A little light reading

Retirement means that there’s a lot more time for reading. And that means looking harder for things to read. After all, it really doesn’t take very long to go through the latest Reader’s Digest. My current backlog is a stack of paperbacks about 2 feet tall on loan from a friend. They are his collection of the Matt Helm adventures.

Matt Helm is the character invented by writer Donald Hamilton in the early ‘60s. Helm is sort of a poor man’s James Bond, a rougher, tougher individual than Bond ever thought of being. Hamilton wrote 27 Helm books, which were published directly to paperback during the period between 1960 and 1993; my friend has collected 22 of them. There were even a couple of Matt Helm movies, with the hero played rather tongue-in-cheek by Dean Martin.

Unlike Bond’s attraction to fancy cars, fancy settings and amazing gadgets, Helm most often drives around in a pickup with a camper top – often in the Santa Fe area or the American Southwest in general. He often sleeps in the camper and his only gadget is the sharpened edge of his belt buckle.

The stories are very formulaic and predictable: Helm’s assignment is always to put himself in danger so as to get close enough to some bad person who is a threat to the safety of America in order to eliminate him or her. Along the way he will meet and bed (always chastely off-screen) one or two attractive women; he will let himself get beat up and then captured by the bad guys and the women will invariably get killed (there’s a lesson in there somewhere). Helm will at the last moment find some imaginative way to free himself and carry out his mission, leaving his secret Agency to whisk away the bodies he has stacked up along the way while he goes home to hunt and fish in New Mexico.

It takes but an hour or two to read each book and thus qualifies for light reading. Too bad there are only 27 of them.