Night Boat To Paris

by Richard Jessup

FROM PARISIAN BACK STREETS TO THE INTERNATIONAL SET'S PRIVATE ROOMS

POLICE FILE
Reese, Duncan. 35. War Service: combat intelligence agent. Post-War Record: thief, blackmailer, procurer, gambler...

That's me, in black and white. A killer with medals. In war, a hero. In peace, a police number.

Well, now the glory boys need me again. Something about getting microfilm by heisting a big charity ball in the South of France. And this time the pay-off is cash, not medals.

Only, I'm not sure I'll be spending my hero's pay. I'm on the boat-train to Paris, and there are some people aboard who want the same thing I do.

One of them may be this girl in my compartment who just turned out the light and climbed into my bunk. But at the moment, I don't see what I can do, except go along for the ride...

158 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Also wrote under the name Richard Telfair

Richard Jessup was a prolific American author and screenwriter.

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published by Dell (#92) in 1956, Jessup’s Night Boat to Paris was republished as Gat Books # 56 in March 2024. Jessup wrote extensively in the 1950’s and 1960’s under both his own name and under the Richard Telfair psuedonym, often westerns. Best Known for The Cincinnati Kid, which later became a movie with Steve McQueen and Ann-Margaret.

Night Boat to Paris is not about a boat. It is a post-WWII espionage story set in England and France. Duncan Reece now runs a pub in London and in the ten years since the great war has tried to forget the ugly things that happened. But now he is called to do “dirty work” for Queen and Country. In fact, he is told to head for Paris the next day and put together a team. Reece has been a number of things since the war, including a blackmailer, a procurer, a petty thief, and a gambler, and it is many of those underworld skills which are required for what lies ahead. For Reece is not a high-tech well-dressed spy like Bond. Rather, he is the kind called upon to do the work in the shadows that no one wants to talk about and no one wants to admit complicity to.

The Reds (who became the new enemy once the Nazis were defeated) are working on a nuclear-supported space station (in the years before Sputnik was launched). The engineer’s blueprints have been microfilmed, but the microfilm was stolen and the thief had been willing to sell them to the British for a small fortune, but got killed while attempting the exchange in a Paris bordello. Mow am ex-Gestapo Colonel may have it and is ready to auction it off during a charity bazaar at a French estate. Reece’s mission, and he really has no choice but to accept it, is to put together a team of underworld characters and brazenly hold up the charity ball and make off with the microfilm and all the jewels the rich and famous would be parading around in. It is an odd job for a spy, but Reece is more of an underworld character than a spy really.

There are several catches including that the Reds want the microfilm themselves and are out to get it at any costs with a stable of endless agents to call upon. Moreover, Reece’s associates are to think of it merely as a criminal enterprise without being let in on the scheme. Thus, Reece has to look over his shoulder to see who is behind him and wonder constantly who he can trust among the handful of unsavory characters he enlists and trains for the big robbery.

The preparations and training take time, but the action is never slow as Reece is constantly being called upon to do wet work. And, the actual robbery, when it comes about, is quite action-packed as is the wild aftermath as the great escape is on.

Jessup’s writing is rock-solid and he captures quite realistically the characters and the action throughout. Considering everything that takes place, you often wonder if Reece is quite the good guy he says he is. He often wonders about what he is doing and how far patriotism should take him.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very entertaining adventure story with great characters, plenty of action, and excellent writing. It is primarily a heist novel that’s wrapped inside a spy mission. Our hero, Duncan Reece, is pulled out of espionage retirement to serve his country just this one last time. The robbery’s spoils, which Reece will be allowed to keep, is cover for the real target, a microfilm of a Soviet blueprint for a military space station that could potentially end the cold war with Russia the victor.

Reece accepts the mission more for its massive payoff, than for his patriotic spirit, and begins assembling a ragtag team of outsiders, each with their own skillset and baggage. The team relocates to a remote farmhouse where Reece runs them through training exercises to ensure their success. Then it’s on to the mission itself, where of course, not everything occurs as intended.

Reece perseveres with complications as the tension and action continues with a chase adventures in the mountains of France.

All said, Night Boat to Paris is a terrific heist/spy/chase novel with near non-stop action. Originally published by Dell in 1956, it was Jessup’s fourth novel and already shows his command of the medium.

[Shadow · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1950s were before my time, but it must have been a golden age for readers of paperback spy, crime and adventure fiction. The decade had so many elements that make for exciting stories: the Cold War at its most intense, the CIA and KGB waging unfettered shadow wars across the globe, the American empire rising, the British Empire falling, the Mafia's invisible empire at its peak, and thousands of veterans of World War II and Korea still young and looking for action. It's not surprising that the decade introduced so many genre greats, like Jack Higgins, Alistair MacLean, Ian Fleming, Donald Westlake, Dan J. Marlowe and Lionel White. A more obscure author who got his start in the '50s was Richard Jessup; I recently picked up his 1956 novel Night Boat to Paris in a lot of vintage spy paperbacks and gave it a quick read.

