Introduction-
Cold Blood
“Goodbye love! Goodbye sorrow! Goodbye Russia!” – that’s how White Blood finished. But Charlie was drunk: he had no intention of quitting Russia. He had one purpose only: to find and kill Prokhor Glebov, the Bolshevik who’d led the assault on Elizaveta. Convinced that Glebov will sooner or later turn up at Lenin’s side, he hunkers down in St Petersburg and waits. Lenin takes power. Charlie learns that Glebov has been appointed Commissar for the Political Re-Education of the deposed Tsar. The chase begins.
Not since Dr Zhivago has a Russian train journey been so spectacular. Having captured an armoured train, Charlie and his private army fight their way east. Near Kazan, he hears of the existence in the city of the Tsar’s gold reserves. At the same time, he meets up with Leapforth Jones, an American secret agent who’s been sent to gather information about the Reds. Charlie teams up with him to seize the gold. But Jones is not the man he appears to be – and when Charlie gets to Kazan he finds Glebov waiting for him.
Thus the hunter becomes the hunted. It is the worst possible situation for Charlie…
Latest Reviews
From The Times, London, March 7, 2009
Cold Blood by James Fleming
The Times review by Giles Whittell
Note to Jonathan Cape: the blurb on the inside back flap of the jacket of Cold Blood does James Fleming no favours. It tells us, first, that he's the great Ian Fleming's nephew. Then it lists what else he's been in his 63 years besides rip-roaring quasi-historical thriller writer: Oxford history graduate, accountant, farmer, forester, bookseller.
Making this - what? The work of a dilettante with a name, written for his own mild amusement and to show anyone who was wondering that there's really nothing to this fiction lark?
Nothing personal, but I would have preferred to know nothing about this Mr Fleming. Then I would have suspended scepticism and been grabbed and swept along by his extraordinary use of plot and pace and language that much sooner.
This is a thriller, no bones about it. It operates by hitting its marks and folding its back-stories as precisely as a 120-page movie script. Speaking of movies, there are as many bullets and somersaulting bodies here as in a John Woo gangster flick, and there is a testicular laceration scene that makes the one in Casino Royale look thoroughly inhibited.
But gore is not Fleming's USP. It just drenches his chosen territory as a matter of historical fact. That territory - Russia, 1917-18, crawling with Bolsheviks and convulsed by civil war - may feel familiar to fans of Pasternak and his imitators, but it is still the reason to read this book.
Fleming is far too impatient a writer to build any of his characters layer by layer. In fact he snaps them together rather as he tears them apart, limb by limb. But he defies you to nit-pick about characterisation and related trivia with the sheer energy and inventiveness of a prose style (“God damn all thinkers”; “Russia, oh Russia! World without end ...”) that is perfectly suited to the grotesqueries of his subject.
That subject is Russia, and revenge, and a bit of redemption. Our hero, back for more mayhem after a previous outing in White Blood, seeks the grisly end, the grislier the better, of a mythic No3 to Lenin who raped and tortured his wife for being an aristo.
Into the pursuit of the flabby, dwarfish, sub-Blofeld Prokhor Glebov by the towering, irresistible, beyond-Bond Charlie Doig are dragged a seductress who makes her first move in a crowded tram, a Mongolian psychopath on a horse called Tornado, a preposterous American cryptographer and, of course, an armoured train.
For anyone who feels that there aren't enough armoured trains in today's popular fiction, or enough murderous White Russians with God and destiny on their side - and I am one - this book is a must.
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