The Loo Sanction - Trevanian

The Loo Sanction is the follow-up to The Eiger Sanction.   It's a spy pastiche by the reclusive Anglo-American Trevanian.   It therefore features American academic and retired hitman Dr Jonathan Hemlock, but takes place almost entirely in England.    It was written in 1973 and is thus about Swinging London in its dark last phase.

Hemlock is in London to give guest lectures.   At the Royal Academy he is hijacked by his former lover Vanessa Dyke to evaluate a contemporary bronze of a horse that is about to go up for auction.  The thing is, Hemlock has the perfect eye - for art and for shooting.   The mysterious vendor, it seems, is trying to hike the hammer price.

Next, Hemlock hooks up with a young Irish wannabe artist, Maggie Coyne.   They spend the night in one of Hemlock's two luxury London pads.   Next morning they find a man grusesomely murdered in the bathroom.   Hemlock finds himself hijacked again, this time to the HQ of Loo, an interservice secret agency.   Maggie has been recruited by them as bait.   They want Hemlock to track down one Maximilian Strange who runs a high-class speciality brothel in which many high-ranking pillars of the Establishment have inadvertently let themselves be filmed in the act.   Loo want the films.   If Hemlock feels the need to 'sanction' someone, or indeed several, Loo will clean up the mess.

The thing about Trevanian is that his jokes are complex and dark.  He was himself an academic and therefore has greater word-power than most pasticheurs.  Jokes and comic names aside, he writes an extremely good thriller.   He does not romanticise violence - it is gory and painful.   The Seventies sex is free and plentiful but comes with consequences, feelings get hurt, people get abused.   The book is not some clever bloke showing off.   Trevanian's self-obscurity and scanty output testify to the effort he put into fine-tuning his work.

I am on the lookout for more.   The Eiger Sanction itself, perhaps - or Shibumi, to which my favourite cntemporary US writer, Don Winslow, wrote a prequel.

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.

Journey into Fear - Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) was the master of spy fiction. Before him there was John Buchan and whoever it was created Bulldog Drummond; after came James Bond. Without Ambler there would have been no Bond. Fleming absolutely stuck with Ambler's formula for success, though in my view his writing was never as good. Where Fleming outshone Ambler, however, was in having the continuing hero. Each of Ambler's major thrillers has a different hero and they tend to be middling men of no particular significance who by chance become embroiled in the machinations of nations. They are more like real spies in that sense and, given that we know they will not recur in the next book, we cannot be sure they will survive, which adds suspense utterly lacking in Bond.


Here, for example, Mr Graham, who lacks even a forename, works in a senior capacity for an international arms manufacturer. This being 1940, the firm's products are in great demand and Mr Graham - having survived an assassination attempt in Istanbul - is trying to get home to England on a cut-price ocean steamer. His fellow passengers are few in number. Any or none of them might be in league with the assassin, who also manages to slip aboard. That, in essence, is the story.


It is down to Ambler's skill as a storyteller that we remain enthralled. His characterisation is excellent, his writing strong. He uses narrative devices well beyond his successor Fleming. For example the first couple of chapters unfold in flashback. We are aware of Mr Graham's amended plan to sail aboard the scruffy steamer, then find out why he has agreed to give up his original plan to travel first class by rail. This gets excitement in good and early (the attempt on his life), introduces the femme fatale (the glamorous nightclub dancer Josette) and reveals the involvement of professional spies in Colonel Haki of the Turkish secret service.


Journey into Fear made an excellent film with Orson Welles as Haki. After the war Ambler moved to Hollywood to write and produce movies. He was extremely successful - I had no idea until I looked him up. He wrote the screenplays for The Cruel Sea and the best of all Titanic movies, A Night to Remember. That is how good he was. Better than Buchan, better than Fleming. The best.

Colonel Sun- Robert Markham/Kingsley Amis

As noted below, I acted on the spur of the moment and bought a copy of Colonel Sun, the first of the continuing adventures of James Bond which began after the death of Ian Fleming. They left a decent pause - Fleming died in 1964 and Colonel Sun did not come out until 1968 - but only because Fleming left a load of scraps that could be exploited in the interim.

Amis had already cashed in with The Bond Dossier (1965) so was an obvious choice for Fleming's heirs. Whether Fleming himself would have approved is another matter. Amis was a truly gifted writer who dabbled in genre fiction from time to time. Fleming was a rubbish writer who created a genre phenomenon. What made the difference was that Fleming knew about the spying business and had met most of the real life spies he brought together in the character of Bond. You wouldn't turn to Fleming if you wanted an inspiring description of a landscape - certainly not if you wanted characters of more than (at best) one-a-half dimensions. But you can and always could rely on his explanation of a particular firearm or car. You can rely him for the tone in which spies and especially their superiors speak and their world view. Fleming was one during the war - a spy and a bureaucrat.


