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Quiller #4
The Warsaw Document
"The deadline was close and I knew now what London had sent me out here to do: define, infiltrate and destroy. And I couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the program Moscow was running. I'd have to get inside and blow it up from there."
Across the black snowscape of Poland's capital, a city where winter is more than a season, falls the shadow of a British Intelligence operation designed to save detente from explosion--an operation that pivots on an agent callously thrown into the front line of the Cold War and caught in the crossfire.
"Entertainment of the first rank." (The Guardian, London)
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
18 people are currently reading
163 people want to read
About the author
Adam Hall
157 books99 followersAuthor also wrote as Elleston Trevor.
Author Trevor Dudley-Smith was born in Kent, England on February 17, 1920. He attended Yardley Court Preparatory School and Sevenoaks School. During World War II, he served in the Royal Air Force as a flight engineer. After the war, he started writing full-time. He lived in Spain and France before moving to the United States and settling in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1946 he used the pseudonym Elleston Trevor for a non-mystery book, and later made it his legal name. He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Adam Hall, Simon Rattray, Mansell Black, Trevor Burgess, Roger Fitzalan, Howard North, Warwick Scott, Caesar Smith, and Lesley Stone. Even though he wrote thrillers, mysteries, plays, juvenile novels, and short stories, his best-known works are The Flight of the Phoenix written as Elleston Trevor and the series about British secret agent Quiller written as Adam Hall. In 1965, he received the Edgar Allan Poe Award by Mystery Writers of America and the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for The Quiller Memorandum. This book was made into a 1967 movie starring George Segal and Alec Guinness. He died of cancer on July 21, 1995.
Author Trevor Dudley-Smith was born in Kent, England on February 17, 1920. He attended Yardley Court Preparatory School and Sevenoaks School. During World War II, he served in the Royal Air Force as a flight engineer. After the war, he started writing full-time. He lived in Spain and France before moving to the United States and settling in Phoenix, Arizona. In 1946 he used the pseudonym Elleston Trevor for a non-mystery book, and later made it his legal name. He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Adam Hall, Simon Rattray, Mansell Black, Trevor Burgess, Roger Fitzalan, Howard North, Warwick Scott, Caesar Smith, and Lesley Stone. Even though he wrote thrillers, mysteries, plays, juvenile novels, and short stories, his best-known works are The Flight of the Phoenix written as Elleston Trevor and the series about British secret agent Quiller written as Adam Hall. In 1965, he received the Edgar Allan Poe Award by Mystery Writers of America and the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for The Quiller Memorandum. This book was made into a 1967 movie starring George Segal and Alec Guinness. He died of cancer on July 21, 1995.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 19, 2020
The fourth Quiller book is a model of its kind. It is a tense spy novel. It is also an exciting exploration of Quiller's world (see pages 21 and 22 for Quiller's description of what espionage is really about) and pits Quiller directly against the Soviet occupiers of Poland. He works for a branch of British intelligence (the Bureau) that is not known to the public, though the KGB has reason to know about it, Quiller in particular. He is a ferret: an agent sent into the Red Sector to carry out dangerous secret missions, and he relishes living on the edge. Hall is quite good at describing both tradecraft and the mindset behind it. (His description of the Mission-think of agents explains a lot about the nature of the dangerous trade.) I have read all 19 of the Quiller novels, and will read them for a third time each if my luck holds.
July 26, 2019
I loved the first two novels in the Quiller series, thought the third was okay, but really didn't enjoy this one.
Quiller's character and the way he views people and situations are totally engrossing. You really feel like you're inside a spy's mind and it comes off as extremely authentic.
The darkness of the spy world, too, feels real and very well thought out.
However, I found this story extremely slow, plodding and hard to get into. Plus, one of Quiller's early lines of enquiry just seemed to be pulled out of the air, with no suggestion of how he got information.
Worst of all are the action/chase sequences. During these, the author seems to abandon commas and full stops. They are very hard to read and digest - sometimes it's necessary to re-read, which is very frustrating. Action sequences should flow fast, be clear and entertain. Put some of the author's paragraphs into a grammar-checker like ProWritingAid and the poor program might actually self-destruct!
