ARGYLLE by Elly Conway
I have so much to say about this book that it’s hard to know where to begin! It’s a rip-roaring spy thriller with a dollop of fantasy, a masterclass in descriptive vocabulary, a trip through history and a complete fail as a movie
promo.
With a bad cover.
First, the plot. Aubrey Argylle is a young man living in the Golden Triangle after the death of his drug-dealing parents. Thanks to them, he’s lived all around the world, gone to posh boarding schools, knows martial arts and has a gift for survival. At loose ends now, he
makes ends meet as a hiking guide.
When a small plane crashes in a remote area ruled over by drug warlords, he takes it upon himself to affect a rescue of the American survivors. They are from a 3-letter US agency, of course, and mightily impressed with Argylle’s ingenuity and local knowledge.
To make a long story short, Argylle is recruited and joins an elite CIA operations team. Their mission is to keep evil tech mastermind Vasily Federov from becoming the Russian president. Federov’s campaign revolves around his promise to recover the Amber Room, the fabulous Russian work of art looted by the Germans. It’s been lost since World War II.
Argylle’s team
must find the Amber Room before Federov does. The catch is that there’s a Russian spy inside the team. But no one, including the reader, knows who it is.
It’s a super fun, super fast story, with Argylle learning to be less of an independent operator as the team zooms around the world chasing clues and being chased in turn by crazed Russians. Every clue leads them to yet another wild setting. Glamor
time in Monaco, hiking through a remote wilderness, Nazi tunnels deep in a mountain, skydiving into a Greek island monastery, etc, etc. Action scenes read like a movie screenplay.
There’s no attempt to portray anything about the CIA as authentic (Anybody remember the Ace Tomato Company from Spies Like Us?) from titles to headquarters location. That’s fine with me, it makes the point that this
is wholly fiction and having a grand time of it, too.
But there's real historic research, great character development, and snappy dialogue.
ARGYLLE would have made a super Mission Impossible style movie.
But wait, there was an Argylle movie.
This is where the book ARGYLLE becomes the oddest and least effective tie-in ever. It was a spinoff of the Kingsmen franchise. The main character in the
eponymous movie is the “author” of the book, Elly Conway.
I think the novel was supposed to bolster the notion of the Elly Conway character as a real author. FYI, this is a made-up name. The book jacket provides a silhouette instead of an author picture and a tongue-in-cheek bio.
The movie-book tie is
too thin to work and the movie was so complicated that audiences didn’t love it. You can now watch it on Apple TV.
But whoever really wrote this book, my hat is off to you. As a standalone spy thriller, ARGYLLE is a blast!
