A Thanksgiving Sampler

Thank God we're talking about test driving,
not our own disastrous driving tests.

A friend and I have been tasting champagne this weekend, because that's what Hubby and I have been asked to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. After we methodically worked our way through several bottles, we felt festive enough to sample pumpkin pie coupled with various flavors of ice cream she had in her freezer. We agreed on the Veuve Clicquot Brut Yellow Label and concluded it's best to stick to a good vanilla.

The holiday season is full of figuring stuff out: the gift for your best friend, the guest list for your winter potluck, how to ship cookies to your far-flung kids. You also need to find some books to read to keep yourself sane. An excellent way to ensure a book matches what you're in the mood for is to stock up on a variety. Let's test drive some possibilities.

During the winter holidays, one hones one's cloak-and-dagger skills hiding gifts at home and diplomatic talents charming colleagues at the office party. Surely, this is the season for reading espionage.

Something British and cynical might hit the spot. Former BBC correspondent Adam Brookes has followed up his compelling Night Heron (Redhook/Hachette, 2014) with Spy Games (Redhook, September 2015). Freelance journalist Philip Mangan is a decent guy with more than his fair share of restlessness and curiosity. After a dabble into espionage necessitated his fleeing Beijing, Philip is in Addis Abba, investigating the Chinese presence in Ethiopia. Then three things happen: an MI6 asset dies in Hong Kong, Philip barely escapes a café bombing, and he is offered some classified Chinese military documents. Thus are Philip and Trish Patterson, his MI6 handler, drawn into a power struggle that is playing out primarily in Ethiopia; Oxford, England; and Chiang Mai, Thailand.

It's not necessary to read Night Heron first, but I'd suggest you do that simply for the pleasure of understanding exactly why MI6 isn't thrilled to find "Philip Mangan," "China" and "spy" again in the same equation, and why Philip is feeling a bit cross about it, too. At 437 pages, Spy Games could benefit from some tightening up; however, if you like an intricate plot woven with separate threads, colorful characters, and beautifully drawn exotic locations, this is for you.

If you're feeling in the mood for dueling American and Russian intelligence agencies, sex used as an espionage tool, and very sadistic villains (brace yourself), check out books written by an espionage insider, former CIA agent Jason Matthews. His writing feels very up close and personal in its focus on the characters' lives and personalities and their elaborate spycraft.

In 2013's Red Sparrow (Scribner), Matthews introduces the CIA's young hot-shot, Nate Nash, and the beautiful Russian agent, Dominika Egorova, whose job it is to get him to divulge the identity of a Russian traitor (see Sister Mary Murderous's review here). Dominika is a synesthete who perceives people surrounded by a colored aura; at the appearance of her black-haloed boss, former Lubyanka prison torturer Alexei Zyuganov, I pulled the covers over my head.

Dominika is back in Russia in Palace of Treason (Scribner, June 2015). She's climbing the ranks of the SVR, much to the chagrin of the scheming Zyuganov, and maneuvering to avoid exposure as she passes information to the Americans. Meanwhile, there's a mole at CIA headquarters passing secrets to the Russians, which creates a very pleasant symmetry (don't you think?), and jacks up the suspense. I was surprised and pleased to see Russian President Vladimir Putin appear as a minor character, as wily and enigmatic as we Westerners find him in real life. Palace of Treason can be read as a standalone, but you'll want to read Red Sparrow, too. One can never find enough good spy yarns––especially those with lovesick agents and recipes.

With all the demands of the holidays pressing, you might appreciate the comfort of an offbeat mystery with a strong sense of place, such as Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri series, featuring the Most Private Investigators Ltd. agency in Delhi, or Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in Botswana.

Vaseem Khan's quirky first book, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (Redhook, September 2015), is the opening book of such a proposed series. Inspector Ashwin Chopra's heart condition has forced him into early retirement after more than three decades on the Mumbai police force. During his last day, Chopra learns of a young man who apparently drowned in a puddle. The Inspector is warned off opening an inquiry and returns home to find a baby elephant, Ganesha, bequeathed to him by his uncle.

As a policeman, Chopra was an incorruptible officer who prided himself on treating everyone equally. So he can't get the screams of the dead youth's mother––that her family is too poor for his death to be adequately investigated––out of his head. Chopra decides to look into it on his own. He must keep this a secret, because his wife, Poppy, would object, and he doesn't want his former police colleagues thinking he's one of those unfortunate people who have no life outside work. Chopra balances caring for little Ganesha, whose abilities are not entirely realistic, with a criminal investigation that takes him through various Mumbai neighborhoods. This allows the reader to glimpse a fascinating city through the eyes of a man who loves it, even though he regrets some aspects of its modernization. The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra is a little too consciously charming for my taste, but I wanted to tell you about it because many readers love it for its charm, and you might, too.

