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Seven Classic Cold War Thrillers Made in America

July 14, 2021 / admin

This essay first appeared in Suspense & Mystery magazine

The British invented the modern spy thriller in the early 20th century. And when the Cold War commenced between the Soviet Union and the West, English authors—Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré—quickly earned a reputation for bringing a literary flair to their accounts of the clandestine skirmishes between intelligence agencies.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greene’s The Quiet American, Fleming’s From Russia with Love, and le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold climbed the bestseller lists.

Le Carré (the pen-name of David Cornwell, a former intelligence officer) offered a dark vision in his novels of blurred moral and ethical lines in the covert struggle against Moscow Central. An undercurrent of anti-Americanism marred le Carré’s work, perhaps reflecting resentment that Britain’s MI6, riddled with Soviet moles like Kim Philby, had been relegated to the sidelines by the CIA.

At the same time, several gifted American writers spun their own cloak-and-dagger tales with just as much (if not more) literary merit as their British counterparts.

Here are seven classic spy thrillers—made in America—that should be on the reading list of anyone who enjoys the genre and has an interest in Cold War espionage:

The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry. The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy shocked the world and sparked numerous conspiracy theories. Fingers were pointed at the Soviets, the Cubans, the Mafia, Lyndon Johnson, the Pentagon, and the CIA. In McCarry’s riveting novel, published in 1974, his protagonist Paul Christopher, a CIA officer, seeks to discover the truth behind Kennedy’s murder. His quest takes him to Europe, North Africa, and Vietnam, where he discovers links between Kennedy’s slaying and the American-backed coup d’état that killed South Vietnam’s leaders, the Ngo brothers, three weeks before Dallas. While you may not buy McCarry’s elaborate conspiracy theory (I don’t), The Tears of Autumn makes an intriguing case that JFK’s assassination was payback from a South Asian dynastic family. Often called “the American le Carré,” McCarry once wrote speeches for President Dwight D. Eisenhower and spent ten years undercover in the CIA.

Stained Glass by William F. Buckley Jr. The Central Intelligence Agency turned to the Ivy League for many of its first recruits in the 1950s. William F. Buckley Jr., the famous conservative gadfly and public intellectual, was one of them. After his brief stint in the CIA, he turned to journalism. When Buckley began writing spy thrillers, he created a hero, Blackford Oakes, a sophisticated and dashing CIA officer, meant to be a (more realistic) American answer to Great Britain’s James Bond. His 1978 novel, Stained Glass found Oakes dealing with the threat of a Soviet invasion of West Germany after a charismatic political figure (Count Axel Wintergrin) calls for an immediate reunification with East Germany. The novel won a National Book Award, and the New Republic claimed that Buckley’s tale “cuts closer to the bone than le Carré has ever cut.”

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. When an unknown Maryland insurance agent published his first novel in 1984 with the Naval Institute Press, the odds for success were long. But President Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of the techno-thriller put the book on the bestseller lists. Clancy’s deeply-researched story revolves around a Soviet submarine commander, Marko Ramius, who decides to defect to the West and to bring his ballistic missile submarine Red October along with him. It introduced Jack Ryan, a cerebral CIA analyst pressed into field service, who then appeared in numerous Clancy novels and is now featured in a Netflix series. The movie version of The Hunt for Red October starred Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, Samuel L. Jackson, and James Earl Jones and proved to be a box-office smash.

The Charm School by Nelson DeMille. During the Vietnam conflict, there were constant rumors that American soldiers and pilots captured by the North Vietnamese might have ended up in the Soviet Union. In DeMille’s 1988 novel, an Air Force colonel, Sam Hollis, stationed at the Moscow Embassy learns of a remote camp (“Mrs. Ivanov’s Charm School”) where Russians are being “Americanized” so they can become a subversive Fifth Column in the U.S. Their teachers: American POWs. Hollis discovers that he must battle both the KGB and elements in his own government—who want to preserve detente—in trying to reveal the truth. In a strange twist, DeMille’s plotline proved to mirror real life; in 2010, the FBI arrested eleven Russian sleeper agents hiding in suburban America (which, in turn, inspired the hit cable series “The Americans.”)

