The Chinese menace
The second British thriller I read during the dog days of Coronavirus, when what was termed a full curfew kept getting extended, dealt with a much more recent phenomenon than Nazi Germany. This was By Stealth by Colin Forbes, whose work I believe I have read previously. He is best known for a series of books about the Deputy Head of the British Secret Intelligent Service, a man identified only as Tweed. He is assisted by a lady called Paula Grey and a journalist called called Bob Newman, both of whom are experts at shooting though Tweed himself prefers not to carry a gun. And he has a reliable support team, which is always available when needed.
In this book, published in 1992, the enemy is Communist China which is supposed to be gearing itself to invade the West, supported by fifth columnists whom it has settled in several countries. It transports them on ships built to avoid detection by radar, but fortunately for the West a Belgian arms manufacturer has developed radar that can detect these ships and the technology gets to Britain in time to be deployed against the ships closing in on Denmark.
The mastermind of the operation is a Chinese General who has undergone plastic surgery and, having eliminated the American doctor who did the job, passes as Dr Wand a philanthropist who looks after refugees. He is the embodiment of evil, and blackmails the scientists he wants to throw off his trail by kidnapping their loved ones, and then killing them.
In addition to dealing with him and his ships, Tweed has also to find two Britishers who help him, one a woman who murders half a dozen people in the course of the novel, though none of Tweed’s friends are amongst them. This part of the book is almost Agatha Christie, two old Hong Kong hands living with their housekeepers in the New Forest near the first victim of blackmail. Which of the two men is the villain, which of the two women the murderess, is revealed only at the very end after the doctor has been eliminated. And the other chap turns out to be not so bad after all, working for the Ministry of Defence though continuously at cross purposes with Tweed.
Oddly the book I read before this one also had a Chinese villain. Called The Man from Beijing, it was by Henning Mankel whom I had read earlier this year, a Swedish writer with a taste for the macabre. The earlier novel I read was about a woman who killed men who abused women. This one began with mass murder, to eliminate the descendants of a man who had abused workers building the American railroads in the 19th century, including two Chinese brothers.
It is the descendant of one of them who plans and perpetrates this brutal revenge, in between working towards the colonization of Africa which Mankel suggests is the remedy for possible unrest amongst the Chinese peasantry as uneven development continues in China. But though Mankel seems to buy the current Western line about how dangerous all this is for Africa, he does suggest also a different perspective in China which is less exploitative. Sadly its principal proponent, the sister of the villain, is also ruthlessly eliminated. But just as he is trying to kill the Swedish judge who has begun to understand what had happened, he too is killed, and not heard of again for his sister had managed to inform the authorities of the enormously corrupt practices in which he had engaged.
Again I was fascinated by the stress on Chinese villainy, one book written shortly after the Tienanmen massacre, the other twenty years later when the West realized the challenges it had to face were economic, and the exploitation it had engaged in with regard to Africa would no longer go unchallenged.