Duet in Beirut, by Mishka Ben-David: when authenticity is more than illusion

The question of authenticity hovers over all spy thrillers and crime fiction. But it's not reality we crave, it's the sense of it. The illusion of reality, if you like, so long as it's believable.

An author creates a world. We inhabit it, temporarily, accepting, if the writer is good at his or her job, its rules, regulations, the needs, wants, desires and motivations of the characters who live there. Because what we want is a story. A story that takes us away from our everyday concerns and absorbs us in other, more exciting ones.

So the novelist is essentially playing a trick.  On us, and sometimes on him- or herself too. I'm always slightly amused by the furrowed-brow method-acting 'research' which leads the creators of some, essentially lightweight entertainments to give themselves over to weeks and months of taking notes rather than writing. In a lot of cases, I'm sure it's (a) a tax-allowable excuse for hanging out with interesting folk, sometimes in glamorous foreign locations, eating and drinking extremely well; (b) a way of avoiding actually writing and (c) a method of getting out of the house. The craving of some readers, particularly in hardware-obsessed, anally-retentive macho fiction, for details of armaments, map references and cars, and in other fields for nit-picking restaurant menus and recipes (I count myself vulnerable on all counts here) allows writers to shortcut to believability through apparent knowledge of catalogue detail. Or sometimes, effective Googling.

What of the writers, though, who actually have personal experience of the extreme activities they write about? Frankly, it doesn't mean two empty chambers in a Walther PPK if they can't write. If they can't convince. 'The myth of experience' one screenwriter of my acquaintance calls it. The notion that just because you know something happened, if you were actually there, the reader/viewer has to believe your story.

John Le Carre is often cited as someone whose secret service career informs his writing, lends it a sheen of respect. Maybe, in his early books. But what carries you through a good Le Carre (and there are some duds) is the literary skill and verve, the atmosphere, the insight into characters, the moral stance which in latter years has become outrage. Stella Rimington, on the other hand, former head of Mi5, writes slight, workmanlike thrillers that never transcend the evident verisimilitude of some sequences. They're basically dull.

Among the dozens of former CIA officers who have turned their skills in dissembling to fiction, Charles McCarry is perhaps the most interesting, paralleling Le Carre (even in name) and in his prescient 1979 novel The Better Angels, predicting Islamic terrorism and passenger aircraft attacks similar to 9/11. With a recent book, The Shanghai Factor, centred on China's use of multinational companies for intelligence purposes, his contemporary relevance remains. But as he says, what he does is produce 'stories...largely imagined, but not entirely so.' McCarry has a mordant gift for taking real events and twisting them into very odd shapes indeed, notably the Kennedy assassinations in The Tears of Autumn.

All of which takes me to the recent publication, for the first time in English, of Mishka Ben-David's superb Duet in Beirut. Ben-David was a Mossad officer for 12 years, and Duet in Beirut was written as a screenplay not long after he left the Israeli secret service (which the book indicates is more like a cross between Mi6 and the SAS, with planned undercover military actions a big part of its remit).

Brilliantly translated from the original Hebrew by Evan Fallenberg, the book deals with a rogue agent who tries to make amends for a previous failure by assassinating, without permission, a senior Hezbollah figure in Beirut. His former mentor goes after him, followed by a hastily-assembled undercover team, but the book's amazing insider detail is matched by beautifully (re)created characters, families and locations, plus an utterly convincing portrayal of the inner wranglings of a secret service, and the political context in which it operates.

There are odd plot echoes of The Bourne Identity movie and  you can pick up  resonances from other films too, especially Syriana and of course Munich, but the book's building of tension and pace until the almost unbearable finale is exemplary, cool and very accomplished. Some may find the quite explicit and sentimental Zionism of at least one character difficult, but in the end, this is among the very best and most revealing spy novels I've read. And it works because a gifted author has harnessed his experience to tell a great tale very well indeed.

Dominique Manotti: Rough Trade

Dominique Manotti is a pseudonym, which sort of sets the tone for, the book, where rough trade equally defines a child prostitution ring, and the garment trade in Paris, 1980, where the workers are Turkish, and illegal. The book is available on Kindle and in paperback.

The police are corrupt and brutal, yet somehow maintain a moral compass of some kind, in the bigger issues, if not the small. Can we say beating, and even occasionally raping suspects are small things? Moral analysis must be tackled by the reader. It does not seem to be something the author spends much time on.

The people the police are up against are pretty terrifying, remember. In the late 1970s-mid 1980s, the Grey Wolves, fascist and ultra nationalist, unofficial militant arm of the Nationalist Movement Party in Turkey were active, murdering and torturing in their own country, but also in a lot of European states. Outstandingly bad people, and still cropping up to this day.

It seems it is always a bad idea taking on Turks. They fight, as many groups do, but they seem to have a predilection for organising, which many don't. The British and Commonwealth armies found that out in 1915 and 1916. Another interesting note. During the Korean War, a significant number of British and American prisoners failed under the tremendous pressure, and became informers and fellow travellers. Turks? Not a single one.