Novel lacks the polish and pace to keep me hooked.
It will be a long time before I try another Quiller novel - sadly, since I love the character!
Quiller's character and the way he views people and situations are totally engrossing. You really feel like you're inside a spy's mind and it comes off as extremely authentic.
The darkness of the spy world, too, feels real and very well thought out.
However, I found this story extremely slow, plodding and hard to get into. Plus, one of Quiller's early lines of enquiry just seemed to be pulled out of the air, with no suggestion of how he got information.
Worst of all are the action/chase sequences. During these, the author seems to abandon commas and full stops. They are very hard to read and digest - sometimes it's necessary to re-read, which is very frustrating. Action sequences should flow fast, be clear and entertain. Put some of the author's paragraphs into a grammar-checker like ProWritingAid and the poor program might actually self-destruct!
Novel lacks the polish and pace to keep me hooked.
It will be a long time before I try another Quiller novel - sadly, since I love the character!
February 17, 2018
My first run in with Adam Hall's secret agent Quiller. I thought it was a very good spy thriller, well written and plotted. It took me a while to get used to the style of writing which is quite unlike other spy thrillers that I have read. At times it is almost stream of consciousness, and I have to admit that I got slightly lost on a couple of occasions while reading the novel. But there were several truly exciting passages to hooked my right back in again. The best of these was when Quiller is on the run in a railway station. The scene in which he hides from police in a washroom was thrilling. All round a first class spy novel and a series that I'll definitely be returning to.
April 27, 2016
A rock-solid espionage novel that stands the test of time. H Hall brilliantly captures the cold and depression of Soviet-dominated Warsaw. Tension is sustained throughout the book, but the real highlight comes two-thirds the way through the novel when Quiller enters Warsaw Station. Easily one of the best suspense/action scenes ever written. Not to be missed.
April 2, 2025
"The Warsaw Document" is the 4th journey into the world of Agent Quiller. Quiller is hard, Quiller is grim, and the world he moves through is as hard as grim as can be. To make things more interesting Quiller is always unarmed, therefore his intelligence becomes the only weapon.
The plot opens with Quiller being called in for a delicate operation that most have refused to undertake in Poland. With the cold war raging, the deadline was close and he knew what London had sent him out there to do: define, infiltrate and destroy. And he couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the program Moscow was running. He'd have to get inside and blow it up from there. Across the black snowscape of Poland's capital, a city where winter is more than a season, falls the shadow of a British Intelligence operation designed to save detente from explosion-an operation that pivots on an agent callously thrown into the front line of the Cold War and caught in the crossfire.
This time around, it’s a battle of survival along with infiltrating the rebellion in Poland while dodging the cruel machinery of the KGB at the same time. This one is a very fast read. There is no wasted verbiage and everything is right to the point. Quiller is a spy who is just one man, finding dirty secrets in a dirty world at great personal cost. He does what he does for reason which he can’t even explain to himself but desperately tries to rationalize the enormous risks taken. Quiller, unfortunately does not fight his way through with technology toys and beautiful women in his bed. Quiller is unsentimental, straightforward and realistic. His adventures are not an escapist’s fare.
Keeping true to the essence of the Quiller series, this adventure is also full of intricacies, psychological insights into behavioral patterns leading to actions based on deductions and sound reasoning.
"The Warsaw Document" continues to be an old school intelligence where the mind is the only effective weapon against the adversary. Quiller, yet again, takes us through this intelligent journey where we get to see how he gathers intelligence; how he plays various scenarios to improvise, adapt and survive; how he exposes himself as bait and how he manages to pull off a failed mission into success at the last minute.
This is yet again a great intelligence novel that should be in the collection of the "espionage fan".
