Assassination! July 14

by Ben Abro

Book Overview

July 14. One of Europe's most sinister terrorist organizations hatches a brilliant plan to assassinate the feared and powerful leader of France, President Charles de Gaulle. Max Palk, an extraordinarily talented British secret agent, is summoned to Paris to hunt down the assassins before it is too late. Ensnared in a terrifying web of doublecross and death, Palk races against the clock to outmaneuver, outshoot, and outthink his increasingly desperate...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803259395
• ISBN13: 9780803259393
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Bison
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Literature and Politics Collide

Originally published in 1963 (ten years before The Day of the Jackal), this thriller written under a pseudonym by two English graduate students was originally conceived as a reaction to Ian Fleming's wildly popular James Bond series. However, it also drew upon the extremely volatile contemporary French political scene for plot inspiration, notably using real name and identity of Jacques Soustelle. The book's rediscoverer and champion, James Le Sueur, rightly notes in his accompanying historical essay that the book was at the cutting edge of the new political thriller genre which blurred fact and fiction, but perhaps overstates the matter somewhat in saying that it could have started a important literary rebuttal to the Bond series.In any event, the novel itself, which occupies 178 pages in this edition, is a fairly entertaining and engrossing caper revolving around the planned assassination of French leader de Gaulle by the OAS. After one ingenious attempt by trained bomb carrying dogs is thwarted in the opening pages, a policeman's widow summons Max Palk, secret agent to help bring down the OAS. Curiously, this ubderspy is an anonymous Englishman office drone, living alone in a dull rooming house on the fringes of London, who, when called forth, transforms rather like a superhero. Next thing you know he's driving powerful sports cars, flying his own plane to his French farm estate, and displaying extreme erudition and Holmesian reasoning and cunning. The never explained disconnect between these two sides of him is a rather jarring and unsatisfactory element of the story, especially if the authors intended him to be the anti-Bond.The plot hums right along with all the usual reversals and revelations, however its flaws are those of many a potboiler: Max is captures and escapes in entirely unbelievable (albeit comic) way, the damsel in distress is too easily rescued, and the plot foiled with too silly a trick. Still, it's not unenjoyable, and there are some real gemlike moments, such as when Max must correctly identify selections from the Oxford Book of Quotations or be taken to the basement and shot. In his 60+ page afterword, James Le Sueur describes the novel's publishing history and the legal battle mounted against it by Soustelle, who claimed libel. This gets deeply into France's internal and colonial politics and history, especially the Algerian war and the OAS. While he does an excellent job of synthesizing and explaining, the essay is still likely to be mainly of interest to those who already are somewhat familiar with the issues at hand. However, for those who plow through it, it is a remarkable episode in the collision of literature and politics. For more on the subject, try and find Philip Dine's Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954-1992.

An Engaging Read!

This resurrected 1963 novel by Ben Abro and its accompanying historical essay by James D. Le Sueur are a defintely a great read. The novel is an historical artifact because of its unusual publication history. The authors provide a simultaneously comic and serious plot for the assassination of De Gaulle by Soustelle (both real-life characters). The protagonist is France's secret weapon, one very British and unassuming office worker, Max Palk, a definite contender in the popular Austin Powers and James Bond arenas. This not too savvy spy stops the assassination attempt on De Gaulle before returning to his every day offic job. In his essay, Le Sueur offers a rich analysis of the novel's publication history by sharing real-life courtroom excerpts of Soustelle's libel suit against the authors (Ben Abro) and by describing the geopolitical, intellectual, and historical forces at work during the decolonization era of Algeria and France. I recommend this book both for its creative fictional and non-fictional accounts of an interesting historial period and because it is an entertaining and fun read.