Mister 8

Here’s a thought for a new series, a plan for an inaugural post at least. Let’s see if it works out, shall we? So the plan is this — for every holiday, or perhaps for a few of the major holidays over the next year, I’ll be taking a look at one of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm series of novels, with maybe a few extra posts here and there about the Dean Martin films or perhaps even the Franciosa television series.

I haven’t read a Matt Helm novel, or indeed any work by Hamilton, in a number of years…probably since high school. I definitely hadn’t read the first novel in the series, Death of a Citizen, which I’ve just finished on this fine Christmas evening. This is an amazing novel in which to debut the character, rooted in the pulps (hell, Matt Helm even is a pulp writer himself), but rising above them through solid plotting and, above all, a brutally honest and affected narrator.

Hamilton’s Helm is not the cocksure 60s swinger that Dean Martin would have us believe him to be. He’s a peaceful, hard-working family man who writes novels about Apache chiefs and the Wild West for a living, doing his research around his home in New Mexico. Here’s a bit of Helm’s biography from his Wikipedia page:

Helm was born on March 24, 1916 in Uppsala, Sweden. He later emigrated to the United States, attended the University of Chicago (receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1938), and served in the United States Navy Reserve during World War II. He was married to Beth Helm….The couple had four children….A long-time resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Helm was a skilled outdoorsman and hunter who wrote non-fiction articles for outdoor magazines and published a book-length collection of them.

Actually, I’m sorry, that’s from the wiki entry for author Donald Hamilton, with the names rearranged a little. That Helm’s life has run parallel to his creator’s might explain the feeling of validity of much that happens within Death of a Citizen. Whereas someone like Ian Fleming is famous for his travelogues, Helm’s descriptions of the American Southwest are not a way for readers to live vicariously, but Helm’s true views on the beautiful, if not sometimes mundane, place that he calls home. And if Fleming’s Bond is a bit glamorous, Hamilton’s Helm is down to earth, preferring his old beat-up pick-up truck to anything fancier.

When we meet Helm, he’s a decade and a half out from his codename of “Eric” and his job as an assassin under an unnamed department of the U.S. government and a boss named (or perhaps codennamed) Mac. He’s at a boring sort of social affair, his wife on his arm, the kids at home with a babysitter, when he catches a glimpse of an old flame, a fellow assassin. She flashes the signal for a meet-up later, and he stays mum. Externally, at least. Internally, his thoughts are running a mile a minute. He’s grown complacent, maybe even happy, in his civilian life, and isn’t sure if he wants to return to the brutal life of a killer. When a dead body turns up in the bathroom of his studio, he doesn’t really have a choice.

What follows is more of a tight psychological thriller than an action-packed shoot-em-up. Though they’re being followed and danger lurks around every corner, greater tension exists in the moral conundrums that Helm explores than in the presence of bullets. In the end, it’s the proverbial death of the citizen that makes this book more tragic than any of the dead bodies found in the previous pages.

The language and pacing of Hamilton’s writing propels the reader from page to page, chapter to chapter. If he hasn’t yet in this book achieved the wit and perfection of Chandler, he’s at least proved himself the equal of Hammett. There are some well-crafted moments where the mundane life of Helm and the cloak and dagger world of Eric collide that provide Hamilton with wonderful material. One of my favorite passages occurs early in the book when the Helms’ house cat tags along as Helm and Tina dispose of a body. The unique voice of Helm, the married man, and Eric, the well-trained assassin shines here:

The front window of the canopy matches up with the rear window of the pickup’s cab, but neither of them open, so you can’t say there’s any real communication. I drew a long breath, turned on the dome light, and glanced around. Her face showed up white and ghostly through the two panes of glass. She had her little pistol in her hand. With it, she beat again on the glass, and gestured vigorously towards the side of the road. I pulled over, jumped out, hurried to the rear of the truck, and unlocked and opened the door.

“What’s the matter?”

“Get it out of here!” Her voice, out of the darkness, was harsh and breathless. “Get it out, or I will shoot it!”
I had a wild gruesome thought that she was talking about the girl she’d already killed once. I had visions of Barbara Herrera rising up with blind eyes and clotted hair. . . . Then there was a silent movement in the opening, and our gray tomcat stood there, its green eyes slitted against the street lights and its für on end:
apparently it didn’t approve of its company, either. It meowed at me softly. I picked it up and tucked it under my arm.

“Hell,” I said, “it’s just the cat. He must have jumped aboard while we were loading up. He likes to drive. Hi, Tiger.”

Tina said from the darkness, in a choked voice:

“How would you like to be locked up with a dead person and have that . . . I can’t stand them, anyway. They give me the creepies, the sneaky things!”

I said, “Well, we sure don’t want to give you the creeps, do we, Tiger? Come on, boy, let’s get you home.”
I scratched the beast’s ears. It’s not my favorite animal by a long shot-we’d only got it because the kids needed a pet and dogs are too noisy for a writer to have around-but in Tiger’s book I was a cat man from away back. We were soul-mates, and to prove it he was now purring away like an amorous teakettle.

Tina had made her way to the rear of the truck, with some difficulty, since there wasn’t room for her to stand up under the canopy and she wasn’t exactly dressed for making progress on hands and knees.

“What are you going to do with it?” she demanded.

“I’m going to take him home,” I said, “unless you think we should keep him with us for company.”

“Go back? But that is crazy! Can’t you just-”

“What? Turn him out here, five miles from the house? Hell, the poor damn fool can’t even find his bowl of milk in the morning if you happen to move it across the room. Anyway, he’d get himself run over sure, and the children would miss him.”

She said sharply, “You are being sentimental and stupid. I absolutely forbid-”

I grinned at her. “You do that, honey,” I said, letting the hinged door drop. She must have pulled back in time; I didn’t hear it hit anything on its way down. I set the latch, got into the cab, waited for a lone car to go by, and swung back towards town.

Suddenly I was feeling fine. You can stay tense only so long. I was over the hump. I was driving ten miles out of the way, with a corpse in the bed of the truck, just to take a worthless alleycat home. It was exactly the kind of screwball thing I needed to wake me up out of my panic-stricken trance. I reached out and scratched Tiger’s stomach, driving one-handed, and the ridiculous beast rolled over on its back in abject appreciation, all four paws in the air. Apparently he’d never heard that, unlike dogs, cats are reserved and dignified animals.
I tossed him out at the corner, half a block from the house. All the driving around hadn’t been wasted. The solution to our problem had come to me, and I threw the truck into gear again and headed out of town by a different mute, no longer creeping along and paying no more attention to the rearview mirror than I normally do. If anybody wanted us, they’d catch us. There wasn’t any sense in worrying about something that couldn’t possibly be avoided.

I love that, good father that he is, he interrupts the body-hiding mission to take home the cat. Which makes the later events of the book more horrific. As we watch Helm carve off the layers of the life he’s built for himself, we remain unsure as to whether he’s sacrificing happiness, or returning to what he authentically is at his core. That he himself is unsure, and the underlying idea of veterans unable to reconcile the violence of their war experience with their peacetime lives, is what elevates this simple spy novel to a beautiful tragedy. In a way, it’s a shame to take something as complete as this book to build a series upon. I hope the next book (see you next holiday) proves me wrong.

Buy Death of a Citizen @ Amazon.com

Spy-Fi Flashback: Matt Helm @ Spy-Fi Channel

Death of a Citizen @ The Rap Sheet

Death of a Citizen at the Unofficial Matt Helm.

James Bond and Matt Helm: The Moral Universe of Literature’s Most Famous Spy and His Chief American Rival (PDF academic paper via HMSS Weblog).