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WORK TITLE: A Very British Ending
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.edwardwilson.info/
CITY: Suffolk, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
Born in US, immigrated to UK, naturalized British citizen. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wilson_(novelist) * http://crimereview.co.uk/page.php/review/2637
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Baltimore, MD; immigrated to England, 1976 (naturalized citizen, 1983).
EDUCATION:Attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and University of Virginia.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Lowestoft College, Lowestoft, Suffolk, England, former lecturer, twenty-one years.
MIILITARY:U.S. Army special forces, 1968; Bronze Star Medal, Army Commendation Medal for Valor, and Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Independent, Tribune (political magazine), the Guardian, and Open Democracy.
SIDELIGHTS
Edward Wilson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and he attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute and then the University of Virginia. Wilson was a member of the U.S. Army special forces during the Vietnam War, and he earned a Bronze Star Medal, an Army Commendation Medal for Valor, and a Combat Infantryman’s Badge for his service. As part of the special forces, Wilson worked in intelligence, and despite his exemplary service, Wilson became disillusioned by American foreign policy and the Vietnam War. Thus, Wilson immigrated to England in 1976, and he became a naturalized British citizen in 1983, even going so far as to renounce his American citizenship.
Wilson has since gone on to write several spy novels, both stand-alone stories and installments in the “William Catesby” series. While most of his books are set in Britain, Wilson’s U.S. intelligence experience provides insight and inspiration. Wilson told an online Crime Thriller Fella interviewer, “Being a Special Forces officer in Vietnam was far from the media image of constant combat action. It was more about going native, running intelligence networks and dealing with double agents—experiences which are invaluable for a writer of spy fiction.” Wilson published his first novel, A River in May, in 2002, followed by The Envoy in 2006.
The Envoy is set in Britain during the 1950s, and it follows diplomat and spy Kit Fournier. Kit works as a counselor for political affairs at the U.S. embassy on Grosvenor Square, which is his cover, but he is actually head of the local CIA station. Fournier is assigned to keep the United Kingdom from gaining nuclear weapons capabilities and to bring Britain more and more under U.S. control. To do so, Fournier must undermine British-Soviet relations.
The Envoy largely fared well with critics, and a View from the Blue House columnist announced that it is “overall, a very well told story, with a couple of nice twists and turns, and an excellent resolution that proves that nothing is as it seems, even to those that think they can see the hand that each party is holding.” Susanna Yager in the Telegraph Online offered further applause, declaring that the novel is “a sophisticated, convincing novel that shows governments and their secret services as cynically exploitative and utterly ruthless.”
Wilson began the “William Catesby” series with The Darkling Spy in 2010, and he added to the series a year later with The Midnight Swimmer. The third installment, The Whitehall Mandarin, came out in 2015, and the fourth installment, A Very British Ending, was released in 2016. Discussing the eponymous character of his “William Catesby” series in his Crime Thriller Fella interview, Wilson explained: “Catesby is the most conflicted ‘hero’ in the spy genre. He doesn’t know who he is. His widowed Belgian mother brings him up as a French and Flemish speaking Roman Catholic in East Anglia. He’s a ‘normal’ English lad on the school playground, but becomes a European when he goes home. Catesby’s genius for languages enables him to exchange the grinding poverty of Lowestoft for a place studying Modern Languages at Cambridge. Commissioned as an officer in SOE, he is parachuted into France to liaise with the Resistance where he is traumatised by the SS massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. The memory of Oradour haunts Catesby the rest of his life.”
The Darkling Spy
With The Darkling Spy, Wilson introduces Catesby via his soon-to-be boss, Henry Bone. While working in Whitehall intelligence, Bone becomes aware of an intelligence asset known only as Butterfly. Apparently, Butterfly holds the keys to several Cold War secrets that could take down top operatives and politicians. Butterfly is also planning to defect to America, and Bone is determined to stop it. The only clues he has to go one are the Butterfly’s beauty and penchant for depraved acts. In order to smoke out the Butterfly’s identity, Bone turns to disgraced spy Catesby. Given his disgraced status, Catesby is the perfect decoy; he will pose as a defector like Butterfly, thus coming into contact with Butterfly’s contacts.
According to an online View from the Blue House critic, “the denouement felt a little flat, although in keeping with the understated telling of the rest of the story.” Nonetheless, the critic went on to conclude that The Darkling Spy is, “overall, a very good cold war spy tale.” A reviewer on the Book Drunk website was far more impressed, asserting: “[This] is the third Edward Wilson novel I’ve read and my favourite so far. The plot was strong and captivating and the characterisation, as ever, was flawless. Starting this late at night, I couldn’t put it down and was disappointed when it ended.”
A Very British Ending
Catesby’s adventures continue in The Midnight Swimmer, The Whitehall Mandarin, and A Very British Ending. In the latter title, Catesby and Bone are worried about two-time prime minister Harold Wilson. They follow Wilson’s career from its early days, well before he is elected prime minister. Catesby and Bone are convinced Wilson is a secret communist double agent. As the intrepid heroes track Wilson, the action spans the entire Cold War period, eventually resulting in a military coup. In this manner, “the author replaces the violence and mayhem of a typical American spy novel with backroom skullduggery,” a Publishers Weekly critic noted.
Lauding A Very British Ending in MBR Bookwatch, Able Greenspan declared: “A deftly crafted and simply riveting read from cover to cover, A Very British Ending by a master of the genre is unreservedly recommended.” John Cleal, writing on the Crime Review website, offered both pros and cons, asserting that “Wilson’s skill is to blend fact and fiction so seamlessly that it becomes almost inseparable and completely believable. His failure is that his political motivation has led him to swallow wholesale every conspiracy theory of the loony left and regurgitate it.” Cleal added: “Despite its bias, this is probably the best espionage story you’ll read this year or any other. It’s brilliantly written, cleverly paced and there’s enough truth to make you wonder.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Independent (London, England), January 17, 2012, review of The Midnight Swimmer, p. 46.
