Book Review – Clive Cussler’s “The Race”

For the one hundredth book review here at Rellimzone, today we’re taking a look at Clive Cussler‘s action story, The Race.

The Race is the fourth book in the Isaac Bell series of novels.  Although it chronically follows The Spy, virtually nothing from The Spy relates to the story in The Race.

Set in 1909, The Race begins with Preston Whiteway, the owner of the San Francisco Inquirer newspaper, hiring the prestigious Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect Josephine Josephs Frost, a promising aviatrix.

Preston Whiteway is hosting an air race across the country.  Called the Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race, the fastest pilot to cross the country along the designated route, and doing so in less than fifty days, shall receive the Whiteway Cup trophy along with a cash prize of $50,000, an insane amount of money in those times.  Preston is sponsoring Josephine as a way to boost the sales of his newspaper through coverage of the race.  The only problem is that Josephine, “America’s Sweetheart of the Air,” is currently being hunted by her soon-to-be ex-husband, Harry Frost.  Hence the reason for the Van Dorn Detective Agency, the best of the best when it comes to protection services.

Van Dorn Detective Agency owner Joseph Van Dorn accepts the protection mission, and he places chief investigator Isaac Bell in charge of the assignment.  Bell, in turn, assigns detective Archie Abbott in charge of Josephine’s personal safety as one of the requirements is to only have married detectives personally guarding Josephine.

In the book’s opening segment, Josephine was flying in upstate New York when she witnessed Harry Frost shoot and try to kill her friend, Marco Celere.  Harry then tried to shoot Josephine out of the air, but he failed.  He then fled and nobody found the body of Marco Celere.

After accepting the assignment to protect Josephine from Harry, Isaac tries to investigate the disappearance and presumed murder of Marco Celere.  The only problem is that there is no evidence of Marco’s body.  He is able to find a bullet fragment near the spot where Josephine saw Marco standing, but his body is gone.  The locals believe that either it was swept away in a river down in a valley, or he was consumed by wildlife.

The pilots gather outside of New York City and make practice flights, fine tuning their flying machines before the start of the cross-country air race.  Harry Frost tracks down Josephine and finds her, but Archie Abbott and Isaac Bell are there to stop him.  Both detectives fire their weapons and hit Harry, but he doesn’t fall as he’s wearing an early prototype of a bulletproof vest.  Harry also fires and seriously wounds detective Abbott.  Harry then slips away in the crowds and escapes before anybody can stop him.

Archie Abbott is rushed to a nearby hospital where doctors try to safe his life.  The doctors there are unable to retrieve the bullet deep in his chest, so a specialist surgeon is whisked to New York City from Chicago to do the life-saving operation.  Archie survives and ultimately makes a full recovery.

Knowing that Harry Frost has the knowledge and resources to strike from anywhere, Isaac Bell acquires his own flying machine so that he can fly along side of Josephine and guard her from the air.  Bell has vast knowledge of aviation from reading recent journals, so after a quick test flight he knows how to operate and fly his airplane.

When the race begins, the pilots have to fly down to the Statue of Liberty, circle the symbol of freedom, and then fly north to Yonkers, New York.  Harry Frost has a rifle and shoots at Josephine’s airplane from a barge in the river, damaging it and forcing her to land on Liberty Island.  She’s later assisted by one of Van Dorn’s patrol ships, and mechanics help get her airborne again.

Bell spots Harry Frost’s boat and uses his pistol to fire back.  He chases Harry to a pier and makes an emergency landing on the pier, and continues chasing Harry Frost.  He chases him into a sewer, but Harry gains the upper hand and escapes again.

The racers continue and slowly make their way to Chicago, Illinois, and then southwest to Missouri and then western Texas.  Since none of the aircraft can climb that high into the sky, they have to cross the Rocky Mountains near the Mexican border where the mountains are smaller in elevation.

The threat of Harry Frost’s attacks are always present, and the man makes a nuisance of Josephine Josephs and Isaac Bell throughout the race.  He tries to make his final attack in southern California before the racers reach the final destination city of San Francisco.  Isaac thwarts Harry’s plan and ultimately confronts the man in a small canyon out in the desert.  After a brief gun battle, Isaac Bell wins the battle after Harry is electrocuted by a bolt of lightning.  Yes, really.

