The Secret Hours - Mick Herron

 I'm fairly sure I have reviewed all Herron's Slow Horses novel on this blog.   I had never even heard of The Secret Hours, Herron's latest book, and started it on the assumption that it is a standalone.   In fact it is much more.   Herron has excelled himself here, and I already held him in the highest esteem.

We start off with a retired spy under attack in his rural Devon bolthole.   Then we move to the Monochrome Inquiry, set up by a debased PM who earlier lost his job as Foreign Secretary when he allowed Russian agents to instal a dating app on his phone.   We are particularly interested in Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, Monochrome's attached civil servants, who are summoned to the Park by First Desk and informed in no uncertain terms that the inquiry is going precisely nowhere.

But then a kerfuffle in a supermarket sees Malcolm with a top secret file in his shopping.   He shows Griselda.   They copy the file and email to inquiry members.   Suddenly Monochrome is very much going somewhere.   They even a witness, who appears under the name Alison North, the name she used in the early Nineties when she was sent to Berlin by the legendary David Cartwright to 'check on procedures.'

Alison tells the panel what happened there.   About Head of Station Robin Bruce, a hopeless and doomed romantic, the actual man in charge Brinsley Miles, and Miles's friend Otis, the subject of the leaked file.   Who Miles really is - we can guess but even to the very last page we are never formally told.   Likewise Alison's identity is cunning held back until the climax of her time in Berlin.

Meanwhile Max Janacek, the allotted name of the Devon retiree, has made his way to London and looked up his supposed protectors at the Park's Housekeeping Department, notably John Bachelor, the drink-sodden milkman we have met before.   This is where Herron's great gift for characterisation kicks in.   Bachelor might be a sloppy drunk but he was once a professional, and even he can ride to the rescue in an emergency, which he does here.

What we have in The Secret Hours is an arm's length review of everything Herron has achieved to date.   It is his spy world, his spies and their back story.   Half the fun is guessing who's who.   Herron is too skillful to simply play games.   He seasons his complex story with regular surprises - not least, at the end, for First Desk.   Even Jackson Lamb would doff his proverbial cap to her for that.

A work of genius.

The Isotope Man - Charles Eric Maine

 Nobody in British sci fi of the Fifties spread their talent as widely as Maine.   Spaceways (also reviewed on this blog) was a radio play that became a movie and finally a book.   The Isotope Man (1957) was originally a movie called Timeslip (1955) starring two B-grade Americans, Gene Nelson and Faith Domergue.   The interesting thing is that the novels don't suffer in any way from being simply novelisations.   In the case of Spaceways they add to the original.   I haven't yet fully traced the antecedents of Timeslip but The Isotope Man certainly stands on its own feet.

Maine is at his best when he sets cutting edge science in the time he was writing.   The London of The Isotope Man is absolutely austerity London in the first half of the Fifties.   American journalist Delaney has been seconded to London's View Magazine.   He has experience of atomic experiments in the US and is therefore the science correspondent.

His task today is to cover the opening of a new NHS maternity unit in Stevenage.   This is not sci fi but a record of a time in which new hospitals were routinely being built.   Before he leaves the office, his eye is caught by a photo on the crime desk.   A man has been plucked from the Thames.   He has been beaten and shot and is now in hospital undergoing emergency surgery.   Delaney recognises him: he is Dr Stephen Rayner, US atomic scientist, and Delaney interviewed him Stateside.   There is something odd about the photo, a sort of haze hanging over the body.   Delaney has a hunch it has something to do with Delaney's research.   He isn't known as the Isotope Man for nothing.

The police are informed.   They check with Rayner's employers, a provincial science establishment doing secret governmental work.   The Managing Director says the injured man can't be Rayner; he's at the factory, and to prove it, is called to the phone to speak for himself.

So Delaney is sidetracked into becoming a freelance investigator, backed up (eventually) by his photographer, Jill Friday - a slick name and an attractive character in her own right.   The timeslip element is cleverly incorporated and Maine never loses track of the thriller element.   There is genuine menace and a compelling villain.   I don't know who played Vasquo in the movie but I suspect Maine had Orson Welles in mind.

I'm a big fan of Maine and there are several reviews of his novels on this blog.   The Isotope Man has got to be one of my favourites by him.   I really love the cover of this Corgi paperback.  

The Loo Sanction - Trevanian

The Loo Sanction is the follow-up to The Eiger Sanction.   It's a spy pastiche by the reclusive Anglo-American Trevanian.   It therefore features American academic and retired hitman Dr Jonathan Hemlock, but takes place almost entirely in England.    It was written in 1973 and is thus about Swinging London in its dark last phase.

