If travel writer Macon Leary was the titular accidental tourist in Anne Tyler's 1985 novel, then fellow travel writer Gabriel Dax is the accidental intelligence operative in William Boyd's Gabriel's Moon, a 1960s-era thriller reminiscent of the twist-filled British spy novels of Len Deighton and Boyd's Scottish compatriot John Buchan. In 1936, six-year-old Gabriel escapes a fire that kills his mother and destroys their home. By 1960, he's a travel writer who lives with trauma-induced insomnia and the guilt that his moon-shaped night light caused the blaze. While Gabriel is on assignment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a government official sets him up with the chance to interview Patrice Lumumba, the real-life prime minister of the newly independent country. Lumumba suspects that people want to kill him to gain control of the country's uranium. In fact, he's assassinated a few months later.
In the first of many developments Boyd (The Romantic; Waiting for Sunrise) dramatizes with elegantly cool detachment, Gabriel discovers that his interview tapes are highly coveted. An MI6 agent named Faith Green approaches him with a lucrative proposition: go to Spain, buy a drawing from an artist, and deliver it to a British Secret Intelligence Service officer. That one-time gig becomes vastly more complicated. Not surprisingly, a 1960s-set novel about espionage and the Soviet Union has old-fashioned elements, including some of the prose ("the soft, brumous dusk fell"). But if a turntable from yesteryear can still play good music, what's a few scratches? Ingenious plot twists and brisk pacing make for an exciting throwback. Spy novel devotees will love Gabriel's Moon. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer