Cold War

KARLA’S CHOICE . . . Between the covers

We are in a wintry London in 1963. Older readers will recall that it started snowing on Boxing Day 1962, and it barely relented for weeks, with temperatures plummeting across the country. Susanna Gero is just one of the many thousands of Hungarians who fled to the west just 6 years earlier, after Russia had put down an uprising with its trademark brutality. She works at a shabby literary agency called Baánáti & Clay. Mr Clay never existed, and Laszlo Baánáti is missing. As part of a scheme of retribution devised by the Kremlin, agents have been despatched to the West to kill people who had the effrontery to leave the Soviet Union and its vassal states. One such is Miki Bortnik, and his target is Baánáti . Between the airport and Baánáti’s office Bortnik has a kind of epiphany, and meekly surrenders to the British authorities.

Baánáti’s disappearance is brought to the attention of the British intelligence service, and for old Le Carré buffs, we are back in the familiar world of The Circus, alongside Control, Connie Sachs, Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase and – of course – George Smiley. Our man has taken early retirement of sorts in the wake of his involvement in the death of double agent Alec Leamas on the Berlin Wall (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Richard Burton in the film). Smiley is persuaded to make a temporary return to work in order to trace Baánáti, who is actually a Soviet agent called Ferenzc Róka. There is mention of the ominous sounding Thirteenth Directorate. This was basically a KGB hit squad, set up to deliver Moscow’s summary justice to former citizens across the world who had irritated Stalin.

Smiley discovers the reason for Róka’s disappearance. He has a son, now in his early twenties. Léo is young man of much promise, something of a gilded youth, but prone to upsetting local communist party officials. The lad has now been taken into custody. Róka has abandoned the pretence that he is a mild-mannered London literary agent, and via a series of false passports is on his way to central Europe to save his son. It is with some inevitability that Control sends Smiley off to Berlin, to rescue Róka and his son from the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi). Smiley hopes that assistance will be given by Hans-Dieter Mundt, nominally leader of the East German Secret Service, the Abteilung. Mundt is actually a double agent who works for the British.

The book’s title, by the way, refers to the man who leads The Thirteenth Directorate. In the three books known as The Karla Trilogy, Le Carre provides an extensive biography of the agent, but we never meet him in person. The BBC cast Patrick Stewart in the role for TV, but he was glimpsed only briefly.

Control complicates matters by sending Susanna off to Berlin in the belief that her presence may help to smoke out Róka. The ploy does not work, as Susanna goes ‘rogue’ on her Circus companions, and things come to a head with a dramatic encounter on the streets of Budapest

How does it feel to be back among old friends? To be honest, it is such a long time since I read the original books or watched any adaptations, that I had to use Google to remind me of some of the characters, but the chill of the Cold War remains inescapable. Harkaway cannot be aiming purely at aficionados of his father’s books, so what will younger readers make of it, coming as they do to the Le Carré ensemble for the first time? The author is already an experienced writer in a different genre, his prose is therefore both subtle and sturdy, and ‘his’ Smiley remains true to the man his father described.

George Smiley remains one of fiction’s most enduring but enigmatic characters. He is not, however, a fragile Ming vase too delicate to be handled. Here, he not only survives, but is given fresh shape and form in a vivid reminder of how espionage was done in the dark ages before the digital revolution. Karla’s Choice is published by Viking/Penguin and is available now.

October 24, 2024 0

LEHRTER STATION . . . Between the covers

John Russell is an Anglo American journalist turned spy. His problem is that he has spied for too many different countries. He has spied for the Russians, the Nazis, the British and the Americans – and they all have a piece of him. In his heart of hearts he is a pre-Stalin communist. Once a member of the party, he is a man who once believed in the promise of genuine socialism.

December 1945 finds him in London with his long term girlfriend Effie Koenen, his son by his marriage to a wife long since dead, and Effie’s sister. He is basically a puppet waiting for the next tug on his strings. This time it comes from the Russians. Such is Stalin’s power and reach in the postwar world that he can easily persuade his allies to terminate Russell’s temporary haven in London, and so it is that Russell and Effie are forced to return to the shattered remains of Berlin.

Effie was a considerable star in the pre-war film world and is anxious to resume her career. For Russell it is a question literally of life and death. If he does not follow the instructions of the NKVD he knows that his life will not be worth living, nor those of Effie or his son Paul. Paul fought in the Wehrmacht in the dying days of the war but has been allowed to re-settle in London as part of the Russian deal for Russell’s continued cooperation.

