The Smuggled Atom Bomb
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A graduate student stumbles across an insidious plot to unleash nuclear terror on America’s greatest cities in a blood-chillingly prescient tale from one of thriller fiction’s twentieth-century masters Personable, good-looking, and a whiz at physics, graduate student Allan Diffenduffer “Duff” Bogan has a bright future ahead of him. But while staying at the home of an invalid widow in Florida, Duff makes a discovery that freezes his blood: a cache of uranium hidden in the locked closet of a fellow guest. The FBI is initially skeptical, but Duff knows all too well what his findings portend. Suddenly, not only is his future in jeopardy, the fate of millions of Americans hangs in the balance as well. If he cannot expose the horrific plot his nation’s enemies set in motion years before, entire cities will be reduced to piles of radioactive rubble in an unthinkable nuclear nightmare stretching from coast to coast. And time, it seems, is rapidly running out.
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Summary
Duff, a gangly physics graduate student, is a boarder and helpmate in the Yates household, home also to the young and beautiful Eleanor Yates. When Duff blunders into a mystery that might be a national threat - or might be nothing - they set out to investigate.
Review
I know of Philip Wylie primarily from When Worlds Collide, which – as a kid – I thought of as a sophisticated, modern, adult story (probably because it mentioned a girl in a bikini). In any case, presumably because of that, I've always thought of him as writer from the '60s or '70s. I liked When Worlds Collide, so I eventually picked up some of his other novels as e-books.
I was surprised to find a very different, very wholesome, '50s-feeling piece in this book. And, it turns out, that's because it was written in the early '50s, though Wylie wrote most of his books in the '30s and '40s. The kids are earnest, well-behaved, and full of good intentions, and shucks, the authorities aren't half bad. It's still got some of the ‘boy genius loves plucky beauty' elements to it that were starting to fade away by that point, but it comes across as charming rather than sappy.
There are no great surprises here, but it's a fun, easy, lighthearted book that I really wasn't expecting. And as a bonus, it was the perfect palate cleanser between snarky Steven Brust books. I'm looking forward to reading more of Wylie's books soon.
