Two spy novels

Despite having invested in a Kindle, I found myself ordering two real books a week ago, as either there aren't Kindle versions available yet or the Kindle version is more expensive.

First off was the third book by Stella Rimington in her Liz Carlyle series, "Illegal action". The basis of this book was more to my liking that the previous ones: Liz has been transferred to Counter-Intelligence (i.e. working against the Soviet threat) from Counter-Terrorism. As an old cold warrior, I much prefer the deviousness of the Soviets. I can't put my finger on the exact cause, but all the way through the book, I kept feeling unsatisfied. As I have pointed out before, Rimington is no literary stylist and seems to write by the numbers (at five sixths of the way through the book, there will be a huge twist in the story which changes one's entire outlook). There are always a few chapters in which the main character of the chapter is referred to solely as "He" or "She", meaning that Rimington is describing someone's actions but that she doesn't want the reader to guess who that person is. I won't reveal the detail for this book, but it wasn't too hard to figure out who the mystery person was. At the end of the book, I found myself so unimpressed that I decided probably not to bother buying any more books in this series. A shame, because a better writer could have done so much more with the story elements.

On the other hand, "The Trinity Six" by Charles Cumming was the real thing. Dense, intriguing and cerebral, this is a worthy successor to Le Carre, mixing fact with fiction almost seamlessly. I've read most of the books listed in the 'bibliography' at the end, so the the historical parts of the story were very familiar. Cumming's anti-hero, Dr Sam Gaddis, does come over as slightly too resourceful for an academic, but that only makes for a better story. He is also a tad too trusting during at least the first half of the novel; I would have thought that someone as well versed in all things Russian would have been more suspicious. Presumably I had an advantage over Gaddis in that I could read what other characters in the book were doing when they were not interacting with him, and so I was able to identify his babysitter well in advance. I also found the fact that Gaddis repeatedly was able to slip under the Russians' radar unbelievable. Maybe they too have lost their touch since the end of the cold war.

Looking back on the story (and this is one that deserves a second and third read, without doubt), it occurs to me that the focus of the story changes in a subtle manner about half way through: the sixth man becomes abandoned and someone else takes his place as being the the book's raison d'etre. The sixth man essentially becomes a red herring.

I hope that Cumming's other book, "A Spy by Nature" is of a similarly high quality. I note that Cumming was approached to join MI6 but turned them down.