Category: Fiction

His Last Bow by Arthur Conan Doyle

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His Last Bow, published in 1917, is the final case of Sherlock Holmes, chronologically, if not actually the last time he appeared in print. The stories collected in the 1927 volume, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, were set earlier. Conan Doyle was quite careless about continuity, but this has never affected the enduring popularity of the Holmes stories.

It is somewhat shorter than most of the other Holmes stories and is subtitled An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. It is also unusual in that it is not narrated by Dr Watson, but written in conventional third-person style.

The action takes place very specifically on the evening of 2nd August 1914, just before the first world war was to begin, an evening with “an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air”. The seaside setting on the eve of war gives the story something of the same feel as the final chapter of John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1915.

Holmes has long since retired, given up Baker Street for the South Downs, and devoted himself to beekeeping. He has written a book entitled Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. We learn in retrospect that in 1912, Holmes was asked to come out of retirement by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, to investigate the German spy ring believed to be operating in Britain.

The story depicts the climax of this operation, as Von Bork, the German spy chief, prepares to return to Berlin. He is discussing how things have gone with Baron von Herling from the German Embassy. There is some doubt as to whether Britain will declare war, but in any event, the two Germans consider that a reckoning between the countries can only be postponed, rather than called off altogether.

Von Bork has been an effective secret agent because he is a keen sportsman, which means that no-one has taken him seriously or suspected his real motives. He is awaiting the arrival of Altamont, an Irish-American who has been gathering information for him. Let’s just say that the evening does not go quite as he expected, and that both Holmes and Watson appear in disguise.

The final exchange between Holmes and Watson, as Watson prepares to return to the army, is quite moving. It’s clear that Conan Doyle was bringing down the curtain not only on the career of the great detective, but also on the pre-war Victorian world with which he was so identified.

If you are reading the Holmes stories, it’s a good idea to leave this short farewell tale to the very end.

I’ve been enjoying all over again the excellent TV series with Jeremy Brett. I don’t think I’m alone in regarding him as the definitive screen Holmes, the actor who was the most faithful to the original stories. It’s a great shame that his early death meant that they did not get around to filming this story. It would have been a great way to go out, but unfortunately, it was not to be.  

The London Embassy by Paul Theroux

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The London Embassy by Paul Theroux was published in 1982. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short stories, narrated by the same American diplomat who featured in a previous book, The Consul’s File. He has now been posted for a term of duty in London. It rather reminds me of the writing of Somerset Maugham.

It’s a sort of fictional parallel to Theroux’s own life as an expatriate American writer in London. One suspects that the diplomat’s observations of London and its natives are very much Paul Theroux’s own. This is London seen clearly through the eyes of an outsider. It is these observations that give the book its fascination: “The city had been built to enclose secrets, for the British are like those naked Indians who hide in the Brazilian jungle – not timid, but fanatically private and untrusting.”

The narrator’s work brings him into contact with all kinds of eccentric characters and odd situations. His neighbours include a quiet civil servant and a loud motorcyclist, heard but never seen. Are they, in fact, one and the same person?  

He has to deal with a mentally unstable American poet, a cross between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. There is an encounter with a group of expensively educated and mindlessly prejudiced schoolboys.

 It is made clear that he is not a spy (they are based on the third floor) but his job does involve the gathering of information. He almost enters the world of espionage when he is approached by a wily Russian would-be defector, and manages to outwit him. He has to employ similar sleight of hand when he is tasked with enforcing the embassy’s rather informal dress code.  

Perhaps best of all is the story “An English Unofficial Rose”, in which the narrator is under the impression that a young woman wants a romantic relationship with him, when her real reason for seeing him is something quite different. As he says: “Language is deceptive; and though English is subtle it also allows a clever person –one alert to the ambiguities of English – to play tricks with mock precision and to combine vagueness with politeness. English is perfect for diplomats and lovers”.

