Espionage

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . The Mask of Dimitrios

The opening part of this book, in geo-political terms, is gloriously old fashioned. Istambul, with its reputation as being the place where east meets west, home of mysterious Levantine traders and treacherous stateless misfits has long since been pensioned off, at least in the world of crime and espionage fiction. It is worth remembering, though, that it was the starting point for Bond’s adventures in From Russia With Love when it was published in 1957, and was still thought to have a suitable ambience when the film was released in 1963.

Charles Latimer is an English academic who has found that writing thrillers is much more to his liking (and that of his bank manager) than lengthy tracts on political and economic trends in nineteenth century Europe. While in Istanbul he is invited to a house party where he meets Colonel Haki, an officer in some un-named sinister police force. Improbably, Haki is a fan of Latimer’s novels and, when they become better acquainted, Haki reveals a current real-life mystery he is investigating. The corpse of a man known only as Dimitrios – once a big player in the espionage world of the Levant and The Balkans – is fished out of the sea. Having attended the post mortem, Latimer decides to investigate just who Dimitrios was, and how he came to end up as he did.

Published on the eve of world war two, when previous atrocities would be dwarfed in scale, the novel reminds us of the horrors which took place in the region after the Armistice. The brutal civil war between Turkey and Greece, with the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, the Armenian genocide, and a succession of coups d’états in Bulgaria had left the region rife with intrigue and foreign meddling. By the late 1930s, Europe was desperately ill at ease with itself. Latimer observes:

“So many years. Europe in labour had through its pain seen for an instant a new glory, and then had collapsed to welter again in the agonies of war and fear. Governments had risen and fallen: men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had thought, had been tortured and died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion.”

As he criss-crosses Europe via Athens, Sofia, Geneva, Paris – by train, naturally – Latimer is drawn into the world of a mysterious man known only as Mr Peters, memorably described thus:

“Then Latimer saw his face and forgot about the trousers. There was the sort of sallow shapelessness about it that derives from simultaneous overeating and under sleeping. From above two heavy satchels of flesh peered a pair of blue, bloodshot eyes that seemed to the permanently weeping. The nose was rubbery and indeterminate. It was the mouth that gave the face expression. The lips were pallid and undefined, seeming thicker than they really were. Pressed together over unnaturally white and regular false teeth, they were set permanently in a saccharine smile.”

The 1944 film of the book took many liberties with the story and, bizarrely, changed the clean-living, rather prim Charles Latimer into a Dutch novelist named Cornelius Leyden, and then compounded the felony by casting Peter Lorre in the role. What they didn’t get wrong, however, was in re-imagining Mr Peters. Check the quote above, and if it isn’t Sydney Greenstreet to the proverbial ‘T’, then I will change my will and donate my worldly wealth to The Jeremy Corbyn Appreciation Society. In his travels, Latimer also meets a rather down-at-heel nightclub manager called La Prevesa:

“The mouth was firm and good-humoured in the loose, raddled flesh about it, but the eyes were humid with sleep and the carelessness of sleep. They made you think of things you had forgotten, of clumsy gilt hotel chairs strewn with discarded clothes and of grey dawn light slanting through closed shutters, of attar of roses and of the musty smell of heavy curtains on brass rings, of the sound of the warm, slow breathing of a sleeper against the ticking of a clock in the darkness”

Quite near the end of the book, Ambler drops a plot bombshell which not only damages Latimer’s own sense of being able to spot a lie when he sees one, but puts him next in line for a drug-dealer’s bullet. He is in Paris, but this is not the city as envisaged by, apparently, Victor Hugo:

“Breathe Paris in. It nourishes the soul.”

Latimer sees a rather different city:

“As his taxi crossed the bridge back to Île de la Cité, he saw for a moment a panorama of low, black clouds moving quickly in the chill, dusty wind. The long facade of the houses on the Quai de Corse was still and secretive. It was as if each window concealed a watcher. There seemed to be few people about. Paris, in the late autumn afternoon, had the macabre formality of a steel engraving.”

