The Spy and the Snake by M J Robotham
Book 57 of the year was this sequel to Mrs Spy, which I reviewed at the beginning of August. So memorable was the sequel’s title that I just had to remind myself of it on Goodreads. Is this a problem? Spy, I get, fair enough, but Snake? I’ve got nothing. Another in a long line of titles that seem to have been AI-generated by the publisher’s marketing department.
This was the one I originally wanted to read, because it’s set in 1968, the same year as my current Work in Progress. But I read the 1965-set earlier book first, and here we are.
In this one, the protagonist, Maggie, is no longer an MI5 Watcher, but has been promoted to a vaguely higher status. She is tasked with exfiltrating a defector from communist Hungary, so much of this is set in Budapest—and you don’t need the author’s Afterword to know that she is quite familiar with the city and its landmarks.
Meanwhile, I, a pedant, am busy annotating the 1968 references and awarding them a pass or a fail. So, for example, some passes:
Waterloo Sunset; Lovely Rita; Robert Redford; Bend Me, Shape Me; MLK and the Paris Riots.
So, unlike before, the pop culture and news references don’t jar. But in the week that Richard Osman was upbraided for not knowing enough about ornithology, there was something that bothered me. The vehicle Maggie and the defector use to escape from Hungary. Slight spoiler: it’s a VW campervan, aka the Type 2, which in the mid-60s, would have looked something like this:
Yes, it would have probably been a split-screen model with an air-cooled engine at the back. So this detail jars:
the diesel chug of a VW drawing near
Diesel? The first VW camper with a diesel engine didn’t appear until the 1980s.
And nevermind how such a camper made its way behind the iron curtain. We’ll stipulate that it was possible for a rusty old example to somehow make its way there. But describing its distinctive air-cooled engine note as ‘diesel’ is kind of unforgiveable. I find it particularly bothersome because it would have been fairly straightforward to research. Not least because the state of the vehicle and its engine is a plot point.
There’s a certain moment when the engine requires some intervention, which is dealt with in a vaguely handwavy way. Fine. But, again, a few minutes research would have offered several options as to what the problem might be in an aircooled VW that had just driven 1500 kilometres across Europe. How about the old oil-bath air filter? Or the distressingly short service interval?
And also, if you’re on the lam from a communist country and driving in the West, why have you kept the Hungarian numberplates on it? Durp.
Anyway, it’s a cozy spy novel. An easy read and moderately entertaining. You keep waiting for something really bad to happen, but it doesn’t.
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