Quiller Meridian

Although this is my first review of an Adam Hall thriller, I can say, as a Haverford College English major who knows literature, that this is an unknown classic. The prose never fails to convey the goodness-what's-coming-next of any decent tale, yet does so through the extremely unconventional method of stream of consciousness--that is, in the first person narrative of the hero. More often than not the authors restrained use of desciptive imagery or metaphor resonates, even reaches the level of beauty of, for instance, the best of Romantic poetry. More accustomed to say snatch and run assignments, the hero here finds himself on a different mission, Meridian, one that does not actually have an objective. Instead, almost as a straightforward investigator, Quiller is sent to interview someone. But the trail goes cold in the middle of Siberia, on the Trans Siberian Express, before he can. I would offer that if the final pages of this book were to have a musical score, one candidate might be another classic, Deborah Cox's Nobody's Supposed to Be Here. The outcome--impossible to believe and yet utterly earned at every step by the author and therefore plausible, and therefore, well, quite breathtaking--is absolutely astounding.

There is a lot more info on the Quiller series at www.quiller.net, a fan site.

How Elleston Trevor (aka Adam Hall)would have laughed - so folks who bought this shamefully out of print classic also bought *JK Rowling*? Well, why not and God bless them and God bless the technology that can crunch the stats to come up with that one. Hall's lone ferret of a spy is one of the great creations of fiction and I think this is the latest one to be essayed by Hollywood to fit on the screen. It'll be the usual fiasco, of course, because Hall's muscular poetry and Quiller's inner dialog simply won't translate and, anyway, it'll have to be dumbed so far down that it might as well be some hack ghoster providing the screenplay, which is probably what it will be. Of course, you can't actually *buy* any Quillers these days because the publishers are incapable to keeping them in print, but that should end when the movie comes out and Travolta or whoever they get struts his stuff and tries to get the shotokan right. (I hope it is Travolta because Elleston piled such contempt on the Ron Hubbard lot in his lifetime that it'd be poetic justice for one of them to come an artistic cropper trying to take on Hall's elegant storyline and real flesh-n-blood hero.)