The Berlin Embassy

Michael Shea

In 1991 I applied to join the Diplomatic Civil Service. Don't laugh, I passed the initial exams and was invited to the 2 day sessions they hold in Whitehall each year for the shortlisted candidates. At the beginning of the first day, one of the interviewing team announced to me "Now we don't want you to feel overawed, what with you being the only applicant in this batch who wasn't at Oxbridge". Needless to say I wasn't invited to final interview.

Michael Shea got a little bit further than me and was a career diplomat and the Queen's spin doctor for ten years. He should know his stuff. His thriller is set in the new British embassy in Berlin. It's 1999. Newly installed as the embassy's Number Two is Alex Murray. Murray quickly has plenty on his plate. There's an old nazi to hunt down and prosecute, an upcoming England-Germany football match which could cause difficulties and a rise in right-wing extremism to report on. Most worrying of all, there's an army of Ukrainian and Russian refugees camped on the Polish border.

It's this mass of refugees (or economic migrants, if you prefer ... topical eh?) which provides Shea with his plot. The refugees are about to pour unarmed across NATO's borders and spark a political and military crisis in the heart of Europe. With Berlin now increasingly the political centre of gravity for Europe, Murray and the rest of the embassy personnel are a crucial part of NATO's response.

Thriller writers have spent ten years trying and failing to find a cold war enemy to replace the Soviet Union. They've tried terrorists. They've tried a neo-fascist Russia. They've tried a lawless Russia. Shea's angle is a starving Russia. A Russia which is prepared to send its envious millions swarming into Western Europe to take a little of the West's plenty. What can NATO's troops do but stand aside? No soldier is going to fire on a man in rags with nothing but looted groceries and a stolen TV under his arm.

It's a decent premise for a thriller, so why doesn't it thrill? Mostly because of the two dimensional stereotypes with which Michael Shea has peopled his book.

There's the snooty and formal Amabassador himself. Even allowing for my own brief brush with foreign office snobbery, Sir Edward Cornwall is just too stiff and starched to be true. Then there's the love interest, an official from the neighbouring American embassy, smart and sassy (naturally), a sprinkling of journalists, devious and unpleasant (of course) and a couple of environmentalists, over-earnest and scruffy (you guessed it).

And then there's the hero, himself, Alex Murray. Bold, intelligent and direct but ever so slightly flawed. He's not good with people, you see. Too truculent and too much of a loner. Bet you've never come across a thriller with that kind of hero in it before, eh?

So it's OK, but nothing special. The next thriller I'm going to enjoy has got to have a protagonist with something a bit different. That title with the detective with Tourette's sounds worth trying. At least it sounds unusual. I'm afraid The Berlin Embassy is run of the mill.