True Bond fans have always shunned the post-Fleming stuff. I have said before on this blog: I read all the early Bonds before I was twelve and loved them; I saw the films as they came out and drew a very firm line after Thunderball, which is crud; I tried the books again sometime this century and have read several, which I find to be a deal less good than they are supposed to be. The plots are rubbish, the characterisation inadequate, and the tone - which, in fairness, was undoubtedly the tone of posh folk in Fleming's formative years - offensive and unacceptable.


And so to Colonel Sun... First off, I have always found Amis's arrogance unacceptable, which oddly makes it perfectly acceptable here. In fact the sex bomb, Ariadne, is a fully developed, conflicted and unpredictable character, which surprised me. I really liked the eponymous villain. The torture scene was stripped down to gruesome basics and was genuinely horrifying. The plot was certainly complicated - much more complicated than anything Fleming came up with - and I'm not sure it worked. Colonel Sun is the super-villain but instead of seeking to rule the world like your regular super-villain, all he wants to do is disrupt a gathering of Soviet spooks on a nearby island and blame it on the gallant Brits, for which purpose he has arranged to kidnap M. (I thought the use of a decrepit and semi-senile M was pure genius.)


The writing is very good, infinitely better than Fleming. Amis handles the action sequences well enough and his descriptions of the Greek islands are often spellbinding. The problem - the failure, really - is his inability to convince us that he knows how to sail a common-or-garden boat. There have to be boats because these are the Greek islands. They have to be sailed cleverly and surreptitiously because this is a spy adventure. But - for goodness sake, Amis - Bond is a bloody naval officer!!! Presumably that's in your Bond Dossier somewhere. Even I knew that. And I also know that Fleming knew how to sail boats - because he, like Bond, was a Naval Commander.

Dead Lions - Mick Herron

Dead Lions is the second of Mick Herron's splendidly warped Jackson Lamb thrillers. I have previously read and reviewed the fourth, Spook Street. It really doesn't matter what order you read them in. The plots are standalone and the premise is always the same: Slough House is where MI5 buries the second rate spooks who are too young to pension off; Jackson Lamb, in charge of Slough House, is a loose cannon whose appalling behaviour is redeemed by his single principle in life, unswerving loyalty.

Dickie Bow, had he been younger, would have been marooned at Slough House. He was certainly a slow horse. But he was in Berlin with Jackson Lamb, and when Dickie meets his maker on a replacement bus from Reading station, Lamb feels honour-bound to stick his nose in. This leads to the death of one of Lamb's own, seconded to nursemaid a visiting Russian oligarch. River Cartwright, meanwhile, grandson of a legendary spook, uncovers what looks like a plot to crash a light aircraft into the City's latest skyscraper by a nest of long-entrenched Cold War agents.

Herron's plotting is second to none. As in Spook Street he manages to walk the delicate tightrope between comedy and suspense. The action sequences are truly thrilling, the black humour of the dialogue always amusing, often laugh-out-loud. Surely somebody has to adapt the series for TV?

Spook Street - Mick Herron

I hadn't come across Mick Herron before. Had I noticed the blurb from the Mail on Sunday I would never have picked Spook Street up, which would have been a shame because, though the Mail on Sunday has no sense or taste whatsoever, this really is an excellent, fresh take on contemporary British spy fiction.

For a start, it's sardonically comic. Jackson Lamb, our team leader, is an appalling slob. The team he leads at Slough House are known elsewhere in MI5 as 'slow horses'. They are, in short, the unmanageable ones.  They have initiated disaster at some point in their career but MI5 dare not sack them in case they go to the Press, in which case some officers who still have prospects might end up in the adjoining prison cell.

Still, even slow horses have their day. Sometimes a case arises which is inescapably their province. Here, the proper domestic spies are fully engaged with a suicide bombing in a shopping mall. River Cartwright, one of Lamb's team, goes to visit his grandfather who is suffering dementia. Only someone claiming to be River has already shown up. The old man, who is not so senile that he can't vaguely remember his own grandson, shoots him dead - because David Cartwright was once also an habitue of Spook Street, by no means a slow horse but a candidate for First Chair. Who has sent an assassin to kill him? Is the old man as gaga as he seems? And how come the assassin and the suicide bomber travelled on papers of British citizens who never existed but who were created by MI5 back in David Cartwright's day?

