As razor-wire springs up like mushrooms, cross-border trafficking becomes a lucrative — and murky — business.

Of course, when Dave Hutchinson came up with that setting for his acclaimed novel Europe in Autumn he had no idea he was writing tomorrow’s headlines.

A science-fiction thriller with a strong European flavour, it landed in spring 2014 amid the Crimea conflict, simmering Scottish and Catalan independence campaigns, rumblings of Grexit and a feeling that the great EU experiment was drawing to a close.

The Morning Star’s Mat Coward hailed it as “original, captivating and elegantly written” and, after a slow start, it began to draw the attention it deserved, including nominations for the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards.

It’s reminiscent of the brilliant British SF authors Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod — brutal realpolitik in crumbling near-future states — and has been called “dystopian” and “post-apocalyptic.” But it wasn’t planned to be either, says Hutchinson. “The action takes place after a flu pandemic but by that token you could say the 1920s were post-apocalyptic, after the Spanish flu after the first world war.

“If it’s dystopia then today is dystopian. What I’d wanted to do was make the world of 50 or 70 years from now pretty much like it is now, just a bit more run-down.

“The action demanded that Schengen had to be rescinded. And it occurred to me that really Schengen is just a temporary fad.

“Europe really is all about borders and has been for centuries,” he says.

Czechoslovakia has come and gone, Germany and Italy are recent constructs — “Europe is very dynamic. This is a pause, the Schengen period. Ten, 20 years and then the internal borders are going to start going back up.”

Amid the refugee crisis Schengen is already fortifying its perimeter — and internal borders could be next. “Border wire is moreish. You see your neighbours have it and you want some.”

Eighteen months on from Autumn’s release Hutchinson returns with Europe at Midnight, a sequel of sorts but a big departure in style, structure and setting.

It’s hard to talk about Midnight without revealing the first book’s big twist, so if you’re part-way through Autumn then read no further for now.

Autumn followed the exploits of Rudi, an Estonian chef in a Krakow restaurant who drifts into the shadowy world of Les Coureurs des Bois, a sort of criminal-gang/postal-service who specialise in smuggling people and packages.

It’s a Len Deighton/John Le Carre world of spycraft, dead drops and passphrases and false identities and the latter is the “presiding spirit,” says Hutchinson, “as he has to be for any espionage novel that’s set in Europe in that kind of milieu.”

That is, until a sharp turn into SF.

Rudi discovers that alongside this Europe is a parallel one, the Community, a colossal Little England founded by Victorians and stretching from Spain to Moscow. The possibility of travel between the two worlds tears up all assumptions about borders, politics and the Coureurs’ job.

It’s such a late, left-field development that I wondered whether any thriller purists were moved to throw Autumn across the room when they realised it was SF.

“I think it has happened, actually,” he laughs. “If somebody asks me what it is I say it’s a near-future thriller. As far as I’m concerned it’s science fiction.”

How, though, did it come to be so up-to-the-moment?

“Pure chance,” says Hutchinson frankly. “I hate to use the word ‘luck’ because a lot of people have been hurt in Ukraine, in Crimea” but “if it had come out five years ago it probably wouldn’t have raised a ripple.”

If Midnight proves as topical then let’s just say we’re all in a lot of trouble.

We begin with two intertwining strands. Jim, an intelligence officer in London, has the rug pulled out from under his world by a stabbing on a bus.

Meanwhile Rupert, the head of intelligence at a huge and strangely isolated university, is trying to stabilise the aftermath of a coup against the campus’s previous regime, whose crimes included nazi-style human experiments.

Those strands come together unexpectedly before leading us deeper into the Community and its difficult, sometimes deadly relationship with Europe.

It makes for a tightly crafted book, coupling Autumn’s virtues with a clever, deliberately disorienting structure. Is it hard, though, to sell Midnight to new readers without revealing Autumn’s secret?

“I’ve made it as standalone as I can. The first book had the reveal of the Community and that was its big trick.

“And the big trick of Midnight is that you don’t know whether it’s a sequel or a prequel.”

Midnight isn’t the sort of book to wrap up the loose ends, either — leaving us, like the protagonists, feeling we’ve glimpsed only part of a plot beyond our ken.

“Life is like that. As Fabio [Rudi’s mentor] says in Autumn: ‘We are fated to go through life with too little information anyway. The sooner you learn that the better,’ and that’s really a mission statement for the book.”

That’s linked to Hutchinson’s preference for writing about ordinary people — usually underinformed and struggling — in a genre overfond of jut-jawed, hypercompetent heroes.

“It’s how I feel all the time and I expect it’s how everybody feels all the time,” says Hutchinson. “Rudi is out of his depth and he just has to wing it.”

Likewise, Midnight’s Rupert and Jim are both handicapped by ignorance of the world they’re in and the political machinations they face.

Hutchinson speaks of the revelation of reading the “wonderful” English author Keith Roberts and realising that “science fiction could happen to people like me. A protagonist didn’t have to be the commander of a mile-long spaceship that goes around blowing up stars — it could be an estate agent.”

Lest the Europe books sound relentlessly grim, they’re anything but. Dark, yes, occasionally brutal.

But the dialogue crackles, the protagonists’ flounderings can be hilarious when the blood isn’t flying, and the fragmented Europe throws up as many hilarities as horrors.

I’m particularly fond of Hutchinson’s Eurovision — a 532-song marathon where voting alone takes three days but England is still, of course, hopeless.

There’s even a playfulness to the book’s sinister side. The Community may be a nuclear-armed menace but it feels like a parody of a Ukip fantasyland — responding to a complex world by hiding with fingers in ears.

“Absolutely. It’s a world out of an Ealing comedy — leafy Cotswold villages where everybody knows their place.

“But these people are absolute bastards. They’re really completely ruthless” — which starts with dragging labour agitators off to the camps and escalates into plot-pivotal atrocities.

For more, you’ll need to read Midnight. The buzz is already building — I was even interrogated at the station by a fan demanding to know how I’d got an advance copy. “I’m enormously flattered but I just can’t get my head round it,” he says.

“For me this is unexplored territory. I’ve been writing for 40-odd years and I’ve just been bumbling along.”

Speaking of toiling for decades before unexpectedly catching the zeitgeist, I have to ask the lurking question…

“I DO NOT LOOK LIKE JEREMY CORBYN!” he protests, despite the “little bunch of miscreants on Twitter” who insist otherwise.

But he was accosted by a stranger on the Underground a few days before the Star man’s landslide win. “He stopped in front of me as he left the Tube and went: ‘Here, mate, good luck with the election’ and walked off.”

As he says of Europe in Autumn, sometimes success is “pure luck … the right person in the right place at the right time.”

And the future of the Europe books, if not Europe itself, is looking pretty rosy.

nEurope at Midnight is published by Solaris on November 5. You can tell Dave how much he looks like Jeremy Corbyn on Twitter at @HutchinsonDave.