The Silencers

A Matt Helm Novel, Book 4

By: Donald Hamilton

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

The fourth installment in the legendary Matt Helm thrillers.

Matt Helm, code name Eric, is sent to extract a female agent working as a stripper in a bar in Mexico. When she is killed before Helm can complete his mission, he finds himself teamed up with the woman's sister as he fights to save the lives of a group of scientists and American officials.

Originally released in the era of the James Bond novels, the Matt Helm novels were considered grittier and more realistic than Bond, garnering them critical praise and an ardent audience.

©1962, 2013 Donald Hamilton (P)2014 Skyboat Media

GOOD FUN

Pretty brutal for the era but worth the listen. Good characters, interesting plot, great narration - onto the next one!

great adventure

great adventure I'm getting more and more intrigued with the character in the book The narrator is awesome

To catch a little bird!

Matt Helm, “Eric” no cover story, and “reactivated” counter-agent, aka assassin. Helm receives a telephone call from his handler Mac and is instructed to recover an operator named Sarah from Warez, NM, across the river from El Paso, TX where he was currently staying. In his hotel room Helm opened a letter that was waiting for him at the front desk. It contained a report from Private Investigations Inc. on a Lilah Martinez aka Mary Jane Helm, Mrs. L. Helm, born Mary Jane Springer who Helm had asked to locate. She was currently working at The Club Chihuahua in Warez. Pat Lebaron, another operator, from Private Investigations Inc. met Helm at his hotel and they proceeded to make their way into Warez. Lilah was parading on the stage at The Club Chihuahua, a moment later she was prone on the stage with a knife in her back. She passed something to another woman Gail Hendricks aka Springer, her sister, who Helm took hold of and they were out the back door into a taxi. Getting Lilah out of the country seemed like a wasted effort at this point. So much for the setup of the story. From here the focus switches to Gail and the man dressed in cowboy gear she entered the club with. The man was suspected of being an enemy agent known as Cowboy, which brought additional suspicion on Gail. Now it was up to Helm, with Gail in tow, to find Cowboy and put him out of commission. At the same time, find out what that passed information had to do with the enemy and put an end to those plans. As usual, Helm offers himself as bait to secure the target(s).

First good book I’m the series

This is the fourth book and the series and I feel the first good one. The others were not bad but it has taken three books of character development and more before this series is starting to mature.

This is not uncommon but it’s gratifying to witness it improve.

There’s still a 60’s vibe of misogyny and avoidance of descriptive sex scenes that might (or might not) have worked back then and just feels weird now.

Sort of feels like doing archaeology sometimes reading these older series and great when you come across a good one and sometimes it’s just a lot of observing well that’s how they wrote them then, even if a good bit of it might be unrealistic 60’s fantasy or something.

Bonus hearing about some of the tech of the era glossed over with science fiction and today it is well known and used all over.

Enjoyable, but not the best

This is my 4th Matt Helm book, and in my opinion, this is the weakest of the first 4. I still enjoyed it, though, and I'm already an hour into book 5 (and enjoying it).

Women were treated differently when this was written back in the 60s, than they are now, and that is apparent in all the Matt Helm books, but particularly so in this book. It's grating, but less so knowing that we've come a long way since the 60s. So when Matt makes a comment like how he doesn't like women in pants, I just remind myself that the book was written 60 years ago, and we've made a lot of progress.

So I suppose what I'm saying is, these are fun books if you keep them in perspective, remember when they were written, and don't forget it's fiction!