The plot opens with Quiller being called in for a delicate operation that most have refused to undertake in Poland. With the cold war raging, the deadline was close and he knew what London had sent him out there to do: define, infiltrate and destroy. And he couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the program Moscow was running. He'd have to get inside and blow it up from there. Across the black snowscape of Poland's capital, a city where winter is more than a season, falls the shadow of a British Intelligence operation designed to save detente from explosion-an operation that pivots on an agent callously thrown into the front line of the Cold War and caught in the crossfire.
This time around, it’s a battle of survival along with infiltrating the rebellion in Poland while dodging the cruel machinery of the KGB at the same time. This one is a very fast read. There is no wasted verbiage and everything is right to the point. Quiller is a spy who is just one man, finding dirty secrets in a dirty world at great personal cost. He does what he does for reason which he can’t even explain to himself but desperately tries to rationalize the enormous risks taken. Quiller, unfortunately does not fight his way through with technology toys and beautiful women in his bed. Quiller is unsentimental, straightforward and realistic. His adventures are not an escapist’s fare.
Keeping true to the essence of the Quiller series, this adventure is also full of intricacies, psychological insights into behavioral patterns leading to actions based on deductions and sound reasoning.
"The Warsaw Document" continues to be an old school intelligence where the mind is the only effective weapon against the adversary. Quiller, yet again, takes us through this intelligent journey where we get to see how he gathers intelligence; how he plays various scenarios to improvise, adapt and survive; how he exposes himself as bait and how he manages to pull off a failed mission into success at the last minute.
This is yet again a great intelligence novel that should be in the collection of the "espionage fan".
September 26, 2022
Very good but not quite great Quiller. As the title implies, Quiller is behind the Iron Curtain and, for this reader, that is when he's at his best. Quiller (and the novels) excel when the restraints on his motion and behavior are tightest; there's something faintly absurd about the few times Quiller finds himself in the United States.
A terrific part of "The Warsaw Document" is when Quiller is in the Warsaw train station, trying to ditch several "tags," his word for people following. He knows they have put him in a box, and, typically, he figures things out down to the point where the train station is one of the few surfaces in Warsaw where snow and ice won't be a factor against him. The tags, however, surround him:
"Two at each main entrance, two splitting up and bracketing the cafeteria blind spot, two going down to the ticket barriers at three and nine o'clock from center, all minor exits covered. This wasn't a box. It was a net. These were elite Muscovites, trained till they ticked like a clock; they may have been in force to this extent round the Hotel Kuznia or held back in reserve until the movement report had gone in. The thing was that within ten paces of the entrance where I'd come in they'd deprived me of visual cover. Their specialized field overlapped a neighboring discipline: the observation of V.I.P.s in public places; the two jobs had various factors in common and the chief of these was geometry: they moved to their stations as if instructed by the computed findings of compass and protractor; they knew the distance I'd have to go before the island cafeteria obscured me from points A and B, the angle subtended by the view of C and D, the sector through which I could move under observations from E, F and G before the A and B zones picked me up again.
"They didn't see the cafeteria or the bookstall or the ticket-gates: they saw vectors, diagonals, tangents. It amounted to this: if each man were a spotlight I would have no shadow."
I love the depth of Quiller's thinking there, his nitty-gritty. For me, that's the best Quiller.
"The Warsaw Document" was published in 1971 when Quiller was still young and it seems pretty obvious the character Foster - a former high-ranking British spook based in London who turned out to be the KGB's man and has defected via boat on the edge of being captured - is based on Kim Philby. I don't mind Adam Hall using a character like that, but I'd have liked the conversations between Foster and Quiller to have been different, less of the "old boy" and who's an "Etonian" and rather cliched. I know Hall is British and his Quiller is, too, and no doubt some of the give-and-take between two high level British spies who find themselves together in Warsaw would have been "typical," so to speak. It's just that I want more out of Foster every time and I don't get it.
Obviously "The Warsaw Document" is much better than average espionage fiction - all Quiller novels are. I'd probably rank it 6th or so on the Quiller list, however. Must read for Quiller fans; not the first one for those new to the superspy.
