ARGYLLE

Written by Elly Conway and Reviewed by Detective Dru

If you’re looking for another article piling on Argylle the movie then you’ve come to the wrong place. This article is going to pile on the book.

 To wit, the flair for language in this debut novel by Elly Conway was immediately apparent.  Vivid imagery on page one?  The Carnival is all in.

 We’re then quickly introduced to a husband and wife:  the Fedorovs.  Mr. Fedorov, aka Christopher Clay in a former life, is now a billionaire running for some sort of office.  The missus is an expired trophy wife that’s even uglier on the inside, though she can afford to be since she’s the daughter of the current president, Vladimir Sokolov.

 The two men, aplomb with bravado, debate in mother Russia, culminating with a Visaly Fedorov promise to repossess the Amber Room that was stolen by the Nazis, and not just brag about the replica that was built like Sokolov.

Russians, Nazis, conspiracies and spies.  Could be the cornerstone for an all-time caper, or could be yet another forgettable paint by numbers spy novel at this point.  If only the Carnival had pulled up stakes at this point instead of reading on.

Part One

Aubrey Argylle (can’t possibly be just a coincidence that this is also the name of the book?) is in the golden triangle of SE Asia while hunting for something that had to do with his dead father, before a plane crashes with DEA agents on board.  Argylle hides in the wreckage while the survivors are captured by locals.

This story is like Hamlet in that Argylle is melancholy at the beginning, aimless and independent entirely of the plot.  Editors (and spymasters) love to mention how important it is to propel your protagonist (or agent) through the plot instead of just passively letting things happen to them.  And yet here we are with another thumb twiddling protagonist to kick things off, the modern day autobiographical calling card for debut novelists.

Melancholy heroes notwithstanding, the author is doing a great job of making the reader feel like the protagonist, and even manages to do so while introducing part of our hero’s entourage.  Argylle outwits the alpha male Iceman he’ll be Mavericking with the entire book and then endears himself to the reader in choosing to be clever instead of brutish by acting sympathetic toward a Thai hooker.

The DEA plane crash was our inciting incident, but now the local drug gang knows that it was Argylle who led the rescue.  He must leave ASAP.  Iceman is actually Scott Novak who is actually Woody Wyatt, a former Navy Seal.  He reports to Coffey (think 007’s M) that Argylle is legit after sizing each other up.  And now for quick character development:  Argylle should be rich because of his drug smuggling parents, but the estate broker stole the inheritance, knowing Argylle couldn’t prove an illegitimate paper trail in court.  Sounds like the local drug gang is responsible for killing his parents, aka motive. 

And now for the flaw and the conundrum: He grew up without a country because his parents were always on the run, so why work for the CIA?  Certainly, it’s not going to be for patriotism.  And the DEA ruined his parents’ lives by pursuing them nonstop, so not them either.  At no point did Argylle consider that maybe just maybe his parents aren’t victims, but rather douche canoe peddling kingpins?

We quickly segue to the call to action: Argylle meets Coffey, she offers the job, but he blames the CIA for his parents’ death, so that’s a no.  Do these companies have HR?  Not a single reference, he didn’t need to upload his resume and then retype it line by line into some database that’s scanning for wildly irrelevant keywords?  Anyway, the CIA worked with the golden triangle gangs because of the DEA pursuit so now it’s sorta their fault his parents are dead.  This Argylle fellow would do great on social media; he’s like a victim chameleon.  Argylle leaves, and then after seeing homeless people in Times Square, he realizes he’s behaving due to fear, not anger.  (huh?) So he returns to Coffey to accept the job.  Nobody at the Carnival was impressed with this metamorphosis, but we were spoiled at a young age when the Skywalker moisture farm burned to the ground, crystallizing the concept of motive.

Flash forward a few months to Argylle working with Wyatt, the guy he outsmarted at the beginning.  They’re on some mission thing together and no one seems to like Argylle as the squad leader, citing his lack of seniority with the team, not to mention he’s replacing a popular team member Dombroski that Coffey has fingered as a mole.  Here’s the thing though – only the author has a relationship with the supporting characters right now.  The audience does not.  Frankly, we barely care about Argylle at this point in the story, much less this Wyatt guy.  So it feels sort of disengaging to fast forward to a time when the dynamic between the characters has been altered without us getting to experience the dynamic-changing thing as well.     

Anyway, Argylle keeps going through training, it keeps going poorly, one exercise goes wrong and Argylle saves Wyatt’s life, which seems to help gel the team after Argylle insists they not kick Wyatt off the team after he made some mistakes. 

Part Two – how’s everyone’s French?

