Review: ‘The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen’ by Thomas Caplan

• Reprints

Updated: March 13, 2012 8:03AM

In The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen, writer Thomas Caplan comes up with a dynamite premise for a thriller. The world’s top box-office star, Ty Hunter, is recruited to play a real-life secret agent on the assumption that his fame would place him above suspicion.

Caplan should have handed off this idea to someone who knew what to do with it. The premise is hardly realistic, nor is the rest of Ty’s background. Before becoming an instant movie star, he was a U.S. Army special forces soldier. When his country needs him, Ty is pressed into secret service by the president himself. This is all nonsense, really, and requires a lighthearted touch. Caplan didn’t have to go for full-on Austin Powers, but should have aimed for the tone of John Gardner’s old Boysie Oakes books, Bond parodies exciting on their own terms.

Caplan’s touch is anything but light. He writes the first third of his novel in a fusty academic style. “With which” and “of whom” constructions clot labyrinthine sentences that Caplan contorts to avoid ending with prepositions. Characters speak in massive paragraphs of dialogue, often telling each other information they already know to bring the reader up to speed. Caplan delves into much too much detail about subjects — the geography of Kansas City’s wealthy suburbs, the layout of a jeweler’s workshop, the terminology of bullfighting — that have no bearing on the plot.

That plot moves at the speed of an arthritic tortoise. After the president tells Ty that only he can save the world from nuclear terrorists, what is the first thing our hero does? He has lunch with his mother. That is lovely of Ty, of course, but it hardly conveys a sense of urgency. No one wants to read a book called The Spy Who Was Nice to His Mother.

In the broadest strokes, the plot recalls Ian Fleming’s Thunderball. Not only has the villain, billionaire financier Ian Santal, stolen nuclear warheads, but his base is a gadget-packed luxury yacht (instead of hydrofoils, this one has an escape sub). Here is where Ty’s movie-star cover actually makes sense, because it allows him to infiltrate Santal’s world of extreme wealth. To get aboard the yacht, Ty must win the heart of jewelry designer Isabella Cavill, who is Santal’s goddaughter, because “villain’s mistress” is no longer an acceptable job description for thriller heroines.

Caplan acknowledges his debt to Fleming by dropping references to the Bond movies. Caplan trips up here as well, though, by mistaking M for Q. A spy novelist ought to know the difference.

During the first half, the story hops from Kansas City to Cannes to Camp David to Rome to Hollywood to London to Vienna to Spain before settling in for a long stay in and around Gibraltar. Despite the frequent changes in location, the novel’s first half is dull and time-wasting. Things pick up in the Mediterranean Sea with an unexpected plot twist, but Caplan, belatedly sensing the book lacks humor, has Ty mouthing glib banter at the worst moments. It kills the tension in the few action sequences of note.

What’s frustrating about this book is that we catch glimmers of the fun, freewheeling, 1960s-style spy story this should have been. The essential ingredients are there, but Caplan buries them under leaden prose, bland characterization, verbose dialogue, needless plot complications and legions of unnecessary characters. The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen is a terrific title, but it advertises an energy Caplan can’t deliver. “The Spy Who Slumped Off the Screen” is more like it.

Jeffrey Westhoff is a local free-lance writer and film critic.