The Feather Men

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This book discusses mostly a group of ex-Special Forces and SAS soldiers who are being targeted and killed by professional assassins. Now supposedly there was a secret British vigilante organization (the "Feather Men") looking out for the health, welfare and families of former SAS members.

Only when Danny provides proof of their execution - which must be made to appear accidental - and a taped confession of their guilt, will Hunter be released. It was written like a non-fiction work (every acronym or slightly unusual word was then explained in brackets, frequently quite unnecessarily), and the "exciting" scenes were told in a completely matter-of-fact way, losing any sense of tension. If its true then it is an astonishing account of the machinations of a world which could only be related by a man of Ran Fiennes' amazing experience. However, there is a paperback edition of The Feather Men which includes photographs of the victims and other real life characters, a map (Oman in 1976) and other illustrations (e. It is about a group of contract assassins, The Clinic, who were hired by an Oman sheikh to carry out revenge killings for the deaths of his four sons during the civil war.But, again because of that, I was a bit disoriented at first, because the prelude, the initial chapters, were slow and over-detailed for that kind of fiction, almost the opposite of a page-turner. black boards, spine lettered in gilt; dust wrapper, a little worn, edges lightly creased and split; Bloomsbury, London, 1991. The Feather Men determined that the deaths of the four SAS was not so accidental… and spent years hunting down the killers. I had this book many many moons ago and somehow it has disappeared when i had thought about reading it. For better or worse, I almost never read a book without finding out what it's about, but I do wish I hadn't read the foreword until I'd gotten into the story.

It was even made into a movie - The Killer Elite - but that movie veered far away from this narrative. I don’t want to throw any spoilers into this review, just that I’d like to believe the whole book is true.There’s no doubt that, “The very decency of democracy hinders the prevention of numerous crimes,” and that as the law forbids the forces of the law to take them out, so the killers (I. At the end of the book, Fiennes holds up his hands and justifies his use of his background knowledge and experience to ‘paint’ the scenes for which there was no primary (first-hand) source. At times it feels too theatrical to be real, but then again much of the story is choppy, random, filled with holes, you don't get all the answers you want. 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. Unfolding over 20 years, the killers are very successful despite the efforts of a private overwatch group known as The Feather Men, a secret group that tried to protect current and former SAS men.

The story is extraordinary and portrays with great accuracy many scenes that were familiar to me as a contemporary soldier. Furthermore, the death had to look like an accident or from natural causes, which The Clinic excelled in doing. There were several times I wondered what Truman Capote would have done had he been presented this story to tell, but the basic fact is, Capote would never have found himself in the position this author did. And not only is it ‘possible’ but it is sometimes ‘necessary’ to do the wrong thing for the right reasons.The time-line also jumped all over the place, and between sets of characters, without warning and sometimes almost in the middle of a paragraph, so it took time to realise that the scene had changed. The sons of the sheikh had been military combatants in various efforts in Oman and as such were killed in military combat by British SAS (Special Air Services) men. I’d therefore like to think that there are a group of people who believe that, “When the police cannot provide adequate protection (because criminals are more sophisticated at finding loopholes in the law) then more appropriate methods have to be found. But, somehow, the uncertainty bred of where the boundary between reality and unreality lies, can, especially at a certain time of year, feel quite sickeningly worse.