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rallamajoopIntrigued by the section on the various tie-in novels in C.W. Walker's book Work/Text: Investigating The Man from UNCLE (which goes into the subject in quite a bit more detail than Heitland's earlier book on the series), I had a bit of a poke around the web to see whether any were available online. What I discovered, largely by accident, is that more or less the entire collection of novels and magazine stories and those from the Girl from UNCLE series can indeed be found in text format on the web. Some can be found transcribed by fans here, while others will require you to be willing to poke through assorted variously dodgey-looking download sites to acquire (seriously, though I have done my best to check, I cannot 100% guarantee I have not picked up a load of nasty malware in the process of finding all these, which is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to link to some of my sources. That said, if anyone would like me to send them the complete batch, drop me a line).
Many of these books can still be got second hand on ebay and other various sites around the web nowadays, though as the physical books are long out of print and the authors never received royalties from them as it was, it's hard to feel too terrible about the minor case of piracy required to snag the full collection. More importantly, having them in digital format makes the collection searchable, not to mention easily cross-referencable, and wow, is there some telling stuff in the keyword and key-phrase usage in these things (or at least if you're of the kind of mindset that finds those sorts of statistics interesting to begin with, which it goes without saying I am). But I’ll get to that in another post.
For now, I wanted to make some notes on the ones I’ve read enough of to have formed an opinion, and write something about my general impressions of the series. But because this is inevitably going to involve me rambling a lot, the short version is that about the only ones I might go as far as reccing were those by McDaniels, and perhaps the one by Fredric Davies. Neither are what I'd call must-reads, but I did have some fun with both. For general reference, the Fans from UNCLE website also has a brief review of all the novels, though less to say about the magazines.
Another series of stories came out in the Man from UNCLE magazine, which ran for 24 issues total with one MfU story per issue, plus various other back-up material (the corresponding GfU title totalled only 7 issues). All these were attributed to the same pseudonym, that of Robert Hart Davis, though in reality many different authors contributed.
The benefit of having everything in my epub library is that I can also tell you the books mostly vary in length from about 40-50K words, with the exception of only a couple of the UK titles which came in somewhat under 35K. Magazine stories ran from 20-40K, and so were mostly but not always shorter.
On top of all that I’ve got two extra titles put out in hardback by Whitman, both by the same author (Brandon Keith), and running to 25-30K. Whitman also published one more book under a different imprint which I’ve not been able to find – and between the various comics, annuals and other magazines which sometimes printed UNCLE stories, god knows how many other licensed tie-ins were produced. (Some may be elsewhere out there on the web, but I’m not in a hurry to go looking right at the moment.)
All in all, 21 different authors wrote at least one story out of the 61 in my collection. By far the most prolific of the paperback authors were David McDaniels (6 MfU novels total, plus another that was never published – a genuine UNCLE fan and widely considered to be by far the best of the authors in the series), and Peter Leslie (from the UK imprint, producing 5 MfU novels plus 1 GfU entry, though his work was rather more variably received by fans). Over in the MfU magazine, more than half the stories came from just two writers, Dennis Lynds and John Jakes, who contributed 7 stories each. Another author, I. G. Edmonds, wrote 2 for the MfU magazine and 3 for GfU.
Some sort of consolation prize for productivity is probably due also to Michael Avallone and Harry Whittington, who contributed the first and second novels in the MfU line respectively. Neither of them were fans of the series, and both their books are reputedly grim affairs, thick with misery and torture, and Avallone famously began his first novel based on the production notes alone before the show even wet to air. According to Walker, Avallone soon went on to produce another novel, but had it refused by the publisher, who had evidently realised fans were more likely to buy books that at least vaguely reflected the tone of the show. Undeterred, Avallone went on to write two more books for the separate GfU line. Meanwhile, Whittington would go on to write 5 stories for the MfU magazine (and one can’t help but suspect it may have been for the same reason).
Some of the better-received non-McDaniels novels came from two teams of two men, both working under pseudonyms, and all apparently both fans of the show and friends of McDaniels himself. Two were published under the name of Thomas Stratton (actually Buck Coulson and Gene DeWeese), and one under the name Fredric Davies (Ron Ellik and Steve Tolliver. For what it’s worth, I’m inclined to agree that McDaniels is the only author in the whole batch who’s really worth bothering with. Though even he has some real shortcomings, he remains the one guy who actually manages to capture the dynamic between Illya and Napoleon to some degree of fidelity, and who comes closest to capturing the spirit of the show.
If the stories have any running theme, it might be their fixation on torture. I’ve not read the first two books in the series, but Walker describes the first (the cheerily-named Thousand Coffins Affair, by Michael Avallone) as a tale in which “Solo and the innocent […] awake from unconsciousness to find themselves stripped naked and imprisoned in medieval torture cages by the villain,” and mentions that Illya spends the second (The Doomsday Affair by Whittington) being drugged, imprisoned and tortured. The Radioactive Camel Affair by Peter Leslie reputedly has a scene were Napoleon is waterboarded, while The Cross of Gold Affair by Fredric Davies puts Illya through much the same treatment (Napoleon, meanwhile, doesn’t fare much better). The Assassination Affair, by J. Holly Hunter, revolves around a villain’s plot to break Napoleon by (you guessed it) torturing him horrifically. Oram’s first novel The Copenhagen Affair leaves a captured female agent in the hands of a torturer with her very own torture chamber, and one apparently vile enough that even the guard who left before she started was violently sick after leaving the room (fortunately, rescue comes before this particular session can get too far). Meanwhile, over in the magazine, the first story I tried reading (The Pillars of Salt Affair by Pronzini) sees Napoleon badly injured in a car accident, then gassed with a nerve agent (one we are assured has a range of truly horrendous potential side-effects), then spends three days imprisoned by the villains in a small room, during which time he refuses all food and drink out of fear that it might be drugged (and beyond which point, one can only presume the rest of the story consists of his dying hallucinations as he expires from blood loss and dehydration. Oh, and he also has a cold, just to top it all off.) It’s not every story (thus far, all I’ve read of McDaniels, Stratton and Phillifents’ work has all been refreshingly torture-free), but there is a lot of punishment crammed into some of these stories.
If Napoleon and Illya aren’t being tortured, there are pretty good odds they’re stuck in the middle of a firefight. Never did I realise quite how boring written action can get after the nth straight chapter until I started reading UNCLE novels (Phillifent, Pronzini and Davies are particular culprits). Action scenes are, of course, a great way of punctuating a plot and ramping up the tension, but past a certain saturation point, it becomes about as exciting as watching someone else play a video game. Actually, I’ll go one further – it’s like reading a text-based account of someone else playing a video game. One gets the sense some authors are trying to cover for how little actual plot they have.
The overall impression is of a batch of authors whose approach to filling pages depends on the characters being constantly in mortal danger. Depressingly few are much interested in character or plot, which is a crying shame considering that UNCLE’s success was built on a formula of larger-than-life villains, ordinary people getting swept up in the action, and two charismatic heroes with amazing on-screen chemistry. But the villains of the novels tend to be thinly-sketched archtypes, and virtually no-one in the writer’s chair seems to have the first idea how to successfully incorporate an innocent into the story. Say what you like about UNCLE’s innocents, they add a much-needed human element to the show, and one which goes frequently lacking on page. Phillifent makes what is perhaps the best effort on that front, giving us an innocent in his first book who is actually present and contributing through most of the action (even if she is the niece of an evil mad scientist, which scores you about a 1 on the creativity scale for this medium). Second place seems to be due to Davies, though his innocents don’t appear at all until the halfway point of his novel, whereupon their personal histories are gushed out to us at considerable length, while Napoleon sort of tags along. Third place, as of this writing, probably has to go to Oram, whose first book writes the innocent out altogether after the first two chapters. The bar in this category is depressingly low.
