Category: Reviews (Page 1 of 6)

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.

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

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

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Copyright © 2019 Jefferson Flanders
All rights reserved

It has been a banner year for spy thrillers and espionage novels, with new books from some of the masters of the genre.

Friends and Traitors by John Lawton

The British traitor Guy Burgess, one of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring, was notorious for his drunkenness, lack of personal hygiene, and proclivity for picking up younger men in public places (when homosexual liaisons were prosecuted as a crime). Some in London’s elite circles found him witty and smart and overlooked his often crude and outrageous behavior. But the American officials who encountered Burgess in Washington in the early 1950s when he served as second secretary in the British Embassy were astonished that the British Foreign Office not only employed Burgess as a diplomat (despite his open anti-Americanism and dissolute lifestyle) but also allowed him access to confidential information. There were red faces aplenty in Whitehall when Burgess defected to the Soviet Union in 1951 along with fellow Cambridge spy Donald Maclean.

Burgess has always been a figure of fascination for British journalists and authors. Andrew Lownie’s recent biography of Burgess, Stalin’s Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess, suggests that he was a very effective intelligence operative, not a harmless “licensed jester” of the ruling class as he has often been characterized. The Burgess that John Lawton portrays in his latest Inspector Troy novel, Friends and Traitors, comes across as a well-connected and brilliant con man, not a master spy. Burgess finds acceptance as “one of us” by the upper class establishment—what Lawton calls “clubbable Britain”— despite his flaws. The novel—part detective story, part spy thriller—traces the friendship between Burgess and Lawton’s protagonist, Frederick Troy, a chief superintendent at Scotland Yard. Troy and Burgess share an alienation from their privileged backgrounds.

The plot of Friends and Traitors centers around Burgess’ desire to return to England from Moscow (a grim place he grew to hate). While in Vienna on vacation in 1958, Troy is approached by Burgess to help broker a possible homecoming. When an MI5 agent sent to meet with Burgess is murdered, Troy (whose father was a Russian émigré) becomes a suspect in the killing. He must clear his name and in doing so discover why powerful forces are determined to keep Burgess from returning to England. In the last third of Friends and Traitors, Lawton picks up the pace of the novel, and he keeps the reader turning pages to the very end.

A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré

When John Le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was published in 1963 to wide-spread acclaim, it represented a dramatic shift in tone for espionage thrillers, a clear departure from the derring-do of Ian Fleming’s rakish super agent, James Bond. Instead, Le Carré (the pen-name of David Cornwell, a former British intelligence officer) offered a darker vision, of Western intelligence agencies that skirted moral and ethical lines in their struggle against their Soviet and East Bloc adversaries. The protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Alec Leamas, is far from glamorous: an aging MI6 agent, haunted by his failures in life, inserted into East Germany on a risky mission. Both Leamas, and his hapless lover, Liz Gold, are treated as disposable chess pieces in the spy game. The novel became an international best seller and was praised by critics and authors; Graham Greene called it the best spy story he had ever read.

Now, five decades later, A Legacy of Spies revisits Alec Leamas’ botched mission and examines the moral choices made by the top British spymasters, including George Smiley (the hero of a series of Le Carré’s books). Le Carré has made some intriguing choices in crafting the novel, employing Peter Guillam, a supporting character in the Smiley series, to recount the story. We don’t encounter Smiley until the very end of A Legacy of Spies.

Guillam is summoned from retirement to answer questions about the Leamas affair: the British Secret Service is worried about lawsuits from family members and a possible Parliamentary inquiry. It’s an interesting conceit: what legal or moral responsibility do the victors of the Cold War have for any “collateral damage” inflicted during the cloak-and-dagger operations of the 1950s and 1960s? As Guillam is quizzed by the lawyers, we learn more about the operation and its aftermath, and the many layers of deception involved.

While A Legacy of Spies is full of wry humor and engaging dialogue (which keeps our interest), it’s not as dynamic or suspenseful as some of Le Carré’s more recent books like A Most Wanted Man, which deals with the war on terror, or The Night Manager, which explores the illicit global weapons trade. There’s some irony in that, because after the Cold War ended, there was speculation that Le Carré would struggle to find his literary way; in fact, he has found much to write about in a world confronting the challenges of ultra-nationalism, terrorism, and corporate malfeasance.