Harlot’s Ghost by Norman Mailer. Considered a leading literary figure at the time (1991), Mailer decided to tackle the story of the early CIA in this mammoth novel (more than 1,300 pages). His protagonist and narrator, Harry Hubbard, is a member of the East Coast establishment who has followed his father into the CIA. Harry is sent to divided Berlin, where he works with the legendary Bill Harvey. He then becomes involved in the covert efforts to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (which produced the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, a colossal CIA failure.) The narrative of Harlot’s Ghost end in the early 1960s, after the Kennedy assassination, finishing with the words, “To Be Continued”: Mailer intended a sequel, Harlot’s Grave, which he never completed. While some of his literary tricks can be annoying (telling much of the story through letters; relying too much on flashbacks; interspersing gratuitous sexual escapades), Mailer’s quirky left-of-center take on U.S. foreign policy and on American society since the Second World War is engaging.

The Company by Richard Littell. This epic novel, published in 2002, is a more disciplined narrative account of the CIA’s history than Mailer’s book, although it’s almost as lengthy, weighing in at almost 900 pages. The book follows a group of Yale students recruited into “The Company” at the start of the Cold War. Littell, a former Newsweek editor, deftly weaves together fact and fiction, portraying the highs and lows for the Agency. The novel spans five decades, from the division of Berlin to the fall of the Soviet Union, offering a fascinating history of the period. The TNT miniseries based on the book featured Chris O’Donnell, Michael Keaton, Tom Hollander, and Natascha McElhone.

The Prodigal Spy by Joseph Kanon. Soviet agents operated in the United States for decades, recruiting Americans to spy for them. Some betrayed their country out of Marxist conviction, others for pay. In The Prodigal Spy, Joseph Kanon’s 1998 novel, a State Department official named Walter Kotlar flees to Prague in 1950 after being accused of treason during the initial Communist witch-hunts. Twenty years later, Kotlar reaches out to his estranged son, Nick, hoping to trade secrets about his past for a return to the U.S. When Nick travels behind the Iron Curtain to reunite with his father, he begins a journey that imparts lessons about loyalty, betrayal, and the abuse of power that resonate in today’s Washington.

The Cold War ended in December 1991. Now, a new generation of American writers is offering fresh perspectives on the conflict. Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Sympathizer, the story of a North Vietnamese mole who comes to the United States to spy on South Vietnamese exiles. Lauren Wilkinson’s 2019 American Spy features a Black FBI agent, Marie Mitchell, sent to West Africa in the 1980s to undermine a Che Guevara-like revolutionary leader. In Atomic Love, Jennie Fields’ 2020 novel, a Manhattan Project scientist, Rosalind Porter, becomes entangled in the FBI search for those passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets.

While it’s been thirty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, scholars are still evaluating the events and actors of the Cold War history. Novelists and screenwriters have no shortage of creative material. There are still fascinating tales to be told about the twilight struggle that marked this remarkable and critical period of history.

Charles Bridge, a novel of the Cold War

August 24, 2020 / admin

NOW AVAILABLE:

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Charles Bridge, a novel of the Cold War from Jefferson Flanders

In 2019, Flanders’ DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA focused on the political turmoil of the 1960s. Now, he returns with a Cold War thriller, CHARLES BRIDGE, set in Prague, New York, and London of the 1980s.

ABOUT THE NOVEL:

Prague, 1983. Claire Markham, a New York antiques dealer, is recruited for a mission behind the Iron Curtain by a mysterious stranger whose organization, the New Exodus Project, arranges for Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. Intrigued, Claire agrees to help a Russian woman visiting Czechoslovakia to defect to the West. But when the exfiltration plan goes awry, she finds herself in a desperate race to the border, hunted by the KGB and the Czechoslovak secret police, with the odds of her escape diminishing by the hour.

