Review of Old Flames by John Lawton (Orion, 1996)

1956 and Khrushchev is on a state visit to the Britain. Given his fluent Russian, Chief Inspector Troy is drafted into the special branch team to mind the Soviet President. During the visit a lone frogman is spotted trying to spy on the Russian battleship berthed in Portsmouth Harbour and a couple of weeks later a body is washed up, although his face and hands are in such poor condition he can’t be identified. Troy sets out to investigate who the frogman is, why he was spying on the ship, and why he was killed, despite warnings to stay away from the case. Soon he is caught in a web of intrigue, his life under-threat, with those that can help him being murdered as soon as he tracks them down. But Troy is a tenacious copper and he isn’t going to be stopped until he discovers the truth.

As I posted a couple of days ago, Lawton is a skilled writer and storyteller. His prose is easy on the eye, evocative, and hooks the reader in early and tugs them along. As a cold war thriller/crime novel, Old Flames works well. The characterisation is good and there is a strong sense of place and history. Where I have a difficulty as a reader is in respect to plausibility. The historical detail, the kinds of relationships between individuals and agencies, the political intrigue, and basics of the plot are all fine in this regard. Rather it is the many coincidences between characters that I find hard to buy. Every character is already known in some capacity to other characters, or has some tangible relationship to them. I noted a number of these in the previous post, but they continue all the way to the end of the novel, with even minor characters linked to Troy or others (for example, the bank at which one of the characters has an account just happens to be managed by a close school friend of Troy's who then provides him access, despite the fact that the character lives in a completely different town and there are hundreds of banks in the city). The story really didn’t need this level of interweaving and coincidence, and in many ways it works best when Troy is in territory where there are no such relationships. It’s not that I am against coincidence, but rather excessive coincidence. The story is also a little too long, padded out with some sidebars that could have been trimmed back. That said, I did enjoy Old Flames and will keep an eye out for other books by John Lawton.

Convenient relationships

I'm just over 200 pages into John Lawton's Old Flames. My sense so far is a very strong opening is entering a bit of a plodding middle, but I suspect it's going to reignite at any minute. Lawton is clearly a very good writer and can tell a good yarn. Like with Black Out though, I can't help but notice that coincidence and convenient relationships play more than a minor role in his stories. His main character, Troy, is a chief inspector in charge of the Scotland Yard murder squad, he is the son of a newspaper magnate Russian emigre for which his brother-in-law is an editor, his brother is the shadow foreign secretary, his ex-girlfriend is Eisenhower's ex-secretary, and he's been drafted in to the bodyguard detail of Khrushchev when he visits Britain, etc. That's a lot of convenient relationships. I can't help feeling that the story might gain something if parts of it didn't rest on them quite so much. I guess the other side of this, is that there are/were families who are incredibly successful and are tied into powerful networks (such as the Kennedys). I don't know, I just find some of the plot unlikely or implausible which always unsettles me as a reader. Still it makes for an intriguing story, and I'm firmly hooked in, so on that level it is working just fine!

The largest geopolitical project in living memory

Over the past year I've read a number of novels set either just before or during the second world war including books by Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, John Lawton, Marek Krajewski, Hans Fallada, Carlo Lucarelli and others, along with some straight history books, but I haven't been keeping track of history itself. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and Germany's invasion of Poland (The Polish Officer by Furst does a good job of capturing the first few days as Poland desperately tries to put in place the basis for resistance knowing that it is being over-run).

Of course, I haven't pre-prepared a post, but I have been thinking about doing one based on a conversation I had with Martin Dodge last week, so I'm hastily moving it forward. At his Mapping Manchester exhibition we were talking about whether the John Ryland's library had survived the blitz intact and that led onto a discussion about bomb census maps. Martin kindly sent me on a link to a story that discussed them. I'd be really interested to take a look at them in more detail. I always remember the two old ladies who lived next door when I was growing up who used to describe going up Caldy Hill to watch Liverpool and Birkenhead docks being bombed. They were great story-tellers - you felt like you were there watching the cities burn.

The tracing below is from the Christmas raids of Dec 20-22, 1940 on the Merseyside area when 365 people died. It is designed to be overlain on a base map, hence why there are so few roads, etc. shown (much cheaper to keep a clean map and have lots of tracings). A daily tracing would be taken so that the pattern of bombing could be tracked over time.


The tracing shows the area between Bootle and Walton and plots 26 separate incidents in quite a confined area. Each incident is given a number, followed by the size and type of bomb, and the location of any unexploded ordnance. Collectively the maps reveal that by the end of the war Liverpool was the second most bombed UK city after London.

These other maps are of Brighton and Bristol.

I've been fascinated by the Second World War for a while now given it was the largest and most complex geopolitical event in modern history with many civil wars operating inside transnational wars, and political ideology explicitly reshaping territory and lives through violence. I've been trying to collect books that explains what went on different parts of the world, including some that traditionally get looked over (e.g. Aleutian Islands [the only bit of the USA occupied by the Japanese], Malta, Isle of Man, Ireland, etc) so I can have a go at mentally stitching the whole lot together.

I'll perhaps try to do something on Irish neutrality tomorrow. Ireland declared its neutrality on the 2nd Sept, the day before Britain and France declared war. It was a policy that was rigidly maintained right to the end of the war.

Lest we forget ...

Saturday Snippet: Black Out

John Lawton has a fine eye for capturing war torn London. In Black Out the year is 1944 and the blitz is still lingering on. I reviewed the book ten days or so ago and I thought I'd share a passage from the book that might wet your appetite.

