Just Finished Reading: The Eiger sanction by Trevanian

Jonathan Hemlock (played by Clint Eastwood in the 1975 movie adaptation) leads a double life. One life is as a respected art expert and university lecturer, the other is as a paid assassin of the American counter-espionage organisation the CII whose job it is to kill anyone who targets American operatives anywhere in the world. When a courier is killed in Canada Hemlock is dispatched to assassinate a pair of enemy operatives but only manages a single hit. Coerced into a second kill he learns that the target – one of three climbers – are due to attempt to climb the notorious North Face of the Eiger. With Hemlocks background in mountain climbing he is an ideal choice for the assignment except that CII has consistently failed to identify who the killer is. Forced into the climb without sufficient preparation Hemlock must decide who the killer is, dispatch him without the others realising what he has done whilst surviving one of the greatest climbing challenges on the planet. This time he’s certainly going to earn his fee!

I haven’t seen this movie in ages but the book certainly brought back a lot of memories from the last time I saw it. I could recall that significant parts of the novel made it straight onto the screen and even had snatches of dialogue brought up from deep in my subconscious. Fortunately I couldn't remember too much detail – until I was right on top of it – so having seen the film didn't really ruin things for me. I did laugh at the cover of my particular novel (not the one pictured above) which had a comment from the New York Times announcing that the book contained “Plenty of Action, Plenty of Sex”. How very Seventies, I thought. There was a fair bit of action between the covers and a moderate amount of sex but nothing too graphic – actually it was all rather tame by modern standards. There was a fair degree of sparkling conversation with Hemlock having some very good lines. I’ll need to dig out the sequel (which I think I have) and see if the author managed to maintain the standard set here. Overall it was a pretty decent read if rather dated. It was certainly entertaining enough to keep me turning pages which is really what it’s all about in the end.

This was the last in the series of books made into movies I've been reading lately. It’s been an interesting experience especially when the book and the film turned out to be two radically different beasts! Next up, after my usual non-themed batch is a series of books based in the Middle Ages. This is, rather inevitably, a rather arbitrary period of History – though more so that I imagined – so I’m going with the English definition of AD 476 – 1485. That gives me 1000 years to play with so I should be able to get a reasonable spread of stories there. I’m looking forward to it.