Joe Country is Mick Herron’s latest spy thriller, but why should you care? That’s easy. Think of today’s leading spy novelists, and the usual suspects will come up. John le Carré leads the list, of course (although sadly he recently died). Of those who are still living and writing, Joseph Kanon and Alan Furst surely […]
Continue Reading...From the 1950s through the 1970s, the American intelligence establishment ran amok. Until brought up short in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings, the CIA roamed the planet, eliminating “Communist” leaders through assassination and economic sabotage from Iran to Guatemala to the Congo. Domestically, the FBI undermined activist movements both Black-led and white with undercover […]
Continue Reading...Even if you’re a fan of espionage fiction, you may not yet be familiar with the name Paul Vidich. You should be. Vidich writes spy novels in the grand tradition of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré. His historical espionage tales rank with those of his better-known contemporaries, Alan Furst and Joseph Kanon. […]
Continue Reading...Reading the sequel to a successful novel is always a chancy proposition. Writers and publishers know it as “the curse of the second novel.” It’s one of those rules of thumb that may hold true much less often than believed. But it does seem valid in the case of Moscow Sting, the second of four […]
Continue Reading...Any veteran reader of mysteries has long since learned that something or someone randomly mentioned out of place early in a story will invariably turn out to be very, very important. Alfred Hitchcock called it a MacGuffin. So, your antennae are likely to wiggle frantically when you stumble upon a casual reference to that American […]
Continue Reading...His name is Javid Qasim, but everyone calls him Jay. He’s British-born, a Muslim, still shy of thirty, and a small-time drug dealer in the Borough of Hounslow in the West End of London. But unknown to Jay, the police have been tracking him in hopes of incriminating his boss, “Silas Drakos, AKA The Drake […]
Continue Reading...In the early days of detective fiction, investigators such as Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes solved cases through sheer deductive brilliance. Later came the tough guys of the hardboiled school of detective fiction (Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s Philip Marlow, more recently Child’s Jack Reacher). They were all more inclined to use their […]
Continue Reading...Alex Gerlis is the author of four outstanding standalone World War II spy novels (The Best of Our Spies, The Swiss Spy, Vienna Spies, and The Berlin Spies), all of which I enjoyed enormously. I can’t quite say the same about his most recent novel of espionage in that era, Prince of Spies—a tale about […]
Continue Reading...The antihero has been a fixture in literature since Homer, although the term was first used in France only in the eighteenth century. In our time, the antihero has become a familiar figure through the writing of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Kerouac, and Mailer and has entered popular culture through comic books, film, and television. […]
Continue Reading...Somewhere in the world, and probably in a dozen countries or more throughout the Global South, American Special Forces operators are engaged in action. Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and other, less-well-known units, operating in small groups on top-secret missions, are involved in what has been called—romantically, ungrammatically, and probably misleadingly—the “War on Terror.” What are […]
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