Learn more about Flanders’ historical fiction here

Cover design: Mick Wieland

Top Spy Thrillers and Espionage Novels of 2020

January 1, 2020 / admin

What are the top spy novels of 2020? Here are my picks (updated as novels are published throughout the year). Please note that I’m partial to historical fiction and authors who have a way with words; the novels I’ve selected reflect that bias.

V2: A novel of World War II by Robert Harris

Novelist Robert Harris (Fatherland; Munich) has returned with a World War II thriller about the British military response to the V2 rockets that the Germans sent raining down on London in 1944, destroying buildings and killing civilians. The development and use of the V2 reflected Adolf Hitler’s desperate quest for miracle weapons (Wunderwaffe), an attempt to stave off Germany’s defeat at the hands of the Allies. While the German missiles caused death and damage in England, they had little, if any, impact on the outcome of the war.

Harris’ novel focuses on two characters—Kay Caton-Walsh, a young British intelligence officer who becomes involved in the search-and-destroy efforts against the V2 launch sites in Belgium; and Rudi Graf, a V2 engineer, whose doubts about Nazism and his role in the German war machine have grown. Graf, and his friend, Wernher von Braun, the leader of the V2 program, had been drawn to missile technology by their dream of building spaceships.

Harris delivers a tightly-plotted, deeply-researched tale, with enough twists and turns to keep the reader glued to the page. At the same time, he delivers a scorching indictment of von Braun—who was brought to the United States after the war and became the architect of the American space program—as an amoral schemer and careerist who welcomed the SS’s war crimes at Peenemünde (slave labor, summary executions, etc.) when they helped him build his missiles. Sadly, when it came to the complicity of von Braun and other German scientists, the exigencies of the Cold War arms race trumped the interests of justice.

Three Hours in Paris by Cara Black

The target, a political leader. The protagonist, his potential assassin. The premise isn’t new—it’s the basis for many historical thrillers, including Geoffrey Household’s marvelous Rogue Male and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. Cara Black has adapted this plot, with a clever twist, in a novel set in Paris in June 1940, just as the Nazis have occupied the City of Light. Her protagonist in Three Hours in Paris, an American named Kate Rees who happens to be a crack shot with a rifle, is recruited by British intelligence to kill Adolf Hitler when he visits Paris for three hours (hence the novel’s title).

Kate Rees will fail in her mission—and the reader knows this in advance—and so Black’s challenge is to explore why her riflewoman misses her mark when she has Hitler in her sights, and how she will evade the German detective, Gunter Hoffman, who is intent on hunting her down. It’s a difficult task, but she succeeds in crafting a page-turner that keeps the reader guessing. Her deep knowledge of Parisian life during World War II adds a welcome authenticity to her tale.

Some may find that Three Hours in Paris too often veers into Dan Brown territory, with Kate threatened with capture by the Germans numerous times and always managing a clever (and near miraculous) escape. This focus on close calls makes for an engaging read, but calls for the more-historically inclined reader to suspend disbelief a few times too many.

The Secret Guests by Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black is a pen name for John Banville, an Irish author who is no stranger to writing about espionage—his 2009 novel, The Untouchables, retold the story of the infamous Cambridge spies through the eyes of an Anthony Blunt-like figure, Victor Maskell. Now, in The Secret Guests, Black/Banville has produced a more commercial spy thriller about the World War II sequestration of Britain’s princesses Elizabeth and Margaret on an Irish estate during the height of the Blitz. The royal heirs have been sent to neutral Ireland with the believe they will find safety there, removed from the nightly bombing of London by the Luftwaffe. Is the premise solely fictional? The book jacket for The Secret Guests claims that Black/Banville “has good information that princesses were indeed in Ireland for a time….”

Banville, a Dubliner, has a keen eye and ear for the pervasive class distinctions of Irish and British society. The main characters in the novel reflect those divisions: the Anglo-Irish detective, Strafford, assigned to watch over the girls; their host, the crusty and snobbish Duke of Edenmore; the well-bred English secret agent Celia Nashe; the icy British diplomat, Richard Lascelles; and the corpulent and shifty Irish pol, Daniel Hegarty, who negotiates the terms of the princesses’ stay at Clonmillis Hall.

