QUILLER BALALAIKA - Book review

Sadly, Balalaika is the last Quiller novel (published 1996). Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor) died the day after he finished it, in July 1995.

It’s contemporary: following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian mafiya is poised to take over the new Russia by destroying the country’s economy. The man responsible and capable of achieving this is a British Moscow-based national, a defector from the Foreign Office, who escaped the country and was given the rank of Colonel in the KGB. ‘His name is Basil Secker, and he uses the Russian alias of Vasyl Sakkas’ (p11). Sakkas is elusive and powerful. Quiller’s mission – Balalaika – is to infiltrate the mafiya and then find and neutralise Sakkas in some manner.

Briefed by Chief of Signals Croder, Quiller is made aware that this is a dangerous ask, with poor chance of success. Quiller requires Ferris as his director in the field; this is so important, that Ferris will be pulled off the Rickshaw mission in China.

As before, Quiller shuns the use of any gun. He is adept at unarmed combat, delivering death when his life is threatened or the mission is at risk of collapsing.

All the style of the previous novels is here displayed at the hands of a 75-year-old thriller writer at the top of his game: the usual spare prose, the stream-of-consciousness writing, the extensive scene of hand-to-hand combat (subsequently employed by Lee Child, among others), and his continual argument with his pain-averse conscience, often referring to himself as ‘the little ferret’.

‘It was eight days since Ferris had been ordered out of the field and by now the lights would be switched off over the board, either that or a new mission would already be set up there with data coming in from the director in Algeria or Baghdad or Beijing, while Mr Croder shut himself up in his tempered-steel shell to consider whether or not to resign, how much guilt to feel for the little ferret he’d left running in circles through the snow, or whether he could hold out a spider’s-thread hope for an eleventh-hour last-ditch breakthrough for the mission, knowing as he did the blind tenacity of said ferret when the jaws of adversity gaped from the shadows of the labyrinth’ (p232).

The breathless climax in wintry Moscow is fitting, another Hall-mark fast-paced ending.

‘That’s it.’ So the author finished his last book. There’s a poignant four-page Afterword contribution by Jean-Pierre Trevor, his son.

Editorial notes:

Combat

In two places Hall mentions hitting the nose with force, driving the bone into the brain and causing instant death. However, when researching my recent  Leon Cazador novel No Prisoners, I learned that this is probably not so: ‘Next instant, Leon deployed the ninja Fudo-ken, the clenched fist slamming full into the man’s nose, shattering the bone structure. While the bone and cartilage probably wouldn’t penetrate his perverted brain, the blow would undoubtedly cause subdural hematoma which was bound to deny the brain adequate blood flow. As a result, a biochemical cascade was in all likelihood happening right now as Leon dispassionately watched. Brain cell death was imminent. No great loss to humanity.’

Chapter titles

The single-word chapter headings were not always evident. In The Quiller Memorandum of the 23 chapters only 12 are single words; interestingly Ch3 is ‘Snow’ and in Balalaika Ch1 is ‘Snow’.

His fourth Quiller (The Warsaw Document) is the first with the consistent use of single-word chapter headings. There is only one other exception, in Quiller’s Run, with 11 of 32 being two-word titles, one of them being ‘Pink Panties’!

Certainly, inevitably, as mentioned already, some chapter headings will be repeated, not least ‘Midnight’.

Why mention this? For my Tana Standish psychic spy novels I adopted Adam Hall’s penchant for single-word chapter titles (Mission: Prague, Mission: Tehran, and Mission: Khyber). In contrast, my Leon Cazador novels have two-word chapter headings (Rogue Prey, No Prisoners, and Organ Symphony).

See also: WRITEALOT: Book review - Quiller: A profile and Bury Him Among Kings (nik-writealot.blogspot.com)

Book appraisal - MAKE ME

Lee Child’s twentieth Jack Reacher novel Make Me (2015) offers more of what his millions of readers have come to expect.