This book is almost forty years old now, and this is not quite the London of today. In general the social attitudes of the narrator are quite modern, almost ahead of their time, but here and there is a reminder that things have changed, just as the American Embassy is no longer the building in Grosvenor Square.

Paul Theroux’s sojourn in Britain also produced the excellent The Kingdom By the Sea, a lightly fictionalised record of his trip around the coastline. In the end, though, he did not stay in Britain, but settled in Hawaii, where he was a neighbour of ex-Beatle George Harrison. Who can blame him?                 

Payment Deferred by C S Forester

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Payment Deferred, published in 1926, is an early novel by C S Forester. In theme and tone it is quite different from the Hornblower series he is most famous for today, or his other later novels based on military and naval history, such as The General or The Good Shepherd.       

This is a crime novel in the true sense of that term, a psychological study of the effect of a murder on its perpetrator. It’s startlingly different from detective stories that were published the same year, by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, and it’s still quite surprising that something as black as this was written almost a century ago.

The tone and sort of life described is rather reminiscent of the novels of Patrick Hamilton, but without the humour. Something, perhaps the sex references, highly unusual in a British novel of this vintage, reminds me strongly of the work of Georges Simenon, the standalone novels that do not feature Inspector Maigret, that he called “romans durs”. There is also a reference to the 1920’s flu pandemic that today’s reader can’t help noticing.

Mr Marble is a bank clerk, married with two children, living in a shabby south London suburb in the years immediately after the great war. He is in serious financial trouble when temptation presents itself in the form of a wealthy nephew on a visit from Australia. Mr Marble’s hobby is photography, so there is a convenient bottle of potassium cyanide in his cupboard. The murder takes place offstage; it is hinted at by the scream that Mrs Marble thinks she has heard when half asleep and her puzzlement at the muddy state of her husband’s suit.

The whole tragic sequence of events that unfolds derives from the fact that Mr Marble has buried the body in the garden. He takes to sitting alone with his secret in the back room, blotting out his fear of the hangman with whiskey, while keeping an eye on the untended scrubby garden to make sure no-one notices anything.

The house is rented. Mr Marble becomes obsessed with getting enough money to secure the freehold to prevent someone else moving in and finding the body. His frantic desperation spurs him on to use his financial knowledge as a foreign exchange clerk to do a little insider trading. The irony is that it is only his guilt that makes him daring enough to take the risk. His scheme succeeds beyond his expectations, making him wealthy, but the problems for this most unhappy of families are only just beginning.

Mr Marble can drink all the whiskey he wants now, as he contemplates the garden, while reading a book from his newly acquired library on crime. Eventually, of course, things move beyond his control.   

The novel is grimly compelling, because the reader can see from quite early on that things will end badly and that Marble’s crime will be discovered. The suspense comes from wondering exactly how it will all play out. The end, when it does come, is both a surprise and bitterly ironic. The title is highly appropriate for a novel where money plays such an important role.    

Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne

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Lawrence Osborne was the third writer commissioned by the estate of Raymond Chandler to write a Philip Marlowe continuation novel and Only to Sleep was published in 2018.

The brilliant idea here is that it is 1988, the tail-end of the Reagan era, and Marlowe is seventy-two, retired and living in the part of Mexico that is just south of California. When an insurance company in San Diego approaches him to investigate a claim, he can’t resist accepting the case; one last job to stave off the boredom and inertia of retirement.

It’s the sort of mystery familiar from Marlowe’s earlier career. Wealthy property developer Donald Zinn has died in Mexico and his Mexican widow is making a claim on the life insurance. The company suspect it may be a fraud and that Zinn is still alive. Marlowe is despatched to Mexico to find out the truth.

Marlowe is not quite what he was, though. That’s hardly a surprise given the hard living that was depicted in Chandler’s books. He has got his drinking just about under control, but tends to have strange dreams. He has a limp because of arthritis and walks with the aid of a cane. It’s suggested that he is impotent now. Something of what he was remains though, because the cane is actually a swordstick. His determination and quick wits in a sticky situation are still intact, too. So is that moral sense, the feeling that in the end he will do the right thing because he can’t help it. 

