The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen [Hardcover]

According to both the intro by Bill Clinton and the NPR interview with the author that led me to buy a copy, President Clinton tightened up an early draft. From which I suspect that draft must have suffered from the same problem as I constantly need to fight in my own technical writing: an attachment to fascinating details that were learned in doing the research. For my own prose, I must constantly ask myself: what do my colleagues need to know in order to advance their own research? For a thrilller, the author should constantly ask himself or herself: what do my readers need to know either to advance the plot or understand the characters? And which details should be left out, not because tbey are unimportant in general but because they do not fit this technical report or this novel.

Caplan has a brilliantly original concept for his main character, a serviceable if less original plot (stop the sale of old Soviet nukes), and clearly did considerable research on the technical details required to make such a plot believable. His research into such details was much better than the average thriller. I'm no expert on military technologies or espionage, I am a civilian scientist, but I do have a pretty good idea what is and is not feasible within the current state of the art of computer and aerospace technology. At some point while reading the average techno-thriller or watching the average action movie, I become irritated by the number of details that betray the writer's limited grasp of what really is feasible. At no point in reading this novel did I exclaim to myself "but it could not work that way!" Caplan must have done an unusually thorough job of research for me to get through an entire novel without being annoyed by tech blunders.

Aside from the residual pacing issues, the other issue I have with this novel is the feeling I knew more than I should have known about what the bad guys were doing and not enough about the main characters as people. At many points we readers already knew stuff the good characters were still trying to find out, because we got to see the villains discussing their plans. It would have been better to let us readers learn these things only by watching the heroes discover them. And by removing most of the scenes where the bad guys discuss their plans, Caplan would have had room for more character development among those trying to catch the villains.

Overall, this book was a good read: I was up until about 1:30 AM last night finishing it. In my younger days staying up late to finish a book was common, but in middle age I usually put it aside until the next day! So keeping me up late shows a thriller is well above average.

It's not every day that you see a thriller introduced by a former President of the United States, but Bill Clinton does exactly that for his old college pal "Tommy" Caplan. Unfortunately, President Clinton's introduction is the most interesting and well-written part of the book. The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen was not worthy of his attention.

It's the story of a nasty duo who are putting together a deal to broker three decommissioned Soviet nukes to the highest bidders. The high-concept twist is that POTUS conscripts a top Hollywood star to go undercover on the trail of the nukes, figuring only someone like Ty Hunter can gain access to the yacht of the mega-wealthy bad guy. Full disclosure: Ty Hunter is everything I hate in a protagonist. When the President and one of his advisors approaches Ty about going under cover, the conversation goes like this:

"Me? I'm an actor."
"Don't be disingenuous," Kenneth said. "You're much more than an actor, and you know it."
"When you were a mere second lieutenant, in the army and attached to Task Force 508," the President asked, "what were you then? You were a commando in an oiled-cotton sweater who possessed every martial arts skill known to man."
"Not every," Ty said.
"You spoke Mandarin and Arabic and Spanish with a fluency that made you indistinguishable from any native."

And so forth. OMG, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's Ty Hunter, box-office superstar! I mean, I'm sorry, but is there anything remotely realistic about that character? Or interesting? And for a guy about whom it is repeatedly asserted he is looking for love, he sure seems to be prepared to hop into bed with any number of beautiful women. I absolutely detested the "romantic" sub-plot of this novel.

I really have nothing good to say. The novel dragged on interminably. The pacing was deadly. The plot vacillated between predictable and boring. The dialog was stilted and embarrassing. ("Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to kiss you." "Then please do. I'd like you to.") I never cared enough about a single one of the characters ultimately to care about what happened to them. (But tell us how you really feel, Susan.)

Look, it's not the worst book I've ever read. There's almost always something worse. But I honestly can't recommend this "thriller" on any level. And there's something even more unforgivable. In his acknowledgements page, Mr. Thomas alludes to this being the first Ty Hunter story. Please, no more, no more! I just can't face it.

The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen: A Novel

In an attempt to join the lofty heights of `Spy Fiction' idols Ian Flemming (James Bond), Charles McCarry (Paul Christopher), John le Carré, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, Thomas Caplan and his Movie Star Spy, Ty Hunter aims for the sun, but like Icarus he rapidly falls.

The novel opens with a home invasion in one of rural Kansas City's wealthiest homes belonging to one of the wealthiest men in the world. But this is no ordinary home invasion nor home invader.

The first approximately 40 pages develops a sense of place, introduces action and excellent character development, which is done so well you'll be close to adding these characters to your Christmas card list, but, sadly, it has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the story except to introduce a minor character that the story could have done without and a freighter that you will not get to know beyond the fact it carries an elicit cargo.

It does serve as an entry for the longest preface in history.

The real story involves Ty Hunter, the worlds biggest movie star who is recruited by none other than the President of the United States to investigate the possible disappearance of nuclear missile in the decommissioning of a post Soviet Missile base.

The suspected thief of these nuclear warheads is yet another of the worlds wealthiest men, Ian Santal. Santal made a name for himself, firstly as a man of science as a professor at England's Cambridge University. After his academic acclaim, he turned his hand to the stock market and made billions. Now, in his third incarnation, he is an international man of mystery, and broker of illicit nuclear devices.

Another suspect is Phillip Frost, an M.I.T. Grad who decided to join Santal's financial firm out of college and who until just recently was on the U.N. Team certifying nuclear devices as decommissioned. An unlikely and slightly fantastical pair of villains would have made Flemming blush, although clearly Caplan was paying homage to Flemming's Thunderball (Santal owns, and a good deal of the action takes place on a super high tech yacht). Caplan even references the James Bond Movies in a supporting character who supplies our hero with high tech gadgets, but he even fails here as well mistaking `M' for `Q'. The reader would, I think, expect a spy novelist to know this.

The first 200 pages of the novel are filled with stops and starts and a meandering plot that had me hard pressed to read a whole chapter every night, and tempted me to put the novel away and not finish it. But, after these 200 pages which seemed more like 600, the story takes off. Further, the first part of the novel will make it apparent that Caplan is the master of the run-on sentence. Sentences that will run half a page encompassing entire paragraphs. I wondered if the editor's gave him a certain allowance of commas and he decided to use them all up here.

The protagonist , Ty Hunter sounds a worthy successor to James Bond. He is part Bond, and part Jason Bourne. He is the worlds number one box office attraction with good looks to eclipse all other Hollywood pretty boys. And his cover, once he is recruited by none other than the President, is a good one, but the character fails on many fronts.

Having been sent out in the world to find the missing nukes, the first thing Hunter does is stop off to have lunch with his mother. Then, when the action and the story start to play about the half way point, Hunter's attempt at Bond style one liners does not come off as sophisticated, but as sophomoric.

Still, you get a glimpse of an interesting read from here to the end, and you can see it was a marvelous idea, but just doesn't quite live up to the authors goals.

the book has an Introduction by Bill Clinton, who was a classmate of the President at Georgetown back in the early `60s. In the intro he does praise the novel for it'd display of the privileged life style and he does mention the all too real threat of nukes falling into the wrong hand but, fortunately, eschews any literary criticism.

Caplan is the author of three previous novels that were more in line with the historical thriller/epic genre as well as the world of high finance, and the privileged lives of other American characters. As promising a character as Ty Hunter is, Caplan would be better served not exploring the spy game in the future.

The Dirty Lowdown