Review: First-rate 'Bluffing Mr. Churchill'
Book cements John Lawton's big-league status
By L.D. Meagher
CNN
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Story Tools
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| | 'Bluffing Mr. Churchill' |  By John Lawton
Atlantic Monthly Press
Fiction
336 pages
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(CNN) -- In wartime London, we are told, everything changed. Dukes and duchesses crowded cheek-by-jowl with butchers and bakers seeking shelter from the Blitz. In the dark, early days of the war, the plucky English stood alone, united in their resistance to the Nazi juggernaut. It was their "finest hour."
John Lawton doesn't buy it. The way he sees it, emergencies don't change the British. They merely paper over the differences.
Beneath a thin veneer of brotherhood, the old class struggles rage on unabated. "Bluffing Mr. Churchill" explores this theme while, at the same time, spinning a cracking good yarn.
In April 1941, the United States is not yet in the war. So when an American spy goes missing in Berlin, the State Department has precious few ways to find out what happened.
Cal Cormack, a son of privilege who was one of the spy's handlers, is dispatched to London to find out what happened. There, he falls in with an assortment of uniquely British characters -- diplomat Reggie Ruthven-Greene, a fellow named Churchill (the prime minister's brother), Walter Stilton of Special Branch at Scotland Yard, Stilton's strong-willed (and beautiful) daughter Kitty and her ex-lover, Sergeant Frederick Troy.
Great detail
Like the other books in Lawton's "Inspector Troy" series, "Bluffing Mr. Churchill" is a spy novel tightly wrapped into a murder mystery -- in this case, several murders, all complicated by occurring in the middle of a war.
A large cast of characters and a wickedly twisty plot do not get in the way of the author's remarkable eye for detail.
"At seventy-thirty on a Sunday morning," Lawton writes, "London was a hive of activity, men in blue, men in khaki, backs bent to shovels and piles of debris, half in and half out of half-houses, twisting and wriggling through the ruins, seeking out the trapped, the living and the dying and the dead -- wires and pipes bursting from the ground like the split entrails of a gored beast, pools of water sitting motionless upon the tarmac, curls of grey smoke rising up into the spring sky from the brickfields of flattened buildings, engines pumping, engines of rescue, engines of destruction, all the machines of antiwar -- and it was as though Bosch had met Breughel, Bosch had met and merged with Avercamp, in the limitless vista of the busy human landscape, the hurly-burly of a gruesome-beautiful urban pastoral."
The Troy series establishes Lawton in the first rank of British popular fiction. The stories are at once deeply personal and globally important.
"Bluffing Mr. Churchill" offers keen insights into the development of the character that will delight fans of his other books and serve as a valuable introduction to readers just discovering them. It is also a gripping and gritty sojourn through an already-dangerous London demimonde, made all the more treacherous by the brutalities of war.
That it is equally successful as an espionage thriller and a detective story is proof that John Lawton is a potent storyteller.
