How we’ve missed the Cold War. The spying, secrets, ideologies, the drab, indefinable sense of menace — there was no better backdrop to a pacy political thriller. And what a debt we now owe to Vladimir Putin. He’s brought it all back, but this time with new layers of violence, deception, ambiguity and moral confusion: the oligarchs, the mafia, the ruthless vulgarity of today’s have-it-all Russians. And then there is Putin himself: sharp, smart, the bare-chested KGB brawler whose icy patience has just enough of Stalin about him to instil fear beyond that crass macho posturing.
Joseph Clyde has skilfully exploited the clash between the old and the new clichés about Russia to give us an intelligent thriller in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré. It is very much today: the Cold War tradecraft of MI5 seems a bit old hat, and Tony Underwood, a relic of the old days, has been forced into early retirement. He picks up a job with an ailing Russian oligarch, Arshile Grekov, who wants to settle down with his millions in a fake castle near London but is frightened of Kremlin plots and concerned that his spoilt, drug-taking, Eton and Oxford son is keeping bad company. Would Tony keep an eye on Sasha and find out where his hare-brained schemes of restoring the monarchy to Russia might take him?
They take him straight into a plot to assassinate the Russian president, pushed along by a Georgian mobster on the make and two Chechens, spouting Islamism and dreaming of revenge. The president is due to go duck-shooting in France after a state visit, and the more sleuthing Tony does, the more plausible the plot. The author certainly knows Russia — as he should: his pseudonym conceals the long diplomatic experience of former MP George Walden, authentically familiar with the literature and language of old Russia, the enduring habits of the Soviet bureaucracy, as well as the smoothly mendacious lifestyle of today’s shallow new Russians.
His portrait of the Russian leader — he is always referred to only as “the President” and never by name, but it feels like Putin — is superb: controlling, enigmatic, sharp-witted and disorientating, the taciturn he-man’s masculinity used as a stiletto against any would-be rival.
There’s still enough of the old spycraft to keep the winning formula going: bugging the chandeliers, staking out hitmen and targets, milking old chums in MI5 for their gossip and surveillance files. The mix of Russian nationalism and criminality and the trademark obsequiousness that adapts to political realities — all this keeps the plot fresh, despite the obvious echoes of The Day of the Jackal.
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There is a satisfying cynicism in the writing also: sardonic, sharply paced, with all the suspense of a page-turner and the tricks of different narrative voices. The plotting among the marshes and the duck haunts of the Camargue does sometimes pall. But the manipulative sex, the inventively coarse language and brisk changes of scene maintain the focus. Of course there are twists: the 100 pages after the climax unravel all that has gone before. Walden slips in erudite detail for the cognoscenti to savour. And maybe even the one howler is deliberate, to tell us it is really just a story: there is no railway station at Southwold.
The Oligarch by Joseph Clyde, Gibson Square, 324pp, £8.99. To buy this book for £8.54, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134