Tag: espionage

Review 2658: Rum Affair

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The famous coloratura opera singer Tina Rossi has made a rendezvous with her lover, Kenneth Holmes, at the flat of one of his friends. When she arrives, though, Kenneth is not there, but a body is in the wardrobe. She has just discovered it when Johnson Johnson, the famous portrait painter, arrives with two policemen, saying there’d been a complaint. Reader of this series know that Johnson is a lot more than an artist. (Although I guess they don’t know at this point.)

Tina puts them off, but after they go outside, a man with a gold tooth bursts out of the wardrobe. Tina screams, but they miss him and he escapes.

Tina is now afraid for Kenneth, but acknowledging the affair could destroy her career. She decides to go to the island of Rum, where his laboratory is located. But she must do it without anyone suspecting, especially her agent, Michael Twiss, who has been trying to keep them apart. Later, she hears that Kenneth is suspected in the explosion aboard a nuclear submarine that was developed under his management. That makes her more eager to get to Rum.

Luckily, Johnson offers to paint her portrait if she will join him for a yacht race in Western Scotland that ends near Rum. Shortly after they leave, it becomes clear that someone is trying to kill Tina.

Dunnett’s Dolly series (Dolly is the name of the yacht) poses as mysteries but the books are really adventure novels with espionage at their core. They are fast moving with entertaining dialogue. All of them are narrated by a different woman, vividly drawn. The 60s yachting life seems to be pretty wild. These books make entertaining reads, even though it is generally impossible to guess what’s going on.

These books have not been republished in order, and I have not been reading them in order. This one, original name Dolly and the Singing Bird, was actually the first one in the series.

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Review 2606: The Episode at Toledo

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I have read two books before by Ann Bridge, and although the second was more action-oriented, they were both about women discovering themselves. When I looked for another book by Bridge, I wasn’t aware that she had a series of books around the character of Julia Probyn. This is one of them, about the sixth or seventh in the series, but Julia is a fairly minor character.

Although not necessary, it might have helped me to have read the series in order. I say this mostly because of the beginning and ending of this book, where Julia is ensconced in Scotland among a throng of characters who are briefly introduced but who I couldn’t keep straight.

Julia receives a guarded letter from her Hungarian friend, Hetty, who has married Richard Atherley, British Counsellor in Madrid. Hetta has asked that Julia send either her husband or another friend in Intelligence out to Madrid but doesn’t explain why. However, her friends speculate that it might have to do with a visiting admiral from the U. S. Understand that this is definitely a Cold War novel, and that in an earlier novel Hetta was kidnapped and drugged by Hungarian Communists.

Hetta is worried because she thinks she has recognized the American ambassador’s chauffeur as a Hungarian Communist who years ago closed down the Catholic school that Hetta attended and took delight in harassing the nuns. However, when Hetta’s friends check into it, they find he has been vetted by American security, so they dismiss her fears.

Of course, he is a bad guy, so Hetta does her best to keep the American admiral out of the ambassador’s car. On a tour to Toledo, Hetta suffers a broken arm after she delays the car, which has an accident trying to get to a rendezvous in time to be blown up.

After that, Hetta’s husband arranges for her to go to Portugal to stay with friends, as she is pregnant. But danger follows her.

For a suspense novel, there is a lot more inactivity than activity. Somehow the balance wasn’t right. There is also a lot of repetition as one group after another discusses the same incidents. Frankly, the last 20 pages or so, in which Hetta’s husband arranges for her to return to Scotland and she does, seem to have no relevance except to return to Julia and her confusing pack of relatives and friends. I would estimate that 50-75 pages of this novel are unnecessary.

Was Bridge tired of writing this series? She seems to have been trying to replicate the kind of books Mary Stewart wrote, combining suspense with lovely descriptions of the country. But Stewart did it better. This book also reminds me of the Cold War books of Helen MacInnes, only they have more romance.

To really evaluate this series, I think I would have to start with the first one, which I plan to do. In the meantime, I prefer her other books.

