Novel Review London bored Richard Hanney. Though a Scotsman by birth, he grew up in Rhodesia, where he became a mining engineer and prospector. But London was too tame for his taste, so he planned to leave it to seek adventures elsewhere. Then, he met a fellow tenant, Franklin P. Scudder, who told him...
In The Riddle of the Sands, published in 1903, 11 years before the Great War began, Erskine Childers envisioned the preparation for a war between Great Britain and Germany that we recognize could have happened. I take it as a cautionary tale. When nations want to war with each other, they will find a...
I first learned about this novel by watching Netflix, which had a series based on the book called Killing Eve. The series stars Jodie Comer as Villanelle, a sociopathic assassin, and Sandra Oh as Eve Polastri, the British spy tasked with bringing Villanelle to justice. Both actors were excellent in their roles, and I...
In May 2020, I began a project to review classic spy novels. I selected eleven books to review, and I went to Powell’s City of Books in Portland to buy them. I was so proud of myself! I expected the project would take a year or eighteen months or even two years to complete,...
There are novels to understand, but there are novels to experience. After reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who was Thursday twice—the second time to remind me of the plot—I concluded that it is securely in the second category. The first time I read it was before my stroke. I not saying that there...
In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, the spy was Harvey Birch, who reported to George Washington. His mission was to watch British troop movements and learn what he could of their intentions. In the novel, he had an unofficial mission: to help Henry Wharton, a British officer, visit his family and return safely to...
Kim by Rudyard Kipling isn’t a spy novel as much as a novel about the type of person who would be recruited as a spy. Kimball O’Hara is a street urchin living in Lahore. A well-known and liked orphan—the locals call him “Friend to all the World”—he’s the offspring between a British soldier, with...
We all love a good spy novel. At least, I know I love espionage thrillers. I have already reviewed several on this blog, including Red Sparrow, The Rhythm Section, and Leaving Berlin. The spy has always been part of Western literature. In Homer’s Iliad, there is a book dedicated to Odysseus and Diomedes as...
