The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson (2023)

28th May 2025

When Dr Max Archer, Associate Professor in Intelligence History at the London School of Economics, receives an old-fashioned calling card inviting him to visit Scarlet King in her Chelsea flat the following morning, it is not surprising that he is somewhat perplexed.

Max is a middle-ranking academic, whose career has stalled and whose wife, pregnant by her new lover, is seeking a divorce. His finances are low and he is currently reduced to renting a studio flat from a friend at a below-market rate.

Scarlet King, a lady in her 90s, is known by Max to have once been the top Russian expert at MI6.

The calling card instructs Max to “tell no one” and to “dry-clean thoroughly”. Thus, we are introduced to our first item of spy-trade jargon: “dry-cleaning” means to undertake counter-surveillance by shrugging off a watcher. Max duly takes a convoluted route to his appointment – glancing in shop windows, doubling back, heading down side-streets. He is unaware that, on arrival at Scarlet’s flat, he is observed, photographed – and identified – from the top floor of the house opposite by two members of the A4 Branch of MI5 who will report back to Saul Northcliffe, Deputy Director of the Security Service.

Scarlet offers Max the opportunity to authenticate her unpublished memoirs – written in the third person – which reveal two highly sensitive post-War state secrets, the publication of which would be highly damaging to Britain’s security services (and some serving officers, Saul in particular) and to the reputation of the UK Government as a whole. As one character remarks, “It would make Kim Philby and the Third Man saga look small fry”. For his part, Max realises that, whilst his involvement in the scheme could bring both academic kudos and significant riches, there would be an inevitable prosecution under the Official Secrets Act and a long jail sentence.

This initial set-up is only the starting point for Matthew Richardson’s impressively plotted narrative, which interweaves the personal stories of the main characters with major intelligence events – some well-known, others fictional – of the Cold War: the exfiltration of German scientists to the West after 1945, the Soviet penetration of the British and American spy agencies, the release of the Miktrokhin Archive of Russian secrets by a KGB defector in 1992, the assassination by the CIA of a “sleeper” being repatriated to Russia in 2010… These events are taken up to the near-present day: there are references to Putin’s nerve agent programme, Novichok and the attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, whilst “[t]he 45th President of the United States was accused of being a Russian mole”.

Other members of the cast list make only peripheral appearances. I had a wry smile when, after the success of her first mission in Vienna in 1946, Scarlet is promoted to a new post in Section IX – Russian counter-intelligence – and meets her boss for the first time:

He extended his hand. She shook it and felt the grip lingering slightly too long. His eyes fixed on her. He had a loose-limbed charm about him, drawing people in.

“Philby”. He smiled again. “Everyone around here calls me Kim”.

I did sense that, on occasion, the author was perhaps overly keen to demonstrate the vast amount of research on which his novel is based. (The bibliography extends to over 50 references). For example, an episode set in the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris allows Richardson to offer his view on the eponymous post-War Nazi hunter: “… [T]he list of Nazis Wiesenthal claimed to have brought to justice was overblown… [H]e played little part in the [Adolf] Eichmann saga [his capture in South America] and… whole chunks of his life story were factually inaccurate. Sometimes, though… [we are] happy to believe the myth”. An unnecessary aside, I think.