No Comebacks – Frederick Forsyth, 1982 ★★★★

Forsyth in a Different Vein

Why didn’t Frederick Forsyth become the biggest name in thriller writing? This short-story collection, published toward the end of a great run of commercial and critical success, posits the idea that while forging an approach to his genre others like Ludlum and Clancy would pursue more diligently (if with less talent) what Fred really wanted was to be O. Henry.

People who picked up No Comebacks in the spring of 1982 expecting ten quick doses of the sort of top-notch thriller writing Forsyth had been producing since 1971’s The Day Of The Jackal (which continued up through 1984’s The Fourth Protocol, his last great novel) were disappointed. I know I was. A few stories offer suspense of this kind, but the overall body count is low and tension is of a more everyday variety.

Yet another reading with older eyes shows the stories work rather well, individually but even more collectively, developing a theme encapsulated in the book’s title, of finding one’s way clear of lasting entanglements, for better or for worse. The one carryover here from Forsyth’s longer fiction is his penchant for the surprise ending.

The ten stories go as follows:

“No Comebacks” – A rich man falls in love with a woman who won’t leave her husband. So he hires a killer to simplify matters.

“There Are No Snakes In Ireland” – A demolition worker takes action after enduring racist insults and physical abuse from his boss.

“The Emperor” – A henpecked husband takes his measure of life while embroiled in battle with a legendary marlin.

“There Are Some Days” – A gang of truck hijackers discover they have made a serious mistake in their latest crime.

“Money With Menaces” – A mousy man becomes the victim of blackmail, and ponders how to spare his ill wife from the pain.

“Used In Evidence” – A shut-in is evicted from his condemned dwelling, and in the process of its demolition becomes a murder suspect.

“Privilege” – A maligned businessman seeks satisfaction when he is unfairly attacked by a newspaper that refuses to correct its mistake.

“Duty” – An Irish couple on vacation in France discover a man with a secret that relates to their country’s tragic past.

“A Careful Man” – When a man has got to go, it makes sense for him to do all he can to ensure his estate is left just the way he wants it.

“Sharp Practice” – An innocent game of cards on a train has repercussions the next day in a courtroom.

One of the stories, “There Are No Snakes In Ireland,” won its author a second Edgar Allan Poe Award; Day Of The Jackal winning him his first. It’s as good a place to start as any when considering what I deem to be the overall positives of this collection, however off-brand it may be.

Author Frederick Forsyth at his Paris apartment, two years after the publication of No Comebacks. He explained his work philosophy to The Telegraph: "I am slightly mercenary. I write for money." Image from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/7946041/I-am-slightly-mercenary.-I-write-for-money.html.

“There Are No Snakes In Ireland” is set, natch, in Ireland, the setting for three other stories here. The protagonist is an Indian, Harkishan Ram Lal, who just wants enough money to study medicine. The demolition work he takes up is hard, especially since the hole-and-corner outfit he works for is too cheap for explosives. The combustability all comes from the foreman, Big Billie Cameron, who abuses Ram Lal for his ethnicity and cows other workers from taking his part.

There is a sense of determinism how the story plays out once Big Billie inevitably takes things too far:

It was done, and what still had to be done had to be done. That was the way of his people.

I wonder if every Indian person would resort to Ram Lal’s tactics, but you need it to set the plot in motion and give Ram Lal a moral pass. You then feel worry for Ram Lal once his seemingly foolproof plan to subject Big Billie to the fatal bite of a saw-scaled viper (which Forsyth informs us is the smallest such snake but deadlier than the cobra) runs astray. First it disappears in Big Billie’s coat lining, then it reappears inside the Cameron home. Outside, Ram Lal fears the snake will end up killing not his nasty tormentor but an innocent family member.

This is a good suspense outing, not as gripping as the best of Forsyth’s regular fiction as his set-up work does clutter things, and Cameron’s bullying is too on-the-nose. But the sting in the tail is quite good here, and action is helped along with welcome dollops of humor, something Forsyth did unobtrusively well in his better novels. I loved a throwaway bit when one of the friendlier members of Cameron’s work gang wonders if Ram Lal, not being an Irish native, will know what tea is.

The essence of “There Are No Snakes” is a linking element in all the stories here, one encapsulated as I said by the book’s nifty title.

