Wed 27 Jun 2018
DONALD HAMILTON – The Frighteners. Matt Helm #25. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original, May 1989. Titan Books, softcover, 2016.
According to the tiny number on the spine, this is #25 in the Matt Helm series, but inside the cover there’s a list of only 23 preceding this one. You figure it out. [In the age of the Internet, it is now very easy to verify that #25 is correct.] Helm takes up with three various female companions in this one, the first a bride on her wedding day.
I do not believe I will be revealing too much of the story line if I tell you he’s impersonating her husband on a “honeymoon” trip to Mexico, on the trail of guns and revolutionaries. There is more that is not what it seems, and while there’s a fair amount if bloodshed, the complications of the plot will have your brain cells working overtime.
[ADDED LATER] I’ve actually probably understated the amount of bloodshed. This is a violent, male-oriented book, filled with talk of guns and the proper way to use them. Of all the quotes I could pick from this book, I liked the one on page 270 just about as well as any. This is Matt Helm, telling his own story: “As I’ve said before, we don’t play the hostage game, and he shouldn’t have tried it. He really shouldn’t.”
June 27th, 2018 at 8:34 pm
I never managed to buy into Hamilton’s description of Helm as “a nice man who kills people.” In some of the later books it was more like THE GRUMPY OLD MAN WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD.
For all the gun expertise Hamilton could make some sloppy mistakes worthy of Ian Fleming regarding them as in one book where Helm gives a Luger (one of the most trouble prone handguns ever manufactured) to a total amateur while the so called expert Helm takes a .22 pistol any idiot could use efficiently.
I love the Helm books, but his constant rants about guns, American cars, and women in pants can grow tiresome, especially in MURDERERS ROW where he contemplated letting a woman be raped because she is wearing ski pants. And they call Bond a sexist.
Adventuring with your Old Maiden Aunt has its drawbacks.
In later Helm’s I also grew tired of the overuse of Mexico and Central American locations.
Those early books had energy and an original voice, but as later books grew in length and Helm has more time to for pointless diatribe the series became more problematic. By the time this one came out if he didn’t catch me in the first chapter I tended to move on to something else.
I wonder how many books Hamilton used the plot of Helm and a female agent posing as a married couple? It seemed like every other book at times.
June 27th, 2018 at 8:45 pm
Recent attempts to (re)read the Helm books has revealed to me all of the above, David. I probably won’t try reading another and be content with the memories of the early ones, read and enjoyed when I was much younger.
June 27th, 2018 at 9:39 pm
I respectfully disagree. If Donald Hamilton commits every one of these infractions and even a few more, so what? It’s the action thriller genre. It should be exactly that: ‘anything goes’. It’s not an English drawing-room mystery. The more sexist, the more violent, the more male-oriented, then so much the better. That’s what it is all for. Such books are not supposed to be read with little white gloves. It’s fiction; it’s escapism from dull, rote, staid, safe, over-regulated modern life. The same principle applies to bodice-rippers devoured by female romance fans.
June 27th, 2018 at 11:04 pm
All I am saying is that Hamilton’s flaws interfered with my enjoyment of the series, that’s horse-races, different people like different things. I didn’t get through some Joe Gall’s either, but I was perfectly happy with Spillane, Aarons, and Dan Marlowe. It’s style, not politics, quality and not how macho his Old Maid hero was.
Anything goes does not include reading material you find objectionable or problematic. Every writer is personally addressing every reader and the reader has the absolute right to say whether he likes how he is being addressed.
My objection was not to Hamilton’s politics, but to his hobby horses getting in the way of the plot as far as my taste went. The early books were short, tight, and the nonsense mostly went to character even when annoying. Later these swelled to twice the size and twice the amount of diatribe.
Anything goes only up to the point you alienate readers.
John D. MacDonald’s later Travis McGee books inflated as well, but MacDonald was a much more entertaining curmudgeon with much more interesting diatribes, and frankly wrote rings around the tired plots Hamilton was churning out in later years for a rapidly shrinking readership as the series wound down.
If I want sexist and violent I have the right to prefer Trevanian to Hamilton or Fleming to Atlee, certainly Spillane to Hamilton, there is no law that you can’t criticize the things that turn you against a certain book or series — that’s as subjective as whether or not you like sugar or cream in your coffee or prefer tea.
