The Ten Best Spy Novels you never heard of

You know the classics. A Perfect Spy, Tinker Tailor or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John Le Carre. Alan Furst’s Eastern Europe. Graham Greene’s jaundiced take on the West and espionage. Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon thrillers. Looking for some off-the-beaten path spy novels? What should you read next?

Here’s 10 great spy novels you’ve probably never heard of.

The Darkling Spy

London, 1956. A generation of British spies are haunted by the ghosts of friends turned traitor. Henry Bone, a Mandarin spymaster, learns that ““Butterfly”“ is the Holy Grail of Cold War Intelligence. In reality, he is an aristocratic pervert whose political tastes are as ugly as his sexual preferences. But worst of all, Butterfly can identify each traitor and every serving British spy who helped them. Enter Catesby, a British spy with his reputation in tatters, who sets the trap by pretending to defect in order to uncover Butterfly. Pressured into becoming a lure, Catesby’s mission leads him from Berlin, through a shower of Molotov cocktails in Budapest, and finally to dinner alone with the East German espionage legend, Mischa Wolf. The novel’s shocking conclusion will change your view of the Cold War forever.

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-Darkling-Spy--by--Edward-Wilson--16636

The Darkling Spy, by Edward Wilson. A pitch perfect, classic Cold War Spy novel. Wilson is an American who gave up his citizenship to become British, and his spy novels echo the best of Le Carre’s morally ambiguous, yet very British worldview. In the Darkling Spy, Catesby is an English spy from the wrong side of the tracks, send to Berlin, crossing paths with the famed Man Without a Face, Markus Wolf, the head of east German intelligence. The romance and the espionage tradecraft are well handled.

Slow Horses

*Soon to be a major TV series starring Gary Oldman* ’To have been lucky enough to play Smiley in one’s career; and now go and play Jackson Lamb in Mick Herron’s novels - the heir, in a way, to le Carre - is a terrific thing’ Gary Oldman Spooks are supposed to be stealthy ... But those who make a noisy mess of their careers end up in Slough House. This is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom: a dumping ground for spies who’ve screwed up. Once high fliers, they’re now slow horses, condemned to a life of pushing paper as punishment for crimes of drugs and drunkenness, lechery and failure, politics and betrayal. In drab and mildewed offices, these highly trained spies moan and squabble, stare at the walls, and dream of better days - not one of them joined the Intelligence Service to be a slow horse, and the one thing they have in common is their desire to be back in the action. So when a young man is kidnapped and held hostage, his beheading scheduled for live broadcast on the net, the slow horses aren’t going to just sit quietly and watch. And unless they can prove they’re not as useless as they’re thought to be, a public execution is going to echo round the world. ’The most exciting development in spy fiction since the Cold War’ The Times ’The most enjoyable British spy novel in years.’ Mail on Sunday ’The new spy master’ Evening Standard

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Slow-Horses--by--Mick-Herron--43418

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron. The Slow Horses are British spies in an off-brand spy agency located in Slough (“Slow”), England. And they are slow. Broken people, not the sharpest of tacks, but they somehow manage to get the job done. Absolutely great anti-Bond spies.

Europe In Autumn

Europe in Autumn is a thriller of espionage and the future which reads like the love child of John le Carré and Franz Kafka.Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he’s trapped in, a new career - partspy, part people-smuggler - begins. Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested, beaten and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue. With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws, Rudi begins to realise that underneath his daily round of plot and counter plot, behind the conflicting territories, another entirely different reality might be pulling the strings...

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Europe-In-Autumn--by--Dave-Hutchinson--12745

Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson. Rudi is a cook-turned-spy in a near future, semi-fictional Balkanized eastern Europe, in the service of a shadowy syndicate. Fun and train travel ensues.

