My literary sweet tooth is cheesy formula thriller writers from the 60s and 70s: Alastair MacLean, Hammond Innes, and Desmond Bagley. Of the three, my sense is that Bagley has best survived the changing times and literary fashions. To be sure, none of them wrote the 800 page brainkillers that became popular in the 80s; but their 250-page novels are well-plotted, expertly written, and rarely feel over-long.

"Running Blind" is a pursuit story: a spy courier is attacked on a milk run, he suspects his boss is lying to him, his fiance becomes involved, and they chase and are chased across Iceland. The spy knows his guns, naturally, but is a Scot and his weapon of choice is his sgian dubh (the small knife Highlanders carry in their hose under the kilt). His gun lore extends beyond movie cliches: buildings do not provide protection against gunfire, so at one point the hero outside the house shoots the baddies (how can you not think of stories like this in terms of the hero and the baddies?) as they hide beside windows inside the house.

One by one, though, the books I've returned to since childhood are losing their potency. Alastair MacLean's alcoholism lets down all but his first books, and it takes fewer novels to bore me every time I dive back into Dick Francis. "Running Blind" still shines, but even its luster is fading: the early reveal and long mcguffin-driven chase mean it's a novel that focuses on action rather than on suspense or mystery. If it were written today, the editor would request a last-minute reveal and a change in the character over the course of the book. But it was written in the 1970s and square-jawed men fighting off swarthy rogues is what the time demanded, and I can't fault its delivery on that front.