The Moroccan Girl by Charles Cumming

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 12, 2019

I always count on Charles Cumming to tell a good story. Like Kit Carradine, the protagonist in The Moroccan Girl, Cumming writes spy novels that occupy a space “between the kiss-kiss-bang-bang of Ludlum and the slow-burn chess game of le Carré.” The Moroccan Girl fits nicely in that niche.

The novel is set against the background of a social protest movement known as Resurrection. Unlike Occupy or Antifa, Resurrection takes direct action against specific individuals who exemplify greed and social injustice, sometimes by kidnapping or killing them. The group’s founders included a Russian named Ivan Simakov and his girlfriend, Lara Bartok, who was born in Hungary. By the time Simakov died in an explosion in Moscow, the movement had thousands of members.

Lara begins the novel by making a statement to the Secret Intelligence Service. Her statement is divided into five parts. Between each part, Cumming reveals the backstory.

By chance (or not), Kit Carradine meets Robert Mantis, who identifies himself as a British spy. Kit has been invited to attend a literary event in Marrakech. Mantis recruits him to pass some money to an asset in Casablanca and to look for a woman in Marrakech who has gone missing. It does not take Kit long to discern the woman’s identity. She is, of course, Lara Bartok.

Kit sees the invitation as the opportunity to follow in his father’s footsteps by doing real work as a spy and hopes that a successful mission might spark a secondary career as a clandestine asset for the SIS. He feels inspired by Maugham, Greene, and Forsyth, all of whom mixed the reality of espionage with their fictional creations. That’s a clever and credible premise, because what spy fiction fan doesn’t imagine being a spy?

Kit enjoys the intrigue of Casablanca until a series of encounters with people who might also be spies convince him that his amateurism has screwed up his mission. Kit’s ego and his desire for future assignments then overcome his good judgment. He decides to prove his value by ignoring instructions and continuing to search for Lara. Along the way, Kit meets a number of shady characters, any or all of whom might be spies working for America or Great Britain or Russia.

In the tradition of spy novels, the reader is asked to question whether each character is who or what the character purports to be. Some of the answers are surprising, as they should be in a spy novel, but the story is sufficiently plausible to be convincing.

I enjoyed the ideological clashes between people who have competing viewpoints: those who want to save the world from oppressors and those who believe that most people want to join the oppressors at the seat of power; those who view violence as a revolutionary tool and those who reject violence regardless of the ideology that provokes its use. I also appreciated the timeliness of The Moroccan Girl, although to avoid spoilers, I will leave it to the reader to discover the way in which Cumming has crafted a story that parallels current events.

Cumming builds suspense nicely and caps the plot with an action scene as the suspense reaches its climax. The pace is appropriate to a novel that falls between kiss-kiss-bang-bang and slow-burn chess game. The story is never dull but it takes time to establish interest in the characters and to create the kind of atmosphere that makes events in Casablanca and Marrakech seem real. In its plot, characterization, and atmosphere, The Moroccan Girl stands among Cumming’s best spy novels.

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The Red House by Derek Lambert

First published in Great Britain in 1972; published by HarperCollins Crime Club on November 2, 2017

The Red House is a novel of cold war intrigue, published at a time when the cold war was still raging. It isn’t a traditional spy novel, although the KGB and CIA play important roles in the story. Rather, The Red House is the story of a Russian’s disillusionment with the Soviet system and a young American’s disillusionment with a government (and father) who want him to put patriotism ahead of love.

Diplomat Vladimir Zhukov arrives in United States in 1968, newly appointed as the Soviet Union’s second secretary. Two KGB minders are determined to keep Zhukov from enjoying the decadent American pleasures that might tempt him to defect. The Soviet ambassador, on the other hand, is a bit more trusting — but not so trusting that he forgets how the game is played.

Zhukov is asked to spy on anyone of interest, while the Americans ask a Brit named Massingham to cozy up to Zhukov. Massingham’s bored wife wants to cozy up to Zhukov for reasons of her own. Her taste for seduction has served Massingham well in the past.

Meanwhile, Zhukov’s daughter Natasha is trying to adjust to her time in decadent D.C., including the unexpected attention of the dashing Charlie Hardin, who is doing a favor for his father, an FBI agent. Natasha appreciates the freedom the US offers, despite her reservations about American politics and poverty. Feelings traditionally get in the way of duty in spy novels that feature a spy who becomes sexually involved with a target, and that theme eventually animates the novel’s plot.

The novel reflects the hawk/dove division of 1968, the fear that southeast Asian governments will fall to communism like dominos in the absence of an American presence in Vietnam versus rejection of such a dubious theory as justification for so many pointless American deaths. The hawk/dove division is also represented by the justifiable concern that the Soviet Union would use military force to suppress dissenters in Czechoslovakia. Those issues contribute to the respective moral dilemmas that Charlie and Zhukov experience as the novel gains steam.

