I just wanted the book that this actor wrote to see if he's as good-a writer as he is an actor.

The problem with The Gun Seller is that it reads like two novels welded together: the first half a spoof of the Bond genre as recounted by, say, Bertie Wooster's motorbike-riding grandson; the second half is much more cynical, as if written by Gregory House, and is much more plot-driven. And the plotting is terrible—silly, confusing, and way, way too earnest. There were times when I winced and thought gosh, it's not that Laurie is a bad writer—it's that his editor just thought, ooh, Hugh Laurie, national treasure; to the presses, ho!

Technical issues aside, though, this is still an enormously entertaining read. Laurie's humour is dry and caustic, and in the fine tradition of Monty Python, throws so many jokes at the page that some of them are bound to stick. Not a world-changing book by any manner or means, but if you like 'British-style' humour, you'll probably get a kick out of this. ( )

From my blog, http://minlshawbookshelf.blogspot.com...

Americans reading The Gun Seller will likely be tempted to think of it as an indictment of the post-9/11 Bush administration's rhetoric and doctrine, but it is important to remember that this was first published in 1996. This 2008 edition includes a brief interview with author Laurie and a few prompts for book club discussion. Thomas Lang is an ex-military Brit who is approached out of the blue with the offer of a hit contract. Lang declines, and decides to warn the target instead. The target, Alexander Woolf, is a wealthy and powerful man. Who is Woolf, though, and who wants him dead? Trying to answer these questions drives much of The Gun Seller, eventually working its way to a point where Lang has uncovered a plot to engineer an act of terrorism as part of a marketing strategy for a new attack helicopter.

Laurie is best known these days as "star of the FOX-TV series House," to borrow from the cover blurb, but once upon a time he played the role of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster in Jeeves & Wooster. Fans of Wodehouse will immediately recognize Laurie's affinity for the esteemed author in the relationship between Lang and fellow agent David Solomon (who even addresses Lang as "master" and "sir"). Similarly, fans of the TV series adaptation featuring Laurie will likely picture him in the role of Lang, and Stephen Fry as the dry, scheming Solomon. According to the interview, Laurie himself has completed a screenplay adaptation for United Artists, and one imagines the story crossing media rather easily.

The predominant weakness is that Laurie's sense of humor starts on page 1 and ends on page 340. There are spatterings of taking things seriously, but the wall-to-wall comedy sometimes gets in the way of a genuine action-thriller. I read this over a few nights, and another problem I ran into was that, for some reason or another, each successive night required me to go back mentally to what had last happened so that I knew what was going on now. Typically, this is only something I run into with particularly dense material, but (no offense, Mr. Laurie) The Gun Seller isn't quite on par with Plato's The Republic. I attribute this lack of staying power to the saturation of humor.

Of course, if you want a genuine action-thriller, there are plenty of other books by plenty of other authors that will fulfill this demand. Still, with the third act of any story relying on rising tension and action, the humor tends to deflate these crucial story elements. Ian Fleming declared that he was a writer, not an author, and that his novels were intended strictly to entertain and not necessarily make the reader a better person. Laurie is an heir to this approach and The Gun Seller is a worthy debut. ( )

Okay, Laurie is funny. Yes. But he tries too hard to be too serious and ends up shooting himself in the foot.

The narrative swings wildly between extreme silliness and extreme seriousness, and the serious bits are often so awkwardly done or unrealistic that they actually bored me. Laurie starts out with an oddly Wodehousian attitude-- Wodehouse doing a spy novel, imagine-- and then veers off harshly into a poorly-realized political thriller which, besides making little to no sense, is so intensely political that it becomes almost sour to read. Add to that the fact that this book was written pre-9-11 and features a strangely (though certainly not wholly) sympathetic look at a pack of terrorists, and the whole setup becomes even more dissonant. He spends the entire book talking about the differences between 'real life' and a spy novel-- his point being that the character, Thomas Lang, is experiencing REAL LIFE, and that his spy-novel expectations are being shattered by the cruel American military-industrial complex-- and then ends the book on a totally outrageous action-hero note involving rocket launchers and Bond-style hero-antics. He's not terribly consistent with his message in that regard, so he comes across as insincere.

Not really worth wasting your time one, particularly if you only like Laurie because of House. This has little to no relationship to anything I've ever appreciated Laurie for-- his Jeeves and Wooster show with Fry, as well as A Bit of Fry And Laurie, were both kindhearted and highly entertaining. House, too, is very good. This book is, however, not very well-done, and is a letdown on practically every account. Don't hunt it down. ( )

The only reason I read this book? You guessed it, Hugh Laurie. Anything to which his name is attached is worth a looksee. I'm not typically a fan of spy novels, so I must admit that some of the spoofing was probably lost on me. However, Laurie obviously enjoys the English language and bends and twists it to wit-laced results. As a narrator, Thomas Lang is sarcastic and self-deprecating, but also a genuinely nice guy. He's likable, someone you'd like to go have a drink with just to hear his running commentary on the people and places with which he comes into contact. Some of my favorites included his observation that hiding behind the warehouse walls was not a good idea "since the walls were no more than an inch of Gyproc plaster board, and probably couldn't have stopped a cherry-stone squeezed from the fingers of a tired three-year-old." Also, his philosophical thoughts on the use of the term bird strike: "This, rather unfairly in my view, made it sound as if it was the bird's fault; as if the little feathered chap had deliberately tried to head-butt twenty tons of metal travelling in the opposite direction at just under the speed of sound, out of spite." Amusing and sometimes laugh out loud funny, it's worth the read and will probably most appreciated by people familiar with the spy genre ( )