My problem was not that the Helm books were male oriented, but that Hamilton eventually seemed interested in every aspect of writing them aside from creating suspense or escapist fare.
I enjoy Ted Bell, Clive Cussler, and James Rollins unreservedly, but I am virtually 180 degrees opposite their politics, and when they screw up I have no problem mentioning it as I have no trouble praising them.
Hamilton’s DEATH OF A CITIZEN, the first Helm, is a stunningly good and original thriller, and most of the first eight or so Helm’s are fast paced, well written, and original despite their flaws.
But yes, even at seventeen I was stopped short by a protagonist wishing rape on a woman whose great sin was wearing ski pants in Norway in Winter when said protagonist was not supposed to be a sociopath or rapist, but a “nice guy who kills people.”
Escapism doesn’t mean you have to give up your taste, views, or deeply held opinions.
I read Bulldog Drummond and Dornford Yates and I have to forgive a great deal, but I find the good outweighs the bad and keep in mind when they were writing, but Hamilton wasn’t writing in the 1920’s in a Pre WWII world. In the early Helm’s the good certainly outweighed the bad, but too many of the later ones simply weren’t good escapist literature because I couldn’t get past all the crap in the way of reading them for escape.
Others opinions may very, and they are welcomed to that. But I am not ceding my right to express why I like or don’t like a book and why it does or doesn’t work for me simply because of the genre it is written for.
Action thriller is as much about creating a mood as any other genre and when a writer destroys that mood by riding a hobby horse to death in its pages it is just as fair to take them to task for it as if a classic mystery doesn’t play fair or wastes an entire book discussing how tea should be served rather than discovering whodunnit.
Ultimately we spend hard earned cash for these entertainments and we have every right to complain when the author is lazy, inept, tired, or has simply gotten lost. My problem with Matt Helm was that he became a less and less believable protagonist as the books bloated and became less about escape and entertainment and more about Helm’s Old Maidish opinions. Some readers loved him for that, some still do, and they are welcome to him, but that audience is pretty old now, and they don’t seem to be reproducing much.
Writer’s like to pretend they are in control, but as Conan Doyle or Ian Fleming could attest your readers have more than a little say, and ‘anything goes’ can blow up in your face big-time if you misjudge what those readers will accept. Good thrillers are just as tightly written and plotted and the characters just as carefully weighed as those in any genre of popular fiction. The so called ‘anything goes’ aspect of male action series is a myth and illusion. If you don’t believe it try writing one about a hero who spends all bis time knitting and living with his gay lover and cats and thinks guns are big, smelly, and noisy.
Contracts will be few and far between.
The great myth about men’s action, pulp, hard-boiled, and crime novels is the idea they are somehow less regimented and prescribed than other genres. In some cases they may seem to move or have more energy because that is the nature of the tales they tell, but the ones that are read and reread tend to be written by writers just as careful and calculated as writers in any genre. Some pulp writers work may be treasured for the free wheeling style they wrote in, but most of them never made it into hardcover and it took nostalgia to get them in paperback, publishers weren’t clamoring at their step because they could churn out 60,000 words a month when the pulps died. The survivors learned new skills or deserted writing entirely.
For me it came down to the fact that the ‘comfortable old boot” aspect of the later Helm novels was offset by my noticing the soles had holes in them, the heels were worn down on one side, and the stitching was coming out. Comfortable Wellies are fine until it rains and you notice how wet your feet are. The male action free wheeling aspect of the later Helm’s was offset for me by the feeling I was wearing a soggy smelly old pair of Wellies.
June 28th, 2018 at 6:00 am
I really like the early Helms but as they got bigger and more bloated, I’ve slowed down reading them and have let more and more time go between picking up the next one. One problem is the one mentioned by David. Too many have the same setup (set in Mexico, posing as married couple), so I have to keep checking back to make sure that I haven’t read it before.
And no, I never thought of Helm as a “nice guy” who kills people. You might root for him, but he is NOT a nice guy.
June 29th, 2018 at 7:55 am
I stopped reading the Matt Helm series with The Intriguers. If you’ve read it, you’ll know what turned me off. I don’t want to spoil the surprise in this book, but it’s sinister.
