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About the author

May 10, 2014 / admin

Jefferson Flanders

Jefferson Flanders is an author, educator, and independent journalist. During the course of his career, he has been an editor, newspaper columnist, sportswriter, radio commentator, college professor, and publishing executive.

The topics touched upon in Flanders’ writing reflect his broad interests: politics, history, media criticism, education and learning, communications theory, sports, evolutionary biology, and theology, and, in his short fiction, the interior “felt life.”

Flanders has taught most recently in the journalism department of New York University, and at Boston University and Babson College.

A graduate of Harvard College, where he earned a degree in history and literature and studied with the poet Robert Fitzgerald, Flanders continued his education at Columbia University.

He is the author of Café Carolina and Other Stories, The Girl from Recoleta and Other Stories of Love, the novel The Republic of Virtue, and of the Cold War First Trumpet trilogy: Herald Square (described as “well-written, action packed and engrossing” in the Washington Times), The North Building, and The Hill of Three Borders.

He has researched his novels in China, Eastern Europe, Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States.

LISTEN to Flanders’ interview with A.C. Fuller on Writer 2.0 podcast.

Chosin, the graphic novel

April 25, 2014 / admin

The battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November and December of 1950, when outnumbered American Marines fought their way out of a Chinese Red Army trap in northeast Korea, remains one of the greatest feats of arms in U.S. military history.

While every Marine knows the story of the First Marine Division’s heroic march to the sea and a number of excellent nonfiction treatments of Chosin have been published recently, the epic battle hasn’t attracted the attention of Hollywood filmmakers or many novelists. Korea has been called the Forgotten War, and—at least in the popular culture—Chosin has suffered somewhat from the same neglect.

To date, only James Brady’s marvelous 2007 novel The Marines of Autumn, praised as the Iliad of the Korean War by Kurt Vonnegut, has focused on the Chosin campaign. (While I begin my recent novel The North Building with the retreat from Chosin, the narrative then shifts to Washington, D.C.)

Brian Iglesias, a Marine combat veteran of the Iraq War, is out to raise public consciousness about Chosin. He has directed a moving documentary film, Chosin, which includes remarkable interviews with the Marines who battled not only seasoned Chinese troops, but also confronted brutal winter weather where temperatures dropped to 20 and 30 degrees below zero.

Iglesias and several writers and illustrators (Richard C. Meyer, Thomas Jung, and Otis Frampton) have created Chosin: Hold the Line, a graphic novel that will serve as the basis for an animated short film.

The graphic novel is told in two parts: “Hold That Line,” which follows a young Marine private, Billy French, through the pivotal struggle by the Americans to hold Fox Hill, and “To the Sea,” which focuses on two young Korean children who are caught up in the conflict and join the fighting retreat from Hagaru to the port of Hungnam, where the U.S. Navy waited to evacuate X Corps.

Much of the battle of Chosin Reservoir was fought at night and the illustrations capture the eerie scenes of snow falling, green and red tracers arcing through the gloom, the sudden appearance of attacking troops, and the intense hand-to-hand combat that often ensued. This comic panel depiction could easily have trivialized the situation; I didn’t find the violence shown to be gratuitous or unwarranted, but rather an accurate reflection of the desperate, life-and-death struggle involved.

Iglesias and his collaborators get the details right: the starkly beautiful terrain; the Thanksgiving meal served to the men freezing on their plates because of the cold; Chinese soldiers forced into frontal mass wave attacks by Red Army political officers ready to execute any who balked at advancing (a tactic pioneered by Lenin in the 1920s); the camaraderie of the Marines who were vastly outnumbered but never broke faith.

The second story told in the novel features the heroic march of the “Chosin Few” to the sea and considers the impact of the war on Korean civilians. One of the less-known aspects of the campaign was that American commanders decided to evacuate nearly 100,000 Korean civilians along with the troops. It’s likely many of the Koreans would have been executed by the Communists as traitors if they had been left behind. An estimated million descendants of the Hungnam evacuees live in freedom today; historians believe the scale of this humanitarian move was unprecedented.

It would be fitting if Iglesia’s efforts culminate in the Chosin story being told in longer form—a full-length feature film would be ideal. If 300, a recounting of the courageous Greek stand against the invading Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, succeeded at the box office, why not bring a stirring tale of modern American bravery to the screen?

