In the Name of the Queen by John MacRae

Published by Endeavour Press on June 27, 2016

In the Name of the Queen has a 2016 copyright, although it appears to have been first published in Great Britain in 2012. In any event, unlike some of the novels that Endeavour Press has resurrected, this one is of fairly recent vintage.

Mike Farrah is in military intelligence. His father is Lebanese and he speaks Arabic fluently. He is recruited by MI6 to impersonate a Jordanian billionaire, the son of a man who has long been dead.

The mission requires Farrah to seduce a Saudi woman whose father is a banker. In fact, he is suspected of being al Qaeda’s banker. Farrah’s minders hope he can help them locate the banker so that he can be snatched by the CIA, which does the dirty work for MI6.

After a good bit of training (including instruction in the art of seduction), Farrah goes to Cairo where he assumes his undercover identity. The beautiful woman is also living in Cairo because she cannot tolerate the intolerance of Saudi Arabia, and is particularly unwilling to be treated as inferior because of her gender. The woman’s brother, on the other hand, has more extreme views and considers everyone in Cairo -- particularly Farrah -- to be decadent and unworthy of his sister’s attention. That, of course, leads to a clash between Farrah and the brother.

Some aspects of In the Name of the Queen are predictable, but the novel also takes a couple of unexpected twists. Farrah learns that he cannot trust anyone -- particularly Mossad, a devious agency that is as dangerous as the enemy he is trying to battle. All good espionage novels are about betrayal, and the question in this one is whether Farrah will betray the beautiful woman and her father before he is betrayed by the people who are supposedly on his side.

Sex scenes tend to be cheesy (“quivering manhood”) and awkward (“exploded in a hot explosion”) as John MacRae proves himself to be one of those British authors to whom the prose of sex does not come naturally. I’m not quite sure I understood Farrah’s motivation for certain actions he takes as the story reaches its climax, and I was unhappy with a couple of unanswered questions that dangle at the novel’s end.

On the other hand, the story is good, the pace is steady, and action scenes are both credible and exciting. The plot does not overreach, which sets In the Name of the Queen apart from most modern thrillers. Characters have a reasonable amount of depth. In the Name of the Queen isn’t in the top tier of spy fiction, but fans of the genre should enjoy it.

RECOMMENDED

An Honorable Man by Paul Vidich

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on April 12, 2016

An Honorable Man is set in 1953, against a backdrop of the Cold War and the McCarthy hearings. One of the characters is loosely based on James Speyer Kronthal, a CIA agent who was blackmailed by the NKVD. He submitted to the blackmail, and thus became a traitor, rather than risking the exposure of his homosexuality. Kronthal committed suicide before he had to answer McCarthy’s questions, which would have focused on his sexual history rather than his (still unknown) betrayal of the CIA.

In the novel, George Mueller works for the CIA. He is disgruntled and everyone knows it, so he is perfect bait. The agency dangles him before Vasilenko, a Russian agent who wants to recruit him. Mueller, of course, is playing the same game, hoping to get information from Vasilenko about a Soviet mole in the CIA known as Protocol.

When a Russian embassy driver runs him off the road as he’s bicycling, Mueller doesn’t know if he was the victim of an accident or an attempted homicide. However, the accident gives him a chance to meet Beth, who picks him up and tends his wounds. Beth is Roger Altman’s sister. Their father, a former IMF secretary, is caught up in the communist witch-hunt. Roger Altman recruited Mueller to the CIA. Small world, isn’t it?

That set-up introduces a plot that is a staple of spy fiction. The reader (like the main character) is challenged to find the mole. But that really isn’t a challenge since the book must conform, at least in a general sense, to history. The story therefore moves toward a destination that the reader can easily foresee.

The characters lack complexity, which makes me chuckle as I take note of the blurbs that compare Paul Vidich to John Le Carré. Still, a novel shouldn’t be judged by how well it lives up to its blurbs, nor should a fledgling novelist be compared to a master. Taken on its own merit, An Honorable Man manages to generate a reasonable amount of dramatic tension.

