Matt Helm - The Character and The Series

The Character and The Series

The character appeared in 27 books over a 33-year period beginning in 1960 and established Helm as one of the most tough-minded, pragmatic, and competent of all fictional agents, whatever their roles. The series was noted for its between-books continuity, which was somewhat rare for the genre. In the later books, Helm's origins as a man of action in World War II disappeared and he became an apparently ageless character, a common fate of long-running fictional heroes.

In the first book in the series, Death Of A Citizen, which takes place in the summer of 1958, 13 years after the end of the Second World War, Helm is frequently referred to by other characters as being of incipient middle age and apparently soft and out of shape, although no specific age for him is given.

In the next story, which apparently takes place in the summer of 1959, a hostile agent from a rival American spy organization taunts Helm as being a shopworn 36-year-old and clearly over the hill as a physical specimen. Later in the book, Helm himself says that he is 36 years old.

A long Internet article (on the now defunct members.aol.com) by Hayford Peirce examined the issue of Helm's age, however, and found this figure to be improbably young given the information about Helm's background in Death Of A Citizen. Peirce postulated that Helm was actually several years older than the 36 years mentioned in The Wrecking Crew and that he was probably born around 1918. In the remaining 25 books of the series, however, the age issue vanishes completely.

Critic Anthony Boucher wrote: "Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told." Golden Age mystery writer John Dickson Carr began reviewing books for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1969. According to Carr's biographer, "Carr found Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm to be 'my favorite secret agent,'" although Hamilton's books had little in common with Carr's. "The explanation may lie in Carr's comment that in espionage novels he preferred Matt Helm's 'cloud-cuckooland' land. Carr never valued realism in fiction."