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Charles Bridge, a novel of the Cold War

August 24, 2020 / admin

NOW AVAILABLE:

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.

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

Top Spy Thrillers and Espionage Novels of 2018

January 1, 2018 / admin

What are the best spy novels of 2018? Here’s a list of my top picks (as they are published throughout the year). Please note that I’m partial to historical fiction about espionage that has a literary flair; the novels I’ve selected reflect that bias.

(I’ve not included my own 2018 spy thriller, An Interlude in Berlin, in this list but if you’re interested, Kirkus Reviews called it “an engrossing tale of intrigue and duplicity,” and you can find it here.)

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

In hindsight, the victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany seems inevitable. At the time, however, particularly in the early stages of World War II before the U.S. entered the conflict, it wasn’t clear that Great Britain would be able to resist the German onslaught. Hitler’s blitzkrieg had brought the Continent under Nazi control. And there were members of the British elite who wanted to sue for peace, and some who even rooted for a German victory.

Kate Atkinson’s novel Transcription explores the efforts of MI5 to monitor the potential Fifth Column of British Fascists during the initial stages of the war. Her protagonist, Juliet Armstrong, is an inexperienced 18-year old who is recruited by British Intelligence and employed as a typist creating transcripts of bugged conversations between would-be German agents. She quickly graduates to infiltrating a cell of upper-class Nazi sympathizers. Juliet, who has some secrets of her own, finds the covert work alternatively comic and terrifying.

Atkinson is a talented and fluid writer and Transcription, while slow-moving at times, is cleverly constructed and laced with a dry humor. The novel shifts back and forth in time from 1950 (when Juliet has become a radio producer at the BBC) to the early war years, and Atkinson has a flair for capturing the details of the period. The conclusion of Transcription is much less convincing than it could be, however, as the necessary backstory that would have made the reader buy into the twist ending isn’t fully developed.

The Other Woman by Daniel Silva

Daniel Silva’s series of Gabriel Allon novels have, for the most part, centered on the struggle between Israel and its adversaries, whether Islamist regimes or jihadist terrorists. His latest, The Other Woman, focuses instead on the threat to the West presented by the authoritarian regime in Moscow and its leader, a former KGB officer.

Fans of Allon—the art restorer, assassin, and head of Israel’s secret intelligence service—will find much in Silva’s latest thriller that is familiar. Once again, Allon and his team of loyal agents roam across Europe, from Vienna to London to Bern to Seville to Moscow. This time they are in pursuit of a sleeper mole deep in the heart of MI6, a task Allon has taken on at the request of his British counterpart. As their hunt continues, the clues point to the mole’s connection with the infamous double agent Kim Philby who defected to Moscow in 1963 (and died there in 1988 at the age of 76 just before the collapse of the Soviet Empire).

The novel’s central premise, that the KGB could have inserted a mole into MI6 during the Cold War, isn’t wholly implausible. In 2010, ten Russian sleeper agents in the U.S were arrested. They were living under assumed identities, tasked with political and industrial espionage, and had been in the country for more than a decade in deep cover. (This spy ring was the inspiration for the FX series The Americans.) Were there other penetration agents in the West, whose control was passed from the KGB to the SVR after the end of the Cold War? The Other Woman suggests that there were; Silva fashions an intriguing take on how that might have happened.

Paris in the Dark by Robert Olen Butler

The talented and prolific author Robert Olen Butler, who won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his lyrical Vietnam-themed short stories (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain), has recently turned to writing historical spy thrillers. The books feature Christopher Marlowe Cobb, an American journalist/spy with a taste for action. Butler’s latest, and fourth in the series, Paris in the Dark, brings “Kit” Cobb to the French capital in autumn 1915, before the U.S. joined the Allies in their bloody struggle with the Kaiser’s Germany.

While Cobb researches a story about American volunteer ambulance drivers, Paris is rocked by a string of bombings. He is tasked with finding and neutralizing the bombers, while maintaining his cover as a newspaper reporter. As Kit Cobb searches for German agents, the clues lead him in a different direction. Butler knows how to tell a compelling story, and how to develop characters the reader cares about, the most intriguing of which is the lovely young American nurse, Louise Pickering (Cobb’s love interest). Paris in the Dark rewards us with a suspenseful and satisfying ending, one that resonates with more modern concerns about terrorism.

