UKC

It's hive mind time...

I've read a bit of John Le Carre (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold) and intend to read the Smiley trilogy. I'm currently reading The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. This 'escapism' malarkey is proving very relaxing for the ol' Tall Clare brain.

What other classic spy thrillers would you recommend?

In reply to Tall Clare:

Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy is one of my favourites (beating only by Smiley's People) and for sometig a little less serious but still a 'ripping yarn', you can do worse than John Buchan.

Other highlights from Le Carre would be The Perfect Spy, A Murder of Quality, The Looking Glass War and The Homourable School Boy.

Enjoy them!

In reply to hindu:

Little drummer girl's pretty good too but not quite up to his earliest stuff IMHO by the way...

In reply to Tall Clare:

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith was adapted into a good film. I did not read the book but after seeing the film, I read its sequel, "Polar Star", which I found to be very atmospheric and compelling. You may enjoy the setting on a Russian fish factory ship.

In reply to Tall Clare:

I once read a Jack Higgins espionage book. It was utter utter rubbish.

In reply to Tall Clare:

I'd recommend Len Deighton's 'Berlin Game', 'Mexico Set' and 'London Match' trilogy, followed by the 'Hook, Line and Sinker' books. The prequel 'Winter' is very good too. Actually he's a fine writer generally.

He also created Harry Palmer, although I've not read any of those books. Maybe I should.

I'd put him somewhere between Le Carre and Forsyth. A little more accessible than Le Carre but much more morally complex than Forsyth. I love the narrator, he's a great character.

On a tangent...John Le Carre's lad Nick Harkaway is proving to be a bit of whizz himself. Angelmaker, published last year and on offer in Waterstones is brilliant and bonkers and would tick the escapist box too.

In reply to Tall Clare: Gerald Seymour has done some good stuff. Harry's Game was the first I think.

In reply to Tall Clare:
"North Cape" by Joe Poyer. Top quality writing.

In reply to Tall Clare:

"Night Soldiers" by Alan Furst and the follow on books; though I didn't think the latest couple were up to standard.

In reply to Hat Dude: Not 100% sure but I think he wrote "The Polish Officer" which was also quite good.

In reply to GridNorth:

He did, and it is.

In reply to Tall Clare:

Not EXACTLY spy thillers but sort of are:

SSGB by someone...think its Len Deighton
Fatherland and Archangel by Robert Harris (bloody awesome books)

I can second Gorky Park too...I have read the book and its brill

Gerald Seymor has written loads....they are a bit blokey and once you've read a few they can seem formulaic(in my opinion) but The Journeyman Tailor is great as is Heart of Danger.

In reply to Tall Clare:

LeCarre best of what I have read of spy stuff, and I guess I have read most of his books - relaxing as you say unhappy endings notwithstanding. Honourable Schoolboy's good (and avoid 'A murder of quality' - a not v good take on the murder mystery genre).


But anyway, reason for posting is to recommend some more mainstream 'literary' writers' take on this genre, if you've not read them

William Boyd's 'Breathless' (on telly recently and slightly if inevitably disappointing, but the book's excellent), and his recent 'Waiting for Dawn' (just really reliably good stuff.)

Ian Mcewan's 'the Innocent' (cold war Berlin. Top.)

Michael Frayn's 'Spies' (not really about spies, unfortunately, but a really really good book.)


(Longer reviews than 'good', 'top' and 'really good' available on request, tho I am typing with a broken thumb so not much longer.)

In reply to Tall Clare:

Not classiscs but try see if you can find any of the books by Leif Davidsen, think most of them have been translated into English.

In reply to Tall Clare: A very readable older one is 'The Riddle of the Sands' by Erskine Childers - raising awareness in Britain of the menace of Germany before WW1. The author supported the cause of Irish independence and was executed by the British, and only (as far as I know) wrote the one novel.

In reply to johnjohn:

I quite liked a murder of quality...

In reply to hindu:

wanna make something of it?






(I quite liked it too as it goes but that does sound a bit damning with faint praise. I t was LeCarre's second book I think and to me read as if he's thinking he'd got lucky with a spy one as his first ala write what you know, thought he'd try a different genre and, having done so, correctly decided to stick with spies.)

In reply to johnjohn:

I liked that it fleshed out more back story for Smiley and was entertaining in its own way- not a major classic but worth a read. Glad he stuck with th spies afterwards!

