The Khufra Run by Jack Higgins
A brief detour today to talk about a novel that disappoints. First, background: Jack Higgins, under that assumed name and his various other pseudonyms, was until his recent death one of the leading thriller writers in Britain and indeed the world. Eclipsed in sales and fame by your Lee Childs and your Robert Ludlums and their imitators, but still the originator of a few interesting characters, one or two technical innovations to the genre. Liam Devlin — who features most notably in The Eagle Has Landed, and is played in the film by Donald Sutherland — the Irish agent-for-hire: he is an intriguing character. He was one of Higgins’s.
The Khufra Run originates no one interesting. Not a character, not a location, not even a concept. It reads relatively quickly, and is written in a way which is never quite boring. But it is something of a workhorse. I borrowed this book from one of those little libraries people have in their front gardens because I knew I’d be lying around all day and wanted something I knew I could finish in that time. This did not, in that regard and that regard alone, disappoint.
As it’s a thriller and concept and setting are important if you wanted to read it yourself, I will not say much that’s specific or traceable. Instead, come with me now as I meditate a while on the vague concepts of the thriller. What do we, the readers, want in something of this style and type? We want action, of course. But what else?
Well, we want a character who is compelling — everyman in a way, but also more capable than an everyman. Down on his luck, has a bit of a past. Can look a little scruffy, a little out of it, but looks can be deceiving. Not someone to be taken advantage of; not someone on whom you’d want to turn your back.
Now, what would be a fine place or a fine situation for such a character to be? Well, perhaps in the middle of sandy nowhere, or idling as a handyman type, a lowly character, a servant for those richer and more famous than he: underestimated again, you notice. Ever apt to be underestimated. He needs a history, this character. Lately of the forces, possibly some kind of special operations. But that was long ago. He wants to retire, now. He wants to be kept out of it. He would rather be left well alone.
But then something important has to happen: something that has not happened to a character of this kind. He must encounter someone new, or be so thrown off his ordinary habits that a new impetus is given to his life. He may be too old for all of this nonsense, but action must find him, and he must be forced back into it. Protest he might. Complain he will. But he must be pushed back onto a certain and violent course.
And after that, you put your pieces together. A journey must be undertaken: with old friends and new. It might be a rickety journey like in The African Queen or an intrepid one into the heart of darkness like King Solomon’s Mines. But it must be filled with peril and devious villains intent on something really unfortunate. And there must be belts of machine gun rounds tearing through wooden structures and sending splinters and steel flying through the dust-filled air. And the character must discover some of his old violence, some of his old tricks, and he must re-emerge from personal concealment to be the dangerous man we always knew he was, secretly hoped he would become, all in the interest of staying alive and — if so minded — in the interests of justice, rough justice, justice after a fashion.
All of these elements are present in this book. Plus a beautiful young woman in trouble. Plus a vulgar older woman who still has some attractions. Plus scenery. Plus movement. Plus this and that. Why then does it not work? Why then is it so unmemorable?
One thing leaps to mind: the whole thing is so obvious not only in its construction but in its conclusions that the reader does not care. None of it has any permanence, none of it any purchase. I can’t, as I write this review, name any of the characters. Nor where they went, save Khufra, of course, and that’s in the title.
And so I lay there on that hot day where I had nothing else to do, and got to the end of this short book in not much time, and put it down more bored than I had been when I picked it up.