At the foot of Eros's pedestal two young women sat in shirtsleeves, daring all for spring sun, and shared a single cigarette.

He walked into Piccadilly, watching his shadow dance before him. In the brightness of such light the city contrasted sharply with the weather. London thawed. London budded. London ached. Like a muscle stretched and strained for too long it yearned to relax. The sense of action, the sense of an ending being almost tangible. Troy found himself wondering if the city would not expire with the forst breath of spring like some old man who had spent his energy enduring the depth of winter and had none left for the simple pleasures of living. What the sun revealed was a city of peeling, blistered paint, of broken, boarded-up windows, of shattered walls and open roofs, of four long years of make do and mend. It was a city scorched and scarred, patched and tattered in the light of spring.

I was also taken by this line:

'Of course war's an utter fucking picnic! Millions getting slaughtered for the benefit of the nostalgia of the survivors.'

Given the plethora of novels, TV series, documentaries and Hollywood movies that focus on the second world war, it's difficult to not think of them as a perverse nostalgia industry built on a mountain of dead bodies (even if some of them help us to think through why it happened and shocking waste of life, rather than simply providing entertainment).

I've already ordered the second book in the series, Old Flames, which moves forward to 1956. If its written with the same prose and eye for place I'm sure to enjoy.

Pre-order splurge

I've had an interesting journey trying to get The Rule Book into Irish bookshops; I've learnt a lot about the book publishing industry in the process. I won't bore you with the details but it seems that the impasse has been cleared (by me taking a cut in royalties so that the publisher and distributor both got what they wanted). I got two reports yesterday of sightings, one in the Dublin Airport, the other in the window of Hodges Figgis, the largest bookshop in Dublin. Hopefully the blumming thing will now find its way into reader's hands ...

Anyway, feeling chipper with myself I decided to splurge and pre-order some books. I very rarely do this, but there are a couple of authors and series I'm prepared put my hand in pocket for. So I've ordered the following, which when they are delivered will zip to the top of a to read pile that's already rickety.


Are there any authors or series that you feel compelled to buy the minute they're published (and forget the price)?







I can't wait to get stuck into these. If they all turn up on the same day I won't know where to start. I also know a couple of people who'll be pestering me for first dibs once I've finished. In fact I imagine they might get snaffled the moment I turn my back.

I also decided to buy two others. Old Flames is the second book in the Troy series, the first of which I reviewed yesterday. If Donna Moore's blog is anything to go by then Go To Helena Handbasket should be a blast. Expect reviews this side of Christmas! I know I'm not going to be able to stop myself, but I really don't need to buy any more books before then.













Flip-it - I've just read the order email from Amazon. Peter Temple is published 3rd Sept, Philip Kerr 10th Sept, and Terry Pratchett 1st Oct. I just followed the default settings which groups the delivery into as few as parcels as possible so the expected delivery date is 7th-13th Oct! I need to to keep a better eye on that next time. Grrrr.

Review of Black Out by John Lawton, Phoenix (1995)

London 1944, the tail end of the Blitz, and a human arm is discovered by children on a bomb site. The arm has been severed from its owner by a knife. The case is assigned to Detective Sergeant Troy, son of a Russian émigré turned newspaper magnate, and the rising star of the murder squad based in Scotland Yard. Troy soon establishes that Peter Wolinski, a Polish communist and intellectual, is missing from his apartment and starts a manhunt, only the victim appears to be German and there is no record as to his identity. Soon Troy is drawn into the world of wartime intelligence and is caught between two femme fatales – Tosca, a feisty New Yorker working for American High Command and Lady Diana Brack, the elegant lover of a shady American operative. Stonewalled by the intelligence services, when Troy refuses to give up the chase he becomes the hunted.

Black Out is one of a series of Troy novels that have been published out of chronological order. It’s the first one I’ve read and there was no sense that I needed to have read any of the others as the book stands alone. I found the first 100 pages or so a little frustrating. The story kind of ambled along and exploited a set of coincidences that I found very convenient and unlikely. For example (and revealing these will not spoil the read) – Wolinski, the man who disappears, lives in the apartment above Troy’s former mentor; Troy’s uncle, a university professor, also knows Wolinski; the woman who visits Wolinski’s apartment exits as Troy revisits his mentor; she is known to him as a family friend; Troy’s trusted constable also knows the woman as his brothers lust after her; the liaison between MI5 and the police attended the same school as Troy at the same time and is known to him; when Troy visits a RAF base he bumps into an old rival of his father. This is a big city, full of millions of people, and yet conveniently half a dozen principle characters are already known to each other and coincide in time and space. Perhaps one, maybe two, coincidences would have been realistic. But seven? And they were the ones I jotted down. In addition, Troy has remarkable luck – for example he’s the only survivor of a bomb explosion.

I almost stopped reading. I’m glad I didn’t as the story really picks up and the tension starts to mount and I ended up really enjoying the book. And there are some great twists towards the end. There was actually no need for these coincidences and the book would have worked equally well if the characters had been strangers. The characterisation is good throughout and I thought Kolankiewicz, the foulmouthed pathologist (‘fuck bloody off bastardpimpcopper’; ‘what the bollox you want, smartyarse’), and Tosca, the feisty New Yorker, were great creations. Lawton captures the atmosphere of black out London and the story eventually evolves into a convoluted and gripping tale.

Overall, despite a frustrating start, Black Out really grew on me, the latter half more than making up for the first, and I’ll keep an eye out for other Troy novels.

Thanks to Uriah Robinson at Crime Scraps for the recommendation. Another review can be found at It's a Crime