Deep Shelter - Oliver Harris

 Deep Shelter is the middle novel of Harris's Nick Belsey trilogy.   Belsey is on restricted duties.   He sees a speeding BMW and gives chase,   The chase ends, the BMW gets out and legs it into what Belsey knows is a blind alley down the side of Costa Coffee - and disappears.

Belsey eventually discovers an entrance to the underground network that lies beneath London, not just the Underground itself, but also the abandoned mail rail system and bunkers built during WW2 and expanded during the Cold War.    Belsey decides it would be a cool idea to take his new girlfriend down there for a date.   While they are down there, the date gets snatched, abducted.   Ultimately Belsey gets an email.   The man he chased, who calls himself Ferryman, has the girl and wants Belsey to come and find her at Site 3.

Belsey of course goes off the radar.   Starts digging into the little information that exists about the subterranean network.   A former spy chief is dumped, naked and dead, behind Centre Point in the middle of London - and all traces spirited away by what looks like the emergency services and isn't.   Very high, very secret police departments start taking an interest in Belsey's case.   His sergeant, and former lover, Kirsty Craik is also taken, first by Ferryman and then by the aforementioned hush-hush squad.   Belsey is sent everywhere, from London homeless shelters to a remote village in Wiltshire as he tries to impose order on chaos.

I love stories of alt-London, secret London, the 'other' megapolis.   I don't know that I have come across a better, more thought-through version than this.   It is also a first rate thriller.   Oliver Harris is a top writer, perhaps the top in contemporary crime fiction and bloody good in spy fiction too.

Tightrope - Simon Mawer

 My first encounter with Simon Mawer's fiction.   It should have been sooner, given the awards he has been nominated for.   It won't be the last.

It took a couple of dozen pages to realize that, as it says on the cover, this is 'literary espionage.'   In Mawer's case it means an extremely high literary ability with plotting and depth that comes very close to le Carre at his best.   For one thing, he is telling his story on two levels: the story of Marian Sutro, who was recruited by the SOE in World War II, and parachuted into France to extract a French scientist needed to work on the A-bomb.   Marian chooses not to accompany the scientist on the flight out.   Instead she is captured by the Nazis on a railway platform, tortured and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp.   She survives, returns to England and spends part of her recovery with an Englih family, becoming a source of fascination to their young son Sam.   The second story is that of Sam as he investigates Marian's story, becoming personally involved in it, and ultimately tracking her down in her old age.

Marian has become bored after the war and is re-recruited by the same man who originally took her in to the SOE.  Now he is operating for an unspecified service.   Marian's task is now to persuade her Russian lover to defect.   He, meantime, reluctantly recruits her for Russia.   The Russians have kompromat on her brother, physicist Ned, and his illegal gay practices.

That gives a flavour of how complex and many-layered the plot is.   Mawer also skips back and forth in time, though we never lose track of where and when we are.   The characterisation is simply stupendous.   Marian is very much the star, the object of everyone else's fascination.   She retains her allure and mystery to the end.   Even Sam cannot get to the inner essentials of her psyche.

Impressive - and a great read.

SOE: Special Operations Executive, 1940-46 - M R D Foot

You have to remember that this work was originally published in 1984 and updated in 1990.   The SOE story was still subject to the Official Secrets Acr and many people still did not know that such an organisation had ever existed.

What Foot provides, therefore, is a comprehensive overview of the background of SOE and a much more general summary of their activity.   Given that they operated in every theatre of war, there were limits to what Foot could say in 1984, given that the Cold War was still raging and many of the countries who had hosted SOE operatives were behind the Iron Curtain.   I guess that the 1990 update was because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino effect on Balkan and Baltic nations.

This book is therefore a solid account for the generalist.   If you want specialist detail, you will need to go elsewhere.

Consequence of Fear - Ted Allbeury

 Ted Allbeury (1917-2005) was that rare thing among spy writers - a real one.  Yes, John le Carre and Ian Fleming were spies but not in the sense that Allbeury was.  Fleming, for example, was never in the field.  Allbeury on the other hand, was SOE, parachuted into France and remaining there until the end of the war.  Le Carre (David Cornwall) was in the field during the Cold War and therefore risked arrest.  Allbeury was actually captured by the Russians in the act of recruiting agents.

As to writing ability, Allbeury is certainly much better than Fleming.  He lacks Fleming's ability to fetishize the trappings of spycraft but perhaps makes up for it with better ideas for world threats.  In Consequence of Fear, for instance, written in 1979 and thus substantially before Chernobyl, the focus is a nuclear disaster which the Russians have covered up for two decades.

