Donald Hamilton

• Born: March 24, 1916
• Birthplace: Uppsala, Sweden
• Died: November 20, 2006
• Place of death: Ipswich, Massachusetts

Types of Plot: Espionage; hard-boiled; thriller

Principal Series: Matt Helm, 1960-1993

Contribution

Donald Hamilton brought the toughness and realism of the Dashiell Hammett detective school to what might be termed spy novels. His series character, Matt Helm, is an outdoorsman, photographer, and writer living in New Mexico, rather like Hamilton himself at one time. As Hamilton picked up boating as a hobby in later years, so did Helm.

The Matt Helm series has done for the United States what Ian Fleming’s James Bond books did for Great Britain—provide the public with a contemporary model of the life and work of a secret agent. Donald Hamilton created a shadowy world of deception and disillusion for his master counterspy, Matt Helm, feeding him a steady diet of treachery to fuel his air of skepticism, and furnishing ample opportunities for him to display his bone-bruising toughness. Helm’s introduction signaled the birth of a novel character in espionage fiction—the consummate professional who willingly subverts all sentimentality when it interferes with the greater good of the mission. At the time of his creation, Helm was a strong departure from the antihero, “amateur spy” protagonists then in vogue. One critic has described Hamilton as “the Hammett of espionage” for his role in reshaping the espionage novel.

Crime novelist Robert Skinner has cited Hamilton as a primary influence on his own work and said that Hamilton influenced Loren Estleman, Bill Crider, Ed Gorman, and James Sallis. Hamilton’s early work featured main characters who are drawn into violent situations against their will and who must learn to cope in order to survive. Matt Helm appears to be a man out of his element in dangerous settings but is actually more durable and practical than any of his opponents, many of whom tend to underestimate him badly.

Matt Helm first appeared on the screen in 1966, with singer Dean Martin portraying him in The Silencers, the first of four adaptations of Hamilton stories. Performing in his trademark laidback fashion, Martin played Helm as a hedonistic playboy who must be dragged into government assignments. The films attempted to cash in on the popularity of the James Bond films but instead were perceived as parodies with more outlandish gimmicks, large numbers of sexy women, and dialogue laced with double-entendres. The films bore little resemblance to their source material, and Martin bore no resemblance at all to his literary namesake. Nevertheless, the films were popular and inspired a short-lived television series, with Anthony Franciosa as Helm, that departed even more radically from Hamilton’s novels.

Biography

Donald Bengtsson Hamilton was born to Bengt L. K. Hamilton and Elise (Neovius) Hamilton on March 24, 1916, in Uppsala, Sweden, a small city about fifty miles north of Stockholm. The Hamilton name is common in that country, particularly among the minor nobility. In fact, had his family not moved to the United States when he was eight years old, he could have rightfully claimed the title Count Hamilton.

Hamilton’s family prospered in America, where his physician father joined the medical faculty of Harvard College. Hamilton intended to follow his father’s lead into medicine, but he changed instead to chemistry, receiving a bachelor of science degree in the subject from the University of Chicago in 1938. He married Kathleen Stick in 1941; they had four children: Hugo, Elise, Gordon, and Victoria.

Hamilton spent World War II doing research as a reserve officer in the Naval Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis, Maryland. He left the navy in 1946 at the rank of lieutenant, deciding to indulge his passions for writing and photography. He quickly graduated from short stories to novels, at the same time writing nonfictional magazine articles on guns, hunting, photography, and boating—a sideline he still maintains. He lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a part of the country that provides the setting for much of his writing.

After nine mystery, espionage, and Western novels, he published Death of a Citizen in 1960. An editor liked the book but offered two recommendations: change the hero’s first name (Hamilton had called him George) and consider making him a series character. Hamilton followed both pieces of advice, and the series continued with twenty-four more Matt Helm books after that first one. Two Helm books, The Retaliators (1976) and The Terrorizers (1977), were nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Awards for best paperback originals. Hamilton continued writing the series until 1993, and it eventually had twice as many titles as Fleming’s Bond series. Hamilton died quietly, in his sleep, on November 20, 2006.

