Tangled Web UK Review June 2009
Free Agent by
Jeremy Duns
hbk out May 09
Published by Simon Schuster
at £12.99
This is a spy book, not a crime novel, but there are crimes aplenty, in that the hero Paul Dark, leaves a trail of corpses behind him.
It is an amalgam of Ian Fleming and John le Carre, concerning MI6 in 1969 Cold War times, with flash-backs to Germany in 1945. Paul Dark’s father was also ‘in the Service’ then and was involved with his son in a dirty-tricks operation, ostensibly to rub out Nazi executioners who could not be otherwise dealt with. The father is found shot, but the son goes on to become a Department Chief twenty odd years later.
He is a kind of James Bond without the glamour and cocktails and exotic girls
in short supply. The story moves to Nigeria during the Biafran civil war and manages
to involve a plot to assassinate Harold Wilson. Much of the background is authentic,
and a long bibliography is offered at the end.
The writing is fast-paced and has a ring of reality, even when cold reason says the plot is unlikely, to say the least, but that is the stuff of fiction. The story is full of the staple diet of espionage books, upper-class bosses who are all jealous of each other and double-double-agents. The usual conundrum of who-works-for-who, and the frequent use of the hero who is so badly sick or injured every so often, that real people would have died, yet he gets up and fights his way out once more.
Not a bad yarn, but too much like so many other spy books to compete with the Old Masters.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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