The Double Agent by William Christie

Published by Minotaur Books on November 15, 2022

The Double Agent is a spy thriller that begins in Teheran in 1943. Alexsi Smirnov, a Russian intelligence officer who infiltrated the German army, is warning Churchill of a plot to end his life. That story is told in A Single Spy.

Churchill’s bright idea is to reward Alexsi for saving his life by sending him back to Germany as a British agent. Having betrayed the Russians, Smirnov is certain that he won’t last long in Berlin. Alexsi’s attempt to escape from the British embassy and make his way out of Tehran is foiled, leading Alexsi to agree to spy for Britain, but on his own terms.

Alexsi wants to pose as a signals officer, preferably in Paris, an affable location from which he will be well positioned to escape when Germany loses the war. The British like the idea but send him to Italy, where he gamely takes over the signals operation at a German base. In addition to supervising soldiers who search for clandestine radios operated by partisans and spies, Alexsi is in charge of encoding and decoding messages to the local German command. He uses his position to send coded messages to British intelligence, passing on tidbits about German plans and troop positions in Italy.

The SS officer in charge of the base is happy to have someone of Alexsi’s coding skill and organizational talents. The officer decides to use Alexsi to spy on an Italian princess who is helping the partisans and who has the ear of the Pope. While Alexsi has fun in her bed, the new assignment adds another level of risk to his life as a spy. He dodges Russians, suspicious SS officers, angry Italians, and an unpredictable princess as the war in Europe comes to a close.

The Double Agent offers a nice mix of tradecraft and action. Alexsi doesn’t pretend to be James Bond, but he’s good with a knife. In most instances, he manages to avoid violence by outwitting his adversary. He has a moral code that, while flexible, prevents him from helping the SS commit atrocities against innocent Italians as reprisal for a partisan attack upon SS soldiers.

Alexsi doesn’t have much of a personality beyond his desire to stay alive and his refusal to participate in bloodbaths, but that’s all the personality he needs in a novel that is about survival rather than political idealism. Fans of A Single Spy will probably enjoy the sequel. The novels are similar in style. The second novel is sufficiently independent of the first that a reader will not miss much by reading The Double Agent without first reading A Single Spy.

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A Single Spy by William Christie

Published by St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books on April 25, 2017

“We gather information by many means, but a single spy in the right place and at the right moment may change the course of history.” With that encouragement, a 17-year-old Russian boy named Alexsi is sent to Germany, where it is envisioned that he will spend years rising to a position that will allow him to uncover great secrets for the benefit of the Soviet Union.

A Single Spy begins as Alexsi, struggling to survive, joins a group of Shahsavan tribesmen, nomads who roamed between Iran and Azerbaijan until the Soviet army began to do serious border patrol. Escaping a Soviet ambush in 1936, Alexsi, at the age of sixteen, is again on his own. Alexsi speaks Russian, German, and Farsi, among other languages, and is improbably literate, which makes him attractive to the NKVD. Like it or not, Alexsi becomes a spy.

Alexsi’s first task is to infiltrate a group that opposes Stalin. To do that, he must take advantage of a girl he knew in the orphanage where he spent part of his youth. That gives William Christie an opportunity to write scenes that flash back to the corrupt and inhumane setting of a Soviet orphanage. Other flashbacks illustrate Alexsi’s pre-orphanage years and explain how Alexsi later came to be living with Shahsavan tribesmen.

In the present, Alexsi serves the Soviets while pretending to serve the Germans in Berlin and Tehran, eventually stumbling onto a plot that may indeed change the course of history. While the plot might be a bit farfetched, that’s not unusual in modern thrillers, and Christie sold me on the story’s credibility.

Alexsi isn’t a complex character and some of the other characters are little more than stereotypes, but that’s common in a thriller that depends on plot more than characterization. The plot earns points for departing from the mold for most spy stories. It also earns points for being smart. Not brilliant, but smart.

The focus on a Russian from the Middle East who infiltrates the Germans during World War II is something I haven’t seen before, and I’m always happy to find a spy novel that isn’t just a variation of stories that the masters of espionage novels have already told. The story moves quickly, particularly in the action scenes that bring the novel to its finish. The themes of betrayal on which all spy fiction depends are sharply developed. Shortcomings of characterization notwithstanding, A Single Spy is a winning contribution to the genre of spy fiction.

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