Slow Burner: A classic espionage thriller

by William Haggard

‘Here at last we have an adult Ian Fleming’ – Sunday Express

For British spymaster, Colonel Russell, the Cold War is about to get hotter.

When plans for a new and highly-innovative form of nuclear energy are stolen it falls to Russell’s Security Executive to retrieve them before the secrets of Slow Burner are leaked to Britain’s enemies.

But as Russell discovers, the enemy within can be more dangerous than any foreign adversary.

Tense, pacy, intelligent and atmospheric, Slow Burner is the first in William Haggard’s Colonel Russell series of hugely acclaimed Cold War thrillers – now available in digital version for the first time.

For fans of Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Charles Cumming and Frederick Forsyth.

‘Thoroughly recommended’ – Observer

‘Could hardly be bettered’ – New Statesman

‘Very good and very intelligent, spy and political fiction. Plot, pace, suspense and set-piece action without flaw’ – Independent

‘Utterly compelling. . . like reading a Bond from M’s viewpoint’ – HF magazine

170 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 14, 2016

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.