If there was any justice in the world then this book would be as famous as
CASINO ROYALE. Even as things stand its hard to understand why it isn't. It achieves everything that Fleming's book achieved and its better written into the bargain.
Before I find myself accused of attempting to tear down one cultural institution in order to erect another in its place I must protest that I'm as much of a Fleming fan as anyone. The fact remains nevertheless that the first couple of Bond books aren't particularly good whereas this, the first in a series of nine Jonas Wilde thrillers, is bloody fantastic. To be fair its author Christopher Nicole, writing under the pen-name of Andrew York, had the advantage of publishing several books prior to this in order to sharpen his writing skills whereas
CASINO ROYALE was the first novel that Fleming ever attempted. And its worth conceding the point too that Fleming was a very quick learner. By the time he got to his third book,
MOONRAKER, he was producing first rate novels of his own.
Even that being so I maintain that
THE ELIMINATOR is better than all but the very best of the Bond books.
It is of course profoundly unfair to discuss and critique any book or series solely in terms of its relationship to another. Compare and contrast isn't really a satisfactory means to any critical end. But such is Fleming's domination of his field that its all but unavoidable here. He stands like the tree that shuts out the sunlight of publicity and stifles the growth of rival saplings. It is in any case no coincidence that
THE ELIMINATOR should be published in 1966 when the thriller market was experiencing the vaccuum occasioned by Fleming's untimely death. Nature's attitude towards a vaccuum is all too well known and so it is no wonder that writers and publishers alike scrambled to fill it. And there is little doubt that Nicole's book was a deliberate contribution to this effort. The judgement of posterity is that none of them succeeded. James Bond remains the last cultural icon to have originated in a novel before such distinctions became the sole preserve of comics, films and televison
*.
But if there ever was a more valiant attempt at assuming Fleming's mantle then I'm damn sure that I've never read it.
Despite a veneer of similarities provided by the glamourous excursions into foreign and female parts
THE ELIMINATOR is a beast of an altogether different stripe from Bond. Jonas Wilde is neither a spy nor a secret agent. He is an assassin, plain and simple: HMG's unofficial state executioner. Pointed at a target he will systematically plot its destruction without qualms or conscience and with no questions asked.
Or at least that's how it used to be. But when we first catch up with Wilde, on assignment in Barbados, we find a man beginning to be afflicted with the first real signs of uncertainty. Hitherto detached, clinical and lethally efficent his two most recent operations have gone badly. His ability to focus on his objective is starting to desert him and he is finding it harder and harder to summon up the personal animosity for his victims that he finds it necessary in order for him to despatch them. In short, after ten years at the top of his game Wilde is beginning to feel his age and is contemplating retirement.
This creeping sense of negativity is only exacerbated when upon his return from the Caribbean he finds himself rushed into another assignment and on home soil too where, it has always been tacitly understood, the elimination section simply does not operate. Deprived of the time he is accustomed to having in order to plan his activities this assignment goes catastrophically wrong and Wilde finds himself taken captive by foreign agents. Worse the fiasco serves to prove that there is a traitor at work in the elimination section. One of the links in the chain of command has gone "red with rust". How Wilde sets about salvaging the situation and revenging himself on his betrayer constitutes the remainder of the book and culminates in a desperate struggle aboard a storm tossed yacht. Its an absolute corker of a read.
There is no particular profundity to Wilde to distinguish him from other characters of his type. But nor is there any glib eccentricity to attract attention to him either, attention which would prove fatal in his game. Fleming was of course perfectly well aware that Bond's addiction to brand names and ostentatious modes of transport was a professional absurdity. But then Bond was always more a reflection of its author's fantasies rather than intelligence community realities. Wilde has his vices to be sure but in his case they are of the low key variety of cocktails and tobacco. Presumably Nicole himself never had any personal inclinations to murder to work through and so was less inclined to glamourising the activities of his character.
There is in any case an unavoidable debate inherent in making a hero out of a killer. Particularly when the reader is no better informed about the justification for his activities than Wilde himself. And it perhaps squeamishness at the idea of the government orchestrating arbitrary murder that has worked against the series in the years since it was first published and inhibited its reissue until recently. The emphasis on the book's quota of violence being directed disproportionately against women also cannot fail to be problematic in the modern cultural climate.
Of course a character without depth or eccentricity runs the risk of being deadly dull to read about. But one of the real pleasures of the book lies in discovering how, in a pre technological era, an agent who cannot be openly acknowledged actually operates. Without access to official channels Wilde has to communicate with his contacts through newspaper adverts, and receives his payments via dead letter drops of hollowed out books stuffed with cash. The lengths which he goes to to effect utter anonymity and untraceability are also captivating and afford the book tremendous period charm. The Route as it is called, which Wilde uses to disappear at the end of each assignment, is a brilliant piece of creative and well thought out reasoning.
The one facet to his character which marks him out, and which comes close to scuppering his career for good when it is identified as a personal idiosyncracy, is his reluctance to use guns. Just like Foggy Dewhurst in
Last of the Summer Wine (played by Brian Wilde incidentally: surely a relative) the Eliminator's hands are his deadly weapons. He is quite candid about his technique when asked about it:
"If I hit you in the right place, very hard, and with the edge of my hand moving slightly upwards. The force of the blow would drive your odontoid process - that's a wad of tissue you've got at the top of your spine - into your medulla, and you would die instantly. Exactly as in a judicial hanging, only then the drop of your own body would provide the necessary force."
To some extent Wilde occupies a halfway house between the prosaic realities of Deighton and the fantastical escapades of Fleming, though he unapologetically looks more towards the latter rather than the former for both his audience and his appeal. Being itself a product of the 1960s
THE ELIMINATOR makes a far more successful fist of evoking the authentic Bond vibe than any of the actual Fleming pastichers have ever come close to achieving. The book is heartily recommended on that score but even more enthusiastically on its own considerable merits.
* And before anyone invokes the infernal thrice cursed spectre of HP I would argue that its still too early to judge. Ask me again in twenty years time and if then the films are still being run out across the ITV network on an almost weekly basis, and if Rowling's trillionaire recluse is still churning out Potter dynasty spin offs to the umpteenth generation, then I'll concede that you just might be on to something.
