Word: forsyth
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...wanting to miss any big-new-story bases, Forsyth throws in the maiden voyage of the world's biggest oil tanker, the Freya, hauling one million barrels of crude into Rotterdam. Anyone who has ever read a book or seen a movie knows as soon as you hear "maiden voyage," you better reserve a seat on the lifeboat. The ship and the Kremlin and the Ukranians and the White House all begin high-speed confrontations and near confrontations as Forsyth builds the tension. Which he does brilliantly. He spends several paragraphs in each location and uses almost cinematic cuts, back...
...Forsyth could never create a George Smiley, the hero of John Le Carre's series that began with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. However convoluted his adventures, Smiley provides an anchor for every Le Carre story because he is a real person--a troubled, depressed, aging spy. Forsyth deals in Supermen, plastic men whom we will root for but never really care about as human beings. He came closest in Jackal, with his portrayal of the man who tried to assassinate Charles De Gaulle; he failed outright in his two later novels, The Odessa File, in which...
...FORSYTH MOVES THE action around the globe every few paragraphs until we learn that the Soviet grain crop has failed almost completely because the red bureaucracy fouled up. The folks in the Zil limousines, especially the Brezhnev-clone Soviet premier, Maxim Rudin, are not amused, and Rudin's Kremlin rivals want to use the crisis to get the old curmudgeon bounced. Back in Washington, Bill Matthews and Assistant for National Security Affairs, Stanislaw (read Zbigniew) Poklewski, and Secretary of State David (read Cyrus) Lawrence want to use the shortage to wring concessions out of the Russians...
...COURSE, there are the characteristic Forsyth touches that, despite his faults, make him a reliably entertaining read. An important Forsyth character would never deign to walk through the front door of a famous building; the author's knowledge of the innards of 10 Downing Street, the White House and, most impressive of all, the Kremlin, add immeasurably to the sense of reality. Superb mannered pillar of the English middle class. It is at first hard to understand what this man is doing among all these movers and shakers. We soon learn: "Andrew Drake, despite his Anglicized name, was also...
...climax does not disappoint. The activities surge to a wild crescendo with everything from the fjords of Norway to the world's fastest airplane integrated into the resolution. Forsyth has indeed fashioned a thriller, where--don't be deceived--the surprises keep coming until the very last page. If only he could portray a human being with the same verve and insight with which he calls forth a "short-barreled pump-action shotgun...