Marlowe laments the way the world has changed, and what he sees as debased modern tastes in clothes and music. He remains a suit-and-tie man, fond of the old jazz songs. As much as a detective story, this is a meditation on the passage of time, ageing and retirement, and facing up to mortality.

Pretty soon the plot turns into a pursuit of a man who may or may not be Zinn. There’s a hint that Zinn is a sort of sinister double of Marlowe, being another retiree yet married to a Mexican woman half his age. It has the same dream-like feel of never quite coming into focus that you find in Raymond Chandler’s books. This is reflected in the title, taken from an Aztec song: “We come here only to dream/We come only to sleep”.

The real main character of this book is Mexico, described with such vividness that you have to read quite slowly to take in the precise, descriptive prose. Osborne is also a travel writer, after all, and catches the bright light and colour of Mexico. He has reproduced the distinctive tone of Marlowe’s first-person narration, but also subtly adapted it. Marlowe is as observant as ever, but the setting is Mexico, not Los Angeles. He is older and a bit gloomier.

Once again Marlowe is on a quest, a road trip from hotel room to hotel room as he goes further south into Mexico and further from America in every sense. Much as the book recalls Chandler, it also reminded me quite strongly of Patricia Highsmith. I am thinking of those tales of American expatriates adrift in Greece or North Africa where dollars will buy a lot of things not available at home. There’s also a hint of F Scott Fitzgerald in a rather sinister Gatsbyesque masked party.

This is that rare thing, a continuation novel that is based on the work of another writer yet stands up on its own as work of fiction. I don’t think you have to have read Raymond Chandler to get a lot out of Only to Sleep.   

Have his Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers

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This is one of the later novels by Sayers featuring her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and was published in 1932. Detective novelist Harriet Vane is on a walking holiday in the west country when she discovers a dead body lying on a large rock on the beach. The corpse’s throat has been cut. She takes photographs and recovers some of the man’s possessions, but this remote spot is some distance from the nearest village. By the time the police have been summoned, the body has been washed out to sea.

Lord Peter arrives from London, where he has read about the case in the papers, and he and Harriet investigate the mystery together. They are able to find out the dead man’s identity and piece together the details of his life as a professional hotel dancer in the coastal resort of Wilvercombe. It appears that he had no reason to commit suicide; there is someone who had a reason for wanting him dead and so the case becomes a murder mystery. The two men encountered by Harriet on the shore, a hiker and a camper, become suspects and when the fatal razor is found it becomes a key piece of the puzzle.

There is something very appealing about stories of a man and woman investigating a crime together and this one brings to mind other detective duos such as Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple and Steve, or Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.

I listened to a very good 1981 dramatization of this on BBC Radio 4 extra. Wimsey is played by Ian Carmichael and Harriet by Maria Aitken. In some ways, this has dated less than a TV adaptation from the same era might have done. On radio, there is none of that contrast between filmed exteriors and interior scenes shot on videotape that used to be the sign of a BBC TV drama series, for example.

Nonetheless, I don’t think a radio version made nowadays would come out quite like this. Ian Carmichael gives Wimsey a no-holds-barred, upper-class, huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ accent and Maria Aitken gives Harriet a clipped, rather Noel Coward way of speaking. This is all to the good as it suits the characters and the story perfectly.

Ian Carmichael had played Wimsey on television in the 1970s and perfectly captures the feeling that his mannerisms are all an act. In the earlier stories one felt this was a defence against his memories of the great war. Here, as he confesses at one point, it is to hide his true feelings about Harriet. He is in love with her, but she wants to retain her independence and repeatedly turns down his proposals of marriage. This is all complicated by the fact that they only met when Harriet was on trial for the murder of her lover. Wimsey solved the case, found the real killer and secured her acquittal. She hates feeling obliged to be grateful to him.

