You won’t find too many novels that include a passage like this:

Yes, Dr. Berlin, but what do you hams talk about? Is what they usually said to him, and he’d realize then that they’d never understand, and he’d change the subject. But sometimes, though rarely, he’d come across someone who really dug his hobby, and then you couldn’t get him off. He’d go on and on about the feeling it gave him of being able to move himself through time and space, annihilating time and distance, his mind, his body, his consciousness out there roaming the planet like some cosmic spirit, and the sense of power, benign power, not the evil kind, knowing that his voice was rattling a loudspeaker in a far-off room in Bombay, or going out through an open window in Johannesburg to someone walking by on the street outside, or filling a room carved out of ice below the frozen wastes at the South Pole.

The here and now, the physical and geographical limitations that all beings are stuck with, would fall away from him as he immersed himself in the action on twenty meters on a good night in spring when the sunspots were dancing and the ionosphere was in a reflective mood and the short path was open to Europe and the Middle East and the Antarctic and Australia, and maybe Africa would come sneaking in the other way around, and later the Far East and Indonesia, you never knew what. He’d close his eyes, or gaze hypnotized at the speaker, and he’d listen to them and talk to them, voices in the night, his night, that is, with the moon shining into the den through the great beam antenna that rose from the lawn outside…

…And while it was his night in California, it was tomorrow morning in Oslo and Hil was getting ready to shovel the snow from in front of the garage so he could go to work, and in Brisbane it was late tomorrow afternoon and Tommy had just gotten home from a rainy day at the lab, and Toshi in Kyoto had just finished tomorrow’s dinner, and then later, Phil was talking to him from his car speeding through the Malaysian jungles to pick up Margaret at her French lesson in Penang, and Phil would lower the car window and let him hear the street noises of Penang even as he sat in his den in the house in Bel Air while the guy right next door was listening to the eleven o’clock news on Channel 2, for God’s sake, and you ask me what do we talk about? We don’t talk about a goddamn thing and it’s terrific.

Extract from The French Atlantic Affair, chapter 7

A novel that uses Amateur Radio as a plot point? It should come as no surprise that the author was himself an Amateur, Ernest Lehman K6DXK. As you will see from his Wikipedia page (how many Amateurs even have one?) he had an illustrious Hollywood career as a screenwriter, producer and director. Alas, he became a Silent Key in 2005.

The French Atlantic Affair centres around the hijacking of a French cruise liner, S.S. Marseille, by a gang of aerospace engineers who have lost their jobs as a result of the cancellation of the Apollo space program. Smart people, who planned their heist to the smallest detail…

…but one thing they didn’t count on was an Amateur who had smuggled his (then-) state-of-the-art Atlas 210X HF transceiver aboard, much to the annoyance of his XYL!

The 1977 book was adapted into an Emmy-winning 3-part TV miniseries starring Telly Savalas in 1979. Check out the trailer – the Atlas 210X makes a cameo appearance at the end of it!

(I managed to procure a copy of the novel on eBay, from a seller in the UK)