The Alexander Cipher

There is a long tradition of the Lone Wolf Hero in British fiction. Starting with Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, John Buchan's Richard Hannay and Dornford Yates' Mansell the unofficial adventurer has captured the public imagination for decades. These all had two things in common. They had military experience and independant means and plunged into their adventures either through force of circumstance, as Buchan's Hannay, or to relive the thrills of front line soldiering like Bulldog Drummond. After the Second World War these characters became less and less believable as the post war Labour Government taxed independant means out of existance and retained many of the wartime measures that restricted the freedom of private citizens. However, the public had not lost it's taste for Lone Wolf adventurers and so a new generation was invented who either charged for their services or who, like Hannay, found adventure looking for them. In the Fifties and Sixties Alistair Maclean became the benchmark writer for these tales though inventing a new hero for each story unlike the previous generation who wrote around one. Then came the Americans who had founded a whole nation on the Lone Wolf principle and whose heroes were very definitely outsiders as against the semi-establishment figures of the classic British stories. These characters either had no visible means of support or, as in the case of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt, the writer invents a whole Government departmnet to pick up the bills for his derring do. Since the arrival of the Americans there has been one attribute without which no hero qualifies as a Lone Wolf and that is the ability to seriously annoy the kind of wealthy and powerful people who can send squads of ex special forces hit-men to, unsucessfully of course, end his story prematurely. Here we come to the hero of Will Adams The Alexander Cipher who manages to annoy not one but TWO such men. The hero is Daniel Knox, archeologist, Egyptologist and scuba diving instructor which latter occupation has been forced on him through offending the wealthy and powerful. As the story opens he has been searching the reefs off Sharm-el-Sheik for traces of the lost treasure of Alexander the Great in company with an Australian called Rick. After beating up an Egyptian shipping tycoon he sets out for Alexandria one step ahead of the hit-men. There he hides out with an old friend who is called in to assist at a newly discovered tomb that is partly below the water table and thus requires divers. At this point another tycoon he had previously offended becomes involved. Knox's only chance of survival is to uncover the secret of Alexander's tomb and hope for the protection of a grateful Egyptian government. Will Adams has written a first class page-turner of a story (my highest mark of approval) and I look forward to many more from this writer.