Double Take

by Gregory Dowling

Hungover at the end of the college term and anticipating three weeks of cat-minding for his eccentric uncle in London, Paul Stannard is drafted into the service of Her Royal Highness and finds himself adrift in the world of terrorism and espionage

191 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1985

About the author

Gregory Dowling grew up in Bristol, UK. He studied English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to Italy after graduating and has lived there since 1979, teaching in language schools in Naples, Siena, Verona and eventually Venice, where he has lived since 1981. He is now Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He published four thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with his novel set in 18th-century Venice, Ascension, and the sequel The Four Horsemen in 2017 (the Alvise Marangon Mysteries).
His academic work mainly concerns British and American poetry; he has published a study of American narrative poetry, a study of the poet David Mason, a guidebook to Byron's Venice and has co-edited two anthologies of 20th-century poetry. He has also published numerous essays and articles on writers from the Romantic period to the present day. He was non-fiction editor for the magazine Able Muse for several years and is responsible for the British section of the Italian poetry magazine Semicerchio. He has also written numerous articles on Venice, and was responsible for the sightseeing pages of the first five editions of the Time Out Guide to Venice. He is on the board of the committee for a new museum in Ravenna devoted to Lord Byron, due to open in 2019.

Reviews

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part of my 5-Review Extravaganza: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEuM6...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

Manages to be a sardonic satyre of the whole international-intrigue thriller genre while being an excellent example of it. Also, the twists just keep coming well past the moment you've lowered your guard as a reader, and get more and more awesome the closer you get to the end.

[Angela Stoffels · Rating 4 out of 5]

So the title was a little misleading,or at least how I took it. I was expecting a murder mystery, and got a "spy thriller" thriller being generous. This was a rather slow start, but ended well. The language was beautiful, a nice departure from the bland vocabulary of some more modern works.

[Spenser Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun spy novel in a very different vein.

Not a parody, not really a spy story, but rather a well written tale of a spy's pawn. A student without a clue is brought into the fold and thing move very quickly from there.

[Alfredo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely a very good read! Comic, sardonic and tongue-in-cheek, with plenty of great action scenes and a great final twist of an ending. Too bad that Dowling has preferred teaching at the University of Venice rather than continuing in this vein...

[Yesmo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious, clever, creative and thrilling! This book has everything you want and more. Im sad that its over but im glad to know about this little gem of a book and i cant wait to lend it to friends and family!