Review: 'Old Flames' scorchingly clever
By L.D. Meagher
CNN
"Old Flames"
By John Lawton
Atlantic Monthly Press
Fiction
512 pages
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Story Tools
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(CNN) -- British authors have made significant contributions to two genres of popular fiction -- the detective story and the spy novel. Now comes a British writer who offers another contribution by combining the two into the detective/spy novel. John Lawton's work "Old Flames" is an intriguing synthesis of the genres, a mystery yarn wrapped inside a tale of espionage.
"Old Flames" is Lawton's second offering, featuring the dogged Detective Troy of Scotland Yard. The story is set in the spring of 1956, and begins with Nikita Khrushchev on a visit to the United Kingdom. It unfolds over the course of several months, much British real estate and a mounting body count.
At the heart of the saga is the mysterious appearance of a body. A man clad in a World War II-era wetsuit washes ashore and ignites a political firestorm.
Troy has only casual interest in politics, despite his brother's standing as Shadow Foreign Minister. But the discovery of the body raises the specter of espionage aimed at the Soviet leader, and Troy has an interest in that, because he was one of the people spying on Khrushchev. He did it in his own, quirky way. He took Comrade Nikita pub-crawling.
The past is no present
Lawton captures the era of the middle 1950s in all its vibrant uncertainty. It was time when much of what has become commonplace -- television, rock 'n' roll -- was brand new.
But "Old Flames" is no nostalgia trip. The turbulent crosscurrents of British society, bred by World War II and loss of empire, are depicted in unblinking hindsight.
"The war had unimaginable importance to the English," Lawton writes. " 'Their Finest Hour' was also their ball and chain. Something in them yearned still for the simple truths of glory. Only a few years ago, there had been national rejoicing on an absurd scale when HMS Amethyst had run the gauntlet of Chinese guns and broken the Yangtse blockade, with the loss of the ship's cat to enemy fire. The moggie had been awarded a 'VC for Cats' and buried with military honours. Troy had never been quite sure whether this was touching or bonkers."
Vividly told
Troy finds himself equivocating about everything. Tracing the dead man's life, he encounters a curiously grief-free widow, a free-spirited mistress, and the mistress' sister. All of which complicates the fact that Troy is himself newly married to Larissa Tosca, ex-U.S. Army, ex-KGB, ex-lover.
"Old Flames" is part Len Deighton, part John le Carré, part P.D. James, and all original. Lawton paints a vivid background of time and place, populates it with unusual and interesting people (fictional and historical) and entangles them in a deliciously intricate game of life, death, betrayals and lies, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.
The result is a ripping good read that celebrates two 20th-century British literary traditions while propelling them into the 21st century.
