The Devil’s Tiger
by Robert Flynn and Dan KlepperTCU Press, 332 pp., $24.95
The subject is tigers. Siberian tigers (an endangered species), bound from Russia to American zoos. The first stop is a Texas zoo, and the airplane from Russia is due in Houston when the unthinkable happens: A storm causes a violent cargo shift and one of the tigers gets into the passenger compartment through the plane’s galley. With this outlandish opening, The Devil’s Tiger announces its intention to grab, and, as it were, maul and bite. A somewhat mangled but brave pilot manages to crash-land the plane off the coast of Padre Island, and most of the human and animal passengers survive. Three tigers disappear into the South Texas night.
Robert Flynn is a veteran and honored Texas novelist (North To Yesterday, In the House of the Lord) and nonfiction writer (A Personal War in Vietnam). Flynn’s good friend, the late Dan Klepper, was the outdoor editor of the San Antonio Express-News, whose best-known work in book form was Pocketguide to Deer Hunting: From Kill to Kitchen. During hunting and fishing trips, the two friends made up a story for a novel set in Texas, one whose plot turned on Cold War relations between the U.S. and the USSR. Klepper died about the same time that the Soviet Union did, leaving Flynn with a dated Cold War adventure story. He put it in a drawer. Revisiting it and rewriting it last year, Flynn fine-tuned the story, adjusting the international politics to reflect the current state of unease instead of the old one. This is very much to our benefit because The Devil’s Tiger is a compelling book, a page-turner that is literate, accurate in its setting, and a genuine thriller that doesn’t pander to an audience used to genre tales.
The book’s strongest point is its characters, and here is the array: a Russian woman veterinarian who has accompanied the tigers, a West Texas naturalist who uses his dogs to capture Mexican mountain lions, a couple of dysfunctional federal bureaucrats who are trying to advance their careers by successfully pulling off this tiger chase, an ambitious television reporter who is making her national reputation with her tiger updates, and a band of crazed right-wing vigilantes who hide in the South Texas brush, alternately trying to kill the tigers (they are Russian, after all) and search for what they are convinced is a secret United Nations base that is strategically located on the Texas/Mexico border. Add to this various small-town Mexican heroes and villains, a foolhardy Anglo rancher who meets his end as a meal for an 800-pound pussycat, and various minor characters who add authenticity to this well-crafted story.
Part of the page-turning is a compulsive search for the next scene with the tigers, because they are what drive the book, with their silent stalking through the Texas and Mexican brush country. Ocassionally, they make sudden leaps through screen doors of trailers crowded with sleeping children. Other amusing touches include the contrasts between the Russian science bureaucrats who are portrayed as ambitious and venal; their American counterparts are merely ambitious and naive. And the graphic juxtaposition of human sex and tiger sex — talk about jungle fever!
To reveal more would be to compromise the real pleasure of this excellent entertainment, but after you read the first chapter, you will know that in Bob Flynn and Dan Klepper, you are in the hands of masterful storytellers.
This article appears in October 6 • 2000.