The Sinkiang Executive in Espionage Aficionados

Aug 23, 2014 Feliks rated it it was amazing

Shelves: genre-thrillers

I'm ramping up my rating--for anything written by Adam Hall--to a consistent 4 stars. The guy is just wild. Ferocious.

Up to now I've allowed myself to be lulled into complacency by the first volume in the Quiller series. That particular book asserted a few key aspects about Quiller which dupes one into assuming Quiller is always going to be quiet, cerebral, and somewhat passive. He doesn't carry a gun. He is sly and wily and avoids fights if possible.

But these were apparently character-elements I'm ramping up my rating--for anything written by Adam Hall--to a consistent 4 stars. The guy is just wild. Ferocious.

Up to now I've allowed myself to be lulled into complacency by the first volume in the Quiller series. That particular book asserted a few key aspects about Quiller which dupes one into assuming Quiller is always going to be quiet, cerebral, and somewhat passive. He doesn't carry a gun. He is sly and wily and avoids fights if possible.

But these were apparently character-elements strictly tied to just that first, unusual Hall novel. It was moody and atmospheric, set in Berlin, and nothing much happened, plot-wise. Hall established there too, that Quiller has a particularly obsessive hatred for neo-Nazis... and so when you glance over the rest of the Hall library you wonder why Hall is sending him all over Asia and Russia.

But 'Sinkiang Executive' is a powerful example of action-espionage writing which demonstrates that all of Hall's other Quiller books are urgently deserving a read. This one is phenomenal!

Hall is a confident author; fully in control of his craftsmanship. He has that great 1970s knack (shared by Forsyth, Follett, etc) which was so common back then and so rare now: the pages race by as fast as you can read. He never fumbles a single sentence. You wonder how the hell he does it: the technical details are so rich and convincing and powerful. This novel involves Quiller (who knew he was a pilot? I though he was a former US military intel?) flying a decoy Mig28 into Soviet airspace (similar to Craig Thomas' "Firefox") and deliberately being shot down to carry out a ground mission. It's just astounding: Hall has all the factoids about air defense systems and air traffic radio frequencies down pat.

What's more--even with all this absurdly rigorous sequence to describe and get correct, Hall's writing itself never lets up pace. He barrels from chapter to chapter with nothing left out, and no letup in tension. Do you realize how tough that is to do? This is top-quality action-thriller writing technique on display; the caliber is as good as any pure action scene in LeCarre or Deighton. If you plucked out an action scene from LeCarre and set it off by itself to stand on its own, it would look like an Adam Hall book.

Adam Hall oughta be a lot better known than he is. If all the rest of the Quiller reads are as good, this is incredible.

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Oct 21, 2015 cool breeze rated it liked it · review of another edition

Quiller faces dismissal for killing an old enemy without authorization and is given a chance for redemption if he accepts a nearly suicidal mission. The first half of the book focuses on the use of a captured Soviet fighter jet. The flying sequences are good but the training sections are a bit slow and the whole scenario that Quiller can fly the plane so well in his first actual flight is more than a bit improbable. In the second half, Quiller is on the Soviet Chinese border with an objective th ...more

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