With this book, Ambler created the anvil on which the great spy novels of the final decades of the Twentieth Century were beaten out. As good as they were, neither Le Carré nor Deighton bettered his use of language, and in this relatively short novel, just 264 pages, Ambler set the Gold Standard. This latest edition of the novel is published by Penguin and is available now.

September 12, 2023 0

WATER STREET . . . Between the covers

Britain’s relationships with both North and South during the American Civil War (1861-65) are something of a historical byway these days, but at the time, the conflict was a major issue in the port city of Liverpool. When the Union navy blockaded Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans and Mobile, it prevented shiploads of raw cotton from departing in the direction of Liverpool, thus dealing a crippling blow to the spinning and textile industries in and around Liverpool. The popular and political sentiment in the city became very much pro-Confederacy, and despite the national government remaining stoically neutral, shipyards on the River Mersey continued to build fighting ships – such as the Alabama – and sell them to the South.

Water Street is a highly entertaining novel set in the summer of 1863, and features murder and mayhem involving Union and Confederate spies trying to outwit each other and advance their respective causes with the British government. Author JP Maxwell centres his tale around two women – Harriet Dunwoody and her creole companion Conté Louverture. Harriet is married to a grotesque man called Banastre Xavier Dunwoody, an ardent and violent secessionist who plans to swing the support of Britain’s government – led by a seriously ill Lord Palmerston – behind the cause of Jefferson Davies and the Confederate States. Harriet is playing a very dangerous double game, along with Conté, as they conspire behind Dunwoody’s back to thwart local efforts to boost support for the Confederacy. In doing so, they enlist the aid of a rather ramshackle band of Irish nationalists, led by a thug called Royston Chubb.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the book (a quick read, just over 200 pages) I did want to step back and examine if – and to what extent – the characters in the book are based on real life historical figures. First, Palmerston. Although he was sick and elderly in 1863, there is no evidence that he was comatose and incapable of thought. The novel has Edward Seymour as First Lord of The Admiralty, and this he certainly was, but it seems his real life influence on Palmerston was nowhere as crucial as portrayed in the book. There was a Confederate agent in Liverpool called James Dunwoody Bulloch who did his very best to advance the Confederate cause during the war years, and he was certainly instrumental in pushing through deals with shipyards like Cammell Laird to build warships for the Confederacy, but he wasn’t the drunken gunslinger portrayed here.

One character who Maxwell doesn’t play fast and loose with is the official US Consulate to Liverpool – Thomas Haines Dudley. Dudley worked tirelessly for the Union cause, always being careful to stay within the constraints of diplomacy. The most curious real life character in the book is that of Major General Benjamin Butler. History has not been kind to him as either soldier, lawyer or politician, but there is no evidence (that I have seen) that he was running a ring of Union spies in the UK, nor that he visited Liverpool in 1863. In an edgy epilogue, Maxwell has Butler listening cynically to Lincoln’s famous speech at Gettysburg on 19th November 1863. He is joined by two characters called Surratt and Wilkes-Booth. If you know, you know!

To be fair, JP Maxwell has not claimed that Water Street is accurate historical fiction, and so my comments on real historical people can be ignored if you enjoy the book. The writing is very much ‘larger-than-life and, to borrow a sporting cliché, Maxwell leaves nothing in the dressing room. I loved every page – it’s full of drama, period detail and vividly portrayed characters. It was published on 1st July – a significant date, in the context of the story – by BK Books.

July 9, 2023 1

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

LONDON BRIDGE IS FALLING DOWN . . . Between the covers

If you are new to the Bryant & May series, then I could be rude and say, “You’re a bit bloody late!” More charitably, I could direct you to some of my earlier reviews of books in this magnificent sequence. Take a look here.