I agree with David’s analysis of the Matt Helm series. TITIAN BOOKS is reprinting the Matt Helm series: https://titanbooks.com/blog/return-matt-helm/
June 29th, 2018 at 10:51 am
Haven’t read a Matt Helm novel in ages. Read every one I could find back in the day, before, according to David, they went to seed. I was a gun nut back then, and I remember feeling annoyed when Hamilton/Helm would identify a caliber or model and then add “as if it matters.” I wondered at the time if maybe the editors were pandering to a public anti-gun mood arising then.
July 7th, 2018 at 6:49 pm
Matt Paust,
Hamilton knew his hunting rifles and shotguns, but he knew diddly about handguns. Though I am pretty anti gun myself I carried one and used them for years and it can be annoying when writers pretend to know what they are doing and get it wrong, especially when they make it an important part of the plot or key to their character (thriller writer Gavin Lyall put off writing VENUS WITH PISTOL for months while he physically worked out a stunt with a pistol key to his plot, an example perhaps of over achievement).
Actually I’ll give Hamilton leeway on caliber since in the real world agents seldom if ever get in the kind of running gun battles shown in movies and on television where those things matter and hit-men prefer the .22 because it is disposable and deadly accurate up close doing far more internal damage than bigger showier calibers which make large external wounds. Dirty Harry would have done far more damage with a .22 than his famous .44 Magnum and it is accurate at greater distances.
As I said Ian Fleming made similar mistakes about guns and then compounded his earlier ones by listening to the famous Major Boothroyd who was right about the superiority of the Walther P38 to the .25 Beretta in a gunfight but totally wrong about the needs of an secret agent in the field where concealment and lethality were more important than punch. The Walther is a soldier or policeman’s gun, not a spies, because they don’t need to fire multiple rounds in combat conditions.
For a secret agent to use a gun means in most cases he has already screwed up, one reason the more realistic Quiller in Elleston Trevors’s Adam Hall series never carries one. For a trained agent taking a gun away from someone is no problem compared to the dangers of being caught carrying one and the dangers of getting one when working behind enemy lines. The British famously managed to silence a revolver in WWII, which could only be fired once, but was a great success because it was used in assassination and only needed to be fired once.
But Fleming was writing playfully and spent very little time in masturbatory gun fantasy compared to Hamilton and too many writers today who make the same mistakes with guns (Lee Child goes on for an entire book about how useless a .38 is in one Jack Reacher novel and then has his hero praising the 9mm weapon he is using, without knowing 9mm ammo is almost exactly .38 in size — like too many he is using second hand knowledge as the basis for macho posturing).
Guns are a great deal of the appeal in the men’s action genre, and while the gun porn in most is something I skip over as extraneous as some of the soft core sex scenes in the lesser works it only bothers me when the hero stops in the middle of the action to “get off” on gun porn.
I had a reader complain once because I used the term “racking the slide” for cocking an automatic weapon. He was, he informed me a veteran of Afghanistan. It turned out he was a typist who never used a weapon in combat, or saw action. I value and honor his service but “racking the slide” was a term I learned training with the SAS in small arms combat. I call it the Hamilton Effect, assumed expertise by association.
My own pet peeve is the “Silencer”. They aren’t “silencers” but “suppressors”, they don’t go “phut”, they sound more like a champagne cork popping, and far from lessening a handgun’s accuracy the longer rifled barrel actually increases accuracy and reduces tumbling. They are not, however, designed for idiots running around in gun battles as they are used in films.
Again something it would take almost no research to find out.
I understand it’s appeal to fans and if that is what they want it is fine, but it takes almost no effort now or then to research and get it right. Winging it as Hamilton did when his character is a self described gun expert was unforgivable. A trip to a newsstand and a twenty dollars worth of gun magazines would have made him equal to any expert on the subject of handguns and semi-automatic weapons.
But I think of Hamilton whenever I hear a self proclaimed “expert” going on how it isn’t Assault Rifle but Armalite Rifle … “as if it matters” when people are actually dying in real life. It’s one thing to complain about fiction for the sake of argument like here, another to extend it to real life.