That is a plot that would suffice for any straightfaced spy novel. Herron is able to deliver more because his spooks are comic and to be able to laugh at or with them we have to know something of who they are. Thus Herron's misfits end up being more rounded than many leading characters in mainstream series (Spook Street is itself the fourth in a series). Drink and domestic problems are not enough to give the slow horses their edge. Thus we have Roddy Ho, deluding himself that he has a proper girlfriend; the homicidal Shirley, and J K Coe who, his colleagues conclude, is "either PTSD or a psychopath."
The bad guys are equally conflicted, equally well-drawn. The prose style is exactly right throughout and there is a twist about 80% of the way through that is as devastating as anything by the master of such things, Jo Nesbo (see, for example, the mighty Headhunters.

I hugely enjoyed Spook Street in every way - intellectually, artistically, and sheer laugh-out-loud. I'm off down the library tomorrow to hunt out more.

Crisis - Frank Gardner

Frank Gardner is the BBC's Security Correspondent who was shot and disabled by terrorists whilst filming in Saudi Arabia in 2004. I became interested in him after watching a documentary series in which he set off, wheelchair and all, to see the birds of paradise in Borneo. So when I saw his first novel. I had to give it a try.

It's not his first book but it is a first novel and has some inevitable faults. His characterisation isn't great and there are scenes that don't need to be there. But it is the depth of knowledge behind the story that draws you in. The idea is a cracker: Colombian drug smugglers decide to take revenge on the Brits who disrupt their trade with a North Korean dirty bomb. Once the clock starts ticking, the device beloved of all the best thrillers, the book becomes thoroughly compelling, as good as any in the genre.


Before that things take their time. It's the inevitable compromise - you have to develop your characters and setting in sufficient detail to make your reader care about the outcome. Gardner's hero, who seems to be continuing in a second novel, is Luke Carlton, an identikit hero with an identikit name, a former Special Forces officer turned spy - which I guess must be a regular thing in real life.


Luke is a newbie at MI6 but he is the obvious man for the job because he was born and raised in Colombia (a prologue in which he loses his parents is one of the scenes I could happily dispense with). His girlfriend Elise and her subplot is a bore, but Luke suffers enough and makes sufficient gung-ho mistakes that we do come to care about his fate. The villains are pretty much the usual black hats - there is no need for them to be anything more. The most interesting characters are the officials at MI6 HQ in Vauxhall Cross (VX), especially Sayed 'Sid' Khan, the conflicted Head of Terrorism, and Luke's line manager Angela Scott.


Crisis is 550 pages. All bar about 50 of them are excellent. A very good debut but Gardner really needs to spend more time on characterisation and giving them more original names.


PS It has just dawned on me that the front cover gives away one of the plot twists. Duh!

The Spanish Game - Charles Cumming

Cumming is 21st century British spy fiction at its best. The Spanish Game (2006) is an early novel (his third) but is fully accomplished. Alec Milius is living in Madrid, not really on the run, but hiding out from the espionage world which he flirted with in an earlier novel with disastrous results all round.


Gradually he gets drawn back. He becomes involved with ETA, the Basque Separatists, and the secretive but real rightwing GAL. This is the tricky part of any spy story - why does the hero bother? This is where Cumming shows his mastery. Milius gets involved because he is working for an ex-pat banker who needs a report for a client on the likelihood of Basque autonomy. The boss, Julian Church, sets up a meeting with colourful Basque politician Mikel Arenaza. Alec and Mikel bond during a night on the town in San Sebastian. Mikel arranges to meet up with Alec in Madrid. He calls from the airport to say he is on his way, but never arrives. Naturally Alec is curious. Inevitably he has the skillset to investigate...


To be fair, the story takes a while to get going. There seems to be too much backstory in the early chapters but believe me, it has to be there to justify the ending - which is downright brilliant. Cumming already had his character from previous novels and again he deals with it innovatively, by building our understanding of Alec's state of mind, the paranoia which means he simply cannot go straight to authorities with his theories about Mikel. Cumming is very, very clever - by some distance the best spy novelist of his generation.

