The Labyrinth Makers - Anthony Price

 Number 26 in the new thirty-strong run of Penguin crime and espionage modern classics, this drew my eye with the legendary green cover.   Anthony Price was a high-grade journalist who wrote on the side and The Labyrinth Makers was his first novel in 1970.   It won him a Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association, and no wonder.

Twenty-five years on from World War 2, we are deep into the Cold War.   Dr David Audley is a reclusive desk operative for the Secret Service, specialising in the Middle East.   Then a wartime RAF Dakota is unearthed during construction work for a natural gas pipeline and Audley finds himself inexplicably switched to a multi-agency investigation.   The plane and its pilot are no mystery: everybody has been looking for Flight Lt John Steerforth and his Dakota since they vanished during the Berlin Airlift in September 1945.   Until now they were assumed lost at sea.   But Steerforth evidently managed to nurse his plane back to England after ordering his crew to bale out over the North Sea.   The question is, what became of his cargo?

Because John Steerforth was not only a decorated war hero, he was a post-war smuggler.   For him the ruins of Berlin were a honey-pot of looted goodies and Steerforth might, by accident or design, have hit upon a very special treasure indeed.   The Russians, from whom it was stolen, have never given up looking for Steerforth's plane.   Now it has been found, they are very interested indeed.   And because they are interested, those higher up the intelligence food chain in London are also interested.   And they have decided, for reasons unknown, that David Audley is the man they need on the ground.

The snag is, the crates found in the wrecked Dakota are not the crates the Russians are mad keen on recovering.   They are decoys, filled with building rubble.   Which means that Steerforth must have stashed them on the day before the doomed flight, somewhere near his isolated base in Cambridgeshire because there was no time for one man working alone to move and bury so much treasure.   Which is why Audley has been winkled out of seclusion.   He might have no experience of field work but he does have a gift for lateral thinking.

The Labyrinth Makers is a great read, a classic espionage thriller of its era, smartly written with genuinely interesting characters.   Faith Steerforth, for example, the late Flight Lieutenant's daughter, is not just sex interest, as she would have been in Ian Fleming or even John le Carre circa 1970.   She helps Audley solve the mystery.   Likewise our supposed villain, the Soviet masterspy Nikolai Andrievich Panin, whose reputation is cleverly built up until he finally turns up thirty pages from the end, is no one-dimensional Fleming villain or even the far complex Karla; he wants the stolen booty back because he suffered the ignominy of losing it in 1945.   His only plan for the treasure is to donate it to a German museum.   The two files of old intelligence files which Steerforth took with it by mistake, Panin is quite happy to burn right here and now.

A real find, this.   I want more and quick internet searches reveal there is quite a lot more.   Price even has another Dagger-winning novel in the Penguin series.   His Other Paths to Glory is at lucky number thirteen in the list.