Brian Ball is a primarily known as a writer of science fiction, but also wrote a handful of thrillers. "Montenegrin Gold," is a stand alone but he also wrote a two book series about a English tough-guy named Keegan who gets roped into spy shenanigans. I have a budding collection of "sci-fi writers writing thrillers" books because I find it interesting when a writer tries wholly different genres. Michael Moorecock's Jerry Cornell books, Harry Harrison's Tony Hawkins and Robert Sheckley's Stephen Dain books to name a few. I've found they are usually a lot of overlooked and vastly underrated. It must be a bit of a mental relief to only have to come up with plot and characters and not full fantasy realms or vastly different alien worlds. Cloak and Daggers are a bit simpler then laser swords and ray-guns.
My edition of this book is from the Walker British Mystery imprint, it's a distinct book with a slightly bigger size which is kind of annoying when stuffing them onto my over-flowing shelves but the quality of the books is top-notch, I always look for their distinctive red spines in used book stores. They reprinted great books from the likes of Desmond Cory,William Haggard and Simon Harvester; among others. I've never been let down by a Walker British Mystery book.
"Montenegrin Gold" is a fairly straight-forward British thriller, it's short fun in a "boy's adventure" kind of way but does lay on some serious overtones. Charles Copley's having a rough go of it, he's fired, his wife leaves him for his boss (whom she's already cheated on him with) and his dad has just died. Shiftless and unsure what to do Copley ends up finding out that his father was a British spy during W.W.II and has left behind some diaries of his activities that (of course) bad guys want because it could lead to hidden gold! Along the way Copley meets the beautiful daughter of one of his dad's spy buddies, watches his son get murdered, goes round and round with the cops, tangles with an old but deadly Nazi-turned-New-York-janitor, gets smashed on the head and drinks a lot.
It's a pleasant easy but thrilling read, the way that few American writers can seem to produce. The British thriller is it's own genre that plays by its own rules. Ball hits all the right notes and creates a solid, failable lead in Copley, truly an every-man thrust into a adventure, first out of boredom then out of pure revenge. I actually read the book on a lazy, rainy Saturday afternoon and that seems to be what the book was written for.
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