HENRY MCGEE IS NOT DEAD
Bill Granger
New York: Warner Books, 1988
320 pp., $18.95
November is back, and he poses a new and difficult mystery. Something has changed; something beyond this story, the ninth November Man novel in this series by Bill Granger. But like any good mystery, one must first twist one's way through the intrigues, the malicious and calculating manipulations of the players in the cold and secret world of cross, double cross, spy and hide.
Special agent Devereaux, code named November by R-Section (a CIA derivative/competitor), is on the trail of the ingenious, nasty, and nearly omnipotent Henry McGee, an ex-agent, double agent, mole, perhaps gone "free-lance." The trails take us to Seattle, Anchorage, Washington, D.C., Nome, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Siberia, Hollywood, and onto a Soviet submarine running silent under the frozen surface of the Bering Sea. This makes for an intricate plot. Indeed the book's format resembles an imploding eight-point asterisk with each of eight plot lines beginning at one of the star's spiky tips, then moving lineally to a resolution at the center.
The trails are icy, made slippery by lies and deceit, and the high price of the stakes. There is the search for McGee in the frigid wasteland where the United States and USSR are separated by only a few miles of frozen sea; there is a radical Eskimo terrorist organization's plot to use an atomic device to destroy the Alaska oil pipeline; there is an ongoing cover-up that involves industrial magnates and U.S. senators; there is a penetration of the Federal Witness Protection Program, which has been compromised by, perhaps, the KGB; there are CIA and KGB attacks on R-Section; and there is the reluctant, fatalistic, aging Devereaux, who'd prefer remaining abed with Rita Macklin rather than risk his life, again, for R-Section's operation chief Hanley. But Hanley has told Devereaux, "There is no such thing as a retired spy . . . .You've had a long rest. It's time to come back." Devereaux answers, "I might choose not to." But the reader knows there is no choosing--not because this is a novel about spy agencies but because the reluctance is an overt gimmick that allows Devereaux the semblance of morality.
Complex problem
In Henry McGee Is Not Dead there is a vast landscape of good--but sketchy--plot material, of which that listed is only the tip of the iceberg. The problem with tremendous months of sketchy material in a complex plot is that this demands sensible explanation of motives and actions or, at the least, convincing reasons and reasonable possibilities for the reader to make the inductive leap required from what's gone before to what's happening now. Relying on complexity to cover up inadequate development is an easy trap into which a novelist can fall. In Henry McGee, Bill Granger asks the reader to make leaps greater than this reader, at least, could justify.
Coincidences do happen. People can be manipulated without their knowledge, particularly if what is required of them is very common--following a trend, holding a simple belief--and more particularly if those to be manipulated are percentages of a population, not specific individuals. Madison Avenue relies not
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