Best Reads of 2014: Part Three

Did you all have a great New Year's Eve and Day? If you celebrated a little too much, I hope by now the fog has lifted and you're confident you'll make it through the day intact. As I write this, it's still New Year's Day. I have an apple pie in the oven, the Tournament of Roses Parade on the TV, and it's a cold but sunny day outside. I sure can't complain.

As I looked back on my list of 2014 books read, I was surprised to see that nearly all my favorites were written by British authors. I've always been a bit of a reading anglophile, but this was pretty overwhelming. I've talked about several of these as the year went on, but that won't prevent me from twisting your arm again in hopes I can get you to read them.

If you're a regular reader of Read Me Deadly, you already know what I'm going to say my absolute favorite read of the year was: Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Crown, 2014). This is a near-perfect read for anyone fascinated by the British class system or Cold War espionage––and if both subjects are among your passions, then this is the mother lode.

To me, the psychology of a traitor to his country is always fascinating, and Philby is all the more intriguing because he was a son of privilege and more than comfortable with the accoutrements of his station. He was proud of being a Cambridge man, enjoyed alcohol-fueled evenings at his ancient London gentlemen's club, loved his Savile Row suits and handmade shoes, and was addicted to reading the Times. Why, then, would he betray all this for a country that had none of these things?

I won't tell you that Macintyre truly explains the conundrum of Philby, though he gives us some shafts of insight. What he does that cements this book for me as a one that I'll have on my shelves forever is to show how Philby's social class insulated him from being found out and punished for so many years. Macintyre details how MI6 (roughly the equivalent of the CIA in the US, while MI5 is similar to the FBI) was an upper-crust milieu that admitted the "right sort" to its ranks and then closed around them in a protective cocoon. Philby's treason––including the hundreds or even thousands of agent deaths it led to––ultimately seemed less important to his colleagues, especially his longtime friend Nicholas Elliott, than his betrayal of his class.

If Macintyre's book is historical nonfiction that reads like a page-turner of a novel, then Robert Harris's An Officer and a Spy (Knopf, 2014) is a novel that illuminates history better than any academic study. I'm sure you know the basics of the Dreyfus Affair: France's false conviction of a Jewish army officer for treason in the late 19th century, his exile to Devil's Island, and the years-long efforts to exonerate him. Harris looks at the story from a different angle, that of Colonel Georges Picquart, an officer who was present when Dreyfus was arrested on charges of passing secret military information to German agents.

Picquart didn't have much of any interest in Dreyfus, and had the same level of anti-Semitic feelings as was sadly typical in the French military and society. But when Picquart was assigned to become chief of the military's secret intelligence bureau, almost by accident he learned that the evidence against Dreyfus was nearly nonexistent, but there was plenty of damning evidence against Major Walsin Esterhazy, a womanizer, gambler and cheat––but not Jewish. Picquart couldn't help pursuing the truth, though it was increasingly dangerous for him to do so within the hierarchy of the military.

Robert Harris wrote Fatherland, to my mind an unparalleled World War II alternative history. I doubt he can ever write anything that will surpass that for me, but he gives it a heck of a good effort with An Officer and a Spy.

So where are the mysteries, I hear you grousing. And to that, I say: What's the matter, you grump, do you still have a hangover of a hangover? But I do have mysteries on my favorites list, never fear.

It's always a thrill to find a new mystery author. Tony Parsons is a well-known journalist and novelist in Britain, but The Murder Man (Minotaur, 2014; originally published in the UK under the title The Murder Bag) is the first in a planned police procedural trilogy featuring the very human Detective Constable Max Wolfe. Max is a refreshing character for this genre. He has a troubled past, but it's a wrecked marriage, not something much darker. And he spends his evenings at home with his young daughter and their dog, Stan, not wrapped around a liquor bottle.

The Murder Man begins with a short prologue of sexual violence that nearly had me putting the book aside for good, but I'm glad I didn't, because after that I was treated to a this appealing new protagonist and his family, and a plot with plenty of depth and sense of place. Parsons also throws in issues of privilege, power, inequality and media manipulation, all of which add to the richness of the story.

An even better-known English novelist decided to turn to mystery writing recently. That's J. K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame, who began her Cormoran Strike series in 2013, with The Cuckoo's Calling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Cormoran Strike returned earlier this year in The Silkworm (Mulholland Books, 2014). This is a leaner story than The Cuckoo's Calling, and I think it's the better for it. In this entry, Strike is persuaded to drop an obnoxious––but lucrative––corporate client in favor of a nonpaying job to track down writer Owen Quine.

