Berlin in 1933, Great Crime Fiction "Prequel" from David Downing in WEDDING STATION

 [Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Wedding Station is an ideal choice for both Downing fans and newcomers to his fast-paced and intense crime novels.”

DavidDowning’s novels of crime, suspense, and espionage have danced through both world wars. His “Station” series, with six titles before Wedding Station, evoke the relentless terror of life in Berlin during World War II. Now, in a fierce and daring prequel, Downing reveals the back story to the propulsive series.

A British citizen with a “German” son from his first marriage, John Russell has no desire to leave the complex and culturally rich city of Berlin. But Wedding Station opens with the burning of the Reichstag parliament building, a display of political malice that Hitler’s forces deftly blame on “Communists” and utilize as a reason to crack down on liberty. Russell’s a reporter for the Morgenspiegel—it’s his job to dig into any crime aspects to the fire, as well as other events around him.

Since the fire’s an obvious fake, with the expected political posturing—“The German people would be expecting a vigorous response from their government, and harsh new measures would be announced over the next twenty-four hours”—Russell’s free to investigate other ominous shifts in the city. Within limits: The newspaper’s editor is already under enormous pressure to toe the official line, if he wants to keep publishing.

“This was what the seasoned professional journalists lived for, Russell thought. Exciting times. Only this was the sort of excitement that might well prove fatal to some of them.”

Within hours, life in Berlin shifts from cultural glory to silently witnessing corpses and abuse. And at work, Russell chases scraps of crime stories, like the death of a teenaged male prostitute, that become entangled with the power and sadism of the various Nazi forces and leaders. When his other leads turn up parallel threads, from a genealogist’s death to a celebrity fortune-teller’s disappearance, Russell’s relentless digging puts his personal liberty and safety at risk. Soon a professional beating comes to seem routine, and his choices narrow to what will put his son and his ability to be a father under threat. Or cost him his integrity and self-respect.

“Russell liked fiction as much as the next man, but he couldn’t imagine agreeing to lie for a living. Better to sidestep the issue … He had thought the crime desk might provide a safe haven but most of the stories he’d covered so far had political hazards etched right through them, like the letters in a stick of seaside rock. Which shouldn’t have come as a shock when the forces of law and order were the people committing the crimes.”

As a “foreigner” in a dangerous city, Russell’s becoming a sort of criminal himself, conspiring with the occasional halfway-human police officer to get murderers captured, hiding out for days on end, desperately trying to protect his son while seeing the child inevitably seduced by Germany’s new politics. Downing manages the painful transformations in thoughtful passages that never detract from the threat and tension of the situations that Russell deliberately puts himself into, in the hunt for both honest journalism and a personal stance against Hitler’s imposed regime.

Wedding Station (the title refers to a location in Berlin, Wedding, pronounced with a V sound at the start) is an ideal choice for both Downing fans and newcomers to his fast-paced and intense crime novels. As a “prequel,” it won’t require catch-up time, except perhaps for the alphabet soup of the various German groups menacing Berlin. And as part of the series, it’s a marvelous exploration of how John Russell steps out of ordinary life into endless dangerous choices, and into how the Nazi regime will convince itself of a mission to subdue all of Europe.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

David Downing's Stand-Alone Thriller, in 1938 Germany

[Originally published in the New York Journal of Books]

Retelling wartime history as spy fiction is Downing’s deeply grounded path; pointing out the power of love and family within it, however, is his aria.

The Cold War? History. The Red Menace? A comic-book phrase tossed around in period films. World-makers struggling to turn the globe into a folllw-up from the Russian revolution of 1917? Ridiculous.

Except, as the “Mueller Report” reveals, there is an ongoing and powerful effort of the Great Powers of the world to exert political will on each other, even if it’s just to distract leaders and hamper economies. David Downing’s series of haunting mysteries set in Berlin (the John Russell series) led to the Jack McColl series, thrillers positioned at the start of the First World War. With his 2019 “stand-alone” espionage adventure, Diary of a Dead Man on Leave, Downing puffs on what now seem like the long-dormant embers of the Communist Party—but they were far from dormant as Germany positioned itself to invade its neighbors in 1938.

