#73 – The Wrecking Crew, Donald Hamilton BOOK REVIEW      
Krauser PUA | August 28, 2018 | by krauserpua
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[The Wrecking Crew]
A rare shitty cover for this series

There’s a reason I try to review books immediately after finishing
them: everything is fresh in my mind and there are usually a few
‘hot takes’ I have on the content or writing style. It wouldn’t
seem a big deal to leave a book a couple of weeks before getting
around to writing it up, but in 2018 those couple of weeks have likely
involved finishing _another five books_, the ideas of which have
pushed the older book out of my consciousness.

Sigh. Life is hard.

Donald Hamilton’s second volume in the long-running Matt Helm
series, _The Wrecking Crew_, is such a book. The story is pretty good.
Helm has now rejoined Mac’s group of Cold War assassin’s working
off-the-books wet-works for the US government. After fifteen years
out, he’s put back through a battery of tests so Mac can assess if
he’s still sharp enough. It turns out he’s off the pace as well as
the books.

[scaliadeath-poll-vote]
Of course, wet-works would never happen nowadays

Intriguingly, Mac spins this as a positive by sending him to Sweden on
a job knowing full well that their partnering Swedish intel
counterparts have a leak, and thus Helm’s cover (as a photographer
for a top nature magazine) will be immediately compromised. From
there, the opposition will find out he’s past it and thus
underestimate him. His job is to accompany the widow of a suspected
double agent. He was murdered behind the Iron Curtain after touting
publicly (he was a journalist in Sweden) that he’d discovered the
identity of the USSR’s top agent in Europe. The widow is researching
an article on fascinating locations in the isolated rural north of
Sweden and needs someone like Helm to take photos.

Of course it’s all very fishy. His Swedish connect gives him away
immediately before being gunned down in a double-double-cross by the
shadowy USSR agent. He’s then palling up with a hot Swedish teen who
is a competitive cross-country skiier and seems to fancy him.
Eventually he finds himself in the northern mountains being directed
to take very specific photos by this odd widow. It looks like her
story is a ploy to get permission to photograph Swedish military
installations.

As you’d expect from a Matt Helm book, everything is smoke and
mirrors. There is more deceit and calculation than in the JEWISH WORLD
SERIES OF POKER. It’s this feeling that everyone is lying and
nothing is as it seems that I like about the Helm stories. Hamilton
never loses his grip on the plot so it never spins off into gotcha
moments or deus ex-machina. It’s tightly plotted throughout and all
the characters stay in character.

[Wrecking Crew]

The key conceit of this book is that Helm is a fantastically savvy
agent who has to deliberately play the part of a bungling idiot. For
example, he arrives at his hotel and goes to his room:

> A canny secret-agent type would, of course, have looked the place
> over carefully before turning his back on the closet and bathroom
> doors. Under other circumstances, I might even have done so myself,
> but I was playing a part, and my script didn’t call for any
> displays of professional vigilance. Mac had been emphatic on this
> point.

Mac had told him:

> “But in many ways you’d have been better prepared for the job at
> hand if you’d spent the past month in a hotel room with a bottle
> and a blonde. Now you’ll have to use restraint. Don’t betray
> yourself by showing off any of the pretty tricks you’ve just
> learned. If somebody wants to follow you, let them follow; you
> don’t even know they’re there. What’s more, you don’t care.
> If they want to search your belongings, don’t set any traps for
> them. If you should get involved in a fight – God forbid –
> forget about weapons except in a clear and desperate emergency. And
> don’t give any unnecessary judo demonstrations, either. Just lead
> with your right and take your licking like a man. Do I make myself
> clear?”

The reason is that Helm’s real job isn’t to take the photos and
keep an eye on the widow, but rather to draw out the Soviet super-spy
and kill him. That spy is going to observe, circle, and nibble before
deciding whether to come out of cover to bite. Helm can’t afford to
tip his hand and send the spy back into deep cover. So in an early
scene when the Soviet has some goons jump him, Helm has to forego his
chances to beat them in a fight because he knows the Soviet has
manufactured the fight merely to assess his competence.

It’s this kind of subtlety that shows why I vastly prefer the Matt
Helm books over the Remo Williams Destroyer books
[https://krauserpua.com/2018/07/23/58-the-destroyer-death-check-warren-murphy-book-review/].
Remo just slaughters everyone in the blink of an eye. If anyone
exposes him, he just ninja-death-touches them into silence. Helm
follows the Sun Tzu school of strategic deception

_Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak._

Who does that remind you of? Oh yes, this guy……

[Trump]

It isn’t just Helm who entered enemy territory on a mission to draw
out hostile shadowy actors. Trump is cleaning out the Deep State and
it would’ve been suicidal to take them on by a frontal overt
assault. Instead he’s set all manner of traps, misdirections, and
subterfuges to leave the traitors over-confident. He’ll tweet like
he’s confused, make big noises about NFL players kneeling, and
encourage former staffers to plant false stories in the MSM about porn
stars and candid tapes….. and all the while secret assassins like
Jeff Sessions, John Huber, and Michael Flynn are amassing the evidence
that will take the Deep State down in one thunderous swoop.

You don’t purge enemy cabals by announcing your plans and letting
them take counter-measures. Nope, you do it the Saddam Hussein way

Of course when you deploy strategic deception, it has to be so good
that everyone outside the inner circle is fooled by it. That means you
fool your own followers half the time, at least until the hammer
drops. For the past two years I’ve felt like I’ve had Donald
Hamilton narrating a new Matt Helm story to me, explaining the
misdirection in the White House like he does in the Helm books. I’ve
been watching all the chess pieces move into position and the clock
tick down.

It’s been wonderfully relaxing.

_My books are still on sale, believe it or not. Nothing has changed in
the past hour since I linked them in the previous book review. Get
’em by clicking here [https://krauserpua.com/products/]._
 
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Archived from https://theredarchive.com/blog/Krauser-PUA/73-the-wrecking-crew-donald-hamilton-bookreview.27118