Cold War

“Old Flames” is Splendid Cold War Crime Fiction

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Scotland Yard’s Inspector Troy isn’t your typical cop. His roots are Russian, his brother’s a baronet, he owns a mansion, and he sees England in 1956 through a very particular lens.  Though his father urged him to “play the game” and learn how to be English, he doesn’t care about cricket or football–or what people think of him either. His wry observations about post WWII-Britain, its feckless leaders, its people and how they speak are priceless:

“Troy loved ‘stands to reason’–it was, when used by a certain kind of idiot, specially bred by the English, the signal, the preface, to the preposterous to a statement that would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be quite devoid of reason.”

A surprising pair of leaders starts the book on its long and compelling voyage into crime: Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin.  They’re respectively the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Premier though Khrushchev is truly in charge and bullies his comrade.  The men are on a deeply boring whirlwind state visit, and because Troy speaks Russian, he’s been assigned as one of six members of a British security team.  All of the men secretly speak Russian and the government hopes that they’ll  catch the communist guests saying something worth spying for.

Troy is assigned to Bulganin but in a powerful and comic scene insists on accompanying Khrushchev.  His interactions with “K” are surprising, entertaining, and move the book forward at breakneck speed before Troy actually gets to investigate any murders. This is a delicious choice that Lawton’s made because it goes so much against the crime novel formula of finding a corpse in the opening pages–or at least the opening chapter.

And speaking of corpse–I was delighted to learn that in England that word can be a verb.  According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it means “to start laughing in a way you cannot control during a performance, or to make someone else do this.”  That actually once happened to me in London at a performance of a P.G. Wodehouse adaptation where I laughed so hard I slid out of my aisle seat.  The actors saw me and cracked up too, followed by the whole audience.

The verb corpse is apparently used by actors and performers, again er the Cambridge Dictionary, and it fits this novel perfectly because for Troy, being British is a performance.  You might find yourself corpsing yourself at the antics of Troy’s busybody twin sisters Masha and Sasha.

Lawton has been compared to John Le Carré and that’s not remotely hyperbolic.  His work is richly layered, beautifully written, and has a sense of majesty.  His ability to capture the atmosphere of a period rivals Alan Furst’s and Troy’s irony reminds me very much of Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko  series.  That’s a hell of a combination.

Old Flames is a novel to savor, offering a window into another world that couldn’t be more real and compelling.  There were many lines and even whole scenes I had to re-read because they either made me laugh or because they were so perfectly realized I was in awe of Lawton’s skill.  Lawton’s minor characters are Dickensian, and that even includes an athletic pig.

Lev Raphael has reviewed for The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post, Bibliobuffet, Jerusalem Report and a handful of public radio stations in Michigan.  He’s the author of the Nick Hoffman mysteries.  His mother was born in St. Petersburg and her father was in the first Russian Revolution and escaped the Bolsheviks with his wife and infant daughter.

Travels Through Europe’s Heart of Darkness

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I was born in New York City to immigrant parents, and when I was young, the question “Where do your parents come from?” wasn’t an easy one to answer.

My father had grown up in the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia which had different names over the course of his youth: Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Carpathian Ruthenia, and the Carpatho-Ukraine. But it didn’t belong there anymore. It had been absorbed by the Ukraine and was now part of the USSR.

Some people didn’t even seem to know where Czechoslovakia was, anyway. Now of course, it’s not on the map at all, having split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The city my mother grew up in northeastern Poland was Wilno, but as Vilnius, it was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. In her years there as a child and a young woman before the Holocaust, it had been variously part of Russia, Poland, Lithuania–but for the majority of those interwar years a Polish city. It had also twice been invaded and ruled by the Germans.

Both my parents spoke a bewildering array of languages and lived in borderlands, as Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum calls them in her dazzling travelogue Between East and West.

Armed with fluent Polish and Russian, the author records amazing interviews and fascinating, lost history as she travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, visiting almost two dozen cities like Odessa and Minsk whose names are well known in the West. But she mainly stops at smaller cities and towns who have been pinballed over the centuries, swept up in endless wars, invasions, and border changes. En route, she also traverses some areas of Eastern Europe likely unknown to most Americas, each with its own dramatic, many-layered history: Ruthenia, Bukovyna, Moldova.

Some cities have been crushed by neglect, Sovietization, bombing—or all three. Others seem like lost jewels. Everywhere she goes, people from peasants to professors open up to her to reveal contradictory identifications. Russian speakers across these lands, for example, might think of themselves as Ruthenian, Polish, or Ukrainian. The locales she travels through have known immense suffering and chaos, and many of her interviewees come across as shipwrecked. Best of all, her grasp of complicated history in every location is faultless. She’s as observant, canny, and in command of le mot juste and just the right quote or anecdote s Rebecca West was in her masterpiece about the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Here she is in discussion with a fascinating Ukrainian linguist with a Turkish surname who tells her he feels like an outsider in his own country:

“And that, he said, was the most Ukrainian thing of all: to read the history of your country as if you were reading it through an outsider’s eyes. It is the fate or borderland nations always to know yourself through the stories or other, to realize yourself only with the help of others.”

Between East and West is one of the most compelling and thought-provoking travelogues I’ve read in years—and vitally important cultural/historical background now that places like Crimea and the eastern Ukraine keep blasting into the news.

Lev Raphael is the author of Rosedale in Love, A Novel of the Gilded Age, and 24 other books in genres from memoir to mystery.