Jon Cleary (1917–2010)

Pearl Rule 14 (p50)

Rating: 2.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Paul Tancred, First Secretary at the American Embassy in Beirut, walks a tightrope. On either side, war is imminent. Caught between a passionate desire for peace and loyalty to an old friend and in love with an Arab girl, Paul is sucked into a whirlpool of espionage and violence.

My Response: On the first page, the author drops the w-bomb. Over the next three pages, he uses the very 1960s racist shorthand of Arabs being shifty bargainers, Western educated if intellectual and violent primitives if not, Americans being honorable if dimwitted, Welsh people being romantic and shifty....

It's got balls...the first line is "You could help us kill Nasser." That isn't exactly the least PC line in the first fifty pages, either. But balls, love them though I do, aren't anywhere near enough to compel me to wade through an American diplomat's loss of innocence told in this period-perfect voice.

I have no idea if anyone I know will want to read Season of Doubt, but believe me it's not one to go on an extended search for. Thus I bid farewell to Author Cleary, after having read [Peter's Pence] at the cyber-behest of Criminal Element's The Edgar Awards Revisited series of articles. (It won for 1975.) I've reviewed that book already. This one, I'm sorry to say, never overcame my distaste for its period politics with a cracking story the way Peter's Pence did.… (altro)

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

At the end of May 2019, Criminal Element ran its weekly piece on the past winners of the Edgar Award for best crime/mystery novel of the year. They were up to 1975, and the winner was this title by Jon Cleary. A thriller set in Rome and the Vatican, it details the accidental kidnapping of the recently-elected Pope, a German survivor of Dachau and the first non-Italian in the job for over 450 years. Unpopular with the Vatican bureaucrats and conservative Catholics, a liberalizing and revitalizing figure beloved of the people, the Pope's past in Germany was going to come and play merry Hell with his present.

So Cleary, Australian and Catholic, clearly saw the election of John Paul II in 1978 and foresaw that the controversial figure would be the subject of much opposition as well as adulation. Way to go, Cleary!

This story, however, goes deeper into geopolitics as it involves the IRA, then in the midst of that bloodbath we call The Troubles, although I myownself would call it "the stupid bloody pigheaded gobshites killing anyone they damned well pleased and calling it patriotism," but there you are. The Vatican's oodles and buckets of treasures are to be raided from within via a forgotten, now-subterranean, grotto. A Vatican insider, American so immune from suspicion (that would NOT have flown in 1975 Italy, BTW, paranoid in the grip of its own terror from the "Communist" Red Brigades), one Fergus McBride helps identify a way in to the Vatican's storied hoard and co-ordinate the holding-for-ransom of the objects. This is all in aid of stopping the killing of The Troubles. With the Vatican's ransom money retrieving their objects, the IR-no-longer-A would resort to bribery and intimidation instead of murder and mayhem.

So we can see this is a fantasy.

The Pope throws a wrench into the doin's by deciding to send these very objects (just think! such a coincidence!) on a world museum tour that he's just thunk up and is going to send the stuff off the very day the IRA dudes planned to steal it, so their plan goes into 24-hour-earlier chaos.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious idiocy of this turn of events because I expect anyone old enough to care about this book will also be worldly-wise enough to know that musea take YEARS to set up exhibitions, the insurance companies require *detailed* plans and proof of adequate security before they'll insure a move, and no museum on the surface of the Earth would *dream* of touching uninsured relics. Not even in 1975.

The forgotten basement of the Vatican is breached (!) and there is a major structural collapse, yet all our IRA thieves are alive! And then the Pope decides to wander downstairs to have a look at the goodies he's blithely consigned to unknown destinations (apparently far and wide, again not remotely realistic as stuff like that in the Vatican's hoard moves in curated bunches or not at all), thus putting himself in line for kidnapping.

Like Aldo Moro, ex-PM of Italy, just three years later. Only Moro ended up dead after 55 days, not rescued in two.

Anyway, onward the plot careens, a juggernaut crushing many vestiges of realism in service of excitement and action. That is this book's raison d'etre: Excitement and action, which Cleary delivers. Sensible plot developments, no; fun set-pieces and chases, yes.

Cleary brings us into the station with a skeleton crew (y'all who bother to read the book will now wince) but the Pope intact. There was no doubt from the get-go that the Pope would not die. That's not the way of the thriller in 1975. Assassinations are headlined, not thrown in as plot twists. But the point was the ride, no doubt about it, and if you're up for a midcentury misogynist's fast-paced and exciting romp, this is a good choice. It didn't win the Edgar for its intricate plotting. But win it did, and judged by the purpose the book was written to serve (action thriller), it deserved the accolade.… (altro)