James Boyle was a spy in the war.  As such he ran Otto Lemke, a German spy captured in Croydon with a radio set, who for the rest of the war broadcast false material to his homeland in return for a train of young women willing to sleep with him.  Thirty years later Boyle is a QC who has just been offered a judgeship.  Lemke is an East German sports journalist who has somehow got hold of detailed documentation about the nuclear spill.  He is willing to trade this for asylum in the US with his latest teenaged girlfriend.  On one condition - he wants James Boyle to manage his defection.

So, under cover of offering legal advice to a TV company planning to broadcast the Moscow Olympics in 1980, Boyle heads for Russia.

I was impressed with how easily Allbeury guides his reader through the very convincing intricacies of Cold War political posturing.  The story does not develop as would generally be expected (and here Allbeury comes close to the standards of mid-career le Carre) and the end came as a complete surprise.  I shall certainly read more.

Nightfall Berlin - Jack Grimwood

Jack Grimwood is one of several up-and-coming British spy writers. I have reviewed several of Charles Cumming's novels on this blog and rate him second only to the master, John le Carre. Jack Grimwood isn't quite that good but he is not far off.

Grimwood is happy to acknowledge his debt to the master, and does so in the book. His continuing character, Tom Fox, is a brilliant character - a former priest turned undercover assassin for British Intelligence. The setting is the 1980s, with the Iron Curtain starting to rust. Mrs Thatcher is halfway through her reign of terror and Fox's father-in-law is one of her ministers. It is five years or so since Sir Anthony Blunt was unmasked as a traitor. More recently, Peter Wright's Spycatcher claimed there were more Soviet agents in Parliament and the Security Services.

 Nightfall Berlin sends Fox into East Berlin to bring home the ageing defector Sir Cecil Blackburn. Everything is arranged but when Fox calls to collect Blackburn for the final time, he finds the old boy with a crowbar through his chest and his minder, who just happens to be the nephew of the KGB Rezident in Berlin, strangled beside him. Everyone, including Blackburn's girlfriend and his daughter, believes Fox killed them. Worse, back in England, someone abducts Fox's young son and demands Blackburn's memoirs as ransom. Fox doesn't have the memoirs. The papers were burnt in the old man's fireplace.

It's a cracking read. Grimwood is another who has realised the importance of thrills in thrillers. And the final shootout in the Berlin zoo is a whiteknuckle ride. This second in the series is highly recommended. I, meantime, will set about finding the first, Moskova.

The Unfortunate Englishman - John Lawton

John Lawton seems to derive great enjoyment from playing with the internet. There are loads of hits when you Goggle him, about half of which are for this John Lawton, the writer not the musician. But none of them manage to tell you any more than you already know. He is the author of eight Troy novels (the Metropolitan Police detective, not the ancient city) and two Wilderness novels, of which this is the second. Wilderness is actually Holderness, but let's not get bogged down. He, Lawton, seems to have worked in TV on both sides of the Atlantic, though we are not told in what capacity or the titles of any programmes. He now, apparently, lives in Derbyshire.


This playfulness, this layering of truth, is carried forward into The Unfortunate Englishman and presumably the Troy series. Characters all have two or three identities on the go and none are what they seem to be. All the books are set in the Cold War era, with a particular focus on the years 1960 to 1963, about which Lawton has written a non-fiction history.


The Unfortunate Englishman starts in 1963 but zips happily back and forth, from the end of WW2 to 1965 across 171 very short, snappy chapters. Essentially it is about a bumbling part-time spy, Geoffrey Masefield, who is caught photographing top secret sites during a trip to Moscow. Joe Wilderness, an East End criminal turned agent, is sent back to Berlin by his boss and father-in-law Alec Burne-Jones to arrange the exchange of Masefield for Bernard Alleyn (formerly Leonid Liubimov of the KGB) currently resident in Wormwood Scrubs.


Wilderness does not want to return to Berlin station, mainly because of what happened in Chapter One. But he owes Burne-Jones too many favours to refuse. Eventually the main players all assemble at a checkpoint between East and West to do the deal - then comes  the brilliant twist.


Along the tangled way Wilderness becomes the father of twin girls and Masefield gets to have sex with two Russian twin sisters. Joe encounters so many old friends and old enemies that I have to wonder what went on in the first Wilderness novel Then We Take Berlin (2013). He also arranges a potentially lucrative sideline in a vast trove of high quality wine he has acquired from a Nazi.


