Ross was forty years old when he wrote his first novel, The Cold War Swap, in 1966. Coming from a career as a soldier, reporter, and political campaigner, he leapt onto the literary scene with that first attempt at fiction and won himself an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery.

The principal settings for Ross's first novel were two cities in which he had worked, Bonn and Berlin. The cities are portrayed vividly with a postwar noir style that sets a tone of quiet despair in which the characters will do almost anything to survive. And the beauty of Ross's characters in this dark world is that they are colorful and alive and they seldom plan ahead. Critics have compared Ross's work to that of Raymond Chandler, not in subject matter but in style. I've always thought of Ross as the American Eric Ambler by way of Elmore Leonard. Ross was the master of colorful, unpredictable characters, thieves, scoundrels, drunks, assassins, madmen, fools, bureaucrats, and confused and bewildered professionals.

In The Cold War Swap as in so many of his novels, it is sometimes difficult to tell if we are meant to take the characters seriously or if the author is leading us down a series of streets, alleys, and dark rooms with no idea himself of who or what will be around the next corner.

Is McCorkle, who sits in his shady bar in Bonn and drinks, broods, and smokes to generic excess, the comic side of Rick in Casablanca ? Is Maas, the fat, sweating villain, the comic side of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon? Is Padillo Zachary Scott's distorted mirror image in The Mask of Dimitrios?

The book is a nonstop tale of blunders by both sides of the Cold War, a constantly changing attempt by mistaken spies and agents to hatch schemes they never quite put together. Is this book a soft laugh at the Cold War novel? I like to think that it is.

Men stagger into hotel rooms and fall dead. Bullets slowly kill off most of the cast. The best character in the book, Cook, the rich alcoholic, leaves the stage with the reader feeling that Thomas has played a dark joke on us, removing the character most full of life when we need him most.

There are things in The Cold War Swap that would seem badly outdated in other hands. In fact, there are dozens of books with the same theme, the rescuing of scientists from behind the Iron Curtain. Most of them are forgotten not because of their subject matter but because their pages were not peopled by the memorable, colorful characters of a Ross Thomas.

A caricature in other hands became a vulnerable human in Ross's books. The two gay defectors in The Cold War Swap move from near cliché to sympathetic humanness. Waas, the vile fat opportunist, is given his best shot and gradually becomes a basically bad man whom we can truly understand.

I knew Ross, a very soft-spoken, generous, quiet man who displayed none of the flamboyance of his characters. Ross was almost nondescript, seldom smiled, traveled everywhere with his wife, and quietly took in and turned to brilliant fiction the quirks and quivers of those around him, from the small, enthusiastic Mexican band that couldn't carry a tune to the Italian taxi driver who displayed his pride in his mastery of the English language by destroying it.

Ross listened. He took no notes. He didn't seem to be there, didn't ask questions. He observed. He imagined.

Ross could turn a phrase with the best of our ilk and not draw attention to it. Ross could surprise us with a sudden turn that left us bewildered and in the palm of his hand, wondering what would happen to the survivors.

The man was a masterful storyteller.

He once told me that he had no idea what his characters were going to do when he sat down each day to write, no idea of how fate might step in. He said, "I often wonder what's going to happen next and that's what makes it interesting for me and, if I'm lucky, for the reader."

He was more than lucky.

Copyright © 2003 by Stuart M. Kaminsky