Those Bloody Russians! Part One: The Ashes of Loda (1965), by Andrew Garve

"How about making a winter journey--say, though the Ukraine?"

--The Ashes of Loda (1965), Andrew Garve

the first American pb edition 

The Russian communist of the era of the Golden Age of detective fiction, between the two world wars, was an excitable sort, usually-- unkempt, hairy (if a man--well, the women might be somewhat hairy too, come to think of it), dirty, with imprecations about capitalist bloodsuckers and imperialist vultures foaming out of their mouths.  

White Russians--exiled aristocrats and pseudo aristocrats--might get some sympathy, frequently reduced as they were to the status of importuning gigolos and gigolettes, trading on good looks and good manners to get by in life.  The Reds themselves received merely ridicule as crude, comical caricatures, unless it was a detective novel by socialists GDH and Margaret Cole, who sympathized with Soviet aims, if not all the methods.

During the second war with Germany, when the United States and United Kingdom were allied with the Soviet Union, the tune necessarily changed.  

Now Russia, Ukrainian genocide and assorted massacres and murders aside, was our noble, if earthy, friend, along with good old Uncle Joe (aka genocidal mass murderer Joseph Stalin).  Then, after World War Two ended and the Cold War commenced, the tune changed yet again, with the USSR becoming the West's direst enemy, neither noble nor comical.  

When the Soviet Union finally dissolved in 1991, less than 75 years after the Revolution (Anastasia Romanov would have been 90 years old had she survived), Boris Yeltsin became president of the Russian Federation, ushering in a new era of liberal democratic reforms, of sorts, and, supposedly, "the end of history"--a phrase which turned out to be as tragically ironic as "peace for our time" and "mission accomplished."

Increasingly unpopular, the sixty-nine-year-old Yeltsin was eased out of power on the final day of the twentieth century, handing control of the country over to his forty-seven-year-old prime minister, Vladimir Putin, a chap you may have heard of; and history, lo and behold, started up again.  (The parallel with President von Hindenburg and Chancellor Adolf Hitler is interesting.) 

Now it's over two decades later and here we are with Cold War II evidently, with a brutal Soviet dictator with great bellicosity threatening the West with nuclear annihilation as his armed forces snuff out freedom and precious human lives in a Eastern European country he claims as his own.  It looks like all those old Western thrillers about those bloody Russians are timely again.  

One of the most notable Cold war crime writers who addressed the Russian menace in fiction was Englishman Andrew Garve.  Although Garve was not specifically a spy novelist, he dabbled in the subgenre, and he also set one of his best detective novels, Murder in Moscow (1951), in the USSR, as the title makes clear.  (His American publishers changed it to Murder Through the Looking Glass--perhaps they didn't want people to think it was a spy novel!)  

Additionally Garve portrayed or significantly referenced Russia in additional novels over the years, these being the very rare early novel Red Escapade (1940) and Came the Dawn (1949), A Hole in the Ground (1952), The Ashes of Loda (1965), The Ascent of D-13 (1969) and The Late Bill Smith (1971).

borders frequently shifted
in this region of the world

Like Murderer's Fen, reviewed here, The Ashes of Loda is a short book, again around 50,000 words.  

The protagonist of the novel is Lord Tim Quainton, an unlikely titled British pressman.  On vacation back home in Britain he falls in love, almost at first sight, with beautiful Marya Raczinski, whom he learns is the daughter of a Polish chemist who survived wartime imprisonment at a German labor camp, Loda, outside the city of Lwow, formerly Poland. 

At the time of the events detailed in the novel Lwow, spelled Lvov, was part of the USSR, having been seized by Russia at the beginning of World War Two.  Today the city is part of Ukraine and is spelled Lviv.  

Lviv is much in the news of late, as the largest city in western Ukraine, where many Ukrainians have been fleeing to escape murderous Russian hordes, on their way to becoming refugees in Poland.  Contrary to what Putin will tell you, Lviv has literally been all over the map over the course of its history.  In 1900, the population was ethnically 49% Polish, 27% Jewish and 20% Ukrainian, while a century later it was 88% Ukrainian, 9% Russian and 1% Polish.  The region has a tragic history of war, famine, mass deportation and genocide.

Lord Quainton hits it off with Dad and he and Marya plan to marry, but then he discovers an old Russian press clipping revealing that Dr. Raczinski in 1953 was found guilty in absentia of a war crime at Loda (revealing an escape plan to the Nazis, resulting in numerous deaths).  This causing friction between himself and Marya, who insists it just can't be right, Lord Quainton resolves to try to discover the truth when he gets back to the USSR.  Attempting to do so soon puts him in peril of his life, while he's on a winter tour of Ukraine for his newspaper.  Will he ever get back out of the Soviet Union alive? 

On the whole The Ashes of Loda is a highly effective little Cold War thriller.  Tim's attempt to escape with his life from the USSR is a real tour de force.  According to one authority Garve drew heavily for this winter snow and ice capade on his old, long forgotten thriller Red Escapade, which I hope will be reprinted one day.  There's a moment, 60% of the way into the novel, when Tim, along with the reader, receives a memorably chilling surprise.  Then we are with Tim as he tries to make his way against all odds to the port city of Odessa, which currently the Russian army at Putin's orders is about to attack.  The final book of the novel is a bit anticlimactic, but the Ukraine section is a real thrill ride, if at times an improbable one (but that's the nature of the beast).  

Still for immersion in Cold Water USSR culture, Loda is not a patch on Murder in Moscow, published during the way days of Stalin's misrule and a true detective novel as well.  More on that one, which I am currently rereading, soon.