It begins with the clandestine burial of a guy called Keever, which is momentarily disturbed by the passing of a delayed night train, which is significant…

Reacher has dropped off at a one-horse town called Mother’s Rest. He’s merely curious how the place got its name, so stopped for an overnight stay to find out; he doesn’t get to know until p491; in the meantime, he meets retired FBI special agent Michelle Chang and learns she’s now running a private investigation business and is the backup called in by her associated Keever...

The pair hit it off and Reacher becomes intrigued by the apparent disappearance of Keever.

Their enquiries seem to upset some locals who object to their presence. Reacher’s first set-piece of violence (p92) deters two of them effectively. Chang and Reacher’s investigation takes them beyond the town (to Oklahoma City, Los Angeles and Chicago) and delves into the unpleasant depths of the internet, where lurks the dark side of human nature.

The pace begins in a leisurely fashion and gradually picks up until the set-piece denouement.

Child has a legion of fans because he writes page-turning stories that pull you in, and this book is no exception. It’s a fast read.

Many fellow writers are not fans of his books – for a number of reasons, not least perhaps because he isn’t ‘literary’ and uses simple vocabulary. [Reacher went and took a shower’ (p68)]. He’s not averse to repeating words in the same paragraph or page. He describes at great length places and buildings that have very little relevance to the storyline or scenes in the plot.

His book titles are often quite odd, too: Make Me is a good example. The only place I found those words was on p54: ‘Plus he calibrated it to make me younger than I am.’ The words may have popped up elsewhere. The meaning can be either ‘force me, if you can’ or ‘you have identified me’ – perhaps!

He’s good at dialogue. There can be pages of it, and not that many cues to signify who is speaking because it’s obvious in the context of what is being said.  When he does employ a speech attribution it is mostly ‘he said’ – Reacher paused a beat and said, ‘Who exactly are you?’ Or: Reacher said, ‘That’s you?’  Occasionally, he varies this: ‘Interesting,’ Reacher said. He doesn’t bother with alternatives to ‘said’ and it works just fine for him and, clearly, his readers.

He injects humour. ‘It’s going to be like picking a lock with spaghetti.’ (p162)

He doesn’t use f-words, settling for ‘bullshit’ most of the time. By doing this he probably alienates some readers who prefer more ‘realism’; yet this is fiction and escapism, so these thrillers don’t have to employ gutter language to strengthen the story. Indeed, he probably gains readership because he doesn’t have his characters ‘effing’ at all and sundry.

He’s good at confrontation and fight scenes. Tension is raised and details are dispensed for what might take only a few seconds but in slow-time seem longer as the words pour out. It is remarkable what can pass in the mind in a fraction of a second at heightened awareness, and he manages to convey this very efficiently on several occasions. Adam Hall’s secret agent Quiller would treat combat in a similar analytical vein.

He’s a master at cranking up the tension in a scene:

‘I’m getting impatient here.’

Wet lips.

Moving eyes.

Urgent.

No response.

Then Reacher… (pp334/335) Very filmic.

So, whatever Child’s perceived faults, his phenomenal success suggests that he has captured that elusive readability trait other writers hanker after.  

Editorial comment

More than once Child writes: ‘Reacher said nothing.’ (for example, pp291, 353 and 407). Sometimes other characters get the same line. Interestingly, there’s a book entitled Reacher Said Nothing by Andy Martin, which looks over Child’s shoulder while he writes Make Me. (It’s now only available second-hand on Amazon, and at silly prices too!)

An observation is made when a magazine is found with a bookmark at the front of an article. Reacher’s assumption is that the magazine owner hasn’t read the article yet. (p108). This doesn’t necessarily hold up: the marker could be there for future reference, the piece having already been read.

