The Killer Elite by Robert Rostand

 

(pb; 1973)

From the back cover 

“The day of the assassins.

“There were three of them, the best in the business. All were in England now, three free-lance professional assassins hired by the same power, three specialists in sudden death closing in one the same target.

“Just one man stood between them and the success of their murderous mission. A man with past failure to atone for; a blood to settle. A man whose almost insane pride would prefer death to another defeat. A man named [Michael] Locken, with nothing left to lose and no one left to trust as the faced the killer elite.”

 

Review

Killer is a tautly written, effectively character sketched action novel with a lot of character-based twists, some of them likely familiar to genre-knowledgeable readers, but many of them still-effective and masterful. This is a great action-genre read, one worth seeking out.

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Two film versions resulted from this Rostand novel.

The PG-rated first version, The Killer Elite, was directed by Sam Peckinpah. It was released stateside on December 19, 1975. Killer‘s screenplay was penned by Marc Norman, Stirling Siliphant, and Robert Syd Hopkins.

James Caan played Mike Locken. Robert Duvall played George Hansen. Arthur Hill played Cap Collis. Bo Hopkins played Jerome Miller. Mako played Yuen Chung.

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The second version, Killer Elite, was released stateside on September 23, 2011. Gary McKendry directed it, from Matt Shering and Ranulph Fiennes’s screenplay.

Jason Statham played Danny [cinematic stand-in for Mike Locken]. Clive Owen played Spike. Robert DeNiro played Hunter. Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje played Agent. Dominic Purcell played Davies.