Jack the lad

Jack the lad

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Jack the lad
Tom Clancy's Duty And Honour by Grant Blackwood 425 pp, 2016 Michael Joseph hardcover. Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops, 995 baht

It is common practice that when a popular author passes away, his estate seeks a replacement to step into his shoes. The new man is expected to emulate the original style to the extent possible. If notes have been left for future plots, so much the better.

Though never in the military, insurance banker Tom Clancy was well-versed in stories involving the armed forces. He had the ability to describe in layman's terms how weapons worked and differed. In his first successful thriller, The Hunt For Red October, it was a submarine (Russian).

When Tom Clancy was summoned to the Pearly Gates in 2013, Grant Blackwood was tapped up to pen his novels. He's better than fair at it, yet there are differences. Russia isn't the constant bete-noir.

Of the branches, Clancy favoured the navy. The literary characters he created and carried over in many of his books were topped by president of the United States Jack Ryan, a former US navy admiral. He's the role model of his son Jack Ryan, Jr, who's the main protagonist in this book.

A number of scriveners, American and British, have conjured up ultra special forces responsible to the president and the prime minister respectively. Jack Jr is a covert operative in the elite The Campus. As patriotic as he is, he can't help envy people in private life who earn a great deal more.

In Duty And Honour, young Jack is on holiday, winding down from his regular death-defying activities. The heavy this time around is an evil German-not Nazi-multi-millionaire, who runs a worldwide security firm out of Munich. He deals with the enemies of his clients by killing them off, his own as well. Jack pays him no mind until he finds himself on his hit list.

Escaping one assassination attempt after another (nobody can outfight or outshoot him), Jack decides not to bother The Campus with his personal problems and gets the assistance of a journalist and the scion of a retired French field marshal. The shoot-outs continue in Switzerland and Namibia in southern Africa, where a dam is blown up.

Blackwood got the style down neat but the plot lacks the strength of a Tom Clancy story. Any competent author could have done at least as well. Best are Jack Jrs one-on-one battle royals.

Get Even by Martina Cole 541 pp, 2016 Headline paperback. Available at Asia Books and leading bookshops, 375 baht

A murky underworld

Cuss words have always been with us -- Shakespeare added a few of his own -- but only for a generation have they been part and parcel of the English language. They trip off virtually everybody's tongues -- men's, women's, children's -- tongues like machine-gun bullets.

Books and films are replete with them. Admonishing those using them is met with an innocent response, but that's how people speak. Which is undeniable. This reviewer makes a conscious effort to avoid them, yet one or another has a way of slipping out.

Granted they limit our vocabulary. Webster's unabridged and Oxford's unabridged respectively have more than a half million words, academics familiar with circa 10,000. The less educated fewer than half that number. With cuss words in extensive use, why bother to learn more than 1,000?

Martina's books wallow in cuss words. Her literary niche is London's East End. Its New York equivalent would be Manhattan's Lower East Side, though attempts are being made to upgrade it. Cole focuses on the gangsters of East End, particularly their families. More particularly the women of those families.

In her many stories, they suffer. At the outset they are innocent, marrying men promising them decent, normal lives. Too late they discover who and what their husbands really are and its effect on their children. Cole offers little variation on this theme.

Get Even is more of the same. Lenny isn't wealthy when he weds Sharon and is vague about the nature of his job, but looks after their two sons and loves their family. His mugging death is a tragedy. Not for long, however. A lovely widow is desirable and Ray sweeps her off her feet.

Ray adopts her sons, they have a daughter. Owning pubs and clubs, money is no object. Sharon observes him closely and doesn't like what she sees. He is violent. Their growing children are taking after him.

Her sons kill a man and laugh. Her daughter is having an affair with her best friend's husband. Ray is unfaithful and a hitman for hire. Lenny had been on the wrong side of the law. For Sharon there has to be an end. And there is. Violent.

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