I know, it’s a bit of a cheat, but I’m finishing off my espionage-themed week with a reminder of the Max Tudor series of mysteries about a former spy turned vicar. They’re not set in the Cold War, so they don’t quite fit, but they do at least have links to the secret services so I’m claiming they count and I’m sticking to it. I’ve read seven of the eight* books in the series at this point and as it’s three years since the last one came out and G M Malliet appears to have moved on to other series, so this may well be a complete series at this point . As I said in that original post, Max’s prior career gives him a great excuse to get involved in murders, which is always a stumbling block for a mystery series, and the village that he lives in has a good variety of secondary characters to add into the mix. If you want a village-set mystery series, this would be a good choice if you can get hold of them!
*I did try and order the eight at one point and the vendor kept not being able to fulfil the order, so I should try that again because the Kindle version never seems to drop in price.
Happy Tuesday everyone, and I’m kicking off a slightly espionage themed week here on the blog with a thriller that’s an absolute classic of the genre.
A Call for the Dead is the first novel that features John le Carré’s most famous creation. When a civil servant kills himself after being the subject of a routine security check, George Smiley finds himself in the firing line as the person who carried out said security check. In order to dodge the finger of blame from his boss, Maston, Smiley begins his own investigation into the death. He’s warned off the case – but that evening receives a letter from the dead man. Do the East Germans know more about this than Circus think? Smiley is determined to find out.
Le Carré is said to have created Smiley as an antidote to James Bond – rather than glamorous women and high octane chases, Smiley’s Circus is a world of anonymous men doing paperwork and following routine. But although that might sound boring, what is on the page is compulsively page turning as you try to work out what on earth is going on. I read this and went straight on to the next book in the series, A Murder of Quality, which is completely different in terms of what Smiley is investigating, but just as good. And fortunately for me I had the third book waiting for me when I finished the second. Because of course this is one of those situations where I have been buying up the books when they appear in Kindle sales (because I enjoyed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy so much) and then not getting around to reading them. But clearly this is the time to remedy that – it’s a classic for a reason. And it’s not a particularly long classic either – it’s under 200 pages but so much happens in it and it packs such a punch that it feels like a much longer book. So good.
You don’t need me to tell you how easy this is to get hold of – it was published in 1961 and it has been in print ever since in various iterations, including as a Penguin Classic. It’s available in every format, including as an audiobook written by the peerless Simon Russell Beale.
Disclosure: I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway – not that that influences what I write…
So, as you may have noticed from the previous posts, I’m not a big thriller reader. Detective or mystery stories, yes, lots of them and preferably set in any period not now (I’m not a CSI girl). I have read some John le Carré before – because before watching the film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I wanted to have read the book – to see if it was going to be too violent for me to cope with (for my post about the contradictions of my job and my aversion to violence in films see this post on my other blog). I enjoyed it so much that I not only watched the film and most of the Alec Guiness TV adaptation, but also read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – which is also really good. I’ve been keeping my eyes out for more of his Smiley series at the library – but hadn’t read any of his newer books* – hence my entry into the Goodreads giveaway (despite the enormous size of the to-read pile) and I was really pleased when I won a copy.
Paperback copy of A Delicate Truth by John le Carré
I’m always very careful not to give away plot spoilers in my synopsis, and it’s quite hard with A Delicate Truth to say much about the plot without saying too much, so I’ve taken my cue for this from the Goodreads synopsis. The story centres around a top, top secret counter-terror operation in Gibraltar – what happened, how it was set up and whether it was the success that it was meant to have been.
The intertwining plots are carefully and meticulously constructed – I never thought that I knew what was coming next and at the end I still had questions (in a good way) and wanted to know more. The characters are believable – in some cases horribly so – and you really can imagine that these events could possibly have happened – although you hope fervently that they haven’t.
Le Carré still has the knack for describing the workings of government in a way that feels real, and in addition, in this book he turns his focus on the world of private defence contractors. I’ve read a lot of news articles about this new aspect of the military world and I can’t claim to know first hand what any of them are really like, but it’s clear that the author isn’t keen, shall we say, on this latest development. And if anything near of the shenanigans that go on in this book have gone on in real life (and I devoutly hope they haven’t) then he’s got reason.
This is an exciting and page-turning book – which I gobbled up in a day’s commute and an evening’s reading. I would recommend it to anyone who has read his earlier works or people who like a thriller at the cinema and want a book for their summer holiday. I’m not surprised this has done so well – I’ll certainly be passing it on to the thriller readers in my family (my dad and The Boy).
A Delicate Truth by John le Carré can be found on Kindle or as a proper book all over the place (although my link is Foyles, for reasons previously explained) and you can also see more reviews on Goodreads.
* I nearly put “contemporary books” but then I remembered that the Smiley books were written at the time that they were set in, it’s just me that’s reading them now!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 