Other Paths to Glory

The Past Lays Bare Present-Day Treachery

The Crime Writers’ Association awarded Other Paths to Glory by Anthony Price a Gold Dagger in 1974. In 2005 they also shortlisted it for the Dagger of Daggers, an award for the best crime novel of the previous fifty years.

That is a good reason to try it.

Synopsis

Paul Mitchell is busy in the Documents Room of the British Commonwealth Institute for Military Studies library. Two strangers disturb his research, an Oxbridge type and a man with ‘soldier’ written all over him. They were looking for help from a First World War expert and asked him if he could identify a map fragment; it was a German trench map from the battle of the Somme. They also asked after Mitchell’s tutor, a Professor Emerson.

That evening, Mitchell took his habitual shortcut along a riverside path on his way home. Two men approached him and threw him into the river upstream of a weir. Only luck and a concrete pillar stopped him from drowning. When soaked to the skin, he arrived home; a policeman met him with a copy of Mitchell’s own handwritten suicide note in his hand. He was busy breaking the bad news to his mother.

If that wasn’t enough to take in, the ‘Oxbridge’ type, a Dr David Audley, arrived shortly afterwards. He brought the news that an assailant had clubbed Mitchell’s tutor to death and burnt his research documents.

Why would anybody murder a military historian whose only crime was to study fragments of a battle that had occurred over fifty years earlier?

Review

Price entwines two plots. Foremost is a cold war skirmish that leaves a trail of dead historians and old soldiers; the second is a detailed account of the battle for Hameau Ridge. Price interlaces the two stories, slipping between a history lesson and a present-day murder to create tension and bewilderment in his protagonists and readers.

At the same time, Price lets you into the mind of the confused and frightened Paul Mitchell. A twenty-something academic who finds himself dangerously out of his depth. His only ally is David Audley from the ‘Ministry of Defence’. But Audley is a man with flaws and no James Bond. He doesn’t drive an Aston Martin with the poise of a stuntman; in fact, “he gave the impression of someone who was determined to give only a quarter of his mind to a job which required at least half of it.”

If you are looking for an all-action blockbuster, you are in the wrong place. There is little sex, the action is sparse, and the violence is curt but don’t think this will be a nice cosy read. The book exudes a subtle ruthlessness. The players don’t take prisoners.

Some criticise the book for being dull and dated. As one reviewer says, “virtually nothing happens in the first 80% of the story”, and he is right. But who would you like to protect your country’s interests? A loner who shoots from the hip as he careers down an alpine ski run, or an intelligent, quiet man in a suit who pulls strings and then cuts them?

Intense, compelling and ever so subtle, this is a gripping read, but only if you like your thrillers stirred, not shaken.

Excerpt

‘ – could have cracked you on the head first. And you know why they didn’t?’ It was Paul Mitchell they were discussing, the Paul Mitchell he knew and loved so well, who lived in a very ordinary, rather boring world and worried about girls and money and making a modest name for himself.

‘Because you were going to be a suicide, so you had to drown,’ continued Audley conversationally. ‘They were probably afraid to mark you, because marks make policemen suspicious. Or maybe they were afraid of hitting you too hard, because every schoolboy knows that dead men won’t drown. So they left it to the weir, and the weir didn’t do its job properly. It was out of their control, quite simply.

‘Now, Professor Emerson’s case illustrates the same thing, but in a different way. They killed him with a blow on the neck – which the fall downstairs was supposed to account for. But the fire was also intended to obliterate everything, and the fire let them down just like the weir.’

‘You mean, it didn’t burn? The papers weren’t destroyed?’

Audley sighed. ‘No, I’m afraid they did manage that. By the time the fire brigade got there the study was like a furnace.’

‘Then how did the fire let them down?’

‘Ah, well that’s the other reason why faked murders don’t work: people do tend to underestimate the efficiency and the intelligence of the experts they hire to look after them. Like the firemen, for a start – just because they wear uniforms and ring bells it doesn’t mean they’re idiots.’

Other Paths to Glory by Anthony Price