Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience

Where has author John Lawton been hiding all my life? This is, quite simply, the best spy story I’ve read for years. It’s been compared to Le Carre and Alan Furst – but those references aren’t entirely accurate. Hammer To Fall is far more fluid and a lot less pompous than Le Carre’s recent work. It has as much attention to detail as Furst’s melancholic war stories but is written with a lighter touch. Our protagonist isn’t a lovelorn Mittel-European aristocrat but instead is a crafty London wideboy, Jack The Lad skulking in the darkened doorways and shady sidestreets on the crummy side of the Cold War.

We meet Joe Wilderness in Berlin immediately after WW2 when he’s making a mildly corrupt crack by shuffling coffee and ciggies between zones. 20 years later, Joe the MI6 field operative has (just) survived a series of physical and political incidents which see him exiled to a seemingly pointless posting in rural Finland. In theory, he can’t do much harm as a part of a cultural mission showing outdated British films to the locals along the borderlands with the USSR. In practice, a wily spy will find a conspiracy almost anywhere – and Joe can’t believe it when an old acquaintance from the other side mysteriously appears…

If anything, Hammer To Fall feels more like Len Deighton’s terrific Game, Set and Match series in its scope, authentic tradecraft, nifty footwork, clever characterisation and almost perfect plotting. Every thread you encounter along the way – every incidental but deftly drawn member of the supporting cast – they all turn out to be essential to the big picture. Lawton transported me to Czechoslovakia in its time of turbulence, to an era when moral relativism was a common concept. Joe might be on the side of the angels, but they’re angels with dirty faces… and they have fingers poised over dangerous buttons.

Lawton might take the occasional liberty with actual events and their times and places but it all enhances the slick storytelling, and accentuates the wry humour in Joe’s complex web of competing relationships. There are some incidents which are catastrophically funny. In others, a quiet human truth emerges – like when Joe muses that spies often forget their cover stories and get carried away with the act of espionage… but he’s become so comfortable in his cover that he might almost have forgotten to be a spy.

Almost, but not quite.

I have a couple of minor grumbles; Lawton over-uses the word ‘crepuscular’, which I think deserves no more than one outing in any book, not half a dozen. Once is clever; more than that is showing off. And several of his phrases feel too modern for the period; did people really say ‘I’ll get me coat’ back in 1968? Or mention a McGuffin?

But these brief bumps in the road did not detract from a magnificent espionage adventure which was genuinely unpredictable, grounded in a gritty reality most people would prefer to forget. It was monstrously enjoyable. Rather wonderfully, this isn’t the first book to feature Joe Wilderness, so there’s more good stuff to look forward to.

9/10

English author and screenwriter John Lawton has long been a favourite of those readers who like literary crime fiction, and his eight Frederick Troy novels have become classics. Set over a long timeframe from the early years of WW2 to the 1960s, the books feature many real-life figures or, as in A Little White Death (1998), characters based on real people, in this case the principals in the Profumo Affair. In Then We Take Berlin (2013) Lawton introduced a new character, an amoral chancer whose real surname – Holderness – has morphed into Wilderness. Joe Wilderness is a clever, corrupt and calculating individual whose contribution to WW2 was minimal, but his career trajectory has widened from being a Schieber (spiv, racketeer) in the chaos of post-war Berlin to being in the employ of the British Intelligence services.

He is no James Bond figure, however. His dark arts are practised in corners, and with as little overt violence as possible. Hammer To Fall begins with a flashback scene,establishing Joe’s credentials as someone who would have felt at home in the company of Harry Lime, but we move then to the 1960s, and Joe is in a spot of bother. He is thought to have mishandled one of those classic prisoner exchanges which are the staple of spy thrillers, and he is sent by his bosses to weather the storm as a cultural attaché in Finland. His ‘mission’ is to promote British culture by travelling around the frozen north promoting visiting artists, or showing British films. His accommodation is spartan, to say the least. In his apartment:

“The dining table looked less likely to be the scene of a convivial meal than an autopsy.”

Some of the worthies sent to Finland to wave the British flag are not to Joe’s liking:

“For two days Wilderness drove the poet Prudence Latymer to readings. She was devoutly Christian – not an f-word passed her lips – and seemed dedicated to simple rhyming couplets celebrating dance, spring, renewal, the natural world and the smaller breeds of English and Scottish dog.It was though TS Eliot had never lived. By the third day Wilderness was considering shooting her.”

Before he left England, his wife Judy offered him these words of advice:

“If you want a grant to stage Twelfth Night in your local village hall in South Bumpstead, Hampshire, the Arts Council will likely as not tell you to fuck off …. So, if you want to visit Lapland, I reckon your best bet is to suggest putting on a nude ballet featuring the over-seventies, atonal score by Schoenberg, sets by Mark Rothko ….. Ken Russell can direct … all the easy accessible stuff …. and you’ll probably pick up a whopping great grant and an OBE as well.”

