DONALD HAMILTON – Death of a Citizen. Matt Helm #1. Fawcett Gold Medal, paperback original, 1960. Reprinted a number of times.

   Donald Hamilton has been a full-time writer and photojournalist since 1946. His first three novels were published in hardcover by Rinehart; all subsequent ones have appeared as paperback originals. In 1953 he turned from suspense and spy fiction to westerns, and over the next several years published five superior books in this field before returning permanently to the espionage novels that form the bulk of his output.

   Death of a Citizen was the first of a long-running series featuring the tough and tough-minded counterspy Matt Helm, who operates under the code name “Eric.” While in the army in World War II, Helm was recruited into a super-secret counterintelligence group whose very existence is not acknowledged by other arms of the government. “What we were, never was. What we did, never happened,” Helm/Eric is told by Mac, the group’s chief, at the end of the war.

   Fifteen years pass, during which Helm acquires a family, a four-bedroom home in Santa Fe, and a profession as a photojournalist and writer of western stories. Then the girl with the code name “Tina” walks back into his life. Behind the fashionable clothes and sophisticated manner, Helm has no trouble recognizing the “fierce, bloodthirsty, shabby little waif’ with whom he shared a dangerous mission in Europe and an amorous week in London afterward.

   She gives him the group’s old recognition signal but says that without Mac’s permission she cannot tell him the details of her mission. After the disposal of a body inconveniently left in Helm’s bathtub, Helm and Tina flee in his truck with a varying cast of characters in pursuit. Matters come to a head in San Antonio when Mac re-enters the picture and Helm begins to find out what has really been going on.

   There is the usual amount of things-are not-as-they-seem and double-dealing to keep the reader alert, but the main point of interest in this first book of the series is not the plot details; rather, it is the event referred to in the title-the death of law-abiding citizen Matthew Helm and the rebirth of the trained and deadly agent named Eric.

   The conversion is rapid, but convincingly done. The cool, crisp, slightly sardonic tone of the first-person narrative is perfect for the book, and remains a continuing pleasure of this series. Later books add more-complex plots, additional glimpses of Mac’s agency, foreign locales, and some excellent action sequences. Assessing the Helm series in the New York Times, Anthony Boucher wrote: “Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Hammett; his stories arc as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.” Number twenty-one in the series, The Infiltrators, was published in 1984.

   Of Hamilton’s non-series novels, Date with Darkness (his first book, published in 1947) and Line of Fire (1955) are particularly good. The Mona Intercept (1980), a “big” novel of seagoing crime, received mixed reviews. As for the four Matt Helm films starring Dean Martin, they arc largely James Bond parodies and do not in any way reflect the essence of Hamilton’s series.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.