The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins (Harry Patterson)

THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE (1971) is one of the many high adventure novels Jack Higgins wrote before becoming an international bestseller with THE EAGLE HAS LANDED in 1975. Many Higgins fans regard these earlier novels as his best work, and I can’t say as I disagree with them.

THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE is set in Brazil in 1938 and is narrated by Neil Mallory, a down-on-his-luck British pilot who, through a series of misadventures, winds up working for an American flier named Sam Hannah, who was a flying ace in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I. Hannah was even known as the Black Baron, the Allies’ answer to the Red Baron. But now he’s come down in the world considerably and has a contract to fly mail and supplies to various isolated settlements in the Amazon jungle.

Things take a turn for the worse when a mission hospital is attacked by natives and the priest and nuns who work there are slaughtered, except for two nuns who are missing when the atrocity is discovered. The sister of one of those nuns, who is a beautiful nightclub singer and aspiring movie star, shows up along with another nun, and Mallory and Hannah are drawn into their efforts to locate the missing women or at least find out what happened to them. Not surprisingly, this does not go well.

As usual, Higgins (whose real name was Harry Patterson) does a great job with the setting, vividly portraying the beauties and the dangers—mostly the dangers—of the Amazon rainforest. His characters are well-developed, none of them completely sympathetic or truly evil. The romantic triangle that develops between Mallory, Hannah, and the young American woman is believable and handled in a realistic fashion. And of course, there’s plenty of action, both in the jungle and in the skies above it. The problem in this book, if there is one, is that the plot is fairly thin and sort of meanders along without any real twists. The one late development that takes Mallory by surprise has been pretty obvious to the reader all along.

But that wasn’t enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. The last section is very suspenseful and then it all comes to a fitting conclusion. I had a good time reading THE LAST PLACE GOD MADE, but I’ve read enough by Jack Higgins in the past that I wasn't surprised by that. I’m sure I’ll be reading more by him in the future, especially more of those early novels before he was a household name. This one is still in print from Amazon in both e-book and paperback editions.

Luciano's Luck - Jack Higgins

Years ago I read and enjoyed quite a few books by Jack Higgins, but then he started writing a series about a character I didn’t care for (Sean Dillon) and I got out of the habit of reading his books. Plus his writing seemed not as good, much like Alistair Maclean in the later stages of his career.

But I found myself in the mood to read one of his books, and I’m a sucker for books about gangsters, so I gave LUCIANO’S LUCK a try. The plot is an intriguing one: During World War II, a British intelligence agent arranges for Lucky Luciano to be released temporarily from prison so that they can parachute into Sicily and try to make an alliance with the capo of the Mafia there to assist the allies in their upcoming invasion of the island. So it’s a gangster book and a World War II book. Right up my alley.

And I enjoyed it, too, although it’s not without its faults. It was published originally in 1981, about the time Higgins’ books started to get not quite as good. This one is still pretty well-written. The main problem I have with it is that the plot takes a long time to really get going. The mission in Sicily doesn’t actually begin until the book is half over. Before that there’s a lot of assembling the team stuff, including the introduction of a lot of supporting characters and several Nazi bad guys. That results in not much action, which continues even after the scene switches to Sicily.

Ah, but the last 50 or so pages! That last section is a whirlwind of action with unexpected plot twists that really had me galloping along to find out what was going to happen. If the whole book had been like that, LUCIANO’S LUCK would be a classic, and also exhausting. As far as I’m concerned, it redeems the book overall and makes me glad I read it. I think I need to go back and catch up on some of the earlier Jack Higgins books I haven’t read. I have quite a few of them. Meanwhile, if you want to give LUCIANO’S LUCK a try, it’s still available in both e-book and paperback editions.

A Fine Night for Dying - Jack Higgins

Over the years I’ve read a number of books by Jack Higgins (whose real name is Harry Patterson) and enjoyed them all, but I haven’t read anything by him in a while. To remedy that I picked up a recent reissue of A FINE NIGHT FOR DYING, originally published in 1969. This is the next-to-last book in a series about British secret agent Paul Chavasse, which was first published under the pseudonym Martin Fallon and later reprinted under Patterson’s better-known pen-name.

I hadn’t read any of the Paul Chavasse books until now. There’s a certain similarity to James Bond: Chavasse reports to an M-like boss who has a flirtatious secretary like Miss Moneypenny, and Chavasse can also be brutally and efficiently violent when he needs to be. That’s pretty much where the similarities end, though, at least in this book. Although it has an international espionage angle, at heart it’s really a gritty little crime story about a ring of smugglers who bring people without visas into England. Chavasse is given the assignment of breaking up this smuggling operation, and to do so he has to pretend to be a fugitive from the law himself.

This is a tightly written book, the sort of lean little British thriller that doesn’t get written much anymore, if at all. A couple of years ago I read a debut thriller from an author who has gone on to be a best-seller. I remember thinking that it had a pretty good plot, but Nick Carter could have handled the same plot in a third as many pages. The same is true of Paul Chavasse. There are no wasted words here. Despite that, the story didn’t really draw me in until the extended action sequence that closes the book. The plot doesn’t have much in the way of twists and turns; the only real “surprise” is telegraphed early on. But the action scenes are very good, and in the end I enjoyed the book enough to make me want to read more of Higgins’ work again. I’ll probably pick up another of his novels soon.