Complications quickly arise—keeping the identity of the royal guests secret from the “help” at the Hall and from the nearby townspeople proves impossible. Many of the locals have bitter memories of the violence meted out by British troops during Ireland’s struggle for independence; revenge could be a motive for retaliating against the princesses. Since we know the historical outcome for the girls (Elizabeth ascending to the throne, and Margaret embracing the role of “rebel sister”) the suspense lies in how Detective Strafford and Agent Nashe will keep them from harm.

The novel comes at a curious time for the British monarchy. The furor over the Queen’s role in Brexit, the absurd drama over Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Megxit, and the entanglement of Prince Andrew with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have raised questions about the future of the institution in the 21st century. In an increasingly secular Great Britain, how does the concept of a divinely-anointed monarch hold up? Will the Royals be retained for symbolic reasons? Or as the host family of tourist attractions like Buckingham Palace? The world of The Secret Guests, when the state of the British monarchy carried geopolitical weight, does seem long ago and far away.

The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich

Paul Vidich’s compelling new novel The Coldest Warrior explores the dark side of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Project MKUltra, a 1950s foray into psychological warfare that featured mind control experiments with LSD and other drugs given to unwitting human subjects. The program was first exposed by the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee in 1975, as part of a broader public airing of CIA dirty tricks (including assassination plots, illegal domestic spying, and other wrongdoing). These skeletons in the CIA’s closet were dubbed the Family Jewels by Agency insiders.

Vidich focuses his novel on a specific crime, the murder of Dr. Charles Wilson, an Army bio-weapons expert who is pushed to his death from the ninth floor of a Washington, D.C. hotel in 1953. While Wilson’s killing is fictional, its circumstances mirror the death of researcher Frank Olson, who was administered LSD by Sidney Gottlieb, the head of Project MKUltra, and fell or jumped to his death in New York City. After this chilling opening, The Coldest Warrior jumps forward to 1975, when the CIA is grappling with the public disclosure of its illegal activities of the past two decades.

Veteran CIA officer Jack Gabriel is asked to take on one last assignment before retiring, investigating possible Agency involvement in Wilson’s alleged suicide. (Did Vidich, who writes with a literary flair, name Gabriel after the guardian archangel of the Scriptures?) As Gabriel examines the evidence in this cold case, he realizes that the guilty parties now hold high positions in the corridors of power. The last third of the novel, as Gabriel moves toward a confrontation with those responsible, is particularly suspenseful, with a somber and fitting resolution.

The Coldest Warrior is more than an entertaining and well-crafted thriller; Vidich asks questions that remain relevant today. In a liberal democracy, how can we keep intelligence agencies acting within bounds? There will always be the temptation to bend or break the law, to adopt immoral tactics, in the face of threats seen as existential. The men involved in Project MKUltra thought the ends justified the means—as they saw themselves on the side of the angels in resisting Communism. The secrecy involved makes bringing Deep State wrongdoers to account very difficult, if not impossible (vide: the lack of accountability for those involved in the CIA’s black site torture of terror suspects).

There are no easy answers to this challenge—legislative efforts at tighter oversight of the CIA have produced mixed results. Our best hope for keeping the national security establishment in check requires a skeptical Congress and a critical and fearless press. In a historical irony, today conservative Republican members of Congress—normally deferential supporters of the national security state—are the ones asking the toughest questions about the motives and methods of our intelligence agencies.

