I just finished THE STEEL MIRROR (1948), Donald Hamilton's
second novel. It came out twelve years before the first Matt
Helm story, a series that I really like. This one is also a
spy story, but in some ways very different from a Matt
Helm.
It's set in 1948. The hero, such as he is, never served in
the war. He's a chemist (the American kind, not the British
pill-dispensing kind), and worked in a lab and never went
overseas. He's been beating himself up for that ever since.
The heroine, such as she is, was captured in France and is
unsure whether or not she ratted out her husband and their
resistance friends. The war is very recent, and the spy stuff
is a bit different, a little off, from the usual Cold War
business we all know from later books. That's a nice and
refreshing to a reader now.
There are lots of twists and turns, especially at the end.
It's not quite as smooth as the Matt Helm books, but then
Helm isn't narrating. It's still a damn fine story. My copy's
a Fawcett Gold Medal from about 1965--shouldn't it be a Gold
Crest, which was their reprint line? In any case, it's one
more time that Gold Medal didn't let me down.
I see from the Donald Hamilton Worship Page [1] that Hamilton
himself was a chemist who worked in navy labs through the
war. I didn't know that. It doesn't look like he had much in
the pulps before his first novel came out, but the bio on the
page says he spent a lot of time writing short stories to
train himself.
The last time we talked about Hamilton, someone said he was
living in Sweden. Anyone know how he is now? He's 88 this
year.
Bill
[1]
http://bobcat.webappcabaret.net/ntpcug/hamilton/hamilton.jsp
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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