A number of significant if minor characters don’t have names. They’re ‘the one-eyed guy’, ‘the Moynahan who had gotten kicked in the balls’, ‘the spare parts guy from the irrigation store’, ‘the counterman’, ‘the hog farmer’, ‘the guy from Palo Alto’ and ‘the man with the ironed jeans and the blow-dried hair’ – the latter is sometimes shortened to ‘the man with the jeans and the hair’. The repetition of these ‘names’ becomes tedious, though they’re probably easier for the reader to identify rather than a single name. I appreciate the predicament; multiple characters with names can become confusing. Sometimes you can identify a bit-player by their description, which I’ve done before: One-eye, Spare-parts, Blow-dry, maybe. One of the most overused words in the novel is ‘guy’; it grates.  

‘Mrs Eleanor Hopkins, widow, previously a wife and a laboratory researcher…’ (p271) Well, yes, she would be a wife previously if she’s now a widow…

Book review - Quiller: A profile and Bury Him Among Kings

Chaille Trevor’s part memoire and part appraisal of her late husband Elleston Trevor’s books is subtitled ‘intimate glimpses into his life and work’ (e-book, 2012).  The profile on Quiller, his shadowy secret agent, is written by Elleston Trevor (Adam Hall) and is only three pages, though enlightening.

Elleston Trevor was a prolific author, first published in 1943 under his own name of Trevor Dudley Smith; he used at least eight other pen-names. A good number of his books were re-issued either as by Elleston Trevor or by Adam Hall. He wrote in several genres – mainstream, children’s, thrillers, espionage, mysteries and plays – until his death in 1995.

The recent sad death of author Philip Kerr brings Elleston Trevor to mind. Kerr bravely fought cancer, determined to deliver his last manuscript, Metropolis (his fourteenth Bernie Gunther novel) to his publisher.

Elleston Trevor had shown similar determination when working on his nineteenth Quiller novel, Balalaika. He dictated the final paragraphs to his son, Jean Pierre. As Chaille says, ‘Inside Quiller’s head we live the close of a novel, and of a master’s life, with a breath of poetry.’ When the inevitability of death sank in, he had chosen not to fight it but to go forward to meet it. ‘Elleston moved on with Quiller-like mettle toward his last challenges: finishing Balalaika, dying gracefully, and beginning a new life. As he saw it, consciousness continues; an ending is a beginning.’

Chaille and Jean Pierre took Elleston’s ashes to the top a mountain that overlooks the family ranch in Show Low, Arizona…

Throughout, Chaille uses quotes and references from many of his twenty-one children’s books, where he could employ his poetic muse. His Hugo Bishop mysteries, each with a chess title (published in the 1950s) were re-issued under his Adam Hall name when the Quiller books became best-sellers.  There’s a lengthy appraisal of his 1970 novel Bury Him Among Kings, which is about a family in the First World War and a lot besides.

Elleston Trevor had a great thirst for knowledge and believed that life was to be lived, yet surprisingly managed to write so many books! 

Chaille Trevor has produced a moving memoire.

Spies and more spies

Last night BBC4 TV aired the final part of Andrew Marr’s series on genre paperback fiction – Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers. (See my earlier blog here).

This time it was the turn of the spies.

We visited Berlin, the remnants of the Wall, the prison where betrayed agents were incarcerated and tortured physically and mentally, and glimpsed old images of traitors such as Blake and Philby. All grist to the mill for John Le Carré’s breakthrough novel The Spy Who came in from the Cold. An old interview revealed that he wasn’t surprised that no communists liked his spy tales!

Another interview was with Frederick Forsyth; we’re shown film clips from The Day of the Jackal, whose protagonist was not a spy but an assassin; the point was that both Le Carré and Forsyth, along with several other scribes of this genre had some background in intelligence work. One of the first of these was Somerset Maugham (notably Ashenden), who confessed that looking back on his fiction he found it difficult to separate fact from fiction in his work.