Here are past lists of top spy thrillers. You can click for:

2019’s top spy thrillers

2018’s top spy thrillers

2017’s top spy thrillers

2016’s top spy thrillers

2015’s top spy thrillers

2014’s top spy thrillers

2013’s top spy thrillers

Ten classic British spy novels

District of Columbia, a novel

April 30, 2019 / admin

NOW AVAILABLE:

Amazon | Kindle

District of Columbia, the latest novel from Jefferson Flanders

“A remarkable tale of political maturity, and its steep price.” – Kirkus Reviews

“In Jefferson Flanders’ compelling historical novel, the ideals of a privileged young man of the East Coast establishment and his like-minded friends are severely tested by the wrenching changes of the 1960s and ’70s that would transform America.” – BlueInk Review

ABOUT THE NOVEL:

Washington, D.C. January 1961. Dillon Randolph, a young State Department official, caught up in the heady days of President Jack Kennedy’s new administration, resolves to help make real the promises of the New Frontier. But the deepening Vietnam conflict causes Dillon to question not only the direction of the war, but also his most fundamental assumptions about his professional and personal life.

District of Columbia captures the turmoil of the 1960s at home and abroad. It tells a haunting and profound tale of lost innocence, of the arrogance of power, of the brutality and tragedy of war, and of lives forever transformed.

FROM THE AUTHOR:

District of Columbia proved to be a hard book to write. That’s meant as an observation, not a complaint.

The novel is largely set in the 1960s, a particularly difficult time for our country, a divisive time filled with painful memories, of assassinations, of civil strife, and of an unpopular and terribly-destructive war. Having lived through the period, it wasn’t easy to revisit those times. I had to grapple with my own conflicted feelings about the conflict in Vietnam, and where it fit into the Cold War.

District of Columbia began as a sequel to An Interlude in Berlin, and initially, I intended for the book to be a historical thriller. But as I told the story I felt compelled to tell, it became more of a political novel. That may not sit well with some of my readers, and I’m prepared for some negative responses (and reviews). All I can say in my defense is that sometimes as a writer your imagination takes you in an unexpected direction. I’ve learned not to resist when that happens.

My protagonist, a young diplomat, experiences many of the highs and lows of a decade of turmoil. Dillon Randolph is at heart a traditionalist; he is unprepared for the social and cultural sea change he confronts. The challenges in his life mirror what was happening for many of his generation.

Top Spy Thrillers and Espionage Novels of 2019

January 1, 2019 / admin

Already 2019 is shaping up to be a great year for espionage novels, with fiction from leading authors like John Le Carré, Charles Cumming, Joseph Kanon, Alan Furst, David Downing, and the late Philip Kerr in the offing.

I’ll list my top picks as they are published throughout the year. Please note that I’m partial to historical spy thrillers with a literary flair; the novels I’ve selected reflect that bias.

The Siberian Dilemma by Martin Cruz Smith

Martin Cruz Smith’s last novel featuring wise-guy Moscow investigator Arkady Renko, Tatiana, appeared in 2013. Now, Arkady is back in Smith’s ninth book in series, The Siberian Dilemma, and the cynical detective must once again operate in Vladimir Putin’s autocratic New Russia, where corruption and political violence go hand-in-hand and the rich bend the rule of law to their benefit.

The novel sends Arkady to the far reaches of Russia, to Irkutsk, in search of his sometime lover, journalist Tatiana Petrovna. She is covering the nascent political campaign of Mikhail Kuznetsov, an oil oligarch and potential challenger to Putin, and that puts her in harm’s way. As he seeks to protect her, Arkady allies himself with a local Buryat shaman, Rinchin Bolot, and Aba Makhmud, a young Chechen falsely accused of terrorism by Arkady’s boss, the corrupt prosecutor Zurin.

The Siberian Dilemma becomes more of a traditional detective story when Kuznetsov’s wealthy business partner and close friend, Boris Benz, is murdered, and Arkady realizes he may be framed for the killing. Driven to solve the crime, Arkady finds that the clues lead him to the forbidding and desolate wilderness around frozen Lake Baikal. There, he confronts deadly cold, wild bears, and hardened criminals, and faces the Siberian dilemma of the title—where you are offered only bad choices. And it’s hard not to conclude that in today’s Russia those, sadly, are the only choices available.

