L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

Robert Wilson lives in Portugal, where his previous taut thriller, “A Small Death in Lisbon,” mostly unfolded and where his latest spy story, “The Company of Strangers,” also takes Lisbon as its epicenter. And once again Wilson demonstrates, as Graham Greene did long ago, that thrillers are the liveliest, most gripping, most thought-provoking literary enterprises going today. The most readable too, when penned by a master spinner like Wilson.

“The Company of Strangers” (the title plays on the insiders’ name for British intelligence services) is about a young German army intelligence captain dispatched to Lisbon by fellow German plotters against Hitler to contact the Allies and about an 18-year-old aspiring mathematician, Andrea Aspinall, whom the Company sends to Lisbon to winkle out German atomic advances and also about the rest of their lives. It is about life as a maze, deceptive but designed; about life as a brutal beast temporarily palliated by drink and cigarettes; about life as a long voyage under a false identity. But how many identities are not false? Or at least assumed, such as those of our young spies whom 480 brilliantly written pages turn into old spies?

It is about history. The history of lovers, one German, one English, a couple that a hot war tears asunder and a cold war reunites; and the history of the West in the half century that begins with the London Blitz and peters out with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Within that span, history is laid out for us to sample: air raids in London, German resistance to Hitler, Salazar’s Portugal and its politics, British intelligence and its intricacies, Communist intelligence and its treacheries, mathematics at Cambridge, the topography of Lisbon, the cat’s cradle of minutiae, dedication, banality and betrayal that makes up a spy’s life and, sometimes, his death. Seemingly authentic in its sinuosities, intricate but convoluted, absorbing and brilliantly written, this is caviar for the cognoscenti. And for the general reader too.

The London Blitz reappears as the occasion of the bombing of a pub called “The Blue Last” and of the shenanigans that ensue. But the mystery that hedges Martha Grimes’ tale unfolds in the present. There are gin mills in contemporary London where martinis are just as they should be: dry, cold and presented straight up with a twist in the correctly shaped glass. But most dram shops are apt to offer three parts vermouth to one part vermouth, as Liza Haggerty scoffs; she recklessly ordered one and got it served in a stubby whisky glass full of ice. Since the scandalized sipper was once a policewoman, she should have known better. But now Liza is merely the wife of Mickey Haggerty, a working policeman, and the friend of Grimes’ durable Inspector Jury, who is mobilized to help solve a hoary and intricate mystery complicated by a recent murder. The point of the exercise is less the leisurely investigations or the imbricated puzzles the sleuthing is supposed to solve than a tour through rather unsurprising English exotica. Grimes, an American, spins a tale more English than the English and situates it somewhere between Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead and Lord Peter Wimsey’s Clubland. Elevators are lifts, cops are coppers, police don’t carry guns because they think “it will only make things worse,” but they pull rank to get a restaurant table. The plot, what there is of it, takes place between 1940 and the eve of the millennium and swings from London to its outskirts and to arty Italy, which supplies the last, unnoticed clue. The cast of characters includes eccentrics, butlers prone to disappear, a smart little boy, a puzzling little girl, a cross-dressing doll, a doggie and several cats: nice, nasty and ginger.

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That is all very well, indeed better than well: a delight to read and to be lulled into a mood closer to that of ballet than to a panting chase. Yet it is all deception, and not even what deception should be. Grimes cheats, breaks the rules of the genre, betrays her characters and leaves her readers in the lurch. Perhaps she just got tired of it all. A pity.