Ungentlemanly Warfare - Howard Linskey

 

When I reviewed my first Linskey, The Dead, in the middle of last year, I noted how careful he was in crafting his prose and how I really must read more of his work.  Not so much now, I'm afraid.  Ungentlemanly Warfare is a pretty standard SOE yarn, though to be fair Linskey does plough relatively fresh ground by incorporating the Milice, the Vichy brownshirts, as the direct opposition to the Maquis underground resistors Harry Walsh is sent to France to organise.  His principle mission is to kill the scientist developing the Me 163 jet fighter plane which, if made operational, will threaten the upcoming D-Day landings.  So far so good - and I should also add in the plus column the nice way Linskey plays the class war within SOE.  Guerrilla warfare is ungentlemanly, therefore those who fight guerrilla wars are not gentlemen; Harry Walsh is only middle middleclass and therefore perfect to aid and abet the guerrillas, but he can never rise above the rank of captain which he earned in the field - thus by default, really - at Dunkirk.

Now for the less good.  The writing at the start of the book is really poor - overdone, unsubtle, unconsidered, unrefined.  There are some appalling proof reading failures: Scott's Guards will live with me forever.  Things certainly improved as the story progressed, either because Linskey gets more involved with the action sequences or perhaps because the first couple of chapters came from an old draft which Linskey managed to restart with an improved skill set.  Certainly I stopped thinking 'This needs editing' and ceased to notice any bloopers, and that's good enough for me.  But then--- Oh god, clever little cameos for Ian Fleming and Kim Philby.  Showing off your research.  Only your research wasn't quite deep enough, Howard.  A level deeper and you'd have found that the first hero of ungentlemanly warfare was Peter Fleming, Ian's brother, who was in charge of proposed guerrilla warfare in Kent when, as seemed certain in 1939 and 1940, Hitler invaded Britain.  See Giles Minton, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The story itself is predictable - Harry has to risk his girlfriend to get to the target.  I don't want to give the game away but the point of a successful adventure story is that the hero has to personally bring down the anti-hero, and that doesn't happen here, so the story doesn't quite succeed.  And I will no longer be quite so keen to read more Linskey.