J. A. S. McCOMBIE – Mandate for Murder

Manor 15349; paperback original, 1978.

   I’m a sucker for books by obscure, one-shot mystery writers, and here’s one that qualifies on both counts. The copy of this book that I purchased off ABE was the only one that was available for sale at the time, and at the moment, a couple of months later, there haven’t been any others that have turned up for sale. Nor I can find a record of any other books written by Mr. McCombie, mystery fiction or not.

   Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV supplies some information: The initials stand for John Alexander Somerville, and he was born in 1925, but that’s it. A search on Google suggested that McCombie was involved with the movie business, however, and so it was off to the Internet Movie Data Base.

   Pay dirt. Sometimes known as J. A. S. McCrombie, he was the screenwriter or wrote the story for:

   Coincidentally, or not, all three films were directed by Virginia L. Stone, who was also the co-producer, along with McCombie. (On the other hand, Virginia Stone was married to long-time director Andrew L. Stone, about whom more might be said at some later date.)

   In any case, I should have known that McCombie was involved with the movies or television, just from reading the book he wrote. Not that I’ve ever watched the current television smash hit 24, but I thought to myself, and more than once, that the person who came up with some of the hard action twists in Mandate for Murder really ought to be writing for more money than Manor Books ever paid him.

   The book’s set mostly in Hong Kong and the area surrounding. When a wealthy sophisticated terrorist kidnaps the consular general, the nephew of the US Secretary of State and the husband of a Senator’s daughter (and the goddaughter of the President), what he hopes to gain is the leverage to free a cohort from a northern California prison.

   Which may be all you need to know. There is torture, there are multiple deaths, some of them occurring surprisingly early, and there is a lot of local color. The writing, although sometimes very sloppy, is vivid and cinematic (not surprisingly) and moderately compelling. The author also seems to know airplanes and other flying craft, of which there are several that are flown and/or blown up during the course of this book. (No animals were harmed, however, as I recall.)

   Unfortunately, which I believe is the correct word, the big surprise that McCombie has in store for the reader is one which I had anticipated long before. When the smaller twists start accumulating too quickly, one of the side effects that can happen is that the reader starts thinking too much about the larger picture and what the author may have up his (or her) sleeve.

   Or in other words, from a structural point of view, unless the author is adroit and nimble-fingered enough at the keyboard, too many twists can be counter-effective, since it can easily leave the big, would-be jolt naked and exposed and not so terribly difficult to smoke out in advance.

   And so it is in this case.

[UPDATE] 06-03-07. There are now four copies listed on ABE, in case you might be interested, and I did watch the final four weeks of 24 in last season’s series.