RE: Bob Skinner's recent comments on Gold Medalist Donald
Hamilton
"As much as I admire Hamilton, I will admit that there's a
watershed
around the year 1977, after which the Helm books changed and
had lost
some of their punch. From what I can tell, Hamilton
temporarily
abandoned the Helm series (for a period of about five years)
while he
worked on his only 'blockbuster' novel, entitled THE MONA
INTERCEPT
(1982). It reads more like an Arthur Haley novel than a
Hamilton, and it
wasn't a success, in spite of some good things imbedded in
the spam. He
returned to Helm in the early middle '80s, but by now the
novels had the
same sprawl that MONA had, but they'd lost much of the
tension that the
early Helm novels had. I rarely read these post 1980 Helm
novels after
the initial read--but I return to those first dozen over and
over. When
the man was on his game, he had no equal."
I rather liked *The Mona Intercept*, and found the Hispanic
federal cop
who was the novel's protagonist a reasonably good stand-in
for Helm.
While it wasn't as tight as the earliest Helms, it certainly
read like
Hamilton to me, not Arthur Hailey. That said, I agree with
Bob's general
position that the earlier, shorter tighter novels are
Hamilton's best
work.
It seems to me I read many years ago in a magazine interview
(*Mystery
Monthly*, *Mystery*, *Espionage*, or some other defunct
periodical) that
he'd prefer to write shorter books, but his editors were on
him to write
door-stoppers in the Robert Ludlum manner. It was more of a
market
consideration than a creative one. - Jim Doherty
--UNS_gsauns2_2983041399--
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