If you’re looking for an old-fashioned pulp-style adventure tale to lose yourself in, you can’t do better than this early Jack Higgins novel. A lot of times when a writer becomes as famous as Higgins, earlier stuff that is best left forgotten is repackaged when it might have been better left as a memory. Not the case here, this is fantastic — for what it is. And what it is, for those who’ve read enough to know what I’m talking about, is a modern updating of a Spicy Adventure tale from the pulp magazines.
After reading this — make that devouring this in huge gulps — I have to believe, whether he would admit it or not, that Higgins had been reading Spicy Adventure pulps and watching 1930s and 1940s “B” adventure films when he decided to write one of his own. Though the setting is the 1970s, and one of our heroes has some drug and drinking issues related to having served in Vietnam, this tale could easily have appeared as far back as the early 1930s it is so timeless.
Jack Nelson is the somewhat weary expatriate, using his Canadian floatplane, the Otter, to eek out a living in Spain. As the story begins, Jack is picking up a coffin in Cartagena and flying it to Ibiza. Upon landing, it isn’t long before he almost runs over a very lovely naked girl in the moonlight. Jack immediately rescues her from some very nasty fellows indeed. Turns out, however, that Claire is not only annoying, but she has tunnel vision concerning a religious treasure which went down on a plane with her father in the nearly inaccessible Khufra. And oh yeah, she’s a nun!
You can just about guess the rest. Despite misgivings, something other than the money compels Jack to help her recover them. His old Vietnam pal Harry Turk has a boat which comes in handy when the Otter is sunk, and as long as Turk can keep the supply of - er - medicine flowing so he doesn’t have to dwell on what happened to him over there, he’s A-plus help when the bad guys are around. And there are some very nasty people who would rather Claire Bouvier not take possession of the Lady of Tizi Benou, and all that gold. What would a nun do with that much money anyway?
Higgins gives us some colorful supporting characters to augment the equally colorful locations. A sexy — and insistent that Jack do something about it — faded Hollywood star, a tiny beach hippie named Big Bertha who is as easy on the eyes as she is easy, a very BAD Algerian named Taleb who thinks nothing of torture, and even some Husa horseman in the remote jungles surrounding the treasure keep the pages flying in this fast escapist read.
This is really pulp +; the plus being that it’s being told by someone who can really write. Higgins uses some strange sentence structure to be sure, hopping around as though he’s completely unaware of the Oxford comma, or that a period could be used between thoughts. Despite this, the story is so much fun, and the narrative so fast-flowing, the reader just doesn’t care.
If you enjoy a fast, fun read that you don’t have to think about — and it really is best that you don’t — or you’re a devotee of the spicy adventure pulps of the 1930s and 1940s, then you’ll probably love this as much as I did. If you picked this up because of Higgins’ name on the book and have never read a spicy pulp adventure, and want Sean Dillon, just avoid it, and let the rest of us who enjoy a good adventure yarn with some mild spice revel in it. Pure escapism at its best.