Hemlock is in London to give guest lectures.   At the Royal Academy he is hijacked by his former lover Vanessa Dyke to evaluate a contemporary bronze of a horse that is about to go up for auction.  The thing is, Hemlock has the perfect eye - for art and for shooting.   The mysterious vendor, it seems, is trying to hike the hammer price.

Next, Hemlock hooks up with a young Irish wannabe artist, Maggie Coyne.   They spend the night in one of Hemlock's two luxury London pads.   Next morning they find a man grusesomely murdered in the bathroom.   Hemlock finds himself hijacked again, this time to the HQ of Loo, an interservice secret agency.   Maggie has been recruited by them as bait.   They want Hemlock to track down one Maximilian Strange who runs a high-class speciality brothel in which many high-ranking pillars of the Establishment have inadvertently let themselves be filmed in the act.   Loo want the films.   If Hemlock feels the need to 'sanction' someone, or indeed several, Loo will clean up the mess.

The thing about Trevanian is that his jokes are complex and dark.  He was himself an academic and therefore has greater word-power than most pasticheurs.  Jokes and comic names aside, he writes an extremely good thriller.   He does not romanticise violence - it is gory and painful.   The Seventies sex is free and plentiful but comes with consequences, feelings get hurt, people get abused.   The book is not some clever bloke showing off.   Trevanian's self-obscurity and scanty output testify to the effort he put into fine-tuning his work.

I am on the lookout for more.   The Eiger Sanction itself, perhaps - or Shibumi, to which my favourite cntemporary US writer, Don Winslow, wrote a prequel.

Unhinged - Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger

 What is it with senior Norwegian police officers and their pesky daughters who keep getting kidnapped by the deranged?   I can explain that.   It's not Norwegians per se; it's Jorn Lier Horst's personal hang-up which he has brought over to this collaboration with Thomas Enger, one of whose books I read so long ago that I can't remember if he has any similar baggage.

That said, the device is taken considerably further in Unhinged.   Iselin Blix is a trainee detective, so her involvement is less awkward.   She lodges with her father's protegee Sofia Kovic.   Kovic is looking into a few cold cases.   Someone breaks into the flat and executes her.   He also attacks Iselin but she manages to fight him off.   Alexander Blix is giving a speech to a class of students, which means he misses a number of telephone calls about the attack.   He is late to the scene.   He takes charge of the investigation.

Emma Ramm is a news blogger who has obviously worked with Blix in previous novels.   She is friends with both Kovic and Iselin.   There is no suggestion of a romantic interest with Blix.   She is much younger than him.   Indeed he rescued her from something horrible when she was five.   In so doing, he killed one of her abusers. 

So Blix asks Emma to accompany Iselin to the regular police trauma counsellor.   The session finishes early and Emma is not in the waiting room when Iselin leaves.   Iselin wanders out onto the street and is snatched in broad daylight, bundled into a stolen car and driven away.   Emma and Blix both miss the speeding vehicle by seconds.

The outcome of all this is only one half of the book.  The first half is framed by Blix's interrogation by Bjarne Brogeland of Kripos, the National Criminal Investigation Service.   This is a proper grilling - Bliz is the one under investigation, having apparently shot and killed someone else.  The device is really well used and adds another level of intrigue and darkness to events.

The second half is the hunt for those behind the murders and abduction.   it is well enough handled and Emma plays a more significant role, but I have to say it is not as thrilling as the first half.   Overall, though, I really enjoyed Unhinged.   A proper police thriller that is properly thrilling.    I shall certainly look out for more.   Apparently Death Deserved was the first Blix/Ramm novel, Smoke Screen second.

PS: Scarred was the Thomas Enger novel I reviewed on this blog back in February 2015.   I didn't much like it but I did admire Enger's writing style.

Boule de Suif - Guy de Maupassant

 In 1880, at the height of his novel-as-experiment phase, Emile Zola put together a collection of six shortish nouvelles by himself and five of his fellow devotees of naturalism.   He named it after the house at Medan which his success had bought him, and the gatherings of disciples he convened there: Les Soirees de Medan.    He went first, with 'Attack on the Mill', then came 'Boule de Suif' by Maupassant and... 

And very few readers got any further.   Les Soirees was no great success - it has never, so far as I can tell, been translated into English.   But Maupassant, making his debut, was all anyone spoke about, a tremendous and continuing success.   Many Maupassant fans still regard it as his best work.   It laid the secure foundation for the hectic decade that followed, during which he produced hundreds of stories and half-a-dozen novels, before his decline and death in the sanatorium at Passy.   Even across the Channel, where Francophobia is bred in the bone, Boule de Suif was translated within months.   And - get this - it retained, and still retains, the French title.   It means ball of suet, but that doesn't work, nor does dumpling or butterball.   No, Boule de Suif is perfect.