For all that I've harped on about the variable tone of the series before, one thing the novels did achieve was to make me appreciate a few things the show did manage to keep fairly consistent on over the years (or at least up until the regrettable 4th season). Villains are frequently memorable characters, and women (innocent or otherwise) are treated as active participants in their own stories – and that last point is one I can't emphasise enough, as it's one of the key details that let me fall so much in love with the show as I did. Whereas the books feel overwhelmingly like a place where UNCLE season 4 came early: all action, drama, misery and boredom, as far as the eye can see.
Where authors do actually try to reproduce the spirit of the show, another thing one starts to notice is that what works on screen doesn’t necessarily work on page. A few authors were clearly watching the first season closely enough to notice that UNCLE’s intelligence briefings are often delivered by voice-over by one of the communications staff. What they don’t seem to realise is that this is a technique which exists to share information with the TV audience – on page, simple declaring that “a female voice” read out the information you’re relating, while giving said female no other role in the scene, adds absolutely nothing to your story. Briefings with Mr. Waverly are likewise a useful expository device on screen, but on page, you could cover most of the same information much more succinctly in an expository paragraph. Scenes like these badly need something else going on to make them work (say, a character Napoleon and Illya are meeting for the first time, some commentary on the relationships between the characters in the scene, the sense that other things are going on in the office, etc), but a lot of the time you don’t really need these scenes at all. Many episodes function fine without them.
There are a number of other odd quirks to the series, as authors go out of their way to incorporate as much of the development notes as possible, but frequently contradict what’s actually in the show. Particularly popular is having characters react with great horror to something that happens on the box regularly, such as Napoleon and Illya being captured. Some (Lynds most notably) have the bizarre habit of consistently referring to Napoleon in the narration by his last name, but Illya by his first. (Why? Have they simply picked whichever was the shorter of the two?) Many take pains to tell us how beautiful and sexy some woman is that Napoleon has his eye on, though never in any interesting detail. And more than a few, depressingly, cannot write a female character for shit (including, even more depressingly, the one female author in the batch). Curiosity and morbid fascination have done far more to keep me going thus far than genuine interest. Reading these is a bit like sampling a well-stocked smorgasbord of all the different ways in which a novel can be bad.
Thus far, I’ve read a few in full, and given up on many more after a chapter or two. Even before you start to consider the question of which actually make the characters recognisable, their written quality varies from “decently written book by someone who never in his life watched the show and probably wouldn't know any of these characters from Adam” to “I legitimately do not understand how anyone ever published this.” But I figured I’d go ahead and write down some of my thoughts on those I’ve read for the record all the same.
Vitriol incoming. Some of these are good, but most did not impress me at all.
In brief: Would make a solid original novel, but doesn’t have a lot of UNCLE flavour, and not much personality.
Certainly one of the better-written entries I’ve tried thus far, though it’s hard to believe Oram has ever seen much (if any) of the show. He doesn’t seem to realise that a cigarette-pack communicator is a standard part of their equipment, or that they regularly use tranquilizer darts, and keeps describing their guns as Lugers. Napoleon, Illya and Waverly sound like themselves in places, and nothing like themselves in others (which is admittedly about par for the course, whether the authors are actually fans of the show or not) – but overall, the narrative, while competent, doesn’t give anyone much of an opportunity to show much personality. The book is more interested in Denmark and Danish history than UNCLE in any obvious form (I was not at all surprised to google the author and discover one of his few other works was a history of the Danish WWII resistance movement. The author himself is from Wales, which is where he sets his other UNCLE novel. Oram was clearly a believer in writing what you know). This does at least give it some local flavour, but leaves the UNCLE characters feeling slightly at odds with the setting.
Perhaps the most humanised of the characters is the innocent, who serves as the POV character for the first couple of chapters (which I genuinely liked) but whose part in the story is done by the time our more familiar heroes appear on screen. It earned a lot of good will from me early on as we meet a number of female agents (past and present) with parts in the story, then lost much of it again as it became apparent that the biggest role any of them would get to play involved being captured and tortured. I do have to give Oram points for not lingering over the gruesome details, and otherwise portraying her as competent, but I would have very much liked some more insight into her history and character. As it is, most hints of personality in this thing turn out to be red herrings, as Oram will sometimes go to some detail in describing people to us who aren’t going to live through the next chapter. Overall, this felt somewhat more like a series of loosely-connected set pieces than a really solid narrative, with Napoleon and Illya mostly just drifting through their roles. Okay, but unremarkable.
In brief: Somewhat over-hyped, IMO, as it does have significant flaws, but nonetheless very much the high point of what I’ve read so far in this series
This is the only McDaniels book I’ve yet read, and on the strength of it alone, I’d strongly concur with the general sentiment that McDaniels is by far the best of the bunch – not only does he actually write fairly solid character voices for both Napoleon and Illya, he's a much stronger writer than most of his colleagues generally. His prose is never a chore to get through and sometimes even quite clever. Whereas many otherauthors in the series populate their worlds with cardboard cut-outs, McDaniels' actually gives his supporting cast enough personality to bring the story a little life. Better yet, McDaniels actually gets the dynamic between Napoleon and Illya, and gets it well enough to produce a scene or two that had me grinning at the page. That’s more than I can say for any other writer I’ve tried yet, and I’ve tried enough to be fairly confident in that opinion.
But even though he writes some legitimately good scenes, I'd hesitate to call The Vampire Affair very good as a whole. For example, there's an innocent character who I liked from her first few lines, but thereafter McDaniels fails to find anything of substance for her to contribute for the rest of the story, beyond following the other characters around and reacting to what happens. The role of Significant Local goes instead to another 'innocent' character, while the role of Nominal Vampire Expert goes to a completely gratuitous insertion of RL fandom personality Forrest J Ackerman into the story, in a scene which takes up a lot of page space without advancing the plot in any way whatsoever. In fact, too many scenes in which our characters are vaguely threatened by various supernatural cliches, but fail to uncover a single, meaningful clue as to what’s really going on are the books major flaw, while the true villain and his actual scheme are introduced far too late to get any real development, almost as an afterthought. Ultimately, in classic Scooby Doo fashion, the 'vampires' are explained away using with science fiction which is scarcely less implausible (a completely silent stealth helicopter, really?) But there's enough fun to be had along the way that I'd still easily rank this as one of the best in the series that I've read so far.
In brief: Better than average use of the innocent couldn’t make up for the fact this basically treated the villain as little more than a plot device from which to hang far too many generic action scenes
An odd one. Phillifent is one of the few authors who legitimately comes across as being familiar with the show, and even gives us a proper innocent character who gets plenty to do – a welcome change (even if she is the beautiful niece of an evil mad scientist, because of course she is). There’s a lot of basically promising ideas in this story, including a larger-than-life villain busily auditioning for a job with THRUSH, and some good action scenes. Unfortunately, what it really lacks is structure. The villain really only gets a couple of scenes, both in the middle of the story, and the THRUSH subplot largely peters out without going anywhere very interesting. By halfway through, we’ve discovered what his mysterious new synthetic drug does and how he plans to use it. By about the two-thirds mark, Napoleon and Illya are finished with foiling that plan it too. At this point, we learn the villain has yet another new synthetic chemical with utterly unrelated effects (one which hadn’t been mentioned more than in passing thus far), whereupon UNCLE gets out the rifles and the grenade launchers and we spend the rest of the book playing “I’m sorry Napoleon and Illya, but your mad scientist is in another castle,” over three different settings, before finally defeating the big bad off-screen using technobabble. Exactly what the villain’s plan ever was, beyond “rule the world” is never developed in any interesting way. Phillifent isn’t unable to write halfway-decent characters, he just apparently loses interest towards the end of his story.
