There is something enormously appealing about a spy thriller that begins in a Nairobi hotel bar with a cold beer, a late appointment and the nagging suspicion that retirement from the dangerous life may not be quite as permanent as one hoped.
Alex Shaw’s Codename: 61 has exactly that flavour. It is an unapologetically old-school espionage adventure, steeped in the world of wartime special operations and Cold War intrigue, but its real strength lies in the unfinished business between men who once trusted one another with their lives.
It is January 1961 and Adrian Snow is MI6’s man in Kenya, operating under Colonial Office cover. At 42, the former Special Operations Executive operative is beginning to find peacetime intelligence work rather less exciting than his wartime exploits. His latest posting has brought him from Paris to Nairobi at a moment when Britain’s colonial presence in Africa is entering its final chapter. All that changes when an old friend is murdered.
Julian Jones-Smyth, another former SOE man, has arranged to meet Snow at Nairobi’s Stanley Hotel. What he is carrying turns an already shocking killing into something considerably more disturbing: evidence suggesting that a figure from their wartime past may not be as firmly buried in history as Snow believed.
From there Shaw does something rather clever. Rather than simply sending his hero racing after the killer, he takes us back to 1942 and the secretive world in which these men were formed.
At Wanborough Manor in Surrey, recruits are being assessed for the SOE. Here we meet Jim Tate, a working-class soldier from Camden carrying his own painful reasons for wanting to fight Nazi Germany. Around him are officers, civilians, French refugees and prospective agents being prepared for a kind of warfare in which deception and improvisation matter as much as conventional military discipline.
The contrast between Tate and some of his more privileged companions gives these wartime sections considerable life. Shaw clearly enjoys the period detail — the training, weapons, cars, clothes and clandestine procedures — but he is equally interested in the friendships created by men operating under extreme pressure. This is important because the story is as much about consequences as conspiracy.
by 1961, the war has been over for 16 years, but its survivors have not simply walked away from it. They have acquired wives, children, careers and responsibilities, yet old loyalties remain. Snow has a family waiting back in Hove; Tate, too, has reached an age when disappearing into danger no longer affects him alone. The men may be older, but the instincts drilled into them during the war have survived remarkably well.
Shaw writes action with admirable directness. There is little interest here in turning espionage into an abstract intellectual puzzle. His spies drink, argue, watch houses, follow suspects and, when necessary, reach for guns. The result has something of the atmosphere of the British adventure thrillers of an earlier generation … closer to Alistair MacLean or early Jack Higgins than the deliberately chilly world of John le Carré.
That is not to suggest the novel is merely nostalgic. Its 1961 setting is well chosen. The British Empire is contracting, African independence movements are changing the political landscape and the Second World War is beginning to pass from immediate experience into history. Snow belongs to a generation caught between those worlds.
The period dialogue occasionally leans heavily into its “old chap” Britishness, and readers who prefer understated espionage may find Shaw’s approach rather more muscular. But that exuberance is part of the book’s personality. This is a story that wants to entertain.
Most importantly, the mystery established in Nairobi gives the alternating timelines a purpose. Details from 1942 gradually change our understanding of events in 1961, while Shaw sensibly avoids showing his entire hand too early. To say much more would spoil several of the book’s pleasures.
Codename: 61 is therefore best approached as a rattling historical spy adventure: guns, secrets, old comrades and dangerous ghosts from a war everyone thought was finished. It is brisk, cinematic and pleasingly traditional. A Cold War thriller with its boots still firmly planted in the mud of the Second World War.
