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Once upon a time, there was a young man who decided to leave his native Scotland to become a famous actor in the United States. Hah! He did it! US audiences met him in the 1960s playing the role of a Russian spy named Illya Kuryskin on the tv series The Man from U.N.C.L.E and know him today as Dr. Donald Mallard (Ducky) on US tv's current and wildly successful series N.C.I.S. Actor David McCallum has certainly done what he set out to do so very long ago.
Much more privately, in the lifetime between Kuryakin and Mallard, McCallum's oh-so-canny brain has churned along gathering and filing away a slew of observations and experiences to cook in his own vat of imagination with the result now of a first novel, a pot of murder, intrigue, sex, violence, and psychology that is as professionally done and satisfying as the work of long-seasoned writers.
Harry Murphy, a financially stable but chronically between jobs New York actor tries rather frantically to pop into an Italian restaurant to use the facilities. Rudely informed that the restaurant is closed, he hurries around the corner of the building and down an alley to find a bit of privacy amid the trash bins where he can relieve himself against the wall. Just over his head there is an open window and to his increasing dismay he overhears and becomes fascinated with the conversation of the men inside the restaurant: they are apparently some kind of longtime crime organization working out how they can now withdraw from their "business" to steal away with their ill-gotten gains and live out what remains of their lives in worry-free luxury. Harry pulls out his phone and lists what he can understand of the names and locations of those whom these men need to "wrap up" in order to be permanently safe – "wrap up" in deaths that will be cleverly schemed and staged so that there will be no trail back to the planners.
Harry, it turns out, is not like us, the normal people who read murder mysteries. Oh no. Somehow he decides that as he has no work lined up right away, he will play the role of a secret hero by relying on the many roles he has played so well all these years and by booking himself on a flight to London to find the one intended victim that he has enough of a name and location for that he might find and warn him that he is about to be rubbed out.
The twists and turns of the plot pile up coincidence after coincidence, but of course there are no coincidences. Harry is drawn into a maze of manipulation that coupled with his own odd decisions somehow leave him alive and functioning if not wiser and a better man. And that takes us to the title: ONCE A CROOKED MAN. The opening pages of the novel quote the nursery rhyme
There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
which quite nicely dovetails into the story and characters. Even more nicely that title, ONCE A CROOKED MAN, offers us an insight into McCallum's understanding of the moral psychology of human existence. As in Once . . . Always. People very often are what they are and remain so and McCallum gives us a gentle look at the quandaries of self-reinvention and, perhaps, how much we are likely to fool ourselves.
So nicely done!
§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.
Reviewed by Diana Borse, February 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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