"The Persian" by David McCloskey

 Written by an ex-CIA man, you would expect this spy thriller to have the ring of authenticity and it does, in spades, from interrogations (though, thankfully, the book does not go into details of the torture) to the organisation of terrorism to drone attacks to traffic jams in Tehran to guns. What does not always come with an ex-spy is the ability to write a good tale but this was a well-constructed, well-written and entertaining story which had me turning the pages. It reminded me - and I have no higher praise - of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre.

The story is largely narrated through the extracted confessions of Kam, an Iranian dentist of Jewish descent, who has decided to spy for MOSSAD to fund his California retirement dream. We also see things through the perspective of his MOSSAD spymaster Arik Glitzman. Iranian Colonel Ghorbani is sending drones to assassinate members of Glitzman's team and Glitzman has devised an audacious plan to kidnap the Colonel and take him to Israel. This requires Kam to con Roya, an innocent Iranian who happens to work as administrative assistant to Ghorbani's team, into thinking that he is working for Iranian security. But could love complicate the con? (I told you it was like the le Carre book.) 

It's a great story told with verve. But I was thoroughly depressed by this portrait of fanatics on both sides engaged in a potentially endless game of tit for tat, a war of attrition in which decency and respect for humanity cannot survive.

Selected quotes:

• “He begins to chew on another sugar cube and stares down Kam with the look of a man who despises fornicators because he desperately wants to be one.” (Prologue; The interrogation room)
• “Developed haphazardly, growing in disorganized spurts, Tehran, like most of us, lacks any coherent centre.” (Ch 3)
• “Lean and beautiful with cheek bones high as heaven.” (Ch 3)
• “Amir-Ali's leaking blood counts down like sand rushing fast through an hourglass.” (Ch 4)
• “She now had a phone, cigarettes, and an audience with an Iranian official. Whatever the Mullahs say, Paradise is a fluid concept.” (Ch 30)
• “Rivka laughed - it was the first time I'd heard one from her, and it was more delicate, hesitant, than I'd expected. I suppose she didn't have much practice.” (Ch 38)
• “Believe the breath from my mouth.” (Ch 40)
• “Love comes with a knife, my mother would say.” (Ch 52)
• “Love is the king of all cons.” (Ch 52)
• “The afternoon had brought the smog, and I sucked in a huge breath of Tehran's toxic air: all exhaust, no relief.” (Ch 72)

May 2026; 388 pages

First published in GB by Swift Press in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Slow Horses" by Mick Herron

Significantly better than most of the offerings in this genre. this is 

an enjoyable and entertaining spy thriller, containing plenty of comedy and moments of genuine tension.

A student has been kidnapped and his captors are threatening to behead him live on the internet. Can the 'slow horses' of Slough House, where the failures from MI5 are sent so, bored with mundane paperwork, they will resign, save the young man. 

It is written in the past tense using multiple 3rd person limited points of view.

Selected quotes:

• Hobden “still read [journalistic] copy as if it were Braille; bumps in the language letting him know when D-notices were an issue; when the Regent's Park mob had left their fingerprints on the facts.” (Ch 2)
• “Half of the future is buried in the past.” (Ch 2)
• “Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of Moody, and most sides of Moody were the wrong one.” (Ch 2)
• “He worked with a bunch of morons. Couldn't make a pun with a dictionary and a Scrabble board.” (Ch 4)
• “She waved her hand airily; her standard semaphore for trivial detail.” (Ch 5)
• “You had more chance of reaching a consensus with a vox pop on Marmite.” (Ch 8)
• “If we're paying for supper, we get to glance at the menu, surely?” (Ch 8)
• “The look she bestowed upon him would have stuck six inches out the back of a more sensitive man.” (Ch 8)
• “‘Once upon a time’ was another way of saying the old days.” (Ch 8)
• “The wheels started coming off before you screwed them on.” (Ch 11)
• “This couldn't have fallen apart faster if you'd bought it at IKEA.” (Ch 11)
• “Sleep was ceding control. While you slept, anything might happen.” (Ch 13)
• “Web was under thirty, and married to the notion that anyone twenty years older was lucky to have made it through the flood.” (Ch 15)

Notes:

• The dodgy politician Peter Judd ("PJ") is a caricature based on ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (BJ).
• At one point, Slough House is compared to Pincher Martin's Island. Pincher Martin is a novel about a shipwrecked sailor written by William Golding.

