The Tango Briefing by Adam Hall

First published in 1973

The Tango Briefing is the fith in a series of spy novels featuring a British agent named Quiller written by Elleston Trevor using the pen name Adam Hall.  A recon flight returns pictures of something in the Algerian desert that might be an airplane. Because its suspected cargo would be dangerous in the wrong hands, Quiller is dispatched to "take a close look at the bloody thing." And bloody is just what he gets, as one would expect from a Quiller novel. He also battles dehydration, exhaustion, and the constant threat of death as he shakes off surveillance, dodges bullets, and parachutes into the desert where vultures are hoping to have him for lunch.

Quiller is a fun character. Of all the fictional spies, Quiller is probably the least likable -- and that's what makes him so easy to like. He's testy, quarrelsome, disgruntled, a loner who loathes everyone, particularly his bosses. Most of the time he behaves like a jerk, but he gets the job done. Quiller survives by relying upon his intellect, a sharp mind that is constantly at war with his instinct and the demands/fears of a body he refers to as "the organism." If often seems as if Quiller wishes he weren't burdened with frail limbs and human emotions, that he would be happier as an analytical robot.

I love the refined-but-tough first-person prose Adam Hall uses to narrate Quiller's story. His surging sentences are perfectly timed, reflecting the anxiety and restlessness of a spy waiting for the action to start. And once it starts, it's unrelenting. Action scenes are intense, particularly those that take place in the desert. They left me feeling parched. The Quiller novels aren't in the same class as the best spy fiction, but they're smart, gripping, and thoroughly entertaining. The Tango Briefing is one of the better ones.

RECOMMENDED

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

Published by Atria Books on May 29, 2012

Set in 1945, Istanbul Passage tells an absorbing story that builds suspense like a Hitchcock movie. The novel rests upon a storyline that was a favorite of Hitchcock's: the (relatively) innocent man caught up in an intrigue he did not anticipate, forced to use his wits to avoid arrest or death. As is often the case in spy novels, themes of betrayal and moral ambiguity in a changing world pervade Istanbul Passage. The temptation and motivation to betray touches every important character.

Leon Bauer (American) is married to Anna (German) who is bedridden with a mysterious ailment. Leon works for R.J. Reynolds in Istanbul but does a bit of spying for Tommy King (Office of War Information) on the side. Tommy is pulling out of the city, leaving Leon to take delivery of a post-war defector named Alexei (Romanian) who is smuggled into Turkey by boat. The handover does not go smoothly. Hours later, in an early plot twist, Leon discovers that people he trusted are not on his side.

Leon learns Alexei's true identity from Mihai, a Mossad agent who believes Alexei to be a butcher, a killer of Jews (an accusation that Alexei denies). Mihai, the only person Leon trusts, refuses to help Alexei. In fact, he argues that it is no longer ethical for Leon to help Alexei gain his freedom. Leon thus confronts a dilemma. Alexei might be evil, but there are degrees of evil, and Alexei's role in the war is unclear. Alexei may be able to provide valuable Russian military intelligence to the Americans. Is it better to hand Alexei over to the Russians so that he can be executed (which might seem a just punishment for his alleged actions during the war) or to give him a pass for his wartime behavior in exchange for the information he claims to possess? Leon stands uncomfortably in the middle of this Hobson's choice, a position that becomes even less comfortable when the Turkish secret police take an interest in Leon's involvement with Alexei. Compounding Leon's problems is a mole whose identity is not revealed until the novel's end.

The revelation of the mole's identity is mildly surprising thanks to deft misdirection. Leon's moment of truth is a highlight in a book filled with scenes that make an impact.  Despite the moderately complex plot that brings together a number of carefully drawn characters, Joseph Kanon maintains a deliberate and gradually escalating pace.

Istanbul Passage raises fascinating ethical issues. When Mihai argues that the actions of people struggling for survival can't be judged by others who weren't in their shoes, he fails to understand that the same logic might apply to his judgment of Alexei. How should the reader view Alexei? He seems unremorsefully selfish yet he is capable of self-sacrifice. He is a Romanian who allied with Germany when Germany seemed to be prevailing, then switched his allegiance to Russia, and now seeks an alliance with the Americans. Other Romanians see him as a traitor, Mihai considers him a war criminal, but in the end, Alexei may simply be a man who tried to stay alive.

