There is always something a little off beam about Charles Cumming's spy thrillers. Neither the Alec Milius nor Thomas Kell books are particularly conventional, and both series proved to be both entertaining and compelling. If the Box 88 series were the work of another writer, I might not have bothered. A novel based on a spy hooked straight out of school - Eton in all but name - might have been a little Young Bond, but in Cumming's hands I was confident they would be interesting.
And so it proved. Judas 62 is the second in the series, and Cumming details the career of Lachlan Kite, once not of Eton, on twin tracks. In the present day, he is a senior spy at Box 88, a covert intelligence group that sits somewhere between the CIA and MI6 but is on the books of neither. And in that guise one of his former operations appears to have come back to haunt him, and so the second narrative tells the story of Kite's adventure in Russia in the summer of 1993 when he took a break from studying at Edinburgh University to help Box 88 smuggle an important scientist out of post Soviet chaos.
I was born in the same year as Cumming, who himself was recruited by MI6 as a very young man, and am roughly the same age as Kite, who left school the same year as I did. Inevitably, therefore, much of the fun in reading these books has been comparing what I did with my summers in the late '80s and early '90s and what Kite did. Some of it, of course, is the same: party, listen to terrible music and chase girls. And some of it not. None of my misadventures included wrestling KGB agents or leaving secret messages for my handlers. And more's the pity, because, from the way Cumming describes it, it beats driving parcels around the back lanes of Berkshire.
Both of these books were hugely enjoyable. Cumming has the great espionage writer's gift of introducing paranoia and tension into the reader's experience, placing us with Kite right in the middle of the action, while driving the plot along at a lively pace with plenty of action, intrigue and plot twists. His characters too are human and therefore credible, with sufficient weakness and doubt to balance the single-mindedness and sang-froid.
It really feels like British spy writing is in a new golden age, with writers like Cumming, Peter Hanington and Mick Herron grasping the mantle left by their illustrious predecessors. They all leave me feeling greedy for more.