A terrific part of "The Warsaw Document" is when Quiller is in the Warsaw train station, trying to ditch several "tags," his word for people following. He knows they have put him in a box, and, typically, he figures things out down to the point where the train station is one of the few surfaces in Warsaw where snow and ice won't be a factor against him. The tags, however, surround him:
"Two at each main entrance, two splitting up and bracketing the cafeteria blind spot, two going down to the ticket barriers at three and nine o'clock from center, all minor exits covered. This wasn't a box. It was a net. These were elite Muscovites, trained till they ticked like a clock; they may have been in force to this extent round the Hotel Kuznia or held back in reserve until the movement report had gone in. The thing was that within ten paces of the entrance where I'd come in they'd deprived me of visual cover. Their specialized field overlapped a neighboring discipline: the observation of V.I.P.s in public places; the two jobs had various factors in common and the chief of these was geometry: they moved to their stations as if instructed by the computed findings of compass and protractor; they knew the distance I'd have to go before the island cafeteria obscured me from points A and B, the angle subtended by the view of C and D, the sector through which I could move under observations from E, F and G before the A and B zones picked me up again.
"They didn't see the cafeteria or the bookstall or the ticket-gates: they saw vectors, diagonals, tangents. It amounted to this: if each man were a spotlight I would have no shadow."
I love the depth of Quiller's thinking there, his nitty-gritty. For me, that's the best Quiller.
"The Warsaw Document" was published in 1971 when Quiller was still young and it seems pretty obvious the character Foster - a former high-ranking British spook based in London who turned out to be the KGB's man and has defected via boat on the edge of being captured - is based on Kim Philby. I don't mind Adam Hall using a character like that, but I'd have liked the conversations between Foster and Quiller to have been different, less of the "old boy" and who's an "Etonian" and rather cliched. I know Hall is British and his Quiller is, too, and no doubt some of the give-and-take between two high level British spies who find themselves together in Warsaw would have been "typical," so to speak. It's just that I want more out of Foster every time and I don't get it.
Obviously "The Warsaw Document" is much better than average espionage fiction - all Quiller novels are. I'd probably rank it 6th or so on the Quiller list, however. Must read for Quiller fans; not the first one for those new to the superspy.
March 16, 2024
Цикл про агента Квиллера, уверенно погружавшийся в клюквенную клоунаду, внезапно посерьезнел и «Варшавский документ» оказался вполне на уровне лучших шпионских вещей Дейтона.
Завязка не обещает ничего интересного — Квиллера командируют в Польшу, присматривать за молодым неопытным дипломатом, поскольку со дня на день в Варшаве начнутся большие переговоры СССР со странами Запада, и ни тем, ни другим абсолютно не нужны провокации и несчастные случаи.
Но, в традициях жанра, рутинное задание быстро превращается в абсолютный апокалипсис с заговорами внутри заговоров, с революционным подпольем, с терактами, погонями, похищениями, с двойными и тройными предательствами, с шифрованными телеграммами и прочими обязательными атрибутами жанра. Написано прекрасным языком, реалистично, психологично. Сцена ухода от слежки на варшавском вокзале, считаю, вообще одна из лучших в истории жанра.
Не обошлось, конечно, и без ложки клюквы в бочке меда — жизнь за Железным занавесом, по мнению автора, напоминает самые страшные эпизоды фашистской оккупации. В Варшаве постоянно зима, ночь, холод и голод, по улицам ковыляют страдающие люди с ничего не выражающими лицами, а если кто ускорил шаг или, не дай бог, рассмеялся, тут же подойдет суровый советский патруль и попросит предъявить dokumenty, и если окажется, что ты вышел из дома без dokumenty, то моментально окажешься в поезде без окон, едущем в gulag, а то могут и сразу поставить k stenke. А в одной особо трогательной сцене Квиллер идет по улице и видит, как оголодавшие дети радостно несут домой околевшую от голода дворнягу. В общем, в семидесятые жизнь в советских странах была страшнее, чем в Освенциме.
Но если перетерпеть этот аспект, то перед нами очень, очень хороший шпионски-политический роман времен Холодной войны.
