Hungary hearts: A review of Passport to Peril by Robert B. Parker.
From Sunday, 18 December to Thursday, 22 December, I read Robert B. Parker's Passport to Peril (NY: Hard Case Crime [Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.], 2009 [copyright 1951]; Hard Case Crime Book Number 057; ISBN: 0-8439-6119-8; 254 pps. [incl. a 5-pg. afterword by the author's daughter, Daphne Wolcott Parker Hawkes), which I checked out from my local public library. The author is Robert Bogardus Parker (1905 - 1955), not the more famous Robert Brown Parker (1932 - 2010), author of the Spenser series of mysteries.
A republication of a 1951 thriller published by Rinehart (the Library of Congress has the author misidentified as Robert Brown Parker...) by the late, lamented Hard Case Crime series of mass market paperbacks (although apparently it has or will soon be re-launched, thanks to the British publisher Titan Books taking over from the rather shady Dorchester Publishing as the line's publisher), Passport to Peril is a competent, though deeply mediocre, thriller starring an ex-journalist/ex-intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps named John Stodder, traveling to Budapest on the Orient Express under what he initially believes to be a false passport as Marcel Blaye of Geneva, but which soon proves to be the passport of a real, recently murdered businessman of interest to both high-ranking ex-Nazis and the MVD (the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del; this was the successor to the NKVD, or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Within minutes after meeting Blaye's secretary, Maria Torres, on the train, Stodder/Blaye and Torres are leaping off the train and fleeing pretty much everybody, putting the purpose for Stodder's trip -- the investigation of the wartime disappearance of his brother -- firmly on the back-burner. They would surely be doomed if not for a chance meeting with a short, gregarious agricultural minister named Hiram Carr and his taciturn, Amazonian wife Teensy.
Passport to Peril is an acceptable time-killer, nothing more: one can imagine it as a competent, not outstanding, episode of an old anthology television show such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Playhouse 90; it's rather a disappointing offer from Hard Case Crime, and one suspects that the publisher, Charles Ardais, selected it primarily for the trivia value of allowing readers to declare that they'd read something by the other Robert B. Parker. (One also suspects that Ardais would be amused at the Library of Congress's conflation of the two Robert B. Parkers.)
Though Stodder is a polyglot fluent in eight languages (and passable in a ninth, Russian), this ability is never really put to good use. On the one hand, the fact that Stodder isn't superhumanly capable and is rather slow on the uptake suggests that the narrative could've been steered towards a more grown-up style of intrigue and thrills; on the other hand, events unfold precipitously, and the plot is goosed along by a few too many happy coincidences for it to be comparable to the mature work of Graham Greene or Eric Ambler. Greene's Stamboul Train, which he labeled "an entertainment," is more convincing than Passport to Peril. Given that Hard Case's métier is pulp fiction, one could've wished for either more thrills or a more immersive, informative experience along the lines of Alan Furst's tales of ordinary people performing espionage in extraordinary circumstances (Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The World At Night, etc.). The novel that we have here is neither fish nor fowl: neither a page-turning, suspense-drenched and action-packed pulp potboiler nor an intelligent, realistic thriller whose existential overtones are almost more terrifying than the events at hand.
That said, Parker does lay out the sinister conspiracy behind Blaye's murder and the events that follow about as matter-of-factly as one might wish (in Chapter Eight: "Unwilling Accomplice," pps. 104-10; however, it should be pointed out that this plot has rather uncomfortable echoes of both the mystic tales mined by Philip José Farmer for his "real-world" stories of Tarzan and Doc Savage [A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, The Mad Goblin] and the anti-Semitic farrago of forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion); on the other hand, there are bobbles that one hopes would have no place in a serious work of fiction, such as Hiram's statement that the Hungarians were occupied by the Romans (p. 181 [Chapter Fifteen: "Search For a Girl"]), when in fact the Magyars -- "Hungarians" to outsiders -- didn't occupy the territory of modern Hungary (or Magyarország) until roughly four hundred years after the Roman Empire collapsed. Also curious is Stodder's referring to Stalin with the title "Generalissimo" (p. 230 [Chapter Twenty-One: "Runaway Locomotive"]); possibly Parker intended this to be a holdover of Stodder's involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
Readers with a taste for thrillers, whether pulpy or adult, featuring revanchist Nazis and Soviet counter-intelligence operatives would be advised to look elsewhere than Passport to Peril.