There are other problems I could nitpick, such as a painful idiot-ball moment where Napoleon walks into the home of a villain he knows perfectly well is developing new and suspicious chemicals, and accepts a drink from him without a second thought, and a couple of times where I could swear someone appeared to remember something that had been said while they were off screen. I very nearly didn’t make it past an early scene set in a local precinct lock-up where Napoleon, having been informed by Mr Waverly that they can't get him off his spurious charge until morning, opts to drug and steal the uniform from a warden who was just doing his job, apparently just so Phillifent can show that that he can. There are, nonetheless, some quite good set pieces scattered through the narrative (such as a lengthy road-chase involving crates of tactically exploding bear-cans), and a few fun moments of levity mixed in too. Characterisation of Napoleon and Illya is, if not great, than at least not glaringly bad. But the entire last third bored me in a way that climactic action scenes emphatically shouldn’t, and that’s no kind of final impression to end a book on.
I tried both of Thomas Stratton’s books, but didn’t get far into either. His writing is more competent than many – and even rarer among the writers of the series, you get the real impression he’s familiar with the show. But the result is still the kind of book that could probably be rewritten for completely different characters by doing little more than find-and-replace their names – there's no spark in the dialogue to really make them feel like the characters we know.
Whereas many other books in the series bored me with never-ending action scenes, Stratton’s feel like they could rather benefit from having someone come through the door with a gun a little more often – far too much of the early chapters of the Mind Twisters Affair consists of Napoleon and Illya wandering around a small town, talking to various people about the odd way some of their neighbours have been acting, then talking to them over again, which frustratingly little actually happening. Ironically, I feel I might actually have gotten further in had he done what most authors do, and split Napoleon and Illya up for the early action – though I’ve tolerated a lot of blah characterisation from other authors who keep them apart, as soon as they’re together, I’m going to want at least a little decent banter that captures the dynamic between them (which is, after all, my favourite thing about the show). Stratton, alas, isn’t quite up to the job.
In brief: I could not get past how many mistakes this made in its first scene, or how it portrayed UNCLE's female staff in its second
The Internet had told me this was one of Leslie's better entries. The plot involves Napoleon being kidnapped in a carefully orchestrated scheme which took place in Del Floria's own shop. The result did not impress me. In fact, the opening scene is so emblematic of the way these books take the word of the development notes over the events of the actual show that I'm going to break it all down point by point.
There's some good detail in this scene, but also a lot of problems. Napoleon's mood is defined by his grumbling about having been sent to a routine conference, about which he'll now have to file a boring report. This doesn't strike me as entirely out of character, but is a poor choice of first impressions to give us about a man as resolutely positive and dedicated as Napoleon. The ability of the villains to gas Napoleon inside Del Floria's own changing room relies on there being a solid door between him and the shop, which is wrong - there's only a thin curtain, which we've seen in the show a dozen times over (and which is even described in the notes). But worst of all, even though Leslie realises that the tailor's shop is monitored by constant camera feed, he seems to think this applies to the changing room itself only, as the villains' scheme relies on their being able to enter the shop, disable the real Del Floria, and then have time to set up their gas trap and settle down to wait for Napoleon to arrive without anyone inside the building noticing them doing it - let alone that there's now a strange woman working Del Floria's press (something Napoleon pays little attention to). This is "explained" by the receptionist having been distracted by something happening on a camera monitoring another entrance - a set up you could believably get from the notes, but which ignores that the receptionist has at most one security screen feed in front of her in any scene in the show, implying that any other entrances (quite sensibly) have other staff monitoring them. This all contradicts stuff which is right there on screen from the first few minutes ever to hit the air. Presumably, there would be plenty of fans who'd take it all in their stride, but it all stands out like a sore thumb to me.
Leslie also insists on calling "Del Floria" "Del Florio", and evidently thinks "Del" is his first name. A scene later, he takes the time to tell us that one needs a white badge to be able to access UNCLE's upper floors, oblivious to the fact the show has been using yellow badges from the first time it broadcast in colour. If you can get past all that, you're up to encountering Leslie's treatment of women, which includes statements like this: "A soft-bodied blonde with her hair gathered on the nape of her neck by a large black bow undulated into the room." The blonde in question has no lines, no other scenes, and nothing to do but usher people into Waverly's office. Yet Leslie still feels the need to tell us what she was wearing, and that she "undulates" rather than walks. The next female UNCLE staff member we meet is in tears, because she's the receptionist and she just can't deal with the thought that Napoleon Solo was captured on her watch! Woe, she babbles, it is all her fault! Naturally, she's fired on the spot. Why UNCLE would put someone so obviously unsuited to the pressures of such a major security role is never questioned.
She's not alone with the dramatics. The entire response the abduction is full of everyone going "OMG, HOW could this have HAPPENED???" almost as if Napoleon isn't captured by the enemy on an almost daily basis.You'd almost think that no-one had ever infiltrated UNCLE via the Del Floria's entrance before (The Vulcan Affair, The Mad Mad Tea Party Affair), and that no-one had ever been attacked or abducted right on that doorstep before either (The Double Affair, The Gazebo in the Maze Affair).
This is where I gave up. If this is Leslie's best, he is clearly not for me.
In brief: If extreme whump fic is your thing, you may find this tropily enjoyable, but otherwise, I'd avoid this one like the plague.
Wow, was this one bad. I say this with the understanding that it does have some reputation of popularity with hurt/comfort fans, as the plot revolves around Napoleon being horrifically tortured by the villain purely in an attempt to break him, then rescued and put back together again (I guess – I honestly did not make it far enough in to be sure). As someone who has herself read more than enough moderately-bad fanfic which happened to scratch some particular itch, I'm hardly going to judge anyone else for the same – but I do have to say, by any other standard, this one is incredibly hard to recommend. I would quite seriously put Holly's ability to write both women and our heroes barely above the level of Whittington's (and if you've not read that review yet, it's emphatically not polite).
There are two “innocents” in this thing, and both are portrayed as all-but-literally Too Dumb To Live. One of is a teenage girl from Napoleon's building, who apparently had nothing better to do with herself but watch him all day and fall terribly in love with him, to the point of insisting he couldn't be a bad man because he didn't look like one (cue horking noises). Meanwhile, Holly has no grasp of Napoleon's voice whatsoever, and not even my contempt for those innocents can stifle how jarring it is to see Napeoleon being this rude and dismissive to them – the narrative actually has him give that teenager a deliberately sexual leer in attempt to scare her away at one point. Whereas most writers just leave his character unremarkably flat, this contorts him out of all recognition.
Otherwise, the writing at large is well down at the teenager-writing-fanfic level for quality. In fact, having read (barely a couple of chapters of) this thing, I'm starting to wonder how much of the worse characterisation I've occasionally seen in fic in this fandom took this as their inspiration. Brr.
As a side-note, this book would appear to be the source of the popular fanon that Napoleon and Illya have to move regularly for security reasons. I’ve never been particularly convinced by that myself, since for one, the development notes refer to their apartments as static, and for another, UNCLE is self-evidently the sort of outfit who won’t even bother to slightly rewrite their security protocols on their most important HQ even after a major security breach (See: Season 1, Episode 1, the first five minutes of the whole goddamn show). For which matter, given that THRUSH (and everyone else on the planet) know exactly where those agents work and can see them entering and leaving HQ from a public street, and could easily just follow them home in the evening, forcing your agents to move regularly sounds like an exercise in futility. I can’t say that knowing the original context has caused me to revise that opinion very much, but to each their own, I suppose.
In brief: More of an experience than a really successful UNCLE novel, but still definitely an experience. Very S3-ish, but that's at least a welcome change from the standard for this series.
Well, this was a hell of a read. One of the few books that actually kept my attention long enough to get me invested – just perhaps not for the right reasons. Here, Napoleon and Illya find themselves up against what can only be described as an off-brand Batman villain (a grotesque caricature called Avery Porpoise, who lives on a floating pool chair in his own personal deadly sideshow funhouse – no joke), whose evil scheme involves a very technical coordinated scheme to manipulate stock prices in the gold market across the world – and I only wish I could guess which of the two authors were responsible for which of those two disparate elements, because I strongly suspect it was one apiece. Along the way, we get plenty of hurt/comfort-minus-the-comfort, as Napoleon and Illya are tortured and generally put through the wringer, as seems to be some sort of requirement for this goddamn series. But there's also a lot of fun in the narrative, and this is one of the few titles in the series which doesn't remotely lack for ability to come up with well-fleshed-out supporting characters, which was a very welcome change.
