100 books like Dead Lions

Ok, it’s an old thriller set in the pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone, pre-EU world of the 1960s. It’s a piece of twentieth-century clockwork, but it delivers suspense! The amoral protagonist can’t summon help by phone or Google his adversaries to gain an advantage. He must work to gain leniency from the Turkish authorities by acting as a double agent, delivering weapons to a gang of potential terrorists so that he might spy on them. The writing has a sharp precision and crisp wit.

Philip Kerr’s series of books about Berlin detective Bernie Gunther is a stunning achievement. The series weaves together the often disturbing history of the Third Reich, real-life characters such as Goebbels and Goering, and a sharp-minded and blunt-speaking detective everyman who is trying to survive the maelstrom around him with morals and life intact. Prague Fatale sets Gunther unto solve murders at a house party of high-ranking Nazis at Heydrich’s rural retreat. It’s a grim twist on cosy, country house murders.

I was utterly spellbound by this book, seduced by its atmosphere of excruciating dread. Its precocious teenage protagonist, Nathalie Waite, is a poster girl for the power of denial. She responds to a horrifying experience at a garden party by retreating into the safety of her own bizarre imagination. Her determination to reinvent herself is a clear product not only of the trauma that she has endured but also of her fear of enduring it again.

Terse, grim, and inscrutable, this novel is Jackson at her opaque best.

There’s a kind of charm and naïveté about the detective in this book, he is a relatively strait-laced character and his shock and moral outrage at the sexual and material excesses of some of the corrupt children of high-ranking CCP officials betokens a wholly different society and upbringing, conditioned by Party propaganda. Inspector Chen revels in poetry and ‘good' food, although descriptions of banquets of turtles and bear’s paws again speak of different cultural tastes. The story is delivered slowly—this is set in a Shanghai before computers and mobile phones and the hero must wend his way around town to speak to witnesses by bus and train. It’s a satisfying read and an evocative journey to a faraway time and place.

The official history of MI5 similarly provides the first authorised account of another secret organisation. The book provides a far-reaching account of clandestine activities since its nascent beginnings as part of the Secret Service Bureau in 1909, and across a period of 100 years. It offers a rare insight into some of the eyebrow-raising operations in counter-espionage, as well as an administrative overview, for an intelligence agency that is responsible for Britain’s security at home. It gives the first inside account from it archives, from Bolshevik threats and Communist subversive activities in the 1920s in Britain to Hitler’s spies in the 1930s, to the Double-Cross deception and agents of World War Two. It goes beyond the Second World War to name some of the traitors and spies of the Cold War. There is a clear understanding publicly for the first time of the sheer scale of surveillance of enemies or… show more.

This is the first book in a nine-book series, and once again, these are books I read and read again and always find something new to enjoy.

Set towards the end of the Cold War, the books make me laugh as well as think. In planning the series, Deighton said he wanted to write about Samson’s marriage and how the relationship is impacted by the work. I found this a compelling idea and it’s something I’ve done in my new book. I’m not sure that Len Deighton was a spy himself, but he certainly knew a few.

John Le Carré, the undisputed master of espionage, shifts gears in The Night Manager as the Cold War ends and an unsteady detente emerges in Europe, creating a power vacuum quickly filled by mercenaries, arms dealers, and drug smugglers who accumulate vast fortunes in the black markets that spring forth.

This book rekindles the flame for Le Carré readers who thought his best storytelling days were behind him.

I have to mention either John Le Carre or Ian Fleming. I’ll go for guilty pleasure over great mastery. I haven’t read this since I was a kid. But I loved it back then. The Bond of the books is more realistic and complex than the cartoon character of the movies but, don’t worry, this isn’t a tale of gritty realism. A lot of fun and a great way to dispose of a few hours of excess reality.

Unlike the official history of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, by Keith Jeffery, this book is written without the censorship of the Service presenting the facts as the author, a journalist and academic, considers fit and proper to show. Very well written and covering a considerable period of time with many secret operations, it is a very good book which The Guardian described as ‘A remarkable achievement and an encyclopaedic post-war history which any student of the secret world should read.’

The author is the BBC's Security and Defence Correspondent and his range of contacts enriches this book. 

It is full of anecdotes about the secret world and Russia looms large in his narrative. 

He explores the psychology and motivation of why British and Russian intelligence officers spied for the enemy during the Cold War and there is an excellent chapter on how the UK security services produced some inaccurate intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.