Blogtour review - Nightingale & Co by Charlotte Printz

Nightingale & Co
Charlotte Printz (trans by Marina Sofia)

Corylus Books, 15 January 2025 (e), 1 February (PB) (390pp)
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781739298982

I'm grateful to Corylus Books for sending me a copy of Nightingale & Co to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

From the Publisher

Berlin, August 1961.

Since the death of her beloved father, Carla has been running the Nightingale & Co detective agency by herself. It’s a far from easy job for a female investigator. 

When the chaotic, fun-loving Wallie shows up at the door, claiming to be her half-sister, Carla’s world is turned upside down. Wallie needs Carla – the Berlin Wall has been built overnight, leaving her unable to return to her flat in East Berlin.

Carla certainly doesn’t need Wallie, with her secret double life and unorthodox methods for getting results. Yet the mismatched pair must find a way to work together when one of their clients is accused of murdering her husband.

Nightingale & Co is the first in a cosy historical crime series featuring the sisters of the Nightingale & Co detective agency in 1960s Berlin.

What I Thought

I loved it.

Printz gives us a view of postwar Germany, and particularly of West Berlin, that was new to me. We may be familiar with le Carré or Deighton Cold War spy antics involving the Wall, prisoner exchanges on lonely bridges at midnight and the heroics of people trying escape the East.

We know less, perhaps, about the impact of the sudden construction of the barrier - the everyday inconveniences as families are suddenly split, people are cut off from their jobs or homes, and transport disrupted. And, connected with that, the porosity of Berlin before the Wall - a city where citizens could work in one part of the city and live in the other.

Behind that suffering is, of course, a deeper history as the generation affected by this was one that had also lived through the War - whose effects are often pointed out in this book with buildings still ruined and bullet holes visible here and there - and necessarily, under the Nazi regime before and during that. There are plenty of passing comments in this book about how people had accommodated themselves with that regime, and what they had then done after to distance themselves. As well as rumblings in bars and on street corners from those who rather liked the Nazis. The details are fascinating and reach into the present of this novel to, affecting the attitudes of the characters and their position in society.

Alongside those political themes, though, this book also does a very good job at delineating the personalities in this story, women (for the most part) living at a time of enormous change, which some of them welcome and others shun. For example, Ingrid, a saleswoman for the new contraceptive pill who is one of Carla's clients. Carla herself, whose life is dominated by her strained relationship with a domineering and controlling mother. And free spirit Wallie, who breezes into this story upsetting apple carts down every street. Wallie is something of a catalyst for events in the book, given that half-sister Carla is rather cautious and, one feels, left to herself would never take the steps necessary to resolve the two cases here (tracking down a missing American serviceman with whom Ingrid had fallen in love, and solving the murder of a prominent architect whose wife came to her seeking help with a divorce, and who then herslelf naturally falls under suspicion). Wallie, on the other hand, goes in with all guns blazing and seems adapt at everything from setting a honeytrap to spotting a tail. We can only wonder where she learned these skills. Perhaps it goes with the territory if you work the bar in a topless nightclub?

Above all, though, Nightingale & Co is a joyous, thrilling crime narrative that keeps the reader hooked from the first page. Carla is a rather atypical detective, at least by genre standards, and she's often juggling the dramatic - having to race across Berlin to interview a client in prison, contending with the dislocations caused by the Wall, chatting up contacts bin the American military - with the mundane - getting home in time for tea rather than face an earful from her mother, or rescuing her zany aunt from some scrape. It makes for a rich tapestry of life, and that's even before we see things from the perspective of the slightly chaotic Wallie who surely has some secrets of her own. (I should mention that until Wallie turns up suitcase in hand, Carla didn't know that her dad had another daughter in the East - so things are pretty tense between then as you can imagine).

It's all rendered in excellent, taut prose by Marina Sofia, including being clear about - but not intrusively - the points where the distinction in German between familiar and formal pronouns conveys shades of social distance that English has lost. 

In short, strongly recommended - and I hope to see more of Carla & Co in future.

About the Author and Translator 

Charlotte Printz is the pseudonym of a successful former TV editor with a penchant for writing gripping historical novels and screenplays. She is one of the founders of the Munich Writing Academy.

Marina Sofia is a translator, reviewer, writer and blogger, as well as a third culture kid, who grew up trilingual in Romanian, German and English. This is her first translation of a German crime novel to be published by Corylus Books

For more information about Nightingale & Co, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Nightingale & Co from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.

#Blogtour #Review - Hammer to Fall by John Lawton

Hammer to Fall (Joe Wilderness, 3)
John Lawton
Grove Press, 14 May 2020
Available as: HB, 400pp, e
Read as: Advance e-copy
ISBN: 9781611856354

I'm honoured to be starting off the blog tour for Hammer to Fall, the new thriller from John Lawton (and grateful to Ayo for inviting me to take part and providing a free advance e-copy of the book).

This is the third book in Lawton's sequence featuring their, rogue and spy Joe Holderness (nickname Wilderness) and for a bonus it also includes (Frederick) Troy about whom Lawton has written rather more books. I enjoy the "shared universe" of these books and characters and the way that Lawton dots backwards and forwards, intersecting with previously established storylines (this one covers events in 1948, 1955 and 1966-68).

As we open, Wilderness is based in West Berlin, notionally and RAF Sergeant but actually up to something spooky. This work seems to leave him with plenty of free time for petty larceny and smuggling and he's part of an established band of "Schiebers", minor crooks, smugglers, and forgers who basically supply what the East German Communist regime can't. This involves contact with their opposites in the NKVD who are just as corrupt. Lawton paints a fascinating picture where amidst the nascent Cold War, such behaviour is simply a fact of life. The accent is very much on the individual, on the minor misdemeanours rather than everything having Consequences with a capital "C". That contrasts with the high stakes in the world of say George Smiley where one feels that an MI6 operative known by the opposition to be smuggling would immediately be blackmailed, turned and end up dishing out secrets from the top of the Service.

