Lately, headlines include edward snowden’s revelations about nsa digital espionage, senator diane feinstein’s public feud with the cia over her alleged espionage of senate staff, and swashbuckling operations in crimea and ukraine (Ordered by former KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin). Can espionage novelists create fiction in 2014 that is as intriguing and surprising as reality? Fortunately for those of us who enjoy the genre, some of those who write spy novels today are up to the challenge.
My picks for these top espionage novels published in 2014 include some contemporary short stories, as well as espionage fiction with a historical flavor (which I find more engaging as a reader than techno-thrillers).
You are reading: Best spy books 2014
(click to see my list of the best spy thrillers of 2013 and the best spy thrillers of 2012).
midnight in europe by alan furst
The protagonist of Midnight Europe, Cristian Ferrat, joins the line of charming and quietly brave urban heroes imagined by Alan Furst in his historical spy fiction. Ferrat, a Spaniard living in Paris and working for an American law firm, is enjoying the good life when the Spanish Civil War breaks out in 1936. He is recruited by the Republican government to help procure weapons for their hard-pressed army, a task hard. by the arms embargo on Spain observed by France, England and the United States (but not by Germany and Italy, which eagerly supplied arms to the nationalists).
Ferrat is not an ideologue: he tells the head of security at the Spanish embassy that he believes in parliamentary democracy and is anti-fascist, but that he does not spend much time on politics. Given that the Spanish civil war involved a bitter and primal struggle between right-wing nationalists and left-wing loyalists, it’s an interesting choice on principle to make his main character relatively apolitical. Ferrat is at heart a sophisticated romantic, a magnet for women, but not a passionate man; he will support the republic to the best of his ability, but he is not about to blindly sacrifice his career or his family for the loyalist cause.
ferrat teams up with a well-connected trader named max de lyon who knows the shady world of the arms trade. Soon, they are off to Berlin, Warsaw, Romania, and Greece as they try to get their hands on anti-aircraft munitions that they can send to the Republicans in Spain. Ferrat and de Lyon must outsmart Nationalist and German intelligence officers on their way, and somehow free the Soviets of needed ammunition.
Furst’s beautifully crafted prose is on display across Europe at midnight, and the novel is a delight to read. Once again, Furst offers a sobering portrait of the realities of European life in the 1930s, when Western democracies belatedly began to realize the existential threat posed by Adolf Hitler’s resurgent Germany.
a colder war by charles cumming
The dissolution of the soviet union may have ended the cold war, but as charles cumming points out in a colder war, the adversarial relationship between russian and western intelligence agencies persists. Since Cumming’s novel was published in England in the spring of 2014, the tension between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the United States. and the European Union has increased dramatically.
This resurfacing conflict makes it easier, in a sense, to create a popular spy thriller, but it also challenges an author, especially an English one, to go beyond the now-worn john le carré trope of spies. from oxford mi6 looking for russian moles while mocking the vulgarity of their american “cousins” at the cia. Cumming only partially escapes these clichés—the clashes between the mi6 and the cia in his novel seem more urgent and dramatic than those with the svr—but he deftly draws on current geopolitical events (including the syrian civil war) to make his point. book a more current feel.
Cumming’s 2012 hero in a foreign land, Thomas Kell, returns from bureaucratic limbo to investigate the suspicious death of a high-ranking British agent in Istanbul, just as a number of MI6 recruits go missing. is there a connection between the death of the agent in a plane crash in greece and the leaks of top secret information? Kell doggedly searches for the truth, in Turkey, Ukraine and London, and Cumming knows how to keep the reader turning the page. I found myself wondering if Mi6 had the money for the elaborate human and electronic surveillance portrayed in the novel (Britain has cut its military and intelligence budgets over the last decade), but that’s a minor quibble. To his credit, Cumming is keen to explore the emotional lives of his characters, an element too often missing from today’s spy thrillers.