There's a lot I genuinely did like about the authors' collective writing style, though it's the sort of style that rambles on endlessly about trivia, but rarely pauses to give you the one piece of context that you actually needed. I could not for the life of me follow nearly all the action scenes (most of these depended intimately on the terrain, which was never described in much detail before the moment that it became crucially important), and I must say gave me a new appreciation for the value of dialogue beats and scene commentary (especially in cases where someone really ought to be reacting to the completely wacky bullshit they've just heard), of which this particular tale had almost none. The characterisation of Napoleon and Illya comes and goes – there are bits which get the voices right, but they tend to be well-spaced between parts which make you wonder just how much of the show the authors had actually seen, such as an extended sequence where, for no practical reason, Napoleon goes to considerable trouble to knock over the villain's drink after being captured, then gloats about it aloud. You sometimes get the sense of an author simply too in love with his own witty dialogue to care whether it would be appropriate for this particular character to say.
The story has other problems too, from the fact you could probably cut half the length without losing anything of real importance, to a trio of innocents who aren't introduced until the middle of the thing and thus never really feel like part of it, all the way down to the good old problem of characters inexplicably forgetting they've brought a gun to this fistfight. But it certainly didn't bore me, and though I feel it may have worked better as an original novel than shoe-horned under the UNCLE brand, it struck me overall as a book that probably could have been excellent, had they only had an editor willing to edit more viciously. On looking up the authors' other work, I was genuinely saddened to learn that is is practically all either of them ever created (and worse, that one died in a motor accident shortly after submitting this novel), because I felt like there was some genuine talent here that could have well gone on to better things.
I'm not sure whether that all adds up to a recommendation, on the balance of it, but it's certainly an experience, if nothing else.
The rest of the stories I've read come from the magazine. Issue numbers included.
I looked this one up specifically because it not only featured Wanda Mae Kim – UNCLE's receptionist from the early episodes – but promoted her to a full field agent. Unfortunately, I think I can safely say that Whittington picked Wanda for this treatment purely because he liked her photo in the press book, while wasting no time establishing himself to be one of the most grossly misogynistic hacks ever to jerk off on page and convince someone to publish it, and that is not the sort of accusation I make lightly.
Wanda's first scene sees her tied down and about to be brutalised by multiple angry men holding various implements of violence, but the narration still takes time to assure us of exactly how gorgeously sexy she looks in her helplessness, from Napoleon's point of view. Napoleon and Waverly then proceed to insult her repeatedly for being so incompetent as to allow herself to wind up in that position (because as we all know, no competent agent like Napoleon or Illya would ever let themselves be captured, restrained and tortured), bluntly suggesting that Napoleon should have left her there to die. For reasons known only to Whittington's drooling id, they then decide to send her on a crucially important mission anyway, where she proceeds to blow both her own cover and Napoleon's in the most unprofessional way possible, because heaven forbid anyone burdened with two X chromosomes be presented as capable of holding her wits together under pressure. But Napoleon gets to lust after her some more in the meantime, which I suppose justifies all this or something.
I think I can confidently state at this juncture that Harry Whittington had never in his life actually seen a single episode of UNCLE, and wouldn't have liked it if he had. It doesn't feature nearly enough women being belittled and slapped around for his tastes.
Now, obviously this is a genre where being a misogynistic sadist usually doesn’t hold you back – Ian Fleming was roughly as awful as Whittington, but Fleming (as I discovered on attempting to read Thrilling Cities) could at least write worth a damn. Whittington can barely string together a decent sentence. "The machine gleamed metallically in a room of metal machines" is an actual combination of words that appeared within the opening paragraphs of his story.
Probably his most laughable failing is his inability to find any remotely organic way to work background information into a scene. In an opening scene where Waverly and Napoleon deal with the news that Illya has been reported dead (he isn't, of course, but in the hands of any other writer's hands this would at least be a decent story hook), Whittington spends most of a paragraph – one nominally about the rage and grief of “slender, young” Napoleon Solo – describing to us the gun he happens to be carrying at the time, down to its precise weight in ounces. Later in the same scene, he stops to throw in that factoid about how one of the entrances to HQ is an underground channel for no remotely relevant plot reason. He finishes, I shit you not, by having Napoleon go, “but, wait, what was it we were actually talking about here, right before we were interrupted by the story hook?” to which Waverly replies, more or less, “Oh, yes – that random item of supposedly-unrelated scientific news that will obviously become a 'surprise' plot point later! Yes, I should really tell you another couple of sentences about that for the benefit of the audience, before deciding I'm just not in the mood anymore, what with Mr. Kuryakin being dead and all.” This is all within the opening scene.
Later, when Napoleon goes to retrieve Wanda, he arrives on the roof in a helicopter that also carries a pilot and four other UNCLE agents. But we can only presume they’re along just for the ride, because Napoleon then sneaks into the building to rescue Wanda completely alone, so as to maintain that crucial element of surprise. You know, right after landing on the roof in a fucking helicopter.
Either whoever transcribed this story is fucking with us (which, given the state of the 'net, is not wholly impossible), or someone actually published this drivel. I dare say you could feed a neural network the UNCLE development notes and an Ian Fleming novel or two, and the output would be substantially better than this.
There's some moderately good tension in the middle, where both our favourite agents think the other dead, but it doesn't really go anywhere much. With all remotely promising characters shuffled off-stage in the first half, we spend the rest of the story pounding through one mindless action set-piece after another, to the point where it stops being exciting and just becomes repetitive. Illya is finally scooped off a de-transmuting salt surface in the final moments by a "grappling sling" strung from a helicopter going at full speed (and if you run a google-search for that term, you may just find my source for this story, because Pronzini is almost the only person ever to think that was a good idea). "Amateurish" hardly begins to cover this mess.
Many of these books can still be got second hand on ebay and other various sites around the web nowadays, though as the physical books are long out of print and the authors never received royalties from them as it was, it's hard to feel too terrible about the minor case of piracy required to snag the full collection. More importantly, having them in digital format makes the collection searchable, not to mention easily cross-referencable, and wow, is there some telling stuff in the keyword and key-phrase usage in these things (or at least if you're of the kind of mindset that finds those sorts of statistics interesting to begin with, which it goes without saying I am). But I’ll get to that in another post.
For now, I wanted to make some notes on the ones I’ve read enough of to have formed an opinion, and write something about my general impressions of the series. But because this is inevitably going to involve me rambling a lot, the short version is that about the only ones I might go as far as reccing were those by McDaniels, and perhaps the one by Fredric Davies. Neither are what I'd call must-reads, but I did have some fun with both. For general reference, the Fans from UNCLE website also has a brief review of all the novels, though less to say about the magazines.
Some vital statistics
The full collection consists of 23 books, variously printed or reprinted by ACE Books in the US and Souvenir Books in the UK, plus an extra 5 novels printed for the corresponding Girl from UNCLE series. Most of the authors were recruited by ACE, though a handful (Leslie, Phillifent, Oram and Bernard) came from the UK.Another series of stories came out in the Man from UNCLE magazine, which ran for 24 issues total with one MfU story per issue, plus various other back-up material (the corresponding GfU title totalled only 7 issues). All these were attributed to the same pseudonym, that of Robert Hart Davis, though in reality many different authors contributed.
The benefit of having everything in my epub library is that I can also tell you the books mostly vary in length from about 40-50K words, with the exception of only a couple of the UK titles which came in somewhat under 35K. Magazine stories ran from 20-40K, and so were mostly but not always shorter.
