Ticket 2 Ride

Retired from acting, but keeping busy. Michael Caine has penned a mystery-thriller. Most celebrities who try their hand at writing fiction usually stick to the area most familiar to them: politics, science, show business, etc. Sir Michael goes for a thriller, a nuclear one at that.

Chief Inspector Harry Taylor is part of a New Scotland Yard special operations unit. I picture him looking and talking like Michael Caine, the star of many detectives, spies and villains. Taylor even uses a term that Sir Michael has used in one or more film roles, calling his arrestee in a most dismissive manner, “sunshine.”

Taylor is not secret agent cool, just rather ordinary, which for a copper is a good thing. Although his dress and manner might suggest a fatherly look, it’s what is on the inside that counts. Taylor can be coldly efficient and underestimated.

“Sure, he’d done his best not to look like an off-duty specialist police officer visiting a club he would normally avoid like the plague. So, out came his smartest blue Armani jacket, navy chinos and a pair of loafers that rarely saw action. All of which was fine. But – as girlfriends had told him in the past – he would never be fashionable: not ever. Not even if a team of stylists from Vogue had spent a day trying to make him look edgy and contemporary. He knew that people in the club would look at him and Iris and think, ‘What is she doing with that tall stiff?’ Which, to his great surprise, bugged him ever so slightly. Not much, but the feeling was definitely there.”

Sir Michael gained international fame as secret agent/private detective Harry Palmer in three films based on the Len Deighton character (The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain). He also played the criminal mastermind Charlie Crocker in The Italian Job, and the unforgiving, organized crime hitman in Get Carter.

“Voldrev. Smythe. Two big swinging dicks of the drug world. Two beasts of the narcotic jungle who – across decades, with many corpses strewn along the way – hated each other’s guts. If Voldrev had the uranium, what was he planning? How much did Smythe know? And how would he act upon that knowledge? Tricky fuck.”

I would say that Taylor is most like John Preston in The Fourth Protocol, a Cold War thriller also about a nuclear bomb threat. Written by Frederic Forsyth, The Fourth Protocol is one of Sir Michael’s best, and most underrated, films in his long career. Deadly Game owes a lot to Forsyth’s style of writing, but not so much that it feels like a copy.

Deadly Game is a convincing thriller, well-researched, and with streetwise dialogue. This doesn’t seem like a rookie novel by a 90 year old actor, one tackling a high-concept plot. Famous people writing books tantalize reviewers, who don’t expect much, but sharpen their with sharp critical pens. Deadly Game stays in its lane, not detouring into sex or work relationships, Sir Michael keeps his eye on the ball, and it pays off.

I got into this book quickly and read it in a couple of days. Not a classic, but better than pulp. Perhaps Sir Michael will write another? I hope so.

4/5