For The Good Of The State

Dr David Audley & Colonel Jack Butler #16

by Anthony Price

General Zarubin, the Soviet mastermind, confronts his Number Two, the infinitely wily Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin, on a point overlooking the British Channel.

Meanwhile, Henry Jaggard of British Intelligence, has two pressing problems. He knows the Soviets are mounting a defensive program against a Polish dissident group in Britain, but he cannot intervene without jeopardizing his best inside agents. And Dr David Audley, of the Intelligence R&D Department, has been playing clever politics again; to bring him to heel, Jaggard needs firsthand evidence.

Jaggard sees his opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. The Professor has formally requested a meeting with Audley, his old adversary. And, with one of Jaggard's own men to abet him, Audley can be safely relied upon to overstep the mark in his attempts to frustrate the KGB...

Genres: Fiction, Espionage, Mystery Thriller

381 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Born in Hertfordshire in 1928, Price was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and Oxford. His long career in journalism culminated in the Editorship of the Oxford Times. His literary thrillers earned comparisons to the best of Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Goddard.

Reviews

[Paul Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic Anthony Price tale from 1986 involving treble-crossing Russians, over-here Americans, UK secret services departments at war with each other and, at the centre of it all, Price's renegade spook/historian Dr David Audley, getting on a bit now but still managing to be too clever by half, this time on a jaunt around North Devon with a new sidekick, minder/historian Sir Thomas Arkenshaw (in Mr Price's version of the British secret service, the people who matter are all historians as well as spies).

The pace is glacial as always, and the action (also as always) consists largely of the dissection, in minute detail, of possible motives for the smallest of actions, with the reader challenged to keep up ("Audley realised, too late, that Comrade Panin never ordered cheese and pickle, hadn't done even in Budapest in 1956. And as the significance of this sunk in, he also realised that Henry Jaggard must have known it, which in turn could only mean one thing about Arkenshaw's presence." - OK, I made that quote up). If you're a Price fan though (which I am) you'll love it, these days with the added bonus of fondly remembering a world before mobile phones, when spies had to make calls from phone boxes and no-one knew where anyone else was. Great stuff!

[Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could just go on repeating that I don't understand why Anthony Price is out of print...
But why is he?
He's such a brilliant writer and his stories... no cinematic crash bangs but just clever, thoughtful... very British cups of tea and pints of beer whilst discussing problems... have a current bun with that?

[Joseph Gurman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since Mr. Price died earlier this year, I've been binge-reading all of his spy novels this summer, as an extended guilty pleasure. An appreciation of his work compared it favorably with Le Carré's. I wouldn't go that far, but it's bracing to read "spy" novels where 95% of the book is internal or dialog, and only 5% action, which is, I suppose, pretty much what real human espionage is like, minus the boredom — no matter what Ian Fleming liked to imagine.

These are well-crafted character studies, if stunningly dated in some ways (sexism, other prejudices) that soften as the series goes on. And the author's misconception of how Americans speak, in the earlier books, is unintentionally amusing, in the style of Alistair Cooke's America's child's garden of misconceptions. By the later books, the British characters talk like American TV characters. Talk about cultural imperialism.

The greatest strength of these novels is variety of points of view: nearly every one is told from the inner perspective of a different character, even though the character might appear in several of the books. There is a central character who's sometimes center stage but often only in the wings. The series demonstrates how to build up a character study in depth from the thoughts and words of many people who work with him.

[Jeff Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the most underrated writer of espionage, Anthony Price pulls another priceless story of skullduggery where an aging David Audley still remains the master of the dark arts of spying. Once again Price provides a wordy and complex plot which nobody knows who's side they are on before the final page of the book.

[Mark Baines · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sluggish, not thrilling. Complicated and layered with little action or intrigue. There is much in the machinations and thought process as well as relating the current events to 11th century history and castles, which interesting as it was was a long winded allegory. “Move over Smiley, Audley is here”; I think not. Not a patch on Le Carre’s taut style.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this for £1 in a charity shop, a nice BCA copy. Mostly because it’s set on Exmoor, near where I live, though a fictionalised version.
It is probably my fifth Audley novel. I don’t believe that they are all recorded here. It’s not the best, some way off the best of them.
There’s too little plot & not enough character development. Audley remains a know all & believes himself justified by events. With all respect, it takes a better class of writer to spin a tale of anecdotal conversation.
The plot is thin and outside the context of the cold war does it matter that KGB agents are shooting each other, even in the UK. The story itself may have served as the basis for an episode of the TV series, ‘The Professionals’.
Smiley it is not. The only real comparison to Le Carré’s circus is the rank incompetence of the protagonists and not the language use.
This was hard to finish, given the amount of books I have been given to read, and if not for the Exmoor connection I may not have made it.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good for fans of the series. History lesson on Poland.

[Beth Friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually read via the Audible audiobook, but no Goodreads listing for that. Internal politics (with Audley set up to fail) and our old friend Panin, seen through the eyes of another agent. The twist with the romance is the least believable part of the story (that she turns out to be a CIA agent), but oh, well.