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.

My Name is Nobody - Matthew Richardson

 

An Islamist suspect is being grilled by MI6.   He doesn't care - he knows he has something to trade.   A secret that will shake the spying world.   Solomon Vine, the lead investigator, gets a call.   Release Dr Yousef immediately.   It comes from C himself, Sir Alexander Cecil.   Vine, always the awkward one, delays and wonders why he should let his man go.   In the meantime, someone shoots Dr Yousef.

Vine returns to the UK, persona non grata at MI6.   But his old mentor Cosmo Newton, former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, offers a lifeline.   Newton thinks he knows what Yousef's secret was - a mole in MI6.   Thus the adventure begins, spy on spy, Vine against Gabriel Wilde, his oldest friend, the other investigator when Yousef was shot, the man who took Rose, the love of Vine's life.  Wilde has been snatched in Istanbul.   A video circulates in which 'terrorists' threaten to behead him.   Is it real - or has Wilde staged the kidnap?   Is Wilde the mole?

The story is gripping enough, the characters sufficiently well drawn.   It is spy fiction in the Smiley mode - spying on spies, the enemy within - and a good example of the genre.   I enjoy the sub-genre and I enjoyed My Name is Nobody (though I hate the title).   I wonder, though, what can anyone bring to the game which Le Carre hasn't already done to the point of death.   Nothing much, I fancy.   In this instance I admit I didn't get who 'Nobody' was but I knew more or less from the outset who the mole was.   The denouement I found slightly underdone.   The build-up to it, however, was extremely well worked.   Not a classic but a very good, very enjoyable thriller.

Hornet Flight - Ken Follertt

 A story loosely based on fact, Hornet Flight is mainly set in Denmark.   Young Harald Olufsen is coming of age in a country bloodlessly annexed by the Nazis.   Most citizens accept the situation; some, of course, welcome it.   Teenagers like Harald get by with harmless jokes and pranks.

There is a fledgling resistance, run by MI6 through Hermia Mount, who lived in Denmark before the war and who is engaged to Harald's older brother, a flight instructor.  On the island where Harald lives the Nazis have built a secret base - indeed, Harald worked on it during his previous summer holiday.  Local workers were cleared away before the final installation took place, but Harald sometimes sneaks by on the shortcut home.

In Britain, Bomber Command is taking a hammering.   If they keep getting shot down at the present rate, they won't be able to help their new Russian allies by bombing Nazi targets in western Europe.   The British are about to deploy radar.  They wonder if the Nazis have developed something similar.  Is that, in fact, what the base on the island is doing?

With the a massive raid planned and only days away, Hermia is smuggled back to Denmark to contact her agents.   She reunites with Arne Olufsen and asks him to visit his home and look into the base there.  In doing so, he confides in Harald.   Another islander, Peter Flemming, is a police detective in Copenhagen, with an invalid wife, ambition, and a significant dislike of his former friend Arne.   If it furthers his ambition, Peter is perfectly happy to work with the Nazis.   The potential involvement of his rival is a bonus.

Harald, meanwhile, is expelled from school (thanks to Peter Flemming) and working oddjobs on a farm on the estate of his rich Jewish schoolfriend.   Harald finds an aged plane hidden in a barn - the Hornet of the title - and sets about repairing it.   Harald can fly a little, but his schoolfriend's sister, ballerina Karen Duchwitz, is fully trained.   Together, they plan to fly photos of the radio installation across to Britain.

Follett is as good as anyone at racking up the tension.   The flight itself is spellbinding.  Some of the secondary action, however, is poor.   There are a couple of unexpected deaths - I won't spoil the book for others by saying who dies - but the last one is poorly done, almost as if Follett has lost interest.  There is far too much coincidence at play and the book is far too long.   Length is always a problem and pointing to dispensible passages with an author as skilled as Follett is almost impossible.   I was never bored, yet I felt things were just moving too slowly.

The characters were fine,.   Follett, as he often does, has young adults as his leads.   This too is fine but these two, Harald and Karen, are too pre-skilled to be absolutely credible.   Arne is an excellent secondary protagonist.   Peter starts off convincingly conflicted but we - and, I fear, Follett - lose interest as his emnity to the Olufsen brothers mounts.   Hermia (sorry) is dull as dishwater.

Not classic Follett then, but still well worth reading.   I'm keen on trying his Century Trilogy.

Dead Lions - Mick Herron

Dead Lions is the second of Mick Herron's splendidly warped Jackson Lamb thrillers. I have previously read and reviewed the fourth, Spook Street. It really doesn't matter what order you read them in. The plots are standalone and the premise is always the same: Slough House is where MI5 buries the second rate spooks who are too young to pension off; Jackson Lamb, in charge of Slough House, is a loose cannon whose appalling behaviour is redeemed by his single principle in life, unswerving loyalty.

Dickie Bow, had he been younger, would have been marooned at Slough House. He was certainly a slow horse. But he was in Berlin with Jackson Lamb, and when Dickie meets his maker on a replacement bus from Reading station, Lamb feels honour-bound to stick his nose in. This leads to the death of one of Lamb's own, seconded to nursemaid a visiting Russian oligarch. River Cartwright, meanwhile, grandson of a legendary spook, uncovers what looks like a plot to crash a light aircraft into the City's latest skyscraper by a nest of long-entrenched Cold War agents.

Herron's plotting is second to none. As in Spook Street he manages to walk the delicate tightrope between comedy and suspense. The action sequences are truly thrilling, the black humour of the dialogue always amusing, often laugh-out-loud. Surely somebody has to adapt the series for TV?

Crisis - Frank Gardner

Frank Gardner is the BBC's Security Correspondent who was shot and disabled by terrorists whilst filming in Saudi Arabia in 2004. I became interested in him after watching a documentary series in which he set off, wheelchair and all, to see the birds of paradise in Borneo. So when I saw his first novel. I had to give it a try.

It's not his first book but it is a first novel and has some inevitable faults. His characterisation isn't great and there are scenes that don't need to be there. But it is the depth of knowledge behind the story that draws you in. The idea is a cracker: Colombian drug smugglers decide to take revenge on the Brits who disrupt their trade with a North Korean dirty bomb. Once the clock starts ticking, the device beloved of all the best thrillers, the book becomes thoroughly compelling, as good as any in the genre.


Before that things take their time. It's the inevitable compromise - you have to develop your characters and setting in sufficient detail to make your reader care about the outcome. Gardner's hero, who seems to be continuing in a second novel, is Luke Carlton, an identikit hero with an identikit name, a former Special Forces officer turned spy - which I guess must be a regular thing in real life.


Luke is a newbie at MI6 but he is the obvious man for the job because he was born and raised in Colombia (a prologue in which he loses his parents is one of the scenes I could happily dispense with). His girlfriend Elise and her subplot is a bore, but Luke suffers enough and makes sufficient gung-ho mistakes that we do come to care about his fate. The villains are pretty much the usual black hats - there is no need for them to be anything more. The most interesting characters are the officials at MI6 HQ in Vauxhall Cross (VX), especially Sayed 'Sid' Khan, the conflicted Head of Terrorism, and Luke's line manager Angela Scott.


Crisis is 550 pages. All bar about 50 of them are excellent. A very good debut but Gardner really needs to spend more time on characterisation and giving them more original names.


PS It has just dawned on me that the front cover gives away one of the plot twists. Duh!