As a person who has had a love of Agatha Christie inculcated in me from the years of my earliest literacy by older female relatives on both sides of my family, I am the first to admit that I am less than conversant in other great mystery novelists of the same period. It took me until my 30s to discover John Dickson Carr, for example – arguably the greatest of the so-called “locked room mystery” writers. My family bookshelves just didn’t deign to notice the existence of any detectives that weren’t Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or (grudgingly) Tommy and Tuppence Beresford*. No surprises, then, that Patricia Wentworth has only just appeared on the horizon of my literary radar**.
Continue reading Grey Mask ff
I am an unashamed Le Carre fan. I think novels like The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are pretty much as good as the espionage genre gets (or at least has got thus far). (I should disclose upfront that I’m not a fan of Ian Fleming, so feel free to form an opinion about that.) However, my heart belongs to Le Carre’s greatest character, George Smiley, so I may not have read this particular novel if it wasn’t for the BBC adaptation starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie (to say nothing of the glorious Olivia Colman).
Continue reading The Night Manager
Commencing in the last days of Saigon, this novel follows the fate of a Captain in the South Vietnamese Army. Aide to a General, bastard son of a French priest…Communist agent. The novel is written in the form of a confession given while in custody – we don’t learn until close to the end who has actually captured our protagonist.
I liked this book, by which I mean I thought it was good. However, I also did not like it, in that I did not enjoy reading it. So what happened? Continue reading The Sympathizer
A YA spy caper centred around an American teenager on a European school trip. (Question: do American public high schools go on European trips? I’ve only ever heard of private schools doing it. And the main character’s family seems too working-class to have paid for it themselves. Whatever, it’s transparently a pretext to get the parents out of the way.) Nothing in this novel is remotely credible – unlike, I guess, the entire Fleming oeuvre? For some reason it’s more noticeable when the protagonist is into comic books and has never been kissed – but the events all tumble into each other in the usual inexorable way of the genre, so if you give the setup the benefit of the doubt, the rest of it follows. Continue reading The Boy Who Knew Too Much
After all the Serious Literature I’ve been reading lately, I thought I’d reward my brain with some literary fast food in the form of a classic spy thriller. I should have been more careful what I wished for. The gentility of the main characters combined with the looseness of the structure somehow makes the suspension of disbelief utterly unattainable; I don’t think it’s any more preposterous than most spy novels, but evidently it’s easier to believe in a highly trained killing machine with amnesia being hunted by various hostile governments than to believe that a person wanted by the police traipsing through the Scottish moors could encounter quite as many benevolent strangers as populate this book. Continue reading The 39 Steps