The relationship between Harriet and Lord Peter extends over four novels in the series, but it isn’t really necessary to know that to enjoy Have his Carcase as a standalone mystery. Yes, there is the slight irritation of the constant deference shown by everyone to Wimsey, the constant “my lording” by all and sundry. You just have to accept that as a sign that the book was published in a different era.

The part that really matters, the well-constructed mystery, retains its freshness. It isn’t easy to guess the outcome, even today, and the solution is highly ingenious. It’s basically an “impossible crime” mystery with a small circle of suspects, but something about the seaside setting gives it a very different feel to a mystery set in a country house. This is clearly the North Devon coast, with Wilvercombe standing in for Ilfracombe. Both the setting and the various characters are rendered with greater realism than was usual for this sort of story in 1932.

Then there is Wimsey himself. Under the “silly ass” act, he is a very shrewd individual indeed with a great knowledge of people. He is a little like a serious version of Bertie Wooster. Ian Carmichael really did make the role his own, both on radio and television. After all, he had already played Wooster by the time he came to play Wimsey.       

Call for the Dead by John le Carré

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If you have never read anything by John le Carré I would recommend that you begin at the beginning. George Smiley arrived fully formed in John le Carré’s debut novel Call for the Dead, published in 1961. Everything that was to become so familiar about this much-loved character is there, right from the beginning. We learn how the academically inclined Smiley, who “had dreamed of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany” was recruited straight from Oxford into the nascent secret service in the 1930s.

He had been let go after a stressful undercover role during the second world war, but recalled to duty in the early days of the cold war. As this novel begins, Smiley is already middle-aged and somewhat at odds with his superiors, a rather marginalised figure. His role in this novel is more that of security officer than spy and may reflect le Carré’s own experiences in MI5. I think he might have had the real-life Portland spy ring, who were arrested at the beginning of 1961, in mind for this tale of spies passing on information in suburban Surrey.  

It’s apparent reading this novel now, that le Carré started his writing career in a very different world from the one we are used to today. It was published a mere fifteen years after the end of the second world war, after all. This is a time when displaced Jewish Germans are worried about the re-arming of West Germany and fear where it may lead. In fact, like so much of le Carré’s earlier fiction, there’s a sense that the real subject here is Germany. After all, Smiley’s love of German literature and language is le Carré’s own.

Smiley is called in to investigate Samuel Fennan, a civil servant who was a communist at Oxford in the 1930s, and who has been anonymously accused of being a spy. Smiley clears him in the vetting interview, but Fennan commits suicide that evening. If he had decided to kill himself, why did the man book an early morning alarm call for the next day?

Fennan’s wife is a concentration camp survivor. A German ex-agent of Smiley’s from the war years turns up in London, with tragic consequences. The introverted and scholarly Smiley may approach the business of counter-espionage as an academic exercise, but here he finds that danger has come to London, in the form of a network of East German spies. He is back in the field once again without leaving home.   

This is a taut, compact and atmospheric novel, only 160 pages or so, written in pin-sharp prose, very different to the more drawn-out style of his later novels. The key themes of loyalty and betrayal that will feature so prominently in the later novels are here. Le Carré’s descriptive talents and gift for believable dialogue are apparent at this early stage and his subtle feel for the nuances of English class distinctions makes its first appearance.

The downbeat atmosphere so associated with le Carré’s fiction is here, too. The only locations are a drab post-war London and its suburbs. It seems to be raining most of the time and the climactic scene takes place in the yellow London fog. Security is depicted as just another branch of the civil service, and a crucial conversation takes place in St James Park, a convenient place for those working in Whitehall to avoid being overheard.

We are told about Smiley’s troubled marriage to the wayward Ann. Characters are introduced who will feature in several future novels, Smiley’s younger colleague, Peter Guillam, and the dogged special branch officer, Mendel.

