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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