MBR Bookwatch, January, 2017, Able Greenspan, review of A Very British Ending.
Publishers Weekly, November 14, 2016, review of A Very British Ending, p. 36.
ONLINE
Book Drunk, http://www.book-drunk.co.uk/ (May 16, 2014), review of A River in May; (August 13, 2017), review of The Darkling Spy.
Crime Review, http://crimereview.co.uk/ (September 12, 2015), John Cleal, review of A Very British Ending.
Crime Thriller Fella, https://crimethrillerfella.wordpress.com/ (August 28, 2017), author interview.
Edward Wilson Website, http://www.edwardwilson.info/ (August 28, 2017).
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (July 3, 2014), review of The Whitehall Mandarin.
[My] Contribution to the [Return of] the Critique of Political Economy, https://critiqueofpoliticaleconomy.com/ (July 9, 2016), Rob Reutenauer, review of A River in May.
Telegraph Online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (March 16, 2008), Susanna Yager, review of The Envoy.
View from the Blue House, http://theviewfromthebluehouse.blogspot.com/ (July 13, 2012), review of The Envoy; (September 11, 2013), review of The Darkling Spy.*
Edward Wilson (novelist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edward Wilson is a British writer of spy fiction. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, United States, he emigrated to the United Kingdom after serving in the Vietnam War, renounced his US citizenship to naturalise in his new country, and after three decades as a teacher chose to quit to devote himself full-time to his career as a novelist. He has written six novels, all published by Arcadia Books.
Contents [hide]
1 Personal life
2 Works
2.1 A River in May
2.2 The Envoy
2.3 The Darkling Spy
2.4 The Midnight Swimmer
2.5 The Whitehall Mandarin
2.6 A Very British Ending
3 References
4 External links
Personal life[edit]
Wilson was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His Anglo-Indian-descended father, a merchant sailor, died when Edward was just six months old, leaving Edward's mother to raise him and his two brothers. He did his secondary education at the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute before going on to the University of Virginia on a Reserve Officers' Training Corps scholarship.[1] He was shipped off to the Vietnam War in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive as a member of a Special Forces unit; he stated that "I didn't think it was right to stay at home, plus if you were an officer there was only a one in ten chance of being hurt", but the experience sharpened his opposition to the foreign policy of the United States.[2] For his actions in the war he was decorated with the Bronze Star Medal and the Army Commendation Medal for Valor.[3]
After the war, Wilson travelled in Canada and later spent time in Bremen, Germany as a language student.[2] In 1976 he settled in Suffolk, England, where he worked as a teacher for three decades.[4][3] He naturalised as a British citizen in 1983 and renounced his US citizenship.[4]
Politically, Wilson is a socialist and a supporter of trade unions.[2]
Works[edit]
A River in May[edit]
Wilson's debut novel A River in May, published in 2002, was based on his experiences in the Vietnam War. As he stated, the book "expelled my battlefield demons".[5] It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.[6]
The Envoy[edit]
The Envoy is set in Britain in the 1950s, and discusses an American plot to sabotage USSR–UK relations. Its protagonist is Kit Fournier, the Central Intelligence Agency station chief at the Embassy of the United States, London.[7] It was the first book in what was originally intended to be a trilogy of spy novels, but later had a fourth book added to it with the publication of The Whitehall Mandarin. The book introduces characters who would go on to play a larger role in Wilson's later novels, including William Catesby [no sign of this character in the Kindle version of The Envoy], a native of a Suffolk fishing village who fits in poorly with either his old neighbours or his government colleagues, and his boss Henry Bone.[4][8] A running joke in the series describes how Catesby's alleged ancestor Robert Catesby planned the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.[9]
The Darkling Spy[edit]
In Wilson's 2011 novel The Darkling Spy, the year is 1956, and Catesby is serving under official cover at the British Embassy in Bonn. Kit Fournier from The Envoy appears again, but in this book he has fallen in love with an English woman who serves as a spy for Moscow, and is considering defection. Publishers Weekly compared Catesby to the John le Carré character George Smiley, and stated that he "will delight those readers looking for less blood and more intelligence in their spy thrillers".[10]
The Midnight Swimmer[edit]
The Midnight Swimmer, published in 2012, is set against the build-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.[8][11]
The Whitehall Mandarin[edit]
The Whitehall Mandarin, was published in May 2014. The launch was held at Hatchards bookshop in London.[2] The title is a reference both to bureaucrats and to China, and the question of how China was able to develop thermonuclear weapons so quickly plays a role in the novel.[4] Paul French reviewed it favourably in The Los Angeles Review of Books, stating that "Finally Edward Wilson is garnering the praise and readers in England he's long deserved, but it is to be hoped that America can discover him too".[4] Denis MacShane expressed similar sentiments in his review in Tribune magazine.[2]
A Very British Ending[edit]
A Very British Ending is published on 14 April 2016. It takes Catesby's story into the 1970s.[12]
Edward Wilson
EDWARD WILSON is a native of Baltimore where he attended the same high school as Dashiell Hammett. He went on to study International Relations on a US Army scholarship and served as a Special Forces officer in Vietnam. He received the Army Commendation Medal with ‘V’ for his part in rescuing badly wounded Vietnamese soldiers from a minefield. His other decorations include the Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
After leaving the Army, Wilson became an expatriate and gave up US nationality to become a British citizen. He has also lived and worked in Germany and France. The author has made his home in Suffolk since 1976. He was a lecturer at Lowestoft College for twenty-one years and continued to teach in Suffolk schools while becoming a full-time writer. He lives in a remote village with his partner. He is a keen vegetable gardener and runner who loves swimming in rivers and the sea.
