Killer in the Kremlin - John Sweeney

 A brilliant demolition of Putin by one of the UK's best investigative journalists, written as he sat in various Kyev Airbnbs during the first months of Putin's all-or-nothing invasion.   Sweeney has long been on Putin's case, one of very few who has managed to challenge the New Stalin to his face.   And, on the subject of face - plastic surgery, overdone steriods, etc. - well, it's all here, all savagely done.

The main theme - the first three-quarters of the book - is what the title suggests: a chronicle of all those Putin has cleared permanently from his way.   The bombings that cemented him in power around the Millennium, the poisonings, defenestrations and assisted suicides that have happened since.   Navalny's murder came eighteen months after Sweeney finished the book, but Navalny's poisoned underpants are here.   The crowning glory is that it was Navalny who tricked some FSB stooge into divulging the facts of the underpants.   Navalny was already a hero to me; the genius of the underpants reveal elevates him to mythic.

Now, of course, Putin's death-toll is expanding daily.   Thousands of duped Russian foot soldiers have met their end in the unwinnable war, poerhaps a tenth of that number on the Ukranian side who cannot countenance losing.   The biggest number of fatalities, as in any modern war, are civilian.   There, the Ukranian dead far outnumber the Russian.   Putin has also killed the warlord-gangster-chef who led the Wagner rebellion.   Prominent generals have gone the way of all flesh, Putin-style.   He is running out of time, out of friends.   Sweeney ends his war journal, the final quarter or so of the book, describing a summitt of autocrats at which even the Chinese seem to be having second thoughts about Vlad.

It is details like that, from the man in the know, the man on the spot, that make Killer in the Kremlin essential reading.   That it is done in the Voice of Sweeney, the man who bawled out the Scientologist on Newsnight, is what makes it so damn enjoyable.

Ashenden - W Somerset Maugham

Ashenden is said to be the fictive version of Maugham's experience as a semi-professional intelligence agent in World War I.  As a famous author, middleaged, and long-term expat, Maugham's presence in Switzerland, France and Italy was unquestioned.  As he famously sociable and civilised, he could easily mix with people of all sorts.  So, therefore, does Ashenden.

The fascinating thing for me was that some of the spies Ashenden tangles with in these stories are easily identified.  Guilia Lazzari, for example, is surely Mata Hari.  Others, I would love to be able to identify. Was Maugham really in Russia during the Kerensky government?  If so, who was Mr Harrington and who was Alexandra Alexandrovna?

Published in 1928, Ashenden is Maugham at the height of his powers.  The writing, characterisation and narrative structure are all superb.  To anyone who hasn't tried Maugham before, could there be a better introduction?  I think not. 

Wolves Eat Dogs - Martin Cruz Smith

Renko Returns - yes he does., or rather did, in this taut thriller from 2004. Truth be told, Renko has returned several times since Gorky Park made Smith an international bestseller back in 1981. Better to say, this is the first of a later career series which also includes Stalin's Ghost and Tatiana, both reviewed here. It is definitely the first Renko novel set after the collapse of the USSR.

This an stunning idea. A couple of New Russian zillionaires get killed. Both are connected to the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster, thus Investigator Renko is despatched to Chernobyl by his boss, who is ever-keen to get rid of him. I don't know how he does it, but Smith conjures up an absolutely convincing world that has developed in the radioactive shadow of the breached reactor in its vast concrete and steel sarcophagus. Supposedly a Forbidden Zone, Renko finds a unique community of natives who never really left and chancers from the outside world.

The mystery, as ever, runs deep. Smith handles it with the wit and grace of a true master. There is a secondary revelation in the final pages, a device I have never seen before. It almost passed me by. Then I realised, and my jaw dropped. A must-read for any self-respecting fan of the genre.

Our Game - John le Carre

First the Wall came down, then the Soviet Union fell apart. The Nineties were a decade in which old enemies lost their edge, former certainties simply evaporated. Eastern Europe suddenly comprised new counties and potential states we had never heard of and knew absolutely nothing about. Chechnya, South Ossetia and, most relevant to le Carre's 1995 novel, Ingushetia - which I have still never heard of.

Many spy writers went out of business overnight, or turned to period espionage fiction. Le Carre, the great master of the form, used his genre to explore the uncertainties. Tim Cranmer is an old-style spy - Winchester, the Treasury - put out to grass. Fortunately he is stinking rich, his inheritance including a Somerset manor and vineyard. His schoolfriend Larry Pettifer, the enfant terrible of Soviet Studies in his day, was Cranmer's agent and later double agent. Old Wykehamists look after one another, and Cranmer has found flighty Larry a sinecure at Bath University. Larry has repaid the favour by absconding with Timbo's trophy girfriend Emma. Then Larry is reported missing. The police call on Cranmer. This comes as surprise to Cranmer, who thought he might have killed his friend some weeks before he went missing.

Has Larry gone back to the Game? Has he involved Emma? Cranmer sets out to find them, his quest taking him from Paris to the wild homeland of the Ingush. I'm not sure that the enigma is ever fully resolved  but what we do get is a vivid picture of one of the world's largest landmasses, a political empire, at the moment of implosion, and the black hole lurking beneath.