So much that le Carré was to develop further in later books appears here for the first time. There is Smiley’s prodigious memory, his ability to recall the numbers of all seven cars parked near his home in Bywater Street, Chelsea. The secret service is based in Cambridge Circus, and Guillam refers to it as “The Circus”.  The term “tradecraft”, a le Carré invention, meaning the mechanics of espionage, also originates here.

I am not sure if le Carré originally intended to write another novel about Smiley at this stage, because his career seems to be coming to an end even in this first book and it ends with his future uncertain. Fortunately for us, Smiley did resume his career as an intelligence officer. The events in Call for the Dead have a direct bearing on the plot of le Carré’s hugely successful 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in which Smiley plays a minor role. Indeed, that later novel is actually a sort of sequel to the earlier one, Another good reason for starting at the beginning, with Call for the Dead.

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

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One of the few pleasures of this strangest of years has been re-discovering the works of Joseph Conrad. Here are my thoughts about his 1903 novella, Typhoon.

Captain MacWhirr is a man of absolutely no imagination. He is also a man of few words. When his chief mate, Mr Jukes, uses a figure of speech, he takes it literally, much to Jukes’ amusement. MacWhirr’s distrust of language applies to the written word, too. When the barometer drops alarmingly, promising extremely bad weather ahead, he consults a book in his cabin. The advice is to change course and avoid the storm altogether. MacWhirr cannot see the point of this, just as he did not when  he heard something similar spoken by a fellow captain. Lengthening the voyage will cost time and therefore money, so how can he justify to his owners a diversion to avoid a storm he has not actually seen? He decides to head straight on into the typhoon and power through it.

One always thinks of Conrad as a writer of the age of sail, but the ship here is actually a steamer. In every other way, though, we are in the pre-technology era. There is no radar and no wireless communication to warn of tricky conditions ahead.

When the storm hits, it is of a fury and violence that no-one on board has experienced before. They are dependent on themselves and the judgement of the captain. “Captain MacWhirr could expect no relief of that sort from anyone on earth. Such is the loneliness of command.” Fixtures and fittings are swept from the deck by the fury of the gale. So much water falls on to the deck that Jukes believes himself to have been swept overboard at one point. If the wheelhouse or the funnel are lost, the ship will be helpless.

Pretty soon we are in that familiar Conrad territory of men battling the savage elements, while fearing that the ship may be plunged into oblivion at any moment. How do they hold their nerve when every moment could be their last?

This is described with that almost hallucinatory vividness that is so characteristic of Conrad’s writing. The reader feels as if they on that ship.        

In his author’s note, Conrad is careful to point out that this story did not derive from direct personal experience. Nonetheless, it is steeped in Conrad’s deep professional knowledge of the sea, ships and the kind of men who sail them.

It shows his mastery of the shorter forms and he skilfully expands our insight into the characters’ thoughts by including some of their letters to family and friends.

In many ways, it is the opposite to Lord Jim. In that novel of 1900, Jim has a romantic conception of himself, deriving from his reading of boys’ adventure fiction, as a man who will rise to the occasion when the moment of danger comes. When he submits to panic like the others, it shatters his idea of himself, and he takes drastic steps to atone for his failure.

Here, through sheer stubbornness and determination, MacWhirr faces the danger head on. He restores Jukes’ flagging resolve with these words: “Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That’s enough for any man. Keep a cool head.”

He even tries, in his way, to do the right thing by the Chinese coolies in the hold below, unlike Jim’s fellow sailors who abandon the pilgrims aboard the Patna to their fate.

As always with Conrad, there is a lot going on here and you certainly do not need to have read Lord Jim to appreciate Typhoon. It stands up by itself.

To his wife and grown-up daughters MacWhirr has become a distant figure, a mere financial provider. In a brief coda, Mrs Macwhirr is shown yawning over the letter her husband sends her describing his experiences in the typhoon. There is a certain irony in Conrad, that supreme man of words, giving us characters who place so little importance on language, whether spoken or written.                

