“Arnold Hodgkiss, a young Chinese
American patent attorney whose secret identity is ‘Jewellery Jules’, is a
notorious jewel thief who has never been caught, or even suspected. He has come
to London to steal the Crown Jewels, is dreamily casing the Tower of London
when a strange man approaches him and says ‘The crown is large’.
Hodgkiss, nonplussed, replies ‘And very heavy’, unwittingly giving the
correct countersign. The man, a spy, thrusts a parcel at Hodgkiss and
disappears. Hodgkiss keeps the parcel, hoping to turn it in some way to his
advantage. Soon afterward, Jerry Cornell receives a new assignment: he is to
discover the whereabouts of plans for ‘Project Glass’, which have been stolen.
Although the thief has been caught, the plans are still missing, and are
believed to be in the hands of a fiendish Chinese agent named Kung Fu Tzu.
Meanwhile, Kung is hopping mad because he never actually got the plans; they
were given to Hodgkiss by mistake.”
Author Michael
Moorcock, best known as the author of fantasy fiction and science
fiction-based parables, released The Chinese Agent in 1970, though it was a
revision of book, called Somewhere in the Night, released during the height of
the spy crazy in 1966 under the pseudonym of Bill Barclay.
The sometimes dark comedy of
errors gets a bit absurd, as Cornell tracks Kung, who in turn follows Hodgkiss,
who then eludes Kung but finds trouble aplenty when he tries to steal a brooch
from a stall on Portobello Road. All awhile this is going on, Moorcock gives us
a bizarre look at the city’s worst aspect, folks just above, I guess, homeless,
and their antics on how they survive. That includes Jerry’s Uncle Edmund, a
person “so fantastically dirty that the rubbish pile in his yard has congealed
and come to life.” This is enhanced when the two communist operatives try to
intimidate him, Edmond sneaks up behind them and pushes them into the quivering
pile, escaping while they fight to extricate themselves from its gelatinous
embrace. It’s less than flattering, but amusing just the same.
What work the most here are
the agents themselves, as each whom have inflated opinion
on their opposition. You’ll get a few good chuckles here, but the book is
clearly of a certain age. But as parody of spy novels, it works.
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