You may know this from what goes on at SFFWorld, but, just in case you didn’t, I do like a good alternate history (aka these days as ‘a counterfactual’.) From Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle to L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall and even Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series, I like the fact that in an alternate history the tale is recognisable yet undeniably different.
Outside the genre, such ideas in books have become mainstream. Books such as Len Deighton’s SS-GB and Robert Harris’ Fatherland have been big sellers, covering similar ideas but of more notice amongst the crime/thriller crowd.
A Kill in the Morning is a novel that manages to combine the best elements of mainstream spy fiction (Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Len Deighton, John le Carre, Frederick Forsyth etc) with an sf-nal alternative timeline – namely that after the Second World War parts of Europe have, by 1955, been ruled by the German Social Democratic (Nazi) Party. Britain agreed to peace in 1941 after the death of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and now German occupation covers much of Europe, lying between The European Community (France, Germany, Italy) and the Communist Soviet Union to the east.
Our unnamed hero, is suitably grim, a mentally tortured British secret agent whose life is made difficult by dealing with death on a daily basis. In counterpoint we also have the equally tortured German femme fatale, Katharina Geissler/Kitty, whose family were murdered by the Nazis and now seeks revenge as part of the underground pacifist White Rose Group.
Our hero finds himself with a mission- whilst also being hunted by a sinister cabal within his own organisation, he has to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, a rising SS leader whose killing of a key player in the British Secret Service (SoE) seems to be the vanguard of a new Nazi uprising within the tired ranks of Germany’s politicians and one which is determined to change the Cold War.
Part Day of the Jackal, part James Bond, this book surprised me in its assured nature. This is a very confident debut, well-written and surprisingly adept. I loved the way that real characters and fictional ones are mixed here. Historical figures British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, German Deputy Rudolf Hess and British Dambuster pilot (now jet bomber pilot) Guy Gibson are intermingled with our fictional characters, alongside a James Bond-ian pulp-style plot involving super-weapons, jet bombers, atomic bombs and even time travel.
All of which written down in such a short summary sounds rather preposterous. But A Kill in the Morning deals with such matters in such a way that the necessity to believe is never compromised, even when there’s the odd coincidence that is a little too convenient. The alternate Cold War future of 1955 comes across as it should, and it reads as if it were a spy novel of that time – think The Ipcress File or SS-GB, but with an element of the Commando comics and Indiana Jones thrown in. Even the cover comes across in the style of an old 1960’s Pan Books paperback.
With this in mind, some of the viewpoints are a tad old-fashioned, yet understandable given the context of their tale. The villain is, as to be expected, appropriately evil, yet coldly logical from his view. There’s also a couple of great heroines that show determination, panache and bravery, even whilst the men are muttering “not a job for a woman…”. A Kill in the Morning manages to play on these antiquated roles with a wry grin and a knowing wink, all the while adding a post-modern sensibility to the proceedings in the same way that a TV series like Mad Men does. They were different times, and we relish in their difference.
It’s also clear that there’s a fair bit of research gone into this one to make that alternate seem real. Maps and diagrams, and the Timeline and Glossary at the back of the book show that there’s been a lot of effort put into creating a realistically possible alternate fiction. It seems fairly tangible, which is a key part of any counterfactual.
In short, A Kill in the Morning is a wonderful page-turner with a plot that would make a great action movie. It’s been in the ‘to-be-read’ pile for a while, and I’m rather sorry I’ve left it so long to read, for from the start it is an action-packed romp that Ian Fleming would be proud of. Like Fleming’s James Bond, A Kill in the Morning’s not to be taken too seriously, but whilst reading gives the reader a great sense of entertainment. A pleasant surprise.
A Kill in the Morning by Graeme Shimmin
Published by Bantam Press, June 2014
ISBN: 978 0 593 07353 7
384 pages
Mark Yon, December 2014
