The Doomsday Affair (The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) by Harry Whittington

The plot in this second novel in the Man From U.N.C.L.E. Television tie-in series jumps right into the middle of the action when a young woman (and THRUSH defector) removes a lei from around her head that she had recently received from Honolulu airport.  Unfortunately, there is an explosive device within the lei and her movements trigger the bomb which kills her immediately.   This happens right in front of Napoleon Solo and literally blows the action wide open in the first paragraph.  It all leads to a diabolical plot by a mysterious entity named Tixe Ylno ('Exit Only' spelled backward) to blow up a major American city with an atomic bomb and pin the deed on Russia, thereby launching World War III.  

Yes, we’ve seen this plot numerous times before but since this was published in 1965, perhaps it was a newer concept then.  For this second book in the series, author duties were handed over to Harry Whittington, who is known as one of the most prolific pulp authors of all time, managing to churn out 85 novels in the space of only twelve years.  That sort of churn and earn approach, unfortunately, is quite evident in this book, and its quality is not nearly as high as in book one, The Thousand Coffins Affair written by Michael Avallone.  Lots of action sequences but all crammed together with little expository or explanatory effort.  The ending is especially representative of this as it all ends rather abruptly.  I turned the last page expecting to see at least a couple more paragraphs but no, nothing there.  No extraneous words wasted on what the consequences of that final scene were or how the characters dealt with it.  Also, the big reveal of the identity of Tixe Ylno is handled just as obviously as thousands of novels before, as well as practically every episode of Scooby Doo you've ever seen.

There was one scene that I was happy to read.  As I watched the television series I kept wondering about the guy who ran the tailor shop that doubled as the secret entrance to U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.  Was he simply a tailor?  Was he a retired agent?  In this novel, Napoleon Solo wonders the same thing but even though we don’t get an actual answer, at least it was good to know that Napoleon and I think alike.  

I did find it interesting that this volume did include Illya in a major role (unlike in book one where he is clearly a minor character).  But he is still obviously subservient to Solo, telling me the book was written based on early scripts or shortly after the first couple of episodes had filmed.  It only took the TV series 5 or 6 episodes before these two characters began to be almost equal in skills, experience, and air-time so I’m expecting the book series to evolve that way as well in short order.

Looking forward to book 3 which is written by yet another author, John Oram Thomas who seems to have been anything but prolific.