Butler’s attention to period detail is impressive with his evocative descriptions of 1915 Paris. The novel also reminds us that Bolsheviks weren’t the only revolutionary socialists active in the early twentieth century—anarchists were also seeking the violent overthrow of the existing order. (One of the earliest spy novels, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent featured an anarchist.) Violence against the ruling class was common. In the decades before the start of the First World War, anarchists assassinated three kings (Italy, Spain, and Greece), the prime minister of Spain, the presidents of France and the United States, and a Tsar (Alexander II of Russia).

Safe Houses by Dan Fesperman

Dan Fesperman tells two stories in his latest thriller, Safe Houses. One begins in 1979 when a young CIA officer, Helen Abell, overhears conversations in a West Berlin safe house that she isn’t meant to—with unintended and dangerous consequences. The other story commences in 2014 after a brutal double murder in a quiet Maryland Eastern Shore town. A young woman teams up with a former Congressional investigator to try to understand why her parents died. Exploring the hidden connections between these stories lies at the heart of Fesperman’s carefully-constructed tale, and he manages to skillfully manage the back-and-forth in time and place.

While it offers suspenseful plot twists, Safe Houses isn’t a traditional Cold War spy novel—it pays scant attention to clashes between the KGB and Western intelligence agencies. Instead, it delves into the internal politics of the CIA, and the way its Old Boy network treated female employees three decades ago. Fesperman takes a decidedly feminist slant on that history (no doubt influenced by the #MeToo movement that began in 2017), and the novel reminds us of the struggles women faced (and face) in male-dominated organizations. Safe Houses focuses on the female pioneers of the CIA, during a time when they were marginalized and constrained to clerical roles. Much has changed: today, the director of the Agency is a woman.

The Hellfire Club by Jake Tapper

Did you enjoy Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? Or the movie National Treasure? How about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? If you like mashups of historical fact, popular culture, and over-the-top conspiracy theories, then you’ll relish Jake Tapper’s political thriller The Hellfire Club. Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, has set his novel in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1954, and it includes all the elements of a breathless (but slightly campy) thriller, offering cameos from political figures of the period including President Dwight Eisenhower, Roy Cohn, Allen Dulles, and Senators Joseph McCarthy, Estes Kefauver, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Margaret Chase Smith.

The novel’s protagonist, New York Republican congressman Charlie Marder, had just arrived in Washington to assume his seat. After too many cocktails at a party with the DC elite, Charlie finds himself entangled in a Chappaquiddick-like incident that makes him vulnerable to blackmail. Despite being a decorated World War II veteran, Charlie is no Profile in Courage when push comes to shove, folding when pressured by a sinister cabal to vote against his conscience and to aid the McCarthy witchhunt. His better half, Margaret, a zoologist, proves to be a sight better on ethical questions, and she helps Charlie maneuver his way through a suddenly-treacherous landscape where friends may be adversaries (and vice versa). Tapper rachets up the suspense; there are mysterious clues, hidden allies, secret societies, and a car chase or two.

Some of the blurbs for The Hellfire Cub suggest that the book is “vividly relevant” in the Age of Trump. That is, to put it mildly, absurd, unless you believe that Deep State operatives in the Swamp secretly decide the fate of the country, aided by amoral Republicats. Then again, as Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong once noted about claims that the moon landing was faked: “People love conspiracy theories.”

The Dark Clouds Shining by David Downing

One of the harder things for any novelist is to seamlessly introduce the necessary context—the key backstories—in a sequel. What storylines from prior books need to be continued or expanded? How should recurring characters be handled? How to accomplish all of this smoothly? David Downing begins his fourth and final Jack McColl thriller, The Dark Clouds Shining, with a clever opening that addresses these challenges: it’s March 1921, and McColl, an ex-British spy, is in the dock in a British court for assaulting a police officer—and his trial helps illuminate McColl’s past, including his disillusionment with Great Britain’s imperialistic foreign policy. After his conviction, McColl is approached by the Secret Service and offered a chance to wipe his record clean if he’ll agree to a clandestine mission in post-revolutionary Russia.