Walter de la Mare looks back at childhood

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For many years, I avoided the writing of Walter de la Mare under the impression that he was a children’s author. He did write many poems and stories for children, but he also wrote for adults. In fact, his work rather blurs the distinction. The subtitle of his 1923 poetry anthology, Come Hither, makes this clear: “For the young of all ages”.

I suppose De la Mare is best known today for his adult short stories. These are often described as ghost stories, but the presence of the supernatural is so subtle and elusive, hinted at but barely seen, that they may disappoint those readers expecting something more conventionally spooky. You often finish a De la Mare story with a feeling of “what just happened there?”, but rather than being frustrating, this makes them all the more fascinating.

The Almond Tree is a story about a child written for adults. Indeed, it is a story about a child’s misunderstanding of the behaviour of the adults around him. It is not a ghost story, but shares the sense of mystery, the feeling that the explanation is there somewhere if only one could grasp it, that De la Mare’s ghost stories have.

As with a lot of De la Mare’s stores, it is quite difficult to convey the atmosphere of The Almond Tree. It is at first warmly nostalgic although it goes on to deal with a tragedy that is never fully explained.

The narrator is a man recalling his early childhood years as an only child at an isolated house in the deep countryside, with only adults for company. He observes his father’s absences from the household and feels the tension between his parents. He does not really understand that the lady his father introduces him to is his mistress.

As the situation worsens, so does the weather, and the climactic events of the story take place in a beautifully described wintry landscape.

Towards the end of the story, we realise what the boy has not understood – that his mother is pregnant. 

The main body of the story is framed by another narrative, that although short, is very important to our understanding of what has happened. Without giving too much away, there is a further twist. Two scraps of dialogue right at the end prompt us to think again and re-interpret some of what we have just read, and may possibly explain the source of the problems between the narrator’s parents.

De la Mare’s finely wrought prose style and narrative method do not make his work the easiest of reads. The reader has to do quite a lot of work, but for me the reward is worth the effort.

The Almond Tree gives you plenty to contemplate once you have laid it aside. Like other De la Mare stories, it reminds me quite strongly of the later stories of Rudyard Kipling, the ones that employ a similar method, where what is missing from the story, what is not said, is as important as what is said.

The Almond Tree was first published in 1923. I think it may have been quite influential on later writers, because I can see traces of it in Graham Greene’s story The Fallen Idol and L P Hartley’s novel The Go-Between.

There is an excellent 2010 BBC radio version of The Almond Tree, read by the actor Julian Wadham, whose voice suits the story perfectly. This was included in a series called Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare, rather oddly.

If the above makes you think that De la Mare’s writing might be for you, I have also written about another of his stories, The House. 

The Temple by E F Benson

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The Temple by E F Benson was published in a magazine in 1924, and later collected in the volume Spook Stories in 1928. It begins, as so often with Benson, with two youngish, well-off bachelors deciding to take an extended holiday in a pleasant part of the country. It is Cornwall this time, and the two men are soon installed in a large seaside hotel, with its own golf links between the beach and the hotel grounds.

The narrator is a writer and his companion is an archaeologist who plans to investigate some of the antiquities of the county. The local people are superstitious about a nearby stone circle, believing it to be a pagan temple. The archaeologist says it can’t be, because the arrangement of the stones is wrong, but more importantly, it lacks a sacrificial stone in the centre. He is sure there must be a temple site somewhere in the neighbourhood and he is determined to find it.

Later, the two men are aware of an ominous atmosphere while walking in a wood: “. . . I was conscious of some gathering oppression of the spirit. It was an uncomfortable place, it seemed thick with unseen presences.” They think nothing of it, emerging back into the sunshine to come across a pretty cottage that appears to be uninhabited. The hotel is beginning to fill up for the season. Would it be possible to stay in the cottage instead? Enquiries are made and the cottage is indeed available at a knock-down price because the previous occupant committed suicide.

