The Smoke: Jethro Series, Book 1 (Creeping Narrative) [Kindle Edition]

London comes alive through Jethro's eyes, and it's a wholly convincing portrayal of the postwar era, with low morale due to widespread rationing (clothes, food, alcohol, tobacco) and the psychological scars of the war. A cockney who fled London for a career in the Merchant Marine and then the Merchant Navy only to return and start a new career thieving, he's a sympathetic figure. Of course he only steals from the rich, who are likely to be insured, and he spreads his wealth generously among friends and family. But when he inadvertently steals from a Russian spy, it leads to the unbalancing of his carefully tailored life.

The book is strong on details, both in terms of description and slang. The author has obviously gone to a lot of trouble to get the period lingo right, and it is fairly well sustained throughout, but at times comes across just too campy. One minor annoyance is that he provides a glossary at the start, but then when using slang terms in the text, awkwardly pauses to explain them the first time they appear, interrupting the flow. A few phrases get overused as well:"a thousand years ago" gets trotted out far too often, for example. The campiness of language underscores a broader fault with the book, which is one of tone. At times the book is a warm fuzzy celebration of camaraderie and family, right down to a scene of everyone standing around the piano signing. At other times, especially the first third, it's a very detailed and suspenseful caper story. At other times it's a London gangster story. At other times it's a dawning of the Cold War thriller. And at other times it's a standard action-adventure piece. These shifts in tone leave the entire thing a little wobbly in places.

And while the book is certainly enjoyable, there are other flaws as well. More than once Jethro's bacon is saved by an very weak deus ex machina. Another problem is the general cartoonishness of some of the characters, especially his sharp-tongued sister, cabbie brother-in-law, most of the gangsters and spies, and police. One other potential problem is that the typeface is awfully small and hard to read. Still, the setting is interesting, and its flaws are probably easily ignored by those looking for a light read. If the idea of a postwar mystery appeals to you, check out Didier Daeninckx's A Very Profitable War, set in 1946 Paris, and Phillip Kerr's A German Requiem, set in Berlin and Vienna in 1947.