Tangled Web UK Review September 2008
Christopher's Ghosts by
Charles McCarry
pbk out August 08
(Duckworth)
at £7.99
Though I’ve not read any of the others, McCarry has written a series of spy novels with Paul Christopher as the central figure. They have a historical bent and he has been classed by the critics alongside Le Carre, Ambler, Greene and Alan Furst, his strength being historical and political authenticity.
This one is a retrospective story, seemingly written to fill in his fans with the earlier history of Christopher, going back to his ‘teens.
Paul was born and brought up in Berlin between the wars, his father being a somewhat eccentric American writer and his mother a beauty from a Prussian aristocratic family. Paul was therefore suspended between two very different regimes, with doubts about the legitimacy of his American nationality. In 1939 he falls in love at sixteen, with a girl who is a quarter Jewish and also falls foul of the Gestapo. Only his mother’s reluctant dalliance with one of the highest-ranking Nazi officers keeps them from arrest. One particular Gestapo man, Colonel Stutzer, makes life hell for Paul and the girl – but I won’t give the story away, except to reveal that he deserved all he got in the end.
The plot jumps to the 1950s, by which time Paul is an American secret agent and by chance comes across Stutzer, who after being captured in Russia, has been turned and is now an East German spook. With the aid of an Israeli hit team, Paul goes after his old enemy, with the expected result.
This is a dark book, with no laughs or wit, but has a ring of reality that is depressingly convincing.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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