Julian Adler: TR Tackles College Football

April 14, 2014 / admin

Julian Adler, a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, recently won the Theodore Roosevelt Public Speaking Contest, which is organized annually by the Theodore Roosevelt Association (TRA), for the New York City public schools. (I’m Julian’s proud uncle).

His topic—Teddy Roosevelt’s intervention to save college football—has a family connection: Julian’s great-grandfather, Carl S. Flanders, played center on the 1905 undefeated Yale team and was named a Walter Camp All-American (second team). Julian will follow Carl’s lead and head to New Haven to join Yale’s Class of 2018 in the fall.

The text of Julian’s award-winning speech follows.

TR Tackles College Football

Julian Adler

If you were one of the 112 million people watching the Super Bowl this year, you might have seen—through a veil of tears—the Seattle Seahawks obliterate the Denver Broncos. Some people blamed Payton Manning, and others praised Russell Wilson. But the real unsung hero is none other than our 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt.

One hundred years ago, football was in trouble. The sport, played mostly by college students, was virtually unregulated, and lent itself to gruesome injuries. The 1905 season was nicknamed “The Death Harvest,” leaving 137 players hospitalized and nineteen corpses on the field. As mothers received notices of their children dying at school, there was a popular movement to make football illegal altogether. “The once athletic sport,” wrote the Beaumont Express, “has degenerated into a contest that in its brutality is little better than the gladiatorial combats of ancient Rome.”

Now, Theodore Roosevelt was a strong advocate of what he called “the strenuous life.” Friendly competition, he believed, brought out the best in people, and should be encouraged. But even Roosevelt admitted that the brutality of football had gotten out of hand. And, moreover, Roosevelt’s son, Theodore Jr., had started playing the sport.

“What to do?” thought Roosevelt. How can football be saved, without putting the lives of its players at risk? How can an American pastime be maintained without having to chance death? As Roosevelt thought about the issue, more and more colleges started dropping football from their campuses. Stanford banned the sport in 1905 followed by Columbia, Northwestern, and Duke. But it wasn’t so much the sport itself, thought Roosevelt, but rather how unregulated it was that was the problem. As Roosevelt wrote to a close friend toward the end of 1903, “I can make an effort to minimize the danger.”

In 1905 Roosevelt invited representatives of all the major colleges to the White House. He explained that football was on the verge of death, but didn’t need to be as long as reforms could be made. This was not the easiest argument to make.

These universities truly hated one another. It was more than rivalry—it was a way of life. After losing the 1894 football game to Yale for instance, Harvard cut off all official communication with the University for over two years. Four years later Harvard students were arrested for shooting a bulldog—the symbol of Yale—in Harvard Yard. Moreover, there was a great deal at stake. Each one of these games drew over 50,000 people and there was a lot of money to be made and not much incentive for reform. But in the course of one day, Roosevelt convinced these universities to establish an intercollegiate league. This Intercollegiate Association of the United States, renamed four years later as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, is better known today as the NCAA.

I love this story.

And it’s cute to think that Roosevelt took such a personal interest in student sports. But in a larger sense, his actions reflect and demonstrate all the qualities that make him remembered. All the qualities that make him loved.

We see Roosevelt preserving something distinctly American. Just as he did with the creation of the National Parks, Roosevelt ensured that something on the verge of destruction survived for future generations.

We see Roosevelt saving something from the evils of itself. Just as he did with his “trust-busting,” Roosevelt regulated an existing system to make it better, and the competition more constructive.

We see Roosevelt caring for his children. TR was famous for having his kids running around the White House, and playing with them. And with regulating football, Roosevelt is caring for his son, and exercising his famous paternal qualities.

We see Roosevelt stepping in as a third party to foster negotiations. Just as he did with brokering the Russo-Japanese peace treaty, Roosevelt gets two fiercely opposed sides to come together and reach an agreement.

And finally, we see Theodore Roosevelt acting like…Theodore Roosevelt. Just as with his rough riding and hunting and cowboying, Roosevelt displays the rugged masculinity for which he was so famous. Of football Roosevelt once wrote, “it’s like life—the principle to follow is simple: hit the line hard; don’t foul, don’t shirk, hit the line hard.”

