We had high hopes for Don Smith’s 1952 foreign intrigue thriller China Coaster, possibly because we accidentally saw a good review of it—and you know by now we avoid reviews because they usually give away too many plot points (which is why our synopses tend to be vague). The novel is about a Western fixer named Mike O’Connor who gets stuck in newly communist China with both the Soviets and Chinese hunting him because of the capers in which he’s been involved and the people for whom he’s worked. When his girlfriend Anya is murdered by a Russian agent he’s driven to seek revenge.
But O’Connor meets “a young and beautiful white woman, the most beautiful white woman I have ever seen,” who was raised Chinese after being found abandoned as a child. He falls in love with this woman—Pao Chu (he renames her Lena)—who apparently has been waiting for O’Connor all her life. She’s the foster daughter of Shanghai’s biggest organized crime figure, who trapped O’Connor in his most recent predicament in the first place. He wants to take her Stateside and live happily ever after, but he can’t until he’s appeased daddy gangster, avenged his murdered love, and seen to the disposition of the dead woman’s teen sister, now alone in China.
That’s a lot on the slate. You have to wonder—if he can bed down with another woman so soon after losing his beloved Anya can’t he let the revenge bit slide? Well, you know these rough and tumble guys and their personal codes. We can’t say whether Smith ever went to China, but regardless, the first half of the book feels like he wrote it using a stack of maps, a how-to thriller pamphlet, and a hefty dose of anti-commie hatred. Things pick up thanks to the revenge plotline, and in the end China Coaster justified its exotic setting, its cool title, and its awesome Harry Schaare cover art—but just barely.
