A Cold Wind from Moscow - Rory Clements

 The latest in the Tom Wilde series, A Cold Wind from Moscow is a particular rich example of what is best in a long-running series.   Time has moved on (to 1947 and the UK's coldest recorded winter), characters have developed and changed (Philip Eaton has apparently been outed as a 'useful idiot' for Stalin's Soviets) and new characters have stepped forward to take their place.   Freya Bentall, for example, is the de facto boss of MI5, albeit the former police gangbuster Percy Sillitoe is the nominal chief.   She asks Professor Wilde to take a short break from his university duties to try and identify which of three MI5 agents is possibly a double.   Meanwhile Uncle Joe Stalin has personal instructed his 'black work' specialist Lazar Lukin to go to the UK and stir up chaos in order to shield their prime nuclear asset Klaus Fuchs who, as Clement neatly points out, was the man who built the nuclear bombs of America, Britain and Russia.   Among Lukin's alloted tasks is the elimination of another veteran of Los Alamos, Basil Rheinhaus.   Reinhaus is a brilliant scientist with a gambling problem, which led Fuchs to try and recruit him as a Russian asset.   Reinhaus, however, preferred to report Fuchs to MI5 and is now in hiding.   One of Tom's suspects is Reinhaus' contact man.   He takes Wilde to an arty event at the home of the super-rich socialite Vivienne Chalke, at which Wilde recognises Reinhaus.   Then all hell breaks loose.

And, I almost forgot, the novel opens with the murder by ice axe of another MI5 agent in Tom's set at college.

A Cold Wind from Moscow is the best of the Wilde novels I have read to date.   Several of the supporting characters are superb, Vivienne Chalke for instance, and East End ice-axe man Terry Adnams.   Tom's wife Lydia is training to be a doctor at St Ursula's in London and I missed her dry wit, and I didn't take to the young woman the Wildes have drafted in to look after their young son.   Other than that, I found only one misjudgement on Clements' part: there is an unnecessary appearance by three of the actual Cambridge spies in the epilogue.   Why?   Unless, of course, that is our clue as to what comes next in the series?   We shall see.

The Man in the Bunker - Rory Clements

 It is the summer of 1945.   The war in Europe has ended and Professor Tom Wilde of Cambridge University is looking forward to his first term of teaching in what seems like years.   But for spies like him, the war never ends.   His friend Philip Eaton persuades him to undertake one last mission.   Is Hitler really dead, and if not, where is he?

Eaton takes him round the various survivors of the Berlin Bunker who are now in England.  Then it's off to the American sector of Berlin where Wilde is teamed with Mozes Heck, a Dutch Jew, raised in Germany, now a lietenant in the British Army.   All of Heck's family died in the Holocaust.   Thus Heck is on something of a crusade.

The fluctuating relationship between the two adopted Brits, the American professor and the Dutch avenger, is what gives the novel its tension.   The trail eventually leads them to the Tyrol where the fallen Fuhrer may be hiding and where a second Fuhrer is definitely on the rise.   The eventual showdown is well done and Clements leaves us with sufficient untied ends to anticipate the next in the series.

A niche subgenre of Oxbridge spies and Nazis has emerged over the last decades and Rory Clements was one of the first.   He remains one of the best and I always enjoy his Wilde series.   You can start reading them at any point - I certainly did. 

Nemesis - Rory Clements

 I enjoyed the first Professor Tom Wilde novel, Corpus, so much (see my review below),  I was always going to pick up future novels in the series.   They didn't actually have the second instalment (Nucleus) so I settled for the third, Nemesis.

It's August 1939, the world is heading for war.   Wilde and Lydia are in France on what should have been their honeymoon.   Wilde is approached with a message from Marcus Marfield, one of his former students.   Marfield is in a French internment camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War.

Marfield was a chorister at Cambridge, with the look and voice of an angel.   Wilde always found him a bit distant, but the least he can do is visit.   He finds Marfield half-starved and wounded - shot, not in Spain but here in the French camp.   Of course he gets him out, gets his wound attended to, and takes him home to Cambridge.

That is when things start to go astray.   Not everything about Marfield is as it seems.   His fahter, for example, commits suicide on the day his son returns to Britain.   Then the psychologist who is persuaded by Lydia to examine Marfield for what we now call PTSD, does the same.   Gradually, Wilde gets drawn into the mystery.

Meanwhile a U-Boat sinks the liner Athenia, which is packed with American citizens returning from Europe, among them Jim Vanderberg's wife and two young sons.   Jim is Wilde's college friend and now with the US Embassy in London.   The rumour circulates that it was really the Brits that attacked the ship in an attempt to prevent Roosevelt joining France and the UK against Germany.

The war is only days old.   A lot of British fascists have yet to choose their side.   A lot of Communists are appalled by Stalin's pact with Hitler.

It's a great premise for a thriller and Clements handles it very well.   Unfortunately it's not quite as good as Corpus.   In places there's something hurried about it.   Nothing a decent edit couldn't fix, but do editors bother these days?   In both books there are little side scenes that are there for plot reasons and don't directly involve the main characters.   In Nemesis there are just one or two too many, the surplus ones explaining plot points we probably don't need to know.   Personally, I tend to take the view that if you're going to do that sort of thing, you're better off doing lots of it.

That said, Nemesis is still a cracking read.   If Corpus was A*, Nemesis is easily B+.   I'm definitely looking out for more.