COLIN D. PEEL – Snowtrap. Doubleday Crime Club, US, hardcover, 1985. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, no date. No paperback edition. First published in the UK: Robert Hale, hardcover, 1981.

COLIN D. PEEL

   A New Zealander by choice and an Englishman by birth, Colin Peel has written at least 15 spy/adventure thrillers since 1973. Of these, this is the only one I’ve read. And if it weren’t the third in this particular volume of a Detective Book Club three-in-one, it might have been a while before the opportunity arose again — of Peel’s sizable output, only two of his novels have been published in the US in paperback (neither one this one).

   I say this even though I once upon a time took it upon myself to collect all of the hardcover Doubleday Crime Club mysteries. That was a long time ago, and I probably had a copy at one time, but if I still do, I am embarrassed to say that I could not locate it if I had to.

   And as long as I am digressing, let me recommend the DBC editions as a source of (usually) inexpensive detective stories, mysteries and spy adventures like this one, books that never came out in paperback, like this one, and which almost always provide solid and non-negotiable amounts of entertainment, like this one.

   And sometimes even more, as the Mignon Warner book (Speak No Evil) reviewed here not so long ago proves, and the one by H. Paul Jeffers (Murder on Mike) as well. That this one’s the lesser of the three does not mean it’s not worth reading. Far from it!

   But as far as spy thrillers go, it’s short — only about 190 pages of medium to large-sized print — and even though former military flyer John Vega might have been a character worthy of further (um) characterization, the book’s simply too short to be more than event-oriented.

   Vega and Lynne Morrow, the girl (of course) who gets him involved with activities well over his head, are the only people in the story who are more than shadows, and if they were to step sideways, you probably wouldn’t see either one of them either.

COLIN D. PEEL

   It starts with Vega hijacking a Mirage jet at an Australian airport, bombing a nearby uranium mine, and blasting two freighters out of the open sea. It’s one heck of an opening act, that’s for sure, and the twist that quickly snaps back at him is a doozie as well.

   What the story needs, and doesn’t quite get, is a finale that’s worthy of these spectacular attention-grabbing devices. Restricted, I’m sure, by the limitations in wordage, set by the markets he was writing for, Peel does his best, but even in 1981 the ending’s one that had been done before, and with the characters so indifferently involved up to then, he simply comes up short, gasping and (figuratively) out of breath.

   When you’re competing in Ian Fleming territory, in other words, as an author, you can’t just let it slip away at the end.

— August 2003

[UPDATE] 09-16-10. A better count of Colin Peel’s novels appears to be in the two dozen or so range, including two written under two different pen names. I have not yet determined if all are criminous, a category that includes spy and espionage fiction, but the good news is that as of last year, the author was still writing: The Rybinsk Deception (as seen above) came out in 2009.