 Maugham's Ashenden

Perhaps too much attention was given to the (admittedly interesting) William Le Queux’ popular sensationalist novel The Invasion of 1910 (1906) regarding a fictional account of a German armed invasion of Britain. The furore following its publication prompted the setting up of a British secret intelligence department, The Secret Service Bureau headed by Mansfield Smith-Cumming in 1909.

Other interviewees were Stella Rimington, a former director general of MI5 and author of the MI5 officer Liz Carlyle books, author Charles Cumming who has written eight spy novels since 2001, an early snippet from Len Deighton, and William Boyd who wrote a new Bond novel, Solo (reviewed here.

Other authors who are examined include (inevitably) Ian Fleming, Gerald Seymour, John Buchan, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler, with intriguing interpretations and motivations.

Quite rightly, Marr states that he is annoyed at the literary snobbery with regard to spy fiction and genre fiction in general. It’s as if being “popular” is anathema.

At their best, spy novels delve into the dark recesses of the human condition, examining the repercussions of betrayal, corruption and deceit. 

Despite the high-tech surveillance in the present, there is still a place for the human spy.

As in the earlier two episodes, there were bound to be some deserving authors omitted, among them Adam Hall (Elleston Trevor), author of the Quiller books, Erskine Childers (The Riddle of the Sands), Dennis Wheatley (Gregory Sallust novels), Helen MacInnes, Alan Furst, David Downing, Desmond Cory (Johnny Fedora series), Colin Forbes (Tweed series), John Gardner (Railton family series, Bond), and Craig Thomas (Aubrey & Hyde series), among others!

The programme is re-broadcast on BBC4 TV tomorrow, Wednesday evening. The series is also linked to the Open University - see here

where you can 'dig deeper into crime, fantasy and spy fiction'...

FFB - Quiller Meridian

Quiller Meridian is Adam Hall’s antepenultimate Quiller novel, published in 1993. For some obscure reason I read his penultimate, Quiller Salamander (1994) in 2002. I’ve got only one more left to read, his nineteenth in the series, Quiller Balalaika, which he completed just before he died in July 1995.

Quiller is a codename for the narrator, a British spy. He never carries a weapon, relying on his brains and martial arts training to get him out of tight corners. Most later books in the series use a mission identifier in the title – Northlight, Barracuda, Bamboo and Solitaire (see note below) and this is no exception. Mission Longshot collapsed and Quiller was called in: ‘They found me in Rome and the embassy phoned my hotel and I went along there and talked to London, and Signals said something had come unstuck in Bucharest and ‘Mr Croder would be grateful’ if I could get on a plane and see if I could pull anyone out alive.’ As far as Quiller is concerned, if Croder says that, it means ‘some kind of hell has got loose and he wants you to get it back in the cage.’

So now Quiller is given a new mission, Meridian, and he has to contact a Russian, Zymyanin, and take over. Apparently, Zymyanin has vital information that London wants. He’d need to move fast, though, as his contact was scheduled to travel on the Moscow train Rossiya to Vladivostok. The tension mounts as Quiller gets acquainted with Zymyanin and a Russian beauty, Tanya. Adam Hall’s books were always topical and this tale takes place in the period of upheaval shortly after the demise of the USSR, when powerful and ruthless men jostled for placement.

As the train rockets through the snowy wastes, a murder throws the mission into jeopardy. This is no Orient Express conundrum, however – soon, very soon, Quiller is involved in betrayal, explosions, hairbreadth escapes and assassination. The suspense is ratcheted as he gets close to ‘curtain-call’. Minor homage: in my Tana Standish psychic spy thrillers I use single word chapter headings, emulating the master, Adam Hall.

Adam Hall – Elleston Trevor – observed about his creation: ‘Obviously antisocial, shy of people and human contact, he is wary of giving anything of himself to others. On rare occasions when the pressures of a mission have forced him into a position where he must consider other people — sometimes a deadly opponent — he reveals compassion, surprising himself.’

