This was one of Ian Rankin’s earliest novels, his third I think, and his only spy thriller after Inspector Rebus became a phenomenon that consumed Rankin’s fiction for the last 20 years (though the recently released Exit Music seems like the last of that series for the time being). This book has an elegiac yet strong flavor so one wonders what might have been…
Watchman (1988) takes place during the years when the IRA and British government were literally heaving bombs at each other and the streets of London were nearly as much a battlefield as Belfast. Miles Flint, the main character, is an obscure civil servant who works for the Men in Black as an observer; he’s satisfied with his minor station and generally prefers spending time at his hobby, beetles, than work or even his wife.
In fiction, of course, that’s exactly when the Fates decide to have some fun at your expense and Miles, increasingly interested in avoiding time alone with the spouse, finds this out the hard way when he decides to horn in on some nighttime surveillance his team is keeping on a suspected Arab assassin.
The Arab uses a feint which ought not have fooled the greenest agent to evade our boy and get to his target. Flint’s bosses let him go with what seems like a slap on the wrist but do disband his small crew and assign Miles to work under a paranoid fellow agent. Then they stand that team down earlier than the trivial chore’s natural completion (which does have consequences, though not for him).
Instead Flint is rushed to Northern Ireland as the service’s representative to tag along as a local flying squad busts a factory supplying the Provos. He finds the assignment odd, the timing frustrating and the company intimidating. The squad’s lengthy drive south does nothing to calm his nerves.
Probably that (as well as authorial requirements) saves his life. Miles Flint must quickly shed his longstanding desire to lurk in the shadows, rethink his assumptions that obscurity is his best means to security and win by showing strength when those who would do him in cannot perceive Flint is capable of it.
Watchman, named for the classic Alan Moore graphic novel, is short at under 200 pages but, as Rankin himself says, moves fast and wastes little verbiage on the extraneous or page count puffery.
recommended
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