One historical issue that runs through the book is the plight of Europe’s Jews. Despite survivors living in Berlin being given special victim status by the occupying administration, and thus receiving better rations, further afield many Jews still found themselves homeless and unwanted. The British are determined to limit the number of Jews heading to the new land in Arab Palestine. The Russians are indifferent and the Americans are torn between support for the British and an awareness of the voting power of Jewish American citizens.

Across central Europe there are several Jewish organisations determined to avenge the deaths of their fellow citizens, by whatever means necessary. Russell meets a young man called Michael who is in one such group.

Michael smiled for the first time and it lit up his face.

“Do you know Psalm 94?” he asked.
“Not that I remember.”
“He will repay them for their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness. The Lord our God will wipe them out.”
“The Nazis I assume? So if God has them in his sights, where do you come in? Are you God’s instruments?”
“Not at all. if there is a God he has clearly abandoned the Jews. We will do the work that he should have done.”

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David Downing (left), writing this book in 2012, was obviously well aware of how things have played out in our own times, but he has Russell reunited with a young Jew who he had helped escape Germany years earlier.

“And I’ll tell you something else,”. Albert said. “I understand why the Poles are expelling the Germans from their new territories, and I understand why they are making it impossible for the Jews to return. If my friends and I have our way the Arabs will all be expelled from Palestine. Anything else is just stirring up trouble for the future.”
“That will put a bit of a strain on the worlds sympathy, don’t you think?”
“Once we have the land we can do without the sympathy.”

Russell’s sense of world weariness and and the depth of his cynicism about those who employ him does not prevent him from being a compassionate man. In order to file a marketable story with his London agent, Russell embeds himself with what could be called a gang of people smugglers, except the people that are being smuggled are Jews desperate to get away from Europe and start a new life in Palestine. The route involves a long and arduous trek – literally across mountains and rivers in – order to get to Italy and then to the Mediterranean Sea. There is one bitterly ironic scene where, on the way, Russell meets up with a man who he knows is a former SS officer. The man is with his young son and Russell promises not to betray them to the Jews, basically because of the young boy. In an awful reversal of what happened to so many Jews years earlier, the pair are identified as non Jews because they are uncircumcised. Russell cannot prevent the father being gunned down; neither can he persuade the boy to leave his father’s body as the convoy moves on.

In another sub plot of the book, Russell tries to locate two missing Jewish people. One is very much close and personal to him and Effie. Earlier in the war Effie had given a home to Rosa, an apparently orphaned Jewish girl. She has now taken Rosa as the child she now knows she will probably never have, and Rosa has gone with them to England. However, at the back of Effie’s mind is that if either of Rosa’s parents should be discovered alive, this will pose a great problem should they wish to reclaim their daughter. Using the same sources – mostly meticulous Nazi bureaucratic records of who was sent where – Russell also tries to discover the fate of a young Silesian Jew called Miriam who we met in an earlier book in this excellent series. (Click the link below for more information)

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/david-downing/

With a mixture of luck, cunning – and favours from friends – Russell manages to survive the t. ands of his Russian minders goes fatally wrong. By the end of the book Russell has peeled back layer after layer of spectacularly evil deeds committed by all parties and nationalities, but somehow his personal integrity – and that of Effie – survive. This is a compelling literary journey through a wasteland which is both moral and literal.

July 9, 2023 0

TWO MEN IN BERLIN . . . Bernie Gunther and John Russell (part two)

In part one of this feature I looked at the two fictional characters Bernie Gunther and John Russell and what happens in the novels, by Philip Kerr and David Downing, both series being rooted in Berlin. There, I dealt with the two series separately, and here I look at what divides them, and what common ground they share

In an imaginary world the two men might have met but, of course, they never did, despite Gunther being House Detective for the celebrated Adlon hotel (below), an establishment sometimes patronised by Russell.

Both men fought (for opposing sides) in the Great War and, in theory, coul have faced each other on opposite sides of No Man’s Land. Both have indelible memories of comrades being blown away by artillery and their tunics smeared with the brains of best mates. Both have an almost umbilical connection with Berlin, its parks and rivers, its tram and railway stations and its monumental architecture.