In reply to Tall Clare: Another vote for Len Deighton. Try the Harry Palmer series which starts with The Ipcress File. Here's a full listing

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/d/len-deighton/.

In reply to SuperstarDJ:


'Ipcress File' is great of its genre; the start of the Harry Palmer books.

In reply to Tall Clare: I think they've been mentioned, if they have I second Fatherland and Archangel, also, Ghost. Not really spy novels, but worth a read.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Bourne series, just the Robert Ludlum books though, Eric Von Lustbader (sp?) Has managed to kill the series, last time I read one, Bourne was 75 a college professor and still kicking ass, which sounds better than it actually is. I do have a soft spot for any Robert Ludlum book though, pure escapism, generally unbelievable twaddle, but great all the same.

In reply to Tall Clare:

I'm going to throw a curveball in from left field outside the box, or some such muddled metaphor.

I really enjoyed "The Endless Game" by Bryan Forbes (better known as a film director). I am not sure whether he wrote it as a novel or as a screenplay first, but there was a great late 80s miniseries adaptation of it, and I much later read the book. I might have been biased toward liking it as the adaptation starred Albert Finney, George Segal and a fetching young Kristin Scott-Thomas, but I thought it was a cracking story. Lightweight fare and quite escapist.

In reply to Tall Clare: If you apprecaite a bit of retro 1950s glamour read the Ian Flemming James Bond books, more plausible than the films.

In reply to SuperstarDJ: I'd recommend Len Deighton too, and add that the two trilogies mentioned were followed by a third trilogy comprising 'Faith', 'Hope' and 'Charity' and finishing off the overall story.

In reply to Tall Clare: The Martin Cruz Smith books are good, especially Gorky Park, but they're more detective fiction than spy thrillers IMO.

In reply to Submit to Gravity:

That's good to know. Thanks for the suggestions everyone - quite a bit to go on here!

In reply to Tall Clare: +1 for Eric Ambler.

Some of Gavin Lyall's output is worth tracking down.

In reply to Tall Clare:

39 Steps

In reply to Tall Clare:

The Odessa Files

and Fatherland

are very good

In reply to Tall Clare:
I'd second the Bourne suggestion, the Bourne Identity had me gripped from the start, the film is only loosely based on it.

In reply to CarbonCopy: I'd agree with the Bourne suggestion too - I was very surprised at how different the story is to the film. I'd also agree with sticking to the Ludlum ones only though - I'm listening to the audiobook of the Bourne Betrayal at the moment - it's cack in comparison.

In reply to Tall Clare:

I've read all of Le Carres novels, the Karla Trilogy are the best three. Also good are The Perfect Spy, The Constant Gardner, The Night Manager, Looking Glass War, Little Drummer Girl, Our Game and The Tailor of Panama.
Naive and Sentimental Lover is a shocker, don't touch it.

Spycatcher by Peter Wright is as good as many of the above, and is true.

After I had exhausted Le Carre, I read all of Len Deighton and enjoyed them all, especially the three trilogies, Game Set and Match, Hook, Line and Sinker and Faith Hope and Charity. You must read all of Deightons novels in chronological order, failing that read the three trilogies in order, its more like a series in nine books.

When you've read all those, get back to me and I'll think of some more...

In reply to Tall Clare: Go back to the real classic novels, 39 Steps, far better than the films, and other John Buchen novels in the Greenmantle series.

In reply to Tall Clare: Ian Fleming's Moonraker? Good luck...

In reply to Submit to Gravity:

Fair enough. I only mentioned Polar Star because a) it's the only one I've read; b) although Renko is a detective investigating something, the backdrop is some neat Cold War espionage stuff and c) the setting is proper bleak and I think Clare likes a bit of that sort of thing

To be honest , detective and spy fiction is not really my thing so I've just ended up listing the few that I've read and enjoyed in the genres and obviously I've failed to distinguish the two genres! Sorry everyone.

In reply to Fredt:

Excellent, thank you. It's a whole new genre for me and it sounds like there's lots to explore.

I've just read 'The File' by Timothy Garton Ash (not fiction, mind - it's about his time in East Berlin and the Stasi file kept on him) and he slates Spycatcher. I remember it being everywhere when it came out, possibly purely because it had been banned.

In reply to Hat Dude: I would agree, Night Soldiers is a classic.
Jon

In reply to jshields:

Probably too new to be 'classic', but for some escapism have a look at Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin series. Spy/government agent stuff set in Imperial Russia.

As others have said Robert Harris' stuff is great.

