VINCE FLYNN'S STAND

By David Beilstein

I HAVE been reading Vince Flynn's thriller novels for a few years now. I recently had the chance to pick up his recent bestseller, The Last Man, published by Emily Bestler books. I'm on page 70 about, and it is a quick and entertaining read. 

While Flynn is not the world's most graceful of writers (his talent is one of pace, not literary a plum), the St Paul native is a master of the page turner. But there is something else. Flynn incorporates into his work situations facing American intelligence and clandestine services in a peculiar mixture of prophetic and timely narratives. The Last Man, for instance, contains a storyline right out of recent headlines involving CIA director David Petraeus and the Benghazi situation in Libya. 

All too often, fiction writers employ a world upon the reader swarming with social science witchcraft and politically correct agitprop. James Bond actor Daniel Craig may enable a scintilla of foolishness when suggesting, in 2008, presidential candidate John McCain would make a good 'M' but Barack Obama would make a better Bond, one knows quickly someone broke some wind. 

It is senator McCain - I'm no fan, believe me - who did the kind of work the fictional Bond does on the silver screen, and conversely, McCain wears the scares to prove it. Community organisers do not make good Bonds, period. 

Therefore, in Flynn's universe, the real is more entertaining than the conspiracy laden turf of so many Hollywood imaginations about the CIA and the intelligence world. 

Simply stated, CIA clandestine operatives are not chasing European bankers with swastikas stencilled on the underside of their Rolexes, but mean as hornets Arabs - the dudes with brown skin and boney noses mind you - ready and willing to send young men with explosive vests into crowds of people to reap the virginal rewords of martyrdom.

Or fly planes into searing towers, reaching for the heavens - knocking them down and crushing and smouldering some 3,000 people. 

Yeah, those guys. 

Even if the terrorists were indeed New York Times certified freedom fighters - the point is this is what consumes geopolitical reality in our time. Thus, a narrative dealing with such issues should contain the parameters and the characters of that world. 

This is where Flynn shines despite wooden prose in places, shoddy dialogue, etc. 

Persistence, though, pays dividends in life. It's why 60 rejection slips from top New York publishers led Flynn in the passion of youth to self publish his first novel, Term Limits. Since that baptism of uncertainty, Flynn has decided to take a sight-seeing tour of the world he writes about with numerous high level contacts in the intelligence world, gathering to himself packs of readers interested in those dark shadows lurking behind closed doors. 

There is clumsiness to how Flynn puts things. I can never get over the amount of didactic entheos he presses upon the reader of how much of a badass CIA operative Mitch Rapp happens to be. I said this before, but turning a few pages of the better Blackford Oakes novels by the late William F Buckley, a former CIA man himself, would help Flynn sharpen his mojo. 

Likewise, I read in vain for something approaching old man Hemingway's iceberg theory; the master's ability to take the real and symbolise it under the surface of poetical prose. Flynn dresses up his descriptive prose hardly poetically, and in turns of phrase that Strunk and White anathematised in The Elements of Style, surrendering to the campaign against cliche.

No one's perfect; for that Flynn gets a pass. He is right in the important areas - and in todays literary soapbox, that makes all the difference in the world. 

Or, it feels like it.