March 2026; 328 pages

First published in 2015 by John Murray

My paperback edition was issued in 2017

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" by John Le Carre

 The classic Cold War espionage story written by a master of the trade.

Following the collapse of the spy network that he has been running, Alec Leamas retires from the British Secret Service. His life spirals downhill through a succession of meaningless jobs, his disillusionment numbed with whisky. Even new girlfriend Liz can't reach him. After he hits rock bottom, in prison, he is courted by the East Germans and agrees to tell them his secrets. But things aren't as they seem. This is a game of bluff and double bluff, of trick and be tricked. And as things collapse towards a disastrous conclusion, there is still one more twist to the story.

It is narrated in the 'omniscient' third person past tense (with occasional authorial glosses) but the reader only has access to the thoughts of the principal characters, Leamas and Liz. This keeps the narration tightly focused.

But I think the main reason why this novel stands head and shoulders over most of its genre is that Le Carre takes time to build up the characters and the settings and that he keeps everything so everyday and therefore so believable. Despite his vast experience and his repertoire of skills, Leamas is no James Bond (although Ian Fleming's original Bond is more vulnerable and grittier and credible than his film alter ego). This is real world spying and the reader can imagine themselves in the role and identify with Leamas without falling into fantasy. 

The other separation between this and its many imitators is the morality question. I compared this with Rip Tide by Stella Rimington (in real life a spymaster) in which the action is performed against a backdrop of 'us' and 'them': whatever we do is good and whatever they do is bad. But Leamas operates in a world where he can scarcely justify his actions even to himself (he seems mostly motivated by anger and hate). It's a seedy, sordid world of deception which corrodes the souls of the often pathetic actors who play in it. And it is perfectly matched to the background: the pathetic fallacy reigns supreme.

This makes this novel is one of the greatest spy stories of all time. The film starring Richard Burton is superb too.

Stylistically, it fits well with its near contemporaries: the work of Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and John Osborne etc: the 'kitchen sink' dramas and novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1964 and the CWA Golden dagger in 1963. It was selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 best novels since Time began (1923). The Crime Writers' Association named it the 3rd best crime novel of all time; the Mystery Writers of America ranked it 8th.

Selected quotes:

• “He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them.” (Ch 3)
• “Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.” (Ch 5)
• “They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery.” (Ch 6)
• “Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat.” (Ch 6)
• “He had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.” (Ch 7)
• “Liz made a rather exaggerated shrug, the kind of overstressed gesture people do make when they are excited and alone.” (Ch 16)
• “It was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church - the same dutiful, little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.” (Ch 19)
• “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” (Ch 25)
• “It's far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill ...” (Ch 25)

October 2024; 240 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rip Tide" by Stella Rimington

 Stella Rimington was the Director General of MI5; she now writes spy novels featuring a female MI5 operative. She can hardly be accused of writing about what she doesn't know!

The book is in the classic thriller mould. It uses the past tense with told by an omniscient narrator who adopts multiple-perspectives - I counted fourteen separate characters who acted as a third-person narrator. This enables the author to keep the story moving along; the next bit of the narrative is always available because somebody can tell that segment of the story. However, there are two disadvantages of multi-PoV. Without using an unreliable narrator (which might be regarded as 'cheating' in this genre) the author cannot narrate from the PoV of one of the baddies ... so the reader can cross each narrator off from their list of suspects. The second disadvantage is, for me, more critical: only an exceptional author would be able to create fourteen characters sufficiently distinctive that they can convincingly narrate. 

It was interesting to note that wherever Rimington does describe the traits of a character it is almost always by saying what one of the other characters thinks of them, as if the author believes that the dictum 'show don't tell' can be circumvented by having one of the fictional characters do the telling.

