Or if you’re partial to railway timetables. If you like crosswords, I think you’d like this book. By piecing together the fragmented quotes they arrive at a message which, in an elliptical way, refers to a dark-haired man from the north who can speak tongues and who the writer wants to visit him. These turn out to relate to books of the Bible, giving chapter and verse numbers. They realise the bumps on the surface contain a message coded as a set of numbers. Lazenby calls up this man, Philpott, to come and interpret the cigarette papers.

He calls in a pupil of his who now works in ‘Scientific Services’ and who, a few years earlier, had called on the Prof and asked him to do a little gentle spying – in fact more like ‘alert observation’ – when he was attending a conference in the Eastern Bloc.

Until the prof roots around in the bottom of it and finds some cigarette papers. His secretary, Miss Sonntag, opens a letter from Sweden which turns out to be empty. We are introduced to a fusty old don in Oxford, Professor Lazenby. Kolymsky Heights is relatively long at 478 pages and quite quickly you realise this is because Davidson’s defining quality is a long, drawn-out and frustrating, round-the-houses approach. Is it any good? What’s it about? Does it make me want to go in search of his other seven thrillers? Kolymsky Heights After a gap of 16 years he returned with Kolymsky Heights, his last novel, which gained rave reviews. he is very much one of the old generation of thriller writers.Īfter Wenceslas Davidson published a novel every couple of years throughout the 1960s and early 70s until 1978 when he disappeared from view. Davidson was born in 1922 and published his first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, in 1960, the year before John le Carré made his debut – i.e. I saw this book in several second-hand bookshops before I picked it up for a pound imagining, from the stylish cover, that Davidson was one of the new young generation of thriller writers.

‘Many tricky dicks walk the trail.’ (Jean-Baptiste Porteur, p.88)

Kolymsky heights