Unlike his two earlier series, Downing does not center the emotion of Diary of a Dead Man on Leave on a couple falling in love or struggling to maintain a relationship through political upheaval. Instead, he fingers the tenderness that can grow unexpectedly between an isolated worker for a better world, and a child who needs his counsel and support.

To Josef Hoffman, struggling on behalf of Russia’s Kremlin to recruit a Communist cell within Nazi Germany five years after Adolf Hitler has seized control, the dream of a worker-led world with fairness and justice is worth every sacrifice. He’s already handled a hidden life in distant Argentina, among displaced Germans there. Now, infiltrating cautiously among the railroad men in Hamm, he knows his chances of a misstep are high … and his death unpredictably close. To quote a 1919 leader from the Soviet Union, “we Communists are all dead men on leave”—that is, only (at best) experiencing a brief respite from self-sacrifice at every level. Downing applies the quotation as a meme for the Communist agents working outside the Soviet Union.

But for a dead man, Josef has a lot of heart. Hiding out in a boardinghouse where the landlady struggles to raise her son safely amid men who want to take over her life and her child’s, Josef’s first intention is to do no harm: Be kind toward young Walter but insulate him from politics.

Yet he fails at this, repeatedly, as when the youngster asks his help on an assignment to provide proof of racial superiority of Nordic people in terms of speech and singing. “ ‘It can’t be true, can it?’ Walter asked doubtfully after he’d finished reading the passage. No, it couldn’t, I thought, but that’s what they rely on—that smidgen of doubt. Anyone who’d listened to a Negro gospel choir or an Italian opera diva would know such ideas for the rubbish they were, but few had been so lucky, especially in a place like Hamm.”

Can Josef answer Walter honestly, while at the same time teaching the youngster enough to protect him in a brutally propagandistic school system and devouring army? What about the rest of Walter’s family—the mother, the brother, the grandfather?

The dangers and sacrifices of Josef’s live create a dramatic and piercing counterpoint to the usual story of espionage. In Downing’s hands, they also create a call to action for our time. But set that aside and absorb the story instead. Retelling wartime history as spy fiction is Downing’s deeply grounded path; pointing out the power of love and family within it, however, is his aria.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

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Shaping the Modern World, and Spy, in THE DARK CLOUDS SHINING from David Downing

The Cold War ended, and many Americans thought the America/Russia espionage dance ended around the same time. Readers of the espionage fiction of John Le Carré could be forgiven for believing it had wrapped up, devolved into some sort of economic tradecraft operated as much by Big Corporations as by the governments of what were once the world's major powers. Money seemed to be taking over, with China the economic power to try to understand. Like the end of Britain's colonial domination, it all seemed to come down to profits.

Then, presto! American elections are "messed with" by today's Russia. Understanding the motives and thinking of the massive nation on the other side of the globe suddenly matters in new ways. Pull up the curtain on a riveting drama -- and enhance it with David Downing.

Downing, whose recent espionage series are published by Soho Press (Soho Crime), came into his own in the "Station" series that he set during World War II in (mostly) Berlin, Germany, with protagonist John Russell trying to operate as a person of integrity during the Nazi years there. Then in 2013 he leapt back in time to World War I with the release of Jack of Spies -- the first in the Jack McColl series. Jolting thought it was for readers to change wars, continents, and protagonists, Downing made it clear that his understanding of the major shifts of the Great War provided yet another panoramic view of how forces of history shape the stage.

THE DARK CLOUDS SHINING is the fourth and final Jack McColl book (I wonder what war Downing will tackle next? hold that thought). This time the most important action and tensions take place in Bolshevik Russia, although from March 1921 to August 1921, McColl is swept across the Russian Revolution's effect and southward into the next revolution in action: that of Mahatma Ghandi leading India into rebellion against British overlords. There are shootings, betrayals, passionate lovemaking -- but most of all, Downing finds his "inner Russian" in this book, often pausing as his characters inhabit dingy apartments, train cars, and safe houses, to let them argue the right and wrong of their efforts.

