Donald Hamilton
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Donald Hamilton (born 1916) is a U.S. writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction about the outdoors. His novels consist entirely of paperback originals, principally spy fiction but also crime fiction and Westerns. He is best known for his long-running Matt Helm series (1960-1993), which chronicles the adventures of an undercover counter-agent/assassin working for a secret American government agency.
Hamilton was born March 24, 1916 in Uppsala, Sweden. He later emigrated to the United States, attended the University of Chicago (receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1938), and served in the United States Navy Reserve during World War II. He was married to Kathleen Hamilton (née Stick) from 1941 until her death in 1989. The couple had four children: Hugo, Elise, Gordon, and Victoria Hamilton.
A long-time resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hamilton is a skilled outdoorsman and hunter who wrote non-fiction articles for outdoor magazines and published a book-length collection of them. For a number of years after leaving Santa Fe he lived on his own yacht, then relocated to Spain where, as of 2004, he still resides. A number of his Matt Helm novels are situated in the Santa Fe area and American Southwest in general; as Hamilton developed an interest in boating, many of the books began to have a nautical background as well.
Hamilton began his writing career in 1947, as American publishers began to experiment with issuing original paperback fiction. His first eleven novels, published between 1947 and 1959, were typical paperback originals of the era: fast-moving, formulaic tales with lurid covers and limited characterization. The most interesting of them is, arguably, Assignment: Murder, (alternate title: Assassins Have Starry Eyes), in which a mathematician working on nuclear bomb design has to save his kidnapped wife from a pair of shadowy villains.
The Matt Helm series, which began with Death of a Citizen in 1960 and ran for 27 books (ending with The Damagers in 1993 although another Matt Helm book, The Dominators, was completed in 1996 but not published), was more substantial. Helm, a wartime OSS agent who is drawn back into the world of espionage and assassination after fifteen years as a civilian, narrates his adventures in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone. He describes gunfights, knife fights, torture, and (off-stage) sexual conquests with a carefully maintained professional detachment, like a pathologist dictating an autopsy report or a police officer describing an investigation. Over the course of the series, this detachment comes to define Helm's character. He is a skilled professional doing a job that he's good at; the job just happens to be killing people.
Helm's cold professionalism invites comparison with Ian Fleming's James Bond, but he does not share Bond's materialism or hedonism. He has more in common with Sam Spade, the private-eye hero of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, or Stephen Hunter's master sniper Bob Lee Swagger.
External link
- Matt Helm: The Unofficial Home Page (http://members.aol.com/MacBorden/index.html)