Word: archere
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...MATTER OF HONOR, Archer...
...trouble is with the author's photo on the reverse side of his new book, a shrewd and amiable thriller called A Matter of Honor. Archer is shown in full color, posing authoritatively in a blue pinstripe power suit, and carries an open volume, perhaps one of his previous tomes. His smile is that of a man who would not be surprised if a headwaiter applauded...
This will not do. Horowitz wears tails, Roger Clemens a Red Sox uniform, and thriller writers, according to tradition, are caparisoned in creased outerwear, lurking beside bridge abutments in the fog. Archer is radiant and fogproof. With a lesser talent, this miscalculation could have been fatal. After all, when one of Eric Ambler's down-at-the-heels protagonists makes a dodgy border crossing, the tension is palpable. Readers know that if the policeman in the greasy uniform were a shade more intelligent, he would realize that the hero's accent is bogus, his passport fake. An author who sees...
...Archer's hero is Adam Scott, a former British army captain who goes on the run and has trouble crossing borders. The pages turn amusingly, and secret agents from several nations chase the protagonist with vigor and invention. But all this hare-and-hounding is the result of a mixup, and one suspects quite early on that when that nice Captain Scott is given a hearing, it will be the agents who are in trouble...
...Even so, Archer is a master entertainer, and on the trail he produces one of the best MacGuffins of recent popular fiction. (MacGuffin was Alfred Hitchcock's name for the object or secret that sets the plot churning.) The time is 1966, and Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, no less, is trying desperately to find a famous icon spirited away from the Winter Palace in the last days of the Czar. It passed through the hands of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring, who gave it to Scott's father, his jailer after World War II. The late Scott Sr., in turn...