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Review 2511: Tropical Issue

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Tropical Issue is the sixth of Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson novels, published in 1980 as Dolly and the Bird of Paradise. Somehow I accidentally am rereading these books completely out of order. (In this case, I typed in “Dunnett Johnson Johnson books in order” and then assumed that the search page, which showed me the covers, was showing me them in order. My mistake, obviously.)

Rita Geddes, a punk Scottish makeup artist, first meets the famous portrait painter Johnson Johnson when her friend Ferdy Braithwaite, a well-known photographer, borrows Johnson’s flat for a photo shoot of political journalist Natalie Sheridan and asks Rita to do the makeup. Johnson has been reported as the only survivor of a plane crash, so when Ferdy deserts her there after the photo shoot, having dismissed Johnson’s exhausted housekeeper, Rita ends up having to take care of him for a couple of days and develops a dislike of him.

Natalie offers Rita a provisional job on Madeira, where she gets to see her friend Kim-Jim again. Kim-Jim is getting ready to retire, and he has set things up so that Rita will most likely be offered his position as full-time makeup artist for Natalie. However, on her way from the airport, Rita is assaulted by a man who seems to believe that she and Kim-Jim are plotting against Natalie.

Rita figures out that her attacker is Roger van Diemen, a banana industry executive, who is supposed to be leaving the island for rehab. When she goes to the airport to make sure he gets on the plane, she meets Johnson Johnson again. Next, she, Fergy, and Kim-Jim take a sledge ride down a steep hill, a tourist offering, but the sledge has been tampered with, and they are almost killed. Finally, a death makes Rita determined to find out what’s happening.

This novel is fast-paced and includes murder, spying, piracy, a hurricane, and even an encounter with a volcano after all of the characters end up in St. Lucia. It has a complicated plot and witty dialogue as Rita tries to figure out what’s going on. And Rita has her own secrets.

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Review 2490: #1970Club AND RIPXIX! Passenger to Frankfurt

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Usually, when an Agatha Christie books pops up as a possibility for the biyearly club reads, I am happy to choose it, especially if I haven’t read it before. This year, in looking for books for the 1970 Club (and also for #RIPXIX), I saw Passenger to Frankfurt, one of Christie’s stand-alone espionage novels. Unfortunately, it was not one of her best.

Sir Stafford Nye is a young mid-level diplomat often distrusted by his peers because of eccentric dress and a certain sarcastic sense of humor. He is returning from a trip to Malaya when his plane, bound for Geneva, is rerouted to Frankfurt and thence to London.

In the Frankfurt airport lounge, he is approached by a young woman asking him for help. She tells him that if the plane had landed in Geneva, she would be safe, but since it is going to London, she’ll be killed. She bears a certain resemblance to him. She asks if he will leave the burnoose he’s been wearing with his passport in it and allow himself to be drugged. She will cut her hair and use his passport, and he will wake up long after the plane has landed in London and claim he was robbed. And he agrees.

Back in London, he places an ad hoping to meet her and she ends up sitting next to him during a concert. He is carefully brought into a mission—one that she is already working—by some government officials who are alarmed about a plot that is rousing the youth worldwide to violence and anarchy. Nye travels with the girl, who has many names but might be Countess Renata Zerkowski, to view a Hitler-like rally headed by a young man referred to as the Young Siegfried. He is just a figurehead, but the officials want to find out who is in charge.

The plot of this novel is so ridiculous that I barely had any patience with it. But worse, there is hardly any action, just a bunch of meetings. Once Nye is recruited, we see him traveling with Renata and then he disappears about 2/3 of the way through, only to reappear at the end. The only real action takes place in one page at the end of the novel. This one is pretty much a stinker. The only interesting character is Nye’s elderly aunt, Lady Matilda Cleckheaton.

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Review 2125: N or M?

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Agatha Christie said she liked Tommy and Tuppence best of her protagonists, so I decided to read them all in order. N or M? is the third. Unfortunately, they tend to be espionage novels, which are not her best even though Tommy and Tuppence are fun.

It’s 1940, and both Tommy and Tuppence are frustrated because no one wants them to help in the war effort. Tommy at 49 is considered too old for intelligence work. However, shortly after he makes another attempt, he’s called on by a Mr. Grant who has an independent operation for Tommy only.

