The Vulture is a Patient Bird by James Hadley Chase (1969)

He married because he wanted a son to carry on his name. He got his son: Max Kahlenberg. There was a real mystery about the birth. No one except the doctor and the nurse saw the baby. There was a rumour it was a freak...some even said it was a monster.

A replica of my copy of the book

The vulture is a patient bird. It does not kill its prey. It waits for another predator to kill and then swoops down on what is left of the carcass.

Max Kahlenberg is the vulture in Chase’s forty-sixth thriller. He is rich, reclusive, unscrupulous, crazy, and a compulsive art thief. He has a network of thieves who steal the finest art works from the world’s greatest museums including the Vatican. His ill-gotten treasures are stored in his secret underground museum in the hostile Drakensberg mountains in South Africa. He lives above the museum, in a sprawling mansion surrounded by 100 square miles of jungle and guarded by Zulu warriors.

The wheelchair-bound Kahlenberg has another secret that no one knows: a grotesque deformity below the waist that compels him to live by the remote from the time he wakes up in the morning.

The human vulture waits patiently for the three men and a woman who are on a secret mission to his house to retrieve a famous poison ring he stole from a rival collector.

The only thing common between the three men is that they have served a number of years in prison.

Garry Edwards is clearly the main hero. He is a tall and powerfully-built 29-year old helicopter pilot and car expert, currently out of work.

Kennedy Jones is a safari and wildlife expert from Johannesburg. Like Garry, he is a rather nice fellow with straggly moustache, long sideboards, and a pleasing smile.

Lew Fennel is the most vicious of all. He is short and heavily built like Rod Steiger with white hair, grey shifty eyes, and thin lips. An expert safe-breaker, Fennel is notorious for robbery, violence and unpremeditated murder, currently on the run from an underworld leader he betrayed.

The woman is Gaye Desmond, a sensuous and beautiful American freelance model employed by Armo Shalik to carry out secret operations. She is the Trojan horse.

The four ‘agents’ have been hired by Shalik to steal the ring from Kahlenberg. Of Armenian or Egyptian descent, he is a small, fat man with chubby hands and beady eyes, who undertakes difficult assignments for the high and mighty—from corporate barons to Arabian princes, art collectors to Texas oil millionaires, and shipping tycoons to powerful industrialists.

James Hadley Chase

The secret ‘operatives’ don’t know that Kahlenberg is expecting them with Hindenberg, his fully-grown cheetah, and the fierce Zulu warriors by his side. Nor do they know that he has a distorted sense of humour and has planned a little game for the thieving quartet.

The Vulture is a Patient Bird is not exactly a crime story that most Chase novels are famous for. Rather, the plot is a red herring in the mould of a Frederick Forsyth story. However, the story is unconvincing as the experienced combine of Garry, Jones, Fennel, and Gaye walk into a trap they ought to have suspected from the start. The suspense is tame and the style not as absorbing as some of Chase’s other novels.

There is a fair amount of humour, mainly due to the lighthearted Jones, and some tense moments as the wicked Fennel lusts after Gaye who in turn lusts after Garry, handsome in a rugged way. But that’s about as much sex as you’ll find in a Chase book notwithstanding the semi-nude women on the covers in particular editions of his novels.

Chase’s characters are usually not as intense or powerful as you might find in, say, a Mickey Spillane or Dashiell Hammett hardboiled novel. They’re often ordinary people leading ordinary lives, the kind you might find in a Harold Robbins pulp novel. The narrative is simple and the plot unsophisticated. A Chase novel is entertaining and can be read in less than two hours.

Born René Lodge Brabazon Raymond, English writer James Hadley Chase was a bestselling author, especially in Third World countries like India, from the 1960s through 1980s. In fact, he was the son of a colonel, a veterinary surgeon, in the colonial Indian Army. I read all his novels in college. Many of these had cops as main characters and the line “I gave him my cop look” was made famous by Chase. He was a prolific writer churning out a novel a year, sometimes two in a year.

You might want to read this book only if you’re a James Hadley Chase fan.