As Cormoran investigates, he learns that Quine has a reputation for being no less obnoxious than his erstwhile client. But Quine is hardly alone in that. Rowling's book is at least as much a thinly-veiled exposé of the publishing world as a detective novel. She paints vivid portraits of a variety of distasteful characters, including the harpy who is Quine's agent, a creepy publisher, a drunken editor, a supremely narcissistic and unpleasant literary rival of Quine's and at least a dozen more minor, mostly unpleasant, personalities.

Rowling makes the publishing milieu deliciously nasty, while her protagonist and his protegée, Robin Ellacott, are people you'd want to have on your side if you ever happen to run into trouble in London. I hope they return in another adventure this year.

Speaking of appealing protagonists, one of my more recent favorites made another appearance this year. Fiona Griffiths is a most unusual person and Detective Constable. Buried deep in her subconscious is a traumatic event from her childhood. She knows it's there, but she doesn't know what it is. But, like a virus, it flares up from time to time in the form of Cotard's syndrome, a condition in which dissociation and depression combine to make her lose touch with her physical and emotional feelings, turn the world into shades of gray and, in its worst stages, make her believe that she is literally dead.

That sounds like a real laugh riot––not––right? Believe me, though, it actually can be. The series books are written in the first person and are in near-equal parts about the case at hand, Fiona's attempts to find out about her past, and about her strenuous efforts to stay firmly resident on "Planet Normal."

In the second book in the series, Love Story, With Murders (Delacorte, 2014), Fiona and her comrades at the Cardiff (Wales) police department are investigating the finding of dismembered bodies in an assortment of odd locations in a quiet suburban neighborhood. With morbid humor, they call the case Stirfry. Fiona herself combines sympathy for victims of crime and their families with a maverick style at work that often lands her in hot water. These books are narrated in the first person, which is the perfect choice since the inside of Fiona's head is an eccentric and often very funny place.

Eccentric might as well be Arthur Bryant's middle name in Christopher Fowler's unfailingly delightful Peculiar Crimes Unit series, featuring old-timers Bryant and his longtime partner, John May. May is dapper, disciplined and diplomatic to Bryant's scruffy, scattershot and sarcastic. But they're both brilliant, and that's what keeps the PCU in operation, just barely, despite how fervently their overlords usually wish them away to perdition.

In Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart (Bantam, 2014), Number 11 in the series, the plot elements are even odder than usual, combining corpses rising from the dead and raven-napping from the Tower of London. The PCU is in a new HQ––just as ramshackle as the old one but now replete with kittens––and they are now under the jurisdiction of the historic City of London. Gone is their old nemesis top boss, the saturnine Oscar Kasavian, replaced with the dressed-for-success Orion Banks, who talks in management-speak and is dismayed to find that the PCU is unlikely to add policing statistics that will help fuel her rise up the rungs of the professional ladder. She and Arthur Bryant are not a match made in heaven.

Despite the outlandishness of the plot, Arthur Bryant is a little less outrageous than usual. He's feeling his years and wonders if he's become extraneous. His introspection is a welcome opening of another dimension into this character, though it's an unwelcome reminder that this series must inevitably someday come to an end.

I'd like to say my next book sticks with the theme of eccentricity, but I think "eccentric" is too limiting a box for William Heming, the subject of Phil Hogan's brilliant A Pleasure and a Calling (Picador, January 6, 2015, though currently available in the US in audiobook form and published in 2014 in the UK). He's an estate agent in a leafy and prosperous village within commuting distance of London. He's quite successful, but not at all showy. In fact, people rarely notice him, and what a handy thing that is for him, being a sociopath and all.

In the apartment to which no guest is ever invited, William keeps a key to every house he's ever sold. He likes to keep tabs on their residents. Usually, that's all he does, but sometimes he feels more is warranted. Someone who is a bad neighbor might need a bit of correction. For example, if he doesn't clean up after his dog, well, that mess might just end up the centerpiece of the man's white carpet. But when Heming finds himself falling for a young woman and learns that a particularly distasteful married man is her lover, things quickly get very much out of hand.

"Creepy" is the adjective most often applied to this novel, but it's the most deliciously enjoyable kind of creepy and I urge you to meet William Heming yourself. And if you haven't changed your locks since you bought your house, think about it.