Analysis

Donald Hamilton served a brief apprenticeship writing short stories after World War II and published his first novel, Date with Darkness, in 1947. Following those came a string of fast-paced Westerns and mysteries. He began his writing with hard-boiled mysteries that had elements of espionage. Two of them in particular contained the elements that would characterize his Matt Helm series. Line of Fire (1955) had what seems at first to be an assassin as its hero and is told in down-to-earth first person as the Helm books would be. The other formative book is Assignment: Murder (1956), in which mathematician James Gregory, involved in a nuclear project, becomes a target of those who want the project stopped.

Line of Fire involves a different kind of hero, a man who is suicidal because of his emasculation in a hunting accident. An expert with guns (often the case with Hamilton’s protagonists), he is strong-armed into faking an assassination attempt so that an aspiring political candidate can garner media attention and public sympathy. The job goes awry, plunging the hero into terrible danger before he manages to redeem himself. This intriguing early book demonstrates Hamilton’s willingness to tinker with the popular image of heroes.

Line of Fire

Some of the characteristics of the Matt Helm series that would start five years later are foreshadowed in Line of Fire, from assassination to good girl/bad girl dichotomies. The sardonic first-person narration that later characterized the Helm novels is on display here, as is the question of the morality of what the protagonist is doing and the use of a knife, like the one that Helm always carries.

The story opens with gunsmith and marksman Paul Nyquist zeroing in on a gubernatorial candidate, but he wounds the man instead of killing him. Only later do readers learn that this is exactly what Nyquist was supposed to do, having been coerced into the job by a man with whom he has a strange bond. Nyquist had been injured earlier in an accident while hunting with the man, a wound that has left him impotent. The man’s girlfriend works hard to cure Nyquist of his affliction. Although Nyquist does not kill the candidate, he does kill a gangster who is with him when the gangster tries to kill a young woman who blunders onto the scene. After saving the woman, Nyquist vainly tries to keep her clear of the situation and finally ends up marrying her to protect her, although the relationship does grow from that point.

Assignment: Murder

Assignment: Murder (reissued in 1966 as the better-known Assassins Have Starry Eyes) edges even closer to the Helm prototype. The book tells the story of James Gregory, an atomic weapons research physicist who is shot on the opening day of the New Mexico deer season. To save his life, Gregory shoots back and kills his assailant, then passes out.

All this happens by the novel’s fifth page, establishing what would normally be considered a fast pace. Even before that flurry of action occurs, however, Hamilton managed to establish his lead character through his musings on why men camping alone live so spartanly, what attracts him to the wide-open West, why atomic research has become unpopular, why modern automobiles have become so ridiculously dandified, and why men hunt animals. During his recuperation and further adventures, Gregory’s narration espouses more of his personal philosophy. Like Matt Helm, who appeared in Hamilton’s next book, Gregory is fair but nonapologetic in advancing and defending his attitudes. Others can love him or hate him—it makes little difference to him—but they had better respect him.

A problem that surely vexed Hamilton in writing Assignment: Murder was how to explain his hero’s considerable fighting skills. He established Gregory as a large man who has spent years hunting, a somewhat lame explanation. In Death of a Citizen, he introduced a character who comes by his fighting prowess more honestly. Matt Helm is introduced as a former member of a clandestine intelligence group (a thinly veiled Office of Strategic Services or OSS) during World War II. His particular specialty was assassinating important Nazis. When the war ended, he had settled down as a Western writer and photographer with a wife and three children. His fifteen years of peaceful retirement are shattered when Tina, a former partner in assassination, walks into a party he is attending. When he last knew her, she kept a paratrooper’s knife hidden in her underwear and a poison pill in her hair. Remarkably, all this information is revealed without strain by the close of the book’s first page.

