The Feather Men

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There is no mention of a multi-million dollar fee as the main motive for Danny and his two accolytes, Davies and Meier. Fiennes himself remained vague on the story's veracity, asserting that it was up to the reader to decide whether it was fact or fiction, and suggested journalists subject events and people described in the book to "forensic examination", and to draw their own conclusions. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. If your book is intended as a gift, please let us know and we will gift wrap it free of charge with a card and any message.

It is almost like two stories in one as equal time is invested in getting to know the main characters on both sides. In 2011, Fiennes stated in an interview with The Daily Beast: "I had chose [have chosen] to change my mind from time-to-time in terms of answering people, and at the moment, I choose to say that the book, and therefore the film, are total fiction.The background was this: Amr bin Issa, sheikh of a tribe in Oman, had lost four sons in his country's civil wars. The story is intriguing - hired killers getting revenge for an Arab sheik by performing hits on the British SAS men who killed one or another of the sheik's 4 sons. The book tells the story of four British Army soldiers, including two members of the Special Air Service, who are assassinated by a hit squad known as "The Clinic".

Well written with at times too much detail but on reflection it was needed to ensure the reader understood fully what was going on. Each of the assassinations was carried out in such an ingenious fashion that there would be no hint of foul play, but one clue these killings had in common was that all four victims had fought in the Arabian desert. This absorbing book details their 14-year struggle to capture the Clinic, a band of contract killers who murdered four former British soldiers. The Feather Men determined that the deaths of the four SAS was not so accidental… and spent years hunting down the killers. I enjoyed the movie adaptation and as the book had a controversial history I was interested in reading it.I will certainly read it again one day, before too long, if only to appreciate better the importance of the leading chapters, as well as recapture the thrill of the story itself.

I don't know if the director of that film, Joseph Mankiewitz, was still alive at the time of the final communist victory in Vietnam in 1975, but if he was, I hope he had the grace to feel at least slightly ashamed of himself for having so perverted the original film. Truth be told, I had to get through the first fifty or so pages, but after that I couldn’t put the book down. Not, of course, those ex-SAS soldiers are being targeted and killed, but more that there are a group of people whose main object – staying ‘loosely’ within the remit of the law, and only flirting slightly with criminality - is to protect them, which surprisingly proves to be no easy task. Well in Killer Elite even Chairman Mao is quoted, “In given conditions a bad thing can lead to good results. The paperback editions, however, presented the book as purely fiction and omitted the index and illustrations.How the hired killers went about their task (making each murder look like an accident), how they were finally apprehended and how this case in 1990 also put an end to the Committee--or so Fiennes ( Hell on Ice ) contends its members have assured him--makes for a highly suspenseful tale. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In June 2010, Alice Clarke, the daughter of SAS soldier Major Mike Kealy whose death is depicted in The Feather Men at the hands of The Clinic, spoke out, saying that her father had died during an endurance exercise in the Brecon Beacons in 1979. And in the end he succeeds not only in foiling de Villiers final attempt but in capturing him as well. It is a sad fact of life that “in democratic societies that there are no-go areas where crime thrives and innocent citizens are preyed upon yet where the police are powerless to act.

Finally, in the autumn of 1990, on a quiet English country lane, the Feather Men achieved a form of justice. The targets for assassination end up all being British SAS officers who were "seconded" to the Sultan's army during the war. Describing Fiennes' claims as "disgraceful", she stated that her mother had confronted the author at the Hay Festival, and he had admitted to her that the story was a work of fiction. Faint tidemarks on the page edges not affecting the text and a bump on the rear board foredge else very good in a near fine dustwrapper with internal spotting. If it is as non-fiction as it claims to be, this book renders 007’s evil at the Grade school level, and even limits Le Carre to early post-secondary stuff.Another parallel with The Quiet American, where the first film to be made of the novel, the 1958 version, with Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy, not the second version in 2002 with Michael Caine, ends up completely distorting the original story, making the English journalist, played by Redgrave, appear to be a naive and bumbling has-been and Pyle, the American agent played by Audie Murphy, is vindicated as righteous and far-seeing, in working towards the establishment of a 'third force' in Vietnam to defeat the communists and replace the effete and outdated French colonialists with the righteous forces of American freedom.