Yet more detective fiction, this time in the guise of espionage and the Secret Service.
Oddly for a secret agent, James Bond has been roped in to investigating a diamond smuggling operation. A dentist in Africa gives the stones to a man in a helicopter who takes them to London to be cut, and they’re sent off to America to be sold.
The only Le Carre books I had read, before this one, were his classics from the 60s and 70s: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and the Smiley Trilogy. This is a more recent work, which deals with the espionage world as it today, with the Cold War a distant memory and terrorism the new threat.
When Issa Karpov, a young Chechen with links to Islamist terrorists, arrives in Hamburg, he immediately draws the interest of the intelligence services. The Germans are keen to erase memories their failure to detect the Hamburg-based group that plotted the September 11 attacks on the US. They want better intelligence sources to help spot future plots.
This is the first of a series of Smith’s novels to feature the Russian detective Arkady Renko. When we meet him he is already a chief investigator and one who has a reputation as both an exceptional detective and a trouble-maker who is not afraid to expose corruption among the influential.
We meet him in the middle of the night on his arrival in Moscow’s Gorky Park. Three bodies have been found in the snow, their faces mutilated and their fingertips cut off to prevent them being identified. Though he initially hopes to pass the case on to the KGB, Renko quickly becomes intrigued.
I read this book at the start of the year and have only now got around to writing about it. Alas, very little memory of its specifics remains.
As with Ambler’s other books now reissued in Penguin Modern Classics, there is a strongly anti-fascist slant to Uncommon Danger, and all of the classic spy novel elements are there.
Ian wrote favourably about this spy novel last year and James is a fan too so I thought I’d see what the fuss was about. The only other Len Deighton I’ve read is SSGB, his alternate-history novel imagining Britain after a Nazi victory in Word War II. That book is decent, though pales in comparison to Thomas Harris’s Fatherland. Similarly, Berlin Game is good but not a patch on John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Deighton’s hero, Bernard Samson, is an ageing spy who has been deskbound for five years. He’s come up the hard way, via a childhood spent in post-war Berlin where his father served in military intelligence. Despite having apparently benefited from nepotism, Samson resents the Oxbridge types whose contacts and breeding have allowed them to bypass him on the professional ladder. He is sharper than his bosses, who don’t have his field experience, and is cynical about their motivation. Samson’s wife, who is also an intelligence officer, is an Oxford graduate from a rich family – a reminder both of how well Samson has done for himself and of the world to which he will never truly belong.
As with my posts about the previous two books in this trilogy, there are going to be spoilers below. Go and read London Match, it’s excellent, if you want to read any further.
Really. I’ll just spoil it, and that would be a shame. Don’t click through unless you’ve already read it.
A likeable English armaments engineer, who we only know as ‘Graham’ (his surname), is in Istanbul talking to the Turkish government about their naval gun requirements, when he is attacked in his hotel room in what at first appears to be a robbery gone wrong. This being Ambler, Graham has in fact stumbled into a spy story as the central character.
Ambler’s formula is that an innocent Englishman suddenly finds himself at the centre of a story that involves people of several nationalities, ranging from friendly, through ambivalent to hostile. Written in 1940, the hostiles in Journey into Fear are Germans, while the friendlies are made up of a stereotypical collection of French, Spanish and Turks.
Eric Ambler would have been 100 years old this year. To celebrate, Penguin have published five of his pre-war thrillers, novels that influenced many subsequent writers, including John Le Carré. Epitaph for a Spy is an endearingly naïve addition to the genre. A Hungarian teacher holidaying on the French Riviera goes to pick up some photographs he’s taken and is unexpectedly arrested by the police.
It turns out that he’s somehow picked up the wrong camera, of the same make as his own, but on the film he’s had developed – not his own – there are photographs that only a spy would be interested in.
This being a rather camp spy story, our hero – Josef Vadassy – is required to play an increasingly bizarre role as the police’s eyes and ears in the hotel he’s staying at. The novel is narrated in the first person by Vadassy, and he’s kept in the dark about the police’s plans in case he reveals them to the real spy, all of which establishes a narrative framework that allows Ambler to keep us in the dark about what’s really going on. There’s a distinct Agatha Christie feeling to the story, with its strictly limited cast of characters, all of who seem to have been bussed in from central casting.