After many false twilights and surviving more execution attempts that John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee, it looks as though the Peculiar Crimes Unit has finally succumbed to the bureaucrats who have been plotting its demise for decades. The vandals have moved in and pulled out all the computer terminals, cut off the electric, and the ineffectual and (rightly) much mocked nominal supremo of the PCU – Raymond Land – has given his valedictory address to the staff (rostered below)

But fate – in the shape of a deceased old lady – has one last trick to play. When Amelia Hoffman is found dead in her flat, the regular police are happy to file the death in the file marked “Elderly Widows, No Family, Neglected By Social Services, Death Of.” But all is not what it seems. Arthur Bryant finds that the dead woman was one of three women who, having worked at Bletchley Park, were then absorbed into the post war British intelligence service. Arthur grabs at this straw with grateful hands, declares it ‘specialized’ enough to warrant the attention of the PCU, and launches a murder investigation.

Unusually for a Bryant & May investigation, there is an international element, courtesy of a frightful chap called Larry Cranston. He holds a British passport, but is in the employ of the CIA and various dark branches of the American state. When he drunkenly runs down and kills a pedestrian, he looks for diplomatic immunity and it is dangled in front of his nose – but at a price. The price is that he hunts down and ‘neutralises’ three old ladies – one of whom is Mrs Hoffman – who hold the key to exposing a sensitive intelligence operation, code-name ‘London Bridge‘.

Arthur Bryant, to the exasperation of his colleagues, has the habit – when he finds the solution to a problem – of going into a kind of investigative purdah. He refuses to share his thinking or his evidence, mostly on the grounds that John May and the others will neither understand it nor believe it. Such is the case here, and Arthur knows that he is dealing with the kind of historical criminal crossword, the esoteric clues for which only he can explain. By the end of the novel, however, even Arthur realises that he has been played, and nothing about the case is what it seems.

As ever, Christopher Fowler’s writing is exquisite. His deep reverence for – and knowledge of – the dark and lonely pathways trodden by centuries of Londoners is compelling. As usual the dialogue sparkles and the jokes are laugh-out-loud, but there is a sense of endgame here. Arthur, it seems, is wearing his inner Ulysses like a suit of armour:

“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

As the old joke goes, “Pretentious? Moi?” Quoting Tennyson in a crime fiction book review? I make absolutely no apologies. Christopher Fowler has, over the long sequence of Bryant & May novels, shown that he lives under the same roof as many great writers who understood ‘Englishness’. In my mind, he sits down happily with such names as John Betjeman, JB ‘Beachcomber’ Morton, George and Weedon Grossmith and – in terms of London – Peter Ackroyd.

It was with great dismay that many B&M fans read on the author’s Twitter the other day that this would be the last novel in the series. After all, the two fellows are impossibly old, given all they have witnessed and been through together, so it was not unexpected. Sad times then, but the last few pages of the book are as poignant – and beautifully written – as anything you could ever wish to read. Think Julius Caesar, Act III, Sc2, line 148. And yes – I did. London Bridge Is Falling Down is published by Doubleday and is out now.

July 30, 2021 0

OUTBREAK . . . Between the covers

This is the third Luke Carlton thriller by the BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, following Crisis (2016) and Ultimatum (2018). Carlton is a former Special Forces operative who now works for MI6, the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom. The novel begins in the frozen wastes of Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago formerly known as Spitzbergen, and three environmental scientists from the UK Arctic Research Station have been caught out by a blizzard and, too far from their base camp to make it back safely, they seek refuge in a hut. What they find there makes them wish they had braved the snow and wind and tried for home. They find a gravely ill man, and one of the scientists, Dr Sheila Mackenzie gets rather too close to him:

“As Dr Mackenzie turned back to face the sick man, without warning he arched his body forward off the back of the couch with surprising speed. His whole body shook with involuntary convulsions. In that same moment, he coughed violently. His mouth wide open in a rictus gape, he emitted a spray of blood, bile and mucus into the air, his face less than two feet from hers, before collapsing, quivering on to the wooden floor.”

