David Grant #01 - Death's Foot Forward

George Brown Mair (1914-?) was a Scottish medical doctor and world traveler who drew upon his vacations behind the Iron Curtain in his ten-book spy series starring NATO Secret Agent David Grant from the U.K. The entire series has been reprinted on Kindle for modern electronic paperback readers starting with 1965’s Death’s Foot Forward.

As the novel opens, Grant is in Moscow on a date with a Russian ballerina. Grant is a surgeon working for the World Health Organization as a cover for his secret NATO spy missions. In any case, the ballerina’s Soviet minders want Grant to stay away from their girl. He travelled to Moscow to see her after a fling in Paris, but the Soviet security service is now hell-bent on extinguishing this budding romance.

It doesn’t take long before Grant is released and he starts doing violent spy stuff. Grant is a legit badass with a hard-on who kills any Russian standing between him nailing this ballerina again.

Grant’s espionage assignment doesn’t emerge until deep into the paperback. Basically, the Soviets have developed a drug/bio-weapon that will open the door to world domination by the U.S.S.R. Grant is tasked with infiltrating the Kremlin, killing the scientist behind the bio-weapon, and smuggling a culture of the germs while leaving none behind for the Russians. Of course, he wants to get his ballerina out with the germ sample.

As James Bond knockoff paperbacks from the 1960s go, this one is pretty good. The spy gadgets thing was a bit overdone and the preparation for the Moscow mission seemed to take forever, but the hardboiled violence was graphic and a spot-on while the mission never veered into the cartoonish. Recommended.