Another great thriller from a great writer, our colleague and friend Rory Clements

Life is hard enough for our fictional detectives, you might think, without authors adding another layer of jeopardy. Imagine if you’re trying to crack a case and you find an SS general is up to his neck in it.

That’s the situation for poor Sebastian Wolff, a Munich murder detective who is the creation of Rory Clements, former sub-editor of this parish and now a top-selling thriller writer.

His latest, Evil in High Places, is the second outing for Wolff, a dogged sleuth operating in pre-war Bavaria, where he must keep a lid on his distaste for the burgeoning Nazi party and its corrupt and murderous leaders.

The story is set largely in the Alpine ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen during Hitler’s 1936 Winter Olympics. Nothing must be allowed to spoil the spectacle laid on by the Führer.

So when a famous and beautiful film star disappears, Wolff is warned that not a word must get out. He has to conduct his investigation with the utmost discretion, his craven boss orders.

Seb manages, by dint of charm and threats, gradually to dig up the truth, exposing an organised racket to rob Jews fleeing the Third Reich of their most valuable possessions.

Then one reckless act puts his life and the lives of those he loves at risk.

Wolff is a sympathetic, well-rounded character who drives his girlfriend Hexie around in a racy Lancia Augusta and enjoys a litre or two of the local brew.

Like all good literary detectives, he has a sidekick, Sergeant Hans Winter, who provides us with a sub-plot that could almost make a book in its own right.

Winter wants to marry his girl but is terrified that the paperwork will reveal his Jewish roots. He hears of a forger who could provide him with documents attesting to an Aryan past. But to contact him he must speak to a man locked away in Dachau.

Winter arranges to go under cover as an inmate at the notorious death camp. However, he finds that getting in was easier than getting out again.

Full disclosure here: Rory Clements is a dear old chum of mine. But what is a column for if you can’t offer a helping hand to your friends and damn your enemies to hell.

Clements is a tennis fan, so let me explain his talents like this. His plots are as precise and deadly as a Djokovic return of serve; occasionally a thrillingly unexpected twist will wrong-foot the reader like a topspin lob from Rafa Nadal.

The writing is as elegant and apparently simple as Roger Federer’s forehand. But most Drone readers will know that such simplicity is deceptive and only achieved through hard work and long experience.

Clements has sold more than one million books and has previously written series on an Elizabethan spy, John Shakespeare, and a Cambridge academic and sometime MI6 agent, Tom Wilde.

Evil in High Places is a pacy and thoroughly enjoyable read and a great start for his new publisher, Viking Penguin. It is in bookstores now.

BUY FROM AMAZON

*****

Fifty-six years ago, a philosophy teacher set her class an essay. Tolerance: Discuss.

Tolerance? Well, naturally, the class was all for it. They wrote of the need to show more of it. All, that is, except for one student.

She argued that you can have too much of a good thing; that an excess of liberal tolerance leads inevitably to the rise of the far Right.

Much to her surprise – and trepidation – once the teacher had marked the essays, she was called to the front of the class.

But she was praised for her answer, which was the one the philosophy teacher had hoped to provoke. It helped that the teacher was Jewish and had spent years in a concentration camp.

As a Holocaust survivor, she understood, as well as anyone alive, the menace of the far Right and the danger of appeasing it.

The young student, then 18, is my wife. And the backlash she foresaw in her essay is upon us now. President Trump is the result of a gradual liberal brainwashing of America.

All across Europe, especially in the Nordic citadels of liberal culture, the Right is gathering strength, winning elections, changing the mindset. The legacy of über liberal Angela Merkel is being swept away.

You could even argue that tolerance is responsible for the grip on power engineered by Russia’s President Putin. He would not call himself and his kleptocrat Kremlin clique far Right.

In this topsy turvy world, he thinks Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is the fascist and that he, Putin, the invader, the warmonger, is on the right side of history.

We saw it coming, we did nothing. He took that as weakness and rolled his tanks across the border and into the killing fields of Ukraine where, according to the latest estimate by the Ukrainian general staff, the Russians have lost about 1,102,570 soldiers, sometimes at a rate of 1,000 a day.

How did we allow it? By relying on America to protect us while we spent the defence budget on more and more welfare, that’s how. It will be years before we are in any position to take Russia on.

Meanwhile, Putin takes his revenge on the West in myriad ways. Rachel Reeves blamed him this week for the hugely costly cyber attacks on British firms, such as Marks and Spencer, the Co-op and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR).

The JLR incident is estimated to have cost £1 billion in lost sales and revenues so far and that is growing at a rate of £5 million a day. Of course, it is affecting the whole supply chain and there are fears it could last for weeks, even months.

Putin sends death squads to assassinate those he dislikes who have taken refuge here. He uses proxies to attack defence firms and infrastructure targets. He “accidentally” sends his drones into the sky above Poland and MiG-31 fighter jets to violate Estonia’s airspace.

He is constantly testing, prodding, provoking. And we should be doing the same back. It must be GCHQ, the cyber and security agency at Cheltenham, that told Reeves the Russians were the hackers.

I hope they are hacking back and making Putin’s remaining days in the Kremlin as uncomfortable as possible.

*****

They used to call it the Delia Effect. Every time TV cook Delia Smith praised a kitchen utensil on her show, viewers swept through John Lewis stores like a swarm of locusts, buying up every last one of them. I remember an omelette pan was particularly popular.

Now the King and the Princess of Wales, who both shared their cancer battles with the nation, have caused a crisis in the NHS. They urged all those with concerns over cancer to seek help.

They did… so many of them, in fact, that the NHS couldn’t cope, a coroner has revealed. The rush caused “significant delays” to treatment and diagnosis because waiting times were lengthened due to extra referrals.

The Royals meant well. They just didn’t think before they spoke. And of course they knew little of the desperate state of the health service because they scarcely use it.

*****

Sad to hear that cricket’s legendary umpire Dickie Bird is dead at 92. He was barking mad – quirky, idiosyncratic or eccentric as the obituaries will call it – but a decent bloke and unquestionably a fine umpire.

The camera would always pick him out in the crowd during Tests at his beloved Headingley after he retired and he was the only umpire I can recall for whom players formed a guard of honour at his last match. His job is done with TV replays now.

RICHARD DISMORE

24 September 2025