As implied above, Quiller is a complex character; here’s a sample passage that suggests as much; while militia vehicles trawl the nighttime streets: ‘… I pulled Tanya into a doorway before its lights reached us. It was there, after the patrol had gone past us without slowing, that she finally broke, and I stood holding her as the sobbing began, her body shaking with it, her tears streaming, jewelling the fur collar of her coat in the moonlight, all the fear and the misery and the loneliness coming out of her over the minutes until at last the force of her anguish broke through the protective shell of my reserves and reached the heart.’ (p127) A long sentence, yet it works, visual and emotional.

Unlike some spies, Quiller doesn’t have sex with all the women he encounters on his missions. It was cold and Tanya insisted he share the blankets with her. ‘So I lay down with her back curved against me and eased my arms around her and felt her shivering; then after a while the warmth came into us and the shivering stopped, but later I felt her hands giving sudden little jerks as sleep came to her at last and she was dragged out of my reach and beyond my help into the first of the nightmares that would be lying in wait for her in the years to come.’ (p141)

While hiding from detection, he hears the laughter of a woman nearby. ‘It was a wonderful sound, coming softly through the night, through this of all nights when joy was hard to come by. It came again and I sipped courage from it, feeling release and renewal, not surprisingly, I suppose, given the natural grace of womankind to succour the needy.’ Excellent stuff.

It’s a shame that the series is no longer available as paperbacks; but at least you can obtain them in Kindle.

Note: This blog entry refers to Quiller Solitaire - http://nik-writealot.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/ffb-quiller-solitaire.html

***

If you like Cold War thrillers, please try MISSION: PRAGUE, MISSION: TEHRAN and MISSION:KHYBER the first three books in the psychic spy series featuring Tana Standish.

Writing - The Prague Papers - Foreword

Prague - Wikipedia commons

THE PRAGUE PAPERS

 

(Tana Standish, psychic spy, in Czechoslovakia – 1975)

The first in a series

 

Nik Morton

 

To be published by Crooked Cat – currently in the publisher’s edit phase,
so it will be subject to change

  

FOREWORD: Manuscript

 

Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK

The agent who called himself Mr. Swann entered the Queen’s Hotel bar at 2PM, just as he had promised. In my business, I’d met a few spies and all of them were nondescript. After all, to be a good agent, you need to blend in, be unmemorable. Swann just didn’t fit that category, so I wondered if I was wasting my time on this mysterious appointment.

            He was tall, dark and sanguine. In his early fifties, maybe a little older. His black hair sported a white streak on the left; a livid jagged thin scar continued from there at the hairline all the way down that side of his face to his chin. The bottle-green worsted suit was bespoke, the shoes patent leather. He wore gloves and carried a large brown leather briefcase. Removing a dark gray trilby, he nodded at me. Spots of summer rain had peppered dark blobs on his shoulders and hat.

As I stood to greet him, he gestured for me to remain seated and strode over. He limped ever so slightly, as if one leg was shorter than the other; I’m only a reporter, not a detective, and I certainly wasn’t going to measure his inside leg.

            He’d implied he was still in the field but I was beginning to suspect that he’d been put out to grass. A bit harsh, I thought. Because of his physical appearance maybe nowadays he was a desk man at ‘Legoland’, the agents’ popular name for the headquarters building at Vauxhall Cross on the Thames.

Let’s be honest, he wasn’t going to melt into any background. Besides, these days he was the wrong ethnic type for infiltration. The Twin Towers atrocity changed several priorities and a few careers come to that. Why do we in the media insist on the shorthand ‘9/11’? Sounds more like a deodorant brand to me. What’s wrong with giving that terrible act of violence against the victims of over thirty different nations its proper name? Anyway, the world was not the same since then and now the clandestine services were mainly gunning for fanatical terrorists, not greedy traitors or misguided ideologists, though those sort probably still existed in the woodwork, waiting their chance to emerge.