In a plot twist anticipating the frequent duplicities found in the Helm series, Tina pretends to be still working for a peacetime version of the OSS. In truth, she has long since gone over to the Russians and now has orders to kill an important scientist who happens to be an acquaintance of Helm. The job would be easier with Helm’s help. When other methods of gaining his assistance fail, she kidnaps his daughter. He must revert to his old ways, including killing Tina by torture, to save his child. His wife, an uncomprehending witness, can no longer bear to live with him. He is thus shed of his family and his inhibitions, permitting his old boss to recruit him again into the espionage business.

Matt Helm Series

Inevitably, Matt Helm is compared to Ian Fleming’s secret-agent hero, James Bond }, and Hamilton is accused of writing derivative books. Some comparisons are obvious. Both men are counterspies capable of violently dispatching their enemies without a moment’s regret. Bond answers to “M”; Helm to Mac. Each ranges far in defending his nation’s interests and has virtually unlimited resources to do so. Helping to fuel the argument, four Helm books were converted into films from 1966 to 1969, with Dean Martin starring as Helm, although they departed from Hamilton’s theme of toughness to spoof the Bond films.

Despite these likenesses, the differences between the Bond series and Helm’s are greater than the similarities. Bond is primarily an urban creature, most at home in some European gambling casino with a sophisticated woman on his arm. Helm is more comfortable beside a trout stream, in the wilderness between assignments. If he has feminine company, he must have first satisfied himself that she is not vamping him for some sinister motive. Moreover, Helm first saw print in 1960, before Bond’s popularity became entrenched in the United States with the help of John F. Kennedy’s widely reported interest and the first of the Bond films. Responding to the suggestion that he had copied the concept, Hamilton said that he had read only one Fleming novel. “I’ve deliberately avoided reading the James Bond novels for fear that I would unintentionally borrow something from him, or bend over too far backward to avoid any similarity.”

If anything, Hamilton’s series owes more to another English writer, John Buchan, than to Ian Fleming. Buchan wrote The Thirty-nine Steps, published in 1915, establishing a model for most thrillers. The recipe calls for a tough, physical hero, with something of a tainted past, who is set into motion in a protracted chase in a wilderness setting strewn with obstacles and is chased himself even as he pursues his target. The hero cannot call on the usual resources, such as the police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for that would be too easy. If the hero is involved with a woman (and he always is), she is physically attractive—although not to the point of incredibility—and the hero is unsure whether she is on his side. The entire mix is seasoned with a heavy dose of moral ambivalence.

The first few books in the series nail down Helm’s character solidly; the ones since then merely repeat his philosophy, although this repetition never quite becomes tiresome. Fans become intimate with the six-foot, four-inch, two-hundred-pound warrior, a man with old-fashioned tastes for simple food, martinis, and women in skirts instead of slacks. A strong biographical parallel becomes obvious when Helm reveals that he has, like his creator, Swedish ancestry. Helm never tires of expressing his preference for honest trucks and foreign cars over Detroit iron. For example, in Death of a Citizen, Helm speaks of his personal vehicle:

The truck is a 1951 Chevy half-ton job, with a four-speed gearbox and a six-cylinder engine developing a little less than ninety horsepower, and it’ll shove any of your three-hundred-horsepower passenger cars right off the road, backwards, from a standing start. It has no damn fins over the taillights, or sheet metal eyebrows over the headlights.

Helm is an expert rifleman and is skillful with a pistol. He handles edged weapons well, as might be expected from his Viking parentage, although he never engaged in a sword duel, unless the machete fight in The Ambushers (1963) is counted. He knows and uses tricks of hand-to-hand combat but thinks that fighting with the fists is foolish because a professional would never dream of fighting for sport—only to kill.

Above all, the key to the man and the series is that Helm is a professional. In his eyes, being a professional is less a matter of being paid for one’s work than an attitude. Each book in the series reminds the reader that Helm despises amateurish weaknesses when they interfere with getting the job done. The banes of his life are the weak-kneed amateurs with whom he is forced to work and on whom he cannot rely. He husbands his respect for those rare individuals who, like him, will not let mere sentiment stand in the way of the mission. Hamilton built his character around this central concept. He believed that too many antiheroes were turning up in espionage fiction, including his own. He was tired of people who became involved against their wills and fought against getting their hands dirty. He thought of Helm as “a refreshing change from the pacific citizens whom I’d been arranging to get reluctantly enmeshed in sinister spiderwebs of intrigue.”

