Due to its 384-page length, I dreaded “The Venom Business” (1969), Michael Crichton’s fifth novel under the pseudonym John Lange. If it had been as weak as his worst Lange effort, “Easy Go,” I might not have finished it.
The best Lange book so far
Luckily, it’s his best Lange novel to this point. (The publisher thought so, too. It’s the first Lange book to be published in hardcover – at the time the mark of a superior or important novel.)
It is indeed overlong for a pulp adventure; every time I picked it up I marveled that I was still chipping away at it. It’s arguably overwritten.
“The Venom Business” (1969)
Author: Michael Crichton, writing as John Lange
Series: John Lange No. 5
Genre: Pulp adventure
Settings: Mexico and London, 1969
The plot isn’t necessarily convoluted (indeed, the plot is mostly unknown to the protagonist, Charles Raynaud), but its many layers and characters make it an inevitable slow burn.
The spirit of Bond
Crichton once said that in the Lange books, he mimicked Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. In “The Venom Business,” that’s crystal clear, and he’s successful at it.
Raynaud isn’t a government agent like Bond, he’s a snake venom smuggler. But like Bond – and unlike the lawyers or doctors of other Lange books — Raynaud is accustomed to action, adventure, gunplay and car chases. He’s an effortless ladies’ man, and he is fine with taking things as they come, rolling with the (sometimes literal) punches.
It isn’t accurate to say “The Venom Business” is a strong character novel. But it is a strong caricature novel. Everyone is one-dimensional but deliciously colorful. There’s Richard Pierce, a trust-funder and selfish womanizer; Jonathan Black, Pierce’s ugly brute of an uncle who is also an ingenious experimental scientist; and Lucienne, Pierce’s scheming stepmother who remains a man-magnet in middle age.
The latter two maneuver chess pieces to acquire the fortune that will soon go to Pierce at age 34, but it’s not as simple as killing him. The will of Pierce’s father states that if Pierce is dead, the family fortune goes to charity.
So he needs to be kept alive but manipulated into something. Plus, Raynaud suspects he himself is being manipulated.
Ladies’ man
Meanwhile, in Bondian fashion, Raynaud enjoys and returns the attention of several women. They’re initially characterized by their beauty, but Crichton gives them a little more depth. (Compare this to the female lead of “Zero Cool,” whom the author minimizes and disdains.)
The intelligent Sandra has a complex about her own beauty and how men react to it. Richard’s plaything, Dominique, is a marvelous sexual specimen yet desperately addicted to heroin.
Jane, the cover girl in the Hard Case edition, allows Crichton to play out thoughts of love rather than lust through Raynaud’s point of view.
This happens rather late in the book, even though Jane is the first femme fatale introduced. In the Raynaud-Jane relationship, I get a slight sense of the cranked-out, one-draft-and-done approach of other Lange books.
Chunnel of love
But overall, “The Venom Business” is carefully planned out. It has to be. The action starts in Mexico with Raynaud capturing a few valuable snakes, but he then goes to London for the bulk of the adventure.
We transition from snakes in the grass to the weeds of Pierce’s money-maneuvering and business ventures, and I found this aspect rather complicated. But in one fascinating aside, Crichton writes about Pierce’s plan to be the financial lead for the construction of the Channel Tunnel.
Also known as “the Chunnel,” this underwater tunnel connecting England and France finally opened in 1994. So read today, “Venom” provides a neat historical window into how people thought and planned about the Chunnel.
Although smuggler Raynaud and scientist Jonathan are indeed in the venom business, the title is also a metaphor for humans displaying venom toward one another in business and romantic jealousies. As such, this is Crichton-as-Lange’s most thematically integrated novel to this point.
But the main reason to recommend “The Venom Business” is that it’s flat-out entertaining, thanks to how Crichton draws these people. I mildly resented how the length cut into my other reading projects, but in the end I forgave it.