Agent OSS 117 #9 (#60 in France): “Trouble In Tokyo”
(French title “A Tout Coeur A Tokyo”) by Jean Bruce. Agent OSS 117 is American
CIA agent, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, stops in Tokyo after leaving Hong Kong,
Sitting the Tokyo office of his company, the local boss asked him to wait while
he interviews one of his secretaries. Eva Davidson has reported to her boss
that a Japanese spy is blackmailing her to obtain secret information on the
American military in Japan. His boss, Henry Babcock, wants secret agent Hubert
to work on the case while he’s in Tokyo. It’s obvious that all his agents are
known already, so Hubert should be able to uncover the spy. So pretending to be
Eva Davidson’s husband just arrived from America, he tags along with her on
supposed meetings. Unfortunately, everything seems to be going wrong. Well,
really, this was a fun read, with an interesting plot and mystery. If we didn’t
know it by his name, reading the story will quickly identify the author as
French. We read that he swims in the
girl’s eyes; he kisses her fingers; licks her palms. He is a black belt in judo
and karate, so we do get some martial arts in this yarn. The reader won’t have
much problem tagging the killer and spy, and solving the case, something a good
intelligence agent would do, if he wasn’t “swimming in the girl’s eyes” all the
time. This Fawcett Crest edition was released in the U.S. in 1965, but the
French edition was published in 1958, which means this novel takes place about
the same time as Earl Norman’s “Kill Me In Tokyo”. Very odd, but I doubt if
either author knew the other. The series ran for 255 issues in France, but only
16 were translated into English and published in the U.S. They were short and
fast reads, as well as fun. A shame more were not released in English.