Under Occupation by Alan Furst

In The World At Night, Alan Furst’s 2002 novel, a French screenwriter–a colorful character named Fischfang–claims he doesn’t have “a real belief in plots.” Instead, he maintains: “Life wasn’t this, and therefore that, and so, of course, the other. It didn’t work that way. Life was this, and the something, and then something else, and then a kick in the ass from nowhere.” That belief in the randomness of life is mirrored in many of Furst’s recent novels about Paris under Nazi rule. It informs Under Occupation, his latest, and those readers expecting a traditional linear plot-line will instead find a series of lightly-linked episodic stories primarily featuring Paul Ricard, an author of detective novels drawn into the Resistance by accident.

The book begins in 1942; in short order, Ricard finds himself working for British intelligence, gathering information, assisting in sabotage against the Germans, and assessing an escape route for downed Allied aviators. He is aided by Kasia, a Polish woman who is part of the Paris demi-monde. Ricard’s assignments become increasingly dangerous, including a risky mission to the German port city of Kiel, where he is asked to spy on the naval yards in preparation for a British bombing raid–and discovers unanticipated complications.

Under Occupation is not without a healthy dose of romance (no surprise in a Furst novel); Ricard attracts more than his share of female attention, including from his mysterious handler, Leila. While at times Furst asks the reader to suspend belief–the Nazis close in on Ricard numerous times only to have him slip away (a modern-day Scarlet Pimpernel?)–Under Occupation delivers equal doses of history and entertainment.

The Accomplice by Joseph Kanon

In 1960, Israeli agents kidnapped the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in a daring operation carried out in broad daylight on the streets of Buenos Aries. While the government of Argentina protested the capture as a violation of its sovereignty, the Israelis refused to hand over Eichmann. He was brought to Tel Aviv, where he was tried, convicted, and executed for his role as a leading architect of the Holocaust and for his crimes against humanity. There were still, however, many former Nazis living in South America who had escaped from post-war Europe through the aptly-named ratline.

Joseph Kanon’s latest historical thriller, The Accomplice, takes the reader to 1962 Buenos Aires where his protagonist, an American CIA officer named Aaron Wiley, is hunting Otto Schramm, a physician involved in the horrific experimentation that took place on prisoners in Auschwitz. Wiley isn’t acting on orders from the CIA—this pursuit is personal, for Schramm has been complicit in the damage done to Wiley’s extended family in the death camp.

As with all of Kanon’s novels, The Accomplice addresses several weighty questions: Does justice require a public trial and conviction? What should be the punishment for unspeakable crimes?Death? Life imprisonment? When the authorities refuse to act, is there a moral duty to pursue justice, even if it means operating outside of the law?

Kanon paints a dark, complicated picture in the novel. Wiley finds few allies in his quest to bring Schramm to justice. There’s little appetite for war crimes trials in West Germany. The Mossad is wary of another international incident. Many Argentine officials are sympathetic to the Nazis. And the CIA sees Schramm as a potential informer on the Peronists, who are now out of power but a threat to return and .

There are personal complications as well. Wiley finds himself attracted to Schramm’s beautiful but emotionally bruised daughter. Caught between her loyalty to her father and her growing realization of the extent and gravity of Otto Schramm’s crimes, she is the most intriguing and memorable character we encounter in The Accomplice.

Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell, the Englishman who writes under the pen name of John le Carré, has been outspoken in his disdain for Brexit, for Donald Trump, and for the rising populist and nationalist tide in Europe. Nor does he want to push the re-set button for Vladimir Putin, either.

Cornwell/le Carré injects these strongly-held political views into Agent Running in the Field, his latest spy thriller, and despite some polished writing and interesting characters, the result is a somewhat muddled tale. Le Carré, known for his left-of-center antipathy for the West’s intelligence agencies (MI6 and the CIA), has been left in an awkward place. Those very same agencies are now seen by the Left as a bulwark against Trump’s erratic foreign policy and authoritarian tendencies. After all, where did the Steele Dossier come from? And the investigation of Russian influence during the 2016 presidential campaign? Further, it was a CIA officer who blew the whistle about President Trump’s alleged improper pressure on the Ukrainian president during a White House phone call. The Resistance to Trump (and to Brexit) is centered in what populists have derided as the Deep State.

