Today is British novelist John le Carré‘s birthday. Why should you care? Let me tell you, it’s not because his books used to put your Grandpa to sleep.

“I hate the telephone. I can’t type. I ply my trade by hand. I live on a Cornish cliff and hate cities. Three days and nights in a city are about my maximum. I don’t see many people. I write and walk and swim and drink.”

–John le Carré

In case you’re unaware, John le Carré is probably the most influential British spy novelist of all time. But if you’re my age or (gasp!) even younger, some of you might think of him as “That guy Grandpa reads.” And, more often than not, “That guy Grandpa falls asleep reading.”

So swipe Grandpa’s Kindle and read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold before you go another minute without knowing how goddamn good a spy novel can be.

Considering le Carré as one of those “old people” writers who was popular in the ’70s is all too common among readers my age, even hardcore book lovers. Even devotees of crime fiction tend to think of le Carré as a snore without ever having tried him. He’s too stodgy, too focused on espionage and politics, too stereotypically British. Who wants to read, like, fifty pages before you even get to the first fistfight?

If that’s what you think, you’re missing out. Mind you, you’re not hearing this from some tea-sipping trust-fundie writing for The New Yorker. Believe me, I’m not all that cultured in my reading tastes. I’m a reader who thinks plot can best be described in terms of body count and “character development” comes from a right hook or the barrel of a 12-gauge. But even if all you want out of a book is a good beating and maybe a hangover, or if the Hard Case Crime-Fawcett Gold Medal style of faster-harder-meaner crime novel is the highest form of art to you, then I submit that you are still missing one of the truly great psychological noir thrillers if you have not read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Yes, it “redefined the spy genre,” whoop-de-doo. Yes, it’s one of those book all those old people have read, hoo-ray. Yes, it’s one of those books that’s always there on boring peoples’ bookshelves. Don’t hold that against it; so’s To Kill a Mockingbird, people. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is tight, fast, mean, and brilliant; if you’ve never read Le Carré, or have not discovered fruitful ground in his longer, at times very complex works, read Spy and understand what genius feels like…50 years on, and fresh as a daisy.

Le Carré is one of the great novelists of his generation, and as far as I’m concerned every generation before or since. He’s a darling of reviewers, but they never have all that much interesting to say about him as a crime novelist, probably because his books are “respectable.”

But le Carré is also in many respects a very, very angry man. He’s deeply disappointed in the ways in which Western governments sold out the promise of a brighter future at the end of of the Cold War…although, to be fair, you can see his distaste for the direction the world is likely to go under the guidance of the Western governments as early as The Russia House, a brilliant novel that came out in the era of Perestroika. It is far more brilliant a novel than a film, if only because le Carré’s relentless, if low-key, experimentation is on display full-force in The Russia House, where the novel is narrated by a secondary character — who is a minor, if significant, character in the film.

In fact, The Russia House is one of three breaking points in le Carré’s career. The question with The Russia House, then and now, was prescient. Would le Carré , who in the 1960s and 1970s had virtually defined the British spy novel as smart, savvy, clued-in to world affairs and almost unbearably melancholy, change as world events changed? Would he find inspiration in alterations in the fabric of reality, or would he be a one-trick-pony like the many other espionage authors — Len Deighton and Frederick Forsyth spring to mind — who turned out unbelievably brilliant spy novels during the Cold War but never really blew past the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the modern era?

With many other spy authors, their relevance in the post-Cold War World was never a likelihood. With Deighton, his spy novels are so crisp, fast and readable that I never expected him to change with the times — why would I? He was a genius at what he did, and as far as I could tell he had a disregard or distaste for greater pretensions. I don’t hold Deighton’s place in history against him any more than I would in the case of Helen MacInnes, Aleister MacLean or Jack Higgins. They were what they were, and Deighton was among the best of them. Forsyth, on the other hand, always felt like a brilliant one-trick pony to me, insightful at times but ultimately unmotivated, even shallow. Higgins was a hack from the get-go, and/or he seems to have passed his later novels on to ghostwriters, as far as I can tell. Clancy, on the other hand, sold out his franchise early, and has spent the years since 1990 fawning over the American power structure, threatening liberals like a drunk barroom brawler and anointing military hardware with his potent Republican seed. Clancy was a joke to begin with. The very idea of any of them writing brilliant and insightful post-Cold-War novels about world affairs is, quite frankly ludicrous.

But then there was le Carré, and twenty or twenty-five years ago, he was a big question mark because he had been one of the chief architects of the Cold War novel. As the Soviet Union shuddered, did le Carré have anything to say about it? Viewed in retrospect, this seems a turning point in the history of British letters. Having built George Smiley out of spare parts and warehoused Churchillian bile, would le Carré descend into self-parody? Le Carré answered with a broadside of great post-Smiley novels; The Russia House was the first, and to my reading Our Game was by far the most human, the subtlest, the most heartbreakingly beautiful, though The Night Manager gives it a hell of a goosing.

