Midnight in Vienna JANE THYNNE (QUERCUS, 432 PP, £20) tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064 Here is something any sane reader would love to find in their Christmas stocking: a completely satisfying mystery story. It is also a masterly spy novel. It is also a wonderful evocation of that fateful autumn, 1938 (immortalised by Louis MacNeice in his “Autumn Journal”), in which London began to prepare for war, and Chamberlain negotiated the shaming Munich Agreement with Hitler, which betrayed the Czechs. Stella Fry is a young woman who has spent the last few years in Vienna, but returns to London, when the family with whom she has been living are compelled, being Jews, to escape after the Anschluss. These are the days when the front page of The Times was still composed entirely of small ads, and she spots the offer of work as a typist, transcribing a book by a celebrated writer. This is none other than Hubert Newman, one of the most famous mystery writers of his day. One of the many satisfying things about this book is the way it pays tribute to the so-called Golden Age of crime-writing. The great Dorothy L. Sayers even makes an appearance, after Hubert Newman … Well, yes, of course, Hubert Newman who has written so many whodunits in which murder is committed, is himself murdered. Stella meets him only once, for her “job interview”. They have lunch together at the Athenaeum, after which he feels a bit peculiar, staggers along the Mall and across to Westminster Abbey, where he expires of a presumed heart attack. Needless to say, this most English of locked-door mysteries is no more English than Stalin. The two figures who investigate this obviously suspicious death are Stella herself and a ruggedly handsome ex-cop called Harry Fox (ex, because he has actually been working for the Secret Service and is now in pursuit of Fifth Columnists (i.e. Soviet agents). Hubert Newman has left Stella the manuscript of a book he has been writing about whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays. The clues about his own true identity and the likely identity of his killer are concealed in the manuscript, which (Newman was beady enough to guess) Stella is clever enough to spot. If I tell you much more, every sentence would require a spoiler alert, but what I can say is that it is the most enjoyable new novel I have read this year. Though a work of fiction, it is peopled with the great names of 1938, and in its pages we meet Wallis Simpson, Ivor Novello, George Orwell and Lindemann (“The Prof”), Churchill’s scientific adviser who has a crucial role to play in this always thrilling story.

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