This came out on Audible recently, and when I happened to look up Helen MacInnes out of curiosity I found that it was included in the audible member library (sadly, only temporarily). I have the 1978 yellow cover edition of this book, which I read years ago and didn’t remember, so I decided to give the audio a listen.

Helen MacInnes is one of the greats, up there with Robert Ludlum and Eric Ambler and Vince Flynn. However, like those authors and pretty much everyone else, she was definitely of her time. Reading this was, in some ways, like a time capsule to a period in our social history that seems hard to fathom today. From the rampant and seemingly unconscious sexism to airline tickets being delivered to hotels by courier, the story was, in some ways, a striking illustration of how much things have changed in less than 50 years.

Sheesh! I’m glad I wasn’t part of that world! Although popular culture seems to look fondly at many aspects of life/fashion in those days, reading this book in 2024 served as an accidental reminder that the 1970s sucked.

It’s also amazing how much the structural and stylistic conventions of novel writing in general, and spy-thriller writing in particular, have changed.

– This is a long-form, complex, multi-faceted story. Even though it does seem to fit a 3-act structure, it’s long. 400 single-spaced 12-point pages in print. Roughly double what I would expect from a spy-thriller in the early 2020s. It seems like the market in 1978 wanted the novel equivalent of a full length feature film, whereas today the market seems to like streaming episodes in 30 minute bites.

– The chapters are long and fully fleshed out. Current writing fashion seems to have a fixation on paring every sentence, paragraph, and scene to the absolute minimum number of words and ideas needed to convey the absolute minimum amount of grammatically coherent meaning to tell a story in other than bullet-summary form. Not so in 1978. Oh no! Let’s have a tour of the hotel, a description of the mountains, and a complete rundown of what everyone is wearing and how they do their hair! This aspect was actually refreshing. Modern spy-thrillers, in contrast, tend to be presented in brief, episodic chapters that are more like little mini-vignettes than fully fleshed out scenes, sometimes to the detriment of immersion and learning.

– Head hopping. Oh, my goodness. I guess expectations were different, and tastes have evolved. Ms. MacInnes clearly felt no compulsion to stick with a close third-person POV. We’re bouncing around in multiple heads all the time, in a sort of sometimes omniscient, sometimes intimately close third-person narrative. It generally wasn’t confusing, but sometimes it was.

– Cars, guns, and gear: These were described with sufficient specificity to inform the imagination and lend flavor/glamor to the story, no more. There was a black Fiat, a Citroen, an old brown Porsche. There was a shotgun, and a rifle, and a 22 automatic with a suppressor (and the small caliber was a factor in the story). This was a positive difference from 2020’s spy thrillers that go into such forensic micro-detail about every spec and brand name of every piece of gear that they’ve got everything short of a buy-it-now link. We should get back to this style for cars, guns and gear.

– Social details that, in the 2020s, seem far less important. For example, it seems that in the 1970s, how you groomed yourself and whether your clothes fit properly were major indicators of social and economic status. This was before the mass-commoditization of manufactured textiles made well-fitted clothing so ubiquitous that we all gave up on dressing well and even billionaires started shlepping around in sweatpants and hoodies. Which means, from a story point of view, that descriptions of dress and grooming habits are also descriptions of status and character, carrying a weight back in 1978 that they wouldn’t carry today. It was interesting, in an anthropological sort of way, but it didn’t convince me to tuck in my shirt.

– The portrayal of women (and, more broadly, of heteronormativity). Holy crap. All the women in this story were either matrons or hotties, and all of them were in constant menial service to men: making coffee for men, making meals for men, doing laundry for men, following orders from men. When a woman falls in love with the male protagonist, it’s never even in question for one millisecond that she would do anything other than quit her career as a professional intelligence officer to follow said man halfway across the world to be his wife-servant, which is all the funnier because said man doesn’t even have a steady job. The gender role myopia was, frankly, bizarre and unsettling, especially coming from a female author.

In MacInnes’s defense, she wrote commercial fiction to sell books and make money, not as a social activist. There is no reason to assume anything about MacInnes’s personal views from these books. In fact, had she portrayed women differently, there’s a good chance her publisher would have refused to print it.

So, aside from some truly cringe moments and, lets face it, a few tropes that today are so tired they lie gasping like goldfish knocked over in the historical fiction aisle, this was a fun, well written and exciting story that kept me interested. 5-stars for it’s time period, because it would be unfair to hold this book up to modern values and expectations. Today, this would be (rightly) unpublishable.

Let’s all be glad it’s not the 70s.