“Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly”, by Andrew Cook

 

Tempus, 368 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0752429595

All I know about Sidney Reilly I learned from Reilly: Ace of Spies, the 1983 miniseries produced by ITV and staring Sam Neill as the eponymous sonovabitch. So, after having trolled through my DVD collection and rewatched it I naturally wondered just how accurate it was, so when I found this book, Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly by Andrew Cook, I naturally snatched it up and dove right in. The short answer? Not so much. The miniseries, you see, was based on the book Ace of Spies by Robin Bruce Lockhart, published in 1967 and based on the reminisces of his father, Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, who served with Reilly in Moscow. It turns out that many of the stories that Papa Lockhart told to little Robin were caca, made to make the British effort to stop the Bolsheviks – and Reilly’s role in these efforts – seem more daring and closer to success than they actually were. Pity, as Reilly: Ace of Spies is one of my all-time favorite miniseries; to learn that much of it is fiction was a great disappointment, indeed.

And it’s hard to get angry at Cook for making it so; after all, it is the historian’s job to uncover the past and present it to the present while preserving it for the future, and so if he discovers that Reilly was one of history’s greatest conmen well, then, there it is. For instance, there is little if any evidence to show that he engaged in any of the activity that speaks of his legendary spying, damnit, or that he was even recruited by “C” until before the Russian adventure (“C” being William Melville, the British law enforcement officer and the first chief of the British Secret Service Bureau). So it would seem that Robin Bruce Lockhart, no doubt following in his father’s footsteps, indulged freely in myth-making in the most famous account of Reilly’s life, while Cook sticks firmly to the facts as far as they can be established. Where he does indulge in some cautious hypothesizing, he clearly indicates that this is so, using only what available facts and realistic conjecture is open to him.

Thus, the overall result of Ace of Spies is a much diminished picture of Sidney Reilly: this is no super-spy who juggled with the fates of nations, but instead a rather nasty little conman and psychopath who didn’t hesitate to lie, cheat, steal and kill to advance his cause – which was always first and foremost Sidney Reilly – and so who came to the sticky end he so richly deserved. One really does not get the impression Cook particularly likes his subject (although he grudgingly admires his courage whilst facing death), but in bringing Reilly firmly down to earth, he makes his version of events all the more believable. Just what it was about this man that made Ian Fleming base James Bond upon him is a total mystery to me, seeing as that fictional spy is nothing like the real one, apart from the ruthless ability to kill if needs be. Cook’s final assessment of Reilly – that he wasn’t “in the conventional sense, a spy at all” – is sadly too true. This is one instance in which the book was not better than the movie.