By this point in time Josephine learns that Marco Celere is disguised as a Russian mechanic named Dmitri Platov.  He has been sabotaging the other airplanes in an effort to make sure that the airplane she is flying, one that he stole the design, is the winner.  His plan is to use the air race to prove that his design is a winner, and to sell it to the Italian army for use as a war plane.  Marco then fakes the “death” of Dmitri and emerges as himself, faking an issue of amnesia for his recent whereabouts.

As Harry lies dying, he reveals the truth about Marco Celere’s connection with Josephine Josephs and his true intentions.

Just before the final leg of the race, Marco Celere steals Josephine’s aircraft and flies away.  It’s discovered that he had made a stop and stolen a bunch of explosives along with an ignition device.  Isaac surmises that Marco has constructed an aerial bomb, and he’s going to use it against the biggest target in the air race, the headquarters of the San Francisco Inquirer‘s building, the biggest structure in the city of San Francisco.

Isaac Bell uses his aircraft and gives chase to Marco Celere.  Although Marco has a head start, Isaac’s aircraft is slightly faster.  He finally catches up to Marco over the city of San Francisco.  He’s able to use his aircraft to distract Marco and cause him to miss his target.  When Marco makes a second pass, he’s distracted again and drops his bomb too late, missing the building but destroying Preston Whiteway’s prized automobile.

Marco accidentally clips a building with a wing, and he crashes to the ground below.  Unlike other pilots who had survived terrible crashes, Marco is killed on impact.

Isaac Bell finishes the route and is deemed as the winner of the air race.  It turns out that although he never registered to fly in the race, his times had still been recorded.  However, accepting the prize money means that Isaac Bell’s photograph would be in all of the newspapers across the country, and he could no longer be a detective.

The Race ends with Isaac Bell declining the prize, instead giving it to Joe Mudd, a pilot who was flying a slower airplane built by labor unionists.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Is Clive Cussler’s The Race any good?

Not really.

Although The Race is a short story, it’s easy to follow, and it has plenty of action and aviation, this particular story feels like it’s missing so much more of the elements that make *great* stories.

For starters, the whole plot between Harry Frost and his actions against Josephine are pretty lame.  We really don’t know why he’s hunting his wife, and when we learn the rest of his story near the end, there really isn’t much there.  Harry’s problem deals something with betrayal from Marco Celere, but it’s just not interesting at all.  There’s only a little bit of the ordeal in the book, and it’s really not clear what in the hell is happening.

That’s a shame too because Harry seemed like a fairly interesting bad guy.  There could have been a fantastic climatic battle between him and Isaac Bell.  Unfortunately, Cussler took the extremely lame option and killed off this incredibly tough fighter with a bolt of lightning of all things.  It’s like Cussler took the easy route and wanted to finish writing this book early.

That cheap and unfinished feeling occurs throughout most of the air race itself, the event that occupies the second half of the book.  The race starts out great with its first leg through New York City, but the rest of the race is extremely bland when it comes to describing it and the action during the race.

The actual racing format is also flawed.  For starters, there is no time penalty for racers who crash or have mechanical problems, and they later reach the check points.  Another problem is that the racers can only go as far as their support locomotives go each day.  It’s not until the last third of the race when one of the racers decides to continue flying in advance of the support system.  Gee, couldn’t the other pilots have also been doing that as long as their machines were still operational?

It’s hard to enjoy a book that is not only extremely simplistic in its plot, but it also has glaring plot holes and other story problems as well.  This is also a book that involves the earliest of days in the world of powered-flight, and if you’re not familiar with that period of aviation, then trying to picture the aircraft can be extremely challenging.  There are some illustrations throughout the book, but none of them really show the aircraft in the book.  You’ll have to go online and do some research if you want to see what the fascinating aircraft look like.

The Race is a book that could have easily been two or three times its length.  Although the hardback edition of the book tops out at 404 pages, there are occasional illustrations, the sentences have double spacing, and the margins are very liberal.  Don’t expect any major interactions with ships or locomotives like in the other Isaac Bell books.  As one would expect, The Race dominantly focuses on early, pre-World War 1 aircraft.

Oh, how I wish that The Race was longer, more detailed, and had a more developed plot with the antagonist.  But it doesn’t.  The Race feels like a quickly written story that could have been significantly better.