Another odd English protagonist, though not at all creepy, is Frank Shaw in Robert Glancy's Terms & Conditions (Bloomsbury USA, 2014). Shaw is part of a particular sub-type of English male, the man who apologizes when someone else bumps into him and uncomplainingly lets other people always have their way. But when we begin the book, Frank doesn't know that about himself, because he's suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident and doesn't remember much of anything.

Though Frank has amnesia, he also has synesthesia, where the sight of people and certain objects triggers sounds, colors, smells and strong emotions. There's a nasty, rancid green smell around the fat, smug, smartly-dressed man who says he's Frank's older brother, Oscar. That slim, sophisticated woman named Alice, who says she's Frank's wife, evokes confusing feelings, but when Frank gets home, the sight of a box of copies of her book, titled Executive X, fills him with rage. And when, rummaging around the house, he finds a jar with a preserved pinky finger floating around in it, he feels elated. What's that about?

Frank slowly begins to put his life together, at least enough to return to work, where he is a junior member of the family law firm, run by Oscar. Frank's specialty is writing contracts, in particular the fine-print terms and conditions that generally put the lie to all the promises in the large print. As flashes of memory pierce the fog, Frank learns that the terms and conditions of his own life are just as contradictory to what Oscar and Alice keep telling him. Maybe it's time to quit apologizing and start writing a new contract for the rest of his life.

Glancy writes the book with a clever gimmick. He uses fine-print footnotes––and footnotes within footnotes––to tell important bits of the story. One chapter, titled Terms & Conditions of Sex, consists of a half-line long sentence and three pages of footnotes. But this isn't just a book with a clever gimmick. It's a vastly entertaining black comedy with a heart.

I do have some books not written by English authors on my 2014 best-reads list; all written by women, whatever that might mean. First, let's take the Eurostar over from England to Paris for The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles (Penguin Books, 2013), the first in Katherine Pancol's "Joséphine" trilogy and, so far, the only one translated to English.

Joséphine Cortès lives in an unstylish apartment on the outskirts of Paris with her daughters, the nightmare of teenage rebellion, Hortense, and the still-sweet little girl, Zoé. The apartment was once home to husband Antoine, but he's now run off with his hairdresser mistress to manage an African crocodile farm. Joséphine earns practically nothing in her job as a history researcher and now she needs to figure out some way of bringing in enough to support the girls.

Joséphine is not about to ask for help from her snobbish mother, Henriette, or her chic society wife, Iris, though both have plenty of money. But help arrives anyway, in a most unexpected fashion. Iris, bored and hoping to impress her other idle friends, announces to them that she is writing a historical novel. Now she's stuck, because she's certainly not interested in doing the work. She proposes that Joséphine use her expertise to write the novel, which Iris will present as her own work, funneling the proceeds to Joséphine.

When the novel becomes a runaway success, the secret begins to ooze out, complicating everyone's lives. But that's not the only complexity, because Pancol also introduces us to a large cast of supporting characters, with their own messy lives and loves. There is Marcel, Joséphine's stepfather, who escapes from his ice queen wife, Henriette, into the arms of his voluptuous and warm-hearted secretary; Joséphine's neighbor and friend Shirley, who has a mysterious past in England; the teenage Hortense and her attempts to grow up too soon; and, of course, Antoine and his life on the crocodile farm.

The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles is a fast-paced, funny and poignant French-style Cinderella story. It inspired a lively discussion at my book club a few months ago, where we agreed that we would all plan to read the next two books in the series when they are finally translated.

Finally, let's get over to the US and two novels that round out my favorite reads of last year. Susan Rieger's The Divorce Papers (Crown, 2014) is one that I lent around to a few friends, and the title always got a rise out of their husbands. I don't know if that would be a benefit or a detriment at your house, but fair warning in any case!

Rieger's protagonist is Sophie Diehl, a Yale Law School grad and young associate at a small, prestigious firm in the fictional town of New Salem in the equally fictional northeastern state of Narragansett. Sophie enjoys her criminal law practice and is dismayed when managing partner David Greaves ropes her into representing Mia Meiklejohn, the daughter of one of the firm's most important clients, in her divorce from Dr. Daniel Durkheim, one of the country's foremost experts in pediatric oncology.

