Four months ago I wrote a Twilight Patriot review of Ascendent: Star Spangled Squadron, a graphic novel by Alexander Macris. By day, Macris is a professional tabletop game designer; he also writes the right-wing Substack Contemplations on the Tree of Woe. In my review I praised Macris’s keen insights about why woke art is bad art, and his willingness to make better art himself rather than simply whining about it. Finally, I challenged my readers who aren’t into superhero stories like Star Spangled Squadron to consider making right-wing art or literature of their own in the genres that they do like.
Richard Nichols, who found his way to my site by way of Macris and Tree of Woe, didn’t need to hear my challenge. Back in 2017, he had already published a solidly non-woke spy novel entitled Lost Causes, and he was kind enough to send me a free copy for reviewing. I read the book this summer and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Nichols was born in Jamaica to a British father and Mexican mother and spent much of his business career working in Britain’s food industry. Among other things, he owned the British and Irish franchise for Corona Extra Mexican beer. His connection with spy stories began early; not only was his family in Jamaica when Ian Flemming wrote his last few novels, but his father even owned one of the boats in the marina scene in Dr. No.
By the 1990s, Nichols was back in Jamaica. “This came about because I could see the terrible direction the U.K. and the rest of Europe was taking,” he told me. “I explored the possibility of entering politics, but since there was no meaningful resistance to speak of, I soon realized my best bet was to start over in another country.”
Nichols’s stint in Jamaica lasted only a year (the crime was terrible), and he ended up in Mexico instead, where he has lived happily for about twenty years. (If the idea of moving to Mexico to get away from crime strikes you as odd, just remember that Mexico is a big and diverse country. Yucatán, where Nichols lives, has about 35 percent of the U.S. per capita homicide rate and the lowest rate of any Mexican state. Also, about a quarter of the people there still speak Mayan.)
The hero of Lost Causes is a middle-aged “axe-man” working for a top-secret British intelligence agency called MI11 or, less formally, “The Mill.” His codename is John Buchan, chosen by himself in honor of the Scottish statesman and adventure novelist (and, not coincidentally, another famous J.B. with whom he shares a lot of traits.) Mr. Buchan hasn’t always gone by that name — he had a past life as an ordinary army officer, fond of rugby and English pubs — but he’s reluctant to dwell on those memories, and his backstory comes out only gradually, in flashbacks.
The main yarn of Nichols’s novel begins when John Buchan’s fellow axe-man, Franchise, is brutally killed while investigating some mysterious goings-on at a high-tech compound in Mexico’s Yucatán jungle. Buchan is summoned by his superiors at The Mill and given his 67th and final mission — to find out what is going on, and (if necessary) kill everyone who gets in the way of his putting a stop to it. Buchan doesn’t much like the fact that, succeed or fail, this mission will be his last, but the higher-ups have decided that MI11 (whose axe-men exist mainly to kill terrorists and other state enemies who aren’t notorious enough to trigger a political crisis) is a relic of a bygone age, and its authority is set to terminate only a few days after Buchan boards the airplane for Mexico.
I will confess that I felt the book was slow to get started, with little action in the first 90 pages. But this changes shortly after Buchan checks into a hotel near the Yucatec city Mérida, which the author describes as
everything that Cancun isn’t. Quiet, respectable, conservative, and authentic, it remains relatively unknown, simultaneously giving the impression of being a sleepy, provincial backwater that’s trapped in time or a sophisticated, bustling mini-metropolis, depending on the mood. In addition to this, it enjoys a reputation as one of the world’s safest cities, being as far removed from the cartel-related violence elsewhere in the country as London is from, say, Athens or Bucharest.
But the pleasantness of his surroundings doesn’t stop the bodies from hitting the ground once the bad guys show up. For the next two hundred pages, Richard Nichols treats us to a solid thriller packed full of shootouts, car chases, close-quarters combat, daring escapes, and injuries that would leave a normal man on his back for weeks, but that Buchan just shrugs off and then keeps on fighting...because he knows that the alternative is dying, and he isn’t the kind of man to give up.
And yet Lost Causes is a multilayered book. Beneath the heroics, there is another level to the story, more political and sadder. John Buchan, for all his derring-do, is fighting on behalf of a civilization that doesn’t respect people like him anymore, for a civilization that’s dying...and he knows it. Indeed, he has known it for a long time — he began his military career fighting not for Britain, but for his true homeland, Rhodesia, a country that, thanks to the actions of British politicians, no longer exists.
