece of writing. I've read the book dozens of times and still continue to be blow away by that paragraph.
As a bit of background, Tina and Helm (or Eric, as he was known at the time) worked together during the war as government assassins. He gets out once Germany is defeated, marries, and leads a normal life until Tina reappears.
Donald Hamilton delivers on multiple levels. Not only does he create entertaining plots, and write them well, he provides a rich array of three-dimensional characters.
Take, for example, what happens when Helm borrows a car, rushing home to save his daughter who's been kidnapped by Tina and her partner Frank.
"It was the ugliest damn hunk of automotive machine I'd ever had the misfortune to be associated with...
"[The gas attendant thinks differently.] 'That's quite a car you've got there. I tell you ... when they can get something real sharp made right here in America.'
"Well, it's all a matter of taste, I guess."
Helm might be his own person, but he understands and accepts that his way is not the only way. That's as rare in books as it is in real life.
One finds murder, kidnapping, and torture within DEATH OF A CITIZEN. The disembowelment of a pet cat. And yet, one finds the following passage while Helm waits for a female guest to leave Frank's hotel room.
"...the tartier the girl, strangely enough, the longer the skirt. You'd think it would be the other way around.
"This one was pretty well hobbled."
And after the woman leaves, and Helm follows Frank out of the hotel and under a nearby bridge:
"There were a couple of cars going past overhead. It was a good a time as any. I took out the gun and shot him five times in the chest."
Only later does Helm explain that Frank was too big and unimaginative to be made to talk. Killing Frank at least took him out of the equation, freeing Helm to concentrate on Tina.
"She licked her lips. 'Better men than you have tried to make me talk, Eric.'
"I said, 'This doesn't take better men, sweetheart. This takes worse men. And at the moment, with my kid in danger, I'm just about as bad as they come."
Between 1960 (DEATH OF A CITIZEN) and 1993 (THE DAMAGERS), Matt Helm appeared in 27 books. Donald Hamilton died in late 2006. He was just about as good as they came.
10 comments:
I remember this one fondly. Sad to say, the Dean Martin films later turned me off from
Matt Helm for a wile. I can be stupid sometimes.
I have never seen the films.
He's not an author I've read before, but that's why I really like it that you include these 'from the archives' posts, Patti. Someone new for me to discover...
Thanks, Margot. I am so glad theses reviews are all saved for us.
I read all the Donald Hamilton MATT HELM books. But the later books are a tough slog to read. TITAN Books started reprinting them a few years ago.
I'm with George. The later novels got fatter and lazier. But the first ones-- DEATH OF A CITIZEN, THE WRECKING CREW, THE REMOVERS, THE SILENCERS, and MURDERERS' ROW -- are great spy Noirs. The Dean Martin movies still show up on the digital and streaming TV movie-channels. The cheesy jokes, back projection, and rickety laser weapons don't improve with age. I wonder if Hamilton thought the money was worth it when they turned his flinty character into Dino's lecherous buffoon.
Nice review. I was turned off by the awful Dean Martin movies, but when I read a review touting the books I got the first one and never looked back. It's great, and the early ones (a dozen?) are all good. But once they start getting longer and he has Helm give too many opinions, it bogs down. I still have about 10 or so unread on the shelf, and maybe someday I'll get back to them, but definitely you should read the early ones.
Series can be great but many seem to deteriorate over time. I think the author can get tire of the character but is stuck with it due to early success.
Writers who choose to be lean but are opinionated can become pounders in their pulpits as they age...I've had reason to contemplate Robert Heinlein thus, and so also Hamilton and any number of others...John D. MacDonald didn't fall completely into that pothole, but certainly series novels don't discourage such behavior.
Weirdly, not only the Dean Martin films but the Anthony Franciosa tv series was on my radar when young enough to give them a try, and the tube version took as many liberties as did the filmscripts...Helm was a retired spy who choose to become a PI in the series, and rather than half-assed spy comedy, the tv show was rather run of the mill private eye action. Perhaps left Hamilton, however wealthier, a bitter and more loquacious man.
Read a lot of these as a teenager and enjoyed them. Read the first two in the series a couple of years ago and was disappointed. I know certain things dont date well but Hamilton keeps drumming it into your head that it's obvious he does not like womeen in Jeans and/or short hair. Woman should always wear heels ad dresses.
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