The Night of Wenceslas - Lionel Davidson

 I have reviewed three other Davidson novels on this blog: The Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Heights in 2019 and The Chelsea Murders in 2022.   I was bowled over by the first two but found the latter to be as bad as I thought it was when I read it as a young man.   I can therefore place Davidson's first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, in context.   It is as good in its way as Kolymsky Heights, not quite as good as The Sun Chemist, and leaves me wondering how anyone who could start with a novel as complex and thrilling as this could end up wasting time and paper and ink on something as trite as The Chelsea Murders twenty-five years later.

Wenceslas is in the tradition of John Buchan.   A young man gets accidentally involved in an international conspiracy, ostensibly about unbreakable glass, in fact about Cold War espionage.   The Cold War element is probably what made it so successful in 1960 (it won two awards).   Davidson was ahead of Le Carre and the Bond films and Len Deighton.   He takes us behind the Iron Curtain, to a communist country that no longer exists (Czechoslavakia), to a Prague as yet unblighted by drunken tourists on stag nights, an imperial gem under a fairly light-touch autocracy in which everyone is expected to keep a wary eye on one another.

We are about half way through, and our hero Nicolas Whistler is on his second trip when we begin to suspect there is something deeper going on here.   Nicolas has taken up with a local girl - Davidson, with a touch of genius, makes her a hefty Slavic girl, by no means without charm - and has cultivated a working relationship with the floor attendant in his luxury hotel.   He finds ways of using them to make his escape from the secret police to the British Embassy.   He has to do so during the National Celebration.   Fantastic stuff, and as in Sun Chemist and Kolymsky Davidson seems to know his stuff.   He lived in Israel for a time, which explains Sun Chemist but Soviet Russia and 1960 Prague?   Indeed, he seems to know these places better than he knew London in the 1980s.   That said, his portrayal here of bedsit London recovering from the Blitz, with lock-up garaages and men of dubious natonality in obscure offices strikes all the right notes.

The Night of Wenceslas has not only restored my faith in Lionel Davidson, I've already bought another.

The Shot - Philip Kerr

 What a range Philip Kerr had!   The best 'good Nazi' series ever, with Bernie Gunther, supernatural, sci fi, and, with The Shot (1999), perhaps the best Kennedy conspiracy thriller of all time.

Sam Jefferson is an assassin, America's finest.   He has carried out hits for the CIA, FBI and even the Mafia, but he doesn't work for any of them.   He is independent.   Or perhaps, after being a POW in the Korean War, he answers to different masters.

In late 1960 the mob brings him down to Miami to take out Castro and enable them to recoup their Cuban assets.   Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli are collaborating, informally, with the CIA.   Giancana has just delivered the crucial Chicago vote which enabled John F Kennedy to defeat Nixon in the presidential election.   Sam's deal with Kennedy's crooked father Joe is that the Kennedy administration will lay off the Mob.

Sam Jefferson heads for Havana and scopes out the Castro hit.   He has no problem moving around the city because he is half Cuban himself.   He delivers the feasability study to Johnny Rosselli and promptly absconds with Sam Giancana's money.   Giancana therefore hires local FBI man Jimmy Nimmo to track Jefferson down.

Sam meanwhile is working with another Miami FBI staffer Alex Goldman.   Together, they are planning to assassinate the president-elect.   Why? - I'm not going to say.   However, one suggestion is that Sam wants to kill JFK because a mob guy 'accidentally' played him a tape of Kennedy having sex with Sam's wife, who is one of his election staffers.   Mary ends up dead soon after.   Sam has disappeared, emptying the house of clues.

But Sam has other residences, other names.   Franklin Pierce is one of the names he goes by in New York.   Sometimes he's Marty van Buren.   He has other women in his life, women from Central America.

Attention moves to Jimmy Nimmo's investigation.   Nimmo is a likeable character.  He tracks down Jefferson's NY apartment.   He figures out that Sam is planning to take out Kennedy before the swearing-in on January 20 1961.   The question inevitably arises for the reader: We all know when Kennedy was actually taken out, November 22 1963; so how can this fictional version be satisfactorily resolved?   BY the supremely capable Philip Kerr, that's how.   I didn't fully twig even as it played out on the page in front of me.   And I absolutely love it.