Red Heroin

Red Heroin #1

by Jerry Pournelle

When engineer and army vet Paul Crane agrees to accompany his police officer friend on a night cruise, he never expected a deadly shoot-out would lead to his being recruited in a CIA sting operation involving China and the heroin trade. There is high-voltage suspense from start to finish in this novel by Jerry Pournelle, author of many Co-Dominium novels and co-author with Larry Niven of THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE and LUCIFER'S HAMMER. Includes a new Afterword by the author.

On "Rousing ... The Best of the Genre"
- The New York Times

On LUCIFER'S "A megaton of suspenseful excitement."
- Library Journal

On Jerry Pournelle's science "A rousing adventure, yet with something to say about the old-fashioned virtues -- courage and honor"
- Asimov's SF Magazine

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1980

About the author

Dr Jerry Eugene Pournelle was an American science fiction writer, engineer, essayist, and journalist, who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte, and from 1998 until his death maintained his own website and blog.

From the beginning, Pournelle's work centered around strong military themes. Several books describe the fictional mercenary infantry force known as Falkenberg's Legion. There are strong parallels between these stories and the Childe Cycle mercenary stories by Gordon R. Dickson, as well as Heinlein's Starship Troopers, although Pournelle's work takes far fewer technological leaps than either of these.

Pournelle spent years working in the aerospace industry, including at Boeing, on projects including studying heat tolerance for astronauts and their spacesuits. This side of his career also found him working on projections related to military tactics and probabilities. One report in which he had a hand became a basis for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the missile defense system proposed by President Ronald Reagan. A study he edited in 1964 involved projecting Air Force missile technology needs for 1975.

Dr. Pournelle would always tell would-be writers seeking advice that the key to becoming an author was to write — a lot.

“And finish what you write,” he added in a 2003 interview. “Don’t join a writers’ club and sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it.”

Pournelle served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1973.

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

While hardly a disaster, this very early (first?) Jerry Pournelle novel, a tale of domestic espionage, is uneven at best. Pournelle would become better-known as a sci-fi author, but here he tackles the tale of a more or less average Joe who is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate a heroin ring tied to Chinese Communists. There is a certain ebb and flow to this novel, and despite its compact length, it tends to drag in spots. For example, Pournelle provides minute descriptions of Seattle and its environs which, unless the reader is familiar with that region, are largely meaningless. Similarly, a great deal of the novel -- and notably its extended climax -- are given over to jargon-heavy descriptions of sailing which, to the uninitiated, are downright tedious, and serve to blunt the action considerably.

Not surprisingly, Pounelle's characters exude a "tough guy" ethos, in which cars, guns, drinking, and bedding women are the orders of the day. Originally published in 1969, this sort of thing is hardly surprising. But even given its era, one cannot escape the sense that this work was written by -- in the parlance of the times -- "a real square," and this impression would be more than amply verified throughout the author's career. (One red flag, for example, is an oblique and disparaging reference to The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.")

Still, to be fair, this doesn't fare too badly given its drawbacks. With just enough twists and turns to keep one guessing, this quick read doesn't make for bad fluff. But fluff it is.

[Benjamin Espen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Red Heroin, a thrilling tale of espionage set in late Sixties Seattle, engineer Paul Crane finds himself sucked into a plot involving drug smuggling, student activists, fast cars, and hot women. This was Jerry Pournelle’s first novel, and it is a remarkable start to a very long career. While this isn’t the Campbelline science fiction that Jerry would come to be known for, you can definitely see the same interests at play, as well as quite a bit about Jerry himself.

While it is commonplace for authors to put a bit of themselves, intentionally or not, into their books, I came away from Red Heroin thinking that Paul Crane was very much Jerry himself. I suspect so more strongly than I otherwise would have after reading the recent eulogy by Jennifer Pournelle, Jerry’s oldest, given at Roberta Pournelle’s graveside service.

I hadn’t known that Jerry’s second child died in infancy, or that his first wife left him in despair. At the beginning of Red Heroin, Paul Crane is a bachelor living in Seattle, eking out a meager existence as a civil engineer. We gradually learn that his only child died in infancy, and his wife left him shortly afterward. Those events happened to Jerry nearly a decade earlier, but I can understand working through such things by writing about them. However, there is more to this story than just this concordance personal trauma.

When this book was written, it was under the pseudonym Wade Curtis, as Jerry was leaving the aerospace business, and used a pseudonym to maintain his security clearance. However, as Steve Sailer at least has told stories that Jerry wasn’t just a cog in the machine of Boeing, but a spy himself, I wonder whether Paul Crane’s dead son wasn’t the only bit of himself that Jerry put into this book. I regret that Jerry never wrote his memoirs, but if my suspicions are true, maybe he couldn’t tell all the good parts.

The Kindle edition includes an afterword by Jerry, so maybe we get some of the good stuff there.

For a first book, Red Heroin was pretty good. It was action packed, and I’ve at least been around Seattle enough myself to recognize the landmarks that Jerry put into the book. The Communist-adjacent student politics of the anti-war characters are a preview of ideas that Jerry would expand on in later books. There is also a fair bit of technical detail around sailing, which now that I think about it does actually fall into the John J. Reilly definition of hard science fiction, leaving the reader usefully instructed in some technical subject in the midst of an adventure story.

This was a brief book, 156 pages in the paperback edition I have, but I appreciate brevity more and more in my stories. I don’t want long, self-indulgent doorstops. I want a story that is fast-paced, full of action, and fun, and that is exactly what I got here. As a long-time fan of Jerry’s work, I was pleased by this, and I would gladly recommend it to either Pournelle fans, or anyone who appreciates adventure.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jerry Pournelle might be called a polymath - aerospace engineer and hard science fiction writer of some note in his collaborations with Larry Niven. He was also a hard line American conservative. This comes across in his first novel, a law enforcement and espionage thriller 'Red Heroin'.

First novels are always interesting even when they are not good because they give you a sense of what a writer might be capable of before they find their true voice. They say you should write about what you know so Pournelle here wrote about Seattle rather than science applied to the future.

It is essentially about Chinese infiltration of the student anti-war movement to set up a spy network funded by the importation of hard drugs. Written in 1969 by a man already in his mid-thirties, it is pretty clear where Pournelle stands on student radicals - negatively.

In the end, this is little more than a fairly conventional paperback thriller of the era with a somewhat lengthy, technical and rather confusing (because of the jargon) denouement on a sail boat where the final action takes place (no spoilers about how or why).

And yet, until it descends two thirds of the way through into the very conventional, it is surprisingly well written and plotted as the protagonist, a bored young engineer, is drawn reluctantly into the world of an All-American security apparat.

We see the radical student movement through the eyes of a right wing conservative scientist (the author) creating a character who has little intrinsic interest in politics. Pournelle himself had no problems about working within the military-industrial complex for the sake of his country.

It is that moment (1969) when opposition to America's anti-communist efforts in Indo-China would have seemed eccentric or suspicious to any normal American (the wider revolt against the war happened some years later). The Chinese Communist threat would have seemed plausible.

What we glean from his first novel is that Pournelle could write well even if he had not fully mastered his craft. It is a serviceable thriller with no science fiction aspects to it that shows us that Pournelle may have been going down the wrong road but that he was walking it with his head held up high.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was OK but I was disappointed as this is the first time I havent been fully engrossed in A Jerry Pournelle book. Pretty procedural but OK.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Authors first book and you can tell. So glad he went on to write sci-fi! Interesting if you want to read about 1960s Seattle area and learn about sailing.