The action in Rough Trade takes place over a single month in 1980, with a great deal of cinematic jump cutting. The focal point is police headquarters, the evocatively named Passage de Desire.

One problem early on is keeping track. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, multiple strands. Second, it is difficult distinguishing the policemen, who don't have much in the way of distinctive features. Apart from Daiquin, senior, and the central character, who is gay, and who initially coerces a Turkish militant, and then falls in love with him.

By the middle of the book, the confusion has abated, and the action compels. There are more of these Manottis, but translation has not caught up yet. Worth watching out for.

Drew Ratter

Where the Dead Men Go: Liam McIlvanney

Just got round to reading this,  second in what is being dubbed, breezily, 'Conway Trilogy 2', after an almost-quite-good-value £5 Kindle download. Just dear enough to annoy, just cheap enough to tempt. £12.99 reduced to nine quid for the paperback seems expensive too...

Anyway. I very much enjoyed All The Colours of The Town (see Thrillfilters passim) McIlvanney's debut thriller (Conway Trilogy 1) and wanted to find out what happened to Gerry Conway, ace Glasgow newshound and failing, guilt-ridden father. He's now getting another shot at fatherhood, with a new baby and a new New Zealandic bidie-in. He has, miraculously, become a PR man and then returned to what is clearly The Daily Record masquerading as The Herald. The book is nailed to 2011, oddly, and you would imagine from the negativity towards the medium of print that both those (real life) organs would be dead and buried by now. They're not, though McIlvanney's pessimisim regarding the future of newspapers, and his cynicism about their present, seems well founded, to me at least. Though if the Record and The Herald were to merge and become The Tribune, well...who knows?

What can I tell you about the plot? Jings. Murder, polis! Two rival gangland bigwigs fighting for supremacy. Corrupt council land deals and dodgy local politicians (hope McIlvanney had this properly legalled under Scots Law; there's some ready and uncomfortable identifiability with living local colour). A dead crime hack, Roma gangs in Govanhill. Paedophile prostitution. Grown-up prostitution. Assassins, Ulster terrorism and lashings of crisps and ginger beer! Actually, I meant malt whisky, wine and proper beer, old-school juicehead scribbler pubs, blues CDs and nice restaurants.

There is some brilliant descriptive writing but there's just a bit too much unlikely neon Taggartesque nonsense; things get cluttered and unconvincing towards the end. And the obsession with parenthood, lost children and fathers, inheritance and the visiting of second generation sins, becomes both distracting and in the end, a bit overwhelming. One minor detail: why is Glasgow and all its locii described with such loving, indeed moving accuracy, whereas Ayrshire's towns, coastal and inland, masquerade under pseudonyms?

I read this book a mere chucked brick from '27 Clouston Street', Gerry Conway's flat, loving the sense of place, the assured familiarity. I know present-day Govanhill a bit and I fear it was pantomimed slightly, the Roma issue somewhat caricatured. Kilmarnock and Prestwick were more than recognisable. Maybe Glasgow vibrates rather too colourfully throughout, and that is possibly a product of McIllvanney's southern hemisphere exile. Or Gerry Conway's prodigious appetite for booze, and nefarious habit of driving while well over the limit.

In conclusion: fascinating, not without its faults but addictive, stylish and just a wee bit too clever for its own good.

Glasgow - in monochrome and colour

I really enjoyed Malcolm Mackay's The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter.  Its sheer, uncompromising oddness (enormous list of characters, with descriptions, before you could start; absolute refusal to deal with Glasgow's vernacular or geography; brutally cut-back prose. The cold, semi-autistic protagonist, Calum Maclean, up and coming gunman in Glasgow's divided crime scene.

It's part of a trilogy, and I was keen to read the sequel, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, featuring more about Calum's ageing mentor, Frank Macleod. There's the same long cast list at the start, now feeling even odder and somewhat ponderous, almost amateurish. And while the influences on Mackay are again obvious (Charles Willeford, James M Cain, Hammett, Derek Raymond) the book's velocity is slower than its predecessor's.

It's still a very good read, once you're committed to the stylistic quirks. But some of the more intimate situations described stretch credulity too far, and that rigid, laconic austerity in terms of location gives way to a sudden, throwaway pin-pointing of places. Renfrew. The South Side. The West End. The descriptions are over-long and tension is built too slowly. Only in the last section of the book do you become utterly locked in to Frank's fate and Calum's role in determining it.

Getting the sequels out quickly was obviously paramount in the publisher's mind. I can understand that they had a pulp pattern to follow and the third book is already being advertised in billboards on the Glasgow Subway. But How a Gunman Says Goodbye gives every indication of too much haste, and less-than-ruthless editing. Still weird and very readable though.

Liam McIlvanney's All the Colours of the Town was published two years ago and is also a thriller set in Glasgow. It too is part of a trilogy, I now discover, following the adventures of its central character, a journalist called Conway. The sequel, Where the Dead Men Go, is out in a couple of weeks.

