The Fools in Town Are on Our Side in Espionage Aficionados

May 22, 2024 Sam Reaves rated it liked it

Ross Thomas is one of my favorite authors, and I've read most of his books several times. This one is an exception; I read it once, some years ago, and had never gone back to it. The reason was very simple, and before proceeding I feel compelled to state it, as what I suppose might be called a trigger warning (something that normally makes me roll my eyes). The problem is that the novel contains a scene of great brutality inflicted on a defenseless and highly sympathetic character. And every tim Ross Thomas is one of my favorite authors, and I've read most of his books several times. This one is an exception; I read it once, some years ago, and had never gone back to it. The reason was very simple, and before proceeding I feel compelled to state it, as what I suppose might be called a trigger warning (something that normally makes me roll my eyes). The problem is that the novel contains a scene of great brutality inflicted on a defenseless and highly sympathetic character. And every time my eye fell on the book I remembered that scene and was deterred from picking it up to re-read it. The scene violates a norm observed in most crime fiction: the victims are not especially likable and nobody's going to miss them. In a typical Thomas novel the people getting shot, stabbed or otherwise dispatched are spies, thieves, con men, thugs and lowlifes of various kinds. We don't mourn them. This scene was different, and it somewhat spoiled my enjoyment of the book.
I finally decided to give it another chance, and I'm glad I did, because as in all Thomas novels there's a lot to like here, though I still think the scene wrenches the novel out of Thomas's usual track of witty, urbane cynicism into something much darker. That may have been his intention; this is the longest of his novels and the one that gives the fullest account of the main character's life.
It's the closest thing to a big-canvas epic he ever wrote.
To summarize, it's the story of Lucifer Dye, an American boy orphaned in China during the Japanese invasion and raised by a Russian madam in a high-class brothel in Shanghai, adopted by an American journalist and taken to the States, where he is educated and eventually recruited because of his unique background and linguistic ability by a small and highly secret government intelligence agency. All this is told in flashbacks (one of which contains the aforementioned scene of brutality); the present-day story is a somewhat clumsy grafting of two plot lines: Dye's disgrace and dismissal from the spy service and his recruitment by an eccentric consultant tasked with cleaning up corruption in a fictional Texas city. The consultant's methodology is to make the corruption worse until the complacent city fathers are compelled to take action, and Dye's role, for which he is suited by his background in skulduggery, is to orchestrate this progressive degradation of the system.
It's all a bit contrived, particularly the way the two plot lines are glued together. It's really two novels, and for my money they would have been better kept separate.
That said, the novel features all the things we love in Ross Thomas's books, the sharp dialogue, the dry wit, the cynicism, the details of how things work in the real world, the intrigue, treachery and occasional spasms of integrity of vividly evoked characters. It's not Thomas's best work, for my money, but I'm glad I went back to it, and with the single caveat regarding one brutal scene, it's well worth reading. ...more

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