Nemesis - Rory Clements

 I enjoyed the first Professor Tom Wilde novel, Corpus, so much (see my review below),  I was always going to pick up future novels in the series.   They didn't actually have the second instalment (Nucleus) so I settled for the third, Nemesis.

It's August 1939, the world is heading for war.   Wilde and Lydia are in France on what should have been their honeymoon.   Wilde is approached with a message from Marcus Marfield, one of his former students.   Marfield is in a French internment camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Marfield was a chorister at Cambridge, with the look and voice of an angel.   Wilde always found him a bit distant, but the least he can do is visit.   He finds Marfield half-starved and wounded - shot, not in Spain but here in the French camp.   Of course he gets him out, gets his wound attended to, and takes him home to Cambridge.

That is when things start to go astray.   Not everything about Marfield is as it seems.   His fahter, for example, commits suicide on the day his son returns to Britain.   Then the psychologist who is persuaded by Lydia to examine Marfield for what we now call PTSD, does the same.   Gradually, Wilde gets drawn into the mystery.

Meanwhile a U-Boat sinks the liner Athenia, which is packed with American citizens returning from Europe, among them Jim Vanderberg's wife and two young sons.   Jim is Wilde's college friend and now with the US Embassy in London.   The rumour circulates that it was really the Brits that attacked the ship in an attempt to prevent Roosevelt joining France and the UK against Germany.

The war is only days old.   A lot of British fascists have yet to choose their side.   A lot of Communists are appalled by Stalin's pact with Hitler.

It's a great premise for a thriller and Clements handles it very well.   Unfortunately it's not quite as good as Corpus.   In places there's something hurried about it.   Nothing a decent edit couldn't fix, but do editors bother these days?   In both books there are little side scenes that are there for plot reasons and don't directly involve the main characters.   In Nemesis there are just one or two too many, the surplus ones explaining plot points we probably don't need to know.   Personally, I tend to take the view that if you're going to do that sort of thing, you're better off doing lots of it.

That said, Nemesis is still a cracking read.   If Corpus was A*, Nemesis is easily B+.   I'm definitely looking out for more.

Corpus - Rory Clements

 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.