Our Game is not le Carre's finest novel. It is not an easy read - it is by no means an easy subject - yet it contains some of the master's finest writing.  He has to stretch his vocabulary in order to pin down the themes that emerge as the exercise progresses.  It is therefore a key work, not only within le Carre's oeuvre, but within the spy genre itself.

And this cover, on the Penguin Classic ebook, has to be the best of any le Carre ever...

Archangel - Gerald Seymour

For those of a certain generation (mine) Gerald Seymour was a familiar face, reporting for ITN from the world's troublespots.  Then in 1975 he published Harry's Game, which was a game-changer in itself.  It was a tremendous hit, the first thriller to really engage with the Northern Irish Troubles, which were then only five or six years old.  Seymour immediately gave up TV for writing and is still turning out high-quality, serious thrillers today.  The 'serious' tag is what has always set him apart from the more lightweight practitioners.  Seymour knows what he is talking about and, if he doesn't, you know that he has the skillset to find out.

Archangel is from 1982, when the USSR was still the Evil Empire.  Michael Holly is a British businessman of Ukrainian extraction.  He has genuine business interests in Russia but stumbles, as so many did in those days, into agreeing to deliver a message on behalf of MI6.  He is caught as they always were and sentenced to fourteen years - not a problem in itself, for there were longstanding ways of dealing with such regular embarrassments.  A swap is set up for a Russian agent in Wormwood Scrubs - everybody's happy, it's business as usual. But the Russian suffers a heart attack and dies.  The deal is off.  Holly can forget the comparatively cushy prison life of a trading asset, he's off the back of beyond, the Correctional Labour Camps of Mordovia.

This is where Seymour really comes into his own.  Holly can speak Russian thanks to his exiled parents.  Everyone else in the camps is Russian or from one of the subject Soviet states.  Seymour humanises them all, even the ambitious KGB captain and the useless camp commander who is counting down the days to retirement.

Meanwhile MI6 is checking Holly out back in Britain.  Will he be able to survive?  Will he give in to torture or blandishments and embarrass the secretive element of HM's government? Meanwhile Captain Rudakov offers a deal: all Holly has to do is admit the espionage and he will be on the next plane home.

In many ways the story boils down to a battle of wills between Holly and Rudakov, which Seymour handles expertly.  It's not giving too much away to say that Holly outstrips expectations.  We think we can guess the outcome because of the way Seymour sets up the narrative. But can we?  Can we really?  Holly might be suffering reality in its harshest form, but at the British end we are in the world of smoke and mirrors.

It must be thirty years since I last read Seymour.  I had forgotten how good he is.  Thankfully Hodder have issued this "Ultimate Collection" so I can catch up.

Snowdrops - A D Miller

I remember this book when it came out.  I remember assuming it was another attempt to write a Russian crime thriller in the wake of Gorky Park.  That's what it looks like, after all.  I remember being surprised that a crime thriller should be nominated for the Booker.

That's what happens when your publisher lets you down with a stereotypical cover.  I mean to say, doesn't it look like every one of Philip Kerr's Gunther novels?  And focusing on the 'snowdrops' - bodies that pop up in the spring thaw - doesn't help, especially when there is only one of them in book, a character we have never encountered and whose only purpose is to be discovered when winter ends.

In fact, Snowdrops is a serious novel about corruption in post-Yeltsin Russia, where of course more or less everyone is corrupt.  It is a world Miller knows inside out, having been a journalist there between 2004 and 2007.  His hero Nick is an ex-pat lawyer, and therefore a corruption magnet.  His firm is blithely working on some complex sub-Abramovitch oil deal when Nick falls head over heels for young Masha, a woman fifteen or more years younger than him.  Through Masha he meets Katya, the sister-who-isn't, and Tatiana Vladimorovna, the aunt-who-isn't.  The affair starts with the first chill of winter and ends with the thaw when Nick's suspension of disbelief washes away with the snow and he realises how low he has sunk, how willingly he has been corrupted.

It's an important novel, then, which certainly deserved its nomination. 2011, in case you're wondering, was the year Julian Barnes won the Booker with The Sense of an Ending.  Miller is a serious and talented novelist, albeit he doesn't seem to have followed up on Snowdrops.  If and when he does, I'll be reading him.

If Not Now, When? - Primo Levi

I was astonished to learn that this was Levi's only novel written at the end of his career.  I remember him as an iconic writer, in many ways the spokesman for all Holocaust survivors, and had assumed that at least some of his many books were fiction.

Levi was an Italian Jew but his hero here is a Russian Jew.  Mendel has become detached from his unit of the Red Army.  For a year he has been wandering alone through the vast Russian landscape.  Then he is joined by Leonid, a paratrooper who has escaped from the German lager at Smolensk.  Leonid, too, is Jewish, but is keen to hide the fact, a recurring theme of the book.  They decide to wander on together - and wander is the word; they have no plan, no goal.  They meet up with various others in the same predicament, until they come upon the predominantly Jewish partisan troop led by the quixotic Gedaleh.  This becomes their family.  They share the troop's Jewishness and adopt their aim of finding a way to Israel.  Instead of trying to avoid the war, they begin to attack the Germans.

A fascinating and truly moving book, all the more so because the debutante novelist turns out to be a master storyteller.  He doesn't wallow in the horror of the Holocaust but finds green shoots of humanity and hope sprouting from the horror.

It is a disgrace that this is not on the A-level syllabus every year.