Le Carré makes a curious choice at the close of A Legacy of Spies; he has Smiley make the case for the pan-European project that British voters rejected in Brexit. While it fits with Le Carré’s public support of Remain during the referendum campaign, it doesn’t seem quite in character for Smiley. Yes, he is Le Carré’s creation, but Smiley has always struck me as the traditional English gentleman who could recite, by heart, John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” Would he really warm to the notion of an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels setting policy for “this scepter’d isle”?

Defectors by Joseph Kanon

During the Cold War, several high-profile British Establishment figures defected to the Soviet Union, including Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and George Blake, but there were few American moles of similar prominence who fled to Moscow. Agents like Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, and Morton Sobell denied their complicity in espionage and stayed to face prosecution (and conviction) in the United States. Two members of the Rosenberg spy ring—the relatively-obscure American scientists Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant—did make their way to Russia and held high leadership positions in the Soviet military-industrial complex. Their story is told in Steve Usdin’s masterful Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley.

In Defectors, Joseph Kanon has imagined what it might have been like if an American double agent, an Alger Hiss-like figure, a true believer in Marxism and world revolution, had decamped to the Socialist Paradise. It’s an intriguing premise, and Kanon has constructed a taut thriller around his defector, Frank Weeks, a Harvard-educated OSS veteran. Weeks had betrayed both his CIA colleagues and Latvian agents inserted behind the Iron Curtain during the early Cold War. The novel picks up his story years later, in 1961, as Weeks’s younger brother Simon, a successful New York publisher, arrives in Moscow. Simon has come to finalize the details on Frank’s about-to-be-published book, My Secret Life. (The KGB had encouraged the British defectors to write “tell-all” memoirs, largely as a propaganda exercise).

Simon is conflicted about seeing his brother, the infamous traitor. They were close during their Boston childhood, and Frank’s betrayal and defection had not only come as a surprise to Simon but also had ended his promising State Department career. Their relationship is captured perfectly in this brief back-and-forth:

”You never change. I can still read your face,” Frank said, a fond smile, the intimacy of drink.

”Yes? What’s it saying?”

”You’re worried. You don’t want to take your hand off the checker, until you’re sure. Remember how you used to do that? No move until you thought it was safe.”

Kanon deftly brings the other characters in Defectors to life: Frank’s wife, Joanna, who drinks to deal with the isolation of exile; Boris, the grim, proud KGB agent assigned to watch Frank; Pete DiAngelis, a CIA agent in Moscow who can’t hide his dislike of Frank and all he stands for; and Gareth Jones, a forlorn British defector not above informing on his fellow Westerners. While Defectors is well-plotted, never flagging, it is Kanon’s ability to illuminate the inner worlds of the people encountered in its pages that make it a novel well worth reading.

A Single Spy by William Christie

At the center of William Christie’s A Single Spy is the character of Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov, an orphan who lives by his wits in the lawless desert of Soviet Azerbaijan and is recruited into the NKVD in 1936. The spymasters in Dzerzhinsky Square have selected Alexsi because he speaks German and they send him as a teenager to Germany as a deep penetration agent. Alexsi is a survivor, ruthless when cornered, and he successfully infiltrates the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and begins to feed Moscow vital intelligence, including Hitler’s plans for an attack on the Soviet Union (information which Alexsi’s superiors ignore).

Much of the tension in the novel revolves around Alexsi’s precarious position inside German intelligence circles and the risks he must take in communicating with his Soviet handlers. He becomes entangled in Operation Long Jump, the Nazi plot to kill Winston Churchill at the 1943 Teheran Conference of the Allied leaders. When Alexsi realizes that both German and Soviet intelligence agencies want the same outcome—the British leader eliminated—he also discovers that he has become expendable. (It’s a threatening situation perfect for a resilient and imaginative survivor to overcome.)

A Single Spy is reminiscent of Alan Furst’s Spies of the Balkans with its depiction of the way the NKVD trained and handled its agents, and with its deeply-researched period detail. The novel is an entertaining and historically informative read, and Christie’s ability to build suspense is impressive.

The Good Assassin by Paul Vidich

Paul Vidich’s second spy thriller, The Good Assassin, (a sequel to An Honorable Man), sends his hero, former CIA officer George Mueller, to 1958 Cuba. Mueller undertakes an informal mission to assess whether one of the Agency’s men in Havana, Toby Graham, has “gone rogue” and is secretly assisting Fidel Castro’s rebels with arms shipments.