This may seem like a small story—a small aspect of Teddy Roosevelt’s life and career—but it is exactly stories like this that make him worth remembering. It is exactly because of stories like this that we talk about him, and write about him, and think about him today. He was a man who cared for much, and fought and strove and struggled to protect the things he cared about. In virtually any anecdote you tell about him, you can see reflected his boundless energy and his desire to improve the world around him.

My point is that with a man like Teddy Roosevelt you don’t have to search hard to see why he is great. You don’t have to pick his grandest action to see the characteristics for which we remember him. In everything he did we see his love for country, for his fellow man, and for just plain old fun.

And you don’t have to be a fan of football to appreciate that.

Ten Classic British Spy Novels

January 2, 2014 / admin

The modern spy thriller was born in Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. While the genre has moved from its upper class gentleman-adventurer roots, today’s writers still borrow themes, structure, and tone from these classic novels.

Here’s my list of the top ten classic British spy novels, the best of the historical best (presented in order of publication with all but one of these books written before 1965).

The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad’s subtitle for The Secret Agent is “A Simple Tale,” but the novel is anything but simple, as the Polish-English author serves up a story of turn-of-the-century London anarchist politics filled with irony, compassion, and reflections about the twists and turns of the human heart. It’s been well received by readers and critics. The Modern Library has ranked The Secret Agent as the 46th best novel of the 20th century.

Adolf Verloc, the secret agent of the title, is a rather pathetic figure, running a seedy Soho shop and taking money to spy for an unidentified foreign power. Pressured by his employer, Mr. Vladimir, a calculating diplomat, Verloc accepts the role of agent provocateur in a plot to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, a symbol of scientific progress. The reactionary Vladimir hopes that the British government will respond with a heavy hand to this act of terrorism and will move firmly against revolutionary socialists and anarchists.

Verloc’s world is shabby and unappetizing. His domestic circle includes his much-younger wife, Winnie Verloc, who has married him for security, not love, and her mentally-challenged brother, Stevie. Then there are the colorful and unsavory misfits in the anarchist cell Verloc has joined: The Professor, a suicidal academic who specializes in explosives, Comrade Alexander Ossipon, an ex-medical student with feelings for Winnie, the elderly Karl Yundt who calls himself “The Terrorist,” and the idealistic Michaelis, who emerges from prison grossly obese and whose rich patroness pays to send him to health spas to lose the weight (unsuccessfully).

And yet there is nothing particularly admirable about the authorities (Chief Inspector Heat, The Assistant Commissioner, Sir Ethelred), the symbols of British law and order, and in their portrayal Conrad’s sense of the ironic becomes apparent. Not surprisingly, things don’t end well for Verloc. Conrad offers us a dark vision in The Secret Agent where moral ambiguity reigns and there are no last-minute heroics to tidy things up.

Many critics have noted Conrad’s prescience about modern terrorism; Robert D. Kaplan has called The Secret Agent “a fine example of how a savvy novelist may detect the future long before a social scientist does.” There are, indeed, disturbing parallels with 21st century concerns about suicide bombers, terrorist attacks on symbolic “soft” targets, the potential for false flag operations, and the balance a society seeks to strike between personal liberty and communal security.

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G.K. Chesterton

While Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday includes spies and suspense, it’s much more than a “spy thriller.” Critic Simon Hammond recently argued in the Observer that: “The novel is a raucous carnival of genres: thriller, farce, detective story, dystopia, fairy tale and gothic romance. It can be read as a philosophical treatise or a fraught expression of religious conviction but above all it is gloriously entertaining.”

At the start of the novel, we’re introduced to two young Londoners, Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme, who argue over the nature of poetry—and we quickly learn that they are not who we think they are. Syme, in fact, is an undercover Scotland Yard detective on the look-out for anarchists. When he infiltrates a strange group of conspirators whose code names are the days of the week Syme becomes Thursday, one of the six men who follow their leader, the large and threatening Sunday.

As Syme/Thursday tries to stop an assassination plot by the anarchist circle, Chesterton’s book takes on a Alice in Wonderland quality. Syme’s encounters with the plotters become more and more surreal and at times the narrative takes on the qualities of magical realism.

