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.  

The Osterman Weekend by Robert Ludlum

(pb; 1972) 

 From the inside flap

 "In a secret room in Washington, D.C., a man named John Tanner is asked to stake his life and those of his wife and children in a gamble whose goal and risks no one will fully reveal to him. "In a small suburban town, where only the nicest people live, friends, neighbors, everyone and anyone may be part of a monstrous conspiracy of international evil." 

 Review

Laconic, paranoid, twisty actioner from one of the masters of explosive political thrillers. This is one of Ludlum's more personal efforts, in terms of scale, plot and characterization. The core players in this steadily ratcheted-up drama are four couples who have been friends for twenty years, since the Sixties. Every couple embodies a varied, evolved social/political outlook from that turbulent period. Any possible conflict between these eight individuals has been (mostly) dodged, with eyes toward preserving the calm of their long-distance friendships, nothing more. Throw into the cautious mix Laurence Fassett, a highly-regarded and sympathetic CIA agent, who tells Tanner that his friends are international conspirators -- and has proof to back up his outrageous charge -- and you've got suburban bedlam ready to happen. Ludlum's ruinous fireworks, personal and physical, don't explode until late in the novel. Character-inherent betrayals and maneuvers (some unexpected) precede and follow the fireworks, of course, as does Ludlum's sublimated quirkiness and ever-present sense of humanity. Oddball, moreish, intense entry in Ludlum's oeuvre. Check it out. 

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The Osterman Weekend was released stateside as a film on October 14, 1983. Sam Peckinpah directed the film -- it was his last, in a storied career -- from a script by Ian Masters and Alan Sharp. 

 Rutger Hauer played John Tanner. Meg Foster played Ali Tanner. Craig T. Nelson played Bernard Osterman. Dennis Hopper played Richard Tremayne. Helen Shaver played Virginia Tremayne. Chris Sarandon played Joseph Cardone. Cassie Yates played Betty Cardone. John Hurt played Lawrence Fassett. Burt Lancaster played Maxwell Danforth. Kristen Peckinpah, daughter of Sam Peckinpah and Marie Selland, played Tremayne's secretary.

Smonk, by Tom Franklin

(hb; 2006)

From the inside flap:

"It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by by a scabrous and malevolent character called E.O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men -- all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results.

"Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year old prostitute quick to pull the trigger or a cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and the Tombigree rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles into Old Texas, where she is fated to E.O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine..."

Review:

Smonk is a perverse, bleak-humored, and violently bloody romp through the Old South where few are virtuous, even children. Its structure, tone, plot and characters are iconclastic, shattering whatever noble stereotypes Western readers have been weaned on, and I enjoyed every filthy minute of the novel, given the sleazy cleverness that Franklin has laid out before his readers.

Too bad director Sam Peckinpah died in 1984, because I saw this as the perfect vehicle for his cinematic pathos: ballistic, raw and tender as he could be. I also imagined Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Sizemore being cast in this dream-film, and a few other actors who specialize in playing f***ed-up characters. (Appropriately enough, there's a scene that pays homage to Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, revolving around the question of whether or not to bury someone.)

If you're a fan of Westerns -- particularly the cable show Deadwood -- you should pick this sucker up. It's inspiring (in a strange way), damn near impossible to put down, and not easily forgotten.