Charlotte Philby

Dirty Money is a detective thriller set in contemporary London, in which the city itself, in its many guises, is almost as important to the novel as the human protagonists. The action ranges from a townhouse off Berkeley Square to an attic in Camden via the back streets of King’s Cross, the roar of the North Circular and the leafy, prosperous enclave of Knightsbridge. This is Charlotte Philby’s sixth novel but her first detective thriller, her previous novels - which we will come back to - having occupied the shadowy world of espionage. Dirty Money introduces a new, all-female detective double-act: Farrow and Chang.

To say that Farrow and Chang have, superficially at least, little in common is an understatement. Madeleine Farrow is a 50-year-old detective sergeant working for a government agency devoted to tackling international organised crime. She comes, perhaps mildly incongruously, from a well-heeled background: her father worked for the Foreign Office and her brother is an Old Etonian Conservative Cabinet minister. Her home life in a flat she inherited from her parents in Marylebone - its bathroom, we are told, is a haven of ‘scented toiletries and cool soft-tiled floor and soft thick towels and the promise of a high-pressure shower’ - is world away from her day job of pursuing ruthless international criminals. Her latest assignment was a harrowing operation tracking down sex traffickers in Vietnam.

Ramona Chang, by contrast, is twenty-eight and living in a seedy attic in a run-down part of Hackney. She is a recovering addict - booze and pills - who used to work as a reporter, first on a north London paper before moving to Fleet Street. As a reporter, she landed a scoop which uncovered an international crime syndicate. Its leaders were arrested but nonetheless managed to arrange for their sidekicks to exact violent retribution on Ramona. As a result, she changed her name before leaving journalism to become a private investigator. Her slightly weird ex-boyfriend is still in the background, complicating her life. Atypically of her generation, Ramona is a technophobe: ‘She is an anachronism: too young to be as resentful of technology as she is; too young to live without it.’ She refuses, for example, to use an Oyster card, preferring paper tickets.

As the novel opens, Madeleine is involved in an investigation into the finances of Ingrid, the wife of a Kazakhstani businessman Amir Zhatchanov ‘currently serving time in his home country… for swindling the state bank there out of the equivalent of two billion pounds.’ Ingrid, meanwhile, ‘is over here spending the proceeds of his crimes with impunity.’ As one of Madeleine’s colleagues explains: ‘We’re talking weekly trips to Cartier, a private island in the Caribbean, a golf course’. The plan is to gather sufficient evidence to make Ingrid Zhatchanova the subject of an Unexplained Wealth Order [UWO], a measure introduced in 2017 to discourage international criminals from laundering their ill-gotten gains in Britain. The details of the Zhatchanova case in Dirty Money bear a striking similarity to the case of Zamira Hajiyeva who was the first person to be the subject of a UWO. Mrs Hajiyeva was the wife of the chairman of the state bank of Azerbaijan jailed in 2016 for his part in a major fraud. It was reported that Mrs Hajiyena had allegedly spent £16 million in Harrods over a ten-year period, including £150,000 in a single day. Her assets allegedly included a house in Knightsbridge, a private jet and a golf club in the Home Counties.

While Madeleine is staking out Mrs Zhatchanova in Kensington and Knightsbridge, Ramona is travelling to Bristol to meet her first proper client as a private investigator. Her client, a student, is the victim of a disreputable escort service which lured in students with the promise of good earnings but was in fact a front for something altogether less salubrious. It’s not long before the two cases collide and Madeleine and Ramona begin working together. Dirty Money is a tautly plotted novel, full of authentic detail to keep readers engaged and sub-plots to keep them guessing. One very minor irritation is Philby’s use of ‘alright’, which is not all right. Another is her use of the adjective ‘nondescript’: it is, surely, a writer’s job to describe, not to duck the issue. These minor niggles apart, it’s a promising and highly enjoyable debut for a new detective double-act and no doubt we won’t have wait long for the next instalment of Farrow and Chang.

Charlotte Philby is the granddaughter of the notorious traitor Kim Philby, who spied for the Russians while working for the British intelligence during and after the Second World War. Perhaps not surprisingly, her previous novels have been set in that world. Indeed, her fourth novel, Edith and Kim is a fictionalised account of her grandfather’s relationship with Edith Tudor-Hart, who played an important role in Philby’s recruitment by the communists. It makes for an interesting comparison with Dirty Money, illustrating the distinctions of style and spirit between literary fiction and the thriller genre while at the same time highlighting Philby’s versatility as a writer. The ability to write successfully in both formats is not something given to all authors.

Charlotte Philby will be coming to Sherborne on Wednesday 4th June to talk to the Sherborne Literary Society about Dirty Money and her other work. It promises to be a fascinating evening.