What I am reading this month

Stink of dead badger opens The Secret Hours by Mick Herron, the best spy novel I’ve read since Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. A what-dunnit, a brilliant satire on the power of bureaucracy to look after its own self, a Swiftian commentary on corruption in the British penthouses of power and a study in human goodness work all at the same time. Perhaps slow to start, the book’s plot turns out just to be taxiing up to the runway before Herron opens up the throttle to full power.

I picked up The Moon’s A Balloon, by David Niven, at Heathrow on my way to Ukraine and read it on the plane and the train to Kyiv. I’d last read it at school. Niven lived a charmed and cursed life and he survives the swings and arrows of hideous fortune with great good humour. Names are not dropped; they are machine-gunned. But Niven did drink with Bogey, picnic with Churchill while Greta Garbo swam naked in his pool. And the moment the second world war broke out, he walked away from Hollywood to do his bit for Blighty.

The Yellow Dog by Georges Simenon was recommended by Tom Holland on The Rest Is History podcast. A fascinating study of the comedy of the French press in the thirties and the power of fear, Maigret’s intelligence and humanity shine through. I’m now hooked on all the others. Fuck it but they’re good.

This spring I helped my pal Aiden Aslin write his book, Putin’s Prisoner. He had been a British fighter soldiering with the Ukrainian marines in Mariupol when in April last year he surrendered to the Russians and was tortured, stabbed and sentenced to death. Now I’m reading Shaun Pinner’s book, Live. Fight. Survive. He, too, was a British chap who fought with the Ukrainian marines. He, too, in Russian custody was tortured, stabbed and sentenced to death. War crimes on repeat. Recommended.

It’s cheating to tip The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano Da Empoli published by Pushkin Press because it’s coming out in January and I was slipped a preview copy. But it’s good, seriously good. "Whoever lives in the Kremlin owns time..." A great novel, it casts light on the creatures that crawl and slither behind the Kremlin's walls, on the mineral hardness of Putin, on the chaos engine that is his way of hurting us. Read this book and you will understand the Russian mind-fuck.

John Sweeney’s Killer In The Kremlin is published by Penguin Books.