Five Great Reads: a KGB ‘illegal' tells all, a cold case half-solved, and ‘the Citizen Kane of rock movies'

The Guardian

18-04-2025

Top of the (long) weekend to you all. I trust Australian readers marked Good Friday in the traditional fashion: by complaining that nothing was open. Before you head to the shops to restock, here are some amazing tales to pore over.
A young woman's body was found hanging from a pine tree in Portbou one morning in 1990. The position she was found in suggested she could not have got there alone but her death was ruled a suicide and the mystery girl's body was buried in a mass grave at the local cemetery.
A 2022 true crime program revived interest in the case. An Austrian TV network broadcast a short follow-up segment. An Italian holidaying there with relatives emailed in a tip. The next day the Austrian show's director made a call to someone who had given up looking for answers.
Art imitates life: The police officer turned author Rafael Jiménez in 2017 wrote a novel, imagining the girl's story, called The Hanging Bride in the Land of Wind.
How long will it take to read: Twelve minutes.
From smoked salmon to award-winning cheddar, luxury foodstuffs have become hot property for UK criminals. And the thieves – sophisticated and clearly 'specialists' in artisan produce, according to the victims – are using all the methods in the online scammers' toolbox to pull off their heists.
Main character energy: In the most meta moment in Five Great Reads history, the aggrieved fishmonger in this story is Chris Swales (no relation, I think).
How long will it take to read: Six minutes.
Making the decision to send your children to school wouldn't be an inflection point in most films but it marks the moment the hero of A New Kind of Wilderness admits he can no longer cope. The documentary follows Nik Payne, who with his wife, Maria, was raising and home schooling their children in remote Norway – until cancer claimed Maria's life.
Now the remaining Payne family are touring the world's film festivals, holding Q&As after screenings. They made the mistake the first time of sitting through A New Kind of Wilderness in full. As Patrick Barkham, who caught up with Nik Payne and his three children, writes: 'Watching him grieve on film is agonising.'
'It's part of you for ever but it's not the defining part.' – Nik Payne on grief.
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
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If your father sat you down for a chat and that was his opening line, where would you mind race to? Were your parents breaking up? Were you really adopted?
Peter Herrmann, 16, was finally about to learn the reason his father detested US pop music. Turns out dad was a deep-cover KGB spy, and that conversation was the catalyst for Herrmann's recruitment by Moscow as a second-generation 'illegal'.
The man codenamed 'the Inheritor' shares the story of his brief career in espionage.
How long will it take to read: Fourteen minutes.
Further viewing: The Americans is somehow still one of the more slept-on shows of the prestige TV era.
When you read the phrase 'the Citizen Kane of rock movies', what springs to mind – The Wall? Purple Rain? The film critic Mark Kermode was in fact referring to Slade in Flame, released in 1975 as a vehicle for the band behind such misspelled glam anthems as Cum On Feel the Noize.
Featuring canal-side conversations about the meaningless of life amid pintloads of grimness, it tanked upon release. On the eve of its 50th anniversary re-release, the band and film-makers reflect on its favourable reassessment.
How long will it take to read: Four minutes.
Sneak preview: The film's trailer suggests it may have more in common with Ken Russell's Tommy than Orson Welles.
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