The highfalutin' word for the form of this novel is epistolary; in other words, it tells its story through a series of documents––like the very popular Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, for example. In this case, the documents include the formal, such as legal memoranda, court filings, legal cases, settlement offers and financial records; personal letters and notes among Mia, her daughter, Daniel, Daniel's (first) ex-wife and his current mistress; and emails between Sophie and her friends and family, and David Greaves. It was great fun not to know when I turned the page whether I'd be reading a handwritten nastygram from Mia to Daniel; a formal (but razor sharp) settlement offer from Sophie to Daniel's shyster lawyer; or a gossipy email from Sophie to her friend Maggie about her dates or sometimes difficult relationships with her parents and her in-office nemesis.

This is not so much the story of divorce as the tale of Sophie's personal and professional coming of age. But it is almost as much Mia's story. This feisty woman steals every scene she's in. She gave up her journalism career to support Daniel's practice and to raise their daughter, but Daniel makes a big mistake in thinking he can steamroller her. She's a force of nature and a real pistol.

This one won't be for everybody, since many people don't like the epistolary form or novels about lawyers. Its characters also embody a certain eastern elite style that may be off-putting to some. But for me, it was a consistently entertaining story of two strong female characters.

Kate Racculia's Bellweather Rhapsody (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) is a much quirkier coming-of-age story, and one that would be particularly good to read this winter, since it takes place at the down-at-heel Bellweather Resort in the Catskills, just as a blizzard approaches. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Bellweather is hosting its annual music convention for New York's high schoolers. Twins Rabbit and Alice Hatmaker (great names, huh?) will be there, Alice as a singer and Rabbit as a bassoonist. Alice's roommate, Jill, is a brilliant flautist who is determined to use the weekend as an opportunity somehow to get away from her mother, Viola Fabian, the new organizer of the competition. Viola is as striking and sociopathic as Cruella de Ville, and she's already left scars on the competition's symphony conductor and the Hatmakers' chaperone, Natalie Wilson.

Although the hotel is awash with high-strung, hormonal musical teenagers and their overstretched adult supervisors, there is another guest. Minnie Graves is returning to the Bellweather, hoping to exorcise the demons who have haunted her ever since she witnessed a horrifying event outside Room 712 exactly 15 years earlier. When a new horror occurs in that room, the already-present intensity is ready to pop like an over-tightened violin string.

Racculia is like a music conductor herself, brilliantly directing her large cast of characters, sometimes in harmony and sometimes clashing. Every character is a bit of a misfit, but her writing is filled with understanding and sympathy for them––well, that's not quite right. Viola is 99% villain, and one you just love to hate. So you've got a young adult coming-of-age tale and an amateur detective story, sprinkled with romance, magical realism, some horror/suspense––and one of the funniest scenes I've ever read, when Minnie Graves encounters Viola Fabian in a Bellweather elevator.

A few weeks ago, our friend and occasional contributor Lady Jane Digby's Ghost recommended Ben Elton's Time and Time Again and it was well up on my list of best reads of the year. However, I'll let her tell you more about it when she joins us next week with her list. In the meantime, all best wishes to you for a wonderful new year in life and one of its greatest pleasures, reading.

Note: Portions of this piece appear in prior reviews on Read Me Deadly and in reviews Amazon and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre

Around the time World War II began, two young men joined one of England's most exclusive clubs, the intelligence service now known as MI6. The two had similar backgrounds: tony prep schools and Cambridge, where they became friends, and forebears who had served the British Empire. In other words, both were in the country's ruling elite and well plugged into the old boys' network. They were both admitted to the British intelligence service with little more than a "he's one of us" type of introduction.

That's where the similarity ends. Nicholas Elliott was everything that his background would suggest: conservative, patriotic and a firm believer that he and his class were born to rule. Kim Philby was only pretending to be the same. In reality, he was a Marxist, had been an agent of the USSR since 1934, and for over 30 years ruthlessly betrayed his country, his friends, family and colleagues, and sent hundreds, or even thousands, to certain death by betraying them to Soviet intelligence.

Kim Philby

In a presentation at a bookstore upon this book's publication in the UK, Macintyre said this is "a story of male friendship and Englishness." The "Englishness" part of the story is tightly linked to the friendship part. Britain's MI6, formerly the Secret Intelligence Service, is the UK's foreign intelligence service. (For US readers, MI6 is the rough equivalent of the CIA, while MI5 is like the FBI.) When Elliott and Philby joined, MI6 was a very upper-crust place, filled with Eton/Cambridge men, from families that had been running the show in the British Empire for generations.

