I'd been reading serious stuff (history of Jews in Australia, Holocaust and Nazi history) for weeks and The Lemur promised light relief. The cover advises that Benjamin Black is a nom de plume of a Man Booker Prize winner and so by implication a superior kind of thriller, but I wonder if the writer mightn't have preferred to keep the connection between his two personae under wraps. This reads as something carelessly knocked-off, with a plot that barely exists and threadbare characters, but conveyed in prose that holds the reader's attention by incisive similes and enough acute observation to signal the presence of a thinking mind. That is to say, it's infinitely better written than the D* V*nci C*de, but nothing like as incident-packed. On the other hand it's short, so not a terrible waste of time. I gave it two out of five for Book Club purposes.

Alan Furst, by contrast, is unlikely to win a literary prize. He is, after all, a genre wrier, his genre being the Spy Novel. But there's no sense in Night Soldiers that he's on vacation from something more serious. On every page you can feel the pleasure he takes in researching his period -- from the mid 1930s to the end of the World War. And the text is strewn casually with nuggets of information, from the origins of the term 'fifth column' or the meaning of Anastasia to an extraordinary list of people (Herbert Marcuse, Archibald MacLeish, John Ford ...) involved in the beginnings of the US intelligence service that was eventually to become the CIA. Where you trust John Le Carre because you feel (or know) that he has lived and worked in the world his spies inhabit, Alan Furst wins your confidence by sheer accumulation of verifiable detail. And having won your confidence he delivers a rattling good yarn of manipulation, corruption, tradecraft, betrayal, survival, and even a little romance. The hero, Khristo, starts out as a young man in a Bulgarian village, is recruited as a spy by the Soviets, trains in Moscow, spends time in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, in Paris in 1937, with the maquis during the war, then working in Czechoslovakia for US intelligence and making his way down the Danube when the war ends. Each of these environments -- worlds, really -- is populated by sharply realised characters. I found it a wrench every time the story moved on, and was absurdly pleased when someone turned up from an earlier chapter, especially when they had been convincingly killed off. Nothing the slightest bit careless about this book. I think the point where I realised I was loving it came with this description of a minor character, the first of Khristo's several lovers, whom he meets at spy school:

She blew at him like a wind. She was an intellectual, a Marxist. She was intense, all business. She sang like a dockworker, ran like a soldier, and argued like a drill. God help the man or woman who let a false lick of lumpen deviationism creep into his words -- Marike would soon have it out, and with a hot tongs at that. She had burned the mannerisms of the arse-licking bourgeoisie from her soul, now it was your turn.

Standard Operating Procedure explains at the start that Philip Gourevitch wrote it, basing his work on conversations with Errol Morris and materials Morris had accumulated in making the film of the same name. Gourevitch chats with Ramona Koval on the ABC's Book Show regularly in his capacity of editor of the Paris Review, so we know from the start that this is not a cheap spin-off from the movie. In fact, even though the famous photographs are a big part of the story, none of them is used here, except for the detail on the cover -- a pair of naked feet standing in what might be a small puddle. As Gourevitch says,

photographs cannot tell stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation. Looked at in this way, as evidence of something beyond itself, a photograph can best be understood not as an answer or an end to enquiry, but as an invitation to look more closely, and to ask questions

Surely, if you have come this far in this sordid tale, you must crave some relief, some release, from the relentless, claustrophobic annihilation of the dungeon: a clear and cleansing note of sanity, an interlude of avenging justice or an eruption of decency, the entry of a hero. But surely you don't want to be deceived. There is no such solace or sanctuary in this story.

But no soldier above the rank of sergeant ever served jail time. No civilian interrogators ever faced legal proceedings. Nobody was ever charged with torture, or war crimes, or any violation of the Geneva Conventions. Nobody ever faced charges for keeping prisoners naked, or shackled. Nobody ever faced charges for incarcerating children who were accused of no crime and posed no known security threat. Nobody ever faced charges for holding thousands of prisoners in a combat zone in constant danger of their lives. Nobody ever faced charges for arresting thousands of civilians without direct cause and holding them indefinitely, incommunicado, in concentration camp conditions. Nobody ever faced charges for shooting and killing prisoners who were confined behind concertina wire. [...] That's how it worked: no photo, no crime ... the exposé became the cover-up.