Завязка не обещает ничего интересного — Квиллера командируют в Польшу, присматривать за молодым неопытным дипломатом, поскольку со дня на день в Варшаве начнутся большие переговоры СССР со странами Запада, и ни тем, ни другим абсолютно не нужны провокации и несчастные случаи.
Но, в традициях жанра, рутинное задание быстро превращается в абсолютный апокалипсис с заговорами внутри заговоров, с революционным подпольем, с терактами, погонями, похищениями, с двойными и тройными предательствами, с шифрованными телеграммами и прочими обязательными атрибутами жанра. Написано прекрасным языком, реалистично, психологично. Сцена ухода от слежки на варшавском вокзале, считаю, вообще одна из лучших в истории жанра.
Не обошлось, конечно, и без ложки клюквы в бочке меда — жизнь за Железным занавесом, по мнению автора, напоминает самые страшные эпизоды фашистской оккупации. В Варшаве постоянно зима, ночь, холод и голод, по улицам ковыляют страдающие люди с ничего не выражающими лицами, а если кто ускорил шаг или, не дай бог, рассмеялся, тут же подойдет суровый советский патруль и попросит предъявить dokumenty, и если окажется, что ты вышел из дома без dokumenty, то моментально окажешься в поезде без окон, едущем в gulag, а то могут и сразу поставить k stenke. А в одной особо трогательной сцене Квиллер идет по улице и видит, как оголодавшие дети радостно несут домой околевшую от голода дворнягу. В общем, в семидесятые жизнь в советских странах была страшнее, чем в Освенциме.
Но если перетерпеть этот аспект, то перед нами очень, очень хороший шпионски-политический роман времен Холодной войны.
June 26, 2024
I've made it through the series to this point, at which point I gave up 31% through the book. I'm reading it in electronic format which may explain the problem. It just seems to me that when they converted the book to electronic format, that they deleted the first page of each chapter. One sentence he's in his hotel room, the next sentence he's walking along some random street talking to "him". Considering how many male characters there are in the book, I have no idea who "him" is. Characters just seem to come and go at random intervals - no appearance, no resolution, just disappearance. In addition, it seems like someone decided to replace every other period with a semi colon creating an incredible amount of run on sentences; which certainly does not help with the flow. I've learned way more than I ever wanted to know about how to be a spy. Of the complaints above, each successive book has gotten worse. I will not be continuing with the series.
February 3, 2024
A classic Cold War espionage novel. It starts slow and goes on that way for some time as all the pieces are moved around the board and slotted into position. The narrative voice is slightly vague and abstract too, hopping around as the hero's thoughts do. However, the latter stages, the last third or so, really spring to life, as the danger grows so does the tension.
A pretty satisfactory read all told.
A pretty satisfactory read all told.
July 19, 2021
My first Quiller book and was hooked - As I've been to Communist countries a few times and know a bit about Poland, this was a good starting point for me, although I saw the Quiller memorandum film when it came out. I like the pace and the twists and understanding of the 'Soviet' mindset.
January 11, 2018
The Warsaw Document is a fine thriller filled with ice, snow, and plenty of duplicitous Eastern bloc Cold War atmosphere.
May 13, 2012
I worry, when I reread l loved book, that my initial opinion was colored by some factor other than the story itself. The Quiller spy thrillers are easily passing the tests of time and vague remembrance. The stories are complex, multilayered, and exciting, and take off in unexpected directions. The only certainty is that things are not always what they seem.
November 21, 2015
Quiller in Warsaw in winter amid rumblings of an anti-Soviet uprising. Quiller’s mission is to “save détente”, which looks like a rather dubious objective in retrospect. Unusually good settings and characters.
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October 14, 2008A Hal
September 2, 2014
Thrilling and as full of danger and intrigue as ever, but I did not like the mission this time, it seemed a little unworthy of "the bureau".
March 11, 2015
Good Quiller story, a dry operator
November 27, 2015
3.5 stars. As always, Hall's prose, plot, mystery, etc. are great but the ending I found quite unsatisfying.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews