John Lawton – författare

It’s London, the swinging sixties, and by all rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are more grim than glamorous. Luckily, Wilderness has a knack for doing well for himself even in the most unpromising postings—though this has gotten him into hot water in the past.

A coffee-smuggling gig in divided Berlin was a steady money-maker but things went pear-shaped when he had to smuggle a spy back to the KGB instead. In the wake of what became an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness is reprimanded with a posting to remote northern Finland, under the guise of a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money—this time by smuggling vodka across the rather porous border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with his old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is—no joke—a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union, following a grain famine caused by Khrushchev’s new agricultural policies.

But there is something fishy about why Kostya has suddenly turned up in Finland, and MI6 intelligence from London points to a connection to the mining of cobalt in the region—a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb. Wilderness’s posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too.

Moving from the no-man’s-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends (including Inspector Troy) and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skullduggery, of art and politics—a gripping story of the always riveting life of the British spy.

London, 1944. While the Luftwaffe makes its final assault on the already battered British capital, Londoners rush through the streets, seeking underground shelter in the midst of the city’s blackout. When the panic subsides, other things begin to surface along with London’s war-worn citizens. A severed arm is discovered by a group of children playing at an East End bomb site, and when Scotland Yard’s Detective Sergeant Frederick Troy arrives at the scene, it becomes apparent that the dismembered body is not the work of a V-1 rocket.

After Troy manages to link the severed arm to the disappearance of a refugee scientist from Nazi Germany, America’s newest intelligence agency, the OSS, decides to get involved. The son of a titled Russian émigré, Troy is forced to leave the London he knows and enter a corrupt world of bloody consequences, stateless refugees, and mysterious women as he unearths a chain of secrets leading straight to the Allied high command.

England in 1963 is a country set to explode. The old guard, shocked by the habits of the war-baby youth—sex, drugs, and rock and roll—sets out to fight back. The battle moves uncomfortably close to Chief Inspector Troy. While Troy is on medical leave for a nasty case of tuberculosis, the Yard brings charges against an acquaintance of his, a hedonistic doctor with a penchant for voyeurism and uninhibited young women. Two of these women just happen to be sleeping with a senior man at the foreign office and a KGB agent. But on the eve of the verdict a curious double case of suicide drags Troy back into active duty. Beyond bedroom acrobatics, the secret affairs now stretch to double-crosses and backroom deals in the halls of Parliament, not to mention murder. It’s all Troy can do, fighting off some bad habits of his own, to stay afloat in a country immersed in drugs and up to its neck in scandal.

Praised for their riveting, ingenious plot twists, John Lawton’s series of espionage thrillers featuring Chief Inspector Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard have an uncanny ability to place readers in the thick of history.

Now an old flame has returned to Troy’s life: Kitty Stilton, wife of an American presidential hopeful. Private eye Joey Rork has been hired to make sure Kitty’s amorous liaisons with a rat pack crooner don’t ruin her husband’s political career. But he also wants to know why Kitty has been spotted with Danny Ryan, whose twin brothers, in addition to owning one of London’s hottest jazz clubs, are said to have inherited the crime empire of fallen mobster Alf Marx. Before Rork can find out, he meets a gruesome end. And he isn’t the only one: bodies have started turning up around London, dismembered in the same bizarre and horrifying way. Is it possible that the blood trail leads back to Troy’s own police force and into Troy’s own forgotten past?

This compulsively readable thriller finds one of our most able storytellers at the height of his game.

Spanning the tumultuous years of 1934 to 1948, John Lawton’s A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters—Méret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel’s start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home and across the untraditional battlefields of a destructive war to an unexpected intersection at the novel’s close. The result, A Lily of the Field, is Lawton’s best book yet, a historically accurate and remarkably written novel that explores the diaspora or two Europeans from the rise of Hitler to the postatomic age.

The sixth installment in the Inspector Troy series, Lawton’s novel opens in 1938 with Europe on the brink of war. In London, Frederick Troy, newly promoted to the prestigious Murder Squad at Scotland Yard, is put in charge of rounding up a list of German and Italian “enemy aliens” that also includes Frederick’s brother, Rod, who learns upon receiving an internment letter that despite having grown up in England he is Austrian born. Hundreds of men are herded by train to a neglected camp on the Isle of Man. And, as the bombs start falling on London, a murdered rabbi is found, then another, and another. Amidst great war, murder is what matters. Moving from the Nazi-infested alleys of prewar Vienna to the bombed-out streets of 1940 London, and featuring an extraordinary cast of characters, Lawton’s latest brings to life war-torn London. In this uncommon thriller, John Lawton delivers a suspenseful and intelligent novel, as good a spy story as it is a historical narrative.

In April 1956, at the height of the Cold War, Khrushchev and Bulganin, leaders of the Soviet Union, are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be Khrushchev’s bodyguard and to spy on him. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead and mutilated beyond recognition in Portsmouth Harbor. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood, and into the dangerous arms of an old flame. Brilliantly evoking the intrigue of the Cold War and 1950s London, Old Flames is a thrilling adventure of intrigue and suspense.

The latest novel in a series regularly singled out for its exceptional quality features Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard in a tale of Cold War spy dealings centered around double agent Guy Burgess—a story of betrayal, espionage, and the dangers of love.

London, 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a European trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod has decided to take his entire family on the “grand tour” for his fifty-first birthday: a whirlwind of restaurants, galleries, and concert halls from Paris to Florence to Vienna to Amsterdam. But Frederick Troy only gets as far as Vienna. It is there that he crosses paths with an old acquaintance, a man who always seems to be followed by trouble: British spy turned Soviet agent Guy Burgess.

Suffice it to say that Troy is more than surprised when Burgess, who has escaped from the bosom of Moscow for a quick visit to Vienna, tells him something extraordinary: “I want to come home.” Troy knows this news will cause a ruckus in London—but even Troy doesn’t expect an MI5 man to be gunned down as a result, and Troy himself suspected of doing the deed.

As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy is haunted by more than just Burgess’ past liaisons—there is a scandal that goes up to the highest ranks of Westminster, affecting spooks and politicians alike. And the stakes become all the higher for Troy when he reencounters a woman he first met in the Ritz hotel during a blackout—falling in love is a handicap when playing the game of spies.