McColl has been tasked with surfacing, and possibly neutralizing, a convoluted assassination plot hatched in Moscow that is meant to provoke conflict in British-ruled India. (Yes, it is convoluted, but engaging). McColl is persona non grata in Russia; he must worry not only about the Soviet secret police but also the threat from the assassins, led by McColl’s nemesis from the past, Aidan Brady, a radical with a violent streak.

The Dark Clouds Shining portrays a Russia where Lenin and the Bolsheviks, having won their country’s civil war, are consolidating power, suppressing their ideological rivals by force. The purges and show trials are yet to come, but it’s clear that state terror is in the cards.

Once in Moscow, McColl is reunited with his lover, the American journalist Caitlin Hanley. She is the most intriguing of the characters in the novel. A feminist who believes in the revolution’s promise of equality for women, Hanley accepts revolutionary excesses as a means to her desired ends—the Faustian bargain that many radicals make in pursuit of their goals.

David Downing is known for his attention to historical detail, and his sympathetic vision—his characters are conflicted and flawed, just like their real-world counterparts. It’s his understanding of human nature, and his compassion, that elevates Downing’s novels. We can only hope that as this series concludes that additional books are in the offing.

Greeks Bearing Gifts by Philip Kerr

The sad news about Scottish novelist Philip Kerr’s death came in March; Kerr, 62 years old, had lost his battle with cancer.

Just weeks earlier his 13th Bernie Gunther novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts, had been published in the United States. In the past, readers and critics alike had avidly followed the adventures of Gunther, the hard-boiled former Berlin detective, as Kerr told the horrific story of the Third Reich and the shadowy struggles of the early Cold War through the eyes of his world-weary protagonist. Gunther is no hero; he’s a man who compromises and looks the other way in order to survive. Boxed in by the Nazi criminals who have become his superiors, he tries to keep his hands as clean as he can, knowing that at some level he is complicit. Gunther’s defense mechanism against the cruelty of the world is a cynical and sardonic humor.

Greeks Bearing Gifts, set in 1957, finds Gunther living in Munich under an assumed name (Christoph Ganz), hiding from assorted spy agencies and the authorities, for, as he says, “I had more dirty water in my bucket than most…” When Gunther/Ganz is offered a job as an insurance claims adjuster for Munich RE, he hopes to start a new and quieter life. But when he is sent to Greece to investigate a claim by a German owner of a yacht that has burned and sunk in the Aegean sea under suspicious circumstances, the case turns quite dangerous.

Bernie Gunther novels are filled with memorable characters, and Greeks Bearing Gifts is no exception. There’s an oily Munich lawyer with a shared past with Bernie, a timid Greek insurance agent named Achilles, an honest Athenian cop who makes use of Gunther’s talents in investigating a murder, an alluring young Communist attorney, and colorful minor players who help keep the pages turning. It’s a dark story that involves the wartime murders of Jews in Salonika and the confiscation of their property and money, and a sadistic SS officer who surfaces with an unresolved mission.

As is his wont, Kerr mixes in pointed historical commentary. Greeks Bearing Gifts explores the debate over the question of German reparations to Greece. Kerr makes it clear his distaste for Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, who didn’t exclude all Nazis from German society or its government, and who didn’t pursue payments to Greece for the devastation caused by the Nazi occupation. (Der Alte, who was an anti-Nazi leader during the 1930s, did push for reparations for Israel, and accepted Germany’s responsibility for the “unspeakable crimes” of the Holocaust).

But Adenauer allowed the reintegration of morally compromised German businessmen and lawyers. He reasoned that a strong West Germany (the “economic miracle”) was necessary as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, believing that the Russians represented an existential threat to liberal democracy. While it helped advance European integration, the Faustian bargain that Adenauer struck was to haunt Germany and provoke unrest in the mid-1960s. As Ian Walker has noted: “The Germany he created just didn’t look back. There was an unhealthy silence at the heart of Germany’s sense of itself.” For too many, there’s been a willingness to ignore the crimes of the Nazi era, a willed amnesia that continues even today over the issue of prosecuting war crimes.

