"Chace fell asleep thinking of the sheer number of men she would have to kill when she woke up."
One of the happier discoveries I've made thanks to actually checking books out from my local library this year -- as opposed to buying their donated or discarded books and hanging out reading one of the books I own -- is just how goddamn fine Greg Rucka's Queen & Country series is.
Queen & Country began life as a comic book published by Oni Press, and is currently on hiatus; another volume is supposedly forthcoming. My library doesn't have any of the definitive collections, so I've missed out on some of the stand-alone issues; however, my library does have most of the original trade paperbacks collecting the various story arcs (Operation Broken Ground, Operation Morningstar, Operation Crystal Ball, etc.); after my first hit (Broken Ground), I checked out all of the remaining collections and plowed through them in two or three days, my nerves thrumming with such a massive influx of adventures in tradecraft.
Rucka also published a couple of novels set amidst these comic book story arcs -- A Gentleman's Game (2004) and Private Wars (2005) -- but my library doesn't have them. Happily, I was able to borrow them through an inter-library loan, a process that moves much faster thanks to teh interwebs than it used to when it was purely a paper-based transaction. I read A Gentleman's Game last Tuesday, 25 August through last Thursday, 27 August; I started Private Wars this past Tuesday, 1 September. (Oddly enough, both Q&C books came from libraries in the downriver region of metro Detroit -- the river in question being the Detroit River -- which makes me wonder why that region's libraries have all of the good spy thrillers on shelf.) The quotation in the subject header is from p. 172 of Private Wars; "Chace" is Q&C's main protagonist, Tara Chace (which may or may not be her real name; at the least, it's the name on her personnel files at SIS, the UK's Special Intelligence Service). Contemplating the number of people you must slay seems like a nicer way of falling asleep than counting sheep -- unless one has an inordinate fondness for lamb (*coughs*).
Queen & Country was inspired by a UK tv show that I've not seen, The Sandbaggers; based on my enjoyment of Q&C, I may have to keep an eye out for DVDs of it. Tara Chace is a Minder in the Special Operations Section of SIS: essentially the position is analogous to Matt Helm's job, namely primarily that of an assassin but also an all-around covert operative who may occasionally be tasked with less sanguinary, even humanitarian work, though odds are that the old ultraviolence will still be called for in spades during the course of achieving the sunnier goals. She is tough, resourceful, intelligent, brutal and compassionate, and Chris Claremont should hang his head in shame for daring to claim to write tough, resourceful, intelligent, etc., female characters with Rucka in the house. Matt Helm would definitely think long and hard about crossing up Tara Chace unnecessarily. But the thing that really sells me on Q&C is the office politics and gamesmanship, which are, arguably, even nastier and more brutish than the action in the field. (Which leads me to another fantasy: if Donald Hamilton's heirs have any designs on the Matt Helm franchise being revived, I would love, love, love to see Greg Rucka write the books, with scenes of Helm's boss Mac spinning, liaising, horse-trading and out-flanking his bosses and his peers in other countries' intelligence services the way that he shows the head of the Special Ops section, Paul Crocker, in Q&C. I'd even like to see a crossover: Helm meets Chace, Mac meets Crocker, the works.)
Rucka is a very economical writer; the prose Q&C novels open up the characters' interior lives a bit, but not too much: no long soap operatics here, although the nature of the work would be enough to reduce many people to a quivering bundle of neuroses and a few incipient psychoses in short order. And while some folks still have a bias against comic books, the quality of the Queen & Country series is so consistently high that one can read them in public with far less guilt and embarrassment than, say, the books of Ted Bell.
In short, I'm nearing the end of current Queen & Country material, and I'm impatiently awaiting more. (Oh yes: my library also has the collections of Rucka's Whiteout and Whiteout: Melt, featuring another tough, resourceful, etc., etc., female character, Carrie Stetko, a U.S. Marshal stationed at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. I liked both story arcs and will be staying far, far away from the soon-to-be-released movie version, starring that living sleep aid, Kate Beckinsale.)
Queen & Country began life as a comic book published by Oni Press, and is currently on hiatus; another volume is supposedly forthcoming. My library doesn't have any of the definitive collections, so I've missed out on some of the stand-alone issues; however, my library does have most of the original trade paperbacks collecting the various story arcs (Operation Broken Ground, Operation Morningstar, Operation Crystal Ball, etc.); after my first hit (Broken Ground), I checked out all of the remaining collections and plowed through them in two or three days, my nerves thrumming with such a massive influx of adventures in tradecraft.
Rucka also published a couple of novels set amidst these comic book story arcs -- A Gentleman's Game (2004) and Private Wars (2005) -- but my library doesn't have them. Happily, I was able to borrow them through an inter-library loan, a process that moves much faster thanks to teh interwebs than it used to when it was purely a paper-based transaction. I read A Gentleman's Game last Tuesday, 25 August through last Thursday, 27 August; I started Private Wars this past Tuesday, 1 September. (Oddly enough, both Q&C books came from libraries in the downriver region of metro Detroit -- the river in question being the Detroit River -- which makes me wonder why that region's libraries have all of the good spy thrillers on shelf.) The quotation in the subject header is from p. 172 of Private Wars; "Chace" is Q&C's main protagonist, Tara Chace (which may or may not be her real name; at the least, it's the name on her personnel files at SIS, the UK's Special Intelligence Service). Contemplating the number of people you must slay seems like a nicer way of falling asleep than counting sheep -- unless one has an inordinate fondness for lamb (*coughs*).
Queen & Country was inspired by a UK tv show that I've not seen, The Sandbaggers; based on my enjoyment of Q&C, I may have to keep an eye out for DVDs of it. Tara Chace is a Minder in the Special Operations Section of SIS: essentially the position is analogous to Matt Helm's job, namely primarily that of an assassin but also an all-around covert operative who may occasionally be tasked with less sanguinary, even humanitarian work, though odds are that the old ultraviolence will still be called for in spades during the course of achieving the sunnier goals. She is tough, resourceful, intelligent, brutal and compassionate, and Chris Claremont should hang his head in shame for daring to claim to write tough, resourceful, intelligent, etc., female characters with Rucka in the house. Matt Helm would definitely think long and hard about crossing up Tara Chace unnecessarily. But the thing that really sells me on Q&C is the office politics and gamesmanship, which are, arguably, even nastier and more brutish than the action in the field. (Which leads me to another fantasy: if Donald Hamilton's heirs have any designs on the Matt Helm franchise being revived, I would love, love, love to see Greg Rucka write the books, with scenes of Helm's boss Mac spinning, liaising, horse-trading and out-flanking his bosses and his peers in other countries' intelligence services the way that he shows the head of the Special Ops section, Paul Crocker, in Q&C. I'd even like to see a crossover: Helm meets Chace, Mac meets Crocker, the works.)
Rucka is a very economical writer; the prose Q&C novels open up the characters' interior lives a bit, but not too much: no long soap operatics here, although the nature of the work would be enough to reduce many people to a quivering bundle of neuroses and a few incipient psychoses in short order. And while some folks still have a bias against comic books, the quality of the Queen & Country series is so consistently high that one can read them in public with far less guilt and embarrassment than, say, the books of Ted Bell.
In short, I'm nearing the end of current Queen & Country material, and I'm impatiently awaiting more. (Oh yes: my library also has the collections of Rucka's Whiteout and Whiteout: Melt, featuring another tough, resourceful, etc., etc., female character, Carrie Stetko, a U.S. Marshal stationed at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. I liked both story arcs and will be staying far, far away from the soon-to-be-released movie version, starring that living sleep aid, Kate Beckinsale.)