Edward Wilson is the author of five previous novels, A River in May, The Envoy, The Darkling Spy, The Midnight Swimmer and The Whitehall Mandarin all published by Arcadia Books. As a commentator and reviewer, he has written for The Independent, Tribune Magazine, The Guardian and Open Democracy.
The Intel: Edward Wilson
1 Reply
Edward WilsonEdward Wilson has been picking up some pretty fine reviews for his Catesby sequence of spy novels, and has even been described as the ‘thinking person’s Le Carré’.’ His latest novel, The Whitehall Mandarin, out now in hardback and on kindle, sees his protagonist threading his way through the sex scandals of London in the Swinging Sixties and into the war-torn jungles of Southeast Asia, on a mission to uncover the truth about a Ministry of Defence official.
And Edward is one of those authors who’s walked the walk. Trained as a spy, he served as a Special Forces officer in Vietnam and received the Army Commendation Medal with ‘V’ for his part in rescuing wounded Vietnamese soldiers from a minefield.
So you can imagine that in this Intel Interview Edward has some absolutely fascinating things to say about the golden age of espionage, dodgy dossiers, wine o’clock, and reading every single review…
The Whitehall Mandarin is a Cold War thriller in the classic style – tell us about it…
All of my books are sequels to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. As a Special Forces officer in Vietnam dealing with agents and double agents, I quickly realised that I had stepped through the looking glass into a world that was not rational and where nothing or no one was what they seemed. Jeffers Cauldwell, the ‘villain’ of The Whitehall Mandarin, is a looking glass chameleon who changes shape and voice from chapter to chapter.
And Lady Penelope Somers, the eponymous Whitehall mandarin, is the greatest shape changer of all. The historically accurate plot focuses on the split between the Soviet Union and Maoist China – which nearly erupted into a Communist v. Communist nuclear war in 1969. The West was a bit slow to adapt to the change in the global balance of power, but then did so making what my reviewer in The Sunday Times describes as ‘a colossal strategic blunder lasting decades’.
The truth behind China’s A and H bombs and her rise towards becoming the world’s greatest superpower is the most closely guarded state secret of modern time. The book, however, blends personal secrets with state secrets. The truth about Lady Somers, the first woman to head up the Ministry of Defence and her wild-child daughter Miranda, is devastating. I wept into my keyboard when I wrote the final pages – but there are funny bits too!
Your spy protagonist Catesby has appeared in four novels now – how would you describe him to a new reader?
Catesby is the most conflicted ‘hero’ in the spy genre. He doesn’t know who he is. His widowed Belgian mother brings him up as a French and Flemish speaking Roman Catholic in East Anglia. He’s a ‘normal’ English lad on the school playground, but becomes a European when he goes home. Catesby’s genius for languages enables him to exchange the grinding poverty of Lowestoft for a place studying Modern Languages at Cambridge. Commissioned as an officer in SOE, he is parachuted into France to liaise with the Resistance where he is traumatised by the SS massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. The memory or Oradour haunts Catesby the rest of his life. After standing unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate in the 1945 election, Catesby is snapped up by SIS (aka MI6). He marries an upper class Englishwoman, but the marriage doesn’t work. Catesby becomes a protégé of spymaster Henry Bone, a discreetly gay aristocrat and friend of Anthony Blunt.
The somewhat sinister Bone ensures Catesby’s advancement in SIS, partly to protect his own secrets. Catesby is distrusted by many in SIS and MI5 for his left wing politics and working class background, but Catesby is always a loyal Briton who loves his country. The name, of course, is ironic – Catesby was leader of the Gunpowder Plot. When the Queen awards Catesby his OBE she gently teases him with, ‘We ought to have scheduled this for the 5th of November.’
How would Catesby cope in the contemporary spy world, do you think?
He would have gone ballistic over Iraq and the dodgy dossier about WMD. Catesby would not have survived in post during the years of the Bush/Blair special relationship. The CIA would have been baying for his blood and his MI6 bosses would have sent Langley all eight pints of it. On the other hand, Catesby would be a valuable asset for dealing with Europe and Francophone Africa. His language skills – he also speaks fluent German and good Russian – would have been invaluable. Catesby would be a good agent to have in Paris or Berlin – and might even have made some sense out of the Ukraine.
The Whitehall Mandarin moves from the sex scandals of the 1960s to the jungles of Vietnam — why were the Sixties such a Golden Age for dangerous secrets?
The Sixties were a Golden Age for spy fiction, but the best single year was 1956! Fifty-six started with Khrushchev’s Secret Speech which signaled the first crack in the Iron Curtain and led to riots in Poznan and the Hungarian uprising. In retrospect, Khrushchev’s speech unchained the forces that led to the Fall of the Wall. In April 1956, Khrushchev sailed to England for a détente summit with Eden. The summit was wrecked by unauthorised bugging and espionage on the part of MI6. Frogman Lionel Crabb disappeared while spying on the Soviet cruiser docked at Portsmouth. The year ended with the Suez Crisis and Prime Minister Eden cracking up as Washington pulled the plug on the pound to force Britain to withdraw from Suez. I write about these events in The Envoy and The Darkling Spy.
But yes, the Sixties was the ultimate Golden Age. The John Vassall spy trial, the Profumo scandal, the Cuban Missile Crisis (I reveal a secret British deal in The Midnight Swimmer), the Golitisin and Nosenko defections, the ‘mysterious’ death of Hugh Gaitskell and the JFK assassination all occurred within a couple of years. Meanwhile, cultural changes were infuriating the Old Guard and turning the colonels puce – and there was still Vietnam and the Wilson Plot to come! And the decade ended with a border war between China and the Soviet Union which almost turned nuclear – see The Whitehall Mandarin for more.
Jacket imageHow have your own experiences fuelled the Catesby series?