On top of all that I’ve got two extra titles put out in hardback by Whitman, both by the same author (Brandon Keith), and running to 25-30K. Whitman also published one more book under a different imprint which I’ve not been able to find – and between the various comics, annuals and other magazines which sometimes printed UNCLE stories, god knows how many other licensed tie-ins were produced. (Some may be elsewhere out there on the web, but I’m not in a hurry to go looking right at the moment.)
All in all, 21 different authors wrote at least one story out of the 61 in my collection. By far the most prolific of the paperback authors were David McDaniels (6 MfU novels total, plus another that was never published – a genuine UNCLE fan and widely considered to be by far the best of the authors in the series), and Peter Leslie (from the UK imprint, producing 5 MfU novels plus 1 GfU entry, though his work was rather more variably received by fans). Over in the MfU magazine, more than half the stories came from just two writers, Dennis Lynds and John Jakes, who contributed 7 stories each. Another author, I. G. Edmonds, wrote 2 for the MfU magazine and 3 for GfU.
Some sort of consolation prize for productivity is probably due also to Michael Avallone and Harry Whittington, who contributed the first and second novels in the MfU line respectively. Neither of them were fans of the series, and both their books are reputedly grim affairs, thick with misery and torture, and Avallone famously began his first novel based on the production notes alone before the show even wet to air. According to Walker, Avallone soon went on to produce another novel, but had it refused by the publisher, who had evidently realised fans were more likely to buy books that at least vaguely reflected the tone of the show. Undeterred, Avallone went on to write two more books for the separate GfU line. Meanwhile, Whittington would go on to write 5 stories for the MfU magazine (and one can’t help but suspect it may have been for the same reason).
Some of the better-received non-McDaniels novels came from two teams of two men, both working under pseudonyms, and all apparently both fans of the show and friends of McDaniels himself. Two were published under the name of Thomas Stratton (actually Buck Coulson and Gene DeWeese), and one under the name Fredric Davies (Ron Ellik and Steve Tolliver. For what it’s worth, I’m inclined to agree that McDaniels is the only author in the whole batch who’s really worth bothering with. Though even he has some real shortcomings, he remains the one guy who actually manages to capture the dynamic between Illya and Napoleon to some degree of fidelity, and who comes closest to capturing the spirit of the show.
If the stories have any running theme, it might be their fixation on torture. I’ve not read the first two books in the series, but Walker describes the first (the cheerily-named Thousand Coffins Affair, by Michael Avallone) as a tale in which “Solo and the innocent […] awake from unconsciousness to find themselves stripped naked and imprisoned in medieval torture cages by the villain,” and mentions that Illya spends the second (The Doomsday Affair by Whittington) being drugged, imprisoned and tortured. The Radioactive Camel Affair by Peter Leslie reputedly has a scene were Napoleon is waterboarded, while The Cross of Gold Affair by Fredric Davies puts Illya through much the same treatment (Napoleon, meanwhile, doesn’t fare much better). The Assassination Affair, by J. Holly Hunter, revolves around a villain’s plot to break Napoleon by (you guessed it) torturing him horrifically. Oram’s first novel The Copenhagen Affair leaves a captured female agent in the hands of a torturer with her very own torture chamber, and one apparently vile enough that even the guard who left before she started was violently sick after leaving the room (fortunately, rescue comes before this particular session can get too far). Meanwhile, over in the magazine, the first story I tried reading (The Pillars of Salt Affair by Pronzini) sees Napoleon badly injured in a car accident, then gassed with a nerve agent (one we are assured has a range of truly horrendous potential side-effects), then spends three days imprisoned by the villains in a small room, during which time he refuses all food and drink out of fear that it might be drugged (and beyond which point, one can only presume the rest of the story consists of his dying hallucinations as he expires from blood loss and dehydration. Oh, and he also has a cold, just to top it all off.) It’s not every story (thus far, all I’ve read of McDaniels, Stratton and Phillifents’ work has all been refreshingly torture-free), but there is a lot of punishment crammed into some of these stories.If Napoleon and Illya aren’t being tortured, there are pretty good odds they’re stuck in the middle of a firefight. Never did I realise quite how boring written action can get after the nth straight chapter until I started reading UNCLE novels (Phillifent, Pronzini and Davies are particular culprits). Action scenes are, of course, a great way of punctuating a plot and ramping up the tension, but past a certain saturation point, it becomes about as exciting as watching someone else play a video game. Actually, I’ll go one further – it’s like reading a text-based account of someone else playing a video game. One gets the sense some authors are trying to cover for how little actual plot they have.
The overall impression is of a batch of authors whose approach to filling pages depends on the characters being constantly in mortal danger. Depressingly few are much interested in character or plot, which is a crying shame considering that UNCLE’s success was built on a formula of larger-than-life villains, ordinary people getting swept up in the action, and two charismatic heroes with amazing on-screen chemistry. But the villains of the novels tend to be thinly-sketched archtypes, and virtually no-one in the writer’s chair seems to have the first idea how to successfully incorporate an innocent into the story. Say what you like about UNCLE’s innocents, they add a much-needed human element to the show, and one which goes frequently lacking on page. Phillifent makes what is perhaps the best effort on that front, giving us an innocent in his first book who is actually present and contributing through most of the action (even if she is the niece of an evil mad scientist, which scores you about a 1 on the creativity scale for this medium). Second place seems to be due to Davies, though his innocents don’t appear at all until the halfway point of his novel, whereupon their personal histories are gushed out to us at considerable length, while Napoleon sort of tags along. Third place, as of this writing, probably has to go to Oram, whose first book writes the innocent out altogether after the first two chapters. The bar in this category is depressingly low.For all that I've harped on about the variable tone of the series before, one thing the novels did achieve was to make me appreciate a few things the show did manage to keep fairly consistent on over the years (or at least up until the regrettable 4th season). Villains are frequently memorable characters, and women (innocent or otherwise) are treated as active participants in their own stories – and that last point is one I can't emphasise enough, as it's one of the key details that let me fall so much in love with the show as I did. Whereas the books feel overwhelmingly like a place where UNCLE season 4 came early: all action, drama, misery and boredom, as far as the eye can see.
Where authors do actually try to reproduce the spirit of the show, another thing one starts to notice is that what works on screen doesn’t necessarily work on page. A few authors were clearly watching the first season closely enough to notice that UNCLE’s intelligence briefings are often delivered by voice-over by one of the communications staff. What they don’t seem to realise is that this is a technique which exists to share information with the TV audience – on page, simple declaring that “a female voice” read out the information you’re relating, while giving said female no other role in the scene, adds absolutely nothing to your story. Briefings with Mr. Waverly are likewise a useful expository device on screen, but on page, you could cover most of the same information much more succinctly in an expository paragraph. Scenes like these badly need something else going on to make them work (say, a character Napoleon and Illya are meeting for the first time, some commentary on the relationships between the characters in the scene, the sense that other things are going on in the office, etc), but a lot of the time you don’t really need these scenes at all. Many episodes function fine without them.
There are a number of other odd quirks to the series, as authors go out of their way to incorporate as much of the development notes as possible, but frequently contradict what’s actually in the show. Particularly popular is having characters react with great horror to something that happens on the box regularly, such as Napoleon and Illya being captured. Some (Lynds most notably) have the bizarre habit of consistently referring to Napoleon in the narration by his last name, but Illya by his first. (Why? Have they simply picked whichever was the shorter of the two?) Many take pains to tell us how beautiful and sexy some woman is that Napoleon has his eye on, though never in any interesting detail. And more than a few, depressingly, cannot write a female character for shit (including, even more depressingly, the one female author in the batch). Curiosity and morbid fascination have done far more to keep me going thus far than genuine interest. Reading these is a bit like sampling a well-stocked smorgasbord of all the different ways in which a novel can be bad.
