The Napoleon of Crime - Ben Macintyre

 

"Thrilling," cries the Telegraph.  "A highly charged thriller!" squeaks the Independent on Sunday.  No it's not.  Anyone who works in the media and writes a book is always going to get quotes for his blurb.  In this case only Macintyre's employer seems to have bothered to read it.  "A well-researched and lively account," says the good old Times, and The Napoleon of Crime is certainly that.  In fact Macintyre's liveliness is adversely effected by the depth of his research.  He thinks Adam Worth, the said Napoleon, is compelling.  He isn't.  A Napoleon of crime is only interesting when he's caught, until which time he is just another inexplicably rich person.  He may or may not have contributed to Conan Doyle's creation of Professor Moriarty, but anyone who has read the stories will tell you he's not very interesting either.

The thing about Worth is that he did two interesting things - he stole and returned Gainsborough's painting of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, at that time the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.  He stole the painting boldly and personally.  He returned it clandestinely and may even have been paid to do so.  He was never charged with the theft.  Yes, that's really unusual and interesting - but unfortunately the two events are twenty-five years apart.  Twenty-five years in which Worth slowly sank lower and lower.

What Macintyre should have written was the story of the painting, overlaying the rapid rise and painfully slow descent of Worth.  But he has discovered too much detail about Worth in the files of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and just cannot bring himself to sublimate any of it.  Thus the first part of the book, leading up to the theft, is rip-roaring.  Everything after that point is just plain boring. My quote, if anybody wants it for a future edition, would be 'Disappointing.'

Ian Fleming and James Bond - Ben Macintyre

I am a big fan of Ben Macintyre, his books, his TV programmes and his contributions to The Times. This is one of his early, minor works, commissioned in 2008 to mark the 100th anniversary of Fleming's birth.

I am in no sense a fan of James Bond. I read perhaps half the novels as a child and gave up to the films after I fell asleep in Thunderball when I was eight or nine. I suppose I have seen most of the Connery and Moore movies on TV since then. I have seen none of the Dalton, Brosnan or Craig iterations and am very unlikely to now. I have re-read a couple of the books more recently. I remember Diamonds Are Forever and Casino Royale. The former is very flimsy, the latter rubbish. Ian Fleming is not an author I take to in any way.


So I am probably not the target audience for a book about Bond and his creator. Yet I enjoyed it. Macintyre makes no attempt to exaggerate Fleming's literary prowess, he relies on the undeniable fact that with Bond he created a worldwide icon and spawned two industries (film and follow-on books) that continue fifty years after his death. Instead he looks at what made the Bond books successful - chiefly the excitement of international jet-setting and hi-tech gadgetry in the age of postwar austerity. Macintyre uses his encyclopaedic knowledge of historical espionage to identify the originals behind the characters. He covers the basics of Fleming's life, the key moments that saw Fleming in Jamaica with time on his hands the urge to write the spy story to end all spy stories. I could personally have done with a little more about his older brother Peter, also a successful novelist and peripheral spy, and his influence on Ian. At the end of the day Ian Fleming was not an especially pleasant man and Macintyre tells us enough about his better side to leave us satisfied.


One unexpected result of reading Ian Fleming and James Bond is an inexplicable desire to look into some of the post-Fleming Bond novels. In particular I am keen to get hold of Colonel Sun, the first of the follow-ons, by a hard-up Kingsley Amis hiding behind the name Robert Markham. I read it when it first came out and hated it. I do not like any of Amis that I have read over the years, so why on earth I've just clicked to buy Colonel Sun on Amazon... What have you done to me, Macintyre? It'll be John Gardner's Bond next but it will never ever be Sebastian Faulks. You hear me? Unless---

Operation Mincemeat - Ben Macintyre

I had seen Macintyre's TV documentaries and especially enjoyed the one about Kim Philby, so picking up one of his books was a no-brainer.

Operation Mincemeat is an update of The Man Who Never Was, the book by Ewen Montagu, filmed by Ronald Neame in 1956.  That was inevitably partial - Ewen Montagu was the man behind the Man Who Never Was - and circumscribed by the demands of British foreign policy and the Official Secrets Act.  Sixty years on, Macintyre is able to go into much greater detail and take an objective overview of events.

Essentially, this is the story of the misinformation by which the British were able to deceive the Germans about where the Allies intended to invade Europe in 1943.  A dead body was given an encyclopedic back-story and dumped off Gibraltar loaded with fake information that the invasion point was to be Greece or perhaps Sardinia but certainly not Sicily, which was the true destination.  The body washed up as intended in neutral Spain.  The neutral Spanish copied the contents to the Germans and then politely returned them to the British.  The German High Command was taken in, not merely by the quality of the faked documents but also because Hitler's favourite intelligence guru was actively conspiring against him on humanitarian grounds.

And that is where Macintyre's account achieves greatness - the expert way he is able to normalise the bizarre preoccupations and habits of spies.  Montagu, in this context, comes across as a fairly straight bat, unlike the recluses and obsessives and the cross-dressers who also crop up.  On the other hand, his brother Ivor, filmmaker and table tennis enthusiast, was a spy for Soviet Russia, something which everyone in the British secret service knew full well.  Well, everyone except perhaps brother Ewen.

Despite the complexity of his tale, Macintyre tells it smoothly and persuasively.  He obviously knows huge amounts about his subject but pulls off the really clever trick of not showing off his knowledge.  Highly recommended.