Mr. Gann, a forthright and thoroughly masculine writer, misses fire with ["Soldier of Fortune," the] account of an attractive American woman's lonely search through the Hong Kong underworld for news of her husband, an American photographer who is mysteriously missing in Red China. The woman, Jane Hoyt, is real enough, but the underworld she explores is much too gentle and approachable to seem true, and its chief figure, an adventurer named Hank Lee, only occasionally convincing as his author struggles to persuade us that he is an enigmatic, ruthless colossus, a kindly Samaritan, and a wistful, unsure lover, all at the same time.

"Fiction: 'Soldier of Fortune'," in The New Yorker (© 1954 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. XXX, No. 34, October 9, 1954, p. 182.