A kind of treason

by Robert S. Elegant

A kind of Treason won the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award in 1967 for best first time mystery novel

239 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Robert Sampson Elegant (born March 7, 1928) is a British-American author and journalist born in New York City. He spent many years in Asia as a journalist. The Asian settings of all but one of his novels reflect that experience. He covered both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars, as well as four or five lesser conflicts.

Reviews

[Bruce Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cornpone romance consisting more of nonsense than reality. Here's how not to speak to a Vietnamese woman:

‘Don’t throw yourself into the fire. Don’t commit suttee on the pyre of Vietnam…’

She won't know what you're saying. Our hero continues...

‘… wandering beside the Styx unable to go in peace to Hades.’

At best, she'll assume you are also fluent in a Martian dialect.
Incidentally, the woman he instantly falls madly in love with smokes cigarettes and drinks. In Saigon, in 2010, let alone the 1960s, a woman who smoked or drank alcohol in public was automatically assumed to be a hooker.
Mallory, our intrepid 'reporter' hangs at the most luxurious hotels in town, hoping to get the 'scoop' on what's going down. Those tossing down cocktails that cost more than the daily food budget of a family are not 'street smart.' No, the story lost me, and kept losing me until the end.

[Mc510 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not terrible, but not what I was expecting. Billed as a story of a journalist caught up in espionage in Saigon (sounds enticingly like Eric Ambler, right?), A Kind of Treason turns out to be more of an attempt at a probing inquiry into the failure of American military/diplomatic policy and strategy in Vietnam and an explanation of the inevitability of viet cong victory, all built around the protagonist's journalistic mission and his half-hearted efforts to solve a murder and uncover a mole.