The stories in Les Soirees shared a common theme.   All were set during the recent Franco-Prussian war which France, it may be recalled, lost disastrously.   In Boule de Suif as bunch of townsfolk attempt to escape from Rouen, which has fallen to the Germans.   Ten of them share a coach, three couples, ranging from lower middle class to aristocracy, two nuns, a liberal agitator called Cornudet, and Elisabeth Rousset, known professionally as Boule de Suif, a fat and popular prostitute.

During the first leg of the journey the decent folk steer well clear of the courtesan.  But only she has had the sense to bring food, which she is perfectly happy to share, so the snobs and the religious are willing to compromise.   Snowfall means they have to stop overnight at an inn.   Unfortunately it is the inn where the Prussian officer in charge locally is also staying.   That evening he sends a message down to the dining room.   Will Mademoiselle Rousset spend the night with him?   No she won't.   Next morning, the officer won't allow the coach to leave.   This goes on for several days - every night, the invitation, the refusal, and in the morning no coach.

The others become restive.   They supported Boule de Suif to start with but the continued impasse is interfering with their plans.   They conspire to persuade her and eventually succeed.   They sit in the dining room drinking champagane and cheering on the thumbs and bumps from the bedchamber above.   Next morning, bright and early, the coach stands ready to leave.   Boule de Suif, distressed and ashamed, is last to join the party (Cornudet is staying on, a personal protest against the hypocrisy of the others).   The 'respectable' folk can hardly refuse to travel with the prostitute.   She is the only reason they are allowed to travel.   But they don't have to speak.  Indeed, they feel free to speak about her...

Hypocrisy and double standards are Maupassant's speciality and he hit the ground running with Boule de Suif.   I prefer Bel-Ami, personally, but Boule de Suif comes very close.    As a longish short story it may very well be, like its title, perfect.

The Russian Intelligence - Michael Moorcock

 The Russian Intelligence is a pastiche spy story featuring a contemporary avatar of Moorcock's Eternal Champion, Jerry Cornell, in Swinging London, at least a decade before the book was written.  Actually it is a reworking and expansion of a story originally written in 1966.   This is Moorcock, after all, and the narrative probably had various earlier incarnations.

It reads like it was written very quickly.   Moorcock reckoned he could do 15,000 words a day in his heyday, so for Russian Intelligence maybe a week, tops.   This being Moorcock, speed doesn't mean inferior, just pacy.   When all is said and done, it is a pastiche of a genre which at the time was itself pretty silly.

Jerry Connell is a Class A agent with Cell 87.   We begin with Connell cradling his dying colleague, Thorp.   Naturally Connell is given the job of tracking down the killers.   Thorp was working on a series of leaks to the Russians.   Clues lead Connell to a publisher of comics, thence to the home of a Russian diplomat who is a subscriber.   While Connell is sneaking round the garden, inside the house the diplomat is being subjected to interrogation by the dreaded Joseph K (one of the better jokes), who is in awe of the British superstar.   Thus the chase begins, taking in discothèques in Soho and the Norfolk Broads.   That's discos in Soho and the damp nothingness of the Broads.

Connell's reputation is unjustified.   The main joke is that he is lazy and cowardly and lives in fear of his wife Shirley, who seems to always know when he has picked up a new girlfriend.   It all ends with a protracted chase around the fens pursued by a spectral horseman and his demonic minions, which is certainly no sillier than say Moonraker, indeed, isn't it what a moonraker used to be?

It's all great fun, expertly done, a window into a time gone by.

Deep Shelter - Oliver Harris

 Deep Shelter is the middle novel of Harris's Nick Belsey trilogy.   Belsey is on restricted duties.   He sees a speeding BMW and gives chase,   The chase ends, the BMW gets out and legs it into what Belsey knows is a blind alley down the side of Costa Coffee - and disappears.

Belsey eventually discovers an entrance to the underground network that lies beneath London, not just the Underground itself, but also the abandoned mail rail system and bunkers built during WW2 and expanded during the Cold War.    Belsey decides it would be a cool idea to take his new girlfriend down there for a date.   While they are down there, the date gets snatched, abducted.   Ultimately Belsey gets an email.   The man he chased, who calls himself Ferryman, has the girl and wants Belsey to come and find her at Site 3.

Belsey of course goes off the radar.   Starts digging into the little information that exists about the subterranean network.   A former spy chief is dumped, naked and dead, behind Centre Point in the middle of London - and all traces spirited away by what looks like the emergency services and isn't.   Very high, very secret police departments start taking an interest in Belsey's case.   His sergeant, and former lover, Kirsty Craik is also taken, first by Ferryman and then by the aforementioned hush-hush squad.   Belsey is sent everywhere, from London homeless shelters to a remote village in Wiltshire as he tries to impose order on chaos.

