The Unfortunate Englishman

Starred review from January 25, 2016
At the start of Lawton’s outstanding second Joe Wilderness novel (after 2014’s Then We Take Berlin), the former MI6 agent accidentally shoots and kills a nuclear physicist he’s trying to smuggle out of East Berlin in 1963. When Alexander Burne-Jones, Joe’s old boss, springs Joe from a West Berlin jail, Joe agrees to go back to work for MI6. Meanwhile, the British spy agency recruits an unassuming Englishman, metallurgist Geoffrey Masefield, and sends him into the field to find where the Russians are hiding their nuclear missiles. Flashbacks bring to life postwar Berlin, where Joe engaged in the “smuggling of coffee, sugar, penicillin, morphine, and anything else that could be nicked.” Real historical events—the building of the Berlin wall, J.F.K.’s visit there—lend verisimilitude to Joe’s attempt at one last big scam. Intricate plotting, colorful characters, and a brilliant prose style put Lawton in the front rank of historical thriller writers. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.).

January 15, 2016
Cold War complexities and personal tensions drive a British secret agent into a desperate corner. Berlin, 1963. Acting "on instinct," British agent Joe Wilderness shoots German Marte Mayerling, who's slipped up behind him. As she lingers near death, Wilderness' handler, Alec Burne-Jones, steps in to protect him, but it's a debt of gratitude with restrictive strings. As Wilderness returns to London, the story flashes back to 1945 and British spy Bernard Alleyn, who rises steadily in the postwar government but is ultimately undone by the Cold War revelation that he and his wife, Kate, are actually Russian. Back in 1960, the perspective shifts to London, where walruslike upper-echelon intelligence officer Geoffrey Masefield takes Burne-Jones' new protege, Wilderness, under his wing. Dispatched to Russia, Masefield witnesses the erosion of British intelligence and an exacerbation of the Cold War. Against this backdrop, Wilderness advances through the intelligence ranks, closely monitored by Burne-Jones, and is offered management of the Berlin office. Masefield works in Moscow while Wilderness immerses himself in the Berlin scene, where he drifts into an affair with co-worker Nina, an indiscretion that haunts him after his return to London. The tale continues to move both backward and forward, documenting recent historical events as well as Wilderness' ethical and personal challenges, before depicting the incidents that led to the shooting of Marte Mayerling. Rueful Wilderness is the perfect Cold War protagonist. With his second adventure (Then We Take Berlin, 2013), Lawton bids fair to build a compelling rival to his seven-volume Troy series.

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Starred review from February 15, 2016
When we last saw Joe WildernessLondon cat burglar turned black marketeer in the rubble of postwar Berlin and then remade yet again as a spy in that same rubblehe had inadvertently shot the woman he was trying to smuggle out of East Berlin and appeared destined to spend a long chunk of time in a Berlin jail. He's rescued from that by his MI6 spymaster (and father-in-law) but forced, unwillingly, back into the game. One thing leads to another, as happens in the cloak-and-dagger world, and Wilderness is tasked with facilitating a spy exchangea Russian who has come to love pretending to be English swapped for a clumsy British scientist and clumsier agent who fell in love with the wrong girl at the wrong time. Complicating matters, Wilderness' former fellow black marketeers, one now a Russian KGB head, the other an American CIA agent, both have stakes in the outcome. Lawton gets the Cold War chill just right, leading to yet another tense exchange across a Berlin bridge, but unlike, say, the film Bridge of Spies, the principals here are not freighted with moral rectitude but, rather, exude a hard-won cynicism in conflict with dangerously human emotions. The result is a gripping, richly ambiguous spy drama featuring a band of not-quite-rogue agents that will find genre fans reaching for their old Ross Thomas paperbacks to find something comparable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)