Since then, le Carré’s novels have continued to be profoundly audacious — even if, as in the case of Absolute Friends, I found the bitter ending to be a shaggy dog story that ended with me being kicked in the nuts, and the hoped-for rebirth of The Mission Song to be ultimately unconvincing. But then, those two books, alongside the brilliant The Constant Gardner, allude to what makes le Carré , viewed from the perspective of crime as an art form, a Woolrich or a Hitchcock or a Highsmith, not a Chandler or a Lawrence Block.

Here’s why I say that: the fact of the matter is that while le Carré is a genre writer, there’s something different about him. You, as a reader, may be willing to break “spy novels” into a different category than “crime novels.” I am unwilling to do that, because I believe thematically the best of both genres should be indistinguishable other than through politics. Le Carré can’t realistically be considered with political nonentities like Forsyth or foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing yahoos like Clancy. You can consider him in the tradition of G.K. Chesterton or Graham Greene, but that’s the cheap way out. Ultimately, le Carré may some things in common with Greene, but it’s his take on the bitter politics of mourning that intoxicates me, not his cleverness.

In that, I mean to say that le Carré is unpredictable in the manner of the very best “literature,” whatever the hell that is. Please don’t misunderstand me; that statement is not to disparage genre writers; this is, after all, Boiled Hard; I live for genre writers and as far as I’m concerned all the arbiters of what is or isn’t “literary fiction” can go fuck themselves. Genre writers are my primary interest. But there are the writers who lay down a crime novel with unassailable efficiency — Donald E. Westlake, John D. McDonald, Lawrence Block, Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain and many others. They redefine the genre by being so good at it that they turn it into a kind of puzzle that subsequent generations cannot help but want to put back together. Their personalities and their aspirations simply can’t be ignored, but ultimately the redefine the genre within the conventions of the genre. They might do it radically and explosively, like Hammett and Chandler in particular, but they ultimately did what was before them. They were unpredictable in the way they redefined genre, not in what they did to redefine it (or, in a sense, obliterate it).

Then there are Patricia Highsmith, Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson and, I submit, le Carré , whose genre aspirations are so tangled up with their deeply conflicting and deeply insightful personalities — in the case of Woolrich, almost suicidally so. Their unpredictability is as different from that of Cain’s as a hawk is from a handsaw. At first glance Woolrich might seem a weird associate for me to put in a category with le Carré ; Woolrich was among the most melodramatic thriller writers ever to put fingers to an Underwood. Willeford, on the other hand continues to convince me through his writing that he was a borderline psychopath. But what these writers have in common with le Carré is the unpredictability for the places they find doom and pain and savagery. If English is a single language — and I’m far from convinced that it is, but let’s go with that hypothesis for now — it’s the aspiration to tell the kind of stories told by Steinbeck or Vonnegut or Shirley Jackson or Harper Lee or Carson McCullers or Faulkner — that leads to novels like le Carré’s. Subtlety can be a virtue.

And none of the writers in the noir tradition ever seemed to know a thing about politics — or to care. The tragic thing in le Carré’s novels is that he does know politics, and world affairs, and he knows how royally the West fucked up. That’s why The Constant Gardener is among his most mournful works. That’s why Absolute Friends ends with a brutal nutpunch to the reader that felt totally unjustified.

Le Carré’s writing, especially his recent writing, is bitter and angry not because he’s like Woolrich or sadistic like Willeford. He seems to have watched with some measure of hope as the Berlin Wall fell, and as the West laid out its plan for a beautiful future.

And then he watched as Western leaders took a crap on everything they’d ever said they gave a damn about.

Le Carré seems to grasp more than almost any other contemporary fiction writer the deep divide between the West’s unconvincing claim of good intentions and the reality of its many, many transgressions. He portrays with a clear and terrifying vision the the tangled web of lies that sits there at the heart of Western world politics, and the slaughter of principles that has followed the end of the Cold War.

In that, John le Carré one of the few fiction writers who still “matters,” if any of us do.

Which I’m far from convinced we do, but hey, let’s go with that hypothesis for now.

If Roger Zelazny’s best science fiction and fantasy novels are strikingly Chandlerian, was there ever a Zelaznyesque crime novel? Not until the surfacing of The Dead Man’s Brother, a “lost” manuscript probably written in 1970 or 1971.

That’s when Zelazny was at the height of his powers, the same general era that bore a long string of excellent science fiction novels and some stunningly innovative fantasies like Jack of Shadows, probably my very favorite Zelazny book.

The Dead Man’s Brother was discovered by Zelazny’s agent Kirby McCauley, and somehow ended up with Hard Case Crime — the perfect home for it. I’m going to guess it ended up with HCC both because the publishing world outside the science fiction community never seemed to quite “get” Zelazny, and because Trent Zelazny, the elder Zelazny’s son, is a huge fan of noir fiction. (He’s also quite an author in his own right.)

Whatever the provenance of Brother‘s happy home, it couldn’t fit anywhere better than right where it is. The Dead Man’s Brother is about an art-thief-turned-art-dealer who gets mixed up in a plot involving the CIA, the Vatican, and a rebel movement in the jungles of Brazil. Do you need to know anything more? Nope, because the second you pick it up you’ll blink, look around, and wonder how two or three hours have passed. You will have slurped the damn thing down and I only hope, for your sake, you haven’t been reading on public transportation. If you have, you might want to check if you might have gotten rolled, and also investigate which city and/or state you’ve ended up in. It’s that good, that hard, that fast, that impossible to put down.