The novel is relatively short, sacrificing an intricacy of plot for bare-bones storytelling. Paul Vidich’s depiction of the Cold War atmosphere is a key to the novel’s success. Vidich’s prose is above-average and is peppered with literary references. Given the limits imposed by the novel’s length, Vidich also does a better than average job of exploring the implications of espionage, the tendency to treat it as a game without considering the morality of using human game pieces that die (or worse) when they are sacrificed or captured. There is a reasonable amount of meat in this slender novel. It works better as a novel of psychological suspense than as a spy novel, but however a reader might classify it, the novel contributes something to the espionage genre, if only as a window that allows the reader to glimpse a true story.

RECOMMENDED

The Good Traitor by Ryan Quinn

Published by Thomas & Mercer on April 5, 2016

Even in the digital age, most novels marketed as being “ripped from the headlines” are stale by the time they are published. Several recent novels have borrowed from the Snowden controversy to build plots around (in the words of a character in The Good Traitor) “courageous people who leak information because ... it is in the public’s interest to know” and the government “cowards who bury their mistakes in secrecy and claims of patriotism.” The Good Traitor backs away from making any bold statements -- it is an action novel, rather than a political novel -- but it builds on some interesting ideas.

The Good Traitor imagines a journalism website -- called Gnos.is -- that writes itself. Computers search the web for information and use algorithms to draw inferences from that information. Other algorithms test the likelihood that the inferences are correct. Some sources contribute to Gnos.is directly but most sources unwittingly contribute information as Gnos.is scrapes data from the internet. When a certain threshold of veracity is reached, the computer labels its conclusions as facts. The computer then publishes the facts as news stories that the computer writes. The point of all this is to eliminate human error and bias from news reporting.

The government hates Gnos.is because it publishes accurate information that the government would like to keep secret. Apparently other people hate Gnos.is (or its reporting) because its unwitting sources contributed to a story about corruption in China. When three of those sources are suddenly murdered by the creative use of technology, the operators of Gnos.is call upon Kera Mersal to help them follow the story. Kera, like one of the Gnos.is founders, is running from the CIA, having been labeled as a traitor because she leaked classified information (which was classified to help the CIA avoid accountability for illegal acts).

The Good Traitor is the kind of novel in which the bad guys can hack computers make airplanes crash and elevators fall. Readers need to suspend their skepticism to enjoy the story. I can do that but I rolled my eyes at a character known as BLACKFISH who roams around China getting into gun battles without being caught.

Other than Gnos.is, which is clever, the rest of the story has been done before -- conflict in the CIA hierarchy, various patriots being framed as traitors, computers turned into assassins. The plot fizzles as it reaches an ending that’s just too easy, given everything that precedes it. The story tries to straddle a line concerning the ethics of revealing improperly classified information, perhaps to avoid angering readers on either side of the debate, but that choice weakens the book. All of those issues make The Good Traitor an imperfect novel, but it’s still a reasonably fun novel. I'd shelve it low on the second tier of spy novels.

RECOMMENDED

In the Company of Spies by Stephen Barlay

First published in 1981; published digitally by Endeavour Press on February 15, 2016

First published in 1981, In the Company of Spies is a cold war novel that fits comfortably on the shelf of second-tier novels that entertain fans of the spy genre. A Hungarian by birth, Stephen Barlay escaped from the Soviet invasion (and his likely arrest) in 1956. A journalist in Hungary, Barlay wrote both fiction and nonfiction in English while living in Great Britain. In the Company of Spies was, perhaps fittingly, produced as a made-for-TV movie in 1999.

The novel is set in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. Helmut Rust gets a message from a Russian who dies during its delivery. The coded message tells Rust, who was forced out of the CIA, that his father wants out of Russia. When Rust makes his way to Russia, he learns that smuggling his father out of Russia is no longer the mission that awaits him.

