Catch Me: Kill Me
by William H. Hallahan
Summary
Boris Kotlikoff defected from the Soviet Union with nothing but his standing as a poet, which makes what happens to him senseless by every rule of the game: days before he is due to take American citizenship, he is lifted from Grand Central Terminal in broad daylight, and vanishes into New York as completely as if the city had swallowed him. He knows no secrets. He is worth no trade. And yet someone has him, and the wrong someone answering the phone will mean a dead poet.
Hallahan's structure is the book's engine: two hunts, run in parallel by men who do not know the other exists. Ben Leary is an Immigration and Naturalization officer, a career functionary from the government's least glamorous service, who takes the disappearance personally, his agency's almost citizen, and works it with a bureaucrat's tools, files, visa records, the paper trail of the city's émigré underworld. Charlie Brewer is a cashiered CIA man, disgraced and expendable, handed the off the books search by an agency fixer precisely because he can be disowned, and he works it in tradecraft's grey market, safe houses, pressure, barter with people who sell people. The two investigations converge on the same machinery from opposite ends, the reader alone seeing the whole board, and the finale runs on the book's cold premise, that a hostage's value and a hostage's life are separate accounts, kept by different men.
Around three hundred pages, wound tight.
Best for readers who want seventies espionage at street level, the defector thriller run as a two handed manhunt through a New York with no glamour left.
Historical Context & Significance
Catch Me: Kill Me won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1978, one of the award's genuine dark horse choices: William H. Hallahan was a Philadelphia advertising man turned novelist whose small, varied shelf ran from occult classics, The Search for Joseph Tully has its own cult, to espionage, and the Edgar arrived as its own event, the committee simply preferring the year's best made machine.
The book opened what became the Charlie Brewer sequence, the disgraced agency man recurring in The Trade and after, Hallahan's contribution to the era's post Watergate spy fiction, where the enemy institution and the employing institution are difficult to tell apart.
His reputation has stayed a connoisseur's property, kept alive by paperback hunters and the Edgar list itself, which functions for writers like Hallahan exactly as this site intends: the prize as a preservation order on books the market mislaid.