Wild Card

by Raymond Hawkey, Roger Bingham

Wild A Novel

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Velvetink]

Fiction thriller. No memory of it except I know I read it. Brought home to re-read again. sometime when my list is shorter.

[Jules]

Overstated cover quotes from Len Deighton aside, I don't mind the plots being bonkers but it's not credibly executed (despite all the experts they had plundered for help). Long descriptive passages must be how you write a novel because the action when it happens is in a couple of short paragraphs. Skim and you'll miss it. Sentence construction is fine and I promised myself I'd finish it (NY resolutions). The plot is predicatable and there is no surprise in the "surprise ending". I expected more. Or anything else.

Typos appear in the the final pages like the proof reader had given up. When I saw the first I knew a second was coming. I can't blame them. I agreed it might have made a decent movie in the right hands along the lines of Capricorn One. Its appeal is in the 9/11 overtones of the plot but I'd hope it would explore it less obviously and more engagingly. OK though.

[Ronald]

read some time in 1979

[Bryan Brassfield]

Decent 70’s government paranoia book. The United States is on the brink of another civil war. Various factions have formed and are using terrorist methods to attack citizens and the government. The president’s approval rating is spiraling to the bottom and people do not have faith in the government to stop the various factions.

Faced with these dire consequences the president enacts Wild Card. I don’t want to spoil what Wild Card is, but it’s a plan the will unite the citizens against a new threat. The president is even willing to sacrifice ten thousand Americans to enact this plan.

Several scientists are gathered to work on the project and sent to a secret area. They are misled to what the true nature of Wild Card will do. They don’t know that this will actually cause the deaths of many Americans. They are led to believe this will only spook them. One scientist finds out the plan and tries to send a heads up to the outside world via chocolates! He uses the methods that James McConnell used with worms of memory being transferred biologically. Yeah it’s a bit silly.

The book goes into lots of details on the set up for Wild Card. Especially how the group uses scientific methods to create the things they need to create. It’s pretty painstaking and slows down the action a bit.

Since this is a paranoia book from the 70’s things take a rather bleak turn. There is a bit of hope by the end, but overall it goes for the downbeat.

I might be a bit generous with the four star rating. The premise is very outlandish and there is a suspension of disbelief to be had, but I’m a sucker for 70’s downbeat government paranoia media.

[J McEvoy]

Rather a splendid conspiracy thriller; in fact, you might say Wild Card is the start-point of conspiracy literature. Its plot may have appeared far-fetched in 1974, and probably remains so today; but there is an invention in its plotting that is persuasive and highly predictive. The invention lies in assembling all those elements in one place that we now take for granted as formula - for example, the recruitment, by coercion if necessary, of top scientists and engineers, at the behest of the president and his advisors, on a national security issue. The gradual betrayals. And the subsequent clean-up operations. Nothing is too cynical here, no palate too jaded for the disillusion on offer. Interestingly, the president in the novel is clearly Edward Kennedy, who of course was never elected president. From here you might want to take a look at Mario Puzo's The Fourth K, an oddball tract which fingers murdered men as future tyrants.

Wild Card is highly recommended if you enjoy knowing conspiracy thrillers. It deserves cult status at least; and the false flag operation at its centre could easily be mounted by governments today if it proved convenient to do so.

[Darren]

Not a bad book, but it should really be more famous than it is, since Alan Moore swiped about half the plot of WATCHMEN from it. If you've read WATCHMEN and you read this, you'll find certain scenes from this book to be pretty obvious and irrefutable templates for similar scenes in WATCHMEN. It amazes me more people don't know this.

[Bernhard]

One of the best thrillers ever. I loved this book and its classic plot - many future films and books seem to have copied elements from it without actually carrying through to the inevitable conclusion... to say more would be to spoil this gem of a book!

[Yvonne Lacy]

Devilish.

[Jenny]

An all-too-believable tale of skulduggery at the highest level of government! Deserves to be much better known.