Neil MacNeil (3)

I discovered W.T. Ballard earlier this year and have thoroughly enjoyed his work up to now. It's not that The Spy Catchers is an unmitigated dud--I don't think Ballard could or would have written a truly terrible novel--but rather that it lacks conviction and heart. This was my first experience with the Costaine & McCall series (all of which were published under the pseudonym "Neil MacNeil") so I can't say what the other books are like, but this one is an uneasy hybrid of the hard-boiled show more detective yarn and the secret agent thriller...with a bit too much emphasis on the latter for my taste. Before he died, a government scientist was developing a cosmic ray gun; now the plans for this weapon have disappeared and two bewilderingly ridiculous, lady-killing detectives are called in to recover them. Costaine & McCall drink a lot, and all the women they encounter melt into helpless puddles of sexual desire, and then there's some more drinking. Occasionally a corpse turns up or somebody tries to shoot one of the detectives, almost as a hasty afterthought (Better move the story along a little now that X number of pages have been filled with jutting nipples and twitching buttocks and entire bottles of scotch consumed in a single manly gulp!).

It's all as thin and silly as it sounds, but The Spy Catchers was aimed at a specific audience and this was the kind of material they wanted. Ballard was capable of adaptation, which is why he had such a long career as a writer. What I sorely missed was his sense of humor: it's one of the greatest strengths of Ballard's straight detective novels. The "humor" here is forced, depending as it does on the not-too-convincing premise that these guys are such irresistible rogues and gee, wouldn't you gouge out one of your eyeballs to be just like them? Things get slightly more interesting during the last fifty pages, when Costaine buckles down to some actual detective work, and Ballard does fire off a tasty sentence here and there ("He habitually wore about him like a negative electric field a reserve that protected him from gross familiarity"). Still, I wouldn't recommend this unless you're a fan of spoofy spy stuff á la Dean Martin as Matt Helm. Ballard wrote some authentic hard-boiled masterpieces like Murder Can't Stop and Murder Las Vegas Style, and those are the books you should be reading.

(Two and a half stars) show less