First published 1979. Fontana paperback, 1989, pp282, c.94,000 words.
This is a classic 1970s’ thriller and one of Kyle’s best. The hero, Jack Tunnicliffe, is typical of his type: an ex-soldier, who would rather not be ‘ex’. He fought in the Korean war, learned the ways of the army and was effective at it. Now he is a mid-level functionary in a bank branch, a bachelor and bored with his life. One day he is late for work, arriving just in time to see armed robbers entering his bank. He swings into action and effectively foils the robbery but becomes injured in the process. That gets his name into the newspapers, and while recovering, he is contacted by two strangers, unknown to each other. His father, it seems, was a bit of a rogue and a pilot who disappeared in a plane crash just after the second world war. There seem to be some extremely valuable rubies missing with his father’s aircraft. And so the chase is on.
The other two main characters, who each hold a piece of the jigsaw, are a dodgy ex-brigadier living in Jamaica and a spinster in her mid-fifties living in Birmingham. The latter is a particularly unusual figure to be central in a thriller of this type. One might expect a desirable young woman; either beddable, as in a Ian Fleming, or intelligent wife material, as in a typical Hammond Innes. Instead we have a starchy, ex-missionary nurse of formidable determination. Tunnicliffe sometimes seems like the muscle recruited to carry out these other twos’ plans. It is a rather fun set-up.
Also, as is typical of this type of book, there is much travel. Some is prosaic, like to Birmingham and in Yorkshire – where there is an excellent scene rather out of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and some are exotic, like Jamaica (a dig at Ian Fleming?) and Borneo. Kyle is a good describer of scenery: the Yorkshire and Borneo episodes are particularly well evoked and provide dramatic contrast: one rugged, almost treeless, exposed, cold, with swirling mists; the other lush, tropical, hot and damp, teeming with aggressive lifeforms of all types. There can be broody menace everywhere, ready to explode into violence. Hunters and hunted probe and circle, seeking the moment to strike, the moment to run.
The pace is excellent, being pretty unrelenting, which is exactly what one wants from this kind of entertainment. Kyle writes fluidly in readily accessible language. Occasionally he delivers a nice line such as: ‘…it certainly wasn’t because Ludlum was some kind of bottomless benevolent society; whatever his motives, they’d wear the perfume of dubiety.’ [p111]. There is one line that stumped me: ‘But I was Percy and the verance would be all mine.’ [p242]. ‘verance’ is not in my dictionary but from the context might mean ‘risk’ or ‘effort’. There are a number of possible ‘Percy’s: Percy Fawcett, lost exploring the Amazon jungle in the 1920s, or George Percy, early colonist, explorer and governor of Virginia at the start of the 17th century. Neither illuminates the sentence.
This is a well written and hugely entertaining thriller, taking one to exotic locations in some unusual company with a good, strong dash of derring-do.
Wikipedia biography of Kyle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Kyle
Kyle fan with more biographical information: https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2008/06/duncan-kyle.html
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792288-green-river-high?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_16
© William John Graham, November 2023