Books: The Spy in the Ointment By Donald E. Westlake (1966/1987)

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 8^th 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.