I read, as I suppose many of my generation did, Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios and Epitaph for a Spy when I was a teenager. They were exciting tales of action in a Europe on the brink of war, with heroes not of the John Buchan mould (I’d read the Richard Hannay books of… Continue reading Eric Ambler: The Levanter
Spy novels have a long pedigree in English. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) can probably be counted the first in the genre. Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands, published four years earlier, is really a thriller, establishing the John Buchan style: plucky Brit gentleman adventurer foils dastardly plot by fiendish foreigners, a template… Continue reading Free Agent