There’s much to like in Vidich’s novel: he captures the pervasive corruption of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba, the grinding poverty, the dominance of American mobsters and corporate interests, and the fear of SIM, the brutal Cuban secret police. Then there’s sultry Havana, filled with casinos, bars, sex shows, brothels, and gawking tourists. (Vidich teases the reader with the prospect of Mueller meeting Cuba’s most famous foreign resident, Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, but the hard-drinking author remains off-stage.)

Vidich stretches the boundaries of the spy genre. He has a literary style, with longish ruminations by his characters, and he’s quite willing to drop readers into the middle of a scene and let them piece together the backstory. There are times when the novel seems unevenly paced, but The Good Assassin closes with a flourish.

On a historical note, Vidich is spot on in highlighting the covert support Castro received from some in the CIA. The conservative U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Earl E. T. Smith, later blamed the CIA and some diplomats in the State Department for enabling Castro’s victory. The Cuban Revolution had its admirers in the United States (not just Herbert Matthews of the New York Times who declared Fidel’s revolt to be “radical, democratic, and therefore anti-Communist.”) While Castro may not have started out as a Communist, by the end of the revolution, those close to him, his brother Raul and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, were determined to establish Latin America’s first Marxist-Leninist state. That they succeeded has been a tragedy for the Cuban people.

Vienna Spies by Alex Gerlis

Vienna Spies is set during the final months of World War II. It has become clear that Germany will lose the war and Austrians realize that their embrace of National Socialism will come with a heavy price. The Red Army is driving the Wehrmacht back toward the west, and it is only a matter of time before Vienna falls.

In Alex Gerlis’ taut thriller, British policy makers have become concerned that Soviet leader Josef Stalin will renege on promises made to support Austria’s post-war neutrality and independence. They decide that they need to find and protect Austria’s leading anti-Nazi politician, one Hubert Leitner, who is hiding in Vienna and who could lead a future government sympathetic to the Allies. MI6 sends two agents, Rolf Eder and Katharina Hoch, who pretend to be a Swiss married couple (he a banker from Zurich, she a nurse). At the same time, the Soviets have also dispatched an experienced NKVD field agent, Viktor Krasotkin, to locate Leitner.

Vienna Spies captures the unrelenting tension for spies living behind enemy lines. The threat of being denounced to the authorities is always present, and the Gestapo is eager to hunt down anyone resisting Nazi rule. Gerlis is aware that modern readers might be skeptical about the ability of foreign agents to survive in a hostile city filled with supporters of Hitler, and he highlights the immense difficulties of trying to establish a cell under such circumstances. (In his Author’s Note, Gerlis cites a scholarly work, The Austrian Resistance 1938-1945, and interviews with Austrian refugees from the time, to bolster his case that they were pockets of anti-Nazis in the city).

Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr’s latest thriller, Prussian Blue, features his battered hero/anti-hero Bernie Gunther, a former Berlin detective of the Weimar era, once again in peril because of his checkered past. The novel offers parallel storylines: Gunther is on the run in 1956 France, chased by the East German secret services after he has refused to assassinate a Stasi agent in England (who was his lover); he finds himself flashing back to his investigation of a murder at Berchtesgaden (Hitler’s Alpine lair, the “Eagle’s Nest”) in the late 1930s. There are twists-and-turns along the way, but the stories eventually overlap before they are resolved.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels is their clear portrayal of the top Nazis not as rulers of a modern nation state but instead as corrupt crime family bosses, intent on amassing money and power (justifying their brutal actions by a horrific ideology). Traditional histories sometimes miss this element. Prussian Blue captures this insight, as Gunther learns during this investigation that the local Nazis in Berchtesgaden are dealing drugs and running a prostitution ring. Kerr is also clear-eyed about his protagonist: Bernie has committed crimes, done horrible things to stay alive—but his moral compass is not broken, and this native Berliner does what he can to set things right in his rough-and-ready way.

Prussian Blue draws on recent historical research suggesting that the Third Reich’s leaders and soldiers were jacked up on stimulants, particularly Pertavin, a version of methamphetamine. There is some irony in the hypocrisy of Nazis high on meth when their Führer was a strident non-smoking vegetarian (with his own secret drug habit).

If there’s a weakness in the novel, it’s that Kerr asks the reader to suspend belief when it comes to Bernie Gunther’s colorful and often subversive verbal pyrotechnics, which are typically aimed at high-placed Nazis and other grim authority figures. The wise-cracking Bernie has “no filter” (to use a 2017 term), when expressing his views. In real life, his sarcasm, thinly-veiled political insults, and outright insubordination would have bought him a one-way ticket to a concentration camp, no matter how useful his talents as an investigator might be.