Hamilton provides Helm with foils against which to demonstrate his mental toughness. Other government agents, most notably the FBI, turn up frequently in his plots. Usually, Helm finds these fellow agents to be obstacles, either because of their basic incompetence or their insistence on following the letter of the law. The older agents, like himself, are generally more reliable than the younger ones, and men more than women. Female professionals do exist, however, and Helm is quick to respect those he meets, regardless of whether they are on his side. One of the rare, lasting love interests he develops is found in The Revengers (1982), in which Helm meets a female journalist. She seems to become particularly dear to him after he learns of an incident in her past. She responded to being raped by two men by going back with some other, tougher men who held the rapists down while she castrated them with a pocket knife. To his way of thinking, that act qualified her as a pro.

To Helm, politics come and go; professionalism is forever. Nevertheless, his high regard for the way people do their jobs would not prevent him from killing them if necessary. Nor does vanity rule Helm. He is willing to take a physical beating and to be captured by the enemy camp if it will help accomplish the objective. Attractive women often make advances to him, but he is always wary, fearing that a woman who offers herself to him has a motive other than romance.

Helm answers only to a shadowy boss who goes by the code name “Mac.” Mac has much faith in Helm, and he gives his best agent considerable latitude. Over the course of the series, a number of notable villains surfaced. The most prominent of these tend to last two or three books before they are done in.

The typical plot opens with Helm (code-named “Eric”) being called to action by Mac, usually by phone. Mac gives him brief and incomplete instructions, either because Mac is holding back fundamental information deliberately or because he has an incomplete grasp of the facts. Often, there is some doubt as to the loyalty of some key person. Helm is then turned loose to penetrate to the heart of the problem. Seldom does he merely react; he acts, causing something to happen. Often, by the novel’s climax he will have allowed himself to be captured by the enemy to discover the truth. Only after the mission is satisfied does he worry about preserving his life.

The Ravagers

Published in 1964, The Ravagers is the eighth book in the Matt Helm series and serves as a model of Hamilton’s writing at its best. Opening with the words, “It was an acid job, and they’re never pleasant to come upon,” the novel makes the reader immediately aware that this book will pull no punches.

Helm is sent to find out why another agent has not checked in on schedule. He learns the answer: The agent has been murdered by a poison injection after his face was splashed with acid. Mac sends Helm to take over the dead agent’s mission. Helm is to follow the wife of an important scientist (perhaps because of Hamilton’s scientific background, scientists appear often in the series) as she crosses Canada with her daughter and a packet of stolen research material she is suspected of planning to deliver to the Russians. Nevertheless, the plot has a twist; Mac tells Helm that he is merely to give the appearance of an honest chase. In truth, the papers were doctored to mislead the Russians in their research. FBI agents are also involved and try in earnest to stop the delivery, but Helm does not trust them. According to Helm,

no cynical and experienced agent is going to be happy entrusting his life and mission to the irresponsible cretins working for some other department. Half the time we don’t even trust the people in our own outfit.

Helm poses as a private investigator when he meets the woman, although she assumes that he is an FBI agent. When a shoot-out occurs in a hotel room between the real FBI agent and a Russian agent, Helm despises his momentary weakness in not killing the American himself before an important Russian contact is shot. Mac also disapproves:

We were not assigned to this job to be nice to little girls, or to clumsy young operatives from other bureaus; quite the contrary. Being nice to people is not our business. If you simply have to be nice, Eric, I will refer you to a very pleasant gentleman who recruits for the Peace Corps.

Eventually, the woman turns out not to be a traitor—she switched worthless information for the doctored packet. The “daughter” with whom she is traveling, however, is a female Russian agent playing an adolescent. She is holding the woman’s real daughter hostage to ensure her cooperation. At the end, Helm thinks that he has failed because the bogus papers never made it into Russian hands. Then he learns that it did not matter. The whole operation was only a ploy to lure a Russian atomic submarine into coastal waters to make the pickup; when it does so, it is quietly destroyed in retaliation for the destruction of an American submarine. Even if Helm can keep up, the reader might understandably feel somewhat dizzy after all the plot switches.