The Great Spy Race - Adam Diment

The Great Spy Race is the second and penultimate Philip McAlpine novel and thus the second and penultimate Adam Diment novel. It is the successor to The Dolly Dolly Spy but it is simply not in the same league. What was a fresh take on the super spy - Carnaby Street instead of Savile Row - has already tipped over into parody. On an island fortress (Scaramanga, Doctor No) McAlpine finds the legendary spy Peters and his amusing ethnic henchman-butler Petite. Peters has set up the titular race for great spies and McAlpine is the reluctant UK entrant. Thereafter it all degenerates into a sort of literate Wacky Races.


There is a certain amount of fun, nowhere near enough Sixites sex, no meaningful jeopardy. That said, Diment's narrative gift is never in doubt. The text rolls along briskly, Sadly, it never gets anywhere I care about. I have no idea what the prize in the race turned out to be.

Three novels in barely a year - then absolutely nothing between 1968 and now. Fifty years of silence. You have to wonder if Diment flogged his idea as far as it could go, then never had another. Truly an enigma. But I don't think I'll be bothering with the remaining third, Think Inc., despite the cracking title.

The Dolly Dolly Spy - Adam Diment

Ah, the Sixties. Sex, pot and spies - all of which feature strongly in Adam Diment's debut novel, published in 1967 when he was only twenty-three and looked - judging by the photo on the back of this paperback - like a handsome, thinner version of Boris Johnson.


To be honest, I had always assumed Diment was a pseudonym and that whoever he was really had simply taken to writing under another nom de plume when the Sixties went sour. But no - I spotted an article in the Guardian about someone trying to crowdfund a reprint of the Diment canon and, lo and behold, we find that Diment is still apparently alive, possibly living in Switzerland, and actually walked away when the film of The Dolly Dolly Spy fell through and his fourth spy novel Think Inc didn't exactly set the book-buying world alight. He does not comment and never has.


The book itself, despite its cheesy title, is actually very good. Diment writes extraordinarily well and takes quite startling liberties with form. For example his hero Philip McAlpine, reluctantly compromised into going undercover with a dodgy air transport company, is listening to his boss drone on about the war and uses this as an excuse to reflect upon his training. This works because McAlpine obviously was there. Later flashbacks, concerning the villain of the piece during the war, do not have that advantage but are nevertheless acceptable because a) it tells us that his war crimes were so appalling that even a young hipster in 1967 is aware of them, and b) that our hero is not so dumb or self-centred as he sometimes makes out.


The joy is period detail - it seems £2000 would buy you a Maserati in '67. The downside is the sexism and casual racism. They are of their time and the saving grace is that Diment, via McAlpine, does not disparage women and black people beyond the use of demeaning terms like 'dolly' and 'spade'. His only interaction with a black person is in the remarkably thrilling prologue, in which his passenger is a black African politician who is sympathetically drawn and whom McAlpine respects. Likewise, although there is lots of talk of promiscuity, and quite a bit of it in practice, McAlpine remains sentimentally attached to girlfriend Veronica Lom.


The spymaster Quine is horrendously camp - but turns out to be happily married to a plain woman who is both intelligent and sexually empowered.


What really dropped my jaw is the amount of reflection and self-scrutiny that is on display. This is something which eludes pretty well all first-time novelists and the vast majority of 23 year-olds. But look at this, from towards the end:

This country [Britain] is, for the time being, a whore. Our Empire has gone and our people remain lazy. We are clever, original, class-ridden and small. The sooner we can get back to being another small country and forget our now useless role of world arbiter the better. Nobody has listened to our advice for years; it is just accepting this fact that is painful. Meanwhile we export fashion and trend to the rest of them, like a good little whore should.

That's how Diment saw it back in '67. Fifty years later you could and paste it into any broadsheet editorial and no one would argue. So who was a very clever boy then? No wonder he was the publishing sensation of '67. They say The Dolly Dolly Spy sold a million. I'm not at all surprised.

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...

Spies of the Balkans - Alan Furst

On the face of it, Furst works in a limited canvas - war comes to ... wherever. But that's the beauty of a World War; it tends to happen everywhere. This time we are in Salonika: the year is 1940 and our hero is Costa Zannis, in charge of a Byzantine special unit of police, part Special Branch, part Diplomatic Corps.

Zannis is good-looking and single. He starts off sleeping with an English spy, hatches a plot with a German Jewess married to a Wehrmacht officer to facilitate the escape of Jewish escapees to Turkey, and ends up seducing the wife of the dubious local millionaire who financed the said escapes. Inbetween time he is called up to active service as the German army masses on the border and recruited to evacuate an English agent from Paris.