The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, in fact, gives Zhukov reason to question his patriotism as he watches tanks roll into Prague on televisions in various New York bars, seeing hope in the faces of young men standing up for change. The novel makes the point that in a city like New York, a city built by the labor of immigrants, a Russian can sit in a certain kind of bar with Germans and Americans and Australians and enjoy the alcohol-fueled fellowship of humanity, a fellowship that is unimpaired by the political differences of their nations’ rulers. In a different kind of bar, however, political philosophies mix less easily, as Zhukov discovers in one of the plot’s turning points.

The Red House is about nationalism and loyalty, political conflict and conflicts of the heart. The novel moves at a deliberate pace — too deliberate in the first half, as the story meanders while establishing the characters in an abundance of detail. Yet tension begins to mount in the last third of the novel as Zhukov finds himself cornered both by his reaction to world events and by a moment of poor judgment. Derek Lambert avoids tugging at the reader’s heartstrings, but there is both sadness and satisfaction in an ending that allows the power of love and the ugliness of politics to coexist.

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Safe Houses by Dan Fesperman

Published by Knopf on July 3, 2018

Safe Houses draws some of its background from a government spy agency called the Pond that was in a rivalry with the OSS (and later the CIA) before the government disbanded it in 1955. The Pond then continued its existence as a private organization because people who like to think they are doing important work sometimes have difficulty admitting that they are no longer the center of the universe.

Safe Houses is told in two alternating time frames. Part of the story takes place in 1979, when Helen Abell, new to her CIA posting in Berlin, is placed in charge of safe houses, an administrative duty deemed suitable for a woman. While making an unscheduled inspection of a safe house, visitors arrive and she overhears (and accidentally records) part of their conversation. She doesn’t know who they are or how one of them got a key; neither man is one of the six people who are authorized to have one. They seem to be talking in a sort of code. Later, she tells Clark Baucom about it. Baucom is her lover and a much older field agent. He tells her to burn the tape and never disclose what she heard to anyone. Of course, the obscure references on the tape to “the Pond” eventually gain clarity.

When she returns to the safe house to retrieve the tape, another visitor shows up (an agent she knows) and she overhears a sexual assault in progress. Helen intervenes, but her intervention puts her career is in jeopardy. Her life is also in jeopardy after it becomes clear that she intends to expose a CIA assassin who is also a serial rapist. That part of the story has Helen fleeing Berlin and making contact with a couple of female CIA employees who may or may not be on her side.

The other part of the story begins in 2014, when a Maryland woman and her husband are shot dead in their bed by their developmentally disabled son, Willard. Henry Mattick is in town when it happens, conducting a clandestine investigation into the family for a reason he doesn’t understand. When the son’s sister Anna wants to hire Henry to find the reason for the murders, Henry’s employer tells him to accept the assignment, to get inside the house, and to make copies of any documents he can find. It won’t be surprising to the reader that the 2014 story quickly links to the 1979 story.

Despite its lurid subject matter, Safe Houses is told in a measured style that lends credibility to the narrative. The plot blends suspense with enough action to keep the story moving at a good pace, but Dan Fesperman doesn’t short-change characterization. The novel is a bit short of atmosphere (other than place names, it doesn’t convey much sense of being in Berlin or any of the novel’s other locations), although Fesperman does an excellent job of conveying the limitations that were placed on women in society (and particularly in male-dominated organizations like the CIA) in 1979. In a time when the #MeToo movement is focusing attention on how powerful men feel empowered to abuse women, Safe Houses shines a spotlight on the importance of standing up for what’s right, and on the risks that people take when they decide to do the right thing.

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The Kremlin's Candidate by Jason Matthews

Published by Scribner on February 13, 2018

The Kremlin’s Candidate is the third novel in a trilogy that features a Russian spy who has agreed to provide intelligence to the CIA. The spy is a beautiful woman named Dominika who was trained as a “Sparrow” — female Russian operatives who are wise in the ways of seduction. In the first novel, Dominika targets a CIA agent named Nate Nash, only to fall in love with him when he recruits her as a double agent.

In The Kremlin’s Candidate, Nash again encounters a beautiful spy who has been trained in the art of seduction, but this one is a Nightingale, the Chinese version of a Russian Sparrow. Nate has trouble keeping his hands off beautiful spies, which has more than once caused trouble with his CIA superiors. Nash is in Hong Kong after visiting Macao to encourage the defection of a Chinese general who has embezzled state funds to cover a large gambling debt. When Nash meets the Nightingale, he wants to recruit her as a source, given her presumed access to sensitive information as the assistant manager of a hotel frequented by the rich and powerful. Nash doesn’t know that the Nightingale is a Chinese spy but she knows all about Nash. She’s been assigned not just to seduce Nash so that she can learn the name of the Chinese traitor he is recruiting, but to kill Nash for having the audacity to spy on the Chinese.