This is where it starts to really fall apart for the Carnival.  The table was set in part one.  But we don’t care about any of these characters yet, and this is especially true when Samra dies.  Are you confused because the only mention of this character was just to let you know that they died?  Welcome to this book.  Because of the constant time jumps, the character development doesn’t feel earned, or even plausible in many cases.  There’s too many names now and the template just seems to be: mission assigned, mission goes awry, Argylle goes rogue, the mission becomes a success, but now the team is fractured. 

What was supposed to be the mcguffin is apparently fake by the way.  There’s this super important bracelet that everybody is after…but now there’s a second bracelet as important as the first.  The Carnival has to wonder if the author was watching Contact while writing this plot twist.

And already we have our second plot twist!  The whole Dombrowski is a traitor, so Coffey replaced him with Argylle - is revealed to be a ruse that Coffey had put on to flush out the real traitor.  It appears that nothing is as it seems, which is fine to a point but it also renders so much of the story moot.  If there’s one thing readers love, it’s having their time wasted. 

And now we’re knee deep in the rinse and repeat model to the story as described above.  It’s like listening to a melodrama playlist that’s stuck on shuffle.  And in between the uncatchy tunes, inundate the reader with 2-D characters, and make sure nothing about them is memorable too for good measure. 

How disappointing to the Carnival to see such little internet real estate on the villain (or villains – does it matter in a story where the antagonist is a mystery?) and it’s for good reason.  Federov and Vasilov are about as complex as a referee’s whistle.  Just one note – unlimited resources, bound by nothing, no consequence.  Even plot armor is more complicated and interesting.

At one point, Coffey calls Argylle the best recruit she’s seen in forty years.  Every practice mission has been a failure, and he gets along with no one.  He just broods.  But this assessment is all because of his temperament according to her. Unless you’re trying to convince me that Coffey is more incompetent than the Nazis on Hogan’s Heroes, then this is story seppuku.

And that brings us to Carter’s arc.  To those readers who grew up in the late 80’s and 90’s, we recognize the nostalgia that is the after school special. First, Carter lashes out at Argylle, referring to cis straight white male savior persona specifically. If nothing else this was informative, since the Carnival had no idea that gender and orientation were so intertwined with being a savior.  But despite overwhelming apathy for this dull and mopey protagonist, it bears mentioning that Argylle has been nothing but supportive to her and at this moment in the story, his demographics have zero to do with plot or character development.  This detour was clearly shoe horned in for hashtag purposes, though one wonders if these kinds of revisions are at the author’s insistence or the social media perusing editors.  But nonetheless, how disappointing when a few pages later, Carter ends up being the closest friend Argylle has on the team and will you look at that – their genesis was founded on Carter’s sexual identity.  Even though the author is trying to be popular and trendy by attacking the cis guy for simply being cis, she committed another crime during her pandering process.  She reduced her precious unicorn Carter to her sexual identity and nothing else.  She’s not a fleshed out expert in her field that’s encountering acclimation issues of both the personal and professional variety, a journey relatable to some, if not most.  Nope, she’s just a lonely queer and shame on the world for making her feel that way.  This is akin to comic book authors of the 80s and 90s substituting assault for female character development, a sad and rather common trope at the time. 

They’re on their final mission as a team and the Carnival counted four randoms who are suddenly introduced to the group only to be sacrificed immediately.  Perhaps they were mentioned earlier in the story but we just forgot, and we’re surely not going to revisit a single page of this book.  There’s plenty of death in this book but not a single significant one with 40 pages to go.  Unless the Carnival is mistaken - characters like Jim Ryder – the reader is hearing his name for the first time one paragraph before he dies.  Why would anyone besides Jim Ryder’s mother care?

A few more randoms were brought in to die. Erin Quinn is revealed to be the traitor because her father, the ex-CIA, is still alive and a discarded hostage to Iraq. Erin colluded as revenge against the CIA that betrayed her family. The end was very action movie scriptish, as if this was a screenplay from day one and cliched its way into an espionage novel.  Argylle avoids a roof collapse and carries out Washington with a broken collarbone in case you were curious about some of the more fecal scented details. 

The two biggest problems with the book were the unengaging characters and the stale repeating template of a plot. Unfortunately, these are kinda sorta important pieces to a good story.  The beginning of the book was sufficient plot wise, but too many uninteresting characters introduced too quickly who are there just to die weighed it down.

The Carnival has not and will not see the movie but we have seen the trailer.  The trailer is 99% cat and the author is a main character…neither of which were in the book.  Congratulations to Hollywood for somehow making this book worse.