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 Chelsea Murders - Lionel Davidson

 I remember this book when it came out in 1978.   It was seen as something of a comeback for Davidson, who then went on to triumph with Kolymsky Heights (reviewed below).   I remember reading it at the time and wondering what all the fuss was about.  Now I've read it again.  And I still wonder.

It is a very silly book.   It contains none of things I like about Davidson (the breathtaking depth of his research, the ability to evoke absolutely convincing extreme locations, the profoundly conflicted characters).  It is a murder book.  The murders are excessively gruesome (I wonder if this is what stirred the critics at the time - was Davidson the first to go so far?), the setting very pretension and the characters by and large off-putting.  The only exception is the mildly eccentric Mary Mooney, a reporter on the local newspaper and stringer for the nationals.  The murderer is not hard to work out although Davidson does a pretty effective job at laying false trails.  The dialogue, of which there is far more than usual in Davidson, is really, really bad.  Some of the faults are of its time and thankfully we have moved on.

If it was the best thriller of the year it was a very poor year.  I see from the back cover that H R F Keating described it as a black comedy.  Dark it certainly is.  Comedy?  Well, perhaps that is what Davidson was trying.  Sadly, he failed.  Badly.

The Sun Chemist - Lionel Davidson

How on earth do you make a thriller out of writing footnotes for the letters of Israel's first president? Lionel Davidson shows how. Igor Druyanov, a historian of Russian descent, is commissioned to prepare a couple of installments of the massive multi-volume Letters of Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952). The years in question were Weizmann's wilderness years - like Churchill, these were the Twenties and Thirties - when he was ousted from the Zionist movement and had to revert to his original profession as a research chemist.

The key to the tension here is that the book dates from 1976 and begins a couple of years earlier, in 1974. This is when OPEC jacked up oil prices, creating a crisis in the West and making the polite, ever-smiling Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani a hate figure. At rhe time it seemed as if the greedy, ungrateful Arabs were threatening the developed world with a new stone age. Indeed, the West has spent the last fifty years developing alternative power sources to avoid a repeat, whilst the Arab world has taken a more moderate line in exploiting what is, after all, their only real resource, and a finite one at that.

But Davidson's book is firmly anchored in 1974-6 and the Israel of that time, a year or so after the first Arab-Israeli war. Davidson might have been born in Hull but at this time he was living in Israel. In the story, it emerges from Igor's research that Weizmann and his research associates might have hit upon a way of synthesizing combustible fuel from root vegetables. It isn't quite so simple, and Davidson spares us none of the science, but that is essentially it: an infinite supply of fuel to a power-hungry world; a windfall beyond price to a state just establishing itself in the deserts of Palestine and the end of time to their near neighbours in the Gulf.

It's a great book and an astonishing feat of writing from Davidson. He was never a scientist, always a journalist but, by God, he does his research. Every part of the book, from the history that drives Druyanov, to the world of international science and petrochemicals, is utterly convincing. Davidson, to be fair, was a peripatetic journalist and, as I say above, lived in Israel - but I've never read anything, fact or fiction, that brings that raw state so alive. Davidson, in my view, is even better than Ambler, better than Greene, and so unusual in his choice of subjects. He deserves to be better remembered than he is. As for this book, is there a thriller in print today that is more topical?

Kolymsky Heights - Lionel Davidson

Is Kolymsky Heights the greatest thriller ever written? That is always going to be a subjective question. Objectively, though, no one can deny Davidson's immediately post-Soviet techno yarn should be in the running.

Davidson is an unusual figure. He had a forty-year career and was always successful, but he only seems to have produced eight novels, of which Kolymsky Heights is the last. I remember reading the penultimate, The Chelsea Murders, in the early Eighties, but have never even seen the others in a library or bookshop.

You can see why there was a sixteen year gap between Chelsea and Kolymsky. The amount of research must have been colossal, let alone developing a hero capable of delivering linguistically, ethnographically and physically. Davidson's novels all seem to have different heroes, which probably contributed to the lack of productivity. The thing is, I suspect he wrote constantly - there is sixteen years' worth of writing on every one of the nearly 500 pages.

Basically, odd-ball academic Porter is asked to go undercover in the vast secret area of Siberia to contact a Russian scientist who everyone thought was long dead. There is a secret in the secret lab. The secret is revealed perhaps two-thirds of the way through and is rather touching in the way it is handled. The book is about the adventure itself - getting to the secret lab and getting back out again, which effectively involves traversing the biggest country on earth both ways. There is plenty of action, a convincing love affair, and, above all, lots and lots of thrills.

Kolymsky Heights is a classic novel of its time and of its genre. Is it the greatest? Quite possibly. The other seven novels are must-reads for me.