England has become infiltrated by Nazi sympathizers in all levels of government, which is why Mr. Grant wants someone from the outside. He has information that either N or M—both German spies, one male and one female—is at the San Souci rooming house in Leamington. Tommy is to pretend to have got a boring job in Scotland then go to Leamington and check into the San Souci. He does so, only to find one of the guests is Tuppence, who has eavesdropped on his meeting with Mr. Grant. So, pretending they don’t know each other, the two begin investigating the household.

I thought that Tommy and Tuppence were a little dense about the identities of the spies. I knew who one was almost immediately. However, this was the usual romp with some adventure and risk to our hero.

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Review 2079: Partners in Crime

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I decided to read all of the Tommy and Tuppence novels in order when I read that they were Christie’s favorite sleuths. Partners in Crime is the second book in the series, set six years after the first.

Tuppence is beginning to be bored when Mr. Carter, Tommy’s boss, asks him to take six months off his work in the Secret Service to reopen the Blunt Detective Agency, which the department believes is connected with espionage. They are to look for a Russian blue stamp on a letter and further contacts.

Partners in Crime is not exactly a collection of short stories, but it is about a series of crimes Tommy and Tuppence solve in between tussles with the bad guys. Each case takes up one or two chapters. The book also has a running theme of either Tommy or Tuppence taking on the persona of a different detective from literature in each case. Unfortunately, I didn’t know who most of the detectives were, so I missed some jokes.

Some of the mysteries are laughably obvious, but others are more difficult. The novel suffers slightly from the problem I find with short detective fiction—not a lot of time to develop plots, red herrings, and characters. However, Tommy and Tuppence are funny and charming, so I enjoyed the book.

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Review 1881: Death in Kashmir

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A quote on the cover of Death in Kashmir compares M. M. Kaye to Agatha Christie. A more accurate comparison in terms of the type of novel it is—romantic suspense rather than mystery—is to Mary Stewart, although there is just something about a Mary Stewart book that this novel doesn’t quite have. Still, Death in Kashmir is entertaining enough.

The novel is set in 1947, the year before the British left India, and it provides an interesting look at the life of British upper-class people living there at the time, although the natives are mostly only in the book as servants.

Sarah Parrish goes to Kashmir to attend the last meeting of the India Ski Club at Gulmarg in a primitive hotel that is usually only open in the summer. The outing has already been shadowed by the death that day of Mrs. Matthews in an apparent skiing accident. In the middle of the night, Sarah awakens to a scraping noise and realizes someone is trying to break into the room next door, that of another young woman, Janet Rushton. Sarah quietly hurries to Janet’s door to warn her and is shocked to be greeted by a drawn gun. However, when Janet sees someone has tried to enter by the bathroom window, she confides in Sarah that she is an agent for the government. She and Mrs. Matthews discovered an important secret and were waiting for help from their superiors when Mrs. Matthews was murdered.

A few nights later, Sarah and Janet have joined an expedition farther up the mountain to ski and spend the night in a ski hut. Sarah catches Janet ready to ski off in the middle of the night because she has finally been contacted by her people. The next day, she too is found dead.

Returning to Peshawar after the trip, Sarah tries to forget what she has learned, but she receives a letter from Janet’s attorney enclosing the receipt for her houseboat in Srinagar and telling her the secret can be found there. So, she finds herself returning to Kashmir with her friends Hugo and Fudge Creed. There she encounters all of the people who were on the ski trip, with a few extras, like the attractive Captain Charles Mallory.

The Cold War plot seems a little silly when compared to those of some of the masters, like Le Carré (and may more fairly earn the comparison to Christie, who also has some silly Cold War plots), but it leads to plenty of suspense and an unguessable villain. A small criticism is that both sides seem to have so many helpers that it’s no wonder there was a leak. A bigger caveat is that the explanations at the end go on for quite a while longer than seemed necessary.