What makes Agent Running in the Field intriguing, in a way, is le Carré’s struggle to make sense of this new topsy-turvy environment, and to balance his long-held dislike of British elites with the reality that its adversaries are also his. That leads to a somewhat jumbled focus for the novel. Le Carré centers his latest tale around three characters: his protagonist, Nat, a middle-aged Secret Intelligence Service officer nearing the end of his career, and two younger characters, Florence (an idealistic MI6 officer) and Ed, whose political views are earnest but extreme. When Florence militates for a counterintelligence operation against a Ukrainian oligarch with ties to Moscow Center, Nat encourages her—only to discover that Russian influence over the Establishment is greater than he realized.

Agent Running in the Field isn’t in the same category as the George Smiley series or even more recent novels like The Constant Gardener or Our Kind of Traitor, but le Carré nonetheless knows both how to tell a story, and how to hook the reader.

Metropolis by Philip Kerr

Before Philip Kerr’s death in 2018, he completed his final novel, Metropolis. One more time it features his wise-cracking hero/antihero, Berlin detective Bernie Gunther. The book tells an origin story—Bernie’s first days on the city’s Murder Commission in 1928. This is a younger, more restrained Gunther, one who hopes to learn the ropes of his new job and leave behind the lingering bad memories of his time as a soldier in the Great War.

Kerr paints a vivid portrait of Berlin in the late 1920s, a mix of Babylonian excess, artistic ferment, political upheaval, and grinding poverty. As Bernie Gunther is plunged into two investigations—of a killer who has been scalping prostitutes, and of a murderer executing crippled veterans begging on the city’s streets—Kerr takes us on a tour of Berlin after dark, its sex clubs and dive bars, its shadowy underworld controlled by ruthless gangsters. And lurking in the background is the emerging menace of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi thugs, battling with Communist street gangs and seeking to undermine the Weimar Republic.

Despite its detailing of some grisly murders, Metropolis is a more hopeful book than many of Kerr’s later Bernie Gunther novels. Set before the Third Reich, the Berliners we meet accept traditional notions of right-and-wrong—there are worrying signs, but for now, the moral center has held. Ahead, the horrors of National Socialism.

Philip Kerr’s fourteen Bernie Gunther novels offer more than noir entertainment: they bring to life the tortured history of Europe from the 1920s through the late 1950s, a history of the immense harm and damage caused by totalitarianism. While his thrillers featured more than their fair share of black humor and cynicism, it was always clear that Kerr believed fiercely in the quest for decency and justice. He, and Bernie Gunther, will be missed.

Diary of a Dead Man on Leave by David Downing

Writers have their fascinations. For historical novelist David Downing, one of them has been how left-wing Germans—socialists, Communists, social democrats—coped with life in the Third Reich. Many of them had battled the Nazis in the 1920s; millions had voted against Hitler and his National Socialists. What was it like for them as the Nazis tightened the screws? It’s a theme Downing addressed in his Jack Russell novels set in Berlin, and it’s one he has returned to in Diary of a Dead Man on Leave.

The novel’s title comes from a doomed German radical facing trial in 1919: “We Communists are all dead men on leave.” Downing’s protagonist, a man who calls himself Josef Hofman, is one of those dead men on leave, a veteran agent of the Communist International, the Kremlin’s organization responsible for promoting world revolution. Sent to the city of Hamm in northern Germany in 1938, Josef has been ordered to organize a resistance cell, recruiting ex-Communist Party members from among his co-workers at the railway yard. Josef has served the Comintern in Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, China, the United States, and Latin America. He is committed to the revolutionary cause, recognizing that his life hangs by a thread—if betrayed to the Gestapo he will be tortured and killed. There is another danger in his line of work: in a time of suspicion and of purges, a summons to Moscow by his superiors can end with a bullet to the back of the head.

