"You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and then control him, but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he's caught" Harold Macmillan.
When Maggie and Gorbachev became friendly and the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War seemingly ended, there were various articles in newspapers signalling the end of James Bond, John le Carre and the entire spy genre in fiction. After all, if we were now all friendly and loving each other, what need of spies?
Well we all know that the thriller/spy story has not died and, in fact, seems healthier than ever and in the last few months have certainly carried on reading in this genre. The Trinity Six by Charles Cumming has the premise that there was not only a Third, Fourth and Fifth man but now a Sixth coming out of the shadows. We all know about Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Anthony Blunt and then later John Cairncross, but the plot behind this story is that there was yet another one (was there anybody at Cambridge around 
this time who was not a Soviet agent I wonder?) The above quote appears at the front of the book and I daresay the government thought they had all the aforementioned spies under control, but as three of them skipped over to the Motherland, they obviously got it wrong.
The identify of the Sixth man has been discovered by Charlotte, a free lance journalist who is ready to go public with the scoop of a lifetime. No surprises that there are people around who don't want this to happen and she suffers a mysterious heart attack before she can publish her findings. Her friend and colleague Gaddis, a historian whose speciality is Russia, decides to pick up the trail and find out the identity of the sixth man, but where to start? It would seem that all of Charlotte's computer files have been wiped and he has only a few tenuous leads.
What happens next is a fast paced thriller with our hero escaping death by the skin of his teeth and whisking backwards and forwards to Moscow, Berlin and Vienna with Those who Wish to Stop Him snapping at his heels. All done extremely well with sharp edged narrative and snappy dialogue.
Great fun and pure escapist literature. I say escapist but it would not surprise me in the slightest if there was such a Sixth man, nay, even a Seventh. There have been so many cover ups in the past over traitors at the heart of the Establishment and after watching eight series of Spooks on the trot, I am now ready to believe that everyone you meet in the House of Commons is a double or treble agent.
OK well perhaps not John Prescott – though having said that, his I am a complete prat persona might just be deep deep cover and underneath lurks a razor sharp mind.
No, surely not…..
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