Rust’s life is complicated by a love triangle, a brother in a wheelchair who works for the CIA, and friends who might be enemies. This is the typical fare of spy novels and, if Barlay doesn’t take the story to the lofty levels attained by the genre’s best writers, he nevertheless gives Rust enough depth to instill sympathy for his predicament. Most of the novel’s twists are not entirely unexpected but the story does deliver a nice double-twist at the end. In fact, the last pages and Rust’s reaction to the surprises are the best part of the story.

A suitable mixture of action and intrigue keeps the story in steady motion. Barlay’s prose is uninspired and occasionally awkward, but no more so than some contemporary writers of second tier espionage novels (a few of whom have achieved bestseller status for reasons that are apparently unrelated to writing ability).

The great insight of In the Company of Spies, I think, is its insistence that Americans who have never experienced an oppressive government have no right to judge the victims of oppression -- people who, motivated by fear or survival, do things that are contrary to the interests of human rights or world peace. To the extent that the novel tries to deliver profound political insights, I think it is less successful. International political issues, particularly in a time of crisis, are more complex than Barlay is able to convey.

The novel builds on the belief that Kennedy betrayed Cuban-Americans by abandoning the quest for Cuba’s “liberation” in exchange for Khrushchev’s agreement to remove missiles from Cuba. Regardless of where the reader comes down on what is no longer a hot-button issue, In the Company of Spies exploits the time and setting in a way that spy fiction fans should enjoy.

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Condor in the Stacks by James Grady and The Little Men by Megan Abbott

MysteriousPress.com is publishing (in digital form) a series of stand-alone stories by popular crime authors in which books, bookstores, libraries, or manuscripts play a central role.  I don't usually review individual short stories, but I'm making an exception for the Bibliomysteries series because the concept is interesting and the authors are well known.

"Condor in the Stacks" by James Grady was published digitally on February 23, 2016.

Condor fans know from reading Last Days of the Condor that the Condor, sometimes known as Vin, was heavily medicated and given a (supposedly) safe and undemanding job at the Library of Congress, sorting books into bins for reshelving and recycling. Vin thinks pretty much all books should be saved. That attitude makes him well suited for the Bibliomysteries series.

Vin tries to kick back his sedation long enough to help a library employee named Kim who thinks she is being stalked. Meanwhile, he tries to solve the puzzle of why he packed seven coffins full of books for recycling but nine coffins are being hauled away.

The plot is beyond far-fetched and it isn’t fully developed. I'm not sure it even makes sense. Still, it entertained me. I liked the story, but not nearly as much as I liked the last Condor novel, which had a depth of character and intricacy of plot that can be difficult to achieve in a short story. I probably would not recommend this story to readers who did not read and enjoy Last Days of the Condor.

The text of the story mentions or alludes to about a dozen authors. James Grady acknowledges them at the end, which is helpful for readers who recognize, but can’t quite place, an allusion. I am one of the readers who benefitted from reading the acknowledgements.

Judging from Amazon reviews, some readers are turned off by Grady’s writing style, which is far from conventional. Odd punctuation, sentence fragments, and stream of consciousness sometimes take over the narrative. The frenzied, off-kilter style reflects Vin’s shaky mental status. I like it for that reason but I realize that it puts off readers who are looking for straight-forward prose. If you are one of those, be warned that this might not be the story for you.

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"The Little Men" by Megan Abbott was published digitally on September 15, 2015

In 1953, Penny went to Hollywood to pursue her dream of fame. Like most wannabe actresses, she found a less satisfying life that the one she pursued. At night, she consoles herself with the books that came with a surprisingly affordable bungalow that she rents in the canyon. Her neighbors soon reveal that the rent is affordable because nobody wants to rent the bungalow where the bookseller killed himself. Or did he?

This is a story of bad dreams and spooky nocturnal noises and shadows on the walls. A mystery with the flavor of a horror story. Like Psycho, the story asks the reader to divine the secrets of a spooky place. Are the horrors that Penny experiences real or imagined?

A well-crafted story, “Little Men” creates a visceral atmosphere and gives flesh to its characters. The story resolves with a couple of unexpected twists. Most of the stories in this series have been quite good, and this one is no exception.

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