Buchan’s anger doesn’t stop him from moving to the United Kingdom after the fall of Rhodesia, or serving in the British military, but we readers do get treated, every few pages, to his bitter complains about the state of modern society. We hear exactly what this hardened soldier thinks about politicians tolerating migrant crime, or children growing up with little knowledge of their country’s heroic past and even less respect for it, or sentimental leftists demanding (and getting) mercy for IRA terrorists who killed civilians during the Troubles, or the rotten state of popular culture, or the explosion of obesity, or the slovenly way that most of his countrymen dress.
Often I found this annoying. (James Bond is not a complainer.) But I had to admit that there was a fair amount of realism to it. After all, seeing your country falling apart, and despairing about the future, but not really knowing what to do except to keep holding up your little piece of civilization, is a core part of the conservative experience these days. (I’ll admit to rolling my eyes at one passage where Buchan includes “chastity” in a long list of lost virtues right after sleeping with a woman he’s known for all of one day.)
And so, even before he hears the bitter news that he has only one more mission before MI11 closes down, our hero is at an impasse. His tragic backstory being what it is, he never really thinks about retiring from the service, settling down somewhere pleasant, marrying, and having a bunch of children. Nor is he trying to reform the surrounding culture, via political action or otherwise. Instead, he remains focused on his work, despising the villains within his society even as he hunts down and kills worse villains outside it. He’s a perfect fit for the Clark Gable line from Gone with the Wind. Why fight now? “Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes, once they’re really lost. Or maybe, maybe I’m ashamed of myself. Who knows?”
Speaking of villains, the bad guys in this story are a mixed bag. Nichols does an excellent job of showing variations in the quality of terrorists and henchmen. Some are careless blowhards who go down without much of a fight, even when the hero is zip-tied and drunk. Others are tougher and cleverer, and they keep John Buchan within an inch of his life through the gun fights and the close-quarters combat, and the wild car chases and the foot chase through the Yucatán jungle — and did I mention that the finale is fought out in the middle of a category-5 hurricane? In the end, Buchan’s survival depends as much on luck, and on the aid of a very special girl he runs into, as on the skills he picked up before and during his last 66 missions.
My main complaint is that not all of the villains have believable motivations. I could understand the people who are in it for money, and even those who take pleasure in doing violence, but I didn’t like having to keep asking: Why are we seeing IRA bombsmiths team up with Muslim terrorists from the Middle East to launch a very elaborate attack on the United States? Who is bankrolling all this, and why? Coherent motives, and a common ideology for the terror outfit, would have made it a better story.
Near the end of the book, we read a twenty-page long monologue in which the top villain explains to the hero (who he wrongly thinks is about to die) his complete philosophy of life and politics — a theory of how a uniquely rich and permissive society, one where “everyone is always free to take the easiest, least demanding route,” has led to most people simply becoming servile drones, predators, or moochers, leaving only a handful of real men (who are increasingly misunderstood and despised) to do the work that keeps everyone else alive.
This man’s belief system is, to a letter, the same as the hero’s — he agrees with John Buchan about who’s good and who’s evil. He’s just chosen to be on Team Evil, and he takes pleasure in what he thinks will be his team’s final triumph. I’m sure that Nichols meant this scene to be exciting and climactic, but to me it seemed out of place, like one of those “If you only knew the power of the Dark Side!” rants that belong in high fantasy.
As I see it, villains in spy thrillers should be less like Milton’s Satan (“Evil be thou my good”) and more like James Bond’s enemies in SMERSH, or the hijackers whom Harrison Ford fights in Air Force One — that is, they should have a belief system different enough from the hero’s that they can actually feel like they’re the good guys.
But then again, everyone’s tastes are different — and to Richard Nichol’s credit, he does give us some real character complexity in the person of John’s love interest, Cari, and her father, of whom I won’t say more. (Some surprises are best left in place.)
On the whole, Lost Causes is an exciting thriller that I would highly recommend to any right-winger who likes that kind of literature. (You can get the hardcover on Amazon.com for $17.50.) It’s a story that knows how to entertain, but it also knows how to make you think, right down to the ending: With John Buchan having triumphed over his enemies, and even won the girl of his dreams...but with MI11 gone, and the civilization that he loved so much no longer caring about its own survival, what is he to do next?
There is room here for a sequel. Nichols told me he is working on one. Having enjoyed the first book so much, I would definitely read it.
Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree. You can read more of his writings at his Substack.
Image via Needpix.