Sunday, March 6, 2022

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.

12 comments:

  1. Really enjoying your tour through the Garve ouvre. I and my friends eagerly consumed his books, along with Dennis Wheatley, assorted Badger Books authors, John Blackburn, Ian Fleming and anything else mystery, horror of SF related. I liked the years when tight plotting, a forward narrative, and zero padding delivered a 50-60,000 word enjoyable book, a skill Garve had in spades. I recently read a book in which the first chapter incorporated what was fairly clearly Google Maps driving instructions for Washington. I recall when P D James began padding for the kind of reader who likes to 'learn' something as well as enjoy a mystery resulting in a book that told me more about the Thames than I wanted to know. That's all I recall of the book. There may have been a mystery as well. Damn you Arthur Hailey!

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    1. These covers are nice as well. Any idea who the artist is?

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    2. Glady you're enjoying the look at Garve, I'd been meaning to blog more about him for a while now.

      What strikes me most about the later PD James is the emphasis she laid on descriptions of room interiors. It reminds me of Virginia's Woolf's comment about Arnold Bennett, that he "laid an enormous stress upon the fabric of things." So did PD James. Things that, at least in the later books, have no real relevance to the mystery plot. If that's the alternative, give us Garve as Eudora Welty said. Jacques Barzun thought the long tale, like in Conan Doyle, was the natural form of the detective novel. Garve's short novels come pretty close to that.

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    3. The artist doesn't seem to be credited, but I agree, this imprint series had nice cover art. Unfortunately, the glue in these pbs, which were published by Popular Library in the Sixties, tends to dry out, leaving the spines brittle and the covers prone to falling off!

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    4. I think the Sixties really was part of a Silver Age in mystery, there was a lot of interesting stuff going on. I start to lose interest in the genre somewhat around 1985, which was about then those super long "crime novels" commenced! Also, I'll admit, for me the Eighties and later lose the allure of "history." I prefer reading the books of my grandparents' and parents' generations.

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    5. Same for me. I really liked the earlier PD James novels, but as the 80s went on my love of classic crime reasserted itself. I still like Kellerman from that period, but I'm reading for the relationship between Milo and Alex now... I honestly prefer Fay's books these days though, especially now Decker has retired to the backwoods of New York State. Her books are cosies now I guess. I interviewed her once. Nice lady. Sorry...I digress.

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  2. "borders frequently shifted in this region of the world."
    In parts of Eastern Europe there were people who were citizens/subjects of five countries in their lifetimes without ever leaving the village they were born in - assuming they lived long enough.

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    1. I remember as a kid I used to be fascinated by this atlas my Dad had which showed the changes in borders in that part of Europe over the centuries. And the infamous partitions of Poland!

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  3. Keen readers may like to know that Garve also had 2 other pen names ( pace John Street!!). Roger Bax and Paul Somers . Virtually all of these were issued by Bello over here ..and in Kindle form , making them affordable. These other " names " were equally readable and I don't think they had differing settings ..unlike say Rhode and Burton.

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    1. Yes, I hope to say some more about those other pen names and just how he came up with Garve.

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  4. Very glad to see this. Garve started out as an enthusiastic socialist, spending nine months in Russia/Ukraine in 1928-9, written up in his first book, A Student in Russia. The rose-tinted spectacles didn't come off until about 1939 with the Stalinist atrocities. More detail on my web site: garve.marlodge.net. If you come across any publisher interested in reissuing Red Escapade, please pass on the information that I scanned the text before parting with my copy to an American, so could supply accurate electronic text.

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    1. Thanks, I hadn't been aware that you had a website. I found out about your book collecting Garve's Russia writings a few days ago and was hoping to get in touch with you. Could you drop me a line at thepassingtramp@gmail.com? Perhaps we could have an interview. I have a vague notion we may have intersected on a comments section as a Mystery*File post a good while ago.

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