What Book to Read?

I’ve sometimes wondered how publishers choose the endorsements they put on books. Presumably if you like the writer giving the endorsement, you’ll want to read the book they endorse. But I can‘t imagine what the thinking was that resulted in having an endorsement for Michael Robotham’s The Suspect by Andy McNab. Robotham writes psychological thrillers. McNab writes espionage thrillers; he is above all an action man. Their books couldn’t be more different.

Andy McNab is a pseudonym. The writer uses it for security reasons, because his previous experience is as an under-cover SAS soldier. He was captured and tortured during the Fist Gulf War and was the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he finally left the SAS in February 1993. You can read about the incident here, and his account of it here. One critic said of him that ‘McNab’s greatest asset is that the heart of his fiction is not fiction: other thriller writers do their research, but he has actually been there’. His books have to be vetted by the British Ministry of Defence, so presumably there’s some truth in this claim.

Remote Control was published in 1997. Its hero, Nick Stone, is an ex member of the SAS, now a ‘K’, or independent operator, on ‘deniable’ operations for the British SIS (Secret Intelligence Service). The book begins with a prologue describing Stone’s involvement as a member of the SAS in an anti IRA operation in Gibraltar in 1988, then jumps to 1997. Stone has been involved in a very ‘deniable’ operation training Kurds in assassination techniques to destabilise Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and now is sent to Washington to check on two members of the IRA. From there, everything goes wrong, and Stone finds himself on the run from an unknown enemy, with no support from his home base. The story is made up of a series of incidents in his ensuing flight, until the hunted turns and becomes the hunter.

The story has its roots in the time honoured espionage thriller; it is in the same tradition as Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. And there are levels of treachery and betrayal in the story that would do Len Deighton’s convoluted espionage world proud. There are, however, significant differences. As a trained SAS soldier, Stone is far more professional than the ‘gentleman’ secret agent of Buchan’s day, and he has a much more casual attitude to violence.

There is certainly a great deal of topicality and realistic detail in the story – possibly too much at times, so that it can read a bit like an SAS instruction manual. And like most action thrillers, it requires readers to forget about everyday reality. But while unsurprisingly the emphasis is on the action, Stone’s portrayal as a likeable, and fallible, character adds some depth to the story. McNab has a simple and colloquial style: here is the beginning of Chapter 1.

If you work for the British intelligence service and get formally summoned to a meeting at their headquarters building on the south bank of the Thames at Vauxhall, there are three levels of interview. First is the one with coffee and biscuits, which means they’re going to give you a pat on the head. Next down the food chain is the more businesslike coffee but no biscuits, which means they’re not asking but telling you to follow orders. And finally there’s no biscuits and no coffee either, which basically means that you’re in the shit.

I liked this book well enough to try some others, but found his more recent ones show signs of being rushed out too quickly. They have titles like Recoil (2006), Crossfire (2007), Flashback (2008), Troop Seven (2009) and Brute Force (2010).

You can find out more about McNab and his books here.