Review: "Terror's Cradle" by Duncan Kyle
The
1970s were a great decade for adventure novels. A wave of writers, mostly
British, were writing suspense adventure, usually featuring a common man in
very uncommon trouble. The most popular, and the most remembered, is Alistair
MacLean, but there were others. Desmond Bagley, Gavin Lyall, and Jack Higgins
all come to mind. But the genre cultivated other writers, while not quite
consistent enough or lucky enough to break into the top level, who wrote some
pretty damn good yarns. One such writer is John Franklin Broxholme. Broxholme
published 15 novels between 1970 and 1993, mostly using the pseudonym Duncan
Kyle, including his 1975 novel, Terror’s Cradle.
John
Sellers is a British newspaperman in Washington D. C. covering a Senate
corruption case that may implicate an English politician. It’s a bust, but
before Sellers can fly home to London he’s sent on a junket to Las Vegas where
a starlet, who is a magnet for trouble, is in more when a man is found dead in
her hotel bathroom. His Las Vegas trip is cut short when he’s threatened, and
then actually chased by armed gunmen. When Sellers returns to England, he learns
his coworker and friend, Alison Hay, has disappeared after a seemingly
successful assignment in the Soviet Union.
Terror’s
Cradle is a slick adventure novel. The protagonist is strong and
vulnerable, and even better, stubborn. He quits his job and plays a harrowing
game with both the KGB and CIA. His mission is to find Alison Hay. The locales
are exotic from the desert landscape of Lake Meade in Las Vegas to Gothenburg,
Sweden to the Shetland Islands in the North Atlantic. The pace is smooth and
quick; it charges out of the gate and never slows. The action scenes are
believable (although the climactic action is on the whacky side) and even
better, exciting. A chase scene in the opening pages transitions from Lake
Meade to the barren desert landscape of its shores, and it’s one of the better
I’ve read:
“As I stumbled quickly between the
sheltering rocks, I heard the car stop and doors open and close. Then there was
silence. I kept going, frantic to get space and distance between myself and the
road.”
Terror’s
Cradle is literate, intelligent, and exciting. The prose is sharp.
The plot is complicated but linear, and smoothly perfect. There isn’t much
mystery about where the story is going, but it is so concise and exciting it
doesn’t matter.
Your last paragraph says it all and embodies exactly the qualities I loved about Kyle's books, which I also stumbled upon. My favorites remain A Cage of Ice, the first one I found in paperback with a cover that made me itch with the expectation of the adventure within, and Whiteout! which, when I think about it, were both direct connections to a couple of my favorite (earlier) MacLeans, Night Without End and Ice Station Zebra (among others). I remember finding this one at the Library and nearly chortling with glee, right there in the stacks. I was like that. I had no way to find these books proactively, as we can do today, so for a nerdy high school bookworm, this was as close to Nirvana as I could get -- a new thriller by someone who could tell a story that would hold me spellbound. It's no wonder most of my early formative writings were imitations and outright rip-offs of these writers who fueled my own writerly ambitions. Absolutely recommend Kyle (and Bagley, et al) to anyone who wants thrillers the likes of which we'll never see again, as they were clearly a product of their Cold War/Vietnam War/wild70s incubation. I recently reread Black Camelot and wondered at how I managed to appreciate it so much the first time around, when I was in my teens. But, then, at the time Black Camelot reminded me of Where Eagles Dare, though it was more stark and realistic. I don't remember the plot of Terror's Cradle as much as I should, but the scenes in the desert are indelibly etched in my memory... Great stuff for armchair adventurers like me. Thanks for an excellent review.
ReplyDeleteI remember chortling more than once as a teenager when I found a book by an author I loved. I was easy to please, and a time that stands out is when I found a ratty copy Bagley's Flyaway at a thrift store. I had never read anything by Bagley, but I had heard from an elderly neighbor he wrote stories like MacLean and man how I loved that book. Looking back, Flyaway isn't Bagley's best, but it's still my favorite of his novels for the simple reason it was the first one I read. I, like you, love these old thrillers with a dash of Cold War -- the paranoia and dark shadows -- and high on adventure. I love Hammond Innes and Gavin Lyle, too. I've been re-reading Lyall's books the past several months and I'm amazed at how literate and good they are.
DeleteI should add that Black Camelot was not one of the Cold War-based novels, of course, but my second favorite setting tended to be WWII spy stories, so... while different, it held its own place of honor in my thriller pantheon.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Black Camelot yet, but I'm hoping to correct that soon. I really dig the WW2 stories written in the Cold War era. Jack Higgins's The Eagle Has Landed, MacLean's Where Eagles Dare. Good stuff.
DeleteI'll have to check the stacks and see if I have anything by Kyle. Maybe, hopefully! Lyle, Higgins and MacLean - definitely. Another author of the era that I've hoovered up some by but not yet read - Anthony Price.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Anthony Price, either and I'm pretty sure I don't have a single book by him in the home archives. I'll try and change that.
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