Play Dirty by Zeno
Play Dirty (1969) by Zeno Zeno (real name Gerald Theodore La Marque) was a veteran of the 1st Airborne Division and wrote 5 books, nearly all of which were authored while serving a 10-year prison sentence for homicide in London. Play Dirty is a novelization of a screenplay by Melvyn Bragg and Lotte Collin for the film starring Michael Caine. This is a classic “men on a mission” type story of a ragtag group of soldiers forced to work together to achieve a seemingly impossible task during the North Africa campaign of WWII—blow up a heavily protected German fuel depot in the desert. Our main protagonist is Captain Douglas, an employee of British Petroleum serving in the Royal Engineers, who is strong-armed into leading a raiding unit of criminals on what could be a suicide mission. His second-in-command is Leech, a sociopathic (and potentially psychopathic) convicted...