It is, of course, a myth in this day and age that you can’t judge a book by its cover. One look at Death or Glory will probably tell you everything you need to know: with a total lack of irony, Michael Asher has turned his hand to fiction to offer up a Commando Comics-style war story, complete with cowardly upper-class officers, burly and independent-minded non-coms, dastardly German intelligence agents, conniving and fickle Italian deserters and drop-dead gorgeous damsels in distress. It’s a story that could have been written any time in the last fifty years, and it’s quite surprising in a lot of ways that Asher felt the need to write it now.

Our hero is ‘battle-hardened Sergeant Tom Caine’, the setting is North African, 1942, where the Western Desert campaign is going very badly for the British and their allies. At the opening of the book, Caine and his mates defy orders to rescue wounded comrades during a night withdrawal, and Caine is offered the classic deal: lead a dicey mission behind enemy lines, or have the book thrown at him. Having already been busted down from the ranks of the officers, Caine puts together a team of similarly scarred and individualistic coves and heads off in to ‘the Blue’, armed to the teeth, in a convoy of trucks and armoured cars. The object of his mission is the female officer codenamed Runefish, apparently a courier to Churchill bearing news that cannot be entrusted to the wireless . Runefish was shot down, and it’s Caine’s job to retrieve her before she falls in to enemy hands.

As well as following Caine, Asher follows Runefish; a German intelligence agent in Cairo who is trying to unmask the true nature of her mission (and who has a nasty line in sexual violence and murder);  and the Germans who are trying to track her down and interrogate her out in the field. Needless to say, Caine’s mission does not go smoothly – they have to contend with friendly fire, false leads, natives both helpful and not, and ultimately with Runefish herself; during the course of the mission, Caine’s force suffers a great deal of attrition from these depradations.

It’s an enjoyable enough tale, well told, and there’s no doubt that as a former SAS member, who has crossed the Sahara on foot with camels, and who is married to a noted Arabist, Michael Asher knows his stuff. There are, it may not surprise you to learn, a few problems: at the start, descriptions of weapons and armour are almost fetishistic, and almost everyone has a jolly nickname, like Henry ‘Wingnut’ Turner, and Paul ‘Shirley’ Temple. These get repeated all too often, and the description multiple times of a soldier ‘who looks likes the sailor from the Player’s Navy Cut packet’ suggests that Asher is using this as a substitute for actually assigning personalities to his minor characters.

The biggest issue, though, is the battle scenes. Stymied by the fact that the English language has only so many words for ‘aim’, ’shoot’, ‘fire’, ‘kill’, ‘pull the trigger’, etc., Asher has invented a vast and at times bizarre vocabulary to try and avoid repetition – and it becomes increasingly intrusive as the book goes on. Apparently the verb ‘to spudsack’ means ‘to fall over when shot’, to ‘pazazz fire’ means to fire a gun, as does ‘to smoothbore’ (I could go on). While it’s clearly difficult to write extended battle scenes without repetition, you can’t help but feel that Asher’s editor should have tried to rein him in a bit, especially with his more onomatopoeic and extravagant made-up words.

If you want a good WW2 adventure for some light holiday reading, you could do a lot worse that Death or Glory – it’s a competent story and it does do a great job of evoking old-fashioned Commando Comics storylines, with added blood and guts. Be aware, however, you are buying a book in which the author frequently manages to refer to the Germans as ‘Jerry’, ‘Fritz’, ‘the Hun’ and ‘the Bosche’ all within the same paragraph.

It’s clearly the plan that Sergeant Tom Caine will march again (the jacket proclaims this ‘The First Sergeant Tom Caine Novel’). Let’s hope that somebody buys Michael Asher a new thesaurus before he writes the next one.

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