The novel's protagonist is Duncan Reece, an ex-World War II British Intelligence operative who fell out of favor with the class-oriented Establishment and turned to criminal work after the war. He is approached by his old intel chief, who considers Reece the perfect man for a very sensitive mission. It seems that an ex-Nazi engineer has developed a nuclear satellite technology for the Reds, but the microfilmed blueprints have wound up in the possession of a wealthy Spaniard and a purchase has been arranged at a charity bazaar at his French villa later that month. Several intelligence agencies, most notably the Reds, are in hot pursuit of the film and are expected to be closely watching the villa. Reece's mission is to stage a robbery at the bazaar, taking the party-goers' valuables as well as the microfilm in order to fool the Reds into thinking it wasn't enemy action. Reece agrees to the job for the very tidy sum in 1956 dollars of one hundred thousand, plus half the loot, an import-export license and his Scotland Yard file and fingerprint records.

Reece's first task is to travel to France and assemble a crew for the heist. He enlists an old associate and all-around shady operator named Tookie, a desperate German gunman named Otto, a French muscle-man named Saumur, and two American mafiosi operating out of Merseilles named Gino and Marcus. There is considerable intrigue leading up to the main event, as Reece is pursued by mysterious assailants in black suits, and he suspects that one of his own men is an informant for the Reds. Several enemy operatives are killed ,and there's some interesting introspection from Reece about why he is doing this that speaks to the inner plight of the shadow operator:

You're a different man, Reece, from when you first started thinking for yourself. A man who has no principles, ascribing to no morality, who has perhaps had the morality knocked out of you. You're a killer; a procurer and thief; a man who has great wit and wisdom when it comes to saving your own neck and feathering your nest. You see that the world is mad and are playing along with it.

Can such a man slip into the comfortable rut of a middle-class merchant?

Another question.

And no answer for it.

Finally the crew gets to the locale of the op and sets themselves up in a farmhouse, where they begin training for their commando-style raid on the villa. From here on out it's a riveting thriller, as the crew, clad in identical black coveralls, berets, face paint and bandanas, assault the party with a rope ladder, grappling hook and Tommy guns, get the loot and the microfilm and try to make their escape. They get to the border and desperately try to find away across, while more men in black show up and they are forced to take drastic action in a mountain village. Conveniently, a village girl unhappy about her arranged marriage joins the crew and leads them on a secret route across the mountains. This finale is a bit less believable than the rest of the story, but it races to a suitably noir ending as the traitor is revealed and Reece makes a run for it into the shadows.

This is just the kind of novel I like: an old-school, hard-boiled adventure that combines espionage, a heist, desperate criminals and ruthless shadow operators. There's plenty of action and shadow operating, but with a more sophisticated style than you get in a typical men's adventure novel. All in all, this was an excellent little thriller, and a glimpse black to a time when spy stories could be told in 158 pages instead of 400+, without all the bloated writing, technological gimmickry or over-the-top action that would plague thrillers in later decades. I will certainly be reading more novels from this era, and can recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the early hardboiled spy work of authors like Donald Hamilton, Jack Higgins, Dan Marlowe and Edward Aarons.

Get a copy of Night Boat to Paris here.

[Tim Deforest · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a suspenseful combination of a heist novel and a spy novel. Duncan Reese was a British intelligence agent during the war who used those skills to become a criminal after the war ended. But in 1955, he's drawn back into the Intelligence game.

He's tasked with planning a heist at a mansion in France during a large party. He recruits and trains a team for this job, but his own real goal is getting his hands on a microfilm. The heist is just a cover.

This job is complicated by Duncan's suspicion that one of the men he's recruited is a double agent who is also looking to get the microfilm. This means that, if the heist is successful, Duncan can expect one of his own men to eventually try to kill him.

Jessup builds up suspense, punctuated by occasional action scenes, and ending with an extended "escape across the border" sequence. Each member of Duncan's team is given a distinct and three-dimensional personality and each of them is a viable suspect to be the double agent.

[Sam Reaves · Rating 2 out of 5]

A great pleasure of book fairs and used bookstores is finding forgotten old paperbacks by authors you never heard of which are good for a few hours of fun between more serious reads even if they're not exactly classics. According to his obit in the New York Times, Richard Jessup wrote more than 60 novels, most of them paperback originals, spending ten hours a day at the typewriter. This one, from 1956, is a breathless tale of a British crook who was a Resistance hero during the war and now ten years later is pressured by British intelligence into heisting a high-society house party in the south of France to obtain a scrap of microfilm containing Soviet nuclear secrets... hey, I've heard worse setups. Proceeding to Paris by the title conveyance, he recruits a German, an American, a Frenchman and two Italians, an ethnic joke of a gang, to pull off the heist. Along the way he realizes that the Commies are on his tail, one of the gang is possibly a traitor, etc. It's a great yarn with colorful settings from the Paris gutters to the hills of Provence, with all the action and twists and turns you could want; as for the prose, its quality may be accounted for by the furious pace at which Jessup reportedly wrote. My favorite was this anatomical curiosity: "A small gold ring hung in the right lobe of his ear."