So far, so funny – and Lawton is in full-on Evelyn Waugh mode as he sends up pretty mch everything and anyone. The final act of farce in Finland is when Joe earns his keep by sending back to London, via the diplomatic bag, several plane loads of …. well, state secrets, as one of Joe’s Russian contacts explains:

“The Soviet Union has run out of bog roll. The soft stuff you used to sell to us in Berlin is now as highly prized as fresh fruit or Scotch whisky. We wipe our arses on documents marked Classified, Secret and sometimes even Top Secret. and the damned stuff won’t flush. So once a week a surly corporal lights a bonfire of Soviet secrets and Russian shit.”

But, as in all good satires – like Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and Catch 22 – the laughter stops and things take a turn to the dark side. Joe’s Finnish idyll comes to an end, and he is sent to Prague to impersonate a tractor salesman. By now, this is 1968, and those of us who are longer in the tooth know what happened in Czechoslavakia 1968. Prague has a new British Ambassador, and one very familiar to John Lawton fans, as it is none other than Frederick Troy. As the Russians lose patience with Alexander Dubček and the tanks roll in, Joe is caught up in a desperate gamble to save an old flame, a woman whose decency has, over the years, been a constant reproach to him:

“Nell Burkhardt was probably the most moral creature he’d ever met. Raised by thieves and whores back in London’s East End, he had come to regard honesty as aberrant. Nell had never stolen anything, never lied …led a blameless life, and steered a course through it with the unwavering compass of her selfless altruism.”

Hammer To Fall is a masterly novel, bitingly funny and heartbreaking by turns. I think A Lily Of The Field is Lawton’s masterpiece, but this runs it pretty damned close. It is published by Grove Press, and is out today, 2nd April 2020.

Hammer to Fall is the third novel starring MI6 spy Joe Wilderness and it is an excellent book based in Berlin, Finland and Prague mainly during the 1960s.

John Lawton cleverly weaves real life occurrences into the main storyline that sees Wilderness cause embarrassment to his superiors whilst trying to understand exactly what is going on. Why does the Soviet Union have a shortage of vodka and what is the connection to cobalt

I have read all the Inspector Troy novels by this author but this is the first Wilderness book that I have picked up. I had no problems fully following the storyline as any backstory required is provided without distracting from the book.

This is definitely a book that I fully enjoyed and one I thoroughly recommend

Despite its European locations, this is a very British spy story, with references which only True Brits or Anglophiles will understand. Joe Wilderness is back at work as a field agent for Britain's MI6. This time he's being sent to Finland while a Parliamentary Committee investigates a botched spy exchange in Berlin which was organised by Joe. As Joe's boss, who's also his father-in-law, points out, half of Britain's secret service would give him a medal, while the other half want him shot.
The action moves from Berlin in 1948 to Finland in the mid 1950's. While in Finland, Joe as cultural attache dispenses examples of British culture to the Finnish people, although he learns that "Carry On" comedies go down far better than modern dramas. Bored with his job, he takes the opportunity to carry out some vodka smuggling - and is soon exchanging it for Russian secret documents which point to a Soviet plan for possible uses for cobalt.
Then it's on to Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the "Prague Spring", the Czech bid for independence which was eventually crushed by the Soviet Union.
In his work as a secret agent, Joe adopts various disguises as cultural attache or tractor salesman and, always involved in various "ventures" usually smuggling certain items from one place to the other.
Now and then, Joe meets up with people from his past, including the Russian Kostya who he dealt with in Berlin and Helsinki and his former lover, Nell who's now working for Willy Brandt, the German politician and statesman who was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) from 1969 to 1974.
As the Russians begin to crack down on Czech dissidents, an old acquaintance of Joe's - Frederick Troy - is given a speedy knighthood by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and sent of to Prague where, Wilson tells him, he is to "fly the flag" for Britain.
The book's 3 main characters - Joe, Nell and Troy - are finally together in the same city where Red Army tanks line the streets and the KGB and Czech secret police are everywhere. Troy's feisty wife Anna and the equally gutsy Janis Bell - MI6's station head in Prague are doing their damndest to cause a major diplomatic incident.
Matters come to a head and the story comes full circle when Joe is faced with a difficult decision to make.
This is a gripping story of double dealing and betrayal at the heart of Cold War politics. Along the way, there's some sly humour as the author references spy novelists Len Deighton and Ian Fleming and to the James Bond and Third Man films. A worthy addition to the Joe Wilderness series which will keep author John Lawton's fans very happy.

My thanks to the publisher Atlantic Books and to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.