warburg in rome by james carroll
although james carroll’s book has one of the least catchy titles for a thriller (it’s warburg in rome, not bond in rome), it’s a challenging and intriguing read. In the novel, Carroll addresses the role of the Roman Catholic Church in sheltering Croatian Fascists and German Nazis after World War II and bringing them to Argentina (the infamous “rat line”). Carroll, an accomplished novelist and historian (and former Catholic priest), infuses Warburg in Rome with a righteous indignation that challenges the reader’s preconceptions like few other novels in the genre.
warburg in rome begins as the war in italy is drawing to a close and centers on two americans, david warburg, a treasury department official sent to help with the growing refugee crisis, and kevin deane, a priest from new york close to archbishop francis sorcerer. Warburg hopes to rescue as many Jews as he can from Hitler’s Final Solution in Italy and Hungary and other parts of the collapsing Nazi empire. Shocked and disillusioned by the hostility and indifference he encounters, Warburg increasingly sees the Vatican and elements of American intelligence as more interested in developing allies—whatever their crimes during the war—for the upcoming fight with Stalin in Europe. central than in addressing the issue. plight of the Jews.
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while warburg in rome is structured along the lines of a traditional thriller, carroll highlights the haunting history of this post-war period through a series of lengthy verbal confrontations between warburg and deane over the church’s complicity in helping the dead. Nazi assassins and the nature of the anti-Semitism struggle. We learn more of this haunting story as we meet some of its other characters: the alluring Marguerite d’Erasmo, a Red Cross official; Jocko Lionni, an Italian-Jewish resistance fighter; a young German priest, Father Lehmann, who assists the Nazis; and an anti-Semitic American intelligence agent, Peter Mates. the extensive dialogue involving these characters slows down the pace of the book, which some action-oriented readers may not like, but it provides deeper historical context and offers a convincing and devastating indictment of high church officials who so they voluntarily harbored the fugitive. war criminals of the third reich.
david downing’s spy cat
David Downing, the creator of John Russell’s thriller series set in Nazi Germany, has delved into the intrigue surrounding the start of World War I in his latest novel, Jack of Spies. His latest protagonist, Scotsman Jack McColl, works for the Royal Navy’s intelligence service and has been tasked with uncovering the mischief the Germans are up to in various corners of the world.
is a brave choice in focusing on the big game just before the outbreak of war – you enter territory well explored by john buchan and erskine childers and, unlike those early 20th century authors, you can’t assume that your readers will automatically be against “the Huns.”
Downing’s Solution: Jack McColl, his hero, acknowledges that the British are far from perfect and is quite sympathetic to the independence movements in India and Ireland, but sees the Germans under the Kaiser as even more flawed. His romantic interest is a feisty Irish-American feminist journalist who sides with the underdog. Jack of Spies takes us to China, San Francisco, New York, Paterson, NJ (site of the famous workers’ strike), Ireland, Scotland, England and Mexico. while the novel could have benefited from fewer locations, the historical context is fascinating. I confess that he did not know about the Battle of Veracruz in 1914, where American Marines fought against the forces of the Mexican Victorian Huerta dictatorship. (And I also didn’t know that Woodrow Wilson had required the orchard to salute the American flag!)
olen steinhauer’s cairo affair
in the cairo affair, olen steinhauer combines elements of crime and spy fiction, adds some international intrigue and produces an entertaining page turner that, on a deeper level, considers the nature of betrayal, personal and political .
Intelligence agencies need those who are willing to betray, to cast aside old loyalties, to become double agents or moles. Beyond its practical uses, betrayal can be exciting, a means of settling old scores, a way of adding excitement to life. A character in the Cairo Affair quotes French writer Demimonde Jean Genet: “Anyone who has not experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.” Steinhauer’s exploration of this theme is what lifts this novel far above its procedural surface.
