The Vanishers is the title of a spy novel by Donald Hamilton which was first published in 1986. It is the twenty-third book in a series of novels featuring the adventures of assassin Matt Helm.
Plot summary
While Mac (Helm's boss) is on a rare solo assignment, elements within Mac's agency try to take power away from him. It's up to Helm to stop this coup in its tracks, while simultaneously dealing with some deadly family-related issues of his own. Meanwhile, in a storyline continued from The Annihilators, Mac finds himself in the middle of yet another revolution in Costa Verde.
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The Vanishers, one of the more complicated Matt Helm stories, is unique in several ways. Usually Helm is captured by the enemy in order to complete his mission. Here, for once, Helm’s boss Mac takes an active part in the action and is the one captured in order to deal with a gang of kidnappers. In most of these books the women are either ruthless foreign agents or naïve Americans who discover that however nice Helm may be personally, his profession is not at all nice. The Vanishers features a woman who is neither naïve nor an enemy. As punishment for a previous mistake in judgment, Helm is excluded from the real national security problem and exiled to Sweden, where he is kidnapped by a group who fear he may interfere with their plans. Eventually he escapes, figures out his mission and completes it, and helps the Swedes with their mission. The ending is different from any other Matt Helm book, but is consistent with his character.
MacDonald "Mac" Gargan is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. During his career as a supervillain of Spider-Man, the character originally appeared as the most well-known incarnation of the Scorpion, and later becomes the third host of the Venom symbiote.
Donald Bengtsson Hamilton was an American writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction about the outdoors. His novels consist mostly of paperback originals, principally spy fiction, but also crime fiction and westerns, such as The Big Country. He is best known for his long-running Matt Helm series (1960-1993), which chronicles the adventures of an undercover counter-agent/assassin working for a secret American government agency. The noted critic Anthony Boucher wrote: "Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told."
Matt Helm is a fictional character created by author Donald Hamilton. He is a U.S. government counter-agent—a man whose primary job is to kill or nullify enemy agents—not a spy or secret agent in the ordinary sense of the term as used in spy thrillers.
W.I.T.C.H. is an Italian fantasy comics series written by Elisabetta Gnone, Alessandro Barbucci, and Barbara Canepa. The series was first published by Disney Italy in April 2001 before the series was released in other countries. As of January 2005, W.I.T.C.H. has been released in over 65 countries. The final issue of W.I.T.C.H. was released in October 2012, concluding the series' 139 issue run. It is about a group of girls who find out they are the new guardians of the elements of Water, Fire, Earth, Air and Energy. The comics are drawn in line with manga conventions. They were subsequently adapted into an animated series, itself taking visual cues from anime.
Mrs. Emily Pollifax is the heroine of a series of spy-mystery novels by Dorothy Gilman. Mrs. Pollifax is a widow and senior citizen who decides one day to leave her comfortable apartment in New Brunswick, New Jersey and join the CIA. Through an initial misunderstanding, Mrs. Pollifax is given what is supposed to be a simple courier assignment by Operations Chief, Mr. Carstairs, and her ensuing adventure leads her to a career in espionage.
Kidnapped is a historical fiction adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, written as a boys' novel and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886. The novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hilary Mantel. A sequel, Catriona, was published in 1893.
Avenging Spirit, known in Japan as Phantasm (ファンタズム), is a 1991 2-player platform arcade game developed by C.P. Brain and published by Jaleco.
Death of a Citizen is a 1960 spy novel by Donald Hamilton, and was the first in a long-running series of books featuring the adventures of assassin Matt Helm. The title refers to the metaphorical death of peaceful citizen and family man Matt Helm and the rebirth of the deadly and relentless assassin of World War II.
The Wrecking Crew is a spy novel written by Donald Hamilton and first published in 1960. It was the second novel featuring Hamilton's ongoing protagonist, counter-agent and assassin Matt Helm. In this book Hamilton continued the hard-headed and gritty realism he had built up around Helm in the first novel of the series, Death of a Citizen. In contrast to most of the tough, but apparently bone-headed, action heroes who had preceded him for the previous 40 years of fiction, Helm was shown to be a tough—and, most important, a tough-minded—agent who actually thought ahead: a man who would let himself be ignominiously beaten up by the opposition to establish his credentials as an ineffective and unworrisome operative, if that was what his role called for, in order to achieve his ultimate goals. In this book, and in the others in the series, when Helm walks into an ambush and is hit on the head, it is because he wants to be ambushed, not because he is too stupid to anticipate the ambush.
Murderers' Row is the title of a 1962 spy novel by Donald Hamilton. It was the fifth novel featuring his creation Matt Helm, a Second World War assassin recruited as a counter-agent by a secret American agency. This was the last Matt Helm novel to not use Hamilton's naming convention of The (Verb)-ers. The expression "murderers' row" had been used previously to describe the batting line-up of the New York Yankees baseball team in the late 1920s.
The Silencers is an American Pathécolor spy film spoof motion picture released in 1966 and starring Dean Martin as agent Matt Helm. It is loosely based upon the novel The Silencers by Donald Hamilton, as well as another of Hamilton's Helm novels, Death of a Citizen.
The Interlopers, first published in 1969, was the twelfth novel in the Matt Helm spy series by Donald Hamilton, which began in 1960. It represents a middle period in the Helm novels, being about 80,000 words in length, somewhat longer than the first four or five in the series, but considerably shorter than most of the Helm books of the eighties and nineties, which were generally well over 100,000 words in length. At this intermediate length, the action moved swiftly while still allowing for plot complications, but avoided the occasional padded-out-by-dialogue tedium of the later books.
The Intriguers, first published in 1972, was the fourteenth novel in the Matt Helm spy series by Donald Hamilton.
The Intimidators was the fifteenth novel in the Matt Helm secret agent novel series by Donald Hamilton. It was first published in 1974.
The Terminators by Donald Hamilton is a spy novel first published in April 1975. It was the sixteenth episode in the Matt Helm series and was the first of the Helm books to portray him, on its cover, as a long-haired, side-burned citizen of the 1970s. This image was subsequently used for reprinted editions of a number of the earlier stories.
The Frighteners is a 1989 spy novel by Donald Hamilton, continuing the adventures of his creation, assassin Matt Helm.
Patricia Holm is the name of a fictional character who appeared in the novels and short stories of Leslie Charteris between 1928 and 1948. She was the on-again, off-again girlfriend and partner of Simon Templar, alias "The Saint", and shared a number of his adventures. In addition, by the mid-1930s, Holm and Templar shared the same flat in London, although they were unmarried. Although such co-habitation between unmarried partners is commonplace today, it was rare, shocking in the 1930s. The two also appeared to have a somewhat "open" relationship, with Holm accepting Templar's occasional dalliances with other women.
The Cat’s-Paw (1934) is a comedy film starring Harold Lloyd and directed by Sam Taylor. It was one of the comedian’s few sound films.
The Vanishing Shadow (1934) is a Universal science-fiction film serial directed by Lew Landers. The serial features what is believed to be the first appearance of a hand held ray gun in film.
On the Run is a series of children's novels written by Gordon Korman. It tells a story about two children who try to clear their parents' names, while they are also being hunted by the authorities themselves. The series has six books in total and was published in 2005 through 2006. The series also has a sequel series entitled Kidnapped, which follows the children after this series.
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