James Brabazon is an author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Based in the UK, he has traveled to more than seventy countries, investigating, filming, and directing in the world’s most hostile environments.He is the author of All Fall Down, The Break Line, and the international bestseller My Friend the Mercenary, a memoir recounting his experiences of the Liberian civil war and the Equatorial Guinea coup plot.
Recently I asked Brabazon about what he was reading. His reply:
I’ve just finished reading Killing Eve by Luke Jennings. It’s a classic cat/mouse, killer/cop story with a lot of dark humourVisit James Brabazon's website.and some very modern twists and tropes. Jenning’s main character is a psychopathic Russian assassin named Villanelle. She’s as lethal with a blade as she is with a pistol as she is with a rifle – and I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if she and Max McLean, the central spy-assassin character in the The Break Line, were ever to meet… There would be sparks. And blood. But whose? Jennings is very courageous writing about the inner-most workings of the female erotic mind. It’s hard to know if he’s hit the nail on the head or not, but I don’t think I’d ever be brave enough to do that – although women do play an absolutely central role in The Break Line.
Before that I re-read The Violins of Saint-Jacques - Patrick Leigh Fermor’s only novel. He gave me a copy (“something for the Istanbul bus journey”) after I stayed with him at his house in Greece in 1991. It’s a perfect picture of a world teetering on the edge of extinction – an allegory, perhaps, of the pre-War Europe he’d travelled through and written about and which, like the fictional island of Saint-Jacques, was destined to vanish forever.
The Page 69 Test: The Break Line.
My Book, The Movie: The Break Line.
--Marshal Zeringue
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