Book Review – Clive Cussler’s “The Spy”
Clive Cussler’s adventure novel, The Spy, returns ace detective Isaac Bell back into another deadly game with a criminal mastermind. This is the third book in Cussler’s Isaac Bell series.
Set in 1908, The Spy begins with Yamamoto Kenta conducting a black ops mission at the Washington Navy Yard. His ultimate target is Arthur Langner’s office. Using his specialized skills, Yamamoto forges a suicide note and places a small amount of explosives in Langner’s piano. He then makes his escape from Langner’s office and then has to avoid the soldiers guarding the Navy yard. A soldier surprises him, but Yamamoto manages to make a getaway.
The next day, Arthur Langner has a meeting with some co-workers in his office. He beings playing the piano to mask their voices in case somebody is trying to listen to their conversation. Once the piano hits a certain note, the explosives detonate, killing Arthur Langner and injuring the other people in his office. The police find the suicide note and consider it a closed case. But when Langner’s daughter goes to the elite Van Dorn Detective Agency and pleads her case, Isaac Bell is sent to investigate her father’s death.
The problem is that Arthur Langner is a gifted engineer who specializes in designing the cannons on battleships. His latest designs are going to put the American navy’s firepower ahead of rival navies in Great Britain, Germany and Japan. According to character witnesses, Arthur Langner was a happy person and not depressed or suicidal. Isaac Bell begins to believe his daughter was correct as more and more evidence supports her theory.
We quickly find out that Yamamoto is working for a man who keeps his identity concealed. You’ll keep guessing throughout The Spy as the mastermind’s true identity won’t be revealed until nearly the end of the story.
The master spy isn’t here in the U.S. to steal ideas or conduct espionage. Instead, this person is set about humiliating the country and destroying future naval projects. In a word, sabotage.
When Isaac Bell meets Alasdair MacDonald (a man nicknamed “The Professor”), an engineer who specializes in ships’ turbine engines, he learns that several engineers connected to the new designs of battleships have all met early deaths. MacDonald is a big, tough guy who enjoys fighting people. He gets into a fight with people in a saloon when three men with knives try to kill him. One of them ultimately succeeds, and MacDonald dies from his knife wounds.
Isaac Bell investigates what little MacDonald told him of “Hull 44,” a secret project at the naval yard. Bell returns to the naval yard and finds an engineer connected to it, but when questioned, the engineer turns and flees. Bell follows the man as he makes his way to a pier and boards a powered yacht. Isaac Bell sneaks onto the yacht and meets its captain, Lowell Falconer, a heroic soldier from the Spanish-American War.
It turns out that Captain Falconer was waiting for Isaac Bell after he heard about MacDonald’s death and was hoping that the detective would show up on his yacht. Captain Falconer takes the yacht (named Dyname) out to sea and demonstrates the power of its engines, engines that MacDonald had designed. As Dyname races across the waves and reaches a top speed of sixty knots, Falconer tells Isaac Bell about Hull 44 and what it means for the future of the U.S. Navy.
Hull 44 is the code-name for a secret battleship currently under construction. Once completed, the ship will have the absolute latest in terms of turbine engines, armor plating, and the biggest and most accurate cannons in the history of naval warfare. It’s a ship that will put the balance of power in the hands of America. It’s a program strong enough to attract international attention and sabotage.
After narrowly avoiding assassination by an extremely deadly snake placed in his hotel room, Isaac Bell receives word of a suspicious German sneaking around in Camden, New Jersey. The naval shipyard in Camden is about to launch the U.S. Navy’s latest battleship, the Michigan.
Isaac Bell and his fellow detectives swarm to Camden and keep a close eye on everybody who comes near the ship in the construction yard. The dedication ceremony seems to be safe until a worker approaches the ship at the last minute. He’s carrying explosives, and if he sets them in the right place, the battleship will roll onto its side on land and kill a bunch of people. On top of that, the incident will humiliate the U.S. Navy and their so-called security. Bell manages to stop the worker, and after a brief scuffle, the worker is killed when a beam falls as the ship is being launched into the water. The Michigan is safe, but it’s clear that the spy is increasing his methods.
Bell follows more leads and learns that the spy is going to strike another shipyard out in San Francisco. He rides trains cross country and again foils an attack, but once it’s not the actual spy conducting the attacks. It’s another one of his hired hitmen, and again the person doesn’t know enough information to give the detective any solid evidence.
It’s back in New York City when the final pieces of the puzzle come into play and we finally learn the true identity of the spy. It’s also then that the spy conducts his final attack on yet another shipyard. This time around he’s using a Holland submarine that he exchanged for two stolen and highly advanced torpedoes. The submarine conducts an attack run from the river, but Isaac Bell is ultimately able to use the Dyname to run into and stop the submarine. The final fight between Isaac Bell and the spy takes place in the claustrophobic cabin inside the sinking submarine.
Is Cussler’s The Spy any good?
I’ll admit that I wasn’t thrilled with this latest adventure in the Isaac Bell series. This book just didn’t hold my attention like the previous two Isaac Bell books heavily involving locomotives, or the ships and underwater action in any of the Dirk Pitt stories. The Spy doesn’t have any of that sort of classic Cussler action.
Like the previous two books, Isaac Bell is too smart of a character. His guesses and hunches are almost always correct, he always has the backing of the elite Van Dorn Detective Agency, and the fortune that he inherited helps him bribe or spend his way out of any problem. That being said, Bell is too good of a character to make the book interesting. These kinds of stories need to rely more on their settings and overall plot, and less of the main character.
It also would have helped if the main villain (and his helpers) would have been smarter people. The Spy could have been more thrilling if more of the villain’s evil intentions actually worked as planned. Stories tend to get boring and too predictable when the hero is able to stop the villain too many times. That’s the case here in The Spy. Sure, a few engineers were killed and there was an explosion at a naval shipyard (it was to cover the theft of the advanced torpedoes), but that was pretty much it for the villain succeeding. It would have been more enjoyable if more of the villain’s plans succeeded, either throughout the book or even in the end.
The Spy mainly takes place around shipyards and dealing with thugs and criminals from Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. Don’t get your hopes up for high seas adventures or thrilling locomotive segments here. Isaac Bell takes more of an investigator role this time as he solves the mystery of the murders and the classified “Hull 44″ project, beats up thugs, and tries to stay on the trail of the spy before he’s left behind in the dust.
For me, the best part of The Spy is the time period itself. I love the setting in the early 1900s where locomotives and ships were still the dominate forms of transportation. Automobiles are starting to become more popular, and it’s the dawn of the Age of Aviation. The Great War may still be six years away from the events in The Spy, but tensions between nations are starting to rise and we’re given historical tidbits here and there.
The Spy isn’t a bad book. Not in any means. I was just disappointed from the lack of locomotives from the previous two Isaac Bell stories, and the lack of ships from any other Clive Cussler novel. Fans of Cussler’s other works will find themselves right at home with The Spy. Whether or not they’ll be pleased with the story is a different question.
