J. Eugene Raxford is the leader of a small pacifist
group, who is inadvertently contacted by terrorists who mistook his group for a
similarly-named terrorist group. The terrorists are plotting something big (the
UN Building), and the Raxford’s long-time antagonists, the FBI, persuade him to
go along with it as a spy. Part of his cover story, one designed to keep him
alive while he plays double-agent, is that he’s also a wanted murder suspect. Now
Raxford –who slowly loses all his master spy material provided to him- must
keep his pacifist lifestyle in check, as he now surrounded by men and women who
being willing kill as easily as they breath.
The Spy in the Ointment is one of Westlake’s earliest comic
novels (his 8th overall, but his first published under his own name that did not carry a murder mystery plot),
and while not as strong as his later humorous heist novels, it’s certainly a
fun read. Raxford comes off more like a variation on Cary Grant’s character of
Roger Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1959 film North By Northwest, a
man forced into the underbelly of American crime because of a mistaken
identity. This book also pokes fun at the FBI, who seem to crib everything
from Ian Fleming’s master spy, James Bond. By the way, at the time, everyone
was doing this sort of variation on spies and mistaken identities, as Graham
Greene’s hugely successful 1958 novel, Our Man in Havana (and it’s hugely
successful 1959 film version) is considered to be the first of this genre. So,
for the next few years, the Hollywood Studios and novelists began releasing variations
on this theme. Some were successful (at the time), but most have passed into
the mists of time, a bygone era when no one really believed any one person
could destroy the world.
A lot of humor comes from the terrorist –a madly group of discordant
nuts- who pool their talents and don’t really care that their larger goals don’t
exactly match. Basically, if they reach their end goal –blowing up the UN- then
they can work together. As usual with Westlake, there is some great comedy bits
within this disparate group, but he does add some serious violence towards the
end, as some of the terrorist begin to get killed off.
It's a bit dated (and only a certain group of older people would know what a mimeograph machine was, and a lot of the action does not begin until the third act,
but even as an early comic novel, it still better than average.
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