Having read all six of David Downing’s “station
series” about Germany in World War II, I was looking forward to his new series
on World War I. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Simply put his lead
characters, Jack McColl and Caitlin Hanley, lack the depth of John Russell and
Effie Koenen. Perhaps it’s the times. The world of 1913-14 had yet to
experience the horror of the trenches, the ideological struggles of the 1920s
and 30s, the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. It was a simpler time.
Downing’s protagonists are Jack McColl,
an automobile salesman initially freelancing as an intelligence agent before
moving on to that line of work full time and his romantic interest Caitlin
Henry, a very attractive proto-feminist working as a journalist. Jack’s spying
takes him to the German concession of Tsingtao, China, San Francisco, New York,
Mexico during the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Dublin and London. Quite a full itinerary,
but he is far from operating on the high political level of Sidney Reilly, the “Ace
of Spies”. It is more the day-to day stuff dealing with naval deployments, arms
shipments and IRA terrorism. Through it all McColl and Henry find the time to
frequently end up in bed.
There are appearances of the founding
fathers of British Intelligence. We meet McColl’s boss, George Smith-Cumming
the head of the Special Intelligence Service responsible for foreign activities,
now MI-6, and Vernon Kell the domestic intelligence chief of the Secret
Intelligence Bureau, now MI-5.
There is a lot of good stuff in this
book and it is worth the read, but I only hope that in future volumes Downing
will improve his character development under the strains of The Great War.
The Amazon URL is: http://www.amazon.com/review/R60CA1I0970MX
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