Gunther is on nodding terms with such Nazi luminaries as Joseph Goebbels, Rheinhardt Heydrich and Arthur Nebe. In contrast, John Russell operates well below this elevated level of the Nazi heirarchy, although he references such monsters as Beria and Himmler, and does have face to face meetings with Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (left).

John Russell is, largely, lucky in love. True, he has a failed marriage behind him but Paul, the son conceived and born when he was still married to Ilse, is a huge part of his life. He is also madly in reciprocated love with a prominent German actress, Effi Koenen. In the final novel, Masaryk Station, they are married. Effi is safe and well in Berlin – albeit in a Berlin being carved up between the Americans, the British, the Russians and the communist Germans who would go on to rule East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall. John and Effi have an adopted daughter Rosa, and Paul, who served as a teenager with the Wehrmacht, has survived the cataclysm of Hitler’s strategic blunders in the last two years of the war, and by 1948 he is living in London.

Gunther, in contrast, has known nothing but trauma in family terms. His wife dies in tragic circumstance and then his girlfriend – whi s regnant with his child – dies in one of the most infamous acts of WW2 – the sinking (by a Russian submarine) of the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945. This account, detailed in The Other Side of Silence (2016) is, for me, the most compelling part of any of the Gunther novels:

The Wilhelm Gustloff was a cruise liner pressed into service as a military transport vessel, and in January 1945 it attempted to sail across the Baltic from Prussia. It was overloaded with some 10,000 personnel, mostly Germans fleeing the advance of the Red Army. The Soviet submarine S-13, captained by a maverick drunk and against orders sent three torpedoes into the side of the Wilhelm Gustloff. The ship sank killing 9,400, and is the worst maritime disaster in history.

Gunther is not a sexual predator, but beds women when they they present themselves, wherever and whenever. Russell remains resolutely faithful to Effi, but as she is an improbably beautiful film star with a healthy sexual appetite, we should not be placing the martyr’s crown on Russell’s head just yet, but he always has someone to fight for – Effi and Rosa, and his son Paul. By contrast Gunther is mostly only fighting for himself and his tarnished ideas of what is right and what is wrong. When he dies, he suspects that there will be few mourners as his coffin is laid in earth.

As far as Berlin is concerned, the two series run on parallel tracks. They share the final decadence of the Weimar years, the descent into Nazi rule, the devastation after the spring of 1945, and the finger-on-the-trigger tensions of the 1960s.

Russell’s geographical stamping grounds are tight: his domain is Europe – Prague, Triest, Belgrade, Danzig, occasionally London but – of course – always Berlin. Gunther goes where the job – or his pursuers – send him. In the novels, we see him operating all over the world – Argentina, Cuba, Greece, the South of France and Russia. Neither David Downing nor Philip Kerr waste time on political posturing, but both remind us that no known measurement – not even the thickness of the proverbial Rizla cigarette paper – separates the degeneration of Hitler and Stalin. This is never more prominent than in A Man Without Breath in which Gunther is sent by Goebbels to Smolensk. His task? To prove that it was the Russians who murdered thousands of Polish officers and flung their corpses into deep trenches. In the real world, it was not until the 1990s that Russia admitted its guilt.

Gunther is – first and last – a cop. He is physically imposing and familiar with violence. Russell is – at least in his day job – a freelance journalist, and avoids physical confrontation if he possibly can. Stylistically, the novels are also chalk and cheese. We share Gunther’s world through his own voice while we learn what John Russell is up to via the invisible third party. There is another important difference in the way the two series sit in what could be called a family tree of thrillers. Philip Kerr shapes his man more in the image of Philip Marlowe, albeit a Marlowe much more enthusiastic about using his fists (or any other available weapon). Gunther also echoes Marlowe’s bitter poetry, and talent for memorable descriptions. This is Bernie Gunther on Heidrich:

“Tall, skeletally thin, his long, pale face lacking expression, like some plaster of Paris death mask, and his Jack Frost fingers clamped behind his ramrod-straight back, Heydrich stared outside for a moment or two, saying nothing to either of us.”

David Downing portrays the world of espionage in a way familiar to readers of John Le Carré; this world is undeniably dangerous and fatal to those who make mistakes, but it it is less overtly dramatic, and – although more subtle – nonetheless deadly. John Russell is – in his heart – a socialist, but one who despairs of the direction taken by post 1945 communist regimes. Bernie Gunther is resolutely German and someone who has suffered grievously at the hands of the Russians, but a man who has gazed into the depths of evil plumbed by Hitler and his minions and realises that there are four combatants in his particular battle – the Germans, the Russians, the Anglo-Americans – and himself.