Elliott wasn't even a particularly good student, but he was from the right sort of family, so he had his ticket stamped to Eton and Cambridge. When he graduated from Cambridge, his third-class degree was no bar to him. He had only to express an interest in becoming a spy to an old family friend and he was in. Kim Philby's credentials were better, his degree was a 2:1, but he was also hired with just an "I know his people" from the right sort and, apparently, no checking into his background. A background, by the way, that included working for the underground Comintern in Vienna in the tumultuous uprising of 1933 and marrying another one of its activists.

Macintyre takes us into the heyday of espionage, and it's a wild ride. It's mind-boggling how many familiar names there are, from Peter Ustinov's father, to even Pope John XXIII, when he was Monsignor Roncalli. Macintyre gives the reader an evocative depiction of the atmosphere of spydom, from the intensely serious to the downright silly. For an example of the latter, I had to laugh out loud at the description of that hotbed of spies, Istanbul, during World War II, when a chief of station of any one of the combatant countries' agencies would enter a certain nightclub, the bandleader would swiftly lead the orchestra in a rousing version of "Boo Boo Baby, I'm a Spy." (Macintyre sets down all the lyrics, which are delightful, and I'm just disappointed that I haven't been able to find an online recording, other than some modern––and dreadful––hip-hop version.)

Cambridge University

But just when I might be shaking my head or laughing at some absurdity Macintyre describes, he would drench me with a cold bucket of reality, describing how Philby eagerly turned over information about anti-communists, knowing that they would be mercilessly killed by the Soviets. In some cases, his reasons appeared to be ideological, but in others it was done to avoid his being exposed. In his later writings, it's clear Philby never felt any qualms about the blood on his hands.

Nicholas Elliott

Adding to the chill reality is the fact that Philby got away with it for so long and was climbing the ladder within MI6, on his way to possibly even becoming chief of service. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody in MI6 to match up all those cases where the Soviets seemed to know what the British were up to with the small handful of people who could have given away the game to them. Was it sheer stupidity? Both Philby, in his reports, and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper rated many of the MI6 higher-ups as lacking in brain power. But Macintyre makes the case that Philby was the right sort, and that this made his betrayal quite literally unthinkable to the posh clubmen in MI6. It's a shame Philby's victims weren't the right sort, or they might have been served better.

Philby didn't find it hard to manipulate Yalie and Anglophile
James J. Angleton, who would become the CIA's chief of
counterintelligence and unwitting source for Philby and the USSR

Retelling the well-known Philby story within the framework of his friendships and the British gentlemen's club mentality of MI6 reanimates the familiar tale of Philby's treason. This is an espionage book, but it is not about spycraft. It is a study of personalities and a society. Macintyre's focus is on how Philby was able to make strong––and maybe even sincere in his mind––friendships, such as the ones with Elliott and James J. Angleton, who later become head of the American CIA, assiduously pump his friends for information, promptly turn over all of that intelligence to the Soviets, and get away with it long after he should have been exposed.

While the betrayal-of-friendship aspect of Philby's story is interesting, it is the "Englishness" part that is most revealing––"Englishness" actually meaning the world of the English upper class. What Macintyre exposes is a peculiar kind of tribal sociopathy, in which the clubmen of MI6 simply couldn't see that one of their own might not fall into line with their worldview. Worse yet, they didn't see anyone outside their class as quite worthy of their consideration. For example, when they trained Albanian guerrillas to slip back into the country, rally locals and overthrow the communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, the MI6 handlers dismissively called the Albanians the "Pixies." And when Philby's perfidy ensured that the guerrillas were wiped out almost immediately, the MI6 functionaries rued the failure of the mission, but had no depth of feeling for the loss of all those men.

Elliott and his tribe belonged to White's, the oldest
and most exclusive gentlemen's club in London

The upper-class types within MI6 failed to see the betrayer in their midst and also failed to understand that the exclusionary nature of their system played a part in creating traitors. Just one example is George Black, an MI6 agent who was not part of the tribe, hated the British class system and became a Soviet agent after having been in a North Korean prison camp in the 1950s. After he was exposed and put on trial, he was sentenced in 1961 to 42 years in prison.

