Book Review: 'Harry's Game' by Gerald Seymour
Gerald Seymour (b. 1941) is a UK writer. In 1963 he joined the staff of the Independent Television News and covered the conflict in Northern Ireland, among other newsworthy hotspots. ‘Harry’s Game’, published in hardback in 1975, was his first novel and successful enough to allow Seymour to devote his career to writing. His Wiki entry lists over 35 novels to his credit. Some of his novels were adapted for television productions; ‘Harry’s Game’ aired as a miniseries in 1982 on the ITV network.
The Fontana paperback edition (256 pp.) of ‘Harry’s Game’ first was published in 1977. My copy is dated 1987, a twelfth printing.
The novel is set in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s. A British cabinet minister has been assassinated by a IRA gunman, an atrocity that the government cannot allow to go unpunished. However, increased police and army raids in the Catholic part of Belfast fail to uncover any useful information. A frustrated Prime Minister decides that a man should be sent in, undercover, with orders to find and apprehend, or kill, the assassin.
A British Army captain, thirty-four year-old Harry James Brown, agrees to carry out the mission. Brown has had some experience in undercover operations, and, being born in Portadown, is familiar with Northern Ireland and its people.
Masquerading as a seaman, come home to Northern Ireland after 10 years in the merchant marine, Harry takes lodgings in a home in Catholic Belfast and sets about learning the identity of the assassin. It’s a dangerous job, made even more difficult by the fact that his minders have allotted Harry no more than three weeks to find his quarry.
Unknown to Harry, the Provos - the footsoldiers of the Provisional Irish Republican Army – keep careful track of any newcomers arriving in the Catholic neighborhoods of Belfast. Can Harry keep up his cover story long enough to keep from being ‘made’ by the Provos, and find the man he has been sent to kill ? With each passing day, the margin of error grows ever slighter…….and the likelihood of Harry’s tortured and bullet-ridden corpse being found lying on a patch of bare ground in Belfast grows ever larger………….
'Harry's Game' is an impressive first novel. The author's familiarity with The Troubles and the environs of Belfast lends authenticity to the segments taking place in Northern Ireland. As well, Seymour carefully avoids sympathizing either with the IRA or the Crown, preferring to present each side's justification for their actions without sermonizing. It is left to the reader to determine the legitimacy of the mayhem committed by the IRA assassin, or his ideological counterpart, Harry.
'Harry's Game' is very much a 'British' action novel, in that the embellished heroics of American-style adventures are absent. Indeed, in the pages of 'Harry's Game, random events and blunders account for success or failure as much as careful planning and personal gallantry. The endeavors of Harry and his quarry are related in a detached prose style, and tinted with enough cynicism to lend the closing chapters a bleak quality that refuses to provide any optimism about a peaceful resolution of the conflict roiling Northern Ireland.
If you like your British crime and suspense novels to be hard-bitten, then 'Harry's Game' will deliver.
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