The Man From U.N.C.L.E. by Michael Avallone

 

(pb; 1965; a.k.a. The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Thousand Coffins Affair: first book in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. series, based on the 1964-8 MGM Television/NBC show)

From the back cover

“In Utangaville, Africa, it took two days.

“In Spayerwood, Scotland, it happened overnight.

“In each town, the people suddenly turned into mindless, babbling creatures who thrashed about wildly, uttering weird, half-human cries─and died. Doctors were baffled as to the cause.  A sudden plague, some mysterious virus?

“But to the members of the United Force for Law and Enforcement, there could only be one answer: THRUSH had a deadly new weapon for world conquest.”

 

Review

After the horrible, mysterious death of a fellow U.N.C.L.E.* agent and friend (Stewart Fromes) and an outbreak of similar deaths in two obscure places, Napoleon Solo and U.S. government agent Geraldine “Jerry” Terry jet around the globe trying to stop the biological viral threat of the terrifyingly scarred villain Golgotha, a member of the worldwide terror group T.H.R.U.S.H. (Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity). This leads Solo and Terry to the dangerous German village, Oberteisendorf, where Fromes, screaming and insane, expired. Meanwhile, fellow U.N.C.L.E. agent Illya Kuryakin and their commander Alexander Waverly work elsewhere to further prevent the culmination of Golgotha’s machinations.

Avallone’s U.N.C.L.E.─an often-wry spy spoof, like the 1964-8 television series that inspired his original, one-off book tie-in─is a tautly written, action-oriented and silly (Napoleon is catnip for all women) read, entertaining with its waste-no-words, swift pacing. This genre-true entry, worth owning, set the tone and pace of the twenty-three U.N.C.L.E. novels that followed (none of them penned by Avallone, who felt betrayed when the publisher, Ace Books, did not hire him to write follow-up books in the series).

[*U.N.C.L.E. = United Network Command for Law and Enforcement]

Next book: The Doomsday Affair by Harry Whittington.