The wood on the hill overlooks the cottage. What are the lights that can be seen moving about in it at night? And just what is the large stone that forms part of the kitchen floor of the cottage?

It turns out that the cottage has been built in the centre of the pagan temple, with disastrous consequences. This is not entirely a surprise to the reader, and as I’ve said before, it’s not really suspense that is the appeal of a Benson story, but the sense of inexorable progress towards a malign fate that cannot be avoided.

He also has a wonderful gift for conveying the sense of place in his elegant, precise prose. His stories are often set in a remote part of the English countryside, with a local large town, such as Hastings, often given its real name but the village or hamlet where the action takes place given a fictional name, allowing Benson some room for invention.

The Temple fits neatly into the genre that is today known as Folk Horror. The central idea is also not as far-fetched as it might appear. After all, something similar happened at Avebury in Wiltshire, where the stones of the circle were knocked down in the eighteenth century and used to build houses in the village that grew up inside it. I suspect Benson might have been inspired by the restoration at Avebury that was beginning at around the time he wrote his story.

I’ve also written about Pirates, another tale by Benson.

The Sad Variety by Nicholas Blake

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The Sad Variety is Nicholas Blake’s penultimate novel featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways. It was published in 1964, so at this point the series had been going for almost thirty years, yet there is no sign of any decline in Blake’s powers or interest in his characters. This story is a compelling mixture of Golden Age detection and the harsh realities of the Cold War.

Here, Strangeways is asked by the security service to keep an eye on an important scientist, Professor Wragsby, who is spending the Christmas holiday at a guesthouse with his wife Elena and eight-year-old daughter Lucy. The girl is kidnapped by two British communists working for a Russian agent. She is ransomed, not for money, but for secrets. So far, so obvious you might think, the story will concern the attempts to get her back.

Things become far more complicated very quickly. The kidnappers arrive in the district with a small boy in tow. They cut and dye Lucy’s hair and substitute her for the boy, so as not to arouse suspicion. What will they do with the rather mysterious boy? It becomes obvious to Strangeways that the kidnappers must have a contact at the guesthouse and he has to try and work out who it is.

The guests are a mixed bunch. There’s a retired admiral and his wife, a young CND supporter and her beatnik boyfriend and a rather bland single man. They all have their secrets, as Strangeways discovers. The revelation when it comes is a real surprise to the reader, linked, as it is, to another jaw-dropping plot twist.

Lucy is a very intelligent and resourceful girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. She comes up with a clever way of communicating her situation. Blake had written about resourceful young people before, in his 1948 children’s book The Otterbury Incident, published under his real name, C Day Lewis.

This novel is a masterclass in increasing tension and sense of threat and it becomes a real page-turner as the plot reaches its climax.

It takes place at a very specific time, the hard winter of 1962/63. The snowbound countryside, described with Blake’s customary poetic skill, almost becomes another character in the story. The really clever thing is the way the wintry conditions that make it so difficult to get anywhere are integrated into the plot. For example, a body lies undiscovered in a snowdrift, and the Russian agent thinks he is about to be arrested, not realising that the soldiers are only there to clear the roads.

Day Lewis was one of the political poets of the 1930s and the novel represents his final break with left-wing politics. It’s no surprise that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 features so prominently here, because this was the event that caused many former left-wing sympathisers such as Day Lewis to take a long, hard look at Russia and the inhumanity of the communist regime.

The Russian agent Petrov is a nasty piece of work, who enjoys violence for its own sake. Paul, the British communist, has been blackmailed by the Russians into taking part in the plot because of his homosexuality. He is thoroughly disillusioned with the Party: “I don’t set myself up as a model of the virtues, but at least I don’t pretend that whatever suits my book is the truth, like you and your bloody Party do.”