Proof Of Life

This is billed as an espionage thriller, but I’m not so sure it is. Yes, the security services are there on the periphery, but the protagonist is a former war photographer called Stroud and all the action surrounds him. To me this was a really enjoyable action mystery – fast-paced, exciting and a rattling good read.

Stroud is down on his luck, living in Amsterdam, drinking and smoking too much and not entirely sure what his future holds. Out of the blue he gets a message from an ex-colleague, Marcus Haig, who is now a subeditor at the foreign department of The Times. The message hints at the prospect of work, so Stroud returns to London to see what’s what.

Back in the day, Haig was a foreign correspondent working alongside Stroud and his closest friend and mentor, a journalist called Vincent Raphael. But in 1970, Raphael was killed in Jordan, when a grenade was lobbed into his Land Rover. Now, six years later, Haig shows Stroud a recent photo of Raphael, apparently alive and well in Istanbul. He tells Stroud that MI6, Mossad and the French Ministry of Defence are all looking for Raphael, and he wants to break the story in The Times. Offering a sizeable fee and generous expenses, Haig asks Stroud to find Raphael. And so it begins.

First stop is, of course, Istanbul, where Stroud discovers there may be more to the story than he thought. The hunt for Raphael takes him all over Europe – the Netherlands, Berlin, Paris and London – and he finds himself locking horns with different security services at every stage. Along the way he realises he didn’t know Raphael half as well as he’d thought he did.

My verdict
The story bowls along at a good pace and the action twists and turns enough that I found it hard to put the book down. It’s set in the 1970s and the writing is atmospheric, but it never feels dated. In fact, there were times when I forgot that it was the 70s at all.

This is the first novel by R.J. Ellory that I’ve read, but after this I’ll be looking for more; and I’m hoping there’s another Stroud story in the pipeline, because he’s a believable character and rather fun. I was willing him to succeed. The ending of this hints there might be another, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Review by: Cornish Eskimo