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.

The Traitor - Sydney Horler

Sydney Horler (1888-1954) was a British thriller writer immensely popular in his day. He was serialised in the News of the World and sold more than two million copies of his many books. He was very much of his day - an admirer of officers and gentlemen, a fan of empire, a disdainer of the foreign. His popularity died with him and this 2015 reissue by the British Library, I have to say, does little to warrant rediscovery.

Horler writes in an obvious hurry and like many hurried authors is overly reliant on dialogue to advance his plot. Worse, he has a habit of referring in these tedious passages to 'the speaker', which I will henceforth take to be a sure indicator of rubbish. The plot is labyrinthine. In 1917 Captain Clinton falls for a sexy French-Garman femme fatale and as result 5000 Allied troops die on the Front. For this service he is naturally given command of MI5. Eighteen years later his adopted son Bobby Wingate falls for the same femme and is court-martialled for passing British secrets to damned foreigners.


The thing is - the point of interest, really - that we are talking 1935. War is coming, not with Germany this time but with Ronstadt, which is very like Germany. Indeed, to a large extent, even in the novel, it is Germany, perhaps the bits we don't associate with decadent Weimar. The tyrant of Ronstadt is Kuhnreich, who doesn't have a Charlie Chaplin moustache but is otherwise noticeably Hitlerian. It's an odd choice by Horler and I suspect he was one of the many Brits associated with newspapers who admired Hitler and the revivified Reich. It spoils the book, on balance (actually, it's one of many things which spoil a not-great-to-start-with book) because it is so blatantly Ruritanian.


It's the odd, unintended things which add the occasional pleasure. The burglar who breaks into Bobby's girlfriend's bedroom has a gas gun to put her to sleep. The secret writing is revealed by the very last thing we would imagine. There just aren't enough of them to make reading it worthwhile. Martin Edwards, who also oversees the British Library's classic crime reissues, says in his introduction that Horler relies on a "least likely suspect" for the final twist. All I can say is, I knew who it was and I never usually get these things. On the positive side it was, very much, the final twist.

The End of the Web - George Sims

George Sims was one of those men with one of those names: ordinary, middling, probably from London or the Home Counties. Lower middle class, in some sort of service industry or perhaps a small businessman. Indeed this Sims, the one in question, was most of those things. For most of his life he was an antiquarian bookseller, first in London, then operating from a cottage in Berkshire. From 1964 on he wrote about a dozen crime thrillers about other middling men, often set in the rarefied world of antiquarian book dealing. This is one.

Leo is the book dealer in question. Leo is middleaged as well as middling, yet a beautiful young woman seduces him. While they are making love an armed man breaks in and kills the girl. Leo suffers a heart attack. Everyone assumes Leo killed the girl, then suffered his attack. But not family friend Ed Buchanan, back from a working holiday in Greece, who investigates. The revelation of the killer's identity is clever and appropriate - but it is the way Sims gets to the revelation that is the surprise of the book.


Sims' prose lacks punch, though his dialogue works well. His descriptive sentences are too long for comfort. His characterisation, albeit he is proud of using ordinary men and women as heroes and villains, is well above average. I especially enjoyed the hired thug in a bad wig. It is the detail that holds the attention. Sims seems well acquainted with all the locations used here. Semi-genteel London in the Seventies is no surprise, but Bodmin Moor and Amsterdam? Likewise, the detail of the car Buchanan borrows to travel to Bodmin - a 1970 De Tomaso Mangusta (it's a supercar not unlike a De Lorean but much classier). Totally the wrong car for the terrain, which gets him into incidental trouble that has nothing to do with the plot.


The plot itself unrolls through a series of narratives. Buchanan does not appear until about a third of the way through. When I realised what the underlying plot was I got very excited because it's one I've been working with for years - indeed, I was working on it yesterday afternoon, immediately before I got to the relevant revelation in The End of the Web.


Best bit for me, structure-wise, was Chapter Two, which consists of two facsimile information sheets, one for Leo, the other for his mate Chard. Who made them? Why? The answer lies therein - but that's telling you nothing.


This fascinating discovery comes via the new series of classic thrillers reissued by the British Library. Another of Sims' novels - The Last Best Friend - is also in the series, so I'm definitely having that the next time I visit. The introduction is by Martin Edwards, who also oversaw the Library's hugely successful classic whodunit reissues and whose cracking website has long been featured on the righthand panel of this blog. Check him out. And check out the magnificent cover photo by Paul Almasy,