In reply to Armadillo: Future classic?

In reply to Armadillo: They look cool - I'm going to get them! Cheers!

In reply to Submit to Gravity:

I found them great fun. I think Akunin's form dropped off a bit with some of the more recent books, but I'm now on to The Diamond Chariot and normal service seems to have been resumed.

In reply to Tall Clare:

If you like the Day of the Jackal, The ODESSA file and Dogs or War are both enjoyable and readable.

Ben MacIntyre books are good. They aren't novels, but they read like them. I supose the genre would be called popular history. Operation Mince Meat is very good.

Also worth a read is the Silence of the Lambs.

The James Bond books are also good. Moonraker, Casino Royale, From Russia With Love and On her Majesties Secret Service are all excellent.

HTH

In reply to Tall Clare:
OK, you have, repeat have, to read Rogue Male. Robert MacFarlane explained why in this Saturday's Grauniad, [available online, but url seems broken] So much follows on from this ... Day of the Jackal for one.

The classic Le Carre Smiley trilogy, where I've always thought Honourable Schoolboy is the best, with the sitauationally trapped protagonist. Pity they never filmed it (yet).

Try Eric Ambler, Mask of Dimitrios. Maybe Buchan, 39 Steps, Greenmantle, to fill in the building blocks of the genre.

Len Deighton, start at the beginning with the unnamed agent (Harry Palmer, from Bolton, insubordinate, Soho in the 60s, so very, very cool) in The Ipcress File and work forwards. I didn't particularly like the later trilogies, too many unconvincing double-bluffs, but each to his/her own. The later Spy Story stands nicely on its own.

These are reading very dated now, cold war - we knew who the enemy was then - but still work as cerebral rather than action pieces, Antony Price's David Audley/Col. Butler sequence. He manages, usually successfully, to place a cold war plot on top of genuine history (WW I, Roman Britain) raising old ghosts. The quality and the action comes in the precision of his dialogue, Oxbridge, civil service, old obligations, as the necessary betrayal goes in over MoD tea in a smoky conference room in Whitehall. He also manages the chronology of the sequence as the lead players become the old dogs, and the young guns are mentored in and tested under fire. Try Other Paths to Glory, or Our Man in Camelot. Old fashioned in the gender relations, but that was the 70s. Mostly on Kindle now, only a few in paperback.

To up the cultural ante: Jospeh Conrad, The Secret Agent.

Post 9/11 spy stories - I haven't come across any great ones yet (yes, I do spend too much time travelling for work, hanging around airport book shops). Unconvinced by Henry Porter's offerings (though his journalistic heart is in the right place). It all moves towards the action stereotype, and you end up hiding a copy of Andy McNab's latest inside the London Review of Books, wondering if you should take up camoflague and off-roading (no!).

Completely off topic, but to show life is stranger - and more moving than fiction - Orlando Figes' Just Send Me Word. True story of a young Moscow couple separated by war in 1941, and then by the Gulag for 10 years. She waited for him.

In reply to SNC:

For more recent shenanigans, you might enjoy A.D. Miller's 'Snowdrops' - the murkiness of modern Russia...


Thanks for the recommendations - I'll get rummaging.

In reply to Tall Clare:

Sorry for the slight hijack but would anyone recommend Elleston Trevor's "Quiller" books? I loved the film The Quiller Memorandum but that's my only exposure to Quiller.

In reply to Tall Clare:
Thanks - yes, Snowdrops is OK, but not I suggest actually worthy of the place on the Booker shortlist which it got (but that was a lowbrow year [intellectual snob alert]).

In reply to Tall Clare:

another vote for William Boyd's Restless (it's not Breathless as above tho) fab book

In reply to Tall Clare: I read Snowdrops just before I went to Moscow and stayed with a woman I didn't know, arranged by another woman I barely knew. It made it a little more exciting...

In reply to SuperstarDJ:


I've only read Billion Dollar Brain - but have seen the film at least five times - and the book is very good, and did make me go "a-ha!" as it explained things that the film skipped over...


Clare, if you can find them, then I really, really recommend Manning Coles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manning_Coles#Tommy_Hambledon_novels

The first five deal with stuff from World War One to World War Two, and I have to wonder whether Le Carre had read Drink To Yesterday


There is a Le Carre collection - The Quest for Karla - that has "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy", "The Honourable Schoolboy" and "Smiley's People" which are the classic "Smiley" trilogy. You should at least read those three in that order, but I also suggest that you look out Manning Coles' "Drink to Yesterday" first, if you can...