The Man Who Was Thursday is a complex book, filled with symbols and allusions but lightened by Chesterton’s wryly humorous view of the human condition. It’s not surprising that in This Side of Paradise F. Scott Fitzgerald had his protagonist Amory Blaine read Chesterton’s novel “which he liked without understanding.”

The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan

Buchan created the “innocent-man-on-the-run” thriller with this novel (a plot device borrowed by numerous suspense writers in the years that followed) and the film version (The 39 Steps) became a huge cinematic hit for Alfred Hitchcock in 1938. Richard Hannay has returned from Rhodesia to London and learns from a stranger, an American, of a plot to assassinate a visiting Greek statesman. When the American is killed, suspicion falls upon Hannay.

Hannay uncovers a scheme by the infamous Black Stone to assassinate the Greek premier Karolides. The rest of the novel finds Hannay on the run, chased by the police and a group of German spies, heading to the Scottish countryside (that Buchan loved and featured in many of his novels). There’s little doubt that in the end the quick-witted Hannay will prevail, clear his name, and foil the plot but Buchan makes sure to entertain the reader with a “ripping good yarn” along the way.

As Buchan’s grandson, Toby, conceded in a Daily Mail piece, the novel does see the world in decidedly Old School terms: “They are easy to laugh at now, these ‘clubland heroes’, stereotyped with clipped military moustaches, inextinguishable briars filled with strong shag, indestructible tweeds and stout footwear, and a habit of direct speech and, sometimes, even more direct action. Yet there is something of Keith Douglas’s poem Aristocrats about them, too: ‘How can I live among this gentle obsolescent breed of heroes, and not weep?’”

The Great Impersonation (1920) by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Oppenheim’s novel begins with two men who look alike—Englishman Everard Dominey and Leopold von Ragastein, a German aristocrat—and he fashions his thriller around the notion of one being substituted for the other, a plot device that Mark Twain used in The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and Anthony Hope employed in The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).

A man claiming to be Everard Dominey returns to England from German East Africa after a long absence and, following instructions from German intelligence, looks to reintegrate himself into elite circles in Great Britain. Will his attempts at espionage be discovered? Dominey’s troubled wife, Lady Rosamund, is puzzled by how different her husband seems upon his return; von Ragastein’s former lover, Princess Stephanie Eiderstrom, is disturbed by his lack of passion. In the end, all is revealed, and we learn that an English country gentleman may not appear at first glance tough enough to take on the ruthless and powerful Hun, but he is!

(The Great Impersonation is fortunately free of some of the casual, and vicious, anti-Semitism found in some of Oppenheim’s other novels from the period.)

Rogue Male (1939) by Geoffrey Household

It’s the late 1930s and an English gentleman and sportsman, a hunter, tests whether he can get close enough to a Fascist dictator to assassinate him with a high-powered rifle. He doesn’t pull the trigger, but is caught by the secret police, and tortured and beaten. He escapes, returns to England, and “goes to ground” when he realizes that, once the hunter, he has become the hunted.

What makes Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male so interesting is its juxtaposition of the placid, sleepy English countryside with a hidden life-or-death struggle. Household knows how to build suspense and his spare, lean prose propels the story forward.

Victoria Nelson notes that Rogue Male’s protagonist is not a patriotic Buchan-like stalwart; for Household’s hero “…only the personal is legitimately political.” Nelson adds that this English gentleman “hates the state and respects the rights of the individual. He eschews all patriotism and believes in ‘dying against,’ not ‘dying for.'”

A Coffin For Dimitrios (1939) by Eric Ambler

Who was Dimitrios Makropolous, also known as Dimitrios Talat and Dimitrios Taladis? English mystery writer Charles Latimer is visiting in Istanbul when Colonel Haki of the secret police invites him to view the body of a notorious criminal named Dimitrios. Latimer decides to explore Dimitrios’ background, a journey that takes him to Greece, Bulgaria, Switzerland, and France, and exposes him to the seedy, demi-monde world that he has heretofore only imagined.

As Latimer learns about the “evil men do” and as he explores the limits of his own morality Eric Ambler’s A Coffin For Dimitrios transcends its genre and asks more of the reader. At the same time, Ambler throws in enough witty asides and sly jokes to signal that his novel is meant to entertain.

