Chris Humphreys

Chris Humphreys introduced us to his hitman anti-hero Mr Phipps in One London Day, which I reviewed earlier this year. In that story, the murderous Phipps was hired by The Shadows, a rogue group of financiers who were subverting justice and posing a threat to the national good. His mission was to kill their accountant. This he did, but not without causing collateral damage, one instance of which was brutally beating Stanley, a young London football thug. That act will come back to haunt him in this novel, where he is hired in joint enterprise by MI5 and MI6 to take out a target in Germany.

The target is Olsen, a former STASI officer who is now running a people smuggling operation using refrigerated lorries. MI6 want him dead, but MI5 and one of their top women, known as Ellerby, would rather go down the legal route using arrest and formal trial. Cleverly, perhaps to distract us from the moral shortcomings of Mr Phipps, Humphreys creates a genuine monster in Berndt Olsen. His titular father was an SS officer, but his blood father was a Red Army rapist. The acne that rendered him monstrous as a youngster has been tamed by the use of Royal Jelly from his beehives, but his mental scars are open and unhealed. He selects young girls from his potential passengers, and uses them terribly.

Humphreys sets the Berlin scene beautifully. The major players are all there, but we are yet to see how their worlds will collide. Phipps, posing as a football fan in town for an international match; Ellerby, dining with an old cop friend, hoping that she can persuade the BND (the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst) to cooperate; Olsen, moving smoothly through the world of privacy and security his wealth has bought; Sadiq Khan, the only member of The Shadows to evade justice, being wined and dined by Olsen in an exclusive gentlemen’s gated complex; Stanley, ostensibly in town to watch a football match, but more interested in smuggling a huge payload of class A pharmaceuticals back to England. There is another person of interest – Wolfgang, Olsen’s formidable neo-Nazi chauffeur and bodyguard.

We are given something of an explanation into why Phipps is a borderline psychopath, and it is because of his harrowing time as a soldier in Afghanistan. Humphreys reminds us, not that it was strictly necessary, that Afghanistan is a bestial, bigoted and benighted hell-on-earth, and that people from The West have, for centuries, been fooling themselves that they can change the place, from the disastrous forays of the mid 19th century to the equally catastrophic interventions of more recent times.

When Ellerby receives the bum’s rush from her contact at the BND, she is left with with no option but to pull the metaphorical trigger on Olsen, by sending a text to Phipps which will set him loose to eliminate Olsen. I’m struggling to find the best metaphor for how the novel plays out, but it involves vehicles, be they trains or cars, converging on – not a crossroads, because that implies just four ways – a point of collision. Do the good guys win? Yes, of course, but in unexpected ways, Olsen’s end being particularly painful and inventive.

The author betrays some political bias during the narrative. He clearly thinks that the AfD is bad for both Germany and Europe. I might disagree with his stance, but this doesn’t dilute my admiration for a brilliant political thriller, which blends traditional Noir with the genre of the flawed-but-reluctantly-sympathetic hired killer. One Berlin Day will be published by Allison & Busby on 17th September.

This is a very clever thriller that blends espionage, murder, personal tragedy and human greed into a potent mix. At the heart, there is a group of rogue British intelligence agents who call themselves The Shadows. While ostensibly going about HM government business, they are running all manner of scams using their diplomatic access, and are earning millions, mostly through drugs. Knowing they need to run a professional business, they have avoided electronic accounting and, instead, employed a North London businessman, Joseph Severin to ‘do the books’. And they are, quite literally, books. Old fashioned accounting ledgers, hand-written and, therefore, utterly untraceable online.

The book begins with Severin being shot dead by a former soldier – ‘Mr Phipps’ – hired by The Shadows, so how does the book develop? Phipps,as well as getting rid of Severin is supposed to retrieve the ledgers, but plans go awry, and this brings in a group of other characters, including Lottie, a professional pianist, and Sonya, a Russian prostitute. As the leader of The Shadows, Sebastien Grant, struggles to tidy up the mess, a resourceful MI5 officer called Ellerby is closing in on the group.

At the heart of the story is a desperately sad tale. Sonya, one of whose regulars is one of The Shadows, has painful personal problems. Both she and her husband Georgiy were Russian military. She has moved to London to exploit her beauty, while he is back in Russia, looking after their daughter Marusya. But the little girl has a tumour on her spine, that needs specialist surgery in USA for it’s removal. Sonya knows that Georgiy has a drug habit. Her dilemma is not knowing how much of the money she wires home is being spent on Marusya’s care, and how much is being swallowed up by street drug dealers.

The book has a split time frame. It starts on 30th July, when the key event of the novel happens, but then we jump to five days earlier, and follow the build-up to the event. The last part of the book then takes us to the days after 30th July, and the dramatic fallout that ensues. I am not a fan of these constructions, for several reasons, one being that words are said, phone calls are made and things occur in the first section of the book which don’t appear particularly significant as one reads them in real time, but then in the middle section these little occurrences come back to bite us, and pages have to be flicked back to make sense of things. A standout case of this is revealed in the bonus trailer for One Berlin Day, the follow up to this novel. It links crucially to something that happens to Mr Phipps on 30th July, but seemed relatively unimportant given what happened next.

Those reservations aside, this is a spectacularly original thriller which I read in just two sessions. I was genuinely entranced by Lottie, Sonya, Ellerby and even felt some empathy with four of The Shadows. Not Sebastien, of course, as he was beneath contempt. Not sure about Mr Phipps, though. Yes, he has served his country well and, like many rough men who do violent things to keep us safe in our beds, has been shabbily treated by the authorities. That said, what he did on July 30th was truly awful and I couldn’t suppress the wish that I hope he rots in hell for it. One London Day will be published on 22nd January by Allison & Busby.