Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Gardner, John (Edmund) - Anthony Boucher

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ANTHONY BOUCHER

["The Liquidator"] starts off as a deliberate (and skillful) parody of James Bond, presenting in Boysie Oakes, of the Department of Special Security, a professional killer with all of Bond's surface qualities and a quite unexpected inner deficiency. It then goes on to involve this amusingly conceived character with an elaborate espionage-and-assassination plot, developed with neatness and finesse. In other words, Mr. Gardner succeeds in having it both ways: he has written a clever parody which is also a genuinely satisfactory thriller.

Anthony Boucher, in a review of "The Liquidator," in The New York Times Book Review, October 18, 1964, p. 46.

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