At first the dark reflections occur mostly around Caitlin, McColl's lost love from the first book in the series; Caitlin's enmeshed in battling for women's rights and children's safety in this new Bolshevik world, working with the brilliant woman leader Kollontai at the Zhenotdel organization. Kollontai sees what Caitlin can't yet:

"Ever since the civil war ended, we've been in retreat. Oh, I know we've had victories -- the abortion law, the apprenticeships, the unveilings the other week -- but they're all things that don't cost money and don't inconvenience men. ... Things I thought we'd settled for good, we're having to fight for all over again. We're regressing, in more ways than one. ... In order to survive, we Bolsheviks have done some terrible things ... we must hold ourselves to a higher standard, if we want to save our revolution. If we don't, then heaven help Russia."

"We must fight each battle as it comes," Caitlin said, more to herself than her friend.

This dark sense of realization will eventually free Caitlin to make frightening personal choices, as an M-Cheka officer, Komarov, takes control of her life and moves her back into contact with Jack McColl. Whether it's arguing with a political opposite number or testing McColl's allegiance to Britain, to the best of Russia, and to her, Caitlin takes the measure of what's right.

McColl is less likely to vacillate: He's operating under specific orders to stop a possible international disaster, while trying to also "hide in plain sight" as Komarov takes over his life, too. In Komarov, the author updates Russian philosophy and literary wisdom, as the slightly inebriated -- but canny -- Russian secret service officer reveals his soul (or the part of it he's willing to share) to Jack McColl:

"In my first year as an investigator, I was jut a problem solver, and quite a good one, if I say so myself. But if that's all a city policeman does, he ends up holding his nose There are no men better placed to understand society than those that police it and no men more wary of radical change, because they know they'll be in the front line when the bombs and bullets start flying. Which is one of the reasons policemen drink a lot," he added, tipping back the glass of vodka.

These meditations darken and deepen the crisis that McColl must manage (while appearing to "be managed"). Downing is so skillful in his pacing that although perhaps a quarter of this 368-page action novel is spent in such conversations, there's never a sense of drag. The espionage, difficult choices, and knife-edge balance of whether Caitlin and McColl will ever reconcile keep the suspense taut and the twists powerful.

Can you read this without reading the rest of the series first? Sure. In a sense, by spacing the titles a year apart, Downing almost forces that sense onto readers. But if you can make time, I'd recommend reading straight through the four Jack McColl books, to appreciate the buildup of costs that Downing presents.

And although you may not want to directly apply McColl's choices to world politics a neat century later, you'll surely come away with a better grasp of Putin's background and sense of pride and entitlement. As Jack Kennedy (a highly uneven yet brilliant past American president) pointed out half a century ago, understanding both our allies and our enemies as people is essential for our own survival.

David Downing's masterful "Russian Revolution" sequence is a great way to get started.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

1917 Crime Novel from David Downing, LENIN'S ROLLER COASTER

David Downing's World War II series set in Berlin, Germany, starting with Zoo Station, turned the cruelties and disasters of wartime Germany into a panoramic backdrop for a series of espionage adventures and some serious grown-up romance. After those six books, Downing moved to World War I and a set of very different espionage novels, featuring brash British spy Jack McColl and his star-crossed lover, an Irish-American journalist, Caitlin Hanley.

The couple's extreme risks in Jack of Spies and One Man's Flag pitted them politically against each other: Jack working for the British government, and Caitlin taking the side of the Irish rebels, in spite of an effort at journalistic balance. In the process, Caitlin's brother died, with Jack mortally involved -- and although finally sharing details brings some relief from guilt and blame, there's still doubt about how well Caitlin and Jack can handle being a couple, considering their jobs and loyalties.