Being a Special Forces officer in Vietnam was far from the media image of constant combat action. It was more about going native, running intelligence networks and dealing with double agents – experiences which are invaluable for a writer of spy fiction. I was an SF advisor with the CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Group), a border screening force that patrolled from remote camps the length of South Vietnam. My CIDG soldiers were Vietnamese, brave fighters certainly, but also heavily infiltrated with sleeper agents. It was estimated that at least 10% of our CIDG were undercover Viet Cong. It was a ‘through the looking glass experience’. Our bravest and seemingly most loyal soldiers were the very ones that we most suspected of being double agents! I did learn the most important lesson for any intelligence officer: you can never be completely certain who anyone is.
I also lived and worked in Germany in the 1970s at the height of the Cold War. I learned the language pretty well and got to understand the culture and politics. This is particularly reflected in The Darkling Spy. I knew a few lower level spies and a diplomat – whom I’m sure had an intelligence function too. On one occasion, I was interviewed by the West German security service – but was assured it was only a ‘routine’ vetting for all Ausländer, foreigners.
Who are the spy thriller authors you admire – and why?
I have to say John le Carré. I am flattered to have been compared to him. Le Carré is to spy fiction what Shakespeare is to Elizabethan drama. But there are other fine Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists: Marlow, Jonson, Ford, Webster. I see myself as John Webster to le Carré’s Shakespeare. Webster’s work is more noir than Shakespeare’s and deals with a world of false appearances and double dealing. In fact, I regard the drama of the period as very close to spy fiction. The Elizabethan cold and sometimes hot war was between Protestant England and Catholic Europe – and England was full of fears about spies and undercover Jesuits.
My favourite standalone spy novel is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. The Russians – still Tsarist – run a perfect ‘false flag’ operation out of their London embassy so that an anti-Tsarist anarchist revolutionary group get blamed for an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. I suspect similar false flag ops have been carried out more recently
Take us through a typical writing day for you?
I get up at six, have a pee, and then a breakfast of two muffins with butter and Bonne Mamam blueberry jam and two cups of tea. I then make a third cup of tea and carry it up to my writing desk. I try to write at least 1,500 words, but might have to deal with urgent emails too. I stop between noon and one o’clock and go for a three mile run and do a hundred press-ups. I have lunch – two slices of Vogel bread with cheese and cucumber – have a shower and then go back to my writing desk.
I continue to work until wine o’clock, which happens after 6 pm – no alcohol ever during working hours. We have supper and then I go back to my writing desk to answer more emails and do research. I try to be in bed by 10:30. My partner insists that I do something else on Saturday or Sunday. I sometimes do a bit of bird-watching from my desk and have a pair of binoculars at the ready. My current favourite is the green woodpecker.
What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?
Entertaining the reader is more important than the writer’s ego. The reader always comes first. If there were no readers, there would be no publishing industry. It sounds obvious, but there are a lot of writers who still don’t realise that.
How do you deal with feedback?
Very seriously. I read every single review – including all the Amazon customer reviews. I respond to praise by trying to reinforce those areas of my writing. I respond to criticism, by trying to fix the problem – but I will never dumb down. I respect my readers as intelligent and creative persons who like a bit of a challenge.
Give me some advice about writing…
Characters come first. In fact, you must let your characters shape the plot – otherwise, the plot will appear artificial. You must also do good villains – preferably a villain that the reader secretly admires like Tom Ripley or Francis Urquhart. Your main character must have a foil: every Holmes needs a Watson. The conversations between the two are an excellent way of developing plot and narrative
Tension is more important than suspense. Everyone knows that Romeo and Juliet are not going to live happily ever after, but we still go to see the play. Sometimes revealing what happens in the first line of a chapter is more effective than springing it later. The reader is going to be on tenterhooks waiting for the dramatic event to happen.
What’s your best advice for an author looking to get into the marketplace…
Learn to pitch your book in fifty words or less – and it’s got to be powerful and original. Agents and publishers get thousands of submissions and they rely on sharp short pitches to persuade them to pick up a manuscript. Also, try to make yourself sound interesting.
What’s next for you?
An insider’s novel about the sinister forces that nearly brought an end to parliamentary democracy in Britain.
A Very British Ending
Publishers Weekly.
263.46 (Nov. 14, 2016): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Very British Ending
Edward Wilson. Arcadia (Dufour, disk), $18 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-1-910050-77-4
Wilson's fine fifth novel featuring spy William Catesby (after 2014's The Whitehall Mandarin) focuses on Catesby's
career from just after WWII to the mid-1970s. Throughout this Cold War period, Catesby and a few others, including
his boss, Henry Bone, take it upon themselves to guard Great Britain from its most insidious enemies: far-right
elements at home and those in America who see communists under every rock. Catesby and company view politician
Harold Wilson, eventually a two-time prime minister, as a Red and will consider any means to topple him, up to and
including a military coup. The author replaces the violence and mayhem of a typical American spy novel with
backroom skullduggery, smear campaigns, innuendo, and dirty money from dodgy sources, pulling in everything from a
deal in 1947 to sell Rolls-Royce jet engines to the Russians to England's World Cup victory in 1966, a victory the Red
haters ascribe to a deal between Wilson and the Soviets. Le Carre fans will find a lot to like. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"A Very British Ending." Publishers Weekly, 14 Nov. 2016, p. 36. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473458985&it=r&asid=9a7c345de08b45d6f243f01179d0554f.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473458985
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A Very British Ending
Able Greenspan
MBR Bookwatch.
(Jan. 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
A Very British Ending
Edward Wilson
Arcadia Books
c/o Dufour Editions, Inc.