A republication of a 1951 thriller published by Rinehart (the Library of Congress has the author misidentified as Robert Brown Parker...) by the late, lamented Hard Case Crime series of mass market paperbacks (although apparently it has or will soon be re-launched, thanks to the British publisher Titan Books taking over from the rather shady Dorchester Publishing as the line's publisher), Passport to Peril is a competent, though deeply mediocre, thriller starring an ex-journalist/ex-intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps named John Stodder, traveling to Budapest on the Orient Express under what he initially believes to be a false passport as Marcel Blaye of Geneva, but which soon proves to be the passport of a real, recently murdered businessman of interest to both high-ranking ex-Nazis and the MVD (the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del; this was the successor to the NKVD, or People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). Within minutes after meeting Blaye's secretary, Maria Torres, on the train, Stodder/Blaye and Torres are leaping off the train and fleeing pretty much everybody, putting the purpose for Stodder's trip -- the investigation of the wartime disappearance of his brother -- firmly on the back-burner. They would surely be doomed if not for a chance meeting with a short, gregarious agricultural minister named Hiram Carr and his taciturn, Amazonian wife Teensy.
Passport to Peril is an acceptable time-killer, nothing more: one can imagine it as a competent, not outstanding, episode of an old anthology television show such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Playhouse 90; it's rather a disappointing offer from Hard Case Crime, and one suspects that the publisher, Charles Ardais, selected it primarily for the trivia value of allowing readers to declare that they'd read something by the other Robert B. Parker. (One also suspects that Ardais would be amused at the Library of Congress's conflation of the two Robert B. Parkers.)
Though Stodder is a polyglot fluent in eight languages (and passable in a ninth, Russian), this ability is never really put to good use. On the one hand, the fact that Stodder isn't superhumanly capable and is rather slow on the uptake suggests that the narrative could've been steered towards a more grown-up style of intrigue and thrills; on the other hand, events unfold precipitously, and the plot is goosed along by a few too many happy coincidences for it to be comparable to the mature work of Graham Greene or Eric Ambler. Greene's Stamboul Train, which he labeled "an entertainment," is more convincing than Passport to Peril. Given that Hard Case's métier is pulp fiction, one could've wished for either more thrills or a more immersive, informative experience along the lines of Alan Furst's tales of ordinary people performing espionage in extraordinary circumstances (Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The World At Night, etc.). The novel that we have here is neither fish nor fowl: neither a page-turning, suspense-drenched and action-packed pulp potboiler nor an intelligent, realistic thriller whose existential overtones are almost more terrifying than the events at hand.
That said, Parker does lay out the sinister conspiracy behind Blaye's murder and the events that follow about as matter-of-factly as one might wish (in Chapter Eight: "Unwilling Accomplice," pps. 104-10; however, it should be pointed out that this plot has rather uncomfortable echoes of both the mystic tales mined by Philip José Farmer for his "real-world" stories of Tarzan and Doc Savage [A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, The Mad Goblin] and the anti-Semitic farrago of forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion); on the other hand, there are bobbles that one hopes would have no place in a serious work of fiction, such as Hiram's statement that the Hungarians were occupied by the Romans (p. 181 [Chapter Fifteen: "Search For a Girl"]), when in fact the Magyars -- "Hungarians" to outsiders -- didn't occupy the territory of modern Hungary (or Magyarország) until roughly four hundred years after the Roman Empire collapsed. Also curious is Stodder's referring to Stalin with the title "Generalissimo" (p. 230 [Chapter Twenty-One: "Runaway Locomotive"]); possibly Parker intended this to be a holdover of Stodder's involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
Readers with a taste for thrillers, whether pulpy or adult, featuring revanchist Nazis and Soviet counter-intelligence operatives would be advised to look elsewhere than Passport to Peril.