The Trinity Six/Charles Cumming
I am becoming a fan of espionage writer Charles Cumming having read and reviewed favourably The Colder War. Previous novels feature his hero Thomas Kell a wizard of detection through computer hacking and mobile surveillance and the French head of MI6 Amelie. The Trinity Six goes back in time to the five who betrayed their country and were at Cambridge, Douglas Maclean, Guy Burgess, Antony Blunt, Kim Philby and John Cairncross. It offers the ingenious theory that there was a sixth Eddie Crane whose identity was changed in 1990. This was done withe complicity of a doctor and some nurses who were at St Mary’s Hospital and substituted a dead person’s name and identity for Crane who lived on under that alias. A journalist Charlotte Berg is on the story but is bumped off by Russian security before she can publish it. She has however disclosed some of it to Dr Sam Gaddis, a history lecturer at UCL specialising in modern Russia. He is helped in turn by Holly Levette whose mother had an affaire with a MI5 officer who sent her his papers covering the duplicity in which he was party. I won’t say more to spoil but the cover up begins to involve too a senior Russian figure.
It is a page-turner as Gaddis is hunted down by Russian security and protected by MI6. Cumming shows talent in maintaining the tempo by, for example, a series of false alarms as Gaddis flees Austria by train and returns to England. Again mobile surveillance and computer hacking feature strongly. I find it rather scary as movement and content of laptop are so easily identifiable. The point is made at the end that the modern jihadist now does not use a mobile or laptop but the old fashioned letter drop. My previous comments that it reads more like a film script than book hold good as does my critique that for some reason Cumming has to explain the contents of every meal taken.
Again I’ read’ it by audio book. I find this an enjoyable method as the reader has a clear voice, can do accents and it takes the strain of concentrating on every word you read. It also means that you can read when you travel. A friend suggested the Bose anti noise headphones and although my preferred method is to read with classical music in the background I did enjoy the sensation of shutting myself off , headset on, immersed in the spoken word.
I have a feeling that after Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carre, Charles Cumming will be the next big thing in espionage writing. There is a bit of each of these writers in him particularly the duplicitous and murky world of the ‘circus’ that Le Carre so brilliantly conveys. Cumming who, I believe, worked for MI6 has insider knowledge (Fleming was in Naval intelligence and Deighton and Le Carre a deep knowledge of spying) . He knows how to narrate a story with a view to a film. The trick is to create an enduring character like Kell as film producers and readers do take to a branded lead character, the ultimate being James Bond.