At the same time, how should the reader view Leon? As a devoted husband, he wants to help his wife but lacks the funds to do so. As a man who is attracted to women, he finds it difficult to resist advances. Leon is probably the most morally stalwart character in the book but he is no stranger to temptation. He wants to do the right thing but in the end he comes to understand that there is no right thing. And since nothing he can do will change the past, the question that confounds him is how to behave in the present.

Kanon manages to generate excitement without endless explosions and car chases. Action scenes are rare but riveting. Kanon writes dialog that is both realistic and smart. His characters are artfully constructed. Leon, of course, is the most fully developed. The reader is privy to his disjointed thoughts, often triggered by something he hears or sees but disconnected from his present environment. Strong characterizations combined with suspense, emotional intensity and ethical ambiguity make Istanbul Passage a standout spy novel.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Prisoner's Wife by Gerard Macdonald

Published by Thomas Dunne on May 8, 2012

The Prisoner's Wife is a better novel than the blurbs that promote it, with their trite phrases like "pulse pounding" and "ripped from the headlines." Gerard Macdonald's story is in some respects familiar, but he avoids clichés while building a plausible, politically astute plot that is propelled by strong, troubled characters rather than mindless chase scenes and tired shootouts. Still, there are enough well-written action sequences to heighten tension while moving the story at a steady pace.

Shawn Maguire, an alcoholic and sex addict, on an indefinite suspension from his position with the CIA, is living on the English estate where his wife is buried. Flash back to 2000, when Maguire gets on the wrong side of the CIA's Calvin McCord, whose daddy used to run the Agency. Maguire's boozing, failed marriages, and taste for married women lead to his professional downfall, a fate that McCord promotes. In 2004, Ayub Abbasi, once a liason between the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, hires the blacklisted Maguire to obtain information about Darius Osmani, an Iranian research scientist who, with a group of Taliban fighters, stole papers from Abbasi's office in Kandahar. Osmani also claims to have discovered a portable nuclear weapon in Afghanistan. Abbasi wants Maguire to find Osmani (who has disappeared) and to learn the location of the weapon. Although Abbasi and Maguire don't know it, about a month earlier two CIA agents captured Osmani in Paris.

Maguire goes to Paris in search of Osmani and finds Danielle, Osmani's wife. Maguire, of course, has a thing for Danielle, although he's still carrying a torch for his dead wife. Together with Danielle, Maguire travels to Morocco and Cairo and Peshawar in search of Osmani. Flashbacks become a regular feature as the story moves forward, supplying the mortar that binds together Maguire's unsteady life.

Like his alcoholism, Maguire's belief that his deceased wife still occupies the house they shared is an old and obvious device to depict the depths of Maguire's tormented soul, but Macdonald doesn't oversell those character traits. Maguire's fretting about his "addiction" to sex, on the other hand, becomes a little silly. Although he participates in too many angst-ridden conversations, Maguire is, for the most part, a well-conceived character, albeit overly reminiscent of the broken figures Graham Greene invented for his spy novels decades ago.

The Prisoner's Wife picks up momentum as it moves toward a surprising climax. Some aspects of the story Macdonald tells are less surprising -- they are, in fact, so familiar that much of the plot seems uninspired. The story is engaging but occasionally stretches the reader's capacity to suspend disbelief. It seems improbable that a blacklisted agent would so easily track a CIA captive as he is rendered from one secret prison to another. It is equally improbable that he would bring the detainee's wife on his dangerous mission, but pairing an aging spy with a young, beautiful woman is a standard feature of espionage stories and Macdonald makes it work despite its implausibility. Besides, she's integral to the story (as beautiful women always are in novels like this).

There are shades of noir in Macdonald's understated prose. Dialog is sharp. Macdonald has a tendency to overuse certain phrases (heavy people move "with surprising speed") but not so often as to become annoying. The plot takes a more accurate view of global politics (as well as inter- and intra-agency politics) than many thrillers manage. Readers who prefer a less jaded view of the American intelligence community, those who don't believe that intelligence analysts were subject to political manipulation post-9/11, those who look for clear distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys, and those who want to believe that the United States never errs, might want to find their reading pleasure in authors who are less grounded in reality. I found it refreshing to read a nuanced novel about terrorism that didn't feature a former Ranger single-handedly saving the nation from cartoonish evildoers.

Macdonald is no Graham Greene, but he is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding field of British spy novelists. The Prisoner's Wife is an intense, entertaining novel in the Greene tradition of dark, morally ambiguous spy stories.

