Tag archives for Espionage
A Young Man’s Game by Paul Blake [Book Review]
A Young Man's game by Paul Blake My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Young Man's Game by Paul Blake is an excellent debut novel with loads of twists and turns. Alec Foster uncovers a plot to assassinate the British PM in Berlin. He then needs to avoid being picked up by the Berlin police, the Russian SVR and the would-be assassins. It's further complicated by suspicion a traitor inside MI6 in the Embassy. A Young Man's Game Alec is a relic of the cold war, a former field officer, promoted away from his passion to a desk job. He's an SIS section head in the British Embassy in Berlin. Personal tragedies have turned him into an alcoholic. So he's out of practice, and very much out of shape, when tipped into the maelstrom by the murder of an SVR…
Sticky End [Flash Fiction] [WW2 SOE]
Sticky End is my flash fiction for the first round of the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Challenge this year. The first round was last weekend and the group I'm in were assigned a spy genre story to be set in a prison cell and featuring glue. The story had to be under one thousand words and written within 48 hours. (Last year I wrote Down the Harbour and Burning to Leave for the 2017 flash fiction challenge). I spent a bit of Saturday thinking about it, the hard bit for me was trying to work in the glue naturally and believably. Some help from Google showed me that the WW2 Special Operations Executive (SOE) used to include tubes of bostik adhesive in the containers that they dropped to the Jedburgh teams. The bostik was used to camouflage improved explosive devices…
German Penetration of SOE by Jean Overton Fuller [Book Review]
English: Hon. Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan (code name Madeleine), George Cross, MiD, Croix de Guerre avec Etoile de Vermeil. Noor Inayat Khan served as a wireless operator with F Section, Special Operations Executive. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) The German Penetration of SOE by Jean Overton Fuller My rating: 4 of 5 stars I've been reading about SOE for more than three decades. This is the third book about SOE that I've read so far this year, and it is one of the earliest to point to the man behind the curtain. There is a carefully cultivated view of plucky heroism fighting thuggish Nazis, and prevailing eventually. The reality is clearly quite different. Each of the three books I've read this year has pointed that out (see my reviews of books about Vera Atkins & Nancy Wake). That we know…
Book Review – Masaryk Station by David Downing
Masaryk Station by David Downing My rating: 4 of 5 stars A very satisfying end to the series, although still leaving me with a wish for a more detailed epilogue that told us more about the rest of the cast's lives. As with the others there is a lot of history being told here, Downing does his research and then puts it on the page. Although one obvious lack was the bit about copying a film where the story goes straight from copying to playback without going through the development process. This is in an era where chemical processing was needed to view pictures on film after they'd been shot. Given the rest of the research I'd have thought that was known to Downing. I did enjoy this though, and there were a number of different angles. Logo of the…
Book Review – Zoo Station by David Downing
Zoo Station by David Downing My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is the first book that I have read entirely in 2015. Amazon had the whole series as a deal of the day for 99p each. I'd had this one, the first in the series, for a little while so I dipped in to see if the rest were worth buying. I got hooked and spent a fiver! I bought this one as an amazon recommendation. I've been buying first hand accounts and histories of the SOE for decades. I picked up the pace a bit a year ago when doing background reading for the short story Hunting Nazis which I used for the end of module on A215. I also read cold war spy fiction too. So amazon recommended me Downing's series. The link is fairly obvious. This…