Sarah Weinman has praised the “postmodern” qualities of this “startling, elegant masterpiece of espionage fiction” and noted: “More than any of his other novels, ‘A Coffin For Dimitrios’ stands out as a classic example of what Ambler termed ‘the ape beneath the velvet’—the furious, pulsating violence beating beneath a smooth and placid façade.”

The Quiet American (1955) by Graham Greene

Had John F. Kennedy not chosen Vietnam as a Cold War battleground, then Greene’s novel might not have received the same level of critical scrutiny, and acclaim, that it later did. The protagonist, the quiet American of the title, is Alden Pyle, a CIA agent and Ivy Leaguer who is also dangerously idealistic. He is caught up in a love triangle with Thomas Fowler, a British journalist, and a beautiful young Vietnamese girl, Phuong, whose seeming passivity appears to mask her true feelings (and who has been seen by many critics as a symbolic stand-in for the Vietnamese at large).

Pyle rejects both continued French colonial control of Indochina and a Communist takeover in favor of a “Third Force” solution promoting American-style democracy and freedom. His decision to covertly intervene in the local political scene has tragic consequences. Greene’s novel, with its anti-American overtones, provoked a harshly critical review in The New York Times (“When Graham Greene grants primary justice to the Communist cause in Asia, and finds insupportable its resistance under the leadership of America, he raises inevitably this question: Has he reconciled himself to the thesis that history or God now demands of the church and of Western civilization a more terrible surrender than any required of the tormented characters in his fiction?”) and only later was the author’s vision of American arrogance hailed as prophetic.

The novelist Pico Iyer, who greatly admired Greene’s book, has noted: “The novel asks every one of us what we want from a foreign place, and what we are planning to do with it. It points out that innocence and idealism can claim as many lives as the opposite, fearful cynicism.”

From Russia with Love (1957) by Ian Fleming

For anyone who has seen the film version of From Russia with Love, it’s almost impossible not to think of the stunning Italian actress, Daniela Bianchi, as the alluring face and figure of Tatiana Romanova, the Soviet agent sent to seduce James Bond, the swashbuckling British secret agent with a taste for fast cars, martinis, and fast women. And then there was Colonel Rosa Klebb, head of Operations and Executions for SMERSH, the villainess of the piece, who is the anti-Bond Girl—short, dumpy, and (it is strongly suggested) not at all interested in men, not even those licensed to kill.

This was Ian Fleming’s fifth novel to feature Bond, Agent 007, and it is perhaps his most literary effort. (The Times Literary Supplement called it Fleming’s “tautest, most exciting and most brilliant tale.”) Bond doesn’t appear until relatively deep into the book, as first we learn of the elaborate “honey pot” trap devised to ensnare Fleming’s cold-blooded hero and the novel ends in a way that suggests that the author had grown tired of the series.

Fleming once said of his creation, James Bond: “He’s a sort of amalgam of romantic tough guys, dressed up in 20th Century clothes, using 20th Century language. I think he’s slightly more true to the type of modern hero, to the commandos of the last War, and so on, and to some of the secret-service men I’ve met, than to any of the rather cardboardy heroes of the ancient thrillers.”

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) by John Le Carré

Graham Greene called The Spy Who Came in From the Cold the best spy story he had ever read. JB Priestley said it possessed “an atmosphere of chilly hell.” The novel became an international best-seller and made John Le Carré a household name and introduced a gritty, more realistic and jaundiced view of what the West’s intelligence agencies did. (Le Carré was the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell, who had served in minor roles in both MI5 and MI6).

The protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer, is the polar opposite of James Bond. As part of an elaborate cover story, Leamas is sacked from his job and then becomes involved with an English librarian and Communist, Liz Gold. His “down on his luck story” has been devised to allow Leamas to enter East Germany and implicate Hans-Dieter Mundt, the head of the East German secret service, as a British spy. Things go awry, however, when Liz Gold turns up, and Leamas learns that all is not what he imagined, and that Control and other members of the British espionage establishment can be as ruthless as their Communist adversaries.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) by John Le Carré

At the heart of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a story of betrayal, personal and institutional. The central character, George Smiley, has been forced out at the Circus (MI6) and is brought back to investigate an overseas mission that may have been compromised by someone within British Intelligence. The plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is heavily influenced by the Kim Philby spy scandal, which revealed that England’s upper class was indeed capable of betrayal.

