Movies today have strayed from the days when we looked in on people’s lives.  Reality shows have taken over, and do a poor job of it at best.  Looking over a friend of mine’s tape and DVD movie collection, I noticed a few of the oldies scattered among them.

“Ever watch those?” I asked.

“Sure.  We like watching them when the world gets too busy,” he said.

Later that evening, I stood in my den, looking a the wall that comprises my library, and decided the world was too busy.  I selected a book by Desmond Bagley, Flyaway from the section that holds all my old thriller/adventure books.  I had read it long ago.  So long ago, in fact, that I finished reading the book again without ever recalling the story.

Desmond Bagley along with fellow British writers such as Duncan Kyle, Hammond Innes, and Alistair MacLean, established the basic conventions of the thriller genre: a tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary hero pitted against villains determined to sow destruction and chaos in order to advance their agenda.

Flyaway was no exception.  The protagonist, Max Stafford, who runs a security firm, finds himself in the North African desert searching for an airplane that crashed in 1936.  It is not until page 247 that I found out why, and the book is only 251 pages long.  Why did I continue the read, not knowing where I was heading?  Because Bagley transported me away from the complex and over-crowded life I’m living.

I travelled by camel train across miles of barren Sahara.  I walked with him and Luke Byrne, as they trudged through soft sand dunes, running low on water.  I lived the slow pace of life then common to people of the desert.  And time slowed down for me.

Modern thrillers have strayed from the path.  I suppose it was the James Bond series that started it; a super hero doing the improbable, if not the impossible.  Don’t get me wrong, I love watching 007 movies, but don’t ever see myself as a spy.  Characters in books by the old masters are ordinary people I can relate to, who are caught up in events as circumstances pile up on circumstances, drawing the reader deeper into the plot.  But always in a way that is believable. 

In these books, the world is not at stake.  Often it is only some sinister event from the antagonist’s past, that also changes the protagonist view of the world he was drawn into.  In Flyaway, that world is the desert of North Africa.

If you want to escape the harsh reality of modern life for a brief moment, read one of Desmond Bagley’s books, they still abound on the shelves of used bookstores.