MARK BURNELL – Chameleon. Avon; reprint paperback, March 2003. HarperCollins hardcover, 2002.

MARK BURNELL

   A spy thriller about a female assassin, the best in the business that there is. She’s Stephanie Patrick a/k/a Stephanie Schneider a/k/a Petra Reuter and quite a few others as the book goes on, and at the beginning of this 400-plus page novel, she’s burned out, in hiding from her British overseers, and (more significantly) from herself.

   This retreat may be caused in large part, by events, in an earlier novel, The Rhythm Section, but since I seem to have missed the book completely, that’s only a strong conjecture.

   But adding to a theory I’m still in the process of developing, there’s something I’ve decided to call the Heinz test. The precise numerical value is still subject to empirical study, and hence revision, but at the present time it goes something like this. If after reading 57 pages, and nothing in the book has happened that makes you really want to keep reading, why should you?

   On page 57 Stephanie is the midst of being involuntarily rehabilitated, being fitted up for service again. And even though the problem she’s being groomed to tackle, something to do with plutonium being smuggled out of somewhere into somewhere, was moderately non-interesting, the reclamation project she’s being forced to undergo was engaging and challenging enough for me to give the book a tentative and conditional go-ahead.

   There’s a re-evaluation stage that comes next, and I’ll call this one the Dalmatian test. When I got to this point, I stopped, and I stalled out again. If I may, I’ll quote for you a paragraph from page 101:

MARK BURNELL

   The largest fraud that Komarov had been associated with had been perpetrated by the Tsentralnaya crime syndicate. It was well known that Russian criminal organizations targeted governments because they tended to be the largest generators of money. Moreover, they were usually very poor at monitoring it. Tsentralnaya had run a highly lucrative petroleum products fraud against the Czech government during the immediate aftermath of the Velvet Revolution. Relaxed laws had allowed foreigners to invest with confidence in the Czech Republic. No one took greater advantage of the new liberal atmosphere than Russia’s most powerful criminal organization.

   There’s more immediately following, three or more paragaphs in a similar vein. Information dumps like these occur far too often. Every minor character seems to have his or her own long history, and in turgid detail. Also making the book unappealing is that it’s also difficult to root for an assassin, whether she’s on “our side” or not. A writer like Donald Westlake can pull it off, a lesser author can not.

   (Note to self: It’s obviously time to put Westlake on the to-be-read list, and maybe Eric Ambler too. See below.)

   Ambler’s early heroes were ordinary people, as I recall, caught up in events beyond their control, and managing somehow to still survive. Stephanie has too many contacts, too much money, and even with all the psychological baggage she carries with her, and the love affair that’s all-too-apparently going nowhere, she’s far too competent at what she does for the reader to care.

   Not this reader, at least. Not this time.

— April 2003


          Bibliographic Data:

      The Stephanie Patrick series:

The Rhythm Section. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 1999. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2000; Avon, pb, 2000.

MARK BURNELL

Chameleon. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2002. HarperCollins, US, hc, 2002; Avon, pb, 2003.

Gemini. HarperCollins, UK, pb, 2003.

MARK BURNELL

The Third Woman. HarperCollins, UK, hc, 2005.