McIlvanney is a very different writer from Mackay. He's an academic, a professor of Scottish literature in New Zealand. He has either a major family literary heritage to draw upon, or a big bad monkey on his back (or both) due to the fact that his old man is the godfather of tartan noir, William McIlvanney. And he loves, rejoices in, absolutely wallows in the glorious, sprawling detail of Glasgow. I suppose New Zealand would do that to a guy.

I loved All the Colours of the Town (only £1.19 for Kindle now. Just buy it!). It's convincing on internal newspaper politics, made me achingly homesick for the west end of Glasgow, and is one of the very few crime novels to tackle - and it does so with an impressive sense of history - west of Scotland sectarianism and its links to Northern Irish terrorism. While some of the writing is a tad florid and there is some Martin Amis-like verbal obscurantism, there are set pieces here that will stay with you forever: Trapped in a  car during an Orange Walk in Larkhall; the various sounds of a tenement close when you're unexpectedly left at home on a weekday.

Only the bad-dad-who-never-sees-his-wean aspect of Conway's life feels like genre furniture. The rest is very assured, extremely gripping and non-formulaic. As for the sequel, well. We shall see, shortly.

Glasgow part one: Field of Blood.

The best 'Glasgow noir' books are, in my humble opinion: William McIlvanney's The Papers of Tony Veitch (just shading the same author's Laidlaw). Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room, and Frederic Lindsay's Brond. Only the last has been televised, and in an absolutely superb version directed by Michael Caton-Jones in the mid-1980s. There's a brief and not very dramatic clip on YouTube. 

But over the past few weeks I've found myself walking on the noir side of Glasgow courtesy of more recent tomes. And, having just returned to the Zetlandics after a brief sojourn back in my home city, watching BBC Scotland's Field of Blood took me back once more to the mean streets of the Dear Green Place.

Field of Blood was an odd experience. Its first outing (why are the BBC commissioning these compressed two-parters? The lamentable Shetland was another piece of televisual booksqueezing) passed me by completely, and for whatever reason I'd failed to realise it was set not just in Glasgow, but in the world of Glasgow newspapers in the 1980s. Not unfamiliar territory for me. The central character, Paddy Meehan, originates in the books of Denise Mina, of which I've read just the one, her first, Garnethill. I enjoyed it but never read anything else by her, and I'm not sure why. I've interviewed her for radio about music, and she was an absolute delight. But like Val McDermid and Alex Gray - I've read one novel each by them, too - the world of her prose was a place to which I didn't want to return.

Anyway, Field of Blood. I caught a trailer which was jaw-droppingly bizarre. It was like River City meets Life on Mars. Ford Kiernan! David Hayman! And, for goodness' sake, the great David Morrissey. All in the murky half-light of miner's strike Glasgow newsrooms, clubs and back alleys. I iPlayered the first episode and after wrestling with the self-consciously 'banteresque' dialogue at first, I began to enjoy it.

The plot was nonsensically, at times hilariously derivative, an amalgam of Bleasdale's GBH, the original State of Play (also featuring Morrissey) and (choose any episode) Taggart. But the look of the show was great, owing much to the TV adaptation of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet (featuring, ahem, David Morrissey) and the aforementioned Life on Mars (Season two, the Audi years). The cars were just about perfect (Citroen CX! Austin Princess 'Wedge'! Rover SD1!) and there was fastidious attention to detail in set design, from the Tunnock's Teacakes and early Macintosh computers to the ties, lapels and moustaches. The newsroom, though, was way too small.

There was a cartoonish element to the acting, but some of it was leeringly great, especially David Hayman as McDade, the miner's union boss. Katherine Kelley was marvellously OTT as the Armani-clad Rebecca Brooks from hell, and Morrissey reliably wide-lapelled. Ford Kiernan was all snappy one-liners hiding his  Great Inner Heartache and Vulnerability, but I warmed to his tanktops too.

Interestingly, this was written and directed by David Kane, who scripted the dismal pilot for (inexplicably recommissioned) Shetland. He's obviously far more at home on the mean streets of 80s Glasgow and in the sarcastic bastardin' verbals of the city too. The lack of time to develop character and foreboding, as in the magnificently sprawling Broadchurch, is a problem. But the seductive setting and full-on acting kind of compensate.

I liked it. In the end, it was no Red Riding or Shadow Line, and certainly no Brond, which was a strange, at times distressing and always disturbing take on the nature of evil-in-Glasgow, actually made in the era Field of Blood was set in, and paralleling its political plot in some ways. It isn't available to watch these days, though Lindsay's book, and its terrifying sequel Jill Rips (made into a movie starring, wait for it, Dolph Lundgren) are deservedly still in print.

Right, that's enough. I'll talk in due course about my other Glaswegian adventures, courtesy of Liam McIlvanney (son of) and Malcolm Mackay. But for now, have a look at Field of Blood on iPlayer while it's still available.