Two excellent wartime thrillers, but each one quite different in its approach to the genre.

Laura Wilson’s An Empty Death is the second book to feature detective Ted Stratton. The first outing, Stratton’s War, was a good debut, albeit one owing a fair amount to the  John Lawton’s Frederick Troy books. An Empty Death is an altogether more singular novel and takes the series into new, more psychological territory.

1944 and London is exhausted by war, loss and the strain of living under the raining V-1 flying bombs. Stratton is tired of the job. Doctors are tired of dealing with bomb victims. Even the murderer is tired by the strain of not being who he wants to be and the effort of maintaining the pretense. Set in and around the Middlesex Hospital and the pubs of Fitzrovia, An Empty Death is an unglamourous, unsentimental, occasionally seedy novel –  as if Patrick Hamilton had written a crime-based sequel to Hangover Square or 20,000 Streets Under The Sky. And is inevitably all the better for it.

It’s an atmospheric book in setting and the internal dilemmas of Stratton and a killer in search of a character are easily strong enough to maintain attention. It’s also an ambitious book structurally, as Wilson plays around with the narrative, weaving together three or four strands into a story that is both small enough to be credible but big enough to warrant some devastating twists and turns along the way. I expect more good things to come from both Laura Wilson and Ted Stratton.

The Interrogator is more of a race against time thriller owing a clear debt to to Robert Harris’ Enigma, set as it is in the milieu of WW2 codebreakers. Although not having Enigma‘s sense of novelty, The Interrogator is for my money a better read, substituting that book’s melodramatic thrills for a real sense of rising tension.

Douglas Lindsay, the titular interrogator, is a naval commander seconded to Ian Fleming’s Intelligence service as he recovers from the mental scars of losing his ship to a German torpedo. Lindsay believes he has spotted a break-in to the Royal Navy codes, which if true, would jeopardise the vital North Atlantic convoys. None of his superiors want to believe him and Lindsay must instead extract the information from an imprisoned U-Boat commander. This is not a sub-Richard Hannay gripping yarn. There are no literal cliff hangers and no desparate fights, chases or ludicrous surprises. Just growing tension and mind play.

As with An Empty Death, an atmosphere of mental exhaustion looms large but The Interrogator is a more straight-forward book. Having said that The Interrogator has real depth to go with real excitement and the convincing setting is the result of some hefty research worn very lightly indeed. In particular the usual London locations are beautifully enhanced by the office politics of the intelligence community and also of German POWs.  There are three things that it is impossible for a novelist or film maker to balls up – a court room drama, a submarine and police questioning. Andrew Williams has two out of three and doesn’t disappoint with either.

An Empty Death and The Interrogator – fine examples of their respective genres and well worth buying if you are a fan of either.

One more gripe that is becoming a hobby horse  - I understand An Empty Death needs to work the halo effect from Foyle’s War on an otherwise nicely designed cover, even if that connection does sell Laura Wilson very short. But The Interrogator has a really nasty picture plonked inside a reasonable typeface design and I can’t believe anyone liked it before it went through. No accounting for taste I suppose.

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