Short-story collections are hard to rate on their own merits. Sometimes you get one or two great stories while the rest either fill space or go off on a tangent that the author doesn’t quite manage to justify. I think of Forsyth’s later collection, The Veteran, as being like that. Then there are short-story collections that may not have a hit single, so to speak, but keep up an interesting theme in various ways.

Ernest Hemingway did this with In Our Time, a sustained mood piece I’d rate up there with the Frank Sinatra album In The Wee Small Hours. James Alan McPherson’s Elbow Room was similarly unforgettable in the main without a single story in it jumping to the forefront of my mind. You end up wishing more writers did this sort of thing; maybe they do and I am just missing them. A good short-story collection can be like exercises in fictional therapy when done well, showing a reader the depth of imaginative storytelling its writer commands.

Speaking of Hemingway, he is mentioned in Amazon.com’s collection of No Comebacks reviews as an obvious influence on another of the stories here, “The Emperor.” There are actually two Hemingway works Forsyth obviously pulls from, “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber” and The Old Man And The Sea.

“The Emperor” introduces us to Murgatroyd, a henpecked banker on a rare vacation in Mauritius with his ever-complaining wife Edna:

Theirs had not been a marriage marked by loving affection, even in the early days before she had told him she disapproved of “that sort of thing” and that he was mistaken if he thought there was any need for it to continue. Since then, for over twenty years, he had been locked into a loveless marriage, its suffocating tedium only occasionally enlived by periods of acute dislike.

Murgatroyd ponders the impossibility of getting a tan while oogling the carefree young women sauntering around him in bikinis and pareus. Then, toward the end of his stay, someone suggests going out on a boat to catch a fish. Murgatroyd knows he will catch plenty from Edna, but since she’s so disagreeable anyway he figures what the hell. Then he finds himself locked in an epic duel with a legendary marlin, known to the resort community as “The Emperor.”

The island paradise of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean provides the setting of "The Emperor," one of the more satisfying tales in this collection. Image from https://mauritiusattractions.com/where-is-mauritius-i-293.html.

Humor is especially well done here, as is the suspense once it gets going. “That’s what the battle is about,” the boat captain coaches him. “He has the strength, you have the tackle and the cunning. After that it’s all stamina, yours against his.”

Murgatroyd’s discovery in his pelagic struggle of his own untapped potential as a man leads to a satisfying and amusing finish, another surprise and a genuinely happy one, unlike poor Mr. Macomber’s.

Readers wanting a dash of more familiar Forsyth will appreciate the tougher-nosed tales here, like “No Comebacks” and “There Are Some Days,” both which find Forsyth more in his spy-fiction element, though with a twist. “Used In Evidence” sets up a mystery involving a mute elderly suspect and a mummified strangulation victim found buried in his apartment, told through the eyes of a police detective who suspects the worst the more he learns of a long-missing wife. Here again Forsyth delivers another of his crisp O. Henry endings, that probes but lightly into the darker regions of the human heart.

The best hard-Forsyth story here is one that journeys back more openly to his everyman theme, “Money With Menaces,” where the blackmailed protagonist, Samuel Nutkin, tries unsuccessfully and with growing panic to bargain with a conniving pair who prey on his human weakness. Forsyth suggests the man is out of his league here:

Samuel Nutkin was just ten years old when a boy at school who had read the tales of Beatrix Potter called him Squirrel, and he was doomed.

But here again we discover an everyman with hidden resources.

Forsyth also is successful here in a lighter vein, not only with “The Emperor” but also “A Careful Man,” which offers both ebullience and black humor in large doses; and “Privilege,” about a lonely man’s battle against the power of an uncaring press. His final tale, “Sharp Practice,” again set in Ireland, this time just before World War II, is his one marked divergence here from the everyman theme, but offers a pleasant caper comedy featuring a judge who gradually discovers himself played not once, but twice.

The only weak link in this string of small pearls would be “Duty,” a story Forsyth explains is based on a real incident reported to him. It offers the one link here to a real event, the Easter Uprising, albeit as background material, but doesn’t move very much as a story and feels like something Forsyth added to lend a bit of tragic weight to his book. Yet it does buttress the overall theme, of how small things can lead to great consequences without much apparent effect on the actor himself.

With its narrative acuity, rapid drive, and especially the clever turnabout endings, No Comebacks is a series of gripping detours that work together not only thematically but in a way that gives you ample reason to keep on reading to the end. I wish only I was of a mind to better appreciate its many positives back when I first read it; it showcases the art of the short story in fine form.