That, then, is the Aliens moment. Events move with terrifying speed. Mackenzie is airlifted back to England and isolation and the wheels of government and the intelligence agencies begin to whirr. Given that there is a large Russian presence in Svalbard, ostensibly for mining operations, the fingers of guilt begin to point towards Moscow, particularly when the virus is found to be man-made.

Gardner doesn’t allow either Carlton or readers pause for either thought or breath. The action zig-zags between the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross in London, the Arctic Circle, Vilnius, Moscow, GCHQ in Cheltenham and – less exotic but rather more deadly – a down-at-heel industrial estate near Braintree.

This is an impeccably researched novel, as you would expect from someone with Gardner’s experience in the worlds of soldiering, news gathering and international affairs. Most of the story is all-too-horribly plausible, given what we know about what is euphemistically known as ‘mischief’ from Moscow and Beijing, but then Gardner has a surprise for us. The Russians are involved, certainly, but not the Russians we might have expected. To say more would spoil the entertainment but I did find the identity of the conspirators not entirely plausible, given what we know (or think we know) about terror cells operating around the world. But hey-ho, this is not a documentary but a novel – and a bloody good one, too.

Gardner has a box full of thriller writer tools, and he uses them to great effect – punchy, short chapters, many of them shamelessly cliff hanging, whirlwind globe trotting, a convincing (if rather conventional) hero, something of a romantic backstory, breathtaking amounts of cyber-wizardry, and enough military intelligence acronyms to satisfy the geekiest security geek. You won’t be surprised to hear that Carlton eventually triumphs, but I advise caution. The last twelve words of the book might set alarm bells ringing …..

Outbreak is published by Bantam Press and is out now.

June 7, 2021 0

SILESIAN STATION . . Between the covers

Followers of this website will, hopefully, have read my 1st May review of David Downing’s Wedding Station (click link to visit). It is actually the seventh book in the series, but is a prequel, being set in 1933. I was so impressed by it that I have raided my piggy bank and bought several others. This review, then, is of a book I have bought for pleasure, rather than a freebie from a publisher. Silesian Station was first published in 2008, and is the second in the series. The central character is John Russell, an Anglo-American political journalist. He married (but later divorced) a German woman, and as their son Paul is a German citizen, Russell is allowed to make his home in Berlin. We are in the late summer of 1939. Six years into the Thousand Year Reich. Six months since Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. Just days away, maybe, from an invasion of Poland?

Russell is a survivor, a man who can usually talk his way out of trouble. Multilingual, and with that all-important American passport, he keeps a wary eye on the features he wires back to his newspaper in the states, but has – more or less – managed to stay out of trouble with the various arms of the Nazi state – principally the Gestapo, the SS and their nasty little brother the Sicherheitsdienst. Russell fought in the British Army in The Great War, but in its wake became a committed Communist. Although he has now ‘left the faith’ he still maintains discreet contacts with the remaining ‘comrades’ in Berlin. With that in mind, it is unsurprising, perhaps, that he has been manoeuvred into the sticky position where both the German and Russian intelligence services believe that he is working uniquely for them, and he is being used to pass on false information from one to the other.

It’s probably not a bad idea at this stage to do a brief political and strategic summary of how the land lay in the late summer of 1939. Germany and the Soviet Union were – in theory – the best of friends, but divided both geographically and in terms of future intent by Poland. Hitler still smarted from the loss of previously German territory after the Treaty of Versailles, while both he and Stalin had eyes on encroachment, to the east in Hitler’s case and to the west for Stalin. Hitler knows that Britain and France are treaty-bound to protect Poland, but is more worried about the reaction from the Kremlin should he try to retake the former German lands of Prussia.

Back to the more human and personal elements of Silesia Station. Russell has agreed to do a favour for his brother-in-law, and investigate the disappearance of a Jewish girl, Miriam Rosenfeld, who has been sent by her parents – who own a small farm near Breslau (modern day Wrocław) to live with her uncle in Berlin, for the chillingly ironic reason that the family are among the few Jews left in the area, and they feel threatened. Russell – aided by his film star girlfriend Effie Koenen – start their search, but Miriam seems to have vanished into thin air. Effie is integral to the story. Very beautiful, and a fine actress, it doesn’t hurt that Hitler’s minister for propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is an avid film buff, and has rubbed shoulders with Effie at premieres of her films, and is apparently a great admirer.