I love stories of alt-London, secret London, the 'other' megapolis.   I don't know that I have come across a better, more thought-through version than this.   It is also a first rate thriller.   Oliver Harris is a top writer, perhaps the top in contemporary crime fiction and bloody good in spy fiction too.

Pierre and Jean - Guy de Maupassant

 Pierre and Jean is not the novel Maupassant writes about in his famous introductory essay, 'The Novel.'   Indeed, the essay is more famous than the novel that follows.   The essay is Maupassant's only critical work, whereas he wrote hundreds of short stories and five or six novels in his single full decade as an author.   In it he explains why the psychological novel is bound to fail - because the only psychology we are really familiar with is our own.   He then gives us, in Pierre and Jean, a psychological novel.

It is primarily the psychology of Pierre which dominates.   The Roland brothers of Le Havre are unusually fraternal.   Pierre has qualified as a doctor, Jean a lawyer; both are living with their parents while they lay the foundations for a career.   Both are enamoured with the pretty widow Madame Rosemilly and maintain an amicable rivalry.

Then, out of the blue, an old family friend bequeathes his fortune to the younger brother, Jean.   Pierre is initially happy for his brother.   Then the questions start in his head.   Why Jean, not him?   Why not half each?   Questions become suspicions.   Suspicions fester, poisoning Pierre's relationship with his brother and, especially, their mother.

Maupassant is a naturalisr.   He knows that in the real world these things result in compromise, not tragedy.   Arrangements are made, an outcome acceptable to all parties is negotiated.   And so it is here.  The lives of all four main characters are changed but not ruined.   The door to rapproachment is left open.

And it is beautifully done, the work of a master at the height of his powers.   It is not really a novel, of course, only 130 pages.   But every page is packed with life and detail, to a much greater extent than a short story.   The cast is small, four principals and three or four bit-part-players, all expertly characterised, the action continuous and compressed.   It's the perfect novella.

The Night Man - Jorn Lier Horst

Having enjoyed Wisting on TV I picked up one of the original novels with a few reservations.   Often (Wallander) the TV versions are nothing like the originals, albeit later novels sometimes come to resemble the TV series (Wallander, again).   The good news with Wisting?  The two are exactly the same.  100% match.

I don't know if The Night Man has been adapted for TV yet.   I doubt it, given the gruesome nature of the initial crime - the head of a teenaged asylum seeker is displayed on a pole in the Larvik marketplace.   William Wisting and his ubiquitous reporter daughter Line investigate the same crime from different starting points.   Line ends up as a potential victim.   

What I particularly liked, which we don't get in the TV version, is the compelling depiction of provincial policing.   I also liked that in this novel from 2009, Nils Hammer, Wisting's colleague, doesn't overtake the narrative (which he regularly does on TV, due to a charismatic actor).   In fact, I had to concentrate to determine which one he was.

The story faces up to contemporary issues - refugees, prejudice, human trafficking and opiates funding international terrorism.   Author Horst has clearly thought them through.   Everything about the book convinces and compels.   I enjoyed it a lot. 

Prince of Spies - Alex Gerlis

 Prince of Spies is the first in Alex Gerlis's quartet featuring Lincolnshire Detective Superintendent Richard Prince, who in 1942 is recruited by MI6 and sent undercover to occupied Denmark to root out a potential mole in Six and to check out sources who have been relaying information about the V1 and V2 programme.   Prince's mother was Danish and he spent his school holidays there.    He also speaks a reasonable amount of German and some French.

The mission is only supposed to last a couple of weeks but Prince's contacts are thorough.  His main contact, Agent Osric (Prince is Laertes), is also a cop, a female detective in Copenhagen called Hanna Jakobsen.   Other contacts and agents are kept at arm's length but include anti-Nazi Germans at the highest level.   After a slow-burning start, Denmark is where the novel really comes alive.   Gerlis uses straightforward prose which, at that point, becomes vital for us to be able to follow the twists and turns of who is who and where they stand.   The characterisation of these agents is more detailed than usual in spy fiction - particularly in war spy fiction, which tends to favour stereotypes of good and evil.   This is the sign of Gerlis's mastery in the genre; he is now launching his fourth series of wartime novels.   It enables us to appreciate the sacrifice these people make.

The thrill-rate is well managed and there are couple of intriguing side-plots.   I especially enjoyed the betrayal of the high-ranking SS officer by his wife, which is entirely conducted in letters and a couple of official memos.   I also liked the arguments over tactics between the spies, the military, and Winston Churchill's special advisers.   I suspect these play out over series.   I am definitely adding Gerlis to my list of must-reads.