What sets Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy apart is Le Carré’s ability to create memorable characters like Smiley, Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase, Jim Prideaux, and Control. He deftly illuminates Smiley’s emotional landscape and how his sensitivity is both a great strength and an exploitable weakness. Le Carré also invented his own spy jargon (mole, lamplighters, scalphunters, housekeepers, the Cousins, etc.) that has the ring of authenticity and in at least one case—the term “mole”—is now in common usage in intelligence agencies around the world.

Click to purchase the critically-acclaimed First Trumpet Cold War thrillers by Jefferson Flanders: Herald Square, The North Building, and The Hill of Three Borders.

Top Spy Thrillers and Espionage Novels of 2013

July 9, 2013 / admin

The year 2013 proved to be a very good year for intelligent, well-crafted spy thrillers. (You can click on the following links for my list of 2012’s top spy thrillers and 2014’s top spy thrillers).

My picks for these top cloak-and-dagger novels published in 2013 follow.

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

The celebrated spy novelist John le Carré (aka David John Moore Cornwell) knows both how to tell a story and how to fashion a morally ambiguous fictional world. Both of these literary skills are on full display in A Delicate Truth, which critically examines the premises and conduct of the recent GWOT (Global War on Terror) and (not surprisingly) finds it wanting.

The novel’s English protagonist, Toby Bell, a somewhat jaded young Foreign Office functionary, becomes aware of a botched commando-style raid on a house in Gibraltar where a “high-value target,” an arms buyer linked to Islamist extremists, is supposedly present. He learns that Operation Wildlife, the rendition of this supposed terrorist, has been orchestrated by a small and unsavory rogue group that includes a CIA operative, an Anglo-American defense contractor, an American evangelical right-winger, and the overly ambitious British government minister Bell has been serving as private secretary. Deeply troubled by what he has discovered, Bell finds himself risking all to expose the cover-up of the failed, and clearly illegal, mission.

As in nearly all of his post-Cold War novels, le Carré’s villains in A Delicate Truth are greedy corporate executives, CIA officials, corrupt Brits who enable the CIA, and First Worlders who oppress Third Worlders. The problem with A Delicate Truth is that the book’s plot is driven by moral outrage at the collateral damage caused by Operation Wildlife, but Operation Wildlife is, quite frankly, small potatoes in a Drone Wars world, where the President of the United States asserts his right to execute American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process. What le Carré wants us to find shocking in the dubious programs of the Bush-Blair era (rendition, enhanced interrogation, etc.) already have been replaced by GWOT policies on steroids (targeted killings by drone, NSA surveillance programs of massive scope) that involve much greater lethality.

There’s no questioning le Carré’s mastery of the genre, and A Delicate Truth will keep you turning the pages, but missing from the novel—surprising for a writer known for his subtlety—are shades of gray, of nuance, of ambiguity. Le Carré, whose politics appear to mirror those of Tony Benn, never acknowledges the difficult choices that Western governments have to make in confronting the rise of militant Islam. How should democratic societies respond to an ideology (Wahabi Islam) that violently rejects Enlightenment ideas? How should le Carré’s beloved rural Cornwall deal with homegrown radicalism, with those who advocate replacing English common law with sharia? Blaming George W. Bush and the CIA and American foreign policy for the Boston marathon bombing or (closer to le Carré’s home) the beheading of an British soldier on a London street in broad daylight by two suspected jihadis requires ignoring reality. The indelicate truth is that radical Islamists reject secular Western values and culture and will continue to do so regardless of shifts in Western policy.

The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry

The young, never-identified-by-name American agent in Charles McCarry’s latest novel makes a rookie mistake: he falls in love with a mysterious and alluring woman, named Mei (codenamed WILDCHILD), who is apparently working for Chinese intelligence in Shanghai. Their often strange affair can be seen as a metaphor, of sorts, for the complicated and troubled relationship between the U.S. and China.

McCarry populates The Shanghai Factor with intriguing and memorable characters: an American spymaster who plays mindgames with his subordinates; a Chinese CEO who despises the barbarians of the West and exploits their greed and arrogance; a deadly assassin who makes her living as a gourmet chef; and a Park Avenue WASP who faces her fatal cancer without flinching.

