THE "legacy" of Alan Judd's title is the code-name for caches of spy materiel hidden by Soviet agents in Britain in the mid-1970s. These are the target of Charles Thoroughgood, the soldier-hero of Judd's Northern Ireland novel, A Breed of Heroes (1981), who has left the Army to become a trainee spy with MI6.
But Judd is actually concerned with a series of legacies, each more telling in its way than the plot's MacGuffin. Employing a number of intricate and entertaining twists, Legacy takes us back to John le Carre and the golden age of spy novels. This is a secret service run by avuncular civil servants who commute from Kent and Surrey, spend the weekends digging their gardens, and, in the sleepy and indirect manner of well-clubbed gentlemen, play brilliant endgames that protect us against enemies without and within.
Judd cleverly reminds us of those times, setting the scene with frequent references to things that were then new and strange, such as pizza or jogging, but which have become part of the fabric of life today. Thus, the affair between Charles's Oxford friend, the Russian diplomat Viktor, and a prostitute called Chantal not only recalls the Profumo affair (Viktor shares her with a government minister), but also reminds us of the times when such indiscretions could topple governments.
Charles has his own legacy. He discovers that his father had a secret life, and this threatens to shake his faith in both family and country. Judd's complex plot reflects the fact that in espionage nothing is ever the way that it seems. Yet where le Carre would exploit that ambiguity to the full, most strands of Judd's plot turn out to be red herrings.
To le Carre, the attraction between Charles and the wife of one of his MI6 superiors might burgeon into an affair that would symbolise the inner corruptions of the service itself. Viktor suggests that Chantal could be in danger from MI5, but this idea - which might have driven the plot - is simply dismissed. As Charles says, "we don't do that sort of thing". Yet the point of much of the spy fiction of that era was the revelation that we very much did do those sorts of things.
Which leads us to the real legacy of the novel, that of the secret service itself. This book reclaims a simpler time, when we wore the white hats (not for nothing is our hero called Thoroughgood), we knew who the black hats were, and the world's flashpoints slotted into one camp or the other. In a more moody, personal and atmospheric way, it accomplishes for Britain what Tom Clancy and others did in America, rehabilitating the fictional reputation of the intelligence community from those who questioned its very purpose.
Yet in the wake of the recent horrors in New York and Washington, one wonders if Charles Thoroughgood might not have spent the 1980s arming and training Mujahideen terorrists in Afghanistan to fight the old enemy, only to find them beyond his control when that enemy disappeared.
This is a dense and satisfying thriller, which resolves itself with the understated flair and essential British decency that much of the fiction of its period undermined. Legacy is a brilliant title, but ultimately the nature of that legacy suggests A Breed of Heroes would be just as apt a name for this novel as it was for Judd's last.