Deadly Game: Michael Caine’s Literary Debut
BOOK REVIEW: DEADLY GAME
By Michael Caine / Mobius
Reviewed by: Cipher Brief Expert Nick Fishwick
The Reviewer — Nick Fishwick CMG retired after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. His postings included Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, he served as director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.
REVIEW — In recent years in the UK, being short until very recently of proper coronations, we have developed a tradition of crowning various celebrities as “national treasures.” Generally, these will be actors, popular singers, “activists,” journalists or the like. They are usually of a certain age (generally over 60, in some cases over 90.) At a time when all the world’s problems are laid by the young at the feet of the old, it may be comforting to see a few older people revered by Gen Z, or whatever – though this is usually because they have acknowledged their generation’s responsibility for bringing the world to ruin.
Sir Michael Caine has not been much mentioned as a national treasure, at least in my hearing. Strange? He is over 90. He is a working-class bloke from south London who, you would have thought, blazed the trail for greater social diversity in an acting profession previously dominated by the privately educated. In the 1960s he was as iconic in Britain as John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Twiggy. He featured in three of the greatest British films of all time, The Ipcress File, The Italian Job and Get Carter. Since then, decade after decade, he has delighted cinema and TV audiences. But no national treasure. Why not? Like a plurality of Brits, he reluctantly voted to leave the European Union. He still represents the old working-class culture of east London pubs, patriotism, boxing match brawls, bravery, picking up girls (or boys) in nightclubs, and taking no one and nothing completely seriously. We have moved on from this culture. (Or we’d like to think we have.)
Which is why it’s interesting to see the embers of this culture in Sir Michael’s wonderfully enjoyable first thriller. The hero is called Harry, a name that once reliably signified an east or south London good bloke (more recently reappropriated by the British aristocracy, and look where it’s got them). Harry doesn’t hate Greta Thunberg, though I suspect he wouldn’t argue with you if you did, but he’s not going to let her stop him driving around in his gas-guzzling pride and joy. Harry is a workaholic with no time for pen-pushing bureaucrats more concerned with diversity statistics than with nicking criminals. He distrusts spies, his own country’s as much as the enemy’s, because they wear suits, don’t take risks and you can’t trust them (which some would say, in south London vernacular, is a fair cop). He served in Afghanistan but as a foot soldier, not a posh boy with stars on his shoulders. Invalided out, the police seemed the next best thing for him.
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You occasionally wonder if some of Deadly Game’s naivete reflects Sir Michael’s ignorance of the upper classes – an ignorance rooted in indifference, not resentment. Caine has had an amazingly successful life and career and has not needed to fuss about the establishment. One of the bad guys in the book is the son of a certain Sir Roderick Smythe, former British ambassador to Russia: it’s almost as if Sir Michael can’t be bothered to come up with a more stereotypical British toffs’ name than Rod Smith (try something like Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, well known to students of British diplomacy in the 1930s). Sir Michael even seems to think it would have been possible for a British ambassador in Russia, or the Soviet Union, to marry a local girl. Come off it, mate.
The plot is pretty bonkers and it is not this reviewer’s job to spoil it for prospective readers. I suspect they will be at least as interested as Harry is in finding out what, how and why a box full of radioactive material found in, then taken from, a dump in east London. I don’t read a lot of thrillers. but I certainly enjoyed this one and that is all that matters. Somehow the authorial voice and values of Deadly Game are authentically and attractively those you would have expected from Sir Michael Caine in his prime. And if he can produce books like this in his 90s, his prime is what he is still in.
Deadly Game earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats.
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