Consequently things here are very morally ambiguous and the implications of what's happening very subtle indeed. Nor is the sense of freewheeling, conniving spidery confined to the immediate post War years. In the main party of the book, Wilderness finds himself posted as a punishment to Finland where he has to pretend to be a Cultural Attaché showing British films in remote, draughty village halls. Bored out of his mind, he rapidly becomes involved in a local racket alongside an investigation in to a potential real bit of spycraft. The heart of the story is, though, always on Wilderness as a person, the effect on him of years spent in dubious undercover schemes while his young daughters grow up without him in London, and on where this may lead (an example is given of an old spy living a only life in Dublin).

The third act of this book takes us to the Prague Spring, where, naturally, British Intelligence is very interested in the goings-on and there is a reunion of sorts of Wilderness and his old crew. (Of sorts...) Lawton is very good, I think, on the dynamics of those months, on how the internal struggles would have looked to a close observer and on the reactions of ordinary citizens. The writing here has to strike a balance between a convincing, engaging plot giving agency to characters we've come to know and understand and the need to narrate the history they are experiencing as though it were in doubt - history which may be bent a little, but can't be fundamentally changed. Lawton does this pretty well - we do get a certain amount of narration, with Embassy cables recounting key events and moving things forward, but we also get Wilderness (and others) pursuing their (sometimes shady) objectives below the radar, as it were, with a genuine doubt about how everything will come to a climax.

In the meantime there are the (to me, ever fascinating) tropes of spy fiction - living a cover, clandestine meetings with contacts, the danger of betrayal, even, in flashback, a scene as agents are exchanged on a bridge in Berlin at midnight. And behind it all there is, quite properly, the human factor. When all the plans are made, all the fall-backs imagined and the risks assessed, what will the thing be that nobody saw but which rewrites the story? The boredom of an agent leading to unwise mischief? The inability, after carrying years of guilt, to harden the heart and kill at the needed moment?  The inability, after years of fear and stress, to trust at the needed moment? The bureaucratic blunder? The key failure of operational security?

The conclusion is truly nailbiting. There is, as Lawton notes, a sense of an ending here - but how will it come?

(That's not, by the way, the only allusion to a book, film or song I saw here - 'It was a looking-glass war from which few returned', 'I met my old lover on the street last night' - with its unstated refrain).

This was an enjoyable, gripping read, a more people-centred espionage story in which the central question is less, what are "they" up to, but, how can we (all of us, both sides) survive this business with something, some of ourselves, intact? Lawton draws his characters generously and he has a way with the telling phrase ('It would be a one-horse town if somebody happened to ride in', 'little Berlin Walls of the skull', 'Not designed to make you feel at home, but to make you feel there was no such place as home', 'It was hard to make new friends. So he didn't try.') There is atmosphere in spades, and the pages on my e-reader flew by. I'd recommend.

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here.

To buy Hammer to Fall, it's worth trying your local independent bookshop, even in these difficult times (especially in these difficult times). Or you can order online from Hive Books - who support local booksellers - Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

There are more stops to come on this tour - see the poster below and do, please, follow all of them.

Review - The War in the Dark by Nick Setchfield

Cover by Natasha MacKenzie

The War in the Dark
Nick Setchfield
Titan Books, 17 July 2018
PB, 416pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a copy of The War in the Dark for review.

1963, and SIS assassin Christopher Winter is on the brink. He's caught between postwar austerity (bombed out building from the War still feature) and a 60s that has yet to begin swinging. He's a murderer, working in the service of law and freedom. It's a tangibly sooty, smoky world of depressing brownish cafes and Bakelite, set against the alluring prospect of technological white heat and progress.

But now, Winter's about to step into a war with the invisible powers, the rulers and principalities of this age, a war fought with runes and rituals and arcane knowledge that seem centuries away from satellites, nuclear weapons and computers.

It all begins with a routine job, the offing of a priest who's been selling secrets to the Russians. Winter's never killed a priest before, but why not? Things don't, though, go according to plan and soon there;s a trail of blood across London and Winter's encountering the Almost men. Convinced that he's been betrayed, he puts together what clues he can and head for Vienna...

This blend of the occult and espionage moves at a brisk pace. While it's clear there is a bigger picture, and the hints that Setchfield drops will eventually build to reveal what it is, the focus is mainly on Winter's immediate plight, hunted by all sides - the Russians, his own Service and shadowier enemies as well. There's no need, I think, to worry too yard about the trail that he's following as it leads him from one confrontation to the next - rather, one might worry about where he's going and what he will do when he gets there. Because Christopher Winter does have skin in this game, even if he doen't realise it. In fact, in a sense he is the skin in the game.

In counterpoint to Winter we also see the progress of a mysterious figure, Hart. Between them, he and Winter hold the fate of nations, of universes. But, enmeshed as they are in the rivalry between a decaying Empire and a rising Soviet Union, will they be able to do their duty - and what will that cost?

I enjoyed this mixture of treachery, blood and magic. Setchfield explores a crossover I've seen dealt with in various ways - from the World War Two sage of Ian Tregillis's Bitter Seeds trilogy to Tim Powers' Le Carre-esque Declare to Charles Stross's Laundry books, but The War in the Dark carves out its own distinctive space infused with a sense of paranoia and doubt that seems to foreshadow the domestic political chicanery of the 70s rather than the Great Game played against Russia (another way, perhaps, in which Winter is on the edge of a change).

It is an absorbing book, one which kept me guessing till the end and one which palpably creates a wider world to which I hope Setchfield can return, with or without Christopher Winter.