The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 15, 2011

Of all the Charles Cumming novels, my favorite remains The Hidden Man, a novel that -- like a Hitchcock movie -- generates suspense by placing unwitting individuals in unforeseen peril.  Cumming tries to do that again in The Trinity Six by sending Professor Sam Gaddis on a quest to identify the sixth and final member of the Cambridge spy ring that included the infamous Kim Philby.  While The Trinity Six is an enjoyable novel, it fails to create the same atmosphere of danger that makes The Hidden Man Cumming’s reigning masterpiece.

The identity of the sixth spy is never in doubt; Cumming reveals it on the first page.  Gaddis learns of it after a journalist friend asks him to co-author a book based on a story she plans to write that will reveal the spy’s name to the public.  The journalist dies soon after that conversation, leaving Gaddis to pursue the truth on his own.  His investigation leads him to an elderly man named Thomas Neame who provides either valuable information or calculated disinformation.  For much of the novel, Gaddis remains credibly clueless as he is played by one intelligence agency and stalked by another.  Eventually his search takes him country hopping and, as is typical in espionage thrillers, when he unearths individuals who can bring him closer to the truth they tend to die.

As he does in his other novels, Cumming derives excitement from intellectual challenge rather than shootouts and chases.  The difficult task of separating truth from falsehood animates the story.  That technique worked well in Cumming’s last Alec Milius novel, The Spanish Game, but it is less successful here.  The palpable tension and riveting suspense that characterizes Cumming’s best work never materializes in The Trinity Six.  This is not to say that the story is dull or not well told; Cumming is a fine writer with a literary style that sets him apart from typical espionage novelists.  Gaddis and the supporting cast are interesting characters and the plot unfolds at a steady but unrushed pace.  Ultimately, however, the novel lacks the heft of Cumming’s most enjoyable novels.  I recommend The Trinity Six to fans of espionage fiction, but with the warning that they might be disappointed if they expect it to live up to the standard Cumming set in some of his earlier novels.

RECOMMENDED

The Spanish Game by Charles Cumming

Published by St. Martin's Press on November 25, 2008

Alec Milius, who made his debut in A Spy By Nature, returns to action in The Spanish Game. Six years have passed since the events described in A Spy by Nature and Milius is still worried that the CIA and the SIS are out to get him. After bouncing around the world, Milius has come to an uneasy rest in Madrid where he does freelance intelligence work for a private British bank. His boss, Julian Church, sends him to San Sebastián to determine whether Basque unrest will have an impact on business development in the region. Julian puts Milius in touch with an old friend there, a Basque politician named Mikel Arenaza. When Arenaza goes missing after arranging to meet Milius again in Madrid, Milius is drawn back into the world of espionage while investigating his disappearance.

I suspect some readers won't like this novel because they won't like Milius. He is self-centered, obsessively paranoid (perhaps with reason, but that makes him no less unlikable) and a bit amoral (even sleezy). None of that bothered me. I don't need to like the characters in order to enjoy a novel, so long as the characters and story are interesting. If you're looking for a morally pure or likable hero, however, you should probably pass this one by. Having said that, it's only fair to point out that at the end of this novel, as was true in A Spy By Nature, Milius shows himself capable of remorse, if not change.
Other readers won't like this novel because they're looking for more action or less ambiguity. You don't get thrilling chases, gunplay, explosions, high tech weaponry, or nonstop action in a Cumming novel. You don't get larger than life, morally pure good guys or cartoonishly evil bad guys. Instead, Cumming gives you an intelligent, credible plot and interesting, ethically challenged characters. That's not to say that the novels are dull or that they lack action. In The Spanish Game, the story develops slowly, piece by piece. The pace begins to quicken at the novel's midway point as the pieces begin to cohere, and there's quite a bit of action by the end, but Milius spends more time thinking than fighting. The novel has some elements of a mystery as the reader, along with Milius, tries to understand the relationship between the major players. As in any good mystery, the ending came as a complete surprise to me, and a very satisfying one.

The Spanish Game departs from the conventions of the typical spy novel by centering the conflict around Basque terrorists (or liberationists, as you prefer), about whom I knew little before reading the novel. I was drawn into the story and even started to feel a bit of sympathy for Milius. Cumming writes well, bringing a literary quality to his prose that, while falling short of Le Carre, is a pleasure to read. This is a better novel than A Spy By Nature, although not quite as good as his second novel, The Hidden Man (an espionage novel that doesn't feature Milius).

RECOMMENDED

The Hidden Man by Charles Cumming

First published in 2003

When Christopher Keen's two children were young, Keen abandoned his family to take a job as an SIS operative. Thirty years later, Keen works for Divisar Corporate Intelligence. His wife is long dead. Keen has reestablished a relationship with his son Mark, but his son Ben refuses to speak to him. Mark is a senior executive at Libra, a nightclub chain that is about to open a club in Russia. The lawyer putting that deal together is under investigation by MI5, in cooperation with Russian police authorities who observed his meetings with an organized crime figure during trips to Russia. Keen has given professional advice to Libra about its Russian business dealings, and MI5 not only wants Keen's assistance, it wants to use him to get information from Mark. Hours after Keen has his first serious conversation with Mark since leaving the family, a Russian with an apparent score to settle enters Keen's flat and kills him. (The killing is actually the first event in the novel; the early chapters fill in the backstory.)

The bulk of the story centers on the sometimes independent, sometimes cooperative efforts of Mark and Ben to learn who killed their father and why. Cumming builds suspense slowly as we learn about each brother: Mark's enthusiastic but naive willingness to assist MI5; Ben's curiosity about a father he's so long detested; Ben's shaky relationship with a wife who finds herself attracted to his boss. Cumming creates a strong sense of atmosphere and danger as the plot develops; a particularly tense scene has the brothers meeting with Latvian gangsters in a strip club. Each brother is a fully developed character; their very different relationships with their father, and their reactions to conflicting stories they hear about him after his death, is fascinating. A turf war between intelligence agencies working at cross-purposes has become standard fare in spy novels, but it's used to great effect in The Hidden Man. The brothers are caught in the middle, they don't know who or what to believe ... it's a great story.

The careful plot, the depth of the characters, and the nice pace at which the story unfolds all make this a rewarding spy novel.

RECOMMENDED

A Spy By Nature by Charles Cumming

First published in 2001

A young man, turned down for employment with the Secret Intelligence Service, is offered a contract position working for SIS as an industrial double agent. Alex Milius is given a position with a British oil company with the expectation that CIA agents posing as employees of an American oil company will recruit him to reveal secrets that will give the Americans a competitive advantage over the Brits in oil exploration. After his recruitment by the CIA, the SIS plans to provide Milius with disinformation to feed to the American agents.

A Spy By Nature is well crafted, offering insight into a type of espionage that is likely more relevant to today's world than traditional cloak-and-dagger stories about governments spying on each other. Cumming provides an interesting look at how industrial espionage (probably more common than most of us realize) might be carried out. Alex is a credible character, filled with the combination of self-importance, uncertainty, and naivete that often characterizes ambitious young men. The supporting characters, however, tend to be less interesting: stereotypical corporate types, spymaster types, and an unforgiving ex-girlfriend type.

While the story maintains interest throughout the novel (I disagree with the reviewers who condemn the book as dull -- this is a novel about the interactions of people, not a 007 story with shootouts or explosions, but that doesn't make it dull), I kept getting the feeling that Cumming was setting up a major plot twist, an unexpected ending that never came. As the story reaches its climax, it all seems a bit anti-climactic. Still, strong writing and a solid main character make this book worth reading, even if it never achieves greatness.

RECOMMENDED