First published 1988. Fontana paperback, 1989, pp 256, c.80,000 words.
The first third of this classic Kyle thriller is top-notch: a great set-up in an interesting location with a plausible cast of characters. The reveals are nicely paced and the scene well sketched in. It seemed as though this was Kyle at his best. Unfortunately the book rather sags in the middle and commits the unforgivable sin of revealing something to the protagonist but not to the reader [p184]. The last third is fast-paced, high-action hokum. A lot of fun, but too far-fetched to be plausible.
The protagonist is John Close, junior partner in a firm of Perth, Australia, solicitors. He is a rather irritatingly wise-cracking, clever chap who knows his way around Western Australia. Just occasionally he has a good line: about his aggressive boss he notes ‘…and personally I believe his spinal column ends in a curly tail.’ [p12].
One day, Close is mysteriously handed a will which allocates a large farm to unknown heirs. He sets about trying to execute the will. This is a classic set up for many a good yarn. There seems to be rather more to the estate than an admittedly large, but very run-down cattle ‘station’. Lots of people seem keen to get their hands on it. After some searching, the heir appears to be Captain Jane Strutt of the British army. She is tough, resourceful, no-nonsense, feisty, and oh yes, rather attractive. Good to see a woman taking charge on occasion in a thriller of this period.
Kyle gives us a good feel for the locality – that vast tract of land, much of it semi-desert, baking under the sun, with its single large city a thousand miles from the next. Beauty and danger lie together in that ancient landscape, civilisation and raw-nature, the new and the immensely ancient. Kyle is also very good on the casual racism of the white inhabitants, particularly against the indigenous people, but also against ‘The Poms’. There is considerable sympathy here for the original inhabitants of the land, whose rich and deep culture stretches back unbroken for forty-thousand years – far longer than any other human ‘civilisation’.
The horrors present are well evoked too: being dumped with a broken-down vehicle in the great sandy desert, being cornered by a lethal and ferocious King Brown snake, tied up and held at gun point. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, through some stroke of last minute implausibly good fortune, ‘with one bound they were free.’ All a bit of a let-down. The writer of the will also left a very complicated trail of clues, which while being clever, seemed to be over-elaborate and at extreme risk of failure. It also results in the saggy-middle third of the book as the search appears to be going nowhere, frustrating for both the protagonist and the reader.
This had the makings of a really great thriller, potentially Kyle’s best. It just needed a bit more work on some of the plot elements to reign in the implausibility factor. An editor should also have removed most of the exclamation marks!
Kyle used the same location, the same protagonists, and roughly the same plot idea for his final novel, Exit (reviewed elsewhere) which unfortunately is even more implausible than this one.
Wikipedia biography of Kyle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Kyle
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6361627-the-honey-ant?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_13
© William John Graham, February 2024