Southern Spies

With multiple arrests of Americans spying for the Soviet Union and other countries, the press dubbed 1985 “The Year of the Spy.” That’s according to the FBI, which maintains a “Year of the Spy” tribute page with a rogues’ gallery of incarcerated intelligence workers. Ace Atkins sets his sprawling new thriller, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, in 1985 Atlanta, where a cast of spies, misfits, and one intrepid teenager play out consequential Cold War intrigue in a Southern setting.

Peter Bennett, 14, is certain that his mother is dating a Soviet spy and sets out to prove it. Simultaneously, an actual KGB agent defects in the American embassy in Rome, while an American FBI agent with connections to the defector has an odd relationship with a stripper who thinks she is serving the CIA. Add a washed-up pulp detective writer, a heavily muscled Atlanta drag star, a sexy Russian sleeper assassin, an earnest young FBI field agent — the only Black female agent in Atlanta — and you have a cast that carries the story through dead drops, dead bodies, and drop-dead comedy.

Atkins knows plenty about the 1980s, having lived through the decade (he was the fictional Peter’s age in 1985) and because he took over Robert P. Parker’s popular Spenser series after the author’s death in 2010. Parker published 11 Spenser books in the ’80s, which Atkins fully absorbed for the 10 titles he wrote in the series (along with 11 books featuring Atkins’ own Mississippi lawman, Quinn Colson).

Starting with the Tears for Fears tune that provides the title, Everybody Wants to Rule the World is packed with cultural touchstones that will make those who survived the decade feel almost nostalgic for it (a phrase this reviewer, for one, never expected to type). Younger readers may find themselves digging up old songs and retro fashions. “A boy in a leather jacket with spiky black hair and eye make-up had his arm around a girl with wild blond hair and dangly earrings,” Atkins writes in a skating rink scene. A few pages later, when FBI agent Dan Rafferty points a gun at a man threatening his stripper pal, the aggressor turns toward him, “his denim jacket opened to show a bright red COKE IS IT! T-shirt.”

Beyond dated dance tunes and clothing, the increasingly complex plot moves through multiple points of view, with six major characters dominating their own chapters in rotation. This could become confusing if each person were not so distinctly drawn, flawed in some memorable way, and ultimately likeable (even, to an extent, the sleeper assassin). The reader starts rooting for all of them. It’s the sort of cast that drives the best streaming shows — a not unlikely destiny for this novel, considering that in November news dropped that Cheo Hodari Coker, creator of the Netflix series Luke Cage, will adapt Atkins’ previous book, the Memphis noir romp Don’t Let the Devil Ride, for Tomorrow Studios.

Perhaps the most flawed and likeable of the bunch is Dennis X. Hotchner, a one-eyed failed writer of hard-boiled paperbacks. He works in a used bookstore when not ranting about inane shows like Knight Rider playing on a barroom TV. After his publication contract ran out six years earlier, his agent told him before quitting:

You know what I could sell, Hotch? A contemporary spy novel. Something with sexy Russian broads, killer snipers and amnesia. Fucking Bob Ludlum is killing it out there.

With this very meta rant, which continues through several profane lines, Atkins lays out his own book: a Robert Ludlum plot as Carl Hiaasen or Charles Portis might have written it. Or maybe Kurt Vonnegut: Hotch, as his few friends call him, evokes no fictional persona so much as Vonnegut’s failed sci-fi writer, Kilgore Trout. Peter seeks Hotch’s help in bagging his mother’s Russian boyfriend, due to an article — “KGB Spies Living Next Door” — the boy finds in a defunct publication called Front Page Detective.

Hotch explains, “It’s just some bullshit I wrote to fill the coffers, kid.”

Of course, Peter won’t buy this. Before long, Hotch and his sidekick in drag are on the trail of dangerous spies — along with everyone else. The principals bounce around Atlanta (and occasionally the outskirts of Washington, D.C.) like so many pool balls, clacking off in surprising directions. Eventually all drop into mostly satisfying pockets, just as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev prepare for a summit “to decide the fate of the world.”

Everybody wants to rule that world. With this book, Atkins once more proves his ability to rule the thriller.