STRATTON'S WAR

Keith Miles is probably best recognised by readers under the pen name of Edward Marston. He writes several well-received historical mysteries spanning the 11th century through to the 19th century. His website is www.edwardmarston.com

Stratton's War returns to the period that Laura Wilson evoked so effectively in The Lover. It is June, 1940 and Ted Stratton is a Detective Inspector, working out of West End Central police station until it is bombed in an air raid. He investigates the brutal death of Mabel Morgan, a former silent screen star, who is  impaled on the railings below her flat. The coroner's verdict is suicide but Stratton believes foul play is involved. It's the start of a long and tortuous investigation that tests him to the limit. 

Anxious to escape the horror of living in the country with her mother-in-law, Diana Calthrop comes to London to do some war work and is co-opted by MI5. Her assignment is to infiltrate the Right Club, an anti-Semitic, pro-fascist organisation. She is promptly seduced by Claude Ventriss, the Lothario of the Secret Service, and realises how unhappy her marriage really is. When her husband comes home on leave, her unhappiness is made even more acute. But it is her discovery that her boss is a traitor which really complicates matters. What should she do? 

The novel is long, labyrinthine and beautifully paced. The private lives of both protagonists are shown in great detail as they move insensibly towards a form of alliance. It's an unlikely but plausible friendship. Only when they meet do they begin to make sense of what has actually happened. Neither has any real freedom of action. Both are pawns in a game that they do not fully understand. Diana is cruelly manipulated and Stratton is furious that criminals are released on the say-so of the Secret Service. His own nephew is one of them. 

Stratton is an interesting character - solid, down-to-earth and tenacious - but he seems curiously isolated. He interviews suspects on his own and has no junior officer to act as a sounding-board and to cover his back when he break the rules. Diana, too, is a loner, not knowing who she can trust in the murky world of wartime London. The dialogue is crisp and the background detail well-researched. It's sometimes difficult to believe that closet homosexuals can be quite as indiscreet as portrayed here or that Abie Marks - supposedly a cunning gangster - woud be stupid enough to leave a doll on his desk so that someone like Stratton could discover that it was the hiding-place for forged documents. 

But these are minor criticisms of a novel that has a fascinating theme, a strong gallery of characters and a driving narrative. Stratton's War is the first of a trilogy. Anyone who picks up this first entry will want to read its successors.