Corpus (2017) is the first of Clements's Tom Wilde series. Before that he had written a fully historical series featuring John Shakespeare. Wilde is historical, too - Corpus is set around the 1936 Abdication Crisis - but falls into the wartime espionage genre, which was exacrly what I was looking for.
It begins with a young woman, a graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, dead of an overdose. Then the parents of another Girton girl are brutalkly murdered in their home. The latter are prominent British Nazis; the heroin user was, the previous year, in Berlin for the Olympics but was inexplicably absent for a while on a secretive mission. Anglo-American professor Wilde lives next door to the third of the Girton trio and thus gets embroiled.
The clever point which Clements builds his story around is that in 1937 the King was pro-German whilst the radical young were Communists - and Cambridge, as we all know, was the breeding ground of the future Soviet spies. Nazis and Soviets are both visiting the city in the late Autumn, as is MI6's Philip Eaton. What are they up to? Are they, conceivably, connected? Whose side is Eaton on? And what of Wilde's fellow Fellows, the overbearing Horace Dill, a fellow traveller, and smarmy ultra rightwinger Duncan Sawyer?
It is very well done. The main characters are well drawn and Wilde's semi-outsider status allows the appropriate degree of detachment. Clements makes him an academic expert on the great Elizabethan spymasters Walsingham and Cecil, a nice touch and also a reference to the John Shakespeare series. I found the female characters less convincing. Lydia Morris, Wilde's neighbour, is both sexy and frumpy, which I understand, but she's also brave and weak, in that order, which I found disappointing. The actual spies or agents were very good and I hope to find Eaton in later instalments. I like Professor Wilde a lot and have made a note to look out for the next in the series, Nucleus.
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