Reviewing and collecting spy fiction and nonfiction
I've written previously about how much I enjoy Adam Hall's Quiller. In The Berlin Memorandum, released in 1965 and retitled to The Quiller Memorandum in the US. Today I'd like to highlight a few of the signed copies of Quiller books I own. The first edition of the The Berlin Memorandum has a flat red dust …
Just before the release of The Honourable Schoolboy, Time published a cover story profile of John Le Carré. If you're too lazy or busy to read Adam Sisman's recent doorstopper of a biography, the Time profile is a very good shortcut. The work of Stefan Kanfer, Dean Fischer and Anne Hopkins, it's a very nice …
My love of spy fiction isn't constrained to prose. There are several graphic novels with an espionage theme that have been able to hold their own with the best of spy novelists. Antony Johnston's duo The Coldest City and The Coldest Winter are two of them. I’ve been a reader of Antony Johnston’s work for …
Throughout the 1960's Evelyn Byrne, a teacher at a New York public school, wrote well known authors and asked if they would write back with the books that had the biggest impact on them as they were in their teens. She would then print these responses in the school newspaper in hopes that it would …
Here are some of my favorite things I did or discovered in 2016 in no particular order- Slough House series - Mick Herron blew me away with his spy series. I burned through all 5 books in the series in a matter of weeks. I read an advance copy of Spook Street, out early next year …
You've read all of John le Carré’s novels, short stories, opinion columns, letters to the editor, his biography and autobiography. Before you go back to the beginning and start all over, you want to try something different. What to do? Read books le Carré has recommended of course! Le Carré is very deliberate in what …
I wrote at the end of last year about lost spy novels by famous authors. Recently a new book came to light that I am extremely excited for and wanted to make sure readers knew about. Donald Westlake Westlake was a prolific author and has the distinction of creating two iconic crime fiction characters. The …
