Straw Man by Lindsey Mellon
On 12th October 1984, an IRA bomb, intended to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, rips the heart out of the Grand Hotel in Brighton. As part of the security response MI6 Station Chief Rome – Haydon Talbot – is tasked with foiling a Libyan plot to ship vast quantities of Semtex explosive to the IRA.
As the wheels of international espionage roll through Rome’s historic centre, Libyan and British agents are pitched against each other in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Haydon recruits British entrepreneur Charlie Lomax to front a sophisticated nuclear sting, with the aim of penetrating the highest levels of the Libyan security establishment. But his bosses will go to any lengths to score a political victory, even if it means sacrificing Haydon’s operation and agent in place.
As the IRA ship carrying the Semtex sails slowly north towards Ireland, Haydon faces conflicting pressures from above to interdict the shipment, whilst seeking to rescue Charlie from a brutal Tripoli jail.
About the author
Lindsey Mellon was born in London in 1949 and largely uneducated. He is passionate about history, travel and current affairs and has harboured an ambition to write fiction for six decades, but never quite got off the blocks. He recently completed a Faber ‘Work in Progress’ course, as part of which he developed the first draft of ‘Straw Man’. He is presently writing a sequel ‘The Sheikh’, set in Khartoum during the sinister infancy of Al-Qaeda during the early nineties. Widely travelled, he has lived in the UK, Ireland, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia, Italy, Spain and Switzerland. He has worked, among other things, as a pilot, a painter, an entrepreneur, an oil explorer and as a Producer in Film & TV. He lives and works in Oxfordshire.
Review
‘Straw Man’ is a slick espionage novel that ticks all the boxes! This is an accomplished piece of work for a debut author and it feels completely authentic in its subject matter. Set just after the 1984 bombing of The Grand Hotel in Brighton which nearly killed PM Margaret Thatcher it is full of old-school tradecraft, relationships between the intelligence communities in Europe and Libya and how the IRA operated on a global scale.
Normally, a book about the IRA you would expect to be set in Ireland but this moves the scene to Italy and how Libya was supporting the group and the UK government's attempts to end this relationship. We meet Haydon Talbot an experienced spy who is Station Chief in Rome which is currently a hot bed of diplomatic relations and a bridge where both the UK and Libyan governments were working to further their ambitions. He has been tasked with stopping the Libyans from supplying the IRA with weapons and semtex and also with stopping their nuclear ambitions. Don’t pick this book up expecting high-speed chases and the world of James Bond, this is about the negotiations between countries, the manipulation of people and the race to create double crosses. No one gets in the way of this or do they? When Haydon recruits Charlie to help with the Libyan situation at first he is just trying to help him out whilst fulfilling his own needs. But as the book progresses he develops a conscious and when Charlie is thrown in jail in Tripoli Haydon has to question what he stands for.
I found this book to be very engrossing and I flew through it in one day! It felt authentic, as though the author either had experienced it themselves or had researched it meticulously. The writing was sharp and to the point and not one word was wasted! Did I like any of the characters, maybe not but then I don't think we were really meant to. They are duplicitous, manipulative and loyal to their country or the colour of money and to no one else. Ironically, the person I had the most empathy for was Sean, the IRA man as he was seemed the most real and human out of the lot of them. At least he questions what is happening around him.
Overall, this was an enjoyable read and I can't wait to read its sequel! Let me know if you pick this one up!