In reply to Tall Clare:

I'm surprised, by the way, that no one has mentioned Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene, yet

Classic Cuban Missile Crisis stuff, taken with a pinch of SALT

In reply to Dominion:

The Karla trilogy are the three I'm most likely to start with. I too am a bit surprised at the lack of Graham Greene.

Here's a question for the assembled throng - can anyone name any female spy thriller writers?

In reply to Tall Clare:

Len Deighton - Funeral in Berlin - a bit dated maybe but good

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers - classic and even older and wonderful! (and the lefe of the author was even more colourful)

In reply to Tall Clare:


I enjoyed the Robert Littell novels that I've read: The Once and Future Spy, An Agent in Place and The Company. The latter covers about fifty years of espionage.

Some of Graham Greene wrote some great spy novels, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Third Man among others.

I think a lot of crime novels such as those by James Ellroy,Philip Kerr and even William Gibson cross over into the spy genre.

One last one Agent Zig Zag is a great true story with more twists than most novels.

In reply to Dominion:

That's what happens when I make a cup of tea half way through writing a reply.

In reply to Tall Clare:

I'd suggest that you plan on Our Man in Havana between some of the Karla trilogy, they're a bit heavy going, and OMiH is a bit of light relief, and a really excellent book.

In certain ways that book does remind me of the relationship that MI5 have with Harry Palmer / Michael Caine in the three classic films (The Ipcress File, Funeral In Berlin, Billion Dollar Brain)

I suspect you've already read Our Man In Havana, already, though?

But it's well worth another read (or two) - it just seems to get better, every time...


||-)

In reply to Adam W.:


Perhaps a miniature bottle of Johnny walker, next time?

In reply to Tall Clare:

Stella Rimington, I haven't read any of her books but it looks like she's done her research.

I

In reply to Tall Clare: 'can anyone name any female spy thriller writers?'

Well Stella Rimington was the first female head of MI5 in real life, and she has written several spy thrillers. No idea how good they are, but they must be worth a try.

In reply to Ianto Bach:

What would she know!?

In reply to Submit to Gravity:

And what's she ever done on Grit?

In reply to Tall Clare:

I was pondering throwing some Greene into the mix but I'm not so well read and I kind of got to thinking that Greene's stuff is not so much "spy thriller" in the (say) Le Carré mould, but more "portrait of a troubled hapless chap in a desperate situation and downward spiral", sometimes with a bit of an espionage backdrop but just as often with a "murder/detective" aspect and I got my wrists slapped for mentioning Martin Cruz Smith because of that But as I say, I know not of what I speak Only read Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter, and seen the film of The Tailor of Panama.

In reply to Tall Clare:
>

Helen MacInnes

(I did that with one point of aid...)

In reply to Tall Clare:



Oh! Does "Baroness Orczy" count?

In reply to Tall Clare:
>


More Google
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayle_Lynds

It will be interesting to see whether those thread contributors who are far more qualified than I am, are familiar with MacInnes or Lynds.

I had half-thought Alma Reville for some of her screenplay work but that was a stretch, and Patricia Highsmith is more "skulduggery on a personal level for revenge or personal financial gain" isn't she...

In reply to Blue Straggler:


Well, can I recommend Our Man in Havana to you, as well?

It's not a "serious" book like the Quest for Karla trilogy, but it is an utter, utter classic, and I'd hate to be parted from my copy of it.

I wonder if the fact that Alec Guiness was in the 1959 film of OMiH made him the prime candidate to play Smiley in the BBC serialisation of the Le Carre books?

In reply to Tall Clare:

Clare- you need to drop everything and read the Karla Trilogy.. (Smiley trilogy) If you enjoyed 'Spy who came in' then you will be blown away by Tinker, Tailor, its a masterpiece even if you have seen the film already it has so much more to offer the reader.. Recently discovered, its now my favourite book and Im a big fan of the film and the 70's series, each 'hold their own' in their own right. Currently glued to the sequel 'Hon. Schoolboy'
Also loved 'Spycatcher' by Peter Wright, a very good read and a real eye opener into real life cold war espionage.. and the backdrop to le Carres world.

In reply to Dominion:

Yeah, brilliant stuff.

In reply to Dominion:

You can! Thanks. I need to start reading novels again and I know I like Greene so this is a good start. I'll see if there are some paperbacks at the library for me to take on my holiday.