Kerr leaves Bernie Gunther’s future unresolved at the end of Greeks Bearing Gifts, hinting at a redemptive return to Germany; his publisher announced that before his death Kerr had finished a final book, Metropolis, which would appear in 2019.

Babylon Berlin by Volker Kutscher

In January, Picador published a paperback edition of the first novel in Volker Kutscher’s noirish series about a detective in Weimar Germany, a publication timed to capitalize on the interest generated by Netflix’s airing of the “Babylon Berlin” miniseries.

The novel, titled Babylon Berlin and translated by Niall Sellar, had been published in Germany in 2008 as Der nasse Fisch (in English, The Wet Fish). It features Gereon Rath, an ambitious police inspector who has moved from Cologne to join Berlin’s vice squad and is looking to make a name for himself. As Rath tries to solve the mystery of an unidentified murder victim fished out of the city’s Landwehr canal, he discovers a cell of Russian Trotskyists is scheming to exchange smuggled gold for weapons in the hopes of deposing Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Rath’s investigation entangles him in a dangerous and complex world of political intrigue that hits closer to home than he, at first, realizes.

Babylon Berlin explores the dark side of life in Germany’s capital in 1929: Communists and Nazis plotting to bring down the government of Social Democrats; an underworld of nightclubs, cabarets, and brothels; and neighborhoods mired in crime and poverty.

Those who have watched the Netflix series will find significant differences between the novel and the televised version. The main characters are shared: Inspector Rath; Charlotte Ritter, a would-be detective working as a typist in Homicide who attracts Rath’s romantic interest; and the cynical Vice squad head, Bruno Wolter, who has links to reactionary elements in the military. But the screenwriters (Tom Tykwer, Hendrik Handloegten, and Achim von Borries) created additional characters, added backstories, and altered aspects of the plot.

The novel is a well-crafted police procedural, with less of the political and social background that makes the miniseries a compelling watch. For those who enjoy historical thrillers, both the novel and the series are well worth the time.

Munich by Robert Harris

History’s verdict on Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of Great Britain from May 1937 to May 1940, has been harsh—he’s seen as Adolf Hitler’s prime enabler, a weak old man whose policy of appeasement emboldened the Nazi dictator and inevitably led to war.

The accomplished and prolific novelist Robert Harris has constructed his latest historical thriller, Munich, around the infamous 1938 meeting in Bavaria’s capital city where Chamberlain, along with French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, met with Hitler and the Italian Duce Benito Mussolini and agreed to German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

Munich takes place over the last four days of September, 1938, focusing on the diplomatic maneuverings of the Four Powers to address Hitler’s ultimatum about Czechoslovakia. Diplomacy is conducted in a blizzard of paperwork—speeches, memos, telegrams, dispatches, war plans. The novel follows two junior, multilingual diplomats, an Englishman, Hugh Legat, and his German friend, Paul von Hartmann, who attend the Munich conference and are called upon to translate and interpret for their superiors. (The two became close while students at Oxford in the 1920s.)

Hartmann has joined the Oster Conspiracy, a plot hatched by Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) to depose Hitler should he order the invasion of Czechoslovakia and risk a wider and unpredictable conflict. Hartmann enlists a reluctant Legat to help, hoping that exposing Hitler’s true expansionist intentions (the dream of an Aryan Lebensraum reflected in secret war plans) will convince the British to scuttle any agreement. It’s a dangerous mission, with German security forces alert for subversion. To Harris’ credit, Munich is a novel filled with suspense—no easy task when the reader knows the eventual historical outcome.