Before all of that happens, the novel follows the path of the earlier books as Dominika engages in clandestine acts, occasionally meeting with Nash for a debriefing followed by (or following) a romp in bed. Dominika has become the CIA’s best Russian source, thanks to her proximity to Putin and her possible ascension to the top ranks of the SVR. But a Russian mole in the American military is being considered for a position as the next CIA director. Even if she doesn’t get the job, the CIA has been ordered to give all of the candidates briefings that would at least indirectly reveal Dominika’s identity as a CIA source and ultimately lead to Dominika’s torture and execution.

The politics in this novel are more pronounced than in earlier entries. Jason Matthews clearly has no use for politicians who believe that oversight of the CIA is needed to keep it from breaking the law, despite the CIA's history and culture of lawless behavior. The novel's insufficiently hawkish American president (now in his fifth year) isn’t mentioned by name, but it isn’t difficult to understand who Matthews had in mind when he derided the president’s “social progressivism.” Matthews complains that his fictional president failed to take a hard line on Russia, a criticism that seems misplaced when compared to the current and all-too-real president, who touts his friendship with Putin, refuses to implement congressional sanctions against Russia, and ignores Russian interference with American elections. In any event, Matthews portrays Putin as a canny and ruthless character, an assessment with which nearly everyone but Donald Trump would agree. The novel's political tone didn't trouble me because Matthews doesn't let politics get in the way of storytelling, which is all I ultimately care about in a spy novel.

Character and plot development in this series have been strong, and the work that went into the first two books pays dividends in this one. The plot takes a couple of unexpected turns before arriving at a surprising but credible ending. The novel includes enough action to keep the story racing forward without becoming a mindless action novel. Tension arrives in waves and then peaks in the penultimate chapter. Fans of spy novel tradecraft will be happy with the series, and readers who want to admire heroes will enjoy the droll wit and fierce resolve of Americans (and the Russian Dominika) who are unwavering in their belief that free nations treat their people decently and that the fight against authoritarians is always worth waging.

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The Seeds of Treason by Ted Allbeury

First published in Great Britain in 1986; published by Dover on November 6, 2017

Jan Massey wants to be understood, so he agrees to tell his story to a reporter from the BBC. The interview takes place in his home in a remote part of Spain. Massey is a former MI6 agent who committed an indiscretion. The novel is his story.

Massey ran the Berlin office for MI6 after the war, a life marred only by a brief disastrous marriage until he met Anna Kolkov. Like Massey, she has Polish roots. Her husband, Alexei Kolkov, is a KGB officer in Berlin, which makes Massey’s affair with Anna rather dangerous. It’s also a bit unconvincing, since there seems little beyond their Polish roots to make them fall in love at first sight or to make Massey behave so impetuously. We are given to understand that Slavic passions are to blame, but the affair happens too quickly and too deeply to make me think that Massey would be such a fool. In any event, the affair gets Massey into a pickle before the novel reaches its midway point.

As the title suggests, traitors abound in The Seeds of Treason. Massey is getting information from a KGB agent named Kuznetsov who is, to some degree, a traitor to Russia, and from a greedy French spy who seems to be betraying everyone he can. Andrew Johnson, a member of the British military who is handling signals intelligence in Berlin under Massey’s watch, decides he’ll be more appreciated by the Russians than the British. He thinks his prostitute girlfriend will even like him better if he’s a Russian hero, but the girlfriend is also prepared to betray anyone who doesn’t pay her enough.

And then there’s an NSA mathematician/codebreaker named Jimbo Vick who isn’t knowingly a traitor, but chats without discretion when he’s in bed with his beautiful girlfriend. As with Massey, love is the source of betrayal. But it is Massey who is the biggest fish in the pond, and a great catch for the KGB if they can use his affair with Anna against him.

Ted Allbeury writes in a low-key, matter-of-fact style, a nice change from the hysteria that pervades so much American spy fiction. The novel lives up to its title by explaining how three different people become traitors, although Vick’s story, at least, seems to be thrown in to provide a third example. Vick’s story might be the most credible of the three but he plays a relatively small role in the story. The most convincing character development is given to Johnson. Whether or not his sudden decision to seek appreciation from the Russians that he can't get from the British is believable, he's such a self-centered creep that the reader will readily see him as someone who would betray his country.

Massey is a more likable character than either Johnson or Vick and, if I didn’t necessarily find his betrayal to be credible, I did appreciate Allbeury’s effort to make him sympathetic. Allbeury makes the point that when a government labels someone a traitor, its first order of business is to paint him as deplorable in all aspects of life, because the government can’t have people understanding why someone might betray the government or, even worse, supporting the betrayer. Not all traitors are deplorable, particularly when they betray a country that isn't your own. That's the lesson Allbeury tries to teach in The Seeds of Treason, and I think he does so successfully.

The novel’s ending seems realistic. This is the only Allbeury novel I’ve read (it seems to the third that Dover has returned to print), so I don’t have much basis for comparison, but I wouldn’t rank Allbeury with John le Carré or Len Deighton or Gerald Seymour, simply because those masters of British spy fiction are justly known for gripping stories and compelling characters. I would instead compare Allbeury to Clive Egleton, who wrote British spy novels that were pleasurable if a bit unexciting.

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