The Unfortunate Englishman is a tremendous read. Lawton writes like a dream. His characters are infinitely complex yet all absolutely credible. I am going to read everything he has ever written,. I recommend you should do the same. Then let's compare notes.

Oblivion - Arnaldur Indridason

Of recent times Indridason has taken his detective hero Erlendur Sveinsson back to his youth. In Oblivion he is in his twenties, newly divorced and recently promoted to CID. The time is the 1970s for the main plot - a murder on the US airbase - whilst the secondary plot, which Erlendur pursues in his spare time, concerns the disappearance of a young girl more than twenty years earlier. This, for regular readers, is a reminder of the incident that dogs his entire career, the loss of his brother when he was a child.


A flashback within a story that is itself something of a flashback is clever. The linkage between the periods - the American occupation of Iceland after World War II and the continuing presence of the Americans during the Cold War - is even cleverer, deepening the narrative with acute social and political insight.


I cannot for the life of me see why Indridason agreed to allow the change of title for the translation. The original title was Kamp Knox, which is what the story is about - the original wartime occupation airbase which still dominated the area in the Fifties when it had been turned into emergency housing little better than a ghetto. This is the shadow that hung over the place the missing schoolgirl lived. There were rumours she had a boyfriend who lived on the camp, which made him lower-class, undesirable, inevitably drawing the attention of investigating police at the time.


The replacement for Camp Knox is the Defense Force base at Keflavik. Officially there should be no nuclear weapons stored there, but Keflavik has the biggest hangar anywhere and there are rumours about what might be cached inside. Hangar 885 is also the only spot on the peninsula high enough to have caused the injuries Kristvin sustained when he fell, albeit he was dead before the fall, hence the police interest. Keflavik is officially US territory and the brass won't cooperate with the Icelandic police, even though Kristvin was one of the many Icelanders who worked there, enjoying the fringe benefits of easy access to American consumables. Are the military hiding something or is it simply contempt for the natives?


Indridason gets better with every book. One of the attractions for me is always the horrific foodstuffs regarded as delicacies in Iceland. I was not disappointed in Oblivion - fermented skate in melted lard. Eeek! He seems to me to be well served by translator Victoria Cribb. But why on earth do they saddle his books with meaningless titles like Oblivion that makes them sound like  ghastly action thrillers from the Eighties?

Leaving Berlin - Joseph Kanon

Joseph Kanon is perhaps best known for The Good German (2001), which I confused with the terrible film The Good Shepherd and therefore overlooked.


Fortunately I looked again when I saw Leaving Berlin on the shelf at my local library. This is Kanon's latest novel, the story of a half-Jewish German author who fled to America after Hitler came to power but who has now effectively been deported for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Alex hasn't even left before he is offered a lifeline by the embryonic post-war spy service - work for us in Berlin and we'll back your appeal.


What makes this novel really zing is that Alex has been invited back to East Berlin during the Russian blockade and the Allied airlift. As a successful author he is feted alongside Bertholt Brecht. Indeed, the climactic action takes place during the world premiere of Mother Courage.


Of course Alex is an equally enticing target for the Russian Occupation Forces. His first love, the aristocratic Elspeth, is now the mistress of the second most important Russian in town. Her sister and her husband are ex-Nazis anxious to repudiate their past. Elspeth's brother has just escaped from the slave camps. The brother of Elspeth's lost love - the boy she flaunted in front of the teenage  Alex - has grown up to become an officer of the civilian police force in Berlin. Everything is thoroughly internecine and everybody, without exception, is pretending to be something they are not.


The plotting is superb. The twists keep coming, right up to the last page. The characterisation and dialogue are extremely well done. The prose is refined, elegant, and perfectly suited to the story. Kanon is wholly American but his depiction of East Berlin in 1949 is utterly convincing. I am not the first to be reminded of John le Carre. Unlike le Carre, Kanon claims no personal involvement in Cold War espionage, but a lifetime in high-end publishing more than compensates. He is a magnificent writer, a new entry for the New Year on my list of must-read authors.

A Ring of Roses - John Blackburn

I am a massive fan of Blackburn (the author, not the town and certainly not the football team). He seems to be largely forgotten today, though I gather Valancourt have recently begun reissuing his books. In his day Blackburn was massive, and his day really was the 1960s. His world is one of rapid technical advances, generational change and the Cold War. A Ring of Roses is one such, from 1965.