            Sitting opposite me, Swann smiled as the middle-aged blonde barmaid placed a whisky and dry ginger in front of him. Clearly, he was known in this place. Not promising, I thought, though obviously being prominent could also imply that you couldn’t possibly be a spy because spies are shadow creatures. Double blind, or whatever they call it.

Maybe that’s how the character James Bond got away with it for so many years, traipsing round the world using his own name more than the odd pseudonym. Now Quiller, he was much more realistic. Never did get to know his real name. And of course Quiller’s author, Adam Hall, was a cover-name for the late lamented Elleston Trevor. Still, those spies were fiction; Mr Swann was fact and studying me.

            Swann’s eyes were a cold blue; one of them, I suddenly realised, was glass. You’d have to be quick to detect the movement but, in an instant, his single orb seemed to scan the entire room and its occupants. As it happened, I’d chosen a booth where we couldn’t be overheard.

Despite the very visible scar, it was obvious that he had undergone some plastic surgery: the aging skin round eyes and cheek contrasted starkly with the pristine sheen of his square jaw.

            He lifted the briefcase onto his lap and clicked open the metal clasp. He fished out a bundle of paper. ‘Perhaps this manuscript would prove of interest, Mr. Morton?’

            I liked the man at once. No skirting around the reason for our meeting, no small talk about the lousy British weather. Straight to the point.

            He handed over about a ream of Courier font typewritten paper, secured by a thick elastic band. The corners were turned and the sheets had lost their whiteness. A bit like me, I suppose. It also reminded me of my rejected manuscripts – except there were no coffee-mug stains.

            ‘Have you heard of the Dobranice Incident?’

            ‘No,’ I said.

            ‘It was a while ago, I must admit.’ He’d never make a politician, I thought; they never admitted anything.

            ‘So when was this incident?’

            ‘1975.’

            ‘Good God, the Dark Ages!’ If my shaky memory was to be believed, I was an idealistic nineteen-year-old, reporting the Melody Maker pop-scene at the time. I shook my head. ‘I wasn’t into world events then.’ I’m fifty-eight now and world-weary. Early retirement would be nice, but it wasn’t going to happen since the politicians had wrecked my personal pension. At least I genuinely liked writing – and getting paid for it. Though, on reflection, no matter how much I wrote, it didn’t get any easier.

            ‘The incident was trivialised,’ Swann said. ‘Made barely page three in the broadsheets at the time. A postscript, really.’

            ‘And this postscript – these papers concern that ‘incident’?’

            ‘Dobranice. Yes.’ He handed over a single sheet, a typed list.

            I glanced at it. Some place-names I recognized as trouble spots from recent history, others I hadn’t heard of and the rest might well be places from a Pirates and Travellers game:

Dobranice

Tehran

Kabul

Caldera

Izmir

Hong Kong

Elba

Naples

Peking

Bulawayo

Mogadishu

Cairo.

       ‘When you said agent, you didn’t mean travel agent, by any chance?’ I asked.

His mouth made a grimace but his good eye shone, betraying amusement. ‘Keith warned me about your – for want of a better description – sense of humour. No, that’s a list of places – where certain assignments were carried out.’

‘So this manuscript is about Dobranice, the top of the list?’

‘Yes. Top place on the list. Top story.’ He grinned lopsidedly. ‘Top secret.’

I took a good gulp of my cool San Miguel, just to remind me of sunnier climes. This hotel was one of the few places to stock imported Spanish beer. Most of the stuff was bottled in Britain and didn’t taste the same. I glanced at a window. Needless to say, it was raining again. A sultry summer, so the weathermen promised. Weathermen and politicians – don’t believe a word they say.

I nodded at the bundle of typescript, itching to get my hands on it, but I held back. ‘Why give this to me?’

            ‘Times have changed.’ He sipped his whisky. ‘The Old Order has gone now. Even if the thirty-year-rule allows them to release anything about the incident, I doubt if you’d ever see the full story.’