Lenin’s Roller Coaster by David Downing

It’s been 100 years since the Russian Revolution, and David Downing has chosen the world-changing events of 1917 as the backdrop for his latest Jack McColl novel, Lenin’s Roller Coaster. His globe-trotting protagonist, McColl, a British spy, holds much more progressive political views than, say, John Buchan’s resolute Tory patriot, Richard Hannay (who had little use for the infernal Huns or for the subversive Bolshies!): McColl has his doubts about British colonial policy and Whitehall’s approach to the revolutionaries seeking reform in Russia.

As the novel opens in the winter of 1917, the Allies and Germans face a bloody stalemate in the trench warfare raging in France and Belgium. While the Czar has been deposed, the British hope to keep the Russians fighting the Kaiser on the Eastern Front. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin wants Russia to withdraw from the war, which (along with his anti-capitalist ideology) make him persona non grata for the British and French.

McColl is sent on an undercover mission to Central Asia, ordered to stop supplies from reaching the Germans. After a series of harrowing adventures, he ends up in Moscow, where his lover, the Irish-American journalist Caitlin Hanley, has taken up residence covering the Revolution. There, London tasks McColl with a dangerous and morally-dubious mission—to assist the White Russians, the counter-revolutionaries conspiring against Lenin and his government.

Downing’s fictional account of the early days of the Russian Revolution in Lenin’s Roller Coaster is largely sympathetic, capturing the excitement and idealism of the feuding socialists and anarchists who thought they were on the brink of altering world history. They were, just not for the better—the 20th Century butcher’s bill for adopting Marx’s state socialism (Communism) approached 100 million dead. This creates a problem for Downing: readers in 2017 may find it difficult to empathize with those (like Caitlin Hanley) who fervently embraced the Bolshevik experiment with its inevitable descent into state terror. As historian Sheila Fitzpatrick noted recently in the London Review of Books, the current scholarly consensus is that: “If there is a lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution, it is the depressing one that revolutions usually make things worse, all the more so in Russia, where it led to Stalinism.”

In his concluding historical note, Downing acknowledges that the outcome of the “grisly Soviet experiment” makes it hard to understand “the inspiration provided by the original revolution—one that captivated millions of men and women in the interwar years and beyond…” Yet, there are disturbing echoes of that same ideological fervor in today’s challenges to liberal democracy mounted by populists of the extreme Right and Left in Europe and the United States. Radicalism is making a comeback. Sadly, the appeal of utopian solutions, whether socialist or nationalist, hasn’t died despite the sobering lessons of history.

A Divided Spy by Charles Cumming

It’s not easy to write a believable spy thriller set in the here-and-now, because these days reality (Russian hacking, the Deep State, jihadist attacks in Europe’s major cities, Wikileaks, etc.) often is stranger than fiction. Today’s headlines about real world espionage and clandestine skulduggery are hard to top. Charles Cumming’s latest novel, A Divided Spy, is very current in its concerns: Russian espionage directed against the West, and the threat ISIS-inspired violence poses to Western Europe. His protagonist, former MI6 officer Thomas Kell, returns to action, haunted by a lost love and eager to take revenge on the Russian FSB officer, Alexander Minasian, he holds responsible. When Minasian is spotted at an Egyptian resort with an older man in what appears to be a gay relationship, Kell sees an opportunity (through blackmail) to avenge the murder of Rachel Wallinger, his lover.

Resolving this plot line would be more than enough for most authors, but Cumming weaves in a further complication: a potential terror attack on British soil. A young British-Pakistani man, Shahid, has been recruited by ISIS for nefarious purposes, sent to the seaside resort of Brighton, where he blends into the community. When Kell is alerted to this jihadist plot, he must convince a skeptical MI6 establishment of the looming danger with time running out.

Cumming has researched the process by which young Muslim men in Great Britain are drawn into the sick jihadist fantasies of ISIS and this informs the novel in a powerful way. He provides a chilling portrait of Shahid, a man torn between new-found religious fervor and his upbringing in the secular West. Just as disturbing: Cumming suggests British counterintelligence is unprepared to deal with the threat of lone wolf terrorism. A Divided Spy can be read as a warning of what may lie ahead, and an implicit call for a ratcheting up of internal vetting and surveillance in the United Kingdom.

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

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

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