In the end The Shanghai Factor transcends its genre as it reminds us of the emotional costs of love, the compulsion of passion, and the often-overlooked psychic strain of espionage. McCarry is far from sentimental as he outlines clearly the differences between East and West—cultural, political, and spiritual—and suggests we are farther from understanding each other than we like to think.

Dominion by C.J. Sansom

C.J. Sansom says he’s intrigued by the idea of alternative history. His latest novel, Dominion, imagines England in 1952 after the Nazis have won the Second World War. In this counter-factual world, instead of turning to Winston Churchill to organize a defense of Britain in 1940, the Tories instead select Lord Halifax as prime minister and he surrenders to the Germans after battlefield defeats in France.

Sansom paints an imaginative portrait of Europe under Hitler’s thumb—there’s continuing conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union but Moscow has fallen and Stalin has been executed, replaced by Marshall Zhukov and Nikita Khrushchev. In the United States, the newly elected president, Adlai Stevenson, is hostile to the Nazis unlike his isolationist predecessors. German Jewish refugees in Britain have been forcibly repatriated to the camps in Germany and there are rumors that British Jews, already forced to wear the yellow Star of David, are next.

Against this backdrop, Sansom has written a traditional spy thriller with plenty of action and skullduggery. Part of the fun in reading Dominion is how he inserts real-life historical figures into the inverted reality he has created. Some, however, have failed to see the humor: Enoch Powell’s widow was infuriated that the Tory politician was portrayed as part of the pro-Nazi British puppet government in the novel.

Sansom’s protagonist, a British civil servant, David Fitzgerald, has joined a Resistance cell connected to Churchill, who has gone into hiding, and becomes involved in a desperate effort to keep atomic secrets out of the hands of the Germans. That twist in the plot seemed shaky on factual grounds: is it likely that the Nazi scientists who invented the V-1 and V-2 rockets, jet fighters, and other advanced military technology would have failed to build an atomic bomb independently after more than a decade of experimentation?

Dominion, while often imaginative and well-written, doesn’t rise to the level of Sansom’s Winter in Madrid and that’s primarily because much of the suspense in the book is undercut by a somewhat predictable ending which is telegraphed well before the close of the book. Yet Dominion is still an entertaining and enjoyable summer read (a best-seller in Britain!).

(My review of Sansom’s novel Winter in Madrid can be found here.)

A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr

In A Man Without Breath, Bernie Gunther, a former Berlin cop and the hero of Philip Kerr’s noir novels, delves into the horrors committed in the Bloodlands, the area in Eastern Europe contested by the Nazis and Soviets during World War II. In the spring of 1943, Gunther is tasked with producing evidence that Stalin has ordered the execution of the Polish officer corps at Katyn Forest. At the same time, Gunther must solve a series of grisly murders of German soldiers. He recognizes the absurdity of police work under a criminal regime, and yet he strives to do the right thing, expose the guilty, and bring about a measure of justice.

A Man Without Breath is the ninth novel featuring Gunther, who is a master of snappy comebacks. His willingness to openly mock Nazi pretensions is amusing, but fantastical: it’s hard to imagine Gunther could hurl his veiled insults at German military and political leaders and still survive. Yet he’s a charming rogue and we know his copper’s heart is in the right place.

Masaryk Station by David Downing

David Downing titled his previous five John Russell novels with the names of Berlin train stations (the books in the series are titled Zoo Station, Silesian Station, Stettin Station, Potsdam Station, and Lehrter Station). For Masaryk Station, the final novel in the series, Downing turned to Prague’s train station named after the famed Czech nationalist leader Thomas Masaryk (whose son, Jan, the Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, died under suspicious circumstances in 1948—it’s probable that he was thrown out of a second-story Prague window by a Soviet agent).

Downing brings an end to his series with an intelligently plotted and thoughtful novel. Set in 1948, Masaryk Station finds Russell, an Anglo-American journalist who has been forced to work for both the CIA and KGB, traveling throughout Eastern Europe on various clandestine missions as the Cold War begins to heat up. In the end Downing invents an intriguing scenario whereby Russell can safely bid farewell to his days as a double (if not triple) agent.