Yesterday's Enemy

by William Haggard, Simon Harvester

Colonel Charles Russell, lately Head of the Security Executive, returns to action when he learns of the probable nuclear acquisitions of a deposed South American dictator and his aide, who seeks revenge against those who killed his family in Hiroshima

204 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1983

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

[Alonzo Church · Rating 3 out of 5]

Col. Charles Russell (Ret.) gets word of a potential threat to the delicate Cold War balance that could result in Armageddon. A Hiroshima survivor wants revenge for the A-Bombing of his family, and now,
30 years later, thinks he has a plan. The US may be Yesterday’s Enemy to his country, but he has a plan to convert the beacon of freedom to a pile of radioactive ash. Can the Col, working with a defrocked Latin American dictator with a hyperactive libido, and a beautiful spy for the other side, keep the world safe just a little while longer?

What starts as a rather rote Cold War thriller gets better as it goes along, once we learn to like the rather unlikely crew that has to save the world and the rather clever plot hatched by the villain. A somewhat weak ending keeps this from being a must read.