What Nanny Didn’t Tell Me
Bernard Porter
- BuyCry Havoc by Simon Mann
John Blake, 351 pp, £19.99, November 2011, ISBN 978 1 84358 403 2
In Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, Sir James Manson hires a mercenary called ‘Cat’ Shannon to stage a coup in the tiny West African state of Zangaro – Equatorial Guinea thinly disguised – and replace its tyrannical president with one who will, perhaps, be less tyrannical, and will definitely grant Sir James the highly profitable platinum-mining concession he wants. The operation goes like clockwork – no problems, no mistakes – though there’s a twist at the end. Simon Mann’s Cry Havoc might seem like a copy of this scenario – same place, roughly the same plot, thirty years later – but it’s much more fun because Mann’s attempted coup turned out to be, in his words, ‘a swashbuckling fuck-up’.
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[*] R.W. Johnson wrote about The Wonga Coup in the LRB of 16 November 2006.