Thus far, I’ve read a few in full, and given up on many more after a chapter or two. Even before you start to consider the question of which actually make the characters recognisable, their written quality varies from “decently written book by someone who never in his life watched the show and probably wouldn't know any of these characters from Adam” to “I legitimately do not understand how anyone ever published this.” But I figured I’d go ahead and write down some of my thoughts on those I’ve read for the record all the same.
Vitriol incoming. Some of these are good, but most did not impress me at all.
The Copenhagen Affair – John Oram
In brief: Would make a solid original novel, but doesn’t have a lot of UNCLE flavour, and not much personality. Certainly one of the better-written entries I’ve tried thus far, though it’s hard to believe Oram has ever seen much (if any) of the show. He doesn’t seem to realise that a cigarette-pack communicator is a standard part of their equipment, or that they regularly use tranquilizer darts, and keeps describing their guns as Lugers. Napoleon, Illya and Waverly sound like themselves in places, and nothing like themselves in others (which is admittedly about par for the course, whether the authors are actually fans of the show or not) – but overall, the narrative, while competent, doesn’t give anyone much of an opportunity to show much personality. The book is more interested in Denmark and Danish history than UNCLE in any obvious form (I was not at all surprised to google the author and discover one of his few other works was a history of the Danish WWII resistance movement. The author himself is from Wales, which is where he sets his other UNCLE novel. Oram was clearly a believer in writing what you know). This does at least give it some local flavour, but leaves the UNCLE characters feeling slightly at odds with the setting.
Perhaps the most humanised of the characters is the innocent, who serves as the POV character for the first couple of chapters (which I genuinely liked) but whose part in the story is done by the time our more familiar heroes appear on screen. It earned a lot of good will from me early on as we meet a number of female agents (past and present) with parts in the story, then lost much of it again as it became apparent that the biggest role any of them would get to play involved being captured and tortured. I do have to give Oram points for not lingering over the gruesome details, and otherwise portraying her as competent, but I would have very much liked some more insight into her history and character. As it is, most hints of personality in this thing turn out to be red herrings, as Oram will sometimes go to some detail in describing people to us who aren’t going to live through the next chapter. Overall, this felt somewhat more like a series of loosely-connected set pieces than a really solid narrative, with Napoleon and Illya mostly just drifting through their roles. Okay, but unremarkable.
The Vampire Affair – David McDaniels
In brief: Somewhat over-hyped, IMO, as it does have significant flaws, but nonetheless very much the high point of what I’ve read so far in this seriesThis is the only McDaniels book I’ve yet read, and on the strength of it alone, I’d strongly concur with the general sentiment that McDaniels is by far the best of the bunch – not only does he actually write fairly solid character voices for both Napoleon and Illya, he's a much stronger writer than most of his colleagues generally. His prose is never a chore to get through and sometimes even quite clever. Whereas many otherauthors in the series populate their worlds with cardboard cut-outs, McDaniels' actually gives his supporting cast enough personality to bring the story a little life. Better yet, McDaniels actually gets the dynamic between Napoleon and Illya, and gets it well enough to produce a scene or two that had me grinning at the page. That’s more than I can say for any other writer I’ve tried yet, and I’ve tried enough to be fairly confident in that opinion.
But even though he writes some legitimately good scenes, I'd hesitate to call The Vampire Affair very good as a whole. For example, there's an innocent character who I liked from her first few lines, but thereafter McDaniels fails to find anything of substance for her to contribute for the rest of the story, beyond following the other characters around and reacting to what happens. The role of Significant Local goes instead to another 'innocent' character, while the role of Nominal Vampire Expert goes to a completely gratuitous insertion of RL fandom personality Forrest J Ackerman into the story, in a scene which takes up a lot of page space without advancing the plot in any way whatsoever. In fact, too many scenes in which our characters are vaguely threatened by various supernatural cliches, but fail to uncover a single, meaningful clue as to what’s really going on are the books major flaw, while the true villain and his actual scheme are introduced far too late to get any real development, almost as an afterthought. Ultimately, in classic Scooby Doo fashion, the 'vampires' are explained away using with science fiction which is scarcely less implausible (a completely silent stealth helicopter, really?) But there's enough fun to be had along the way that I'd still easily rank this as one of the best in the series that I've read so far.
The Mad Scientist Affair – John T. Phillifent
In brief: Better than average use of the innocent couldn’t make up for the fact this basically treated the villain as little more than a plot device from which to hang far too many generic action scenesAn odd one. Phillifent is one of the few authors who legitimately comes across as being familiar with the show, and even gives us a proper innocent character who gets plenty to do – a welcome change (even if she is the beautiful niece of an evil mad scientist, because of course she is). There’s a lot of basically promising ideas in this story, including a larger-than-life villain busily auditioning for a job with THRUSH, and some good action scenes. Unfortunately, what it really lacks is structure. The villain really only gets a couple of scenes, both in the middle of the story, and the THRUSH subplot largely peters out without going anywhere very interesting. By halfway through, we’ve discovered what his mysterious new synthetic drug does and how he plans to use it. By about the two-thirds mark, Napoleon and Illya are finished with foiling that plan it too. At this point, we learn the villain has yet another new synthetic chemical with utterly unrelated effects (one which hadn’t been mentioned more than in passing thus far), whereupon UNCLE gets out the rifles and the grenade launchers and we spend the rest of the book playing “I’m sorry Napoleon and Illya, but your mad scientist is in another castle,” over three different settings, before finally defeating the big bad off-screen using technobabble. Exactly what the villain’s plan ever was, beyond “rule the world” is never developed in any interesting way. Phillifent isn’t unable to write halfway-decent characters, he just apparently loses interest towards the end of his story.
There are other problems I could nitpick, such as a painful idiot-ball moment where Napoleon walks into the home of a villain he knows perfectly well is developing new and suspicious chemicals, and accepts a drink from him without a second thought, and a couple of times where I could swear someone appeared to remember something that had been said while they were off screen. I very nearly didn’t make it past an early scene set in a local precinct lock-up where Napoleon, having been informed by Mr Waverly that they can't get him off his spurious charge until morning, opts to drug and steal the uniform from a warden who was just doing his job, apparently just so Phillifent can show that that he can. There are, nonetheless, some quite good set pieces scattered through the narrative (such as a lengthy road-chase involving crates of tactically exploding bear-cans), and a few fun moments of levity mixed in too. Characterisation of Napoleon and Illya is, if not great, than at least not glaringly bad. But the entire last third bored me in a way that climactic action scenes emphatically shouldn’t, and that’s no kind of final impression to end a book on.
The Power Cube Affair – John T. Phillifent
Possibly against my better judgement, I gave Phillifent another try, but did not get much beyond the discovery that he evidently cannot portray a woman as professional agent worth a damn. Much page time is also dedicated to telling us how totally gorgeous another female character is, while Napoleon is portrayed as barely able to function with her in the room. That Phillifent has now set a second book on the British isles would also tend to suggest he’s not comfortable venturing far from home. The book isn’t terrible otherwise (Napoleon and Illya stumble onto a case while checking up on a retired agent while on vacation – rather contrived, but at least mildly different), but wasn’t grabbing me enough to make it feel particularly worth giving Phillifent more of that chance.The Invisibility Affair / The Mind Twisters Affair – Thomas Stratton
In brief: Not as bad as many, but not much to recommend it onI tried both of Thomas Stratton’s books, but didn’t get far into either. His writing is more competent than many – and even rarer among the writers of the series, you get the real impression he’s familiar with the show. But the result is still the kind of book that could probably be rewritten for completely different characters by doing little more than find-and-replace their names – there's no spark in the dialogue to really make them feel like the characters we know.
Whereas many other books in the series bored me with never-ending action scenes, Stratton’s feel like they could rather benefit from having someone come through the door with a gun a little more often – far too much of the early chapters of the Mind Twisters Affair consists of Napoleon and Illya wandering around a small town, talking to various people about the odd way some of their neighbours have been acting, then talking to them over again, which frustratingly little actually happening. Ironically, I feel I might actually have gotten further in had he done what most authors do, and split Napoleon and Illya up for the early action – though I’ve tolerated a lot of blah characterisation from other authors who keep them apart, as soon as they’re together, I’m going to want at least a little decent banter that captures the dynamic between them (which is, after all, my favourite thing about the show). Stratton, alas, isn’t quite up to the job.
