Higgins Overboils the Pot: The White House Connection
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Author: Jack Higgins
Title: The White House Connection Genre: thriller A few years back, Penguin re-released Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed as a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition. I suspect both author and publisher made a few bucks off it; within its genre that particular book is considered a classic. Eagle's subject matter -- a European World War II spy thriller -- makes it, however, an example of a dying subgenre. Writers like Higgins and Robert Ludlum, and to a lesser extent Frederick Forsythe and Ken Follett, made their literary bones with novels of World War II espionage and heroics. But as the segment of the audience who had actually been there for the war grows smaller, such authors have been forced to either update their resumes or watch their careers dwindle along with their audience. Some haven't gotten the hint, as in Allan Folsom's abject refusal to let Hitler die. Korea and Vietnam war spy thrillers never caught on like WW2 tales. It might have been too much societal angst, it might have been middle America's inability to identify with the unavoidable Asian-American spy. Decades of Cold War standoff, though, provided steady employment for a seemingly unending string of WASP-y superspies, from Flint to Bond to Scarecrow and Mrs. King. As Germany's status morphed from foe to ally, UK and US authors like Higgins and Ludlum relied on the villany of Russians, Poles, and Bulgarians to keep their readers interested. Of course, as we all know, that "unending" supply of stories in fact did end, and nothing's as stale as yesterday's news. What's a writer to do? Read the headlines... I think we can all assume that attempting to devise a means for some lantern-jawed, blue-eyed blond European to infiltrate an al Qaeda cell is weighing heavily on the minds of many thriller authors right about now. But there are other organizations abroad in the world whose actions and methods are considered beyond the pale by many, and it will always be easier for the CIA or MI-6 to put a mole inside the IRA, Brigate Rosse, or Bader-Meinhof than to infiltrate a Mid-Eastern organization. And that brings us to The White House Connection, in which Higgins gives up on parachuting spies behind German lines in favor of the Irish Question. Would that he had done it well, but he didn't. A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother Peter Lang is dead in service of the Queen; two years gone. The young man was unmasked by the IRA cell he was infiltrating and brutally executed as a spy. His father died within the year, at least partially of a broken heart; leaving Peter's mother alone with 'way too much time on her hands, not to mention more than enough cash to let her live as she darn well pleases. When a dying friend of her late husband slips her an illegal copy of Peter's service file, Helen Lang learns that her son was sold out by a mole at the highest levels of the U. S. government: the titular White House Connection. This miscreant operates through a Boston-based group of Republican sympathizers, or deals directly with an IRA thug named Jack Barry. Helen Lang -- that white-haired, grandmotherly sixty-something -- concludes that the only proper course of action is to avenge her son's murder. The five members of the "Sons of Erin" fall one by one before her wrath, leaving her with but two tasks: to ferret out and punish the mole in the White House, and to finish off Barry, one of the IRA's most feared lieutenants. To perform these feats, she jets back and forth across the Atlantic in a private Gulfstream, carrying her little .25 equalizer blithely through customs in her purse. She is ever accompanied by her chauffeur Hedley (coincidentally, a Vietnam special forces veteran), who tumbled to her latest avocation after her first kill. While Grandma's Out Capping Thugs Two strikingly similar clandestine governmental organizations (one in London, one in DC) notice Helen's handiwork, though neither is (immediately) aware that their mysterious gunman is actually a blue-hair on a killing spree. A little detective work reveals that the five dead men were loosely connected (besides being killed with the same weapon). Once that's uncovered, it becomes apparent that they were the conduit through which a British counterterrorism squad -- including Helen Lang's son -- was sold out. The two agencies, working together, divine the presence of the mole in the White House and set in motion a complicated plan to unmask and capture him. Helen, on the other hand, simply drops in on a party fundraiser at a friend's house to talk to the U. S. President about leaks in his administration: being rich does have its advantages, I guess. What happens next, and then next, and then next stretches the realms of credibility to the breaking point, but it shouldn't come as any surprise that several people (most of 'em bad guys) end up dead on Long Island, in Ireland, and in Essex. I'll leave it for any interested readers to find out who killed whom, where, and how. Credibility! Credibility! My Kingdom for Some Credibility! The White House Connection is a potboiler of the first order. Higgins began with an patently unreasonable scenario: a very rich, very peeved old lady with time on her hands and a pistol in her purse. He then stretched that scenario to the breaking point, imbuing her with a level of tradecraft it takes a degree from Spy School to develop. Then, he stretches it some more: she has a fifty-something chauffeur who's easily capable of disarming one of the U. S. President's Secret Service detail. That's after she cleared a security checkpoint and was actually face-to-face with the President, with that cute little shootin' iron of hers still in the pocketbook clutched to her side. Guess Higgins doesn't watch "The West Wing," eh? And he keeps on stretching his plot until it breaks noisily, then wads everything up and boils it some more. Too many coincidences spoil the soup boiling merrily in this pot: Helen's husband just happens to have a friend with the real skinny on Peter's death; Helen's devoted chauffeur just happens to be a one-man wrecking crew; the mole just happens to slip through the FBI's vetting process for his very high-level position, although the most damning information is easily obtained when that British government agency starts looking. The soup's flavor is also ruined by over-reliance on bureaucratic jealousy: one British government agency hid the files that broke the case out of jealousy and spite; the U. S. agency doesn't talk to either the FBI or the CIA. By the time he's done cooking his soup, Higgins has churned out little more than a 300-page pot of dishwater. From the "I Shoulda Known" Department Sentence one, paragraph one, chapter one: Born in Boston in 1933 to one of Boston's wealthiest families, Helen Darcy's mother had died giving birth to her, and she was raised as an only child. Bulwer-Lytton, eat your heart out. Parting Shots If you like good literature, You'll want to give this book a wide berth. The concept of a mother seeking revenge is interesting, but Higgins just doesn't carry it off. If the idea of a mother avenging the cold-blooded murder of her child piques your interest, I'd suggest that you hunt up a copy of James W. Hall's Gone Wild. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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