Чистильщики

Content: Death of a Citizen (novel) Cleaners (novel) Ambush (novel) The series is about the adventures of Matt Helm - an agent acting on behalf of a highly classified structure under the American government. Creating the image of Matt Helm, the writer endowed him with a number of autobiographical features. Like its creator, Matt Helm is an Americanized Swede, a former front-line soldier who temporarily became a journalist and photographer, an avid hunter, during the war years he was an operative officer of the US Office of Strategic Services, an organization that sent sabotage and terrorist groups into the territory of Western countries occupied by the Nazis. Europe. He is brave, resourceful, kind, despite his ostentatious cynicism, and will give a hundred points ahead of James Bond. He rushes headlong into a leapfrog of adventures with a former front-line girlfriend (`Death of a Citizen`), finds an abandoned church in the mountains of New Mexico, stuffed with truly diabolical means of destroying all life on earth (`Cleaners`), bravely rescues superspy Sheila from captivity in one from Latin American countries and takes her as his assistant (`In ambush`). The confrontation between the hero D. Hamilton and enemies rarely has political overtones. The political scenery in which Hamilton plays out his exciting shows is just a conditional background of the plot, and nothing more. Even where political intrigue is built into the plot (as in Ambush or Traitors), international relations are just a frame for a detective-adventure puzzle. Hamilton's novels, although formally tied to specific political situations of the 60s or 70s, are still read with unflagging interest today. This is due to the fact that the building material of D. Hamilton's plots are the classic "thriller" blocks: ambushes, fights, chases, mysterious disappearances, assassination attempts, disguises, and the plot itself is firmly based on the rapid turns of intrigue and the tense expectation of an unexpected denouement. In addition, the novels about Matt Helm are distinguished by the amazing authenticity of the situations and actions of the characters - and this despite the fact that the author sometimes uses a deliberately fictional pretext to start the plot (for example, in "Ambush" a Soviet nuclear missile disappears from Cuba). D. Hamilton cannot stand "cranberries" and knows the material he works with thoroughly - hence his love for reasoning about sniper art, for comparing the technical characteristics of cars of different brands, for a meticulous description of cold and small arms.