One more battle in the spy wars that rage through the back alleys of the ports, from elegant hotels to abandoned piers, in lonely desert outposts, and in the souks and cafés of North Africa. Under the command of Captain Eric DeHaan, she sails for the Intelligence Division of the British Royal Navy, and she will load detection equipment for a clandestine operation on the Swedish coast–a secret mission, a dark voyage.Ī desperate voyage. She is the Noordendam, a Dutch freighter. She is the Santa Rosa, she flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines, and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmö.īut she is not the Santa Rosa. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter steams up the Tagus River to dock at the port of Lisbon. The Book of Spies brings us the aristocratic intrigues of The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which French émigrés duel with Robespierre’s secret service the savage political realities of the 1930s in Eric Ambler’s classic A Coffin for Dimitrios the ordinary citizens (well, almost) of John le Carré’s The Russia House, who are drawn into Cold War spy games and the 1950s Vietnam of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, with its portrait of American idealism and duplicity. We meet diplomats, political police, agents provocateurs, secret operatives, resistance fighters, and assassins-players in the Great Game, or victims of the Cold War. These are not just stories of professional intelligence officers. Thus Alan Furst offers a diverse array of selections that combine raw excitement and intellectual sophistication in an expertly guided tour of the dark world of clandestine conflict.

Inspired by the politics of tyranny or war, each of these writers chose the base elements of spy fiction-highly evolved spy fiction-as the framework for a literary novel. Here is an extraordinary collection of work from some of the finest novelists of the twentieth century. An anthology of the world’s best literary espionage, selected by a contemporary master of the genre, Alan Furst.

Night soldiers books in order