The Splintered Sunglasses Affair – Peter Leslie
In brief: I could not get past how many mistakes this made in its first scene, or how it portrayed UNCLE's female staff in its secondThe Internet had told me this was one of Leslie's better entries. The plot involves Napoleon being kidnapped in a carefully orchestrated scheme which took place in Del Floria's own shop. The result did not impress me. In fact, the opening scene is so emblematic of the way these books take the word of the development notes over the events of the actual show that I'm going to break it all down point by point.
There's some good detail in this scene, but also a lot of problems. Napoleon's mood is defined by his grumbling about having been sent to a routine conference, about which he'll now have to file a boring report. This doesn't strike me as entirely out of character, but is a poor choice of first impressions to give us about a man as resolutely positive and dedicated as Napoleon. The ability of the villains to gas Napoleon inside Del Floria's own changing room relies on there being a solid door between him and the shop, which is wrong - there's only a thin curtain, which we've seen in the show a dozen times over (and which is even described in the notes). But worst of all, even though Leslie realises that the tailor's shop is monitored by constant camera feed, he seems to think this applies to the changing room itself only, as the villains' scheme relies on their being able to enter the shop, disable the real Del Floria, and then have time to set up their gas trap and settle down to wait for Napoleon to arrive without anyone inside the building noticing them doing it - let alone that there's now a strange woman working Del Floria's press (something Napoleon pays little attention to). This is "explained" by the receptionist having been distracted by something happening on a camera monitoring another entrance - a set up you could believably get from the notes, but which ignores that the receptionist has at most one security screen feed in front of her in any scene in the show, implying that any other entrances (quite sensibly) have other staff monitoring them. This all contradicts stuff which is right there on screen from the first few minutes ever to hit the air. Presumably, there would be plenty of fans who'd take it all in their stride, but it all stands out like a sore thumb to me.
Leslie also insists on calling "Del Floria" "Del Florio", and evidently thinks "Del" is his first name. A scene later, he takes the time to tell us that one needs a white badge to be able to access UNCLE's upper floors, oblivious to the fact the show has been using yellow badges from the first time it broadcast in colour. If you can get past all that, you're up to encountering Leslie's treatment of women, which includes statements like this: "A soft-bodied blonde with her hair gathered on the nape of her neck by a large black bow undulated into the room." The blonde in question has no lines, no other scenes, and nothing to do but usher people into Waverly's office. Yet Leslie still feels the need to tell us what she was wearing, and that she "undulates" rather than walks. The next female UNCLE staff member we meet is in tears, because she's the receptionist and she just can't deal with the thought that Napoleon Solo was captured on her watch! Woe, she babbles, it is all her fault! Naturally, she's fired on the spot. Why UNCLE would put someone so obviously unsuited to the pressures of such a major security role is never questioned.
She's not alone with the dramatics. The entire response the abduction is full of everyone going "OMG, HOW could this have HAPPENED???" almost as if Napoleon isn't captured by the enemy on an almost daily basis.You'd almost think that no-one had ever infiltrated UNCLE via the Del Floria's entrance before (The Vulcan Affair, The Mad Mad Tea Party Affair), and that no-one had ever been attacked or abducted right on that doorstep before either (The Double Affair, The Gazebo in the Maze Affair).
This is where I gave up. If this is Leslie's best, he is clearly not for me.
The Assassination Affair – J. Hunter Holly
In brief: If extreme whump fic is your thing, you may find this tropily enjoyable, but otherwise, I'd avoid this one like the plague. Wow, was this one bad. I say this with the understanding that it does have some reputation of popularity with hurt/comfort fans, as the plot revolves around Napoleon being horrifically tortured by the villain purely in an attempt to break him, then rescued and put back together again (I guess – I honestly did not make it far enough in to be sure). As someone who has herself read more than enough moderately-bad fanfic which happened to scratch some particular itch, I'm hardly going to judge anyone else for the same – but I do have to say, by any other standard, this one is incredibly hard to recommend. I would quite seriously put Holly's ability to write both women and our heroes barely above the level of Whittington's (and if you've not read that review yet, it's emphatically not polite).
There are two “innocents” in this thing, and both are portrayed as all-but-literally Too Dumb To Live. One of is a teenage girl from Napoleon's building, who apparently had nothing better to do with herself but watch him all day and fall terribly in love with him, to the point of insisting he couldn't be a bad man because he didn't look like one (cue horking noises). Meanwhile, Holly has no grasp of Napoleon's voice whatsoever, and not even my contempt for those innocents can stifle how jarring it is to see Napeoleon being this rude and dismissive to them – the narrative actually has him give that teenager a deliberately sexual leer in attempt to scare her away at one point. Whereas most writers just leave his character unremarkably flat, this contorts him out of all recognition.
Otherwise, the writing at large is well down at the teenager-writing-fanfic level for quality. In fact, having read (barely a couple of chapters of) this thing, I'm starting to wonder how much of the worse characterisation I've occasionally seen in fic in this fandom took this as their inspiration. Brr.
As a side-note, this book would appear to be the source of the popular fanon that Napoleon and Illya have to move regularly for security reasons. I’ve never been particularly convinced by that myself, since for one, the development notes refer to their apartments as static, and for another, UNCLE is self-evidently the sort of outfit who won’t even bother to slightly rewrite their security protocols on their most important HQ even after a major security breach (See: Season 1, Episode 1, the first five minutes of the whole goddamn show). For which matter, given that THRUSH (and everyone else on the planet) know exactly where those agents work and can see them entering and leaving HQ from a public street, and could easily just follow them home in the evening, forcing your agents to move regularly sounds like an exercise in futility. I can’t say that knowing the original context has caused me to revise that opinion very much, but to each their own, I suppose.
The Cross of Gold Affair – Fredric Davies
In brief: More of an experience than a really successful UNCLE novel, but still definitely an experience. Very S3-ish, but that's at least a welcome change from the standard for this series.Well, this was a hell of a read. One of the few books that actually kept my attention long enough to get me invested – just perhaps not for the right reasons. Here, Napoleon and Illya find themselves up against what can only be described as an off-brand Batman villain (a grotesque caricature called Avery Porpoise, who lives on a floating pool chair in his own personal deadly sideshow funhouse – no joke), whose evil scheme involves a very technical coordinated scheme to manipulate stock prices in the gold market across the world – and I only wish I could guess which of the two authors were responsible for which of those two disparate elements, because I strongly suspect it was one apiece. Along the way, we get plenty of hurt/comfort-minus-the-comfort, as Napoleon and Illya are tortured and generally put through the wringer, as seems to be some sort of requirement for this goddamn series. But there's also a lot of fun in the narrative, and this is one of the few titles in the series which doesn't remotely lack for ability to come up with well-fleshed-out supporting characters, which was a very welcome change.
There's a lot I genuinely did like about the authors' collective writing style, though it's the sort of style that rambles on endlessly about trivia, but rarely pauses to give you the one piece of context that you actually needed. I could not for the life of me follow nearly all the action scenes (most of these depended intimately on the terrain, which was never described in much detail before the moment that it became crucially important), and I must say gave me a new appreciation for the value of dialogue beats and scene commentary (especially in cases where someone really ought to be reacting to the completely wacky bullshit they've just heard), of which this particular tale had almost none. The characterisation of Napoleon and Illya comes and goes – there are bits which get the voices right, but they tend to be well-spaced between parts which make you wonder just how much of the show the authors had actually seen, such as an extended sequence where, for no practical reason, Napoleon goes to considerable trouble to knock over the villain's drink after being captured, then gloats about it aloud. You sometimes get the sense of an author simply too in love with his own witty dialogue to care whether it would be appropriate for this particular character to say.
