cool breeze’s Comments (group member since Apr 20, 2015)

cool breeze’s comments from the Espionage Aficionados group.

I just finished Mick Herron's new novel, The Secret Hours. It is a standalone novel, but set in his Slow Horses world. I think it is the best new spy thriller I have read since le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017). My full review is at this link.

Ben wrote: "This work is... a proposed road map that seeks to avoid 'the Thucydides Trap' of a slide to war between a 'great power' and an emerging rival."

As I recall, Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace is an excellent examination of this issue from Athens/Sparta to Rome/Carthage, Britain/Germany, and US/USSR. I think he suggested that West/China was probably next, but there wasn't enough material for a historian like Kagan to get into any detail at the time it was published in 1996. In any case, he felt the lessons to be learned from earlier examples were timeless and generally applicable, though often sadly neglected with catastrophic consequences.

Len Deighton is still alive at 93 and still has veto rights over any re-release of the miniseries after the original broadcast. He is also apparently still bitter about the short Sir Ian Holm being cast as Bernard Samson, so he has continually blackballed re-release in any form.

Since Deighton has made it impossible to pay for a legitimate copy, I have no qualms in noting that it has often been available as a torrent on various sites. So, the current options are 1) get it as a torrent or 2) wait for Deighton to die and hope his estate reconsiders. However, Deighton appears bitter enough to have left instructions in his will barring this.

Feliks, since it sounds like you are Jonesing for some more Bernard Samson, why don't you finish reading the series, or at least resume it? I think there are seven books in the series that you haven't read yet. Most are very good, 4 stars. Hook (#4) and Winter (the prequel) are only 3 stars, but Sinker (#6) is close to 5 stars. Except for the prequel, they should be read in order, so don't skip ahead to Sinker.

So, who is the locked room ninja? I don't think it is Quiller or Nicholai Hel from Shibumi.

Congratulations, Susan! The Tango Briefing is correct. So, my guess for the locked room spy was Quiller. It sort of sounds like him, but I can't recall a specific scene or novel with that scenario.

I thought The Tango Briefing was very good (I also rated it four stars), but I thought surviving a nuke at 485 meters was over the top. Between the heat, blast (shockwave, oxygen depletion) and radiation I don't think a rock is really going to make it survivable at that distance.

None of the above. I am holding off on giving the answer in case the same spy is the answer to your original locked room question. When you are ready to give up on the suitcase nuke, I will provide my guess (which I think is wrong, but is the same spy) on the locked room.

Nope. Another hint: the same novel features a nerve gas with psychotic effects.

Feliks, you have read the suitcase nuke book, and rated it four stars. But it is not one of your guesses.

I am not sure I know that one. My best guess is that it was the same spy who survived a suitcase nuke detonation by scrambling behind a rock 485 meters away. Yeah, sure...

Extra credit: who was the spy who supposedly survived the suitcase nuke and what was the novel?

So, who is the fictional spy with the code name Cicero?

Archimedes was a character in Charles McCarry's fine 1995 novel Shelley's Heart, about a stolen presidential election.

The rock star is tough. Joe Strummer's father was in the British foreign service, but I don't think he has ever been acknowledged as a spy. Police drummer Stewart Copeland's dad was CIA. Ian Hunter's dad was MI5, but I don't consider him "high-powered". Olivia Newton-John's dad was MI5, but few would consider her "rock".

Maybe someone else will get it. Extra credit: who were the sixth, seventh and eighth men in the Cambridge spies? 🤣

I saw you write on another thread that you are a "strictly nonfiction reader these days". So here are a couple more nonfiction recommendations I think you'll like:

The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia. Nonfiction about real-life spies that reads like a gripping thriller

The White Nile. More about explorers than spies, sometimes a small distinction

And you might enjoy this collection of short essays if you are in a curmudgeonly mood: Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses. If you don't like it, you can pitch it after a few essays; they are only a few pages each.

You should be able to get any of those from the library without depleting the Dzerzhinsky treasury.

Not evolutionary change, poor childhood nutrition, what with WW I, the Great Depression and WW II. The average limey bloke is now at least 5'-9".