PO Box 7, 124 Byers Road, Chester Springs, PA 19425-0007
www.dufoureditions.com
9781910050774, $18.00, PB, 368pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: "A Very British Ending" by Edward Wilson is the story of MI6 agent Catesby who haunted by the ghosts of
an SS atrocity and kills a Nazi war criminal in the ruins of a U-boot bunker. The German turns out to be a CIA asset
preparing to be smuggled to South America. As a hungry Britain freezes in the winter of 1947, a young cabinet minister
negotiates a deal with Moscow trading Rolls-Royce jet engines for cattle fodder and wood. Both have made powerful
enemies with long memories. The fates of the two men become entwined as one rises through MI6 and the other to
Downing Street. It is the mid-1970s and a coup d'tat is imminent. Senior MI6 officers, Catesby and Bone must try to
outwit a cabal of plotters attempting the overthrow the Prime Minister. "A Very British Ending" reveals the dark
underside of the Secret State on both sides of the Atlantic.
Critique: A deftly crafted and simply riveting read from cover to cover, "A Very British Ending" by a master of the
genre is unreservedly recommended and will prove to be an enduringly popular addition to community library
Suspense/Thriller fiction collections. For personal reading lists it should be noted that "A Very British Ending" is also
available in a Kindle format ($4.99).
Able Greenspan
Reviewer
Greenspan, Able
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Greenspan, Able. "A Very British Ending." MBR Bookwatch, Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479869326&it=r&asid=ce61008a44b34245bb8558aa45408483.
Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479869326
The Midnight Swimmer By Edward Wilson Arcadia, [pounds sterling]11.99
The Independent (London, England). (Jan. 17, 2012): News: p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Independent Print Ltd.
http://www.independent.co.uk/
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Full Text:
Killing is always a serious matter. All too often, amid the glitzy gadgetry of the spy thriller, all the fast cars and sexual adventures, we lose sight of the essential seriousness of what is at stake. John le Carr[c] reminds us, often, and so does Edward Wilson. And Wilson has the advantage that he has chosen to play with hindsight and backstory in his trilogy of thrillers. In this third, the ominously named Catesby, a secondary figure in earlier books, takes centre-stage. We have survived Catesby's adventures, but might not have done.
This book is set in the early 1960s. We first see Catesby and his duplicitous boss, Henry Bone, disposing of an inconvenient American in a manner we recognise as tradecraft from its similarities to what has been alleged about the death of Dr David Kelly. They operate in the murky area where intelligence gathering and occasional murder overlap with deniable backdoor diplomacy, in an era where humanity's future is at stake because the US thinks of statesmanship as poker and the Russians think of it as chess.
Wilson has a nicely measured taste for historical irony and plausible conspiracy theory. This novel about what turns into the Cuban Missile Crisis is full of sidelights on the Profumo Affair, the French Connection and precisely why Marilyn Monroe sang "Happy Birthday" to JFK. Catesby is a perpetual outsider - alienated from the Norfolk fishermen among whom he grew up, but not quite one of the mandarin class. Like all outsiders, he is forced constantly to observe and notice, purely to survive.
This is an intellectually commanding thriller which does well those things that thrillers are supposed to do, but adds a mordant wit, and a poignant sense of the human cost of every move in the game of nations. Wilson's characters move among historical personages - Che Guevara gets some memorable scenes, and Harold Macmillan has a powerful moment - but there is equality. Wilson takes the real and the imagined with equal high seriousness. We spend the book knowing that the world survives - but Wilson's characters do not have that luxury, and that makes us care for them.
Order for [pounds sterling]10.89 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030
A Very British Ending
by Edward Wilson
Senior MI6 officers Catesby and Bone try to outwit a cabal of power-hungry plotters on both sides of the Atlantic trying to overthrow the British Prime Minister.
Review
Like the legendary George Smiley, Edward Wilson’s SIS man William Catesby relies more on intelligence than violence – although he is perfectly prepared to kill in cold blood. Although his loyalty is never in question, his struggles with his own conscience and political convictions lead him almost to the point of a breakdown.
Using his cosmopolitan background as a scholar and soldier, Wilson creates authentic settings and plots based on verifiable events. A master of ambiguity, he produces likable villains and nasty heroes as he exposes what he sees as the dark underside and power games of the Secret State on both sides of the Atlantic.
The story covers more than 40 years from the atrocity of Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944 when units of the Das Reich SS division massacred more than 600 men, women and children in a French village.
Catesby – it is an office joke that his alleged ancestor Robert planned the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – working with the Limousan maquis at the time of the massacre, is deeply affected and later executes a former Nazi officer who was involved. The German turns out to be a CIA ‘asset’, who is being ‘rat-lined’ to South America. In the bitter winter of 1947, when even the Channel froze and Britain faced starvation, a young cabinet minister negotiated final details of a pre-arranged deal with Moscow, trading Rolls-Royce jet engines for cattle fodder and wood. The Russians used them to power the Mig 15, so deadly to American planes in the Korean war.
Both men have made powerful enemies with long memories and their fates become entwined as one rises to the senior ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service and the other to Downing Street.
By the mid-1970s, Harold Wilson has become Prime Minister and the power and money brokers on both sides of the Atlantic, led by the obsessive CIA deputy director James Jesus Angleton, believe him a Soviet plant and plan his removal.
Faced with civil unrest at home, the failures of Wilson’s policies both overseas and in Ulster and a desperate economic and financial situation, unbelievably by 1968, a British coup d état, led by right-wing members of the establishment, MI5 and the armed forces, was imminent. Even a senior member of the Royal family was approached as potential head of a government of national unity!
If you lived through those days, as I did, you’ll know some of this is fact. Even the un-named plotters are easily identifiable from the Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, who claimed Hugh Gaitskell had been assassinated by the KGB to have the pro-US Labour leader replaced by Wilson, to Cecil King, the head of the International Publishing Corporation and Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Wilson’s skill is to blend fact and fiction so seamlessly that it becomes almost inseparable and completely believable. His failure is that his political motivation has led him to swallow wholesale every conspiracy theory of the loony left and regurgitate it – even to the point added almost as an afterthought – that Margaret Thatcher ordered the sinking of the Argentinean cruiser Belgrano knowing that a peace deal in the Falklands had come into effect!
