John Lawton (author)

John Lawton
Born 1949
England
Pen name John Lawton
Occupation Novelist
Period 1987–present
Genre Espionage, Crime, Historical
Notable works Novel: Old Flames (1996), Novel: Second Violin (2007)

John Lawton is a producer/director in television, and an author of historical/crime/espionage novels set primarily in England during World War II and the Cold War.

Biography

Lawton had a brief and unspectacular career in London publishing prior to becoming, by the mid-1980s, a documentary television producer at the newly created Channel 4. In 1993 he settled in New York, and in 1995 won a WH Smith award for his third book Black Out[1]. He went back into television in England in 1997, and by 1999 had dropped off the TV and books map completely. He returned in 2001 with Riptide (American title: Bluffing Mr. Churchill), which was snapped up by Columbia Pictures. For most of the 21st century, so far, he has tended to be elusive and itinerant, residing in England, the United States and Italy. He appeared in New York, in 2008, with a reading in Greenwich Village.[2] Earlier the same year he was named in the Daily Telegraph (London) as one of '50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die.' In October 2010 he read in Ottawa, Toronto, Portland and Seattle, ending up at the Mysterious Book Store in Tribeca, and later that year was named in the New York Times Review's 'Pick of the Year' for his novel 'A Lily of the Field'.

Many of the Biography pages within Lawton's books have a decidedly tongue-in-cheek bent with hobbies listed as the 'cultivation of the onion and obscure varieties of potato', or 'growing leeks'. Those close to him would stress that such descriptions are meant quite seriously. His author bio notes that "since 2000 he has lived in the high, wet hills of Derbyshire England, with frequent excursions into the high, dry hills of Arizona and Italy."[1]

Bibliography

Frederick Troy novels

The novels in the Frederick Troy series share the eponymous protagonist Frederick (he doesn't like any form of his given name, preferring to be addressed by his surname) Troy, the younger son of a Russian immigrant father who's become a wealthy newspaper publisher and baronet. Defying class and family expectations, the independently wealthy Troy joins Scotland Yard, becoming an investigator on the "murder squad". The rights to this character were purchased by Columbia Pictures.[2]

The series, in published order:

The story begins during the last stages of the London Blitz in 1944. Sergent Troy is assigned to find out who's murdering German scientists who've been secretly smuggled out of Germany and into Britain. Later, Troy tracks his suspect to Berlin in 1948, during the Berlin Blockade. Along the way, he tangles with British and American spy agencies, a Russian spy and a British femme fatale.
Chief Inspector Troy, because he speaks Russian, is assigned to guard Russian Secretary-General Nikita Khrushchev, during his 1956 visit to Britain. Along with these duties, Troy investigates the death of an ex-navy diver during a curiously botched spy mission.
The third Troy novel uses the historical events of the Profumo Affair and the Kim Philby spy scandal of the early 1960s as a jumping-off point for a fictionalized version in which Troy, now risen to Commander in Scotland Yard, discovers that an apparent suicide (of the fictional Stephen Ward-analog character) was really a murder. A second apparent suicide thickens the plot. Most of the historical characters get fictional equivalents, a few appear as themselves, and Christine Keeler becomes a pair of sisters. In the closing Historical Note, however, Lawton explains his historical inspirations and cautions that "This is not a roman à clef." Concurrent with the scandal/spy/murder plot, Lawton interleaves some cultural history on the beginnings of 'swinging London'. The novel's title is a double entendre, referring both to the pills used in the second suspicious suicide and to Troy's life-and-career-threatening battle against tuberculosis.
Lawton backtracks chronologically to the early days of World War II, before Black Out. The Americans, not yet in the war, send Calvin M. Cormack to London to find an agent fled from Germany and bring him in for debriefing. He is paired with MI5 officer Walter Stilton and takes Stilton's daughter Kitty as a lover, who is also seeing her ex boyfriend Sergeant Troy of Scotland Yard. When Stilton is killed, Cal joins with Troy to investigate the trail of murders and learn why the agent won't come in.
This book opens at almost exactly the same point as Black Out, and then skips ten years beyond the end of Black Out to pick up the lives of characters who are only children in the first novel. In 1959 two of them have grown up to be East End gangsters trying to move into the West End, and one has become a policeman working with Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy. There are some similarities to the historical story of the three Kray brothers, but Blue Rondo is set in a very different era and the author has, on occasion, warned against making too much of such anlaogy.
Another "prequel" to Black Out, this time back to 1938. The main protagonist this time is Frederick Troy's older brother Rod, working as a reporter for his father's newspaper. Rod travels to Vienna, just in time to witness Kristallnacht. Returning to Britain, he is sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man because of his Austrian birth and failure to pursue naturalisation. During the Battle of Britain, he is freed to become a fighter pilot. Meanwhile, brother Sergent Troy investigates the murders of several East End rabbis. The parallel stories eventually converge at the final denouement.
This novel tells two linked stories, differing in tone and structure, but heading to the same conclusion. The first part, "Audacity", is set in the years 1934–46 in Europe, and has only the briefest mention of Frederick Troy. It is, essentially, the back-story to all that follows. The second part, "Austerity", set in London in 1948, is a more familiar Inspector Troy murder investigation, that, almost inevitably, spills over into Cold War espionage.[4]

The series in chronological (reading) order[5]

Other fiction

Another look at the Profumo Affair that so shocked the English, played this time as comedy, when a junior army officer is mistaken for someone important, set up with a hooker and blackmailed. Reads very much like Lawton's homage to Graham Greene

Non-fiction

Television

References

  1. ↑ Author bio at Grove Atlantic.com (accessed 19 February 2011)
  2. ↑ The spy novelist whose spies are crooks, Adam Dunn (accessed 19 February 2011)
  3. ↑ Essay by the author on the history underlying Second Violin (accessed 19 February 2011)
  4. ↑ New York Times Sunday Book Review (accessed 19 February 2011)
  5. ↑ Lawton, John (2007). Second Violin. p. title.2.

External links

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