As well as exploring the various facets of Zannis's character, Furst also brings to life his family and associates. This is what brings me back time and again to Furst's novels.  So much detail, such effective writing, faultless research, a labyrinthine plot - and all in less than 300 pages. The sheer rigor is astonishing, the results captivating.  Absolutely my favourite writer of World War II spy fiction.

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.

A Colder War - Charles Cumming

Cumming first came to prominence with A Foreign Country, which won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for best thriller of the year and the Bloody Scotland crime book of the year, both in 2012.  The protagonist of that book, the forty-something disgraced SIS operative Thomas Kell, returns in A Colder War.

The premise is similar.  Still under investigation for his role in unlawful rendition and torture Kell is called back to action by the misfortune of an old friend and colleague, in this instance Paul Wallinger, chief British spy in Ankara, is killed in a dubious flying 'accident' immediately after a high profile operation he was running with the Americans goes spectacularly tits-up.

It's a mole-hunt with the personal undertones - Kell becomes passionately involved with Wallinger's daughter, and she becomes unexpectedly involved with the mole-hunt.  We know who the mole is fairly early in proceedings but Cumming is nevertheless able to maintain the suspense levels to the very end.  He has, in many ways, taken up the spy world where John le Carre left it.  Kell is not entirely dissimilar to George Smiley, though he does have a much more active personal life.  Cumming is now a major player in the genre.  I look forward to Kell's next appearance.  In the meantime I must try one of Cumming's standalone novels, perhaps the first, A Spy by Nature.

Watchman - Ian Rankin

Watchman is Rankin's third novel, after Flood, which I loved, and the first Inspector Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, which I bought when it first came out in paperback and thought was very poor. Watchman, reasonably enough, sits somewhere between the two.  Like Knots it is genre fiction and thus does not aim as high as Flood.  In this instance it is spy fiction, written very much in the aftermath of watching the Smiley adaptations on TV.  Miles Flint is a silly name, but no sillier than George Smiley, and as with Smiley the name is the direct opposite of the man.  Smiley never smiled - or, at least, not as if he meant it - and Miles Flint is neither well-travelled nor especially hard.

Flint is a watchman, an organiser of surveillance.  One of his key operations goes horribly wrong.  He seems to have been forgiven but soon realises he hasn't.  Machinations are in progress for the top job at MI5, as they always seem to be in sub le Carre fiction, and Miles finds himself caught in the crosshairs.  He is despatched to Ulster, still - in 1988 - embroiled in the Troubles, betrayed and left to fend for himself.  Can he rise to the occasion?  That is the nub of the book but it is far too long in coming.  Really what we have here is three stories rather crudely bolted together.  It cries out for depth and knowledge of the human condition that sets le Carre apart.

It's an immature work by a young writer still trying to find his voice.  There's nothing wrong in that - on these foundations Rankin built one of the great literary careers.  It's well worth reading and judging on its own merits.  But you wouldn't want to read it twice.

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.

Mission to Paris - Alan Furst

Furst really pins all his colours to the 'eve-of-war' scenario.  We know The Spies of Warsaw is 1938, Midnight in Europe was definitely 1938 (see my earlier review) and now Mission to Paris is set ... guess when?  And it's also set in Paris, so no surprises there.

In this case, our hero is Frederic Stahl, a Viennese adventurer turned Hollywood star - a sort of cross between Anton Walbrook and Gary Cooper.  He has been loaned by Warner Brothers to Paramount who want him to star in a European feature about the aftermath of World War I.  Stahl lived in Paris as a young man and is more than happy to revisit.  Equally keen to renew old acquaintance are his colleagues from a brief stint in the Austrian Embassy in Barcelona.  Now, since the Anschluss, part of Greater Germany, they ostensibly want Stahl to chair the judging panel for a German festival of mountain films (a neat and historically accurate touch).  Of course, they also want to claim him as a fine specimen of Aryan manhood.  Stahl is repelled by Nazis and flatly refuses, but is then persuaded by American diplomats to act as their go-between with agents high places in the Reich.  Thus Stahl is launched on the other Furst trope, spying.

It's a cracking read.  One advantage of Furst's narrow canvas is that you can be sure he really knows his period material.  As a much-travelled man, his geography and cityscapes are equally reliable.  Most importantly, he manages to bring so much that is new to each 1938 European spy novel.  Here we are completely misled, not once but twice, as to the girl Stahl will really end up with.  Furst manages to keep the tension going until the very last page and still tie up all loose ends, which is pretty damn clever.