Does it work? Hell’s bells, does it work! The Dead Man’s Brother is a fast-paced, gorgeous piece of crime fiction that would have fit as easily beneath the pulp cover Hard Case put on it or the weird photo-covers they put on mainstream international thrillers in those days. And wherever it had gone, it would have been rhapsodic poetry, cover to cover, and that’s what it is today. If crime is your poison, this is one of the best. It’s quick, hard, brutal, and uncompromising. But there are other authors who can do that…some as well, or almost as well, as Zelazny. What The Dead Man’s Brother brings to the table that is absolutely unique is the Zelazny feel…dour, world-weary, erudite, clever, unimpressed by human foibles but in love with the arts and the good life and the wicked twist of a phrase or a sentence that nobody seems to be expecting.

Speaking of weird ’70s thriller photo-covers, I remember shelf after shelf in my grandparents’ house, packed with the half-trashy, half-snooty paperbacks that Zelazny was probably imitating. If it was published in the seventies and it had a cover with a .25 Beretta, a Gold Krugerrand and a tube of lipstick on the cover, that’s the genre Zelazny was aping here. He blew them all out of the water in a book he never even bothered to get published. Here, he skunks Helen MacInnes; he drop-kicks Alistair MacLean; he spanks Ian Fleming and sends him home crying. For what it’s worth, The Dead Man’s Brother even gives John LeCarre a wedgie.

But since I brought up LeCarre, it’s worth considering for a moment where international thrillers like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold deviate from international thrillers like The Dead Man’s Brother. I think it’s important, to me at least, in figuring out why Zelazny and LeCarre occupy very different niches in my pantheon of genre writers.

My one beef with Zelazny has always been that he never seemed to push himself in dealing with deeper themes. Though his life seems to have  had its share of drama — as does everyone’s — most of his work seems to only hint at a depth of inner experience.

Meanwhile John LeCarre is at times as brilliant a stylist as Zelazny, but LeCarre’s action scenes and incidences of physical jeopardy and emotional tension lack the intensity I crave in my crime novels. As an amateur student of British history, I find generalizations about the “English character” deeply distasteful, but there’s no escaping the fact that for my American tastes, LeCarre is usually if not always far too polite. If even the boneheaded Ian Fleming could be bothered to thrill at violence now and then, doesn’t it stand to reason that a competent writer like LeCarre, whose ideas reflect a bona-fide political existentialism at times, would bring an urgency to his violent scenes that matches or exceeds other spy writers who don’t seem to have a deep or wounded sense of life’s futility and beauty?

Sadly…not really. LeCarre has written effective scenes of menace, to my mind, in only two novels — the aforementioned The Spy Who Came in… and Our Game. He tried with Absolute Friends, but never got there because by the time on-screen violence occurs, the novel has long since lapsed into pedantry. Most of LeCarre’s works in the interim have been weak on the action and long on the slow.

Why I mention it here is that LeCarre’s works, on the other hand, feature the intensely powerful interpersonal and political themes that I always want from a stylist as evocative as Zelazny, but never quite get. In The Dead Man’s Brother, Zelazny unquestionably comes closer to those interpersonal insights and real-world intensity than he did anywhere else, with the exception of his brilliant early short stories and novellas.

It may sound like a strange observation, but I think if Zelazny had gone the direction that The Dead Man’s Brother seemed to have been taking him, there’s a chance he might have gotten there. Zelazny certainly had the brains and the balls to understand how the world works, on an interpersonal, geopolitical and historical level, and the humanity to care. The fact that he seems to have remained largely apolitical in his writing may not be an absolute of his personality, and it might have changed in the environment that ’70s crime novels would have represented. Not having known the man, I wouldn’t really know.

Anyway, back to The Dead Man’s Brother itself, with which I have no beef whatsoever — “deeper themes” be damned, it’s one of the best crime novels ever written.

The aforementioned Trent Zelazny, the Z-man’s son, speculates in his afterword that his father did not plan the book as his “breakthrough,” but rather just wrote what was in his brain. He says that at the time it was (probably) written, Zelazny was reading a lot of crime fiction, so it makes sense he would have headed this direction…knowing Roger Z’s writing, it does seem unlikely that he sat down and planned it out as a career move. From what I can tell, he wrote what he loved at any given moment…a habit that is in keeping with his visceral love of language.

If you’re an aspiring action writer, there is no better tutorial on how to write action scenes than reading The Dead Man’s Brother alongside Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. If you’re a science fiction or fantasy fan, it doesn’t get better than Zelazny’s writing in either genre, especially some of his his stunning early short stories and novellas.

But regardless of whether you give a damn about science fiction or Roger Zelazny, if you appreciate a crime thriller that punches you in the face so hard you have to go looking for your molars about six blocks over, grab The Dead Man’s Brother and see how it’s done.

(Originally reviewed on Thomasroche.com, 04/25/2009)