Sat 5 Nov 2016
Archived Review: DONALD MacKENZIE – Raven and the Kamikaze.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[3] Comments
DONALD MacKENZIE – Raven and the Kamikaze. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1977. No US paperback edition. First published in the UK by Macmillan, hardcover, 1977.
When Raven’s roguish friend Count Zaleski drunkenly denounces a fellow exile as a member of the KGB, he unwittingly disrupts the man’s delicate plans for a final act of revenge aimed at the Russians, setting off a race against time to find the desperate man before he destroys his unknown target.
Since retiring from Scotland Yard as a detective inspector, Raven has had several exciting adventures worthy of print, but while this affair has all the right ingredients — spies, counterspies, and a beautiful woman in love with the hunted man — it seems to rush headlong and downhill into an ending which comes as a total letdown.
Rating: C plus.
Bibliographic Note: In all, there were 16 books in MacKenzie’s John Raven series, published between 1974 and 1993.
November 5th, 2016 at 6:41 pm
Four or five of the Raven book were published in paperback by Berkley in this country, so there’s a chance I read another in the series, but if so, I don’t remember it.
I don’t even remember reading this one. I suspect I obtained a copy of the hardcover through the Hartford Courant while I was reviewing mysteries for them, but I don’t believe this review appeared there.
The artwork on the dust jacket is very nice — a rarity in those days when most hardcover mysteries went straight to libraries, and as a result publishers used the most generic covers they could get away with.
November 6th, 2016 at 1:23 am
I much preferred MacKenzie writing about criminals to the Raven books. His former profession gave his protagonists a much more realistic feel than I felt he could apply to a retired policeman.
November 6th, 2016 at 9:51 am
David
Your comment led me to a search of the Internet, where I found out something I hadn’t known before.
Quoting from
http://www.existentialennui.com/2015/10/author-donald-mackenzies-crime-and-spy.html
“What makes MacKenzie unusual among his crime-writing brethren is that he genuinely knew of what he wrote. Those aforementioned two volumes of autobiography, Fugitives (1955, US title Occupation: Thief) and Gentlemen at Crime (1956), published at the start of his literary career, detail his prior career – as a convicted criminal; initially a confidence trickster, then a share-pusher and finally a robber.”
I also discovered that one of MacKenzie’s books has been reviewed before on this blog, one I’d completely forgotten about, Death Is a Friend:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=15638
All of the comments that follow were generated by the fact that stamp collecting figures highly as a plot device in the book.