FFB: THE DEAD LINE, Philip McCutchan

 (from the archives)

 reviewed by Bill Crider

Forgotten Books: The Dead Line -- Philip McCutchan

 Back in the '60s I read spy novels by the metric ton.  I wasn't the only one, as there were more spy series being published than I care to count.  The reason, as you all know, was James Bond.  Every publisher wanted to find "the next Bond," and as you can see by the blurbs on this book, Commander Esmonde Shaw was one of the guys that reviewers thought might fit the bill.  I'm not sure how many books in the series Berkley published, but I read a lot of them.  I ran across this one the other day and picked it up to see what it would be like to read one again.  Or re-read.  I have an idea I read all the Berkley editions with this particular cover style.


As you'd expect, Commander Shaw is pretty much a Bond clone, except even more suave and attractive to women.  He's a magnificent physical specimen, and he has a great car.  He smokes, too.  Everybody did, back in the old days.  The book opens (as a lot of spy novels did) with Shaw recovering from wounds received on his previous assignment.  He's doing some surfing to tone up, and of course all the young women on the beach swoon over him.  Also of course in only a short time he's become one the best surfers around.  Now, however, it's time to get back to work, so he gets put through some tough exercises by his handlers and proves that he's aces.


Then he learns about his assignment.  This is a very '60s novel, with the commies stirring up "the Coloured elements" and doing a bang-up job of it. Shaw's sent to Harlem, where a woman falls for him at once and gets involved in some really serious action that even includes a tiger.  In an apartment.  Things get even more bizarre later on.  (Spy novel plots got more and more outrageous as the years went on for writers not following the Le Carre model.)  It's kind of hard to get past the racial elements of the plot here.  It might have been good fun in 1966, but it's not so much now.  Still, McCutchan had a flair for this kind of thing, and the book zips right along. 

 

(I wonder what Bill would think about how far backwards we have traveled in terms of racial elements in 2025)