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Bezig met laden... The Spy in the Ointment (1966)door Donald E. Westlake
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The three-time Edgar Award-winning Grand Master of Mystery serves up a dangerous case of mistaken identity in "the best spy comedy I have ever read" (The New York Times). J. Eugene Raxford is not what anyone would call a debonair man of action. He has no class, no skills, and all the physical prowess of a napping tree sloth. James Bond would think twice before letting him park the Aston Martin. Though he is a devoted pacifist, Raxford is also--thanks to a tragically consequential typo--the supposed leader of a half-baked and violent radical organization. That's why the FBI wants him to go undercover and spy on the consortium of real-life terrorists and deadly assassins. Now, with the help of his girlfriend--who is even more clueless than he--Raxford is about to enter a realm of danger and deception unlike any he has ever imagined. And the safety of the entire world depends on his every move. "If the suspense doesn't kill you, the laughter will." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Inventive . . . Wholly delightful." --The New York Times "No writer can excel Donald E. Westlake . . . but he has excelled himself . . . If you miss it, you'll regret it." --Los Angeles Times Praise for Donald E. Westlake "Westlake has no peer in the realm of comic mystery novelists." --San Francisco Chronicle Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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I thought of this while reading his 1966 novel “The Spy in the Ointment,” which is about a liaison of weird villains.
This novel came early in Westlake's career, soon after he shifted from serious crime novels to comic crime novels. The narrator is J. Eugene Raxford, a pacifist. In the 1960s the feds were as suspicious of pacifists as they are now of Republicans, and so they tap his phone and monitor his movements. Gene knows about it but doesn't much care. He's a true pacifist, after all.
To prove how harmless he is, Gene agrees to become an FBI spy at a meeting of representatives from small fringe groups on both the far left and the far right. Most of these people seem too wacky (or weird) to be dangerous to anyone, but that is not true of the leader of this meeting, a young man whose evil plans include blowing up the United Nations building. The weird villains are his patsies. What's more, he is the brother of Angela, Gene's wealthy girlfriend, who goes with him to this meeting and whose life he must ultimately put aside his pacifism to save.
Many complications pile up in barely 200 pages, most of them comic, but for a comic novel there are a surprising number of bodies lying around when it's all over.
“The Spy in the Ointment” is not Westlake at his best — that will come later with the Dortmunder novels and especially his classic “Dancing Aztecs”;— but it shows him in the process of developing his talent as an author of comic crime. ( )