Ben MacIntyre has a new book: The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, and I want it.
The celebrated author of Double Cross and Rogue Heroes returns with his greatest spy story yet, a thrilling Americans-era tale of Oleg Gordievsky, the Russian whose secret work helped hasten the end of the Cold War.
Another MacIntyre book from the Cold War period is A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. This one has on my mind since recently reading Kate Atkinson's Transcription. I want to read both The Spy and the Traitor and A Spy Among Friends because MacIntyre writes nonfiction so well.
I've enjoyed a couple of Ben MacIntyre's nonfiction books about WWII. My favorite was Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory. What a great film this one would make!
From my review: Maybe the reason the entire plan reads something like a novel is that so many of the individuals involved in one way or another were already novelists or became novelists. While truth is often stranger than fiction, it helps if those who conceive and construct such a complicated plan have the imagination of fiction writers. I lost count of how many writers were involved from start to finish. The most famous, although his role was small, was Ian Fleming. No wonder the Bond stories were so popular, Fleming had all the experience one might need with espionage, double-thinking, and dreaming up ways to confuse or mislead the enemy.
Reading about Ian Fleming's role in Operation Mincemeat eventually led me to read The Man with the Golden Typewriter. What a pleasure to read the correspondence between Fleming and people like Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham, and Raymond Chandler.
The letters were all interesting in so many ways. Reading each one was a pleasure, and my opinion of Ian Fleming rose as I read the book. He was not just the author of sensational novels, but a former Naval Intelligence officer, a friend of some of the most talented authors of the day, and a charming and witty correspondent.
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A Kind of Grief by A.D. Scott is set in the Scottish Highlands in the late 1950's during the Cold War. I read the first in this series in 2010 and enjoyed it. Although I thought I would continue with the series, it didn't happen (best laid plans "gang aft agley" -- thank you, Robert Burns), and Scott's latest offering is the sixth book featuring Joanne Ross.
So...I have missed the four books in between, and thus was unfamiliar with some important events that are referred to in this one. Maybe that is part of the reason I wasn't as taken with this book as I was with first one, but I also found the style a bit off-putting and don't remember feeling that way when reading A Small Death in the Great Glen.
What I did like is the connection to the Cambridge Five. (I read A Kind of Grief in May, but am scheduling the review for September. In May, I also read 3 fiction and 1 nonfiction books about espionage during WWII and later during the Cold War, so there was a nice fit in subject matter which also included watching Granite Flats, a Netflix series that also had the espionage and Cold War angle. None of this reading/watching was deliberate, and I love it when happenstance creates a synchronicity in subject matter and/or characters.)
I also love the setting. The highlands fascinate me in fiction and fact, and the late 1950's are
so removed from our current global inter-connectedness and our technology. The differences between the 1950's and 2015 are almost Brigadoon-ish.
Would I read more in the series? Yes, but I intend to check with the library to see if they have the second in the series. I would like to catch up on at least some of what I've missed.
Read in May; Blog post scheduled for Sept. 30, 2015.
NetGalley/Atria Books
Mystery. Oct. 6, 2015. Print version: 368 pages.
