The Antagonists

by William Haggard, Tony Evans (Cover design)

Starring Col Charles Russell

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

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

[Nicholas George · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a well-written--yet dated--60s Cold War saga of a scientist from an unnamed Soviet bloc country coming to the U.K. for a conference and becoming embroiled in a web of 'antagonists' who want to use him for their own purposes. The plot is complex and it was difficult to keep everyone's allegiance straight. Perhaps it would have been more gripping if it were less generic and more current.

[Surly Gliffs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this one up for four bucks at Time Bomb Vintage. Haggard poses as a master of spy intrigue, aided by the gushing blurb on the cover from the New York Time Book Review ("as delicate and deadly as a spider's web"). Just to let us know how hush-hush all this is, Haggard also deploys various code phrases: the "Confederate Republic" for Yugoslavia, the "Security Executive" for MI5. Entities like the CIA and the Soviet Union are risky enough that they're named only by euphemism or not at all.

The plot manages to lack both direction and plausibility. The Russian double agent unwisely doubles back and uncritically calls his handlers on a tapped phone; the Yugoslav scientist has encephalopathy and an inane bout of jungle fever. There's a single woman in the story, a communist sympathizer contemptuously branded both stupid and unattractive, who does little more than stitch a wound and mutely observe plot beats. At the end, Haggard doubles down on the sexism, punishing two "antagonists" by forcing them to marry.

There's some entertainment to be had from the action and the Cold War intrigue. But besides one lucky gunshot, there's nothing particularly delicate or deadly about this tale. Recommended strictly for students of clumsy Cold War spy thrillers.