A Helluva Thriller That Ought Not Be Forgotten

Some thoroughbreds not only race fast themselves, but have the ability to pass talent along to their foals.  Maybe authors work the same way.  Patti Abbott is a fine writer who recently garnered a Derringer Award for her story "My Hero" and is the mother of this year’s Edgar winner for best paperback original, Megan Abbott.  Anyway Patti is asking some of her friends to recommend “books we love but might have forgotten over the years.”

Now I don’t want to brag about a memory which can’t always recall where a car was parked thirty minutes ago.  But....  if I love a book I don’t forget it.  I cherish the memory.  Still, the thrust of Patti’s request makes sense.  Who’s overlooked nowadays?  My first inclination was to name a book by Ross Thomas, maybe Briarpatch.  Still, I’ve blogged about him before as have others.  So I went for a stroll along the bookshelves in my office and bedroom.  I cradled this book and that one.  When I came to an old British Penguin paperback of Lionel Davidson’s The Sun Chemist, I stopped.  Now that wasn’t my absolute favorite of his books although it was terrific.  Davidson’s premise was that Chaim Weizmann, the British chemist, first president of Israel, and distant cousin of yours truly, came up with a formula for synthetic oil that had been lost and the hero of the book tries to track it down.  Wonderful.  As were The Menorah Men, The Rose of Tibet, and The Night of Wenceslas (a Gold Dagger winner).  Davidson won a second Gold Dagger for The Chelsea Murders published in 1978, wrote a children's book that saw the light of day in 1980, and then went dark for years.  Finally, like the swan whose last song is its sweetest, Davidson came out with Kolymsky Heights in 1994, one of the two or three greatest thrillers ever. 

There’s more derring-do and adventure in Heights than is typical in Davidson’s oeuvre.  Johnny Porter is not exactly your everyday kind of guy – a Gitksan Indian from British Columbia who happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, too.  A melding of the ancient and the new.  He goes on a mission for the CIA, which he distrusts, to discover a secret inside Russia of inestimable humanitarian value that had been hidden under Stalin's orders.  (As with the missing formula for cheap oil in The Sun Chemist and the original Temple menorah in The Menorah Men, something of tremendous value has been lost and our hero races to find it.)  Porter stands apart, an outsider in his own country and in Siberia an outsider again.  He falls in love or does he?  There’s arcane technological and anthropological lore, a beautiful doctor to fall in love with (or not), and an incredible chase across the frozen tracts of the far north.  In the end Porter proves his loyalty not to a country but to individual people and to humankind.  Read this book.  (You can read the New York Times review here.)

We can’t expect another book from Mr. Davidson who turned 86 in March.  But what a way to leave ‘em wanting more Kolymsky Heights is.

Comments

[Patti Abbott]

And what a lovely discussion it was, Keith. This looks terrific and I'd never heard of it or him.