Steinhauer’s novels are driven by intricate plots, and the Cairo Affair is no exception. Set primarily in Egypt during the 2011 Libyan civil war, the action begins with the sudden mob-style murder of an American diplomat, Emmett Kohl, in Budapest and follows his widow, Sophie, as she tries to figure out why he has been assassinated. .
as various narrators tell the story (sophie kohl, cia agent stan bertolli, american security contractor john calhoun and egyptian intelligence officer omar halawi) it becomes clear that kohl’s murder has something to do with a covert operation created by the cia called stumbler. WikiLeaks has revealed some aspects of Stumbler, a clever touch by Steinhauer, but his true goal, to further US business interests in the region by controlling the Libyan uprising, has been hidden. Sophie travels to Cairo, but her quest to uncover the truth is complicated by his own troubled past. It is Halawi, a man of old-fashioned morality, who puts the pieces of the puzzle together and, in the end, allows Sophie to decide what kind of justice he will seek.
an officer and a spy by robert harris
robert harris is known for getting the details right in his historical fiction, as can be seen in his novels riddle and pompeii and even in his best-selling (and counterfactual) homeland, which imagines a believable and triumphant third reich in 1964 as adolf hitler is approaching his 75th birthday.
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in an officer and a spy, harris faces the controversial drefyus affair and manages to create an intriguing thriller, quite a feat since many readers will know the resolution of this scandal that rocked french society at the beginning of the century.
Harris brings to life all the main figures in the case: Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of passing secrets to the Germans, convicted and sentenced to inhumane imprisonment on Devil’s Island; Colonel Georges Picquart, the principled French counterintelligence chief who realizes the real traitor is a dubious commander named Ferdinand Walsin Esterházy; the scheming Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier, who has his eyes set on higher political office; The courageous journalist Émile Zola who defends Dreyfus, highlights the anti-Semitism and corrupt military justice involved, and the case is an international cause célèbre.
while colonel picquart is the novel’s hero, harris doesn’t shy away from portraying his flaws. Picquart shares the prejudices of the French officer class of his day: he does not particularly like Jews, he despises homosexuals, and he is of little use to calculating politicians or nosy journalists. But Picquart, an idealist, also believes in the traditional military virtues of honor and integrity. His dogged commitment to finding the truth leads him to risk his career and his personal happiness as he seeks justice for Dreyfus.
harris fuses elements of the spy novel, detective story, and courtroom drama into an officer and a spy. is an entertaining retelling of a pivotal episode in the history of France’s Third Republic, one that helped shape French politics for much of the 20th century.
ward just american romantic
One could argue that American romance doesn’t belong on this list of spy novels. There are no traditional spies in the book, and Ward simply doesn’t draw on any of the tried-and-true (and overused) plotlines commonly found in thrillers. But Harry Sanders, an American diplomat and the American romantic of the Just title, becomes embroiled in a secret mission to Vietnam that profoundly alters his life and his career. American Romantic considers the role that secrecy plays in organizations, in families, and in marriages, and therefore I would argue that it deserves the attention of any reader intrigued by the covert and clandestine, personal and political.
There are echoes of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn in the opening chapters of Just’s novel: we are introduced to Americans, innocents abroad, mystified by a culture and people whose perspective is so different, so opaque, that the tragic and violent conflict in indochina that followed should not have come as a surprise.
There is more to American romanticism than a consideration of how the United States dealt with the demands of empire after winning World War II. he simply does not neglect the personal lives of his characters. Sanders has a brief affair with a German woman in Vietnam and never resolves her feelings for her. he must deal with small and big tragedies in her marriage. After diplomatic posts in Asia, Africa, and Europe, Sanders becomes a permanent expatriate, retiring to France rather than his native New England, a revealing statement about his growing estrangement from his own countrymen and culture. him.
There is an elegiac tone to the novel: the post-war optimism and certainty of purpose of America’s elites were put to the test as the cold war progressed. American Romantic reflects that reality. In the halls of power in Washington, America’s rightful place in the world seemed clear in 1945; what it should be today is not so obvious.
(click to see my list of the best spy thrillers of 2013 and the best spy thrillers of 2012).
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