The novel is deeply researched, blending fact and fiction effortlessly, and rich in period detail (a characteristic of Harris’ books). Munich captures the strong anti-war sentiment in Great Britain, France and Germany. There was a reason that cheering crowds greeted Chamberlain upon his arrival Munich—the memories of the First World War and its ten million dead were still raw. (The mindless slaughter of that conflict is depicted in all its horror in John Keegan’s magisterial The First World War; in Chapter 9, “The Breaking of Armies,” Keegan describes the gory reality for the British, Australian, and Canadian troops in the nightmarish Third Battle of Ypres.) The popular desire for peace was genuine.

Munich raises a series of provocative historical questions. Did Chamberlain concede the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia not only in hopes of “peace in our time,” but also because, as Harris suggests, he was conscious of the relative inferiority of the British army and air force compared to the German war machine? Did he seek to buy time for Great Britain to rearm? In the novel, Chamberlain laments: “The main lesson I have learned in my dealings with Hitler is that one simply can’t play poker with a gangster if one has no cards in one’s hands.” (Certainly Daladier felt he had negotiated from a position of weakness; he later commented: “If I had three or four thousand aircraft, Munich would never have happened.”)

Or did Chamberlain and Daladier squander a chance to confront Hitler? What if France and Britain had stood fast at Munich and risked war with the Axis Powers? As Winston Churchill pointed out in his brilliant speech to the House of Commons on October 5th, 1938, that faced with Allied resolution, Hitler would have paid a high price for the Sudetenland; the Wehrmacht would have confronted a determined Czechoslovak Army “which was estimated last week to require not fewer than 30 German divisions for its destruction.” And perhaps the anti-Hitler resistance, Prussian aristocrats in the German High Command, would have moved to forestall a second global conflict.

In his Commons speech, Churchill rebuked the idea of a comfortable detente with Hitler: “…there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.”

Churchill understood that totalitarianism (whether in the form of Hitler’s National Socialism or Lenin and Stalin’s State Socialism) represented an existential threat to liberal democracy, one that couldn’t be ignored or bargained away. Tragically, Neville Chamberlain never fully comprehended the nature of Nazism (how it was much more than gangsterism, and how its toxic ideology transcended the traditional nation-state), and millions paid the price for his failure.

Traitor by Jonathan de Shalit

Many observers believe that Israel’s intelligence agencies—the Mossad and Shin Bet—are among the best in the world. During the Cold War, however, the KBG and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) managed to place numerous moles in key positions in the Israeli government. Among the more prominent penetration agents were Lt.-Col. Israel Bar, a military analyst; Marcus Klingberg, an expert on chemical and biological weapons; and Col. Shimon Levinson, a senior Israeli intelligence officer. Many of these agents betrayed their country on ideological grounds, with Communist sympathies trumping Zionist patriotism.

Jonathan de Shalit’s Traitor, a bestseller in Israel translated from the Hebrew by Steve Cohen, focuses on the hunt for a long-entrenched mole, code-named Cobra, in the Israeli government, an agent recruited during the Cold War. (De Shalit is the pseudonym of a former Israeli intelligence officer). Aharon Levin, former head of the Mossad, is called out of retirement and tasked with finding Cobra. Fans of Daniel Silva’s modern spy thrillers will find the recruitment and composition of Aharon’s secret team quite familiar—including two brilliant and tough female operatives. The hunt leads to Europe, Russia, and the United States, and takes on an increasingly political cast. It’s one thing to figure out who the traitor is, it’s another to publicly expose a foreign spy in the corridors of power and risk the political damage both at home and abroad.

De Shalit is at his best in exploring the reasons for Cobra’s treason, that mix of narcissism and feelings of alienation and marginalization that often motivate penetration agents. There’s an intriguing twist—Cobra believes he has been spying for the CIA, but he has been tricked into passing information to the East Germans and the Russians. The team hunting him doesn’t care about his motives: they are eager to catch him and see him face the harshest consequences. The Israelis have always taken a hard line on the question: Soviet spy Marcus Klingberg, arrested in 1982 and tried in secret, was sentenced to 20 years in prison (and served the first 10 in solitary confinement).

Traitor offers an insider’s perspective on the challenges facing Israel’s intelligence community. There’s plenty of suspense in the frantic hunt for Cobra, and an ending that reflects the hall of mirrors that often confronts those responsible for countering espionage.

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

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