David Downing’s series ends with John Russell and Effi, like tens of thousands of other Berliners, becoming engulfed by the total Russian shut-down of land access to the city in 1948 – the act that precipitated the legendary Berlin Airlift. Philip Kerr’s premature death in 2018 means we shall never know if Bernie Gunther eventually enjoyed his retirement, but David Downing is – happily – still with us, and an eighth novel, Union Station, is due in 2024, and jumps forward to 1953, with Russell living in California.

June 23, 2023 1

MOSCOW EXILE . . . Between the covers

Some writers who have authored different series occasionally allow the main characters to meet each other, provided that they are contemporaries, of course. I’m pretty sure that Michael Connolly has allowed Micky Haller to bump into Harry Bosch, while Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone certainly knew each other in their respective series by Robert J Parker. Did Spenser ever join them in a (chaste) threesome? I don’t remember. John Lawton’s magnificent Fred Troy series ended with Friends and Traitors (2017), and since then he has been writing the Joe Wilderness books, of which this is the fourth. I can report, with some delight, that in the first few pages we not only meet Fred, but also Meret Voytek, the tragic heroine of A Lily of the Field, and her saviour – Fred’s sometime lover and former wife, Larissa Tosca. As an aside, for me A Lily of the Field is not only the best book John Lawton has ever written, but the most harrowing and heartbreaking account of Auschwitz ever penned. Click the link below to read more.

WW2 HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION (1) A Lily of the Field

The notional central character in this novel is Joe Wilderness, although he does not appear until the half way point of the book. For readers new to Joe, a bit of background. First, his real surname is Holderness – his nickname rather cleverly reflects a character who is beyond the pale of conventional loyalty and morality. His WW2 service career was marked by insubordination and bootlegging, and his eye for the main chance found him operating various scams in post war Berlin, where his deviousness brought him to the attention of the British intelligence agencies. Since then, he has been involved in various covert operations on behalf the government – and himself.

The background action in Moscow Exile begins with the activities and subsequent shock-waves caused by the scandal of The Cambridge Five – Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Cairncross and Blunt – pillars of the British establishment who were actively working for Moscow in the 1950s, but the novel has a wide timespan – from the late 1940s to 1969. Charlie Leigh-Hunt, a British toff with a distinguished WW2 record carries the story for a while, as he is sent to be chief spook in Washington after the hurried departure of Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby. Charlie has an affair with Charlotte ‘Coky’ Shumaker a British socialiter, whose husband is Senator Bob Redmaine – a thinly disguised version of Joe McCarthy, he of the notorious anti communist witch hunts. Ironically, Coky is in the pay of Russia, as is Charlie, who eventually ends up as a Moscow resident.

Joe Wilderness has also, since a disastrous attempted prisoner exchange on a Berlin bridge between the East and West sectors, been a guest of the KGB, and Lawton sets up a delicious plot twist when Fred Troy – now a Lord, and a British diplomat – is persuaded to be ‘Our Man In Moscow.’ Again, readers new to Lawton’s books might welcome some background on Fred (see below)

THE TROY DOSSIER . . .

The plotting, by this stage, in terms of bluff and double-bluff, makes John le Carré look like Enid Blyton but, to cut to the chase, HM government decides that it is too dangerous to allow Joe to remain in Moscow, and so he has to be ‘extracted’. It doesn’t hurt that Joe’s father in law, Colonel Burne-Jones is a senior figure in MI5, and his boss – Roderick Troy – is both Home Secretary and Fred’s brother. Normally, spies are only released in exchange for other spies, but the woman handling the Russian end of things, General Volga Vasilievna Zolotukhina is just as big a crook as Joe, and she wants money – £25,000 in the proverbial used notes.

Publicists and other book people who make lists might dub this the fourth Joe Wilderness novel but, for me, it’s the latest saga in Fred Troy’s career – and all the better for it. It is a dazzling and erudite journey down the complex back roads of Cold War diplomacy and skullduggery. Lawton is one of our finest writers, and every page he writes is pure pleasure. Moscow Exile is published by Grove Press and will be available on 4th May.

April 27, 2023 0

THE POSTMAN DELIVERS . . . White Fox

This is not due until the Spring of next year, but it looks a cracker. Owen Matthews, author of thrillers Black Sun and Red Traitor, completes the trilogy as he takes us back to 1963, and a political world struggling to come to terms with the momentous events of 22nd November.

