KOLYMSKY HEIGHTS

Geschreven bij Kolymsky Heights

Bought this novel long ago in NL-translation (“Expeditie Kolimsky”) at a market stall and was struck by its imaginative power. One friend has read this compelling spy story four times by now. I reread it only once. Having given away my own copy, I have to rely on my memory to entice readers to enjoy this captivating spy novel, which is also a love story. This brilliant novel is about sneaking into Siberia and getting out again during the Cold War.
Kolyma is one of the coldest regions on earth and the site of many labor camps in the Stalin era. The story is situated in eastern Siberia, some of whose native people migrated millennia ago to Alaska and western Canada. The novel’s hero Johnny Porter is a Canadian Native Indian with a gift for language, who turns out to be well able to communicate with speakers of his ancestors’ language. Because he receives a plea for help from a security agency: the Soviets are doing something very suspicious and dangerous in a super-secret laboratory deep inside the permafrost of Kolyma… And as the song goes, Johnny goes.

For readers to discover (and enjoy) how Porter infiltrates into the Soviet Union and finds his way to Kolyma, survives there while investigating, and most of all, how he gets out again…

Author Lionel Davidson (1922-2009) is an enigmatic person. In the 1960s and ‘70s he won three Gold Dagger Awards, the top British prize for crime writing. Then, for 16 years, he fell silent. Until recovering from whatever ailed him and write this book, first published in 1994. Alas, by then the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was old news and his book was ignored as part of a genre no longer popular. Written ten years earlier, it would have been a bestseller.

Geschreven bij Kolymsky Heights

Bought this novel long ago in NL-translation (“Expeditie Kolimsky”) at a market stall and was struck by its imaginative power. One friend has read this compelling spy story four times by now. I reread it only once. Having given away my own copy, I have to rely on my memory to entice readers to enjoy this captivating spy novel, which ultimately, is also a love story. This brilliant novel is about sneaking into Siberia and getting out again during the Cold War.
Kolyma is one of the coldest regions on earth and the site of many labor camps in the Stalin era. The story is situated in eastern Siberia, some of whose native people migrated millennia ago to Alaska and western Canada. The novel’s hero Johnny Porter is a Canadian Native Indian with a gift for language, who turns out to be well able to communicate with speakers of his ancient ancestors’ language. Because he receives a plea for help from a security agency: the Soviets are doing something very suspicious and dangerous in a super-secret laboratory deep inside the permafrost of Kolyma… And as the song goes, Johnny goes.
It is for readers to discover (and enjoy) how Porter infiltrates into the Soviet Union and finds his way to Kolyma, survives there while investigating, and most of all, how he gets out again…
Author Lionel Davidson (1922-2009) is an enigmatic person. In the 1960s and ‘70s he won three Gold Dagger Awards, the top British prize for crime writing. Then, for 16 years, he fell silent. Until recovering from whatever ailed him and to write this book, first published in 1994. Alas, by then the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was old news and his book was ignored as part of a genre no longer popular. Written ten years earlier, it would have been a bestseller.