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thejoeyharris's review
5.0
This was a good read. Collins does his usual excellent job in writing a character that brings to mind the early Bond films (I've not read the books) as well as the flavor of the early 60's.
brettt's review
2.0
The recent death of Sean Connery brought a blip in attention to his James Bond movies as examples of mid-60s attitudes and imagery, leaving co-authors Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens a prime debut point for their Bond homage about British MI6 agent John Sand, Come Spy With Me.
Sand, they suggest, is the actual spy on whom Ian Fleming -- who goes unnamed in the book -- based his Bond novels. The renewed notoriety of the books accompanying the major box office success of the movie series raised his profile and ruined his usefulness as a secret agent, seeing as how he wasn't all that secret anymore. So he retired and settled down with Stacey Boldt, the Texas oil heiress whose life he saved in his final adventure. As an executive with her company, Sand's time is taken up with deals and boardrooms instead of caper and bedrooms -- until the President of the United States sends an invitation to a meeting. Rogue elements of the CIA plot deadly and destabilizing moves in the Caribbean, and the President doesn't know who among his own people he can trust. Can John Sand, retired, happily married and rather averse to upsetting his wife by getting into the gunsights of enemy agents, help him? After all, nobody does it better.
Come Spy With Me takes a lot of great ingredients -- the swagger of mid-60s popular culture, the chance to take on a Bond-type character without the layers of icon varnish, the nostagia-strengthened moral certitude of honest American and English good guys vs. authoritarian and megalomaniacal bad guys -- and from them creates a pretty bland entrée. The book title riffs of a Frank Sinatra album and promises some good old-fashioned Rat-Pack 'tude that never really comes across, even though Frank and the boys make a swinging cameo early in the story.
The central plot of Sand trying to uncover and thwart the rogue CIA and organized crime elements who want the region open for their kind of business never really gets into high gear, almost seeming like a prologue to the personal dangers Mr. and Mrs. Sand may yet face from villains thought buried. Collins and Clemens reach for Fleming's energy but don't re-create it even with all of these kinds of meta-narrative touchstones at their disposal. In the same way that a program for a museum exhibit may show pictures of artwork that may be very well-done but aren't the work themselves, Come Spy With Me is a well-done homage to a character and an era while only being so-so done itself.
Sand, they suggest, is the actual spy on whom Ian Fleming -- who goes unnamed in the book -- based his Bond novels. The renewed notoriety of the books accompanying the major box office success of the movie series raised his profile and ruined his usefulness as a secret agent, seeing as how he wasn't all that secret anymore. So he retired and settled down with Stacey Boldt, the Texas oil heiress whose life he saved in his final adventure. As an executive with her company, Sand's time is taken up with deals and boardrooms instead of caper and bedrooms -- until the President of the United States sends an invitation to a meeting. Rogue elements of the CIA plot deadly and destabilizing moves in the Caribbean, and the President doesn't know who among his own people he can trust. Can John Sand, retired, happily married and rather averse to upsetting his wife by getting into the gunsights of enemy agents, help him? After all, nobody does it better.
Come Spy With Me takes a lot of great ingredients -- the swagger of mid-60s popular culture, the chance to take on a Bond-type character without the layers of icon varnish, the nostagia-strengthened moral certitude of honest American and English good guys vs. authoritarian and megalomaniacal bad guys -- and from them creates a pretty bland entrée. The book title riffs of a Frank Sinatra album and promises some good old-fashioned Rat-Pack 'tude that never really comes across, even though Frank and the boys make a swinging cameo early in the story.
The central plot of Sand trying to uncover and thwart the rogue CIA and organized crime elements who want the region open for their kind of business never really gets into high gear, almost seeming like a prologue to the personal dangers Mr. and Mrs. Sand may yet face from villains thought buried. Collins and Clemens reach for Fleming's energy but don't re-create it even with all of these kinds of meta-narrative touchstones at their disposal. In the same way that a program for a museum exhibit may show pictures of artwork that may be very well-done but aren't the work themselves, Come Spy With Me is a well-done homage to a character and an era while only being so-so done itself.
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