RECOMMENDED

House of the Hunted by Mark Mills

Published by Random House on April 3, 2012

House of the Hunted begins in midstream, as if it were the sequel to a novel that had already set up the plot and established the characters.  It is 1919 in Petrograd.  As Irina Bibikov is surreptitiously released from prison, Tom Nash, who orchestrated her escape and is the father of her unborn child, flees from Cheka patrols.  Little by little, Mark Mills fills in the backstory.  We learn that Nash was working for the British Foreign Office until, after barely escaping from Petrograd during the Russian Revolution, he joined the SIS to better his chances of assisting the woman he loves.  His attempt to spirit Irina out of the country goes disastrously wrong; Nash has been betrayed and is lucky to make a second escape from Russia.

After that tense beginning, the story flashes forward to 1935.  It again begins in mid-stride, introducing new characters in a new setting (Toulon, France) as if they were already familiar to the reader.  The focus nonetheless remains on Nash, who is haunted by his failure to rescue Irina.  Despite his retirement from a life of danger, Nash becomes the target of an assassination attempt.  Even worse, he suspects he has been betrayed by one of his friends.  At that point the novel blends suspense and mystery as Nash tries to figure out who wants him dead and why.  The threat forces Nash to look back upon his life, giving the reader an abbreviated view of the events that shaped him, including some ugly childhood memories.

The characters in House of the Hunted are all erudite, well-educated and often artistic.  They make impossibly witty dinner conversation while consuming bottle after bottle of fine wine.  They are nonetheless a believable mix of Russians, Americans, Germans, French, and British, the sort of folk who might have summered (or lived) in a charming harbor town in the south of France between the two world wars.  Nash’s relationship with a goddaughter who is blossoming into adulthood adds an interesting dimension to Nash’s character as he tries to decide what to do about their changing relationship.

This isn’t a novel of jaw-dropping developments, and in that low-key sense House of the Hunted is more credible than many espionage thrillers.  Several small interpersonal dramas substitute for blockbuster international intrigue, although those dramas give birth to intrigues of their own.  There is nonetheless a significant surprise at the end, as well as a smaller one, neither of which I anticipated.  This is a novel without loose ends; all the storylines are carefully knotted together as the story reaches its climax.

Mills’ prose is as smooth as the cognac the characters love to drink.  He tells a smart, engaging tale.  While I felt emotionally detached from Nash and the other characters (maybe I’m just not a cognac kind of guy), I appreciated the skillful storytelling and enjoyed the unexpected plot developments.  The final chapter sets up the possibility of a sequel that I would love to read.  Nash is a worthy heir to James Bond, sophistication and grit without all the flash and gadgetry.

RECOMMENDED

Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton

First published in Great Britain in 1966

At some point in Billion Dollar Brain, the unnamed British spy from whose perspective the story is told says to an American named Midwinter: "You think the best way to contribute to a dangerous situation is to raise a private army out of your profits on cans of oil and beans, frozen orange juice and advertising, and to operate your own undeclared war against the Russians." That pretty well sums up the plot. Midwinter wants to recruit the unnamed British spy to his private army of agents; the Brit plays along to learn what Midwinter is planning. The premise is thin and not particularly credible, but it leads into a fun, well-written story that feels only slightly dated despite its 1966 vintage (other than giving the book its title, computers are fairly peripheral to the plot, fortunate given that they operate as little more than expensive answering machines).

In its depiction of paranoid overreaction to the perceived threat of Communism, Billion Dollar Brain reminds me of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Kubrick's humor is over-the-top while Deighton's is of the understated British variety -- the film is played for laughs while Deighton's novel retains the elements of a thriller -- but both use satire to make the same fundamental point: "facts are no substitute for intelligence" and all the nefarious facts that could be mustered about Khrushchev's Russia would not have justified the decision to initiate a world-ending nuclear conflict.

Billion Dollar Brain is written with an understated nonchalance, low-key humor perhaps too frequently offsetting the tension of high-stakes espionage. Although it is one of Len Deighton's early novels, he wielded all the tricks in a seasoned writer's arsenal to direct a play in the reader's mind. Dialog often makes the reader picture scenes that are never directly described; non sequiturs force the reader to rethink characters and settings; offhand remarks help the reader imagine the details of a character's personality. The plot takes a couple of perfect twists before arriving at a satisfying conclusion.

Billion Dollar Brain doesn't have the same heft as Deighton's later novels but the story is fun, the characters are quirky, and the writing is so engaging that the novel is of enduring value.

RECOMMENDED