The Whispering Dead - David Mark

You don't associate David Mark with international espionage thrillers, but the author of the famed DS McAvoy series and other dark crime fiction works successfully across a number of genres including historical fiction (Anatomy of a Heretic) and even a mental health memoir (Piece of Mind). As a genre however, for me spy thrillers are something of a genre of the past, made almost redundant not just by the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, but by the internet. Who needs to send agents into the field nowadays when you can employ hackers and deploy drones?

There are exceptions to every rule and - again from a personal perspective - there are a few authors who keep the spy thriller relevant and exciting, managing to bring a contemporary feel to an old school of writing. In my limited reading in the genre, Mick Herron stands out with his Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, just about managing to keep one step ahead of the absurdity of modern day political and establishment affairs with flair and humour. Gerald Seymour too manages to blend in those absurdities of the new order of globalisation and commercialisation of crime and war with not yet extinct old school tie attitudes.

That long preamble is just to set the scene to say that David Mark, not unexpectedly, also succeeds in breathing life and a contemporary perspective onto a somewhat stale genre in The Whispering Dead and he does it also by straddling the past with the present. Because, as we all know, the sins of the past have a way of revisiting us in the present, and that's a theme that you will find in other books by this author. Here, his 'agents' if you want to describe Cordelia Hemlock and Felicity Goose that way (Flick is only an ordinary housewife), are very aged indeed in 2016, both in their 80s and about as far away from the popular image of spies as you can imagine. But my goodness they have a shocking and somewhat unpleasant story to tell.

And tell it they do to Paolo Fergus, a writer for a website exploring the activities of the intelligence agencies who has come upon some interesting information about the dubious activities of British Intelligence in Central America in the 1980s. He is pointed in the direction of the borderlands village of Gilsland, where Baroness Hemlock and Flick still reside, and he records their testimonies of what happened in this very place in 1982. Recruited into MI6 in 1968, Cordelia's career was almost derailed (potentially lethally) by reporting the involvement of British forces in crimes against humanity taking place in Guatemala and Belize. Not wishing to step on the toes of President Regan and his efforts to purge Communism from his back yard, her bosses seem to want to turn a blind eye to this, and unfortunately - as far as Cordelia and her Gilsland friend Felicity are concerned - that would appear to make any evidence and witnesses of it disappear.

I've said that you don't really expect David Mark to delve into such political affairs and international incidents, but he has been there before and very successfully in The Guest House. What is more surprising is that it's not in the first Cordelia Hemlock book The Burying Ground (aka The Mausoleum). Cordelia and Felicity do get involved in political secrets and power plays going on behind the scenes that seem to involve a military base in the area, but unless I am mistaken, there is no mention of Cordelia's recruitment and subsequent career in the secret service. I thought that maybe I had missed something, but after a quick scan back though the other book, I thought I'd better check with the author himself*, who assured me that "Cordelia was subtly manoeuvred towards the secret service at the denouement of the first one", revealing that this was always the intended direction as he "always saw the whole book as being an origins story for Judi Dench's version of M". So there you go...

Really however, despite the venture into US Central America policy and the obviously entirely fictional imagining of the craven subservience of the British Intelligence in aiding their activities, the secret to David Mark's success in making The Whispering Dead relevant as an espionage thriller is that he is working on home ground, so to speak. You'll find him doing the typical things that David Mark does so well, delving as much into local character and history or assessing the impact that nefarious outside agencies have on small insular English communities. The key to that is having the story related from the perspectives and the very colourful nature and experience of two elderly English ladies of very different backgrounds. As ordinary people, they tend to react in a very different and perhaps more human way to extraordinary situations than other fictional secret service agents.

So, having clarified the author himself that this was the direction he always intended to take Cordelia Hemlock - and who can doubt him with that kind of naming of the character? - The Whispering Dead is all the more impressive for how it builds on the characters of Cordelia and Felicity Goose in The Burying Ground. Aside from the thrilling nature of the political secrets, revelations and violent attempts to cover it up, with the requisite complications of betrayal, double-dealing and ambiguity of never knowing the true nature of what you are dealing with, there are more human and universal concerns that make this a little more David Mark. Here it's not a glamorous game played by posh former public schoolboys, it's not about being on the side of the angels, "in the service of a greater good" or a self-serving power-trip; what matters are the little people caught up in it all. And for some of those concerned here there is the knowledge of what it is like to lose a son, and that makes troubles in far off lands feel much more relatable, real and relevant.  

Reading Notes: The Whispering Dead (Cordelia Hemlock 2) is published by Severn House on the 6th December 2022. Bit of a long wait, but it is worth it. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advance eBook copy for review.

*David Mark is actually very approachable and a great deal friendlier than you might think from his dark cime books. He's well worth following on social media, happy to answer questions, sign books or offer guidance to any budding writer who would like a literary mentor to cast an expert eye over their work.