Old Flames

Starred review from November 11, 2002
Third-timer Lawton (1963; Black Out) breathes new life into an increasingly creaky genre with this complex, evocative tale that's part Cold War thriller, part whodunit and part olde English lament. Reprising his role as a Russian aristoi–cum–Scotland Yard shamus, Freddie Troy returns from Black Out's wartime fog to the dreary 1956 London of Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, where the visiting Nikita Khrushchev is cheerfully threatening nuclear annihilation. Given his Russian background, Troy is roped into an official-escort-and-spy-while-you're-at-it routine. The Russian leader gets uncomfortably pally with Troy as they tour the city, giving him a secret code word for shadow correspondence; Troy is just beginning to feel relieved at Khrushchev's departure when the decomposed body of an English frogman who allegedly spied on Khrushchev's ship turns up. The pursuit of an insignificant spy killer leads Troy into a maze of double agents, money laundering and murder, not to mention possible corruption inside Scotland Yard and both MI5 and MI6. Along the way, the author cleverly uses his protagonist and a motley crew of secondaries to meditate on WWII nostalgia ("They remember all that was bad about it and go on celebrating it. And the good stuff... the way you class-conscious bastards pulled together... all that's forgotten. You used to know you were all in the same boat, now you don't even think you're on the same river") and the settling chill of the Cold War (" 'The Bomb' was 'THE BOMB'. Not HE or incendiary, not 500lb or ton, but mega
tons—a word still virtually incomprehensible to most people, often paraphrased in multiples of Hiroshima: twenty Hiroshimas; fifty Hiroshimas"). Lawton has created an effective genre-bending novel that is at once a cerebral thriller and an uproarious, deliciously English spoof. Agent, Clare Alexander, Gillon Aitken Associates, London.(Jan.)Forecast:While this thriller may be too tongue-in-cheek for some readers, Anglophiles will eat it up.

November 15, 2002
April 1956. Nikita Krushchev is in London on a diplomatic errand. Chief Inspector Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned as a bodyguard to the Russian leader. But he has a secret mission, too: Troy, fluent in Russian, is to spy on Khrushchev (who doesn't know the British cop speaks his language) by eavesdropping on private conversations and reporting back to his superiors. It's a tough assignment, with a handful of tricky moral qualms, and it gets a heck of a lot tougher when a Royal Navy diver turns up dead. Apparently the diver had been snooping around Krushchev's ship. Who sent him? And who killed him? And what does Troy's former lover, a U.S. Army officer turned KGB agent, have to do with all this? Lawton, whose earlier novel " Black Out" (1995) also featured Troy, vividly re-creates cold war Britain. Like Robert Harris' World War II novel " Enigma" (1995), this is jam-packed with detail and with many fully realized characters. The intriguing mystery plus the wonderfully re-created period setting equals first-class storytelling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)