The journalist and broadcaster James Naughtie has added another string to his bow and penned his first novel. The Madness of July is a political thriller set in and around Westminster's corridors of power in the 1970s, the decade in which Naughtie was The Guardian's chief political correspondent and hobnobbed with statesmen and secret servants. He has the credentials to produce an authentic novel about Cold War skulduggery; the question is whether he possesses the literary talent.
In keeping with books of this genre, Naughtie’s plot is labyrinthine. We start semi-simply. A dead American turns up in an inconvenient location – “In a bloody cupboard somewhere in the bowels of our beloved parliament”. Cause of death: drug-induced accident. So far, so humdrum. But Naughtie soon stirs things up.
The dead man never touched drugs, had two passports and was a representative of “a small, bespoke outfit of American intelligence”. Spooks from both sides of the Atlantic smell murder, deceit and cover-up. Will Flemyng, the foreign office minister, whose phone number was in the victim’s pocket, smells trouble.
Naughtie pans out and thickens his plot. A senior Whitehall official and perpetrator of a hushed-up crime is about to be appointed British ambassador to the United States. As British-US relations are jeopardised, Abel Grauber, a seasoned Cold Warrior, is sent from Washington to London tasked with both investigation and damage limitation. Meanwhile, Flemyng, after being reactivated as a spy, heads north to the family home in the Scottish Highlands for a reunion with his brothers, where fresh revelations about his mother’s past forces him to question his own origins. Just when truth is in sight, Naughtie ups the stakes with the revelation that a dead spy and a wayward diplomat are only the tip of the iceberg, a preamble to, or maybe a diversion from, a bigger picture.
A quarter of the way into the novel, Grauber’s boss Maria informs him of the risks ahead: “It’s not here yet, but there’s a storm coming our way, a big one, and it’s moving fast. Could blow itself out; my guess is not. A hurricane gathering speed.”
This may be so; what doesn’t gather speed, however, is Naughtie’s narrative. Give or take the odd thunder-rumble, the calm preceding his storm is too serene and prolonged for a book of this kind. After the murder is announced, Naughtie pads out pages building up his cast rather than building up momentum.
Mysteries need their quota of red herrings, but in Naughtie’s case, the dead-ends are redundant secondary characters. “A surfeit of allies” is one of the novel’s refrains, and, regrettably, one of its critical weaknesses. Here, more is less.
In time, though, the novel's pace picks up and takes off. The Madness of July has all the right components: scheming politicos and self-serving agents, punchy dialogue, enigmas, surprises, an elaborate paper chase and a letter that Flemyng considers "the most extraordinary document I think I've seen in my time in government".
That choice of name – Flemyng – even with its slight warping, puts us in mind of 007's creator, but Naughtie's inspiration is unmistakably John le Carré. Deception supersedes derring-do. A whodunit list of five possible ambassadors, one of them dodgy, is reminiscent of the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy mole-hunt. Berlin, le Carré's backdrop of choice, is Flemyng's old stamping ground, still that "island in the east, a place boiling with politics and intrigue".
Where Naughtie deviates and renders the novel truly unique is in his shrewd choice of enemy. His events may play out during the height of the Cold War, but there is not one Soviet villain to be found.
The two sides in Naughtie’s pitched battle are in fact Britain and America, whose hostilities have created distrust and unleashed infighting. “We have been learning a good deal about how our Big Ally is operating on both sides of the great divide,” Flemyng is told. “Sometimes against our interests.”
Le Carré once described the spy writer Eric Ambler as “the source on which we all draw”. For the current crop of thriller writers, le Carré is now the starting point, and Naughtie takes the master’s old tricks and does new things with them.
As a thriller, The Madness of July is a period piece sheared of high-tech gizmos and slick spy-speak and is all the more refreshing for being so.
While it can’t be mentioned in the same breath as those early, 1970s-set le Carré novels, it can easily be classed as a noteworthy addition to the genre or a promising start to a second career.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance critic.