Despite its bias, this is probably the best espionage story you’ll read this year or any other. It’s brilliantly written, cleverly paced and there’s enough truth to make you wonder just how close Britain might have come to becoming America’s ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier.’
Reviewed 12 September 2015 by John Cleal
The Exile and the Spy
By Paul French
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JULY 3, 2014
EDWARD WILSON swapped the jungles of Vietnam for the bleak coastline of the Suffolk marshes, Britain’s most easterly point, on the North Sea, facing across to Holland. He traded serving as an officer in the US Army Special Forces for a post teaching English literature and, along the way, quietly emerged as a preeminent spy novelist with an uncanny knack for recreating the milieu and language of the Cold War espionage world. Wilson renounced his US citizenship in the 1980s and took a British passport. Since then he’s been producing novels that blend reality with rumor and show that there’s never been anything particularly special about the supposed “Special Relationship” between America and Great Britain. He’s rather flown under the radar of widespread popularity, but his latest novel, The Whitehall Mandarin, might be changing that.
At the core of Wilson’s novels is Suffolk. American readers may not be familiar with the county, which is somewhat remote and self-contained by English standards. It’s where Wilson chose to lose himself after Vietnam and also where his recurring character, the rather reluctant British spy Catesby, hails from and invariably returns to at times of trouble. Wilson describes Suffolk as “acres and acres of damp un-harvested wheat bounded by thick dark woods.” It is where inward-looking villages hug the coast next to barbed wire–surrounded US Air Force bases with nuclear-armed American bombers ready to take off for Murmansk or Moscow on the signal from Washington. It is where England ends and Northern Europe begins. It is where Wilson, for roughly 40 years now, has secluded himself and worked on expunging his personal demons. Coincidentally, it’s also where one of his earliest fans, and another melancholic literary exile in England, W. G. Sebald, chose to settle and deal with his ghosts of postwar Germany.
To Wilson, Britain was at the forefront of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, caught between America and the Soviet Union. Within Britain, Suffolk is historically where invaders land: where the Vikings landed, where Nazi Germany would have landed in World War II, and where the Soviets might have come, too (but never did, thanks partly to those US bases). Wilson has settled in Suffolk and adopted this land. His spy hero Catesby (and his bosses never forget to remind him he shares the surname of the mastermind behind the 1605 Catholic Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I and blow up Parliament) is also caught between the lines. A Belgian mother marks Catesby always as an outsider of sorts, despite his English father. Of and not of, within but still somewhat without — this is, for Wilson, the eternal plight of the fluent exile and always of the spy — able to pass but always slightly suspect.
The Whitehall Mandarin extends Wilson’s planned trilogy of novels set against the backdrop of the Cold War — The Envoy, The Darkling Spy, and The Midnight Swimmer. But The Whitehall Mandarin makes an even greater attempt than his previous trilogy to provide an alternative history of British-American relations during the Cold War. While recreating reality — a British world of the Profumo sex scandal, messy decolonization, and imperial decline combined with America’s rise to prominence and simultaneous descent into the quagmire of Vietnam — Wilson finds the unreal and accentuates it. The “Last Days of Rome” sexual license of the British Establishment (always with an uppercase “E” in England), the LSD trip of 1960s America, and the Heart of Darkness that is both upcountry ’Nam and the wilds of Suffolk: everywhere is both simultaneously familiar and strange in Wilson’s alternative narratives, best comparable perhaps to James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy.
Heart of Darkness is a reference throughout the book — its appeal to Wilson perhaps obvious, the Vietnam vet turned literature teacher who, like the Polish émigré Conrad, has adopted British citizenship. Like The Whitehall Mandarin, Heart of Darkness begins on the Thames in the heart of London and then moves to a strange, unreal environment that discombobulates those who enter it. Thanks to Apocalypse Now, Vietnam is an Asian correlate for Conrad’s Congo — a place where imperial overreach has run riot and moral compasses are wrecked.
In his previous trilogy, Wilson stayed largely within 1950s England. His fodder has been the familiar world of British intelligence, London streets of watchers and the watched, fungible allegiances, the Cambridge spies, and the penetration of the British secret service by the Soviets, of course, but also by the Americans who never quite trust the British to, as the doyen of British spy fiction John le Carré would say, “share the treasure.”
In The Whitehall Mandarin we have London of the 1960s — swinging and liberated yet still Establishment-dominated and subject to the social codes of the prewar era — well rendered as a place where a call girl and a charlatan could bring down a Tory government (as the 1963 John Profumo/Christine Keeler scandal did, unless you really believe Harold Macmillan resigned on “health grounds”). But then Wilson ups the pace with a dramatic and psychedelic chase across America, where Kennedy cool is giving way to hippie-trippydom. And then he takes us to post–Dien Bien Phu Vietnam as the French Indo-China Empire collapses into the battle for American spheres of influence. We’re in a world familiar to us through countless books and films; familiar to Wilson through having lived it — grunts, choppers, jungle, the North Vietnamese trudging the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Colonel Kurtz–like figures in abundance. Wilson terms it “Disneyland East.”
