For the past few decades, any half-decent author referencing moles and spooks and the Berlin Wall was immediately hailed as the heir to John le Carré. Some were worthier than others (take a bow, Mick Herron); most, unaware of what made le Carré truly great, were knocking off pale imitations. How satisfying it is, then, to discover that the true heir to John le Carré is Nick Harkaway, aka Nicholas Cornwell, the maestro’s son.
Karla’s Choice (Viking, £22) is set in 1963, between the events outlined in the novels The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), at a time when George Smiley has resigned from the Circus due to the catastrophic failure of Operation Windfall (”Of the fate of Alex Leamas a few scant months before, no one spoke.”). When a Russian hitman arrives in London to assassinate the ostensibly harmless Hungarian literary agent László Bánáti, only to suffer a religiously inspired crisis of faith that causes him to abort his mission, Smiley is hauled back into harness by Control and charged with discovering who the mysterious (and now vanished) Bánáti really is, and why the Kremlin needs him taken off the board.
Le Carré afficionados will appreciate that the title refers to Smiley’s Russian equivalent, the faceless KGB puppet-master and the worst kind of enemy during the Cold War: “a hard sort of fellow, a true believer”. What follows is a stunning piece of literary ventriloquism. Harkaway avails of a wonderful supporting cast already in play – Control, Connie Sachs, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Jim Prideaux – but it’s his phenomenal ability to get under the skin of these familiar faces, and create memorable new characters such as the Hungarian refugee Susanna Gero, that sets him apart from all other pretenders to le Carré's throne. The novel is a triumph; the long-suffering George Smiley, it seems, will be deferring his anticipated retirement for some time to come.
The Grey Wolf (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), Louise Penny’s 19th novel to feature Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, opens in a whimsical fashion with a break-in at Gamache’s Montreal apartment that is followed by an unexpected request from the burglar, who wishes to meet the chief inspector in order to return some stolen items. This is all a touch contrived, but when the meeting concludes with the burglar being murdered while a helpless Gamache looks on, the story quickly moves into high gear.
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Gamache realises that the Sûreté is compromised by an informer in the ranks, and that Montreal is facing an existential crisis as a terrorist group plots to introduce a lethal poison to the city’s water supply. The plot is a delight, featuring as it does a shoal of red herrings, the recipe for Chartreuse, chart-topping musical monks, TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and the threat to the world’s water security as climate change puts the squeeze on natural resources. All told, it’s a hugely entertaining read.
Scott Phillips’s Cottonwood (2004) delivered a vivid portrait of a 19th-century Kansas frontier town courtesy of its protagonist, the photographer and bon vivant Bill Ogden, who bears witness to a (real-life) serial killer’s spree. The Devil Raises His Own (Soho Crime, £25.99) finds Bill in Los Angeles in 1916, when Hollywood’s early years were mirrored by a booming business in stag movies.
Bill’s sharply observant eye is undiminished by time, allowing Phillips to deliver a dark-stained noir punctuated by arson, pornography, gunplay, blackmail and the occasional murder by claw-hammer. But while he frequently avails of the opportunities for violence and mayhem that the sprawling, anonymous Los Angeles boomtown creates, Phillips roots his story in superb characters whose concerns are the stuff of tragedy: the single mother Trudy, a blue movie actor who suppresses her true sexuality; Purity Dove, the Hollywood ingenue who is little more than a plaything to the powerful men who run the studios; and Henry Seghers, a man who is always just one step ahead of poverty’s gaping maw. Tough and brutal, but also poignant and tender, The Devil Raises His Own is a novel to rank alongside Phillips’s excellent The Ice Harvest (2000).
Angela Merkel, the former German chancellor, is looking forward to a quiet retirement out of the limelight. Alas, a murder occurs in the idyllic village of Klein-Freudenstadt, where Angela has come to live with her husband Achim, devoted bodyguard Mike and new pug Putin, causing Angela to wonder whether she might not be able to solve this latest problem to present itself, even if “she was about as much of a genuine detective as Melania Trump was a genuine feminist”.
So begins David Safier’s Murder at the Castle (Old Street Publishing, £14.99), in which Angela deploys her people skills and brilliantly analytic mind to become a German Miss Marple, all the while littering her inner monologues with disparaging references to the many famous (and infamous) personages she has encountered during her storied political career. Translated by Jamie Bulloch, the conceit here is daring and initially charming, but the joke may wear a little thin for crime fiction fans whose reading preferences skew towards gritty realism.
Jane Casey built her considerable reputation on a series of superb novels featuring Maeve Kerrigan, the London-based police detective whose tough exterior masked a delicately observed fragile persona. The Outsider (Hemlock Press, £8.99) is a standalone novel that shoots off at a tangent to Kerrigan’s world, as Rob Langton – Maeve’s heartbroken ex-boyfriend – puts his life on the line by infiltrating the family of Geraint Carter, the wealthy, civilised face of a gangland mob.
On the payroll as a chauffeur-fixer-gofer, Langton eases into the luxurious world of Haulton House where Carter holds court and spins his dreams of a new world order. For Carter is no ordinary criminal; a man of extreme private passions, Carter is a racist who is plotting a “spectacular” that will incite anti-Muslim sentiment and pave the way for a political revolution intended to restore England to its former racial purity.
A timely novel, to say the least of it, The Outsider employs the conventions of spy fiction to devastating effect, as Casey skewers nativist populism, the enablers of domestic violence and the arrogant patriarchy of the old boys’ club in an understated thriller that quietly thrums along at a breakneck pace – think Succession with an undercover agent of chaos tossed into the maelstrom and you won’t be too far off the mark. Casey’s fans will always want more Maeve Kerrigan, of course, and understandably so, but The Outsider is a novel that easily matches the quality of her best work to date.
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