So we open in 1917 in LENIN'S ROLLER COASTER, with a pair of workers' revolutions in Russia while the rest of Europe is tugging the "Reds" into the Great War. Caitlin wants to reconnect with her Bolshevik friends, to build stories of the massive changes in human history taking place; Jack's assigned to blowing up bridges and anything else that will keep the Germans from getting the arms and other supplies they need to win the war against England and France.

Downing's Berlin (World War II) series unfolded a very different side of that war, the "home front" in what was once one of Europe's most elegant and civilized cities -- but this new World War I series, partly because it's further back in time but also because American readers, at least, know fewer details, challenges Downing to create fully fleshed settings and motives. Motive, on the other hand, is emphatically not a problem for the people pushing Jack and Caitlin around: They know what they want, and they'll kill readily to move their causes forward. Even Caitlin's closest, kindest friends turn out to have a talent for violence, without regrets.

The weight of so much detail to introduce moves LENIN'S ROLLER COASTER off the pace of traditional espionage or crime fiction, though. Pages upon pages pile up with background and explanations. Interior comments from the characters aren't sufficient to whip the pace. A sample of the text: "If the Bolshevik experiment ended in failure, Caitlin thought the failure should be their own. If Lenin and the party went down to defeat, it should be at the hands of the Russian people, not a cabal of foreign interests in league with past oppressors."

When the two adventurers finally cross paths in Moscow, the friction between them adds striking danger to each one's pursuits. But it takes three-fourths of the book to reach that part -- a long journey made lively at the halfway point by Jack's unexpected fostering of an orphan, but otherwise challenging for readers who seek a rapid pace and costly decisions made under fire. Oddly, the book seems to have taken on some of the Russian literary maneuvers and density.

This means that if you like Russian espionage, an unusual face of World War I (the Great War, the war to end all wars), and insight into the factions that clashed after the Russian Revolution, this book's meant for you. Think Boris Akunin, for instance -- plan to spend time with this one.

I'm a committed Downing fan, for the meticulous historic details and cultural insight, as well as the face of fiction. And I was glad to take my time in reading LENIN'S ROLLER COASTER. But I have relatively few readers I'll recommend this one to -- because it's so far off the genre's usual conventions. Downing is an amazing author; I'm hoping there are enough "unconventional" readers out there to keep this series going, and to satisfy the hunger to see Jack and Caitlin somehow reconnect once the shooting is over. All from Soho Crime, of course.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Espionage and Opposition, World War I: ONE MAN'S FLAG, David Downing

David Downing's six-book World War II espionage series, with each book named for a railroad station in Berlin, established him as a master storyteller who could play the passions of romance and loyalty like stage lights across the scenes of menace, risk, and carnage. It almost hurt physically to come to the end of the series with Masaryk Station and watch the characters learn what the war-torn, peace-torn city would become to them. And with the end of the war, and the end of the high-stakes spying that nearly destroyed them, John Russell and his lover Effi Koenen, an actress who has performed for the German High Command as John forcibly served British, American, Russian, and German needs, were free to walk away. To become, in a sense, ordinary, wounded people, able to make choices in large ways instead of just in small ones. To live in peacetime.

So of course, the series ended. To my delight, in 2014 Soho Press brought out the first book of Downing's next series, Jack of Spies. Oh, marvelous -- Downing simply moved back into the preceding war! In the second book of this series, released this week, ONE MAN'S FLAG, Downing takes readers on a much stranger journey than in his Berlin series. Despite the popular pre-, post-, and in-the-midst-of-war mysteries that are circulating from other authors around the World War I timeline (Charles Todd; Jacqueline Winspeare; Pat Barker), this massive monster of a war is less well known to Americans -- we had so small a role in it -- and Downing draws out details that surprise and challenge. In Jack of Spies, for instance, the German occupation of part of China launched the action (and I'd never been aware of it until I read the book). In ONE MAN'S FLAG, we discover also the perilous state of the British Empire, first in India, where Jack McColl is investigating gun-running efforts to feed a predictable rebellion against the long-time foreign rulers -- and then in Ireland.