No prizes for getting the reference in the title. The plague resurfaces in Berlin and the opposing superpowers have to come together to prevent a pandemic. What makes the story quintessentially Blackburn is that this is the genuine medieval plague unearthed by chance and genetically manipulated to make it resistant to the obvious cures like penicillin.

Regulars Blackburn characters reappear - General Kirk with his torn hand and Sir Marcus Levin, concentration camp survivor turned super scientist. There is dark humour - the plague-spreaders are hidden behind the names of characters from the more macabre stories of the Brothers Grimm (Iron Hans and Clever Gretel) - and whilst we are encouraged to think that a former Nazi scientist is behind the outbreak, it turns out not to be quite so simple. We get flashes of the Cold War blame game and the revelation that in 1965 a custom-built Ferrari came in just under £7000. Less of a surprise is that the British Press was as ghastly and underhand then as it is today.

John Blackburn writes thrillers with a twist. No one in his day wrote them better and I can't offhand think of anyone today. He writes simply and with pace. This Penguin greenback is 158 pages and packs in more story than contemporary thrillers dragged out to twice the length.

Dead Man Running - John Blackburn

Blackburn was incredibly popular when I was a child.  I remember exactly the shelf where his books were ranged in my local library.  I remember aspiring to be as successful when I grew up,  Yet he was largely forgotten even before his death in 1993, and since then he has vanished entirely.  I cannot for the life of me think why that is.

In the main, and certainly to start with, Blackburn wrote in two genres, John Wyndham style sci-fi horror and Eric Ambler style thrillers.  It seems unfair to suggest that he copied two better known writers; it is better to say he worked in similar fields.  Like Wyndham, his sci-fi tends to be set in the immediate tomorrow, so similar to now that it might as well be today.  Like Ambler, his world of subterfuge is European, his protagonists ordinary men cast adrift from normality.  In both forms Blackburn anchors his narrative with a whodunnit structure.  He is very good indeed at the mystery element,

Dead Man Running is the first of his thrillers, written in 1960, before the Berlin Wall but at a time when Russia was the deadly enemy of the West.  On the face of it, it is a murder mystery: Who killed Peter Carlin's wife and where is Peter Carlin?  Carlin, it turns out, is being interrogated by KGB thugs in Moscow.  The British authorities know exactly where he is.  To the great British public Carlin is both a killer and a traitor.

The rest of the story is Carlin's attempt to prove he is neither.  The conspiracy is incredibly murky.  The cast of characters is varied and colourful - the snobbish ex-maid, the last of his line aristocrat and philanthropist, and best of all the mad man-of-action adventurer J Moldon Mott.

OK, it's old-fashioned, but it is written with great skill, admirable economy (a modern equivalent would be a padded 350 pages whereas Dead Man Running is a well-honed 158) and a healthy humanity.  Nobody here is a total villain, no hero without fault.  Blackburn is every bit as good as I assumed he was back when I was a lad.

Little Red Monkey - Eric Maschwitz (& Bevis Winter)

This is not actually an original novel but a novelisation by British hack Bevis Winter of the original BBC TV series written by Maschwitz back in 1953.  By the time this paperback was issued in 1961, Little Red Monkey had already been adapted into a Ken Hughes B movie.

Maschwitz was not actually working for the BBC in 1953, however he had been Director of Variety until 1939 and would become Director of BBC TV before switching to ITV in 1963.  He had been nominated for an Oscar for his script work on Goodbye, Mr Chips.  An original Maschwitz script for TV was therefore a very big thing indeed for the BBC in 1953, and it went out in Saturday evening primetime from January of Coronation Year.

To read more about the film and TV versions, click here.  This, however, is a book review.  The writing is a little clumsy, no doubt because it is the work of Winter.  The plot, however, is brilliant.  Two scientists burst through the Brandenburg Gate, bringing Soviet research secrets to the West.  One of them is murdered soon after in London.  He dies clutching the titular monkey.  It is Colin Currie's job to protect the remaining boffin until he can be flown away to Canadian safety.  Meanwhile, foreign dirty work is afoot in London.  Colin's former sweetheart witnesses an investigative journalist getting mowed down by a truck.

It all comes to fruition on a fog-bound night in the rural Home Counties.  I was particularly impressed by the way Maschwitz plays fair with the reader.  The revelation of the killer is truly astonishing but once you know the clues are all there in the preceding text.  For Alfred Hitchcock or even Len Deighton the monkey might just have been an eye-catching maguffin, but for Maschwitz it is the principal clue.