The Tears of Autumn

Spun with unsettling plausibility from the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and featuring secret agent Paul Christopher, “The Tears of Autumn” was a major bestseller upon its publication in 1975, and this riveting novel of espionage and foreign affairs remains just as gripping today. Christopher, at the height of his powers, believes he knows who arranged the assassination, and why. His theory is so destructive to the legend of the dead president, and so dangerous to the survival of foreign policy, that he is ordered to halt his investigation. But he is a man who lives

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Tears-of-Autumn-A-Paul-Christopher-Novel--by--Charles-McCarry--9206

The Tears of Autumn, by Charles McCarry. The Kennedy assassination was never so clearly, cleverly, plausibly explained.

Night Heron

Set in China, and ripped from today’s headlines, comes a pulse-pounding debut that reinvents the spy thriller for the 21st century.A lone man, Peanut, escapes a labor camp in the dead of night, fleeing across the winter desert of north-west China.Two decades earlier, he was a spy for the British; now Peanut must disappear on Beijing’s surveillance-blanketed streets. Desperate and ruthless, he reaches out to his one-time MI6 paymasters via crusading journalist Philip Mangan, offering military secrets in return for extraction.But the secrets prove more valuable than Peanut or Mangan could ever have known... and not only to the British.

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Night-Heron--by--Adam-Brookes--478

Night Heron, by Adam Brookes. Peanut is a Chinese dissident/spy trapped in a Chinese prison camp. Mangan is a British journalist hanging out in Beijing with a friend and a high society Chinese girlfriend. When Peanut breaks out of camp and re-establishes contact with British intelligence, in the form of Trish Patterson, a tall, attractive Army intelligence officer, Mangan is slowly drawn into an operation to penetrate the Chinese military network, with Trish as his handler. Brookes readily evokes the new China, the growth, the politics and the conflict between Communist Theory and Capitalist Practice.

The Crook Factory

It’s the summer of 1942, and FBI agent Joe Lucas has come to Cuba at the behest of the Director to keep an eye on Ernest Hemingway in the Caribbean. Lucas thinks of it as a demotion-a babysitting job for a famous writer who has decided to play spy, assembling a team of misfits including an American millionaire, a twelve-year-old Cuban orphan, a Spanish jai alai champion and more in a would-be espionage ring Hemingway dubs the “Crook Factory.“But when Hemingway uncovers a critical piece of intelligence that both threatens his life and endangers the political landscape, the fate of the free world and the life of one of its most preeminent writers lies in the hands of the FBI’s most ruthless agent.

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-Crook-Factory--by--Dan-Simmons--167237

The Crook Factory, by Dan Simmons. Dan Simmons is a treasure. He can write anything from Science Fiction to mythological fantasy to crime novels, to historical fiction to horror. Did you know Ernest Hemingway was a spy in WWII in Cuba? Me neither. Dan Simmons did, and tells the story.

Legends

Now a TNT series starring Sean Bean Robert Littell is the undisputed master of American spy fiction, hailed for his profound grasp of the world of international espionage. His previous novel, The Company, an international bestseller, was praised as “one of the best spy novels ever written” (Chicago Tribune). For his new novel, Legends, Littell focuses on the life of one great agent caught in a “wilderness of mirrors” where both remembering and forgetting his past are deadly options. Martin Odum is a CIA field agent turned private detective, struggling his way through a labyrinth of past identities - “legends” in CIA parlance. Is he really Martin Odum? Or is he Dante Pippen, an IRA explosives maven? Or Lincoln Dittmann, Civil War expert? These men like different foods, speak different languages, have different skills. Is he suffering from multiple personality disorder, brainwashing, or simply exhaustion? Can Odum trust the CIA psychiatrist? Or Stella Kastner, a young Russian woman who engages him to find her brother-in-law so he can give her sister a divorce. As Odum redeploys his dormant tradecraft skills to solve Stella’s case, he travels the globe battling mortal danger and psychological disorientation. Part Three Faces of Eve, part The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and always pure Robert Littell, Legends―from unforgettable opening to astonishing ending―again proves Littell’s unparalleled prowess as a seductive storyteller.

