The Whitehall Mandarin by Edward Wilson

review by Maryom

William Catesby is on the trail of a spy again - this time someone highly placed in Whitehall. His superiors learn, through a mole inside the KGB,  that a Soviet spy ring is no longer sending information back to Russia but on to its communist rival China, and that someone high in the British government hierarchy is providing that information. Catesby has a hunch about the informant but where can he find the evidence to back it? Why would a high ranking civil servant 'turn' and spy for another country - ideology, dark hidden secrets worth a spot of blackmail or just for the money?
It's not an easy task and a story that starts in the late 1950s burns on a slow fuse through the sex scandals of London in the swinging sixties to its end in war-torn Vietnam.

The Whitehall Mandarin is another excellent convoluted maze of an espionage thriller from Edward Wilson. With his trademark of wrapping of a story around historical facts, the story is littered with references to real events and people, such as the Profumo scandal, Kennedy assassination and double-agent Oleg Penkovsky, blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. Don't think this is a dry recitation of facts though - it's a gripping story full of subterfuge, lies and double, and triple, crossings; so much so that at times I felt I should have been keeping notes to remind me who I thought was on which 'side', who was lying to whom, and which people knew they were being lied to and using that for their advantage!
The setting moves from the bleak Suffolk marshes, via the offices of Whitehall and decadent society parties to the jungles of Vietnam, but it isn't really an action-packed story of high speed chases and gunfights, more on the lines of Le Carré's Smiley stories.

It seems a little odd to tag this as historical fiction  - after all I can vaguely remember some of the events - but it's surprising how long ago some of these events took place.

Maryom's review -  4.5 stars
Publisher - Arcadia Books
Genre - Adult Spy Thriller, Historical Fiction

Buy The Whitehall Mandarin from Amazon

The Midnight Swimmer by Edward Wilson

 review by Maryom

William Catesby is a British spy caught up in the Cold War of the early 1960s. The US is planning an invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro's revolutionary government; the Russians are deploying soldiers and nuclear armaments there to support Castro - but if WW3 breaks out one of the first casualties will be Britain!. How can either side back down without total loss of face?  Catesby is sent to Berlin, to Cuba, to Washington in an increasingly desperate attempt to avert the seemingly inevitable. As these events play out on the world stage, Catesby finds himself caught up in a love-triangle with a beautiful Russian.

The Midnight Swimmer is a great espionage story set against a real, very frightening backdrop. Of course we all know now how things worked out but this is one of the few novels I've read that really capture the feeling of tension and fear of the time. Fiction and non-fiction merge easily though Catesby does seem to be just a little too much always where the action is. It has everything you would expect from the spy genre - exotic locations, secret assignations, honey-traps and men torn between personal and patriotic ties.

I must admit I hadn't come across Edward Wilson's novels before being invited to his event at Edinburgh International Book Festival where he was talking about historical espionage fiction. What he said there intrigued me enough to track down this, his latest book, through my library - and now I'll be asking them for more!

For more historical background - and an extract from The Midnight Swimmer - see this previous post by Edward Wilson

Maryom's review -  4.5 stars
Publisher - Arcadia Books
Genre - Adult Spy Thriller, Historical Fiction

Buy Midnight Swimmer, The from Amazon