Jeff Noon

The journalist as sleuth

Thrillers from John Simpson and David Mamet feature newspapermen as sleuths. Also reviewed are Ian Rankin and Keigo Higashino

Despite being well-travelled as the BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson doesn’t roam far from home in his spy thriller, Moscow, Midnight (John Murray, £20). Life and art intermingle, in both subject matter and character. The hero is named Jon Swift, a veteran journalist bristling under new media regimes. When government minister Patrick Macready is found dead — presumably from a solo sex game gone wrong — Swift takes it upon himself to clear up a few loose ends. Soon he’s under investigation himself, ostracised, and journeying to Moscow to work a connection to a number of Russians who have met similar ‘accidental’ fates.

Swift is cynical, unreconstructed in his view of women, a bit snobbish at times. But his voice is clear and strong, and his moral code keeps him on track. Simpson knows his stuff, obviously, and his plotting is strewn with expert analysis of international affairs and insider knowledge of journalistic practice: all very entertaining. But maybe an author can know too much? The usual gaps in the data field that spy stories revolve around are missing here. And so the mystery suffers. Sometimes, you just have to leave things out.

In a House of Lies (Orion, £20) is Ian Rankin’s 23nd novel featuring the detective John Rebus. Well, he’s not really a detective any more. He’s retired, and ill, hoping for a ‘managed decline’, as his doctor says. But the quiet life holds few delights, and old cases keep dragging him back into action. This time round a dead body found in the woods — a man missing for more than ten years — stirs up no end of trouble, not least for Rebus himself, who was on the original investigative team, a team that cocked up so badly they were named in a police corruption suit.

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