Epitaph for a Spy is a pleasing enough diversion, but it’s far too silly to take at all seriously. The writing is likeable enough, but to modern readers the plot is probably a little too predictable and lacking in thrills and spills. At its core is a fierce anti-fascism that was certainly in advance of its time, but the genteel setting removes it from the source of this anti-fascist anger, and robs it of the life-or-death conflict that is at the centre of the most compelling spy stories.
Great book. To discuss it all I’m going to have to give away bits of the ending and things that happen along the way, and as it’s a book about spies, I should warn you: here be spoilers. Just so you know.
Bernard Samson, a well-established and senior, but not director-level, member of the SIS is disturbed to find that one of the service’s best agents in East Berlin, codenamed Brahms 4, wants to defect. Wants to go urgently. He’s not alone in his disquiet, the rest of the department is worried too. He’s despatched to Germany to asses the situation.
Evidence builds that there is a traitor in the London office and a process of discovery begins, and the irascible, grumpy Samson has to protect himself as well as discover whether Brahms’ desire to defect is genuine, then get him out if it is. In the end he sends him out first, allowing himself to be arrested by the East Germans and discovering the London-based double agent in the process. Having been through his senior colleagues, he realises that it’s his wife, Fiona, who is the traitor.
The picture of spying here is one of profoundly personal relationships. Samson and Brahms have known each other for years and most of the fixing and organisation in Berlin is performed by Werner Volkmann, a banker who Samson grew up with. The motivations for engaging in the business are all entirely human (mainly egotistical) and actions, even tiny gestures and affectations, are explained in terms of their meaning and what the actor wishes to demonstrate.
Samson’s hatred of people with little practical experience grows out of his knowledge that high-minded politics couldn’t be further from the everyday business of espionage, and that the people involved meeting in publics quares and sitting, cold, tired and bored, in cars in the middle fo the night are the important players rather than the men in Savile Row suits in expensively-decorated offices. But then he would think that, wouldn’t he.
The public but secret politics of east vs west are contrasted with the private politics of the SIS offices and their agents. The power structure within the SIS is built partly in the office, partly at weekend parties and in clubs and bars. The structure of information gathering is built with personal friendships and family links. The aims of the department are not only secondary to an individual’s aims, they are inextricably bound up together.
Fiona’s defection clearly marks a point in Samson’s personal and professional life that will be influential later on. The next two books are piled up next to me waiting to be read.
Eric Ambler was born in 1909 and to mark the centenary of his birth Penguin has reissued five of his first six novels. Written between 1937 and 1940 these books brought a new realism to the spy novel genre and paved the way for the likes of John Le Carre and Len Deighton.
Ambler’s novels typically centre on amateurs who are unexpectedly plunged into espionage. Epitaph for a Spy is no exception. The hero, Josef Vadassy, is arrested after trying to collect his holiday photos from a chemist in a small French town. He’s unable to explain why his film contained shots of French naval fortifications. The authorities suspect that Vadassy’s camera was switched at his hotel and blackmail him into returning to trap the real spy.
So begins a Hitchcockian plot in which Vadassy tries to follow the mysterious instructions from the agent in charge and clumsily snoops on his fellow guests.
The occupants of the hotel could have been borrowed from any crime novel of the period. There’s an English major and his wife, a young and witty American couple, a Swiss industrialist and a few others. Of course, each of them has a secret that Vadassy will inadvertently uncover before the conclusion.
It all sounds very cosy but Ambler’s characters are convincing, especially Vadassy whose ineptitude results from inexperience and fear rather than stupidity. Underlying the whole story is a genuine political concern and the darkness hanging over Europe in 1938 is inescapable. The book has a subplot – which I won’t spoil here – that is quite affecting.
It’s a very good novel. I’ve got another of the reissued Amblers on the shelf and I’m looking forward to getting to it soon.
