Posted on 02/28/2013 9:26:14 AM PST by Perdogg
Titan Books publishes Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series, the first two are available now on Amazon.
I read those back in the 60s, when I was 12 years old or so. Wonder if they hold up.
BTW, Hamilton’s vision of spy Matt Helm was nothing like the terrible movies with with Dean Martin.
My Pop used to read those, I remember. Mayba eI’ll give them a try.
“BTW, Hamilton’s vision of spy Matt Helm was nothing like the terrible movies with with Dean Martin.”
They rank right up there with The “Flint” disasters.
“BTW, Hamilton’s vision of spy Matt Helm was nothing like the terrible movies with with Dean Martin.”
Here here! Read them in the 80s and enjoyed much. Time for a reread.
Modesty Blaise also fared badly at the hands of holly-weird.
I wish someone would reprint all the Travis McGee books.
Otherwise, they're about like the James Bond movies ... the stories and plotlines are all pretty much interchangeable. I happen to like all of them, though. Matt Helm makes James Bond look like a wimp.
And previous posters are right. Skip the Dean Martin movies.
I also saw the Dean Martin movies, but I always thought they were supposed to be spoofs.
My favorite movie is “The Big Country,” made from Hamilton’s novel. He wrote terrific Western books.
The feminazis dikes are not going to be happy with this. Matt Helm, the self-described greatest assassin in the worldm was an incurable sexist. And I say good for him!
I did the same thing in the early 70s.
Pretty racey stuff for a 12-year old and I never quite forgot it.
Several months ago a friend gave me a couple of the Helm series as a birthday gift, just ‘cause she had heard me talking about it.
They were all right. A little dated, and maybe a bit more contrived than I remembered, but they held up okay.
Of course the stuff with the love interests is terrifically tame by today’s standards. Nonetheless when you have a lady in a hotel room with a fur coat on and nothing else, it somehow still is more interesting than having her there butt naked, with a boyfriend or two and a goat and a dog, as seems to be the case with present-day secret-agent men.
Mr. Helm would be proud of you. "Oftentimes, the difference between being interestingly nude and embarrassingly naked, is a nice tan."
Different books, written for a different time. Nowadays, the main character would be a single mother who talks placatingly to multi-ethnic bad guys from a non-specific country, about how they feel.
Then, they'd all hug and have a suitably low-fat vegan meal.
http://vintagepopfictions.blogspot.com/2013/02/donald-hamiltons-wrecking-crew.html
~SNIP
The Wrecking Crew was the second of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels. Matt Helm is a US spy, he works for an ultra-secret intelligence agency, his boss is named Mac and he uses his work as a photographer as a cover. Those are the only real resemblances between the novel and the movie of the same name, in fact they’re the only resemblances between the Matt Helm novels as a whole and the Matt Helm movies.
To explain the bad movies, James Bond utterly owned the genre, and any straight spy movie would get panned, so both the Italians, who loved the genre, and Americans, decided to play them for parody and yucks.
It really went on and on. Some of the Italian ones.
Agente 077: Fury In The Orient
Agente 077: Missione Bloody Mary
Agente Speciale LK aka Lucky, El Intrepid
Berlin: Appointment For The Spies
Marc Mato, Agente S. 077
OSS 117: Double Agent
Pier 83 Mission Death
Special Mission Lady Chaplin
Tiffany Memorandum
Your Turn To Die
Many of the rest:
http://www.imdb.com/list/cSi1Z9RlGBM/
I did the same thing in the early 70s.
Pretty racey stuff for a 12-year old and I never quite forgot it.
Several months ago a friend gave me a couple of the Helm series as a birthday gift, just ‘cause she had heard me talking about it.
They were all right. A little dated, and maybe a bit more contrived than I remembered, but they held up okay.
Of course the stuff with the love interests is terrifically tame by today’s standards. Nonetheless when you have a lady in a hotel room with a fur coat on and nothing else, it somehow still is more interesting than having her there butt naked, with a boyfriend or two and a goat and a dog, as seems to be the case with present-day secret-agent men.
Those Matt Helm/Derek Flint movies were great!
Dean Martin had some of the best one-liners in movie history in the “Matt Helm” movies.
Sexy Woman offering Helm a drink: “Bottoms up!”
Matt Helm: “I can hardly wait.”
Stella Stevens and Dean Martin are driving along.
Stevens: I want to hear some music. As she turns on the car radio, Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me” plays.
Matt Helm: “Oh, turn him off, he’s terrible!”
Helm changes the station and Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody” plays.
Helm: “Now that’s a guy that can sing! “
When we were kids, we used to go to the Saturday Matinee and watch the Matt Helm/Derek Flint movies for something like .10 cents if you were under 12 years old.
Dean Martin always had a drink in one hand and a hot babe in the other.
James Coburn did his own stunts and was the epitome of a bon vivant and international ladies man.
Sure, the movies were campy and corny, but they were fun and filled with innuendos that I didn’t really get until I was older.
I have a few of them on DVD as well.
These guys, along with Sean Connery/James Bond, were my idols when I was growing up and when I first began to notice that girls weren’t “icky”
Damn You Charlie Manson, and your whole family too!
They are indeed reprinting the John D. McDonald’s in trade paperback...there are still Mass Market versions most titles still in print as well!
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