The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

First published in 1975

To pursue his theory concerning the assassination of JFK, Paul Christopher resigns from the spy agency that employs him and with the tacit approval of his boss begins an investigation that takes him to Italy, France, and Vietnam, among other places. What he learns may seem a little far-fetched, but McCarry writes convincingly, and his story is a refreshing respite from the more conventional fictionalized views of the Kennedy assassination.

McCarry provides wonderful descriptions of the places to which Christopher travels; the reader can feel danger in the atmosphere as Christopher walks into a Vietnamese alley. McCarry deftly mixes politics with a stirring tale of investigatory intrigue to create a well-paced spy thriller that actually thrills.

I liked McCarry's first novel, The Miernik Dossier, slightly better, but this one is nearly as good.

RECOMMENDED

Home Run by Gerald Seymour

Published by The Harvill Press on May 30, 1989; published in the US in 1991 under the title The Running Target

Writers of espionage novels are inevitably compared to John Le Carré, particularly if the writer is British. Gerald Seymour's writing style isn't as polished, and the characters in Home Run lack the multi-layered depth of Le Carré's best characters, but the plot and pace of Home Run are worthy of the master.

Home Run begins with the 1982 execution of a teenage girl in Iran. The rest of the novel takes place several years later. Point of view shifts frequently as two storylines unfold. One concerns a drug investigation that follows the death of a 19 year old heroin addict who overdosed. Her father, an important public official, pressures the police to make the heroin importer's arrest their top priority. The cops diligently pursue the task, grumbling all the way. The other story focuses on Matthew ("Mattie") Furniss, Head of the Iran desk at the SIS, who is being pressured by the new Director General to increase the quality of intelligence coming out of Iran. Fortunately, Furniss has cultivated a new Iranian spy, a family friend who happens to be the brother of the girl who was executed.

Home Run gets off to a conventional start, particularly with the drug investigation, where Seymour employs off-the-shelf drug cops who give the usual tiresome speeches about the evils of illicit substances. The main cop character is filled with anger and moral outrage -- traits that turn out to be necessary to the plot -- but he has the standard fictional cop's "driven by duty" personality. Seymour provided him with the familiar neglected wife who is no longer tolerant of his "job first" priorities and is making her displeasure known.

Mattie Furniss is a stronger and more interesting character; thankfully his story is at the heart of the novel. At the Director General's insistence, Furniss travels to Turkey to give a pep talk to his agents. Things do not go well for him. Back at home, bureaucrats and politicians are busily abusing their power or wielding it unwisely. There's a fascinating turf war between the self-righteous drug agents, who view the "faceless wonders" of the SIS as impeding their all-important drug investigation, and the smug SIS officers who view the drug agents as "glorified traffic wardens."

Both storylines are filled with action and tension. The pace picks up considerably by the novel's midpoint, moving with furious speed as the characters encounter realistic threats in dangerous places. Torture scenes are vivid without going too far.

Seymour uses too many comma splices, leading to awkward sentences, but that's a minor gripe. For the most part, the writing is adequate to its purpose, even if the prose doesn't soar. Stylistic lapses quickly become secondary to storylines that captivate the reader's attention.

I would enthusiastically recommend Home Run to most fans of espionage fiction, but it isn't for everyone. If you like novels in which the good guys are pure and the bad guys personify evil, this is not the book for you. There are plenty of evil bad guys, but the three main characters -- Furniss, his Iranian spy, and the drug cop -- each make questionable moral decisions. Seymour's construction of the characters and plot makes it easy to understand why they act as they do. Seymour doesn't judge them; the reader is left to decide whether each character's actions were right or wrong under the circumstances. The answers aren't necessarily clear -- I liked that, but some readers won't appreciate the moral ambiguity. As the novel's end approached, I was drawn into each character's world, fascinated by the choices they made, understanding and sympathizing with them even when I disagreed with their decisions. For all these reasons, I regard Home Run as one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking spy novels I've encountered.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

A Killing in Moscow by Clive Egleton

First published in 1994

Clive Egleton's second Peter Ashton novel is better than his first (Hostile Intent). Ashton is given a stronger personality (the polite British version of abrasive) and he begins to have a life outside the office. The plot is a bit less far-fetched and a bit more interesting than the story in Hostile Intent in that A Killing in Moscow explores the relationship between the KGB and organized crime in post-Soviet Russia, arguing (through Ashton) that it doesn't matter whether the people on the other side are motivated by politics or greed if their actions jeopardize national security.