And it's Ireland that has pulled steadily on McColl and his former lover, Caitlyn Hanley. If you haven't read Jack of Spies, sorry, this will "spoil" its plot a bit -- but you can't go into ONE MAN'S FLAG without learning right away what Jack did in the debut book of the series, his serious and painful betrayal of Caitlyn and her brother that smashed their relationship and sent them spinning to opposite corners for the opening of the war. But fear not -- that revelation's barely scratched the surface of the first book. Should you read it before ONE MAN'S FLAG? Yes, probably. You don't "need" to, as the second book retells, quite deftly, the core of the first one. Oh well -- don't worry, you'll catch up, in either sequence.

The point is, Downing lays out the intriguing but less well-known crises of the opening salvoes of the war, including Ireland's Easter Rising, which any history book or website will tell you right away was timed to shrug off British rule ... but naively, and with very poor timing indeed. Still, it's the crisis that pulls Jack and Caitlyn back toward each other. Neither has been able to walk away from what their love means to them. And this time, it's not just Jack who struggles with loyalty: Caitlyn's commitment to honor her brother's death sets her up to potentially entrap Jack, for revenge, maybe even death.

That's where the book title takes on increasing importance: It's from an expression that is supposed to be an old one, parallel to "one man's meat is another man's poison" -- this time, "one man's flag is another man's shroud." If Jack is to serve his British masters honorably, he may put Caitlyn in danger. And if she is to honor her brother's commitment to the Irish independence cause, she will do worse to Jack.

Downing provides more than a page-turning plot, and more than fresh views of the events of this "war to end all wars" -- he looks into the face of War itself, over and over, not just through Jack and Caitlyn's eyes but also through Jack's brother Jed, who rises bitterly to Caitlyn's probing challenge, to spell out what it's like in the trenches:

"I used to take the human body for granted," he began conversationally. "What you saw was what you saw. Just another person. And sometimes I still see them that way. But mostly they're bags, bags made of skin, crammed full of blood and flesh. And the bags get punctured so easily, and all that stuff falls out. Slithers out, usually. Brains, intestines. You see men who suddenly realize that their bag has split, and they're desperately trying to hold it together, but they can't. You see someone you know well, someone you've seen talk and laugh and eat and smoke, and suddenly there's nothing there under the nose but blood pumping out, and the eyes are still open, full of horror. And you think, Thank God that isn't me." He fell silent, as if remembering something.

Facing such revelations, small wonder that it's Caitlyn even more than Jack who sees the disaster that the Great War is inflicting on the peoples of Europe. Will either she or Jack be able to see their own work clearly enough to survive, in any sense whole?

Sign me up for every book of this series. As in his earlier series, Downing portrays with detailed intensity the life of honorable people and especially of clear-eyed women in his espionage fiction. The epigraph for ONE MAN'S FLAG is a Virginia Woolf comment on women, ending, "As a woman my country is the whole world." Caitlyn might say the same -- and Jack might have time to hear it, before his nation pulls him back to his own sort of trenches to soldier onward.

If your mystery reading is wide and varied, you may have come across the Diana Gabaldon books -- oddly, and poignantly, Downing's books inhabit a parallel universe of strong passion and irresistible forces of history. And, of course, risk. Danger. And integrity.

Which is, of course, why I recommend them so strongly.

Summer Reading: Intense Mysteries from Established Authors

Here are some terrific releases for this summer, to put into the beach bag or suitcase.

David Downing, JACK OF SPIES. First in a new series, espionage and an unforgettable protagonist, Jack McColl, in the threatening season as the Great War becomes inevitable. Reviewed already: http://kingdombks.blogspot.com/2014/05/world-war-i-espionage-from-david.html ... Full set of Downing reviews, here.http://kingdombks.blogspot.com/search?q=David+downing

Henry Chang, DEATH MONEY. Fourth in the Jack Yu series, set in Chinatown, best yet. Review over the weekend, if I can make time. Missed out on the earlier ones? Reviews here.

