Because I Needed a Furst Fix ...

The Caribbean Account, by Alan Furst (Dell, 1983), with cover illustration by Ron Lesser. This was the last of three novels Furst penned in the late 1970s and early ’80s, before he gained fame as an author of historical spy fiction.

Like its predecessor, Your Day in the Barrel (1976) and The Paris Drop (1980), it starred “marijuana dealer Roger Levin (Levy in the first book), who has the habit of becoming caught up in espionage scams and helping in the retrieval of a missing heiress,” recalls Australian critic-blogger Jeff Popple. “They were fun, easy going reads, notable more for their cool tone and dialogue, than their plotting.” In 1981, the year of its original hardcover publication, Kirkus Reviews called The Caribbean Account “a third too long and sometimes sophomoric, [but] more consistently amusing than Levin's previous doings.”

The magazine offered this plot description:

This time Levin is hired by a lawyer friend to deliver $500,000 to a stranger at Miami’s Orange Bowl Stadium. And though the delivery goes okay, the stranger is then promptly murdered (the money stolen) before Levin’s eyes. So, back in N.Y., Levin demands to know what’s going on—and he learns that the $500,000 was, in effect, a ransom for the release of young, crazy, missing heiress Fiona De Scodellaire: in exchange for the dough, her latest cult/guru was supposed to kick her out and send her home. But now that scheme has fallen through, and Levin is hired to find the heiress and the cult’s hideout. He sleuths around, traces the cult to the isle of St. Maarten, locates pudgy Fiona (who immediately lusts for Levin), and uses the sex hookup to lure Fiona home. Then, however, a miserable, Levin-less Fiona is lured back to the isle by her Jim-Jones-y guru (for assorted kinky rituals)—and finally there’s a lethal showdown between Levin and the guru.

Kirkus went on to criticize Furst’s habit of mixing storytelling styles. “When he shifts from hard-boiled comedy and sex-farce to more emotional stuff (Levin’s love life, the death of his chum), the effect is lame,” its review read. “And the thin plot here is self-indulgently stretched out—with the guru’s verbose journal, with Levin’s fantasies, etc. But it’s reasonably entertaining overall—with enough truly stylish and funny moments to promise better things ahead if Furst can continue to get his spunky talent under control.”

Better things, indeed.

(Hat tip to Robert Deis for the cover scan.)