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Legends-A-Novel--by--Robert-Littell--77137

Legends, by Robert Little. OK you may have heard of this, as there was a TV series loosely based (very loosely) on it, and Littell is somewhat well known. This is the most intricately plotted, dizzying spy novel we’ve read. Triple crosses and triple identities, our hero doesn’t really know who he is, he’s lived so many legends. Truly the “wilderness of mirrors”, as former CIA chief spy-hunter James Jesus Angleton called espionage.

Kim

First published in “McClure’s Magazine” between December of 1901 and October of 1901, “Kim” is the story of Kim (Kimball) O’Hara, the orphaned son of a British soldier. Set against the backdrop of “The Great Game” a political conflict between Russia and Great Britain in central Asia, the novel traces the life of the title character from begging and errand running on the streets of Lahore to his schooling at a top English school in Lucknow, where he is trained in espionage, and ultimately to a government appointment where he himself gets to play in “The Great Game.” Set between the second and third Afghan War, “Kim” presents a vivid portrait of 19th century India. Considered by many as Kipling’s masterpiece, “Kim” is a classic novel of espionage and adventure which helped bring popular attention to the political and diplomatic confrontation between the British Empire and the Russian Empire in Central and Southern Asia at the end of the 19th century. This edition includes an introduction by A. L. Rowse and a biographical afterword.

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Kim--by--Rudyard-Kipling--53124

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. You may have heard of it, and you’re thinking, “Rudyard Kipling, Jungle Book, oh this will be a kids book”. Far from it. Still a classic. The phrase “The Great Game”, the battle between Britain and Russia for control of the east, was popularized by this book.

The Spy

A historical adventure reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley romances, Cooper’s novel centers on Harvey Birch, a common man wrongly suspected of being a spy for the British.

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/The-Spy--by--James-Fenimore-Cooper--80736

The Spy; or, A Tale of the Neutral Ground by James Fenimore Cooper (1821)
You probably only know Cooper dimly as the author of Last of The Mohicans. which you probably didn’t read but saw the movie with Daniel Day Lewis. The Spy is a factually-based account of the exploits of Harvey Birch, a secret agent in the American Revolution.

A Spy Among Friends

From bestselling author Ben Macintyre, the true untold story of history’s most famous traitor

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/A-Spy-Among-Friends-Kim-Philby-and-the-Great-Betrayal--by--Ben-Macintyre--5484

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre. One non-fiction book to mix in here. Imagine if the number 2 or 3 person at the CIA was a Soviet agent. Sounds impossible, right? Not so. Kim Philby was responsible for counter-intelligence for MI-6, the home of James Bond and England’s equivalent to the CIA. Philby was a life-long communist agent, a mole in Britain’s intelligence establishment. A Spy Among Friends is best, most accessible view into the real life of the most devastating of real double agents.

Last but not least:

Declare

As a young double agent infiltrating the Soviet spy network in Nazi-occupied Paris, Andrew Hale finds himself caught up in a secret, even more ruthless war. Two decades later, in 1963, he will be forced to confront again the nightmarethat has haunted his adult life: a lethal unfinished operation code-named Declare. From the corridors of Whitehall to the Arabian desert, from post-war Berlin to the streets of Cold War Moscow, Hale’s desperate quest draws him into international politics and gritty espionage tradecraft -- and inexorably drives Hale, the fiery and beautiful Communist agent Elena Teresa Ceniza-Bendiga, and Kim Philby, mysterious traitor to the British cause, to a deadly confrontation on the high glaciers of Mount Ararat, in the very shadow of the fabulous and perilous Ark.

https://www.thehawaiiproject.com/book/Declare--by--Tim-Powers--60146

Declare, by Tim Powers. What do Kim Philby, Lawrence of Arabia, Djinn, Nazis, Russians, Ankhs, the Ark & Mount Ararat and long wave radio have in common? Declare. Deeply fantastical and yet intensely plausible, due to the deep historical research of Powers. Almost (almost!) everything in the book has plausible historical explanation, as set out in an appendix. A deeply strange and wonderful novel.

Take a look. Your bookshelf will thank you.

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