The English fascination with spies is gloriously reflected in our literature, from Kim to A Question of Attribution, and while their Egyptian and Israeli counterparts remain untranslated, and the Americans unreadable, English spy novelists rule. Compromised, divided and alienated, the spy is a model modern hero, and the spy’s world, with its furtive and fetishistic arcana, is an admirable theatre of identity, of English attitudes to sex and class, hypocrisy and betrayal. (The best recent spy novel is John Banville’s The Untouchable, which tells the story of Anthony Blunt more freely than Alan Bennett’s play, nudging the facts into outrageous fiction — casting Graham Greene as the villain, for example.)
The Cambridge traitors are re-revisited in Charles Cumming’s The Trinity Six, a title with a premise: that besides Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross, there was a Sixth Man, one Edward Crane, pronounced dead at St Mary’s, Paddington in 1992. The story begins 15 years later, with Sam Gaddis, a don at UCL, a tepidly lecherous smoker and drinker, divorced, up to his oxters in debt, and the author of a book attacking a certain gangster, war criminal and judoka, formerly of the KGB and currently President of Russia, named Sergei Platov. At his book’s launch party, at Daunt’s, Holland Park, Gaddis is approached by an attractive young woman …
One is not hugely surprised to learn — and all too soon, it seemed to me — that Eddie Crane is still alive, that Vladimir Pu-, sorry, Sergei Platov, cough, has a guilty secret, and that the two things are somehow mysteriously related. In Moscow, Berlin, Vienna and New Zealand, Gaddis follows a trail of interested parties, most of whom are killed immediately post-interview, and in one case mid-.
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