The Unquiet Sleep

by William Haggard, Gillian Lewis (Illustrator)

mystery

190 pages

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

William Haggard (born Croydon 11 August 1907, died Frinton-on-Sea 27 October 1993) was the pseudonym of Richard Henry Michael Clayton, the son of the Rev. Henry James Clayton and Mabel Sarah Clayton. He was an English writer of fictional spy thrillers set in the 1960s through the 1980s, or, as the writer H. R. F. Keating called them, "action novels of international power." Like C. P. Snow, he was a quintessentially British Establishment figure who had been a civil servant in India, and his books vigorously put forth his perhaps idiosyncratic points of view. The principle character in most of his novels is the urbane Colonel Charles Russell of the fictional Security Executive, (clearly based on the actual MI5 or Security Service), who moves easily and gracefully along Snow's Corridors of Power in Whitehall. During the years of the fictional spy mania initially begun by the James Bond stories, Haggard was considered by most critics to be at the very top of the field.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really enjoying this dated, sexist yarn of bureaucracy and spies, but then I got drunk and lost the damn thing!
Found it!
Finished it. Ripping yarn in a tired, sanguine, world weary kind of way. The sort of erudite, pithy, lived in commentaries that just aren't around anymore in this limp biscuit, cheap and sassy world we live in.

[Sam Reaves · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Haggard was a British civil servant who wrote espionage thrillers from the late fifties through the eighties. His books lack the flamboyance of an Ian Fleming and the gloomy fatalism of a Le Carre; they are, more or less, novels of manners about the British establishment and its discontents.
This one features the series hero Colonel Charles Russell, who heads something called the Security Executive, a Whitehall troubleshooting outfit.
A Tory junior minister, formerly an executive with a pharmaceutical company, has a wayward young wife. She is stepping out on him with a Cypriot gangster who is interested in cornering the black market in a new drug produced by the minister's former company which has magical benefits but seems to be highly addictive and has just been temporarily banned pending an evaluation... Scandal looms and things get complicated. Russell and his top assistant, a shrewd and tough female veteran of the French Resistance (where she and the junior minister shared harrowing times) have to handle things discreetly.
No car chases or explosions, no pulse-pounding suspense; this is espionage fiction in a quieter vein, with personal relationships and political calculations more important than gadgets and weaponry. Sophisticated entertainment.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

One from my old dad's shelves, this edition was printed around the time I was born.
It's a reasonably decent page-turner. Most of the goodies are a bit on the obnoxious side, but still, you know who you have to root for and it's not too hard to do so mostly, though they're all a bunch of what my peers used to call 'Tory scum', trying to protect the innocent British public from being sold drugs by a bunch of nasty quasi-foreigners (Cypriots) instead of by an upstanding pharmaceutical company. While it's hard to really care all that much (and while, also, the author photo on the back doesn't help in that regard), it is fairly enjoyably plotted, there's a nice uptick in sex and violence in the second half, and a happy ending, with a side order of the baddies getting what they deserve - those nasty, common/foreign/female people! Better than Jeffrey Archer, at least, to be ungenerous.