Books for blokes

Novels worth reading fall neatly into two categories. There are great ones and there are those I like to call Good Trash. The former bear endless re-reading and are only ever ruined when some Hollywood director decides he needs to go for his intellectual stripes and make one into a film. Conversely, Good Trash often seems to be written with the celluloid version in mind.

These three books fall squarely in Good Trash territory, and the camera lens never feels far away. They also drip testosterone.

The protagonists are men who would sooner fire a gun than sweet-talk a lady. Conversations are like rifle chatter: rough, rapid and to the point. There isn't an awful lot of internal dialogue because they have been stripped back to the bare action essentials.

Let's start with the Jack Higgins, so exhaustingly macho and pacy it feels like being bullied through an SAS assault course. I thought: 'I bet this chap doesn't need Viagra,' and was amazed to discover that Harry Patterson (Higgins's real name) is a 74-year-old former clerk for the Electricity Generating Board, who lives in the Channel Islands.

His age does show, however, in his slightly dated plotlines and his writing style, which is spare to the point of baldness.

Bad Company is billed as a Sean Dillon thriller. Fans will know that the character was an IRA man before becoming an enforcer for Downing Street, and here he is called on to intercede in the affairs of one Max von Berger, an SS Sturmbahnfuhrer to whom Hitler gave his explosive diaries in his final days in the bunker.

Since World War II, von Berger has become as rich and powerful as he is ruthless. He deals in arms and has allied himself to the dangerous Rashid family who have extensive oil interests in the Middle East.

The book is packed with unsavoury characters (Saddam makes a cameo appearance), none of whom it is possible to like, although - somewhat weirdly - Higgins seems to want us to admire von Berger.

Tom Clancy (pictured on the book jacket dressed up in a Vipers cap, enormous sunglasses and huge bomber jacket, and looking about as threatening as a snowman) seems a bit more up-to-date and is a better writer. I found his post-9/11 novel incredibly addictive.

Twin brothers Dominic and Brian Caruso, respectively a rookie FBI agent and a Marine just back from Afghanistan, are recruited, along with their cousin Jack Ryan Junior, to a top-secret anti-terrorism organisation.
Jack's father, U.S. President John Patrick Ryan, has appeared in other Clancy novels (and their screen versions, played by Harrison Ford and - in an improbably youthful incarnation - Ben Affleck), and Junior is at least as smart as his dad.