The Violent Ones by E. Howard Hunt

The Violent Ones Reviews

• 
  Dave

  This selection features an espionage novel by pulp author turned watergate burglar, a Howard Hunt, a man of many talents, a true renaissance man. This novel features a return to France decades after the Second World War and a search for missing gold bequeathed to partisans in he heat of war and then forgotten. Cafe singers, bodies dropping on doorsteps, and secret cabals fill the tale. Readable, although a bit stiff.
• 
  Angela

  I love these old '50s adventure stories where every woman is a whore and every man is a hero. If only life were black and white like that, wouldn't it all be simpler? Great escape book!
• 
  Austin Hunt

  To think this was written in the late 1940s is incredible. It would be fascinating to see this done retro-noir on film. I’d love it, personally. But beware, this is a potent “wokeness” antidote.
• 
  Chris Stephens

  Generic post WW2 foreign spy/mystery story.
  I might be biased on this one cause I find who he was to be deplorable.
• 
  Kenneth

  The author, Howard Hunt, is perhaps best remembered as E. Howard Hunt who was one of the burglars who broke into Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate Apartments in Washington, D.C., in 1972. Hunt worked with the OSS during World War II - the precursor to the CIA. The Violent Ones is set in postwar France, in the late 1940's. The novel's main character, an American named Paul Cameron, returns to France and becomes involved in a search for a large quantity of gold that the allies had parachuted into France during the war to help finance the activities of the French Resistance against the occupying Germans, but had been diverted and hidden. Cameron has to deal with both friends and foes, and telling them apart isn't easy - good cloak and dagger stuff. The book seems to have a good feel for the Paris of that era.