"A Slaying in September" and "A Drug Called Power" by Ian Mackintosh or a Quest Fullfilled

Ian Mackintosh created "The Sandbaggers" simply one of the finest espionage shows ever produced. It's a taut, pot-just-about-to-boil-over show about the ins-and-outs of gritty "real-life" spying. Nothing fanciful or romanticized, it paints a dreary, bleak portrait of Cold War Era bureaucracy and high cost of human life, it's on the free TV app Tubi right now. So, go watch it.

The beer might have helped.

Mackintosh was a Navy man who wrote TV and novels and then disappeared mysteriously over the Gulf of Alaska which has all the makings of a spy novel as their on conspiracy theories of defection and Mackintosh's past as a secret agent.. I had never read one of Mackintosh novels but drooled over them online for many years. His first novel "A Slaying in September" was published by Robert Hale in 1967 and was quickly followed by four more books until 1970. Three of the novels star Tim Blackgrove a English private eye/gunman/troubleshooter guy who's out for revenge against big drug pushers.Past his initial burst of novels he wrote adapations for his shows "The Sandbaggers" "Wilde Alliance" and "Warship."

Tim Blackgrove Series/Early Novels:

"A Slaying in September"  (1967)

"A Drug Called Power" (1968)

"The Brave Cannot Yield"  (1970)

Non-Series: 

"Count Not the Cost" (1968)

"The Man from Destiny" (1969)

All of these books are near impossible to find; they rarely come up online for sale and when they do you better be willing to crack open your piggy bank and then your neighbors and then maybe rob a bank or something. I don't know the that the demand for novels like this is strong enough for their price tags sometimes. I knew unless I got extraordinarily lucky I'd never own one. And I still don't.

One day the light bulb popped on  above my head to try an Inter-Library loan for the Mackintosh books. I don't know why I hadn't before, I try it every so often with the impossible to find books. My library will only let you do three-inter-library-loans at a time and I tried for the full Tim Blackgrove series and came up one short. But hey, make lemonade. Both the books required fairly heavy fees to check out due to their scarcity but I'm good a spending money on books.They came in fairly short order from the east coast to the mid-west; one from Cornell University and the other from the New Jersey School of Medicine and Dentistry! Both are in rough shape and one was nearly falling apart but by god, I'd get to read them.

 "A Slaying in September" was Mackintosh's first novel AND it shows. Basically the daughter of a buddy (who's in love with Tim) gets murdered by a drug smuggler and Blackgrove goes a murdering. The few reviews of the these books online at Existential Ennui and Mystery File are not particularly kind  to the books, marking them for reading in more of the "interesting" category then the "good" category. I've said it before but my tasters burnt out long ago for "bad" books, if I can half-way laugh at the book and have a good time with it, it was a worthy read. Where do Mackintosh's first novel land? 

It's borderline.

Parts of the book are exactly what you want in a late-60's Executioner-type pulp novel (even though it predates the first Executioner) then there's long passages of love-lorn Tim Blackgrove feeling sorry for himself or falling head-over-heels instantly for a woman, then chiding himself for doing just that. But when he's on the hunt and actually paying attention to his revenge-quest it's a crackerjack story. Blackgrove can be totally remorseless and violent dispatching baddies with his Luger and his .22 Walther. Then it slides right back into the flowery love stuff. Mackintosh must have been a romantic and then cured of it by the time he wrote "The Sandbaggers," its a stark change from his later work. And it's very paperback-convenient in terms of plot. Tim doesn't do any detecting, just beatings and shootings and casually meeting the right people. Over all, push come to shove, right down the line, with a gun to my head I would say that I liked it. I read in nearly a sitting. I'd be very glad to own a copy of it BUT I don't know if I'd ever reread it, so yeah.

So with the fist book down, I moved to the second novel "A Drug Called Power," where 'ol Tim meets the rich, bored Sue Dell and in a page-and-a-half has transformed her from a casual drug-user to a international Drug-commando. The call themselves, wait for it: T.W.I.N.S. that is Trans-World Independent Narcotics Squad. Yeah, baby! That's not quite as cool as U.N.C.L.E. but it's very much in the paperback Spy world. The books are an odd mesh of old-school hard-boiled P.I., secret agent and vigilante stuffed in a tea bag and sipped in the proper British manor. Sue does really liven the story up and gives the gloomy Tim someone to talk too. This novel in particular reminded me of a lost pilot to a good old ITV Action series, like "The Saint," "Department S" or "The Protectors" as the T.W.I.N.S. get roped into working for MI5 to stop a supervillain from blackmailing the world with poison. This one's more a crackling boy's-own-type adventure. I got flashbacks of reading Sexton Blake/Norman Conquest adventures during my time with these two books, I'd bet Mackintosh was fan.

Overall I liked the second better and I'm going to try the Inter-library loan for the remaining two stand-alone's cause I'm a gluten for punishment and I'd read the final "The Brave Cannot Yield" in a heartbeat.  I can't say they are good books, but they are both interesting in contrast from his later work and as shut-off-your-brain adventures. It's a quest that ends after years of searching the internet and it feels a little like a tiny door has been closed, its a good thing there's a mountain's worth of books I need to read, so crossing these of the list isn't the worst thing.