What a near miss. For two thirds of The Vienna Assignment I thought I’d chanced upon a spy series fit to give Alan Furst a run for his money. And then just as I had mentally committed myself to buying the lot,  Olen Steinhaer trots out a handful of faintly ludicrous plot devices and the whole thing goes up in a puff of melodramatic smoke.

Let’s start with the good things about The Vienna Assignment, of which there are many. It is a labyrinthine 1960s Cold War spy novel in the grand tradition of John Le Carre. It is well researched, well written and convincing in that claustrophobic spy story way. The main character, Brano Sev is, in an interesting twist on convention, a loyal operative from the other side of the Iron Curtain.  Although as morally compromised and disillusioned as any Le Carre hero, Sev is not beset with any great doubts and he is not on the road to any great Damascene conversion. The settings too are good ones. In particular the nameless Iron Curtain satellite country that feels a lot like Poland is well drawn and Vienna with its emigre community made up of people who either are or who aren’t who they say they are, shows up as well here as it does in other spy stories, most notably The Third Man.

Steinhauer doesn’t shy away from the arbitrary brutalities of the regime Sev represents, but the book doesn’t drown under this weight. Indeed Steinhauer has an eye for the absurd and a lightness of touch that caries the book along nicely. What comes across are real crimes commited by real people in a real world of bureaucracy and austere rural strictures.

On the other hand… What was the point spending hundreds of pages to gradually build a convincing world of professional deceit, only to drop in huge coincidences lifted from the trashiest of trashy thrillers. Worse is a ludicrous plot line that owes a huge debt to, of all things, Billion Dollar Brain, the weakest of Len Deighton’s Michael Caine/Harry Palmer books/movies. If anything The Vienna Assignment is even slightly less convincing than the barking barmy movie Ken Russell made of Billion Dollar Brain. The one that killed off the Harry Palmer series.

This though is overly harsh and unfair as judged against most other books, The Vienna Assignment is an intelligent thriller that has much to say about the nuances of the day. It’s just judged against the book it might have been, it falls some way short. Heroic failure then – I’ll give Steinhauer one more go.

One last minor gripe. The UK titling comes across as a bit of a crass attempt to add a touch of spice where none is perhaps needed. Personally I prefer the evocative 36 Yalta Boulevard, to the Robert Ludlum-esque (The Something Something), title The Vienna Assignment. Why? Let’s leave on a positive though: The Vienna Assignment is two thirds of a very fine book indeed.

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