Hugh Laurie is best known as an actor – the volatile but brilliant Dr. House or Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry's Jeeves – but he occasionally branches into other creative arts, like jazz music and writing. In 1996 he published a just-this-side-of-spoof espionage thriller called The Gun Seller.
Part Wodehouse, part Robert Ludlum, Laurie's only novel finds ex-soldier Thomas Lang bamboozled into infiltrating a terrorist group in order to short circuit an embassy attack orchestrated by an evil munitions manufacturer as a marketing stunt. The plot is complicated enough to stay interesting and internally consistent enough, just, to stay acceptable.
Best of all, it is funny. It is really funny, which is really hard to do. Laurie definitely channels his inner P. G. Wodehouse, but through a spy thriller filter, so it comes out like a James Bond story written by Mark Steyn. Pure fun. Too bad Laurie hasn't come out with a sequel.
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NOTES
I bought this on a whim and finally read it for the TBR challenges I am doing this year:
- MT. TBR CHALLENGE (hosted by Bev on My Reader's Block)
- OFF THE SHELF CHALLENGE (hosted by Bonnie on Bookish Ardour)
- TBR PILE CHALLENGE (hosted by Adam on Roof Beam Reader)