Scratch One - Michael Crichton

Before he became a successful bestselling writer of fiction and blockbuster film and TV series (Westworld, Jurassic Park, ER), Michael Crichton cut his teeth writing a series of pulp suspense novels under the pseudonym of John Lange. Written in 1967 while still a medical student, his second Lange book Scratch One meets the remit of that sensationalist style well. It's an espionage thriller based around a case of mistaken identity that provides action and excitement glamour and perhaps a bit of tongue-in-cheek or knowing humorous play with the genre.

There is a serious political deal that is taking place however that underlies the intrigue, an arms deal and shipment of Norwegian surplus weaponry that is being shipped to Israel. A middle Eastern terrorist group, known as The Associates, having got wind that Israel are building a nuclear reactor, want to prevent the deal taking place and have employed a number of assassins to target those agents who are setting it up.

When one of the agents is killed in France however, the Americans withhold sending their man, a ruthless killer called Morgan, to Nice, but the terrorist group don't know that. Arriving on the Cote d'Azur to purchase a villa for a client, lawyer Roger Carr is mistaken for the American hitman and not just by the terrorist group. Carr gets some idea of the kind of danger he is unwittingly caught up in when his plane arrives and explodes soon after landing in Nice airport.

For the first half of Scratch One the case of mistaken identity appears a little too close to The Pink Panther Strikes Again (made in 1976, you wonder if Blake Edwards was aware of this John Lange novel) as international assassins unsuccessfully try to bump off the oblivious American lawyer. The hapless Carr can't figure out why suspicious and dubious figures pass him cryptic messages, why he is getting strange phone calls calling him Morgan. Even when he narrowly manages to avoid the assassination attempts of the killers, who end up killing innocent bystanders or themselves, Carr just carries on with enjoying the pleasures of a working trip to the Riviera. Even finding naked women ready to entrap him in his bed at the Negresco (with no greater success) doesn't set off any alarm bells.

Once it puts these ludicrous assassination attempts aside, Scratch One is great fun, enjoying the same espionage thrills and glamour of the classic James Bond adventures, filling the plot with exotic 'location shooting' in Cannes and Monaco, in the Monte Carlo casino, with romantic exploits and glamorous women with large busts who repeatedly try to seduce Carr. Crichton/Lange even manages to tie a tense finale in with the excitement of the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, Scratch One, for all its faults and cheap thrills, arriving at the finish line as an undoubted winner.

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