The story has other problems too, from the fact you could probably cut half the length without losing anything of real importance, to a trio of innocents who aren't introduced until the middle of the thing and thus never really feel like part of it, all the way down to the good old problem of characters inexplicably forgetting they've brought a gun to this fistfight. But it certainly didn't bore me, and though I feel it may have worked better as an original novel than shoe-horned under the UNCLE brand, it struck me overall as a book that probably could have been excellent, had they only had an editor willing to edit more viciously. On looking up the authors' other work, I was genuinely saddened to learn that is is practically all either of them ever created (and worse, that one died in a motor accident shortly after submitting this novel), because I felt like there was some genuine talent here that could have well gone on to better things.
I'm not sure whether that all adds up to a recommendation, on the balance of it, but it's certainly an experience, if nothing else.
The Man from UNCLE Magazine
The rest of the stories I've read come from the magazine. Issue numbers included. #1. The Howling Teenagers Affair – Dennis Lynds
In a concept perhaps too meta for its own good, the latest threat to Illya and Napoleon is a hoard of crazy teenagers, whipped into bloodlust by hypnotic popular music. Concept aside, this is not a well-written story. Lynds does a decent job setting the mood, but a lot would be explained about the opening scene had whoever transcribed this accidentally skipped every other line. Napoleon's first scene (which he spends canoodling with a lady, quell surprise) has him react with great suspicion when a record cut out shortly before he kissed his date (because that might mean, uh, what?) Lynds' major recurring villain is established as such in a scene in which Napoleon notices her shadowing him home, and has Illya knock her out in the street without a shred of difficulty, then leave her with the nearest convenient cop, because establish a villain as a legitimate threat from their introduction is clearly too pedestrian for him, when there’s an opportunity to make Napoleon and Illya look cool instead on the line. It's all a bit of a mess, basically; I couldn't get into it at all.#2. The Beauty and Beast Affair – Harry Whittington
In brief: Literally the only reason to read this one is to see just how bad it is. It is comically bad, or at least might be if it weren't also so grossly misogynistic.I looked this one up specifically because it not only featured Wanda Mae Kim – UNCLE's receptionist from the early episodes – but promoted her to a full field agent. Unfortunately, I think I can safely say that Whittington picked Wanda for this treatment purely because he liked her photo in the press book, while wasting no time establishing himself to be one of the most grossly misogynistic hacks ever to jerk off on page and convince someone to publish it, and that is not the sort of accusation I make lightly.
Wanda's first scene sees her tied down and about to be brutalised by multiple angry men holding various implements of violence, but the narration still takes time to assure us of exactly how gorgeously sexy she looks in her helplessness, from Napoleon's point of view. Napoleon and Waverly then proceed to insult her repeatedly for being so incompetent as to allow herself to wind up in that position (because as we all know, no competent agent like Napoleon or Illya would ever let themselves be captured, restrained and tortured), bluntly suggesting that Napoleon should have left her there to die. For reasons known only to Whittington's drooling id, they then decide to send her on a crucially important mission anyway, where she proceeds to blow both her own cover and Napoleon's in the most unprofessional way possible, because heaven forbid anyone burdened with two X chromosomes be presented as capable of holding her wits together under pressure. But Napoleon gets to lust after her some more in the meantime, which I suppose justifies all this or something.
I think I can confidently state at this juncture that Harry Whittington had never in his life actually seen a single episode of UNCLE, and wouldn't have liked it if he had. It doesn't feature nearly enough women being belittled and slapped around for his tastes.
Now, obviously this is a genre where being a misogynistic sadist usually doesn’t hold you back – Ian Fleming was roughly as awful as Whittington, but Fleming (as I discovered on attempting to read Thrilling Cities) could at least write worth a damn. Whittington can barely string together a decent sentence. "The machine gleamed metallically in a room of metal machines" is an actual combination of words that appeared within the opening paragraphs of his story.
Probably his most laughable failing is his inability to find any remotely organic way to work background information into a scene. In an opening scene where Waverly and Napoleon deal with the news that Illya has been reported dead (he isn't, of course, but in the hands of any other writer's hands this would at least be a decent story hook), Whittington spends most of a paragraph – one nominally about the rage and grief of “slender, young” Napoleon Solo – describing to us the gun he happens to be carrying at the time, down to its precise weight in ounces. Later in the same scene, he stops to throw in that factoid about how one of the entrances to HQ is an underground channel for no remotely relevant plot reason. He finishes, I shit you not, by having Napoleon go, “but, wait, what was it we were actually talking about here, right before we were interrupted by the story hook?” to which Waverly replies, more or less, “Oh, yes – that random item of supposedly-unrelated scientific news that will obviously become a 'surprise' plot point later! Yes, I should really tell you another couple of sentences about that for the benefit of the audience, before deciding I'm just not in the mood anymore, what with Mr. Kuryakin being dead and all.” This is all within the opening scene.
Later, when Napoleon goes to retrieve Wanda, he arrives on the roof in a helicopter that also carries a pilot and four other UNCLE agents. But we can only presume they’re along just for the ride, because Napoleon then sneaks into the building to rescue Wanda completely alone, so as to maintain that crucial element of surprise. You know, right after landing on the roof in a fucking helicopter.
Either whoever transcribed this story is fucking with us (which, given the state of the 'net, is not wholly impossible), or someone actually published this drivel. I dare say you could feed a neural network the UNCLE development notes and an Ian Fleming novel or two, and the output would be substantially better than this.
#13. The Deadly Dark Affair – John Jakes
Great action opening scene, but one which winds up jetisoning details at random as it progresses. Much is made of a THRUSH man with a distinctive scar who's left behind when a helicopter takes off, after which he's inexplicably never mentioned again. When Napoleon and Illya find themselves in need of a proper lead later, Waverly suddenly goes from being completely stumped to having a staggeringly convenient revelation involving and old friend's son and an article in the morning paper, and is able to point them in exactly the right direction. Overall, I'd rate Jakes' skill above Lynds, but too many details kept throwing me out of the story for me to get into it.#23. The Pillars of Salt Affair – Bill Pronzini
One I checked out because I'd seen it recommended, but on reading it, clearly the part of the rec I should have paid attention to was the reccer's love for UNCLE's season 4, as this story is likewise all drama and betrayal without any real personality. There's an innocent, who turns out to be a traitor in her second scene, then vanishes from the story. There's a villain, who is revealed only late in the story, has only one scene of any real note, and no plan more nuanced than "conquer the world!" He's invented a completely undetectable chemical that turns pure water into pure salt - ie, one compound, into an entirely separate compound, with no elements in common - which makes even the exploding apples of S3 look pretty likely in comparison (I mean, I can deal with a lot of bad science in these things, but christ, even medieval alchemists working to transmute gold into lead had were working from a better understanding of basic chemistry than this). The plot sees Napoleon badly injured in a car accident, then gassed with a nerve agent (one we are assured has a range of truly horrendous potential side-effects), then spends three days imprisoned by the villains in a small room, during which time he refuses all food and drink out of fear that it might be drugged (and beyond which point, one can only presume the rest of the story consists of his dying hallucinations as he expires from blood loss and dehydration. Oh, and he also has a cold, just to top it all off.) It's very hard to take any of it remotely seriously.There's some moderately good tension in the middle, where both our favourite agents think the other dead, but it doesn't really go anywhere much. With all remotely promising characters shuffled off-stage in the first half, we spend the rest of the story pounding through one mindless action set-piece after another, to the point where it stops being exciting and just becomes repetitive. Illya is finally scooped off a de-transmuting salt surface in the final moments by a "grappling sling" strung from a helicopter going at full speed (and if you run a google-search for that term, you may just find my source for this story, because Pronzini is almost the only person ever to think that was a good idea). "Amateurish" hardly begins to cover this mess.