Title: Atom Bomb Angel
Author: Peter James
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 324
Rating: 3.5/5
Peter James is a cracking author, but his early stuff isn’t his best. That’s okay though, and I still quite like to read it because it reminds me that everyone starts somewhere and that there’s plenty of scope for improvement.
I’m not saying that Atom Bomb Angel is a bad book, but it does feel like a James Bond knockoff by someone who would love to be Ian Fleming but who’s never worked in espionage and hasn’t got the memo that Bond is a sexist dick. Of course, the age of the book also contributes to that effect, because some of the attitudes (and the technology) feel dated.
I actually think that one of my favourite aspects of the book was the foreword, because James talked about his approach to researching and writing books and how he made the decision early on to never write about something unless he’d experienced it himself, bar death. He does the same thing with locations because he was once asked what it was like in a country he’d never visited.
He also mentions that when he was writing this book, he contacted the press secretary of a British nuclear power plant and chatted to a chap called Terry Pratchett. Both of them were unknown authors at the time, but it’s cool to think that two of my favourites happened to have that conversation way back when.
Other than that, there’s not too much to say about this book. It’s competent enough but not exactly exceptional, and I doubt I’ll think about it again anytime soon. That’s a shame in some ways, because I get the feeling that James wrote it in such a way that he hoped it would be thought-provoking and generate discussion. Maybe it did that twenty years ago, but not so much today.
