The Feather Men

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At times it feels too theatrical to be real, but then again much of the story is choppy, random, filled with holes, you don't get all the answers you want. The story is intriguing - hired killers getting revenge for an Arab sheik by performing hits on the British SAS men who killed one or another of the sheik's 4 sons. Best book I have read in a long time and it is a true story, with a lot of it set in Oman, a country I have never thought very much about. The book tells the story of four British Army soldiers, including two members of the Special Air Service, who are assassinated by a hit squad known as "The Clinic".

Frankly, it's just another example of the Special Forces' reputation being exploited for commercial gain. A well structured book that is clearly more fiction than fact albeit some of the characters did/do exist.But, somehow, the uncertainty bred of where the boundary between reality and unreality lies, can, especially at a certain time of year, feel quite sickeningly worse. One, the clinic, consisting of three contract killers, and the other, the feathermen, a body of men dedicated to protecting the interest of the men and their families, who serve or have served in the SAS. Unfolding over 20 years, the killers are very successful despite the efforts of a private overwatch group known as The Feather Men, a secret group that tried to protect current and former SAS men.

However, there is a paperback edition of The Feather Men which includes photographs of the victims and other real life characters, a map (Oman in 1976) and other illustrations (e. It is perhaps the ultimate vigilante story, a tale that combines the white-knuckled tension of The Day of the Jackal and the revelatory drama of Spycatcher. I’d therefore like to think that there are a group of people who believe that, “When the police cannot provide adequate protection (because criminals are more sophisticated at finding loopholes in the law) then more appropriate methods have to be found. Another parallel with The Quiet American, where the first film to be made of the novel, the 1958 version, with Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy, not the second version in 2002 with Michael Caine, ends up completely distorting the original story, making the English journalist, played by Redgrave, appear to be a naive and bumbling has-been and Pyle, the American agent played by Audie Murphy, is vindicated as righteous and far-seeing, in working towards the establishment of a 'third force' in Vietnam to defeat the communists and replace the effete and outdated French colonialists with the righteous forces of American freedom.At the end of the movie, it was stated that this movie was based on the 1991 non-fiction true story historical novel by author Ranulph Fiennes.

black boards, spine lettered in gilt; dust wrapper, a little worn, edges lightly creased and split; Bloomsbury, London, 1991. I will not give away too much suffice it to say that it is a riveting read and is highly recommended. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The important thing is to be sure that the reasons are right, and that we admit the wrong, and that we don’t lie to ourselves. This absorbing book details their 14-year struggle to capture the Clinic, a band of contract killers who murdered four former British soldiers.It is a sad fact of life that “in democratic societies that there are no-go areas where crime thrives and innocent citizens are preyed upon yet where the police are powerless to act.

Well written with at times too much detail but on reflection it was needed to ensure the reader understood fully what was going on. The time-line also jumped all over the place, and between sets of characters, without warning and sometimes almost in the middle of a paragraph, so it took time to realise that the scene had changed. Each of the assassinations was carried out in such an ingenious fashion that there would be no hint of foul play, but one clue these killings had in common was that all four victims had fought in the Arabian desert. Only when Danny provides proof of their execution - which must be made to appear accidental - and a taped confession of their guilt, will Hunter be released. I know I would have enjoyed it far more had I not been second-guessing all the way through whether it was supposed to be a thriller or a retelling of a true story.Finally, in the autumn of 1990, on a quiet English country lane, the Feather Men achieved a form of justice. I had this book many many moons ago and somehow it has disappeared when i had thought about reading it. I happened to read that book in Saigon in 1963, some ten years after it was written, in the city where much of the action takes place, and even though the situation had changed since then the book still struck me as totally true to life.