Gallery Bookshop - Tony Miksak's Words On Books

Tony Miksak's
Words on Books
as broadcast weekly on KZYX radio

From the Financial Frying Pan to the Fascist Frying Pan

To order any of the books mentioned in this article, see the links at the bottom of this page.

Escape with me from the financial follies fruitlessly fostered on frugal families. Let's visit the world of spies.
I read the news today: Julius Rosenberg was indeed an atomic secrets spy in 1950, and a dissident writer in 1978 stabbed with a poisoned umbrella on a bridge in London was indeed murdered by Bulgarian secret agents.
The spy thing is all around us. It's not at all limited to historical novels.
According to The Double Life of Agent Piccadilly by Hristo Hristov, Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was umbrella-ed to death by a "Dane of Italian origin, an occasional smuggler arrested twice in Bulgaria and given the choice of going to prison or becoming an agent."
Prisoner in Bulgaria or spy in London. Which one would YOU choose? Turnips and brown water, or crumpets with marmalade?
That's the kind of choice faced by numerous characters in the novels of Stella Rimington, Alan Furst, John Lawton, John LeCarre, and others.
Stella Rimington has stellar credentials. She worked for thirty years in MI5, counter subversion, counter everything, and became Britain's head spy in 1992. She was the first woman to hold the post and the first to be publicly announced, causing her daughter no end of trouble in school.
If only Rimington wrote as well as she administers. Her characters are dull, plot lines thin, thriller quotient low. Still, her books are mildly entertaining, like a polite CSI episode. When she describes the view out MI5's upper windows: you know she's been there.
I came to John Lawton late, and he is an exciting discovery. His latest "Inspector Troy thriller" will be sixth in the series.
Lawton covers the same time and territory as Alan Furst -- Europe between the wars. They differ in style and feeling.
In edgy Alan Furst novels such as Red Gold or Dark Star anyone may be a threat or an ally, or both. Characters risk everything on a chameleon sense of morality or justice.
In John Lawton's latest book, Second Violin, he taps a strong vein of British whimsy. You may be in Winston Churchill's club or Sigmund Freud's parlor, but you'll soon be with foreign pastry chefs incarcerated on the Isle of Man.
In one scene a Jewish tailor flees Nazi thugs. He has big ears, flat feet, and he's wearing his father's too-big overcoat. There is nothing at all funny about it, but Lawton locates the absurdity.

"At each street corner Hummel would slow to a walk, glance round the corner, and enter only if the street was empty of Brownshirts. If there were people around -- ordinary citizens, if that phrase meant anything any more -- he would walk past them, hoping they would not notice he was barefoot, and begin to run again only when well clear. "He wondered what it was the fascists had against pianos. In the length of four or five (Vienna) streets he had passed half a dozen smashed pianos, and only half a mile or so back he had narrowly escaped a sense of deja vu when another piano came crashing down from a top-floor apartment. He had... walked on as though it rained pianos every day in this part of Vienna. "(The street) wasn't empty, there was a bunch of kids dawdling in front of the smouldering shell of a row of shops -- but kids were kids, they weren't Brownshirts. Hummel pressed on. He'd run as soon as running became practical. The next thing he knew a boy of six or seven was stamping on his toes.
"'Big Ears got no shoes!' It was a call to battle."

Where Alan Furst is relentless, Lawton is poetic. Together, they make one heck of a composite author. I'm reading them both with vast enjoyment.

Aired Sunday September 28, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday October 1, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

Novels by Alan Furst were annotated in last week's WOB.
The Double Life of Agent Piccadilly by Hristo Hristov will be published in Bulgary in Bulgarian, but you can purchase the English version on the author's home page: http://hristo-hristov.com/content/view/36/41/lang,english/
Hristov also published: Bulgaria: 1300 Years by Hristo Hristov. Sofia Press hardcover (1980). Out of print. Available from used book dealers, $15 to $50.
Illegal Action by Stella Rimington. Knopf hardcover $24.95. ISBN 9780307268853.
Secret Asset, A Liz Carlyle Novel by Stella Rimington. Vintage paperback $13.95. ISBN 9731400079827.
Second Violin by John Lawton. Atlantic Monthly Press hardcover $24. ISBN 097113991X. To be published November, 2008.
His most recent paperback: A Little White Death by John Lawton. Grove/Atlantic paperback $12. ISBN 0802142907.
From the Publisher:

The latest novel from the master spy novelist John Lawton follows Inspector Troy, now Scotland Yard's chief detective, deep into a scandal reminiscent of the infamous Profumo affair. England in 1963 is a country set to explode. The old guard, shocked by the habits of the war baby youth, sets out to fight back. The battle reaches uncomfortably close to Troy. While he is on medical leave, the Yard brings charges against an acquaintance of his, a hedonistic doctor with a penchant for voyeurism and young women, two of whom just happen to be sleeping with a senior man at the Foreign Office as well as a KGB agent. But on the eve of the verdict a curious double case of suicide drags Troy back into active duty. Beyond bedroom acrobatics, the secret affairs now stretch to double crosses and deals in the halls of power, not to mention murder. It's all Troy can do to stay afloat in a country immersed in drugs and up to its neck in scandal.

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