The Loo Sanction is the follow-up to The Eiger Sanction. It's a spy pastiche by the reclusive Anglo-American Trevanian. It therefore features American academic and retired hitman Dr Jonathan Hemlock, but takes place almost entirely in England. It was written in 1973 and is thus about Swinging London in its dark last phase.
Hemlock is in London to give guest lectures. At the Royal Academy he is hijacked by his former lover Vanessa Dyke to evaluate a contemporary bronze of a horse that is about to go up for auction. The thing is, Hemlock has the perfect eye - for art and for shooting. The mysterious vendor, it seems, is trying to hike the hammer price.
Next, Hemlock hooks up with a young Irish wannabe artist, Maggie Coyne. They spend the night in one of Hemlock's two luxury London pads. Next morning they find a man grusesomely murdered in the bathroom. Hemlock finds himself hijacked again, this time to the HQ of Loo, an interservice secret agency. Maggie has been recruited by them as bait. They want Hemlock to track down one Maximilian Strange who runs a high-class speciality brothel in which many high-ranking pillars of the Establishment have inadvertently let themselves be filmed in the act. Loo want the films. If Hemlock feels the need to 'sanction' someone, or indeed several, Loo will clean up the mess.
The thing about Trevanian is that his jokes are complex and dark. He was himself an academic and therefore has greater word-power than most pasticheurs. Jokes and comic names aside, he writes an extremely good thriller. He does not romanticise violence - it is gory and painful. The Seventies sex is free and plentiful but comes with consequences, feelings get hurt, people get abused. The book is not some clever bloke showing off. Trevanian's self-obscurity and scanty output testify to the effort he put into fine-tuning his work.
I am on the lookout for more. The Eiger Sanction itself, perhaps - or Shibumi, to which my favourite cntemporary US writer, Don Winslow, wrote a prequel.
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