As he grows close to the people he meets in Hamm, Josef begins to question his purpose. He begins a diary (a risky and foolish act). He knows that he should resist any emotional entanglements, but he can’t help himself. By growing close to the widow running his boarding house, her twelve-year-old son, and their circle of friends, Josef realizes that he may be jeopardizing his mission and his good standing in Moscow.

Downing recognizes that his sympathetic portrait of a Comintern operative, a man dedicated to advancing a totalitarian ideology, a man with blood on his hands, may not sit well with every reader. Yet it is a measure of Downing’s considerable imaginative talent that he helps us see how it is possible for a decent man to serve an indecent cause.

The Moroccan Girl by Charles Cumming

Charles Cumming’s clever new novel is, well, quite meta—The Moroccan Girl is a spy thriller featuring a protagonist, British author Kit Carradine, who writes spy thrillers. As the novel begins, Carradine is about to leave London, headed to a literary festival in Marrakesh, when he is approached by an MI6 officer, Robert Mantis, asking for his help. A covert agent of the Secret Service may be attending the festival; she is in trouble, hunted by the opposition. Will Kit pass along a sealed package to this mysterious woman? Kit is intrigued by the chance to experience first hand the reality of the world of espionage. (The idea of becoming a “writer-spy” appeals to him.) Moreover, he’s bored and welcomes a break in his routine, closeted in his London flat cranking out his would-be bestsellers.

It’s not long before Kit discovers that the “Moroccan girl” he has been tasked with locating is actually Lara Bartok, a member of the violent Antifa group Resurrection, and a fugitive from justice. Resurrection has been attacking right-wing populists in Europe and the U.S. through kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations of politicians and journalists. Described as a latter-day Ulrike Meinhof, the West German radical and terrorist, Lara had been the girlfriend of Resurrection’s leader, Ivan Simakov, but now she’s renounced the violence (or has she?). Lara’s alluring, street-smart, and has a magnetic appeal for men. When Kit meets her in Marrakesh, he finds himself quickly over his head—Russian and American intelligence agents are hunting Lara, intent on retribution. When Kit decides to help her evade her pursuers, the novel picks up speed and keeps the reader absorbed until its resolution.

The Moroccan Girl asks an ingenious question. How would a gifted and imaginative storyteller, who has spent years researching spy tradecraft, fare when suddenly thrust into the secret world? Could the amateur outwit the professionals? Could he stay one step ahead? Cumming has fashioned an intriguing and amusing story built around answering those questions.

A Spy in Exile by Jonathan de Shalit

Ya’ara Stein, a thirty-something Mossad-trained operative, is the protagonist of Jonathan de Shalit’s second spy thriller, A Spy in Exile. (De Shalit is the pseudonym of a retired Israeli intelligence officer with a literary bent). Ya’ara has been recruited by Israel’s prime minister to form a secret unit to battle Islamist-affiliated terror cells in Europe. This elite unit, like the one established after the Munich Summer Olympics massacre in 1972 to hunt down and execute Palestinian terrorists, is designed to administer rough justice to Israel’s enemies while ignoring national boundaries and international law.

De Shalit has produced a well-crafted novel, and he’s created an intriguing character in Ya’ara. Sophisticated, intelligent, unbending, she cooly plans daring, extra-judicial killings and doesn’t shy away from violence action herself. While some of the members of her team express qualms about the vengeance Ya’ara and the unit pursue, she rationalizes it as necessary for Israel’s survival. She believes, as does the (fictional) prime minister that “rampant Islamic terror could only be defeated by means of a hard-fought and bloody war, from close quarters, with continuing and relentless violence….” It’s a grim picture, one with little hope. While many Israelis might endorse these “long war” sentiments, it’s more problematic for European and American readers.

In contrast, the hit Israeli television series “Fauda” has attempted to humanize the Palestinians of the West Bank and their conflict with their occupiers. The recent screen adaption of Little Drummer Girl also offered a more nuanced view of the situation (even more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians than the novel by John Le Carré). If de Shalit continues his series, it will be interesting to see whether future novels reflect the changing political landscape in Israel and the West, and the desire for compromise and a lasting peace.