The novel begins with the execution of British businessman Colin Joyner and the prostitute he was entertaining in his Moscow hotel room. Peter Ashton, not quite trusted or simply disliked by those in power at SIS as a result of his actions in Hostile Intent, has been assigned to run Security and Technical Services where his access to top secret information is limited. Ashton, in Moscow to conduct a security audit, is sent by the British Embassy to assist the local police in the investigation of Joyner's death. This straight-forward task becomes more complicated when Ashton learns that a Russian woman employed as an Embassy secretary has been spying on the British Embassy official who monitors commercial transactions, and has been passing information to the prostitute who was found dead in Joyner's room. The novel follows Ashton as he puzzles out the relationship between the spy and Joyner. As in Hostile Intent, Ashton makes it his responsibility to keep the spy alive, creating the opportunity for some fast moving action scenes.

The pace in A Killing in Moscow is intense and Egleton's prose is more fluid than it was in Hostile Intent. The combination of intellectual intrigue and well written action scenes makes this a fun reading experience, and the ending is just wild.

RECOMMENDED

The Miernik Dossier by Charles McCarry

First published in 1973

Paul Christopher, a character in The Miernik Dossier who appears in most of Charles McCarry's subsequent espionage novels, writes in a report: "There is an artistry to what we are doing: spies are like novelists--except that spies use living people and real places to make their works of art." McCarry knows something about the similarities of spies and novelists, having been a CIA operative himself before commencing his career as a writer of spy novels. The Miernik Dossier is his first, and it is excellent.

The story is told in a series of documents: reports, transcripts of recorded conversations, cables, diary entries, and the like. A drawback of this format is the difficulty of developing a character's personality through documents. McCarry solved that problem by having Christopher (an American agent) write very thorough, engaging reports, complete with verbatim accounts of dialog, descriptions of clothing and scenery and body odors, discussions of his observations, fears, and thought processes, and other material that helps set the scene and flesh out the characters. (Amusingly, a document prepared by one of Christopher's handlers complains that Christopher's reports lack organization and are filled with extraneous information.) Perhaps real spies don't write entertaining reports that work well as chapters in a novel, but maybe McCarry did just that when he worked for the CIA. In any event, Christopher's reports (and to a lesser extent, his British counterpart's and Miernik's diary) provide the flavor that makes the novel work as well as it does.

And it does work well. The story is filled with intrigue as the American and British agents accompany a member of the Sudanese royal family and a Polish diplomat on a road trip from Geneva to Sudan. The two spies are operating under diplomatic cover; each knows that the other is an operative but neither can admit it. They suspect that the Pole is also a spy and that he may have something to do with a Soviet-run terrorist group that has recently formed in Sudan, but they're never quite sure what role the colorful, irascible Pole is playing: is he a spy, and if so, what is his mission in Sudan? Add to the mix the Pole's sister and the British spy's girlfriend, both of whom join the trip, and the story becomes almost comical as everyone suspects everyone else of being something other than what he or she seems. Of course, when things are not as they seem, there is a potential for mistaken actions, and in this novel, that risk leads to a powerful ending. Some fast-paced action scenes in the desert add additional excitement to a story that is never in danger of becoming dull.

The Miernik Dossier teaches a lesson that applies not just to intelligence agencies but to all law enforcement agencies: once an intelligence analyst (or, for that matter, a police detective) begins to theorize that someone is a spy (or a criminal), they are likely to look for evidence to support that theory and risk losing their objectivity. For its excellent illustration of that principle as well as its riveting story and sympathetic characters, I recommend this novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Defection of A.J. Lewinter by Robert Littell

First published in 1973

A.J. Lewinter, a physicist specializing in ceramics who does military research on missile nosecones, defects to the Soviet Union (the novel was published in 1973, when the Soviet Union still existed). His knowledge of ceramics isn't likely to be helpful to the Russians, but Lewinter may have obtained accurate knowledge of missile trajectories--information that could enable the Soviet Union to develop an effective anti-missile defense. The American government isn't quite sure whether Lewinter was able to memorize the trajectory formulas during his brief time with them, while the Soviets aren't quite sure whether Lewinter is a genuine defector with useful information, a genuine defector who has been given false information to fool the Soviets, or an American agent.

Littell's novel takes a fun look at the games played by espionage services. The Americans want the Russians to believe Lewinter's information is useless. The Russians, in turn, need to figure out whether they're being played by the Americans. The novel takes us through the reasoning processes employed by both sides. The characters, on both the American and Russian side, are interesting albeit one-dimensional. This is more of a cerebral novel than an action-packed thriller, but the twists and turns taken by the Americans and Russians as each side tries to out-think and to out-deceive the other make the novel a gripping read.

RECOMMENDED