This will be published by Bantam on 9th March next year, and please keep your eyes skinned for a full review nearer the publication date. Here’s a link to Owen Matthews’ Amazon page.

December 15, 2022 0

HAMMER TO FALL . . .Between the covers

English author and screenwriter John Lawton has long been a favourite of those readers who like literary crime fiction, and his eight Frederick Troy novels have become classics. Set over a long time-frame from the early years of WW2 to the 1960s, the books feature many real-life figures or, as in A Little White Death (1998), characters based on real people, in this case the principals in the Profumo Affair. In Then We Take Berlin (2013) Lawton introduced a new character, an amoral chancer whose real surname – Holderness – has morphed into Wilderness. Joe Wilderness is a clever, corrupt and calculating individual whose contribution to WW2 was minimal, but his career trajectory has widened from being a Schieber (spiv, racketeer) in the chaos of post-war Berlin to being in the employ of the British Intelligence services.

He is no James Bond figure, however. His dark arts are practised in corners, and with as little overt violence as possible. Hammer To Fall begins with a flashback scene,establishing Joe’s credentials as someone who would have felt at home in the company of Harry Lime, but we move then to the 1960s, and Joe is in a spot of bother. He is thought to have mishandled one of those classic prisoner exchanges which are the staple of spy thrillers, and he is sent by his bosses to weather the storm as a cultural attaché in Finland. His ‘mission’ is to promote British culture by traveling around the frozen north promoting visiting artists, or showing British films. His accommodation is spartan, to say the least. In his apartment:

“The dining table looked less likely to be the scene of a convivial meal than an autopsy.”

Some of the worthies sent to Finland to wave the British flag are not to Joe’s liking:

“For two days Wilderness drove the poet Prudence Latymer to readings. She was devoutly Christian – not an f-word passed her lips – and seemed dedicated to simple rhyming couplets celebrating dance, spring, renewal, the natural world and the smaller breeds of English and Scottish dog.It was though TS Eliot had never lived. By the third day Wilderness was considering shooting her.”

Before he left England, his wife Judy offered him these words of advice:

“If you want a grant to stage Twelfth Night in your local village hall in South Bumpstead, Hampshire, the Arts Council will likely as not tell you to fuck off …. So, if you want to visit Lapland, I reckon your best bet is to suggest putting on a nude ballet featuring the over-seventies, atonal score by Schoenberg, sets by Mark Rothko ….. Ken Russell can direct … all the easy accessible stuff …. and you’ll probably pick up a whopping great grant and an OBE as well.”

So far, so funny – and Lawton (right) is in full-on Evelyn Waugh mode as he sends up pretty much everything and anyone. The final act of farce in Finland is when Joe earns his keep by sending back to London, via the diplomatic bag, several plane loads of …. well, state secrets, as one of Joe’s Russian contacts explains:

“The Soviet Union has run out of bog roll. The soft stuff you used to sell to us in Berlin is now as highly prized as fresh fruit or Scotch whisky. We wipe our arses on documents marked Classified, Secret and sometimes even Top Secret. and the damned stuff won’t flush. So once a week a surly corporal lights a bonfire of Soviet secrets and Russian shit.”

But, as in all good satires – like Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and Catch 22 – the laughter stops and things take a turn to the dark side. Joe’s Finnish idyll comes to an end, and he is sent to Prague to impersonate a tractor salesman. By now, this is 1968, and those of us who are longer in the tooth know what happened in Czechoslavakia in 1968. Prague has a new British Ambassador, and one very familiar to John Lawton fans, as it is none other than Frederick Troy. As the Russians lose patience with Alexander Dubček and the tanks roll in, Joe is caught up in a desperate gamble to save an old flame, a woman whose decency has, over the years, been a constant reproach to him:

“Nell Burkhardt was probably the most moral creature he’d ever met. Raised by thieves and whores back in London’s East End, he had come to regard honesty as aberrant. Nell had never stolen anything, never lied …led a blameless life, and steered a course through it with the unwavering compass of her selfless altruism.”

Hammer To Fall is a masterly novel, bitingly funny and heartbreaking by turns. I think A Lily Of The Field is Lawton’s masterpiece, but this runs it pretty damned close. It is published by Grove Press, and is out today, 2^nd April 2020.