It is a chastening thought that Boris Johnson’s responsibilities now include MI6. Alan Judd’s latest novel is particularly interesting about the relationship between our intelligence services on the one hand and our politicians (and their special advisers) on the other.
Deep Blue is the fourth of his spy novels to have Charles Thoroughgood as its central character. (Charles also appears in Judd’s very first novel, A Breed of Heroes, but as a young army officer in Northern Ireland rather than as a spy.) He is now running MI6, a thankless job, particularly as the service is fighting for funds and (worst of all) cast out of central London to an office in Croydon. He’s growing old, too, an analogue spy in a digital world. Paradoxically, this is one of his professional strengths.
When the director general of MI5 picks up a menacing snippet of internet chatter about ‘Deep Blue’, the phrase sets off an echo an Charles’s memory: not to IBM’s chess-playing computer but to an inconclusive MI6 case from 30 years before.
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