A.N. Wilson discovers crime fiction that is both nihilistic and spiritual

Owen Matthews’ Red Traitor (Bantam Press, £16.99; Tablet price £15.29) is the second in a trilogy about KGB officer Alexander Vasin caught up in potentially earth-destroying Cold War brinkmanship. This time it is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, said by some to have been the most dangerous week in human history, when the US and the Soviet Union came close to unleashing nuclear war. Owen Matthews has two matchless gifts. He knows Soviet Russia inside out and every paragraph rings true. And, almost more important, he is a magnificent storyteller, compulsively readable and with the ability to conjure up a whole gallery of grotesque characters. This story is closely based on the real events which can be read in The Penkovsky Papers (about the real Western agent in the heart of the KGB), but Matthews has made the American “mole” much more sinister than Penkovsky. Vasin himself, the ex-cop reluctant KGB spook, is a wonderful central intelligence. The flavour – alcohol-fumed, cynical, wry, as sharp as a sub-zero Moscow winter – is so strongly Russian that it is hard to remember you are reading English.