For me, the highlight was the movie Stahl is making, Apres la Guerre.  This could so easily have been embarrassing, but Furst gets it more or less pitch-perfect.  This is exactly the sort of movie second-string American leading men were making in non-Nazi Europe in the late thirties and precisely the way the Europeans made them.

I liked Midnight in Europe a lot.  I liked Mission to Paris a lot more.  Top quality.

Jack of Spies - David Downing

Downing is the author of six espionage novels featuring John Russell and Effi Koenen set in Nazi Germany.  Jack of Spies (1913) is the first of a new series featuring gentleman spy Jack McColl in the lead-up to and during World War I.  This first volume takes us from 1913 to immediately after the outbreak of war.

There is a great deal to recommend the book and much to look forward to in the series.  The problem is, it is entirely an introduction to the series and does not stand as a novel in its own right.  First mistake: Jack has met his love interest before the novel begins, so we are denied any real character or narrative development there.  Secondly, the antagonist (who is all-too-clearly planned to continue through the series) is nowhere near antagonistic enough; indeed he serves very little purpose.  Instead of having the single enclosed world of the first series, Jack is all over the world in the space of a few months (China, America, Mexico, London, Ireland) and seriously wounded twice with no significant recuperation or impairment despite the constrained timescale.  Thus we have no opportunity for meaningful characterisation outside Jack himself.  The story is patchy and somewhat pointless.  The description of setting is good and convincing but I am left with no idea what anyone looks like.

I have an unread ebook of Zoo Station, which I look forward to reading, and will certainly read the next McColl novel.  But they had better be more satisfactory novels in their own right than Jack of Spies for me to stay onboard.

As a footnote, this is a very well made physical artifact of a book from Old St, a publisher I haven't come across before.

A Delicate Truth - John le Carre

John le Carre gets better with age.  A Delicate Truth was published in 2013 when he was 82.  It is his 23rd novel and for my money one of his best.  What keeps him going, I suspect, is disgust with the state,  It used to be the conflicting states of East and West but now it is the controlling, deceitful and above all secretive state of Britain (and, to an extent, our American owners) that gets his goat.  And boy, is le Carre's goat well and truly got.

Three years before the novel's 'present' - that is to say, back in the dying dog days of New Labour - a long serving Foreign Office civil servant is persuaded to go and observe a clandestine op in Gibraltar.  The mission is definitely off the books; even the SAS are acting as a pro tem mercenaries.  'Paul', as he is then known, is acting as the Minister's red telephone.  Officially it's a success.  The dubious international target is captured and taken off to one of America's secret interrogation centres.  But, this being le Carre, that's all spin.  In fact the op was a disaster.  Still, spin covers all that.  The minister leaves parliament for a cushy job in the private sector, the government changes and nobody is any the wiser.

Except. ... the rising star minister was given a rising star private secretary.  The private secretary was excluded from all knowledge of Operation Wildlife and, for his own protection, secretly recorded the discussions.

Now, three years later, everything unravels.

The key point, though, is that the government might have changed but the way it operates hasn't.  The book is full of wonderful vituperation from le Carre, himself of course a former insider, about the spreading web of secrecy, the ever-increasing number of bankers, arms dealers, international arms merchants etc who are granted special access to the corridors of power.  In an ideal world the intelligence services serve the nation, not the government of the day, and the civil service acts as a buffer between ministers and the corrupting world of private finance.  Neither of these things are true in contemporary Whitehall and le Carre has a boundless well of insidious double dealing at his disposal.

A great novel from one of Britain's best.  A classic of the genre.

A Foreign Country - Charles Cumming

I've been keeping an eye out for Cumming's work since he won the CWA Steel Dagger, and the Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Book of the Year for this very novel in 2012.

As I have stated several times on this blog, spy fiction is not my first choice and I can only tolerate the very best.  Fortunately, Cumming is up there with the very best.  Much more literate than Fleming and not as tendentious as le Carre can sometimes be.

The storyline here is unrolled through a number of clever twists, none of which strain the credulity.  Essentially, it is this: the incoming female head of MI6 vanishes; Thomas Kell, the spy who was effectively thrown into the cold, is given the off-the-books task of tracking her down with the vague promise of reinstatement if successful.  This means we don't have to endure too much office in-fighting and can get down to the chase through Tunisia and France.

The plot deepens, the target changes more than once, and the pace never once relents.  Cumming has stripped down the backstory of his characters to the bare minimum needed to engage our empathy.  Thus he can devote all his authorial energy to making his thriller thrilling.  He succeeds.

I am definitely up for more.  The Trinity Six sounds intriguing...