This is yet another purchase from the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Book Fair. There's already talk around Gutbrain Headquarters about going back next year but getting a table to sell books instead of buy them. Because there are a lot of them here. But I still want to read them all! So not next year but maybe in a few years.

Anyway, Heather grabbed this book for me because it's a spy novel with a shark on the cover. Which is all I need.

I was immediately a little suspicious, though. The publisher or imprint, Apollo Books, didn't ring a bell. The copyright page gave them an address in Connecticut, which never inspires confidence.

Then there's the fact that the front cover tells you that this is "a spy novel". Well, the name of the book is The Accidental Spy so this isn't exactly a revelation.

And on the back cover there's this blurb, in quotes: "'A spine-tingling story of violence and death'".

That's pretty generic but more alarming is that this quote isn't attributed to any person or periodical. It's just there. For all we know it could be a quote from the author himself or a member of his family or his agent or dentist or whatever.

But this is all surface stuff. What happens in this book?

It's basically the kind of story that Eric Ambler did really well and, apparently, made look a little too easy. An innocent abroad gets embroiled in international intrigue and espionage.

The highpoint of this subgenre is almost certainly The Mask of Dimitrios a.k.a. A Coffin for Dimitrios, which actually is a great book and was adapted into a decent movie while also being the primary inspiration for Citizen Kane.

Our book is narrated by Tim Clayton, a guy who runs some shops in the US and makes a good living buying stuff in other countries and selling them back home at huge mark-ups.

He and his partner, Elena, posing as a married couple, are yachting around Spain with Tim's college buddy Mort, who's rich and brilliant but also a racist, right-wing bigot. Tim has tuned this out and also lets the reader know that his own background is such that he's not exactly outraged by this.

Tim and Elena go through the usual paces. Mort disappears mysteriously, their cabin on another ship is searched, there's an attemped murder of either Tim or Elena, they meet a mysterious man who they think is a bad guy but the reader will immediately guess is some kind of intelligence agent.

Eventually it all leads to smuggling secret plans for something, I already forget what. In those days it was usually something to do with radar or missiles but maybe this time it was about some kind of energy source for rockets.

I forget because I definitely stopped caring by the time we got there. Mostly the book is a travelogue of Spain with the narrator tediously sharing all of his thoughts, opinions and observations and once every hundred pages or so getting into a car chase or shooting someone with a spear gun.

There is a shark, eventually, near the very end, but it's not a particularly believable shark and its situation is bizarre enough to drift into poetic and surreal territory.

Too bad for everyone involved, though, this little spark of interest in the book's last pages is an aberration, and mostly what we have here is a dull and unconvincing attempt at Ambler-like adventure.

The first line is "Ironically I suppose, all that follows began at the time which was one of the most pleasant periods of my life".