Hamilton’s writing style, particularly for the first two-thirds of the series, is as direct, forceful, and hard-hitting as his hero. The first ten or twelve books are lean and fast paced. In the beginning, the books run about sixty thousand words, although the changing demands of the marketplace have driven the word count up to nearly twice that in the later novels. It is difficult to maintain the earlier, crackling level of suspense in the swollen scenes all too common in the later works.

Despite all the hard-nosed toughness of the Helm books, they are similar in many ways to mysteries. The books are written in the first person, and Hamilton plays scrupulously fair in letting readers discover the facts as soon as Helm does—and draw their own conclusions as to the final answer. The only elements of mystery fiction missing are locked rooms, secret messages, and amateurs who win.

The Mona Intercept

Although The Mona Intercept (1980) is Hamilton’s sole attempt to write a major blockbuster, it has all the elements of his other suspense thrillers: The Everyman who is dragged into events with which he must cope or die, the dedicated and ruthless government agent, the “good” and “bad” woman, are all here, but the characteristics are spread across a much larger cast than usual. The central thrust of the novel is an attempt by a Cuban terrorist to hijack a vessel at sea, with various ramifications for world peace. Mystery genre expert Robert Winks, in his 1982 book Modus Operandi, terms the book “a possibly unwise experiment with substantially weightier fiction.”

The book’s story line moves well enough, but not as fast as it does in Hamilton’s slimmer novels. It probably did not live up to its author’s expectations, and he went back to doing what he did best: Matt Helm, who returned in The Revengers after a five-year absence and continued through eight additional novels.

Principal Series Characters:

• Matt Helm is an American working for an unnamed bureau that specializes in doing the government’s dirty work—principally counterespionage and assassination of enemy spies. Having learned his trade during World War II, Helm retired from active duty until his past forced him back into the business. When working, he is the consummate professional, unsentimental and utterly pragmatic.
• Mac is Helm’s no-nonsense boss and may even exceed Helm in lack of sentimentality. He has been known to suggest ending aircraft hijackings by shooting down the hijacked planes, figuring it would not take long for hijackers to get the message. Little else is revealed about him, not even his full name.

Bibliography

Banks, R. Jeff, and Guy M. Townsend. “The Matt Helm Series.” The Mystery FANcier 2 (March, 1978): 3-11. Survey of the story lines and themes in the first twenty Matt Helm novels.

Erisman, Fred. “Western Motifs in the Thrillers of Donald Hamilton.” Western American Literature 10 (February, 1976): 283-292. Brief essay that attempts to find links between Hamilton’s early Western writing and his later thrillers.

Greene, Douglas G. John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles. New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1995. Cites Carr’s view of Hamilton’s books, in which Carr cites Matt Helm as “my favorite secret agent.”

Hamilton, Donald. “Shut Up and Write.” In Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work, edited by Robin W. Winks. New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1986. Essay in which Hamilton discusses his own work and offers advice to other writers.

Sennett, Frank. “The Death of Matt Helm?” Booklist 98, no. 17 (May 1, 2002): 1456-1458. Sennett looks at the history of the Matt Helm series and how Helm was perceived as a more rugged James Bond. It notes how Hamilton’s work peaked in popularity in the 1960’s and 1970’s and faded in the following decades.

Winks, Robin. Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction. Boston: Godine, 1982. Personal defense of the mystery that argues detective fiction does not differ from more “respectable” literature and appeals to readers for the same reasons as other writing. Includes a discussion of Hamilton’s writings.

Winks, Robin. “The Sordid Truth: Donald Hamilton.” The New Republic 173 (July 26, 1975): 21-24. A brief appreciation of Hamilton’s Matt Helm series by one of the most distinguished critics in the mystery and detective genre.