1987 Cold War espionage thriller. The upgrade to Polaris warheads, to
get them through a new generation of Soviet defences, is one of the
most closely-guarded of British secrets. Then one of the pages is
found in a rubbish bin on Parliament Hill…
All right, so this isn't one of my usual genres; the closest I
normally get is technothrillers that, to be honest, are often at least
as much about the hardware as about the people. But I was asking about
fiction writers who'd dealt with the post-WWII Royal Navy (other than
John Winton and Patrick Robinson of course), and Archer's name came
up. (No relation.) Shadow Hunter is apparently the very Navy one,
but being me I started with his first published book.
There's a lot of stereotyping here (the one lesbian is an enemy agent,
all CND members are at best unwitting tools of the Russians) but
many of the people work as people; they're flawed and often
unpleasant, but each one acts in a way that the reader can tell is
consistent with their personality. There are the usual games of
who's-the-mole, and some unfortunate failures of procedure which
might be forgivable in amateurs but really aren't in professionals,
but altogether this works surprisingly well, not raising my
implausibility-hackles the way e.g. Mark Dawson did. (If the choice in
lead characters is between perfect-at-everything and
flawed-and-unpleasant but basically human, I will, reluctantly, take
the latter.)
What also works well is the host of nasty little bits of detail about
just how one compromises a source. It's broad-strokes stuff, but it
shows how it can happen and even leaves one with a little bit of
sympathy for the victim. That's a lot better than the pulp-era
reliance on "some hypnotic drug untraceable by forensic tests", at
which I nearly groaned aloud.
Alas, I could have done with another chapter: the espionage plot is
wrapped up all right, but there are some hanging personal
considerations that could really have done with being concluded rather
than just abandoned. Still, surprisingly good, though of course one
has to get into the mindset of the time.
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