            ‘Well, thirty years have gone, haven’t they? I don’t recall anything being released about this Dobranice place, though.’

            ‘And I doubt if you will, ever. Anyway, whether it’s Prague, Dobranice or other assignments in Iran, Afghanistan, Argentina… Not everything is covered by the thirty year rule; some take longer to be released. The point is that they’re all about Tana. And we feel her story should be told now.’ The look in his eye seemed wistful, as if there was a history between him and this Tana person.

            ‘Tana?’

            ‘Tana Standish.’ He nodded at the pile of paper. ‘Read the manuscript – she’s in there.’ He looked sad, almost bereaved, the way he spoke about the mysterious Tana.

            Blood throbbed in my temple. Every instinct I’d developed in the news-hunting game told me this might be worth a look. ‘You said "we". Who wrote this?’

            ‘Me. And a few others. Keith and Mike. Others. A group effort. Let’s just say that we downed a few drinks and got together a number of times after the Berlin Wall came crumbling down. I know, that’s a long time ago as well.’ His mouth curved. ‘Anyway, it made a pleasant change from dry assignment reports.’

            ‘But –?’ I offered. There always has to be a but.

            He smiled again, thinly. ‘Well, it might be best to rewrite it as fiction, Mr. Morton. Just to avoid the stupidity of another Spycatcher circus.’

            ‘Or Stella Rimington’s Open Secret?’

            ‘Not so open, was it? In fact, not much action in her prose, I’m afraid. Now, Dobranice – it has more than enough action.’ His features turned rueful. ‘More than enough.’

            ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘those books were about the Security Service, MI5. This isn’t, is it?’

            ‘Indeed, you’re quite right. It’s a rather secret part of the Firm, actually.’

            ‘I’m not going to put any agents at risk by writing about this, am I?’

            ‘No, these adventures won’t figure in the revelations of Wikileaks, Assange or Snowden.”

            ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’

            ‘It might have fresh relevance, now that Mr Putin is keen to start a fresh Cold War.’

            ‘True. What do you want in return?’

            He studied the remains of his drink and because I wasn’t psychic I couldn’t fathom what he was thinking, but it was more than his words: ‘Just the story. The story is the thing.’

            Another question had been nagging throughout our clandestine meeting. ‘Why bring this to me? As much as I try spreading the word on Twitter and Facebook, I’m not exactly well-known, you know.’

            ‘Jack Higgins turned us down.’

            I glared and he grinned. ‘Just joking,’ he said. ‘You’ve been around the block, if you like, you’ve lived through these times, even if you didn’t know what was going on in secret circles. Not many do, if we’re honest. We’ve still got one of the most secret societies on earth, right here in good old Britain. Whatever happened to ‘Great’?’

            ‘Sold for a peerage, perhaps?’

            He shook his head and smiled. ‘I don’t do politics. Not a good idea in our profession. But as I was saying, actually, Keith liked your articles for the Portsmouth and District Post.’

            I didn’t for a minute believe a word of it. And yet... I fingered the manuscript in anticipation. It seemed too good to be true. I was being handed all this secret stuff on a plate.

‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘I’ll give it a go.’

‘Just do her justice,’ he said.

* * * *

Later, how I wished I’d met Tana Standish. People like me – and those accursed politicians – sit cozily at home with our petty complaints while men and women like her fight the good fight against evil. The Cold War may have gone away for a while, but we still need people like Tana Standish, Alan Swann and Keith Tyson. And they get no thanks. Mainly, their stories go unheard and unread. At the most, their achievements probably get a footnote in a newspaper.

            After several months shut away from the world of today I have finished this book, which I have called The Prague Papers – the first chronicle of Tana Standish’s missions which presages several calamitous adventures with significant revelations from recent history. It is dedicated to all the secret agents who fight behind the scenes and behind the news.

 

***

 

Note: This is just a teaser. All of the Tana Standish books begin in a similar manner, with the secret documents being handed over... The novel is in the third person, however.