Months later, of course, all these ambiguities were wiped out by the fury of war, but John Russell has one other contradiction to deal with. Another acquaintance, Sarah Grostein is ‘walking out’ with a prominent SS officer who is – clearly – unaware that she is Jewish. When their relationship goes disastrously wrong, Russell feels obliged to pick up the pieces.

Aside from the human dramas, Downing describes with great clarity the fateful days before the Soviets and the Nazis – via the short-lived Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – agreed to allow each other to live and let live, and how that fateful decision gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland, thus triggering six years of death, terror and mayhem.

Is Miriam Rosenfeld found? Where did she go? Can John Russell and Effie Koenen keep one step ahead of both the SS and the NKVD? Well, the fact that they appear in later books will answer the last question, at least, but you will have a few hours of tense reading a classic piece of historical fiction while you find out how. Silesian Station is published by Old Street Publishing Ltd and is available now.

June 1, 2021 0

HARDCASTLE’S SECRET AGENT . . . Between the covers

Before I became a reviewer, and earned (I hope) the privilege of being sent books and .mobi files by publishers, I had been a lifetime library user. Crime Fiction was my first and last love, and in my regular Saturday afternoon trawl through the shelves, there were certain authors whose names I always sought out. In no particular order, these would include Jim Kelly, Phil Rickman, John Connolly, John Sandford, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Jonathan Kellerman, James Lee Burke, Graham Hurley, Christopher Fowler – and Graham Ison.

The Graham Ison books were slimmish-volumes, usually the Brock and Poole series, but my favourites were always the Hardcastle books. Ernie Hardcastle was a London copper in and around the years of The Great War. He could come over brusque in his dealings, but other might use the word ‘avuncular’. He distrusted innovations such as the telephone, but had a true copper’s nose for villains. A couple of his books are reviewed here, but inevitably, ‘time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away..‘ Thankfully, in Hardcastle’s Secret Agent, Ernie is still with us, but long since retired, and the Hardcastle concerned is his son Walter, now a rising star in the Metropolitan Police.

We are, as ever, in London, but it is 1940. The Phony War is over, and the Luftwaffe are targetting industrial sites they believe to be involved in making parts for military aircraft. When several important employees of one such factory are burgled – clearly by an expert – but with nothing other than trinkets stolen, Hardcastle believes he may be on the track of a German spy on the look-out for plans, blueprints or important military information. Hardcastle has to deal with The Special Branch, but finds them about as co-operative as they were with his father a couple of decades earlier. This has a certain tinge of irony, as part of the author’s distinguished police career was spent as a Special Branch Operative.

The search for the German spy withers on the branch, but Hardcastle has other fish to fry. A prostitute – or at least, a young woman who was free with her favours – has been found beaten to death, and the hunt for her killer takes Hardcastle into military quarters.

Eventually, Walter Hardcastle gets both of his men, and on the way we have a vividly recreated world of an England struggling to come to grips with a new world war. Not one that is being fought far away on some foreign field, but one which is brought to people’s very hearths and homes every single night. Hardcastle’s Secret Agent is published by Severn House/Canongate Books and will be out on 1st May.

Sad to relate, Graham Ison died suddenly in late 2020 before he could complete this book. It was finished with the help of his son Roger. Graham Ison was prolific, certainly, and critics might argue that he stuck to a reliable formula in each of his series, and never ventured into unfamiliar territory. Neither was he a darling of the crime fiction festival circuit, but I suspect after decades working as a policeman that never bothered him. What he was, however, was a reliable name for readers who bought his books and – importantly – library borrowers, who knew that they could rely on him for a story well told, and if his words took them into familiar territory, then that was nothing for either reader or writer to be ashamed about.