I understand that a novelist isn't obliged to give a balanced account of the socio-political structure of the world . There were moments when Rimington tried to offer a balance, for example when it was explained why Somali pirates were forced into piracy and when the villains were allowed to offer justifications (though these seemed shallow, the platitudes of fanatics, rather than any sort of personal soul-searching) but these were momentary paragraphs, lost in the bulk of the book, and had the appearance of unconvincing tokens. I reiterate that it isn't the function of a novel to offer balance. But the best spy novels (eg those of John le Carre and Graham Greene) are able to be intensely personal accounts of individuals seem from only their perspective and yet can still suggest that the world of espionage (like the world itself) is full of moral ambiguities. This book reverts to a simplistic division between goodies and baddies; the baddies are almost all dyed-in-the-wool villains and the only possible criticism that can be levelled at a goody seems to be that he (or, more rarely she) is incompetent or inefficient. 

But character doesn't really matter in this genre. The plot is everything, and Rimington has constructed a workable if fairly standard plot. It gets off to a slow start with the inciting incident being delayed until the end of chapter two but again that is standard within the genre; there is almost always a little bit of scene-setting first.

Despite the jarring use of the word 'expatiating' in the second sentence, there is little to object to in this book. It was a thoroughly competent example of the genre; the story rattled along in 63 short chapters (averaging less than six pages each chapter).

But if there is little to object to, equally, there is little to celebrate in this book. 

Fundamentally, this novelist can't seem to see that there are always many more than two sides to every story. That's a deficiency for a novelist (and scary in a spymaster) but perhaps it's inevitable if you have fourteen viewpoints.

Selected quotes:

• "He'd be a self-proclaimed 'straight shooter', which really just meant he not only lacked sophistication but was proud of the deficit." (Ch 28)
• "Tall, dark and not entirely handsome." (Ch 55)

The story rattles along, told in 63 short chapters. A perfect example of the genre. Think of it as a burger from a fast food outlet. There's a lot of skill goes into making food that millions of people enjoy. It's cheap and easy to eat and the flavours are unsubtle and utterly predictable, which often adds to the appeal: you know exactly what you will get. But I prefer meals with more complex flavours. Fast food is forgettable; I like memorable meals. I doubt I'll ever read another Rimington.

October 2023; 369 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"American Spy" by Lauren Wilkinson

 A black American woman with young twin sons successfully defends her family against an attempt to kill them by a night intruder. Feeling to her mother's farm in  Martinique, she starts to recall the events that led up to this point: her frustrating career as an FBI agent leading to her recruitment as an intelligence agent targeting Thomas Sankara (a real figure), president of Burkina Faso. 

This is a classic espionage novel, set at the height of the Cold War, and structured like a normal thriller. But its emphasis on the everyday practices of the intelligence agents, on the humdrum details of the bureaucracies and the shabby morals of those who work in the service, reads much more like a John Le Carre spy novel (such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) and even more like a Graham Greene (I was repeatedly reminded of The Quiet American) than anything with James Bond or Jason Bourne.

But I felt it didn't quite succeed like those two classics did. The characters didn't convince me. I suppose the narrator-protagonist was supposed to be an American Mom whose over-riding concern was the defence of her children but the ease with which she killed in the first few pages, her lack of guilt, and the lack of reaction from the authorities rather undermined her later moral qualms. 

I found this book was an uncomfortable chimaera: half classic all-action thriller, half world-weary novel. 

Selected quotes:

• "I'm so glad to be your mother, and for the most part I enjoyed being pregnant with you. But the endgame could've used some improvement." (Ch 1)
• "If there are regional variations in speech, I think it stands to reason that they also exist in handwriting." (Ch 2)
• "Recruiting and running informants was about cultivating their trust. To do that I found it worked best to lie frequently to them." (Ch 2)
• "My mother and I have always innately understood the best ways to irritate each other." (Ch 10)

January 2022; 287 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God