If there’s a coherent theme to The Whitehall Mandarin, it’s ambition: Britain’s hopeless postwar ambition to retain the Empire, Soviet ambition to influence the developing world, America’s ambition to thwart Moscow, and their proxies in Vietnam. One more ambition that underlies the whole tale for Wilson plays on the double meaning of “mandarin” — the omnipotent Chinese ruling elite as well as the stodgy bureaucrat of Whitehall corridors and endless cups of tea. Wilson ponders an interesting stat from the early years of the nuclear arms race:
FISSION TO FUSION
France = 105 months
United States = 86 months
Soviet Union = 75 months
United Kingdom = 66 months
People’s Republic of China = 32 months
How did China get a thermonuclear weapon so fast? And in the midst of the Sino-Soviet split and the madness of the Cultural Revolution too? Chinese spying on the West predates the recent hacking and leaking scandals. For anyone anxious about a leaky Anglo-American spy community and keen to historically revise the PRC’s espionage credentials, Wilson has a theory!
In the hands of a lesser writer all this scenery and action — swinging London, the internecine feuds of Whitehall and Langley, psychedelia-tinged American heartlands, Vietnam (initially rendered in the style of The Quiet American’s Southeast Asia, before the descent into Apocalypse Now), and even Mao’s creepy inner sanctum of Zhongnanhai — would be overwhelming, too sprawling to control. But not in Wilson’s adept hands. Finally Edward Wilson is garnering the praise and readers in England he’s long deserved, but it is to be hoped that America can discover him too. His stories are our stories, just as his own story is one of two countries nervously eyeing each other in wary allegiance.
¤
Paul French has written a number of books, including Midnight in Peking, winner of the 2013 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.
Title: The Darkling Spy.
Author: Edward Wilson.
Genre: Espionage.
Release Date: April 28, 2010.
Source: Bought.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Purchase: Amazon UK | Amazon
London, 1956. A generation of British spies are haunted by the ghosts of friends turned traitor. Henry Bone, a Whitehall intelligence mandarin spymaster, is convinced that a man code-named ''Butterfly'' is the Holy Grail of Cold War Intelligence and is about to defect to the Americans. Butterfly’s brain is an archive of secrets that can wreak havoc and destroy lives and reputations, and Bone also knows that Butterfly’s beauty and aristocratic charm hide a pathological depravity that seeks satisfaction from inflicting pain and humiliation. Bone knows he has to get to Butterfly before the Americans.
Catesby, a spy with his reputation in tatters, is pressured to become a fake defector in order to track down Butterfly. Catesby’s quest leads him from Berlin, through a shower of Molotov cocktails in Budapest and finally to dinner alone with the East German espionage legend, Mischa Wolf.
The novel’s shocking conclusion will change the reader’s view of the Cold War forever.
The Darkling Spy is an excellent novel – full of suspense and very well written. As a Cold War spy novel, this book needed a lot of research but the author did that so well. It was tense, the settings strong and effective and the complex plot gripped me instantly but also got stronger as the book went on.
Edward Wilson’s characters are always great to read – discovering who is who and separating the (minimal) trustworthy characters from the ones ready to betray is always enjoyable and Wilson weaves the twists in brilliantly. Catesby was a likeable character which is more than I’ve come to expect from this genre of novel. He was loyal and easy to root for throughout his mission to uncover Butterfly.
Stand out parts in The Darling Spy for me included the interaction between Catesby and Bone which was very entertaining and brought a bit of light relief to a darker plot. I also loved how strong the research of settings and history felt – it didn’t distract from the novel and instead, was more interesting and intriguing. I imagine, although this is fiction, that people who lived in the age this book was set in will have had memories brought back from some of the events during this era too.
The Darkling Spy is the third Edward Wilson novel I’ve read and my favourite so far. The plot was strong and captivating and the characterisation, as ever, was flawless. Starting this late at night, I couldn’t put it down and was disappointed when it ended yet looking forward to Wilson’s next book, The Midnight Swimmer. A great novel.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Review of The Darkling Spy by Edward Wilson (Arcadia Books, 2010)
1956 and the cold war is heating up. The reputation of Britain’s intelligence services lies in tatters after the defection of Burgess and Maclean, with the suspicion of other traitorous spies still in place. Henry Bone, a British spymaster, has discovered that a key East European spy, codenamed Butterfly, is about to defect to the Americans. Butterfly has plagued Bone for two decades and carries secrets that would further damage Britain’s reputation. To try and get to Butterfly first Bone turns to his protégé, William Catesby. Catesby is already perceived by some to be a security risk given his Belgium mother, working class background and socialist sympathies. After a mission to Budapest at the height of the uprising in 1956 and a personal scandal, Catesby is persuaded to be a plant defector to East Germany, hoping to identify Butterfly before he defects himself. It’s a mission that places duty ahead of all else and Catesby’s hoping that he hasn’t made a fatal choice.
The Darkling Spy is a cold war spy story in the mould of John Le Carre – a dark, complex, layered tale of small heroic, compromising and treacherous acts and mind games, rather than the action, thrills and womanising of Fleming. Wilson creates a world in which no-one quite trusts anyone else, even family, friends and allies; in which the wrong decisions can have fatal consequences. It is a world of pervaded by lies, deception, mis- and dis-information, politics and ideology. There is a strong sense of atmospherics and sense of place throughout and the story is told through an engaging voice. Bone and Catesby are convincing characters with interesting back stories that are nicely portrayed and the other characters are well penned. The plotting is very nicely done, with the various pieces of the jigsaw manoeuvred into place and the final picture only being revealed in the last few pages. The denouement felt a little flat, although in keeping with the understated telling of the rest of the story. Overall, a very good cold war spy tale.
Friday, July 13, 2012
Review of The Envoy by Edward Wilson (Arcadia, 2008)
In 1950s Britain Kit Fournier is a career diplomat and spy, notionally the Counselor for Political Affairs at the US embassy on Grosvenor Square, but also the CIA Head of Station. His family have a foreign service pedigree and Fournier is well travelled, schooled and networked. The Cold War is well underway, both the US and Russia have the hydrogen bomb, and Britain is struggling to remain a world power and hold on to its empire. Fournier’s primary job is to spy on and undermine his supposed ally, bringing them evermore under US influence and control. To that end he seeks to disrupt British-Soviet relations and to keep an eye on Britain’s attempts to become an atomic power, running covert operations and a network of agents. Through his cousin, the beautiful and alluring Jennie, married to a British nuclear scientist, he hears about developments at Orford Ness, an island off the Suffolk coast. Determined to find out what is happening and to disrupt its progress he plays a dangerous game with MI5/6, the KGB, and his own spymasters, being drawn into a position that’ll take all his guile and skill to handle.