Garry Disher, HELL TO PAY. Let's hope this is the start of a new series .... yes, it's that good. Review to follow soon. If you haven't yet read Disher's Australian police procedurals and very dark crime fiction, here's a great place to start. We keep mentioning Disher and Dave and I fight (gently) over who gets which ones first; see why, here.

Anna Loan-Wilsey, A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT. Third in the Hattie Davish historical mysteries, well plotted and paced, again showing that this author can take her material outside the soft "historical" stereotype with her assertive and intriguing sleuth. June 24 pub date, review soon. Loan-Wilsey's first book was amazing: review for that one, here.

Taylor Stevens, THE CATCH. Exceeds even the high bar already set by Stevens for the androgenous and tough Vanessa Munroe, in another global thriller. July 15 pub date; review in early July. I wait all year for the next one, on edge (really). See why, here.

Julia Keller SUMMER OF THE DEAD. West Virginia, third to feature prosecutor Bell Elkins, full of action, suspense, and bitter questions. Pub date is August, and review will run sooner, as it's worth pre-ordering (and lucky you, if you can attend an author event). Get ready with a look at her earlier work here.

World War I Espionage from David Downing: JACK OF SPIES, Compelling New Series

David Downing's well-established espionage series set in Berlin during the Second World War wrapped up after six books, reaching the end of the war and a more settled situation for John Russell, reluctant spy finally able to settle with his family in a safe place. The series end didn't surprise readers, but it certainly brought a sense of loss.

Fortunately, Downing's opened a new series, this time opening in 1913, before the domino-game of catastrophes that would engage so many nations that it would become the first "world" war -- the Great War, the war to end all wars (ah, if only). In a sweep of geography and exhilaration that an elegant man of the time could encompass, Downing's quick-paced adventure for protagonist Jack McColl begins in a German-occupied section of China (did you know? I didn't!) and roars across the Pacific to San Francisco, then to Chicago, New York and New Jersey (the mills of Paterson!), and at last across another ocean to Ireland, that hotbed of rebellion and skilled revolutionaries.

Those who already know Downing's craft realize his deft hand with romantic passion and delicately portrayed merging of lust and love -- and like the "Station" series (his Berlin one), JACK OF SPIES includes a serious affair of the heart: Jack McColl's quick infatuation with an Irish-descent adventuress, Caitlin Hanley, turns out to be far deeper than a traveler's passion. But Caitlin has her own motives and powerful allies, and her motives don't align with John's; how long can the relationship survive their opposite loyalties and missions?

What I especially appreciate about Downing's writing is his willingness to admit that spies have feelings, often uncomfortable and distressing and even disabling, brought about both by the situations of hidden lives and danger, and their own adaptive rootlessness. Here's a bit from JACK OF SPIES as Jack McColl deals with the way deaths keep piling up around him, not just in war-poised China but even among the hills of San Francisco:

As he watched the hills of San Francisco draw ever closer from the bow of the ferry, McColl tried to shake off the numbness that seemed in danger of immobilizing him. Jatish was dead, and that was that -- he had no time to mourn a man he'd known for only an hour. ...

He'd been shown how ruthless the enemy was and he would have to be more vigilant. Disembarking, he scanned the waiting travelers with more concern than usual, double-checking several faces that instinct told him were innocent. In this job, he realized, paranoia could become second nature.

Although Downing is sometimes compared with that master of British spy fiction, John Le Carré, the literary link should be with Alan Furst, who also demonstrates the compelling process by which an ordinary person in an uneasy time can become a collaborator in the secret world of political maneuvers that demand nations and armies to follow. His mood isn't as pervasively dark as Furst's, yet the costs and deaths add up steadily, and by the end of JACK OF SPIES, a reader may be attentively waiting for more than the next book -- one waits for the inevitable conflict, whose roots are clearly exposed as McColl continues to accept his risky assignments.

Brought to us by Soho Crime ... wonder how many books the Great War will spin into, as Jack McColl is thrust into examining the loyalties and conflicts of the people and nations around him?