This is actually Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, but this is
just how I picture Elliott, sitting down for his chat with le Carré

And yet, when MI6 finally saw the light with Philby, just a couple of years after Blake's sentencing, putting Philby on trial was apparently unthinkable. He was immediately offered complete immunity if he would reveal all, and Macintyre makes a good case that he was allowed to do a "fade," to slip away to Russia, after he was interrogated. Was it just because MI6 couldn't stand another round of bad publicity? That must have had something to do with it, but I was struck by the author John le Carré's talk with Nicholas Elliott some years later. When le Carré asked Elliott if MI6 had considered having Philby liquidated, Elliott instantly reproved him, saying: "My dear boy. One of us." At that point, I lost whatever sympathy I felt for Elliott and his smug, hard-drinking, clubby tribe.

Earlier this year, I was riveted by Robert Harris's An Officer and a Spy, which also described elements of social discrimination within an intelligence service, in this case the French service during the Dreyfus Affair. I thought that likely to be the most fascinating espionage title I would read in 2014, but A Spy Among Friends just edges it out. Even if you've read every book about Philby there is, I think you'll find food for thought in Macintyre's latest.

Note: Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Book Review of Ben MacIntyre's Double Cross

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre

A Serbian playboy, a melodramatic Pole, a bisexual Peruvian heiress to a guano fortune that was never enough to keep up with her gambling habit, a failed Spanish chicken farmer and a Frenchwoman of Russian heritage who would place her little white dog (inexplicably named Babs, even though he was male) above any other loyalty. What is this, an espionage team or a cast list for a Monty Python sketch? Ben Macintyre does it again; unearths the story of a highly improbable, but true, high-stakes World War II espionage caper, carried out by a team of supremely eccentric characters.

These five agents were the key players in Britain's Operation Double Cross. By March 1943, Britain had captured 126 spies and turned several into double agents. Some other German agents volunteered themselves to work for Britain. At first, the British used the double agents to give the Germans "chicken feed," true intelligence data the British could afford to give up, but once British intelligence became convinced that they controlled every German spy in the country, they decided the network could be used to mislead the Germans on a large scale and affect the outcome of the war.

The plan was to use the Double Cross agents as part of a massive and elaborate plan to persuade the Germans that the D-Day invasion would take place, not at Normandy, but at Pas de Calais and via Norway. The espionage operation was carried out over many months, and involved all kinds of fakery to persuade Germany that vast armies were massing at the best spots in England and Scotland to invade at the false invasion points. The Double Cross agents passed on thousands of messages to advance this fakery, and other tidbits of false intelligence to further the plot.

The Germans wholeheartedly believed in "their" agents, showering them with fulsome praise, money, and even an Iron Cross in one case. It seems that though the Germans had a good deal of success capturing spies and resistance operatives in occupied territories, they were terrible at spotting double agents. I had to wonder if it had something to do with key differences in their culture and national psyche versus those of the British.

British intelligence reveled in the gamesmanship and double-dealing required for Double Cross. The war was, of course, deadly serious, but the British intelligence services almost gleefully embraced the most elaborate and absurd trickery in pursuit of their strategic goals. They hatched wild ploys, like breaking up Germany's homing pigeon communication network by infiltrating it with British pigeons, and spending weeks training an actor to impersonate the colorful Field Marshall Montgomery and appear in Gibraltar as the D-Day invasion approached, so that the Germans would be lulled into complacency.

The British intelligence services were filled with old school chums who played cricket at Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and enjoyed the Times crossword puzzle. All that practice learning to disguise the curve of a googly pitch and understand a cryptic crossword seems to have come in a lot more handy than the Germans' tradition of giving each other dueling scars.

Kudos to Ben Macintyre, author of Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat, for bringing us another unique and stranger-than-fiction tale of the sometimes farcical, but always riveting, intelligence agents and operations that helped win World War II.

For additional reading, consider J. C. Masterman's The Double-Cross System. Masterman was the head of the Twenty Committee, which devised and ran Operation Double Cross. ("Twenty" was chosen as the name for the committee because the roman numerals for the number 20 are XX, or a double cross.) Masterman was an author, an Oxford don and avid cricketer. He wrote two mysteries: An Oxford Tragedy and The Case of the Four Friends.

Note: I was given a free review copy of Double Cross, which will be published by Bloomsbury on July 31, 2012.  A version of this review appears on the Amazon product page, under my Amazon user name.