Anyway, Deighton's Bernard Samson series was complete in 1996 and the rest of the novels are waiting for you, if you ever feel so inclined. Just trying to suggest something I think you would enjoy in repayment for your good tips over the years, most recently Fast One.

In the opening title scene, Holm only comes halfway up the height of truck grille behind him. Of course, 5'-5" was an average height for a British man in those years. I agree he did a fine job.

I think you are really missing out on some great espionage novels by not trying the next three in the series, but "you can lead a horse to water..."

Archimedes is in a book by a major espionage novelist. Goodreads shows you have read four of his books, but not this one. We will see if someone else gets it.

The Ian Holm mini-series was rare because 6-foot-plus tall Deighton reportedly hated the casting of 5'-5" Holm as Bernard Samson and refused to allow any rebroadcast or redistribution.

I don’t think I know a fictional spy with the code name Cicero (there was a real one).

For extra credit, how about a mole named Archimedes?

Brahms Four was an agent in Berlin Game, but the series is more than a trilogy. It is actually 10 books, including a prequel (https://www.goodreads.com/series/6559...). In my opinion, all but #4 and the prequel are solid 4-star espionage classics (and those two are 3 stars).

The first three books were made into a fine miniseries starring Ian Holm as Bernard Samson. You can find it on YouTube with a search on "Berlin Game" or "Game Set & Match".

I think the difficulty is good, so I am providing only a hint, not the answer: the main overall storyline is retold from the point of view of the central mole in a later book in the series.

Feliks, I still think you are missing some real treats by not continuing your reading of the series.

Stacey,

Feliks has it right - political correctness and cancel culture are hot button issues for me. The cancelers try to get people fired from their jobs, ruin their businesses, deplatform/silence their speech and ban their books. It is a plague.

Amazon has banned a number of books due to flagging. Considering their dominant position in book sales, it is the modern equivalent of book burning, or the secret police busting up the printing equipment in a raid.

Feliks wrote: "Bunch of frightened little nannies grabbing their skirts and perching on a stool when they spy a mouse on the floor.

Men and women both! Makes me puke."

Hear! Hear! The same goes for all political correctness, which is just about everything these days.

Sherlock Holmes, in The Sign of Four says, “Women are never to be entirely trusted – not the best of them.” So what? There is a school of thought that holds that Sherlock was a woman, the evidence including (view spoiler)[that his face showed no trace of stubble after hiding out on the moor for days with no means to shave (hide spoiler)] in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

One might as usefully ask, “is romance or feminist writing 'male friendly'?” It overwhelmingly is not, but again, so what?

Wanting to “flag”/cancel/censor anything because in your personal opinion it is "inappropriate” is reprehensible. Don't be a Karen! If you don’t like a book, give it a bad rating, and/or leave a thoughtful review explaining your issues with it and let that speak for itself.

McCarry's Shelley's Heart (1995) eerily anticipated some of the events of the 2020 election, 25 year beforehand. It was on National Review's list of "Ten Great Conservative Novels" (their list included books written since 1950 and was published in 2010, before National Review became completely cosplay conservative). Even left-wing NPR put the book on its 2004 list of "Best in Political Fiction". The lists have some interesting overlap, Advise and Consent being the other.

My personal favorite is still the roman à clef The Spike, which is non-fiction with the names of the guilty changed to forestall libel lawsuits (some happened anyway). Since it was published in 1980, before Al Gore "invented the internet", I did a first draft at creating an internet version of a key, or clef, to the real names of the guilty parties, who include Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Frank Church. The key is available on goodreads at the end of the book listing in the discussion section. Several other people have contributed identifications, confirmations and corrections to the discussion, but we are still not completely sure about a few characters, including the woman that Feliks described as an "outrageous nymphomaniac" (best current assessment: French actress and journalist Claude Sarraute, the second wife of Jean-François Revel), so please take a look and contribute any thoughts you might have to the discussion.

The Spike is even more fun to the read with the key to know which of the real-life people were stone cold traitors / committed communists, which were compromised / blackmailed traitors, which were fellow travellers / "useful idiots", and which were in it for pure graft, treason-on-demand for a fee, which always includes "10% for the big guy".