As sharks and Nazis are to the History Channel, so WW2 novels are to historical crime fiction and Laura Wilson’s Stratton’s War is a recent and enjoyable addition to the Home Front, Blitz-based sub-genre. Better than Robert Harris, on a par with Barbara Nadel, Stratton’s War threatens to approach the level of a good John Lawton.

The story centres around DI Ted Stratton of West End Central and Diana Calthrop, a beautiful Mayfair deb straight out of the world of the Mitfords. Stratton is investigating the suicide of a silent movie star that somehow points toward Soho gangland. Diana has just started work for MI5 infiltrating the high society, anti-Semitic, pro-German, Right Club. Inevitably Stratton’s murder enquiry and Diana’s counter espionage work cross-over.

Stratton has the makings of a really interesting series detective. He is a three dimensional human being, and is portrayed by Wilson without recourse to short-hand quirks. He is not alcoholic, he is not a genius and he is not suicidally depressed. He does not play an instrument, never once cooks a gourmet meal and does not have a more than normally dysfunctional domestic life. What Stratton is though, is an intelligent, solid copper who is well aware of his place in the bureaucratic pecking order. As the taut plot of Stratton’s War unfolds he is given plenty of reasons to become more acutely aware of this place.

London in 1940 is depicted by Wilson as a city getting used to nightly air raids, death and destruction. The crimes, in relation to what we have subsequently become used to, are oddly innocent. These might be simpler crimes from arguably simpler times, but this is a city on the brink, during the last days of explicit class segregation and Stratton’s War is a story of people on the shadowy outer margins of history’s sweep. Just as they might be in a great Alan Furst Europe-on-the-brink novel.

So promising is this for an ongoing series, that my sole objection is the title. Stratton’s War is too good a book to ride the coattails of a moderately entertaining TV series. Nonetheless this is great atmospheric fun and I very much look forward to the second Stratton novel later in the year.

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