The Envoy is a superior spy story that blends real world events and people with a fictional tale. It is complex, multi-layered, atmospheric, full of historical and political insight, and reveals deep insight into human relations. Wilson constructs a compelling and plausible plot that cleverly uses real events, such as the Ordzhonikidze incident in Portsmouth harbour, Britain’s hydrogen bomb program, and the Suez crisis, and real personalities such as Allen Dulles, Jack Kennedy and Dick White. He recreates the social landscape of Britain and the wider political atmosphere and diplomatic games being played in the 1950s, providing a deep sense of historical realism (indeed, the bibliography at the end of the book shows that Wilson did a fair bit of research in plotting the book). In particular, Wilson captures the spy’s world of deception, lies, betrayals, coercion, blackmail, state-sanctioned murder, paranoia, danger and constant worry, and that half the battle is the games within and between one’s own organisations. His characterization is excellent, especially his portrayal of Kit Fournier as a self-reflexive spy racked with self-loathing, yet compelled out of duty and honour to play his role, and he does a good job at exploring the human condition and what drives and shapes people in particular circumstances. Overall, a very well told story, with a couple of nice twists and turns, and an excellent resolution that proves that nothing is as it seems, even to those that think they can see the hand that each party is holding.
Cynically exploitative and utterly ruthless
12:01AM GMT 16 Mar 2008
Susanna Yager reviews crime fiction
The protagonist of The Envoy by Edward Wilson, Kit Fournier, is ostensibly a senior diplomat at the American embassy in London. In fact this is a cover for his real job, CIA Chief of Station. It's the 1950s, the height of the Cold War, and the nearest Kit has to a friend in London is his KGB opposite number who, like him, is there to spy on the British.
Washington disapproves of Britain's policy of détente with the Soviet Union, so Kit has been ordered to poison relations between London and Moscow during the forthcoming Soviet goodwill visit. The Americans intend to teach their closest ally a lesson: there can be only one foreign policy for the West and that is made in Washington.
This is not the kind of escapist spy thriller generally found on the bestseller lists. Wilson's story has no heroes. It's a sophisticated, convincing novel that shows governments and their secret services as cynically exploitative and utterly ruthless.
Review ~ A River in May by Edward Wilson.
Title: A River in May.
Author: Edward Wilson.
Genre: War Novel.
Release Date: March 15, 2007.
Source: Bought.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Purchase: Amazon UK | Amazon
What happens when a bunch of murderous gringos are let loose on a third-world country? The country is Vietnam and the war has escalated into a technological bloodbath. Lyndon Johnson is in the White House and each night on the network news programmes Americans watch their soldiers returning in their thousands - in plastic body bags.
In Vietnam, Lieutenant Lopez, a twenty-three-year-old American of Mexican origin, has volunteered for a tour of duty to escape not the cocoon of privilege his adoptive parents have wrapped him in, but a personal tragedy in which he is implicated. Lopez has been assigned to a remote border camp defended by a US Special Forces team and by Vietnamese irregulars. At first he regards the war as a personal penance, but is gradually forced out of his self-pity to become aware of the brainless brutality, bleak cynicism and injustice which swirl around him. Lopez starts to shed his layers of acquired identity and culture, and begins to go native.
In this powerful and profoundly disturbing first novel, Edward Wilson poses the question: how far will one individual go to right the wrongs of his country, before betraying his fellow soldiers and comrades? His answer, unexpected and shocking, will remain to haunt the reader long after first reading. This is a Vietnam war novel with a difference, giving voice to the dispossessed.
A River in May is a Vietnam War novel which is not something I’d normally read yet Edward Wilson blew me away with the powerful prose in this book. There’s no escaping that this book handles bleak and harrowing issues but the writing was stunning and this book presents a plot which is not to be ignored.
Lieutenant Lopez is a complex, conflicted character who battles with the horrific realities of war along with his own personal demons too. You can’t read this book expecting heroes and characters you’re going to love but instead, refreshingly real characters who I connected with, regardless of my opinion on them. The characters were written perfectly.
Edward Wilson drew on his own experiences from the Vietnam War when writing A River in May, making this novel much more honest yet equally distressing. The pacing was spot on and the plot, laced with black humour, is shocking yet equally moving. You battle along with Lopez and his guilt, suffering and search for answers. A River in May is a difficult novel to read but very rewarding and so worth it.
A River In May, Edward Wilson (2002)
July 9, 2016 by Bob Reutenauer
9162278Uniquely and powerfully done war novel. Wilson delivers what is quite clearly an autobiographically informed Vietnam War novel. Set apart from all the rest of the classic soldering narratives of the mud, the blood, the drugs— 13th Valley, Dispatches, other greats, joined more recently by Matterhorn. Wilson anticipates the more recent literary renderings of confusion, espionage, and which side were you on in the jungle?— The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. Lopez, our protagonist is a Mexican American Harvard grad, trained right up by the Army, swiftly sent to unit leadership at a way north Khe-Sahn type “Hill.” The wonder of the writing is how Wilson, keeps the point of view strictly through the eyes of Lopez. Seeing only what he— a self identified humanitarian moralist we are convinced, sees and hears brings us along as he takes action, ultimately, against evil and in defense of innocents. Cooperation with NLF infiltrators in his unit to enable Viet Cong fighters, some how seems, in the end, a reasonable course of action for our hero.