Otto Penzler was the grand patriarch behind The Mysterious Press and the long-gone, much-missed magazine The Armchair Detective. He was instrumental in helping the mystery genre to flourish throughout the past two decades, a role he continues today, in part with the “Otto Penzler Presents” line for Forge, which rediscovers recent classic mysteries, all of which have won an Edgar (the highest award granted to mysterious fiction), and reissues them with a new introduction and prefatory material. The series includes the brilliant GOD SAVE THE MARK by Donald Westlake, Adam Hall’s vital THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM, Brian Garfield’s HOPSCOTCH, Joe Gores’ A TIME OF PREDATORS and William Boyer’s PEREGRINE. The newest entry in the series is GRANDMASTER by former married couple Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran.

Originally published in 1984 by Pinnacle, and winner of the 1985 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, GRANDMASTER is a well-chosen addition to the series. It’s a broadly drawn espionage action-adventure thriller crossed with Eastern mysticism and tales of spiritual monks with superpowers. So it’s not your traditional British cozy.

CIA expert Justin Gilead is the Grandmaster, called that in part because of his prowess at tournament chess, in part because he is a master agent, able to do things that others literally cannot, for Gilead was trained, starting at a very young age, by a group of mysterious monks. They immersed him in their religion, taught him their physical and mental regimen, and have thus crafted the finest example of manhood in the world. Or Godhood. For the monks believe that Gilead is actually the Patanjali, or the reincarnation of Brahma, and his destiny, as ever, is to continue to fight evil.

Gilead’s opposite number – for in spy fiction there must always be an opposite number – is Alexander Zharkov, head of Nichevo. Nichevo is a “dirty tricks” version of the KGB, and they play very rough indeed. Zharkov, too, though this is less well-explained, is some kind of superhuman force. His will, and his destiny, is matched to that of Gilead.

It’s spies, comic-book superhero ninjas and sexy babes all in one. That’s not a bad combination, actually. And Murphy and Cochran pull off this preposterous material quite well. Dialogue is smooth, the plot moves along well and there is an excellence in the brief descriptions of place and action. The wildly varying locations all come alive for the reader, and the brutal action scenes are appropriately filmic.

But almost paradoxically, it’s the characterization that suffers. Because Gilead is so perfect, and so spiritual, he’s almost soulless. He’s just too perfect for the book’s own good. It’s the one disappointment in what is really a rollicking adventure. As long as you’re comfortable with the fantasy, you should have no problem believing in the spycraft. And that saves the book. GRANDMASTER is worth the read, and it’s worth it to rediscover a book and see why it deserved its Edgar.

Murphy is, of course, the author of the popular THE DESTROYER series, clocking in at more than 130 books (and one feature film, REMO WILLIAMS … THE ADVENTURE BEGINS). If you collect those, you’ll want to get this.

Buy it at Amazon.