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Review 1323: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

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Cover for The Spy Who Came in from the ColdThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold was the novel that made John Le Carré’s name as a master of espionage fiction. His introduction to my edition tells just how much he resented the attention he got for it. Even though it is one of his earlier books, having been published in 1963, it is one I hadn’t read.

At the beginning of the novel, Leamas watches in anger from West Berlin as his last good agent, Karl Riemeck, is shot crossing the border from East Berlin. Leamas is fairly sure, on his return to England shortly thereafter, that his career as an operator is over. Instead, he is offered a dangerous last mission. He is to appear to have been retired to a desk job, to go to pieces and lose his position and continue to go downhill with the hopes that he will be approached from the other side. The objective? To take down Mundt, a ruthless official on the other side of the wall and the man responsible for Karl’s death.

All goes according to plan, and Leamas is approached shortly after he gets out of prison for assaulting a grocer. Only, if you are familiar with Le Carré, you know that things will be much more complicated than they seem to be. And Leamas has one weakness. During his descent, he got involved with a young, naïve girl, Liz, a member of the Communist Party.

Le Carré is a master of suspense and a plotter of labyrinthine plots. In addition, his novels always have more going on in them that just action, such as raising serious issues of morality. This novel is rightfully a famous member of its genre.

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Day 1300: Munich

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Cover for MunichRobert Harris’s newest book, Munich, takes place during four days in September 1938, during which England’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, met with Hitler, Mussolini, and the President of France to try to avoid war over Czechoslavakia. Or at least Chamberlain was trying to prevent war. As he has done before, Harris manages to create suspense around an event the outcome of which we already know.

He does this by introducing two characters, friends from Oxford who are now diplomats. Hugh Legat is a junior secretary for the Prime Minister. Paul von Hartmann is in the German foreign ministry, but he is also a member of a group who would like to bring down Hitler. The group asks him to attempt to encourage a strong response from England on the Sudetenland issue by leaking secret German aspirations in Europe to England through his friendship with Hugh. The group believes that if war is declared, the German army will stop Hitler.

This mission is a dangerous one for Hartmann, who already has one SS officer on his tail. Meanwhile, Hugh in trying to be a liaison is continually stymied by orders from his jealous boss.

I felt a little more detached from this one than I usually do for Harris’s work. It depicts Chamberlain, though, as a much more determined and politically savvy man than he is believed to be now. I get the feeling that Harris, who states in the afterword that he has been fascinated by this meeting for years, wants to show Chamberlain in a more positive light than history generally affords him.

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Day 1203: The 1977 Club! The Honourable Schoolboy

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Cover for The Honourable SchoolboyI actually read this novel before the 1977 Club was announced, but I was pleased to find that it was published in that year. I have a couple of other books I’m reviewing this week that I read especially for the club.

Here are my previous reviews of some other books published in 1977:

* * *

I wasn’t aware that there was a sequel to John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy until I picked up The Honourable Schoolboy and started reading it. It is truly a worthy successor.

In summarizing the plot, I have to give away a key point of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but a point revealed toward the beginning of the novel. In that novel, of course, George Smiley uncovered a mole for the Russians high up in British intelligence. Because of the mole’s position, as The Honourable Schoolboy begins, all of the service’s spy networks are compromised and must be dismantled.

With a small staff of personnel who were dismissed during his predecessor’s reign, Smiley must figure out a way to make the service viable again. He has the idea that they can look for intelligence in the lacunae of his predecessor’s work, that is, look for promising leads that were suppressed.

1977 club logoThey find one, payments by the Russians to an account in Hong Kong, first small ones but later very large. Since the “spook house” in Hong Kong has been closed, Smiley recalls a journalist, an “occasional” agent, Jerry Westerby, from retirement in Tuscany to investigate this lead. A tangled path leads him from a Chinese businessman in Hong Kong to the man’s former prostitute English mistress, a Mexican drug courier in Vientiane, and some ugly dealings.

It is always amazing to me that Le Carré can evoke as much excitement from a paper chase as from an action sequence. Once again, he is in top form with a taut thriller. This novel is set against a backdrop of Southeast Asia exploding into chaos with the end of the Vietnam War. Westerby’s investigations take him to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, and Saigon.

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