Tomorrow we'll look at a few more holiday reads.

When You're Too Tired to Sleep

What do you do when you fall into bed exhausted and then can't get to sleep? After rejecting ideas too masochistic (scouring out the bathtub, ironing) and even worse (lying there and making a mental list of where you've gone wrong since first grade, pondering our current US Congress), you should reach for a book or a DVD and the remote. Which one all depends on how you feel.

Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins

If work has you feeling imprisoned and you've got a life sentence with those in bed beside you: your spouse, snoring and snorting in his sleep, and your dog, who won't stop licking his privates: Break out with George Clooney in O, Brother, Where Art Thou?, if you're hankering for a Coen brothers movie with bluegrass music, or Out of Sight, if you're more in the mood for an escaped Clooney pining after Jennifer Lopez, who plays a dedicated US marshal in a movie based on the Elmore Leonard novel. Perhaps you like the idea of the prison being a World War II German POW camp, and your thoughts about the escapee run to the more the merrier, and include Steve McQueen on a motorcycle; if so, fire up The Great Escape. You could watch a cult favorite, The Shawshawk Redemption, featuring unconventional prisoner Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), and his buddy, the prisoner/entrepreneur, Red (Morgan Freeman).

Or, crack open Michael Robotham's Life or Death (Mulholland, March 2015), for a look at another enigmatic prisoner, Audie Palmer, who climbs out of a Texas prison the night before he's due to be paroled. Audie had admitted his involvement in an armored truck robbery that led to the deaths of four people. He was sentenced to 10 years, but the missing $7 million was never recovered. Weaving in and out with Audie's back story are the efforts to find him by pint-size FBI Special Agent Desiree Furness; the sheriff, who as a deputy shot Audie in the head during the robbery; and a prison buddy named Moss. Aussie author Robotham's storytelling kept me turning pages, but some British substitutions for their American counterparts (such as bank "queue" rather than "line") were a little distracting. More distracting are the length of Audie's sentence (c'mon, this is Texas, not Scandinavia), the fact Audie even survived in the joint, given the particulars, and the ease with which he escaped; however, these quibbles weren't enough to keep me from enjoying it. This isn't one of those pulse-pounding thrillers; it's the kind that makes you want to know what happened in the past and how things would end, and, no, I didn't peek.

For when you're so tired, you're feeling less than human––in fact, you're wondering if you're lower on the mammal totem pole than your dog: Empathize with Jax, a mechanical servitor who longs for freedom in Ian Tregillis's The Mechanical (Orbit, March 2015), a hybrid of steampunk, fantasy, and alternate history set in the early 1900s. The book opens with the public execution of some Catholic spies and the destruction of a rogue mechanical man. In the 17th century, the work of scientist Christiaan Huygens led to the development of a Dutch army of automata powered by alchemy and clockworks. These "Clakkers," capable of independent thought, but enslaved through a built-in hierarchy of obligations called "geasa" to their masters and the Queen on the Brasswork Throne, allowed the Netherlands to become the most powerful nation in the world.

There is now an uneasy truce between the Netherlands and the remnants of its opposition in New France (in Canada). In the capital of Marseilles-in-the-West, spy-in-charge Berenice Charlotte de Mornay-Périgord has her hands full with a dangerous Game of Thrones-like situation. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, her small espionage network is disappearing. One of her spies, Luuk Visser, a Catholic priest working undercover as a Protestant pastor, gives Jax an errand and then, oh man, you really must read this book for yourself. Everyone is passionate and scheming away like mad. I've never read anything quite like this cinematic novel, and I bet we'll see it eventually on the big screen. It tackles free will, what it means to be human, identity, loyalty, the meaning of faith and religious freedom, and revenge and redemption. Tregillis doesn't shy away from harming his characters, so you can't assume anyone is safe. Some people may find Berenice's foul mouth offensive, and there are a few scenes I found genuinely disturbing. Some scenes drag a little bit, but these flaws are minor. I'm glad there are two more coming in the Alchemy Wars trilogy because this book was great reading on a sleepless night.

If you'd rather watch a robot than read about one, there are the Terminator movies with our former California governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a cyborg sent back from a future in which machines rule the world. I'm telling you, Schwarzenegger was born to play this role. Blade Runner, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, features Harrison Ford as Los Angeles cop Rick Deckard, who is called back to duty in 2019 to track down and kill rogue replicants. James Cameron's Aliens has a cyborg on hand when Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver was born for this one) returns to the planet of Alien. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie, Robocop (forget the re-make), is about a Detroit cop, killed in action, who returns to the force as half-human/half-robot. (And they say Humpty Dumpty couldn't be put back together again.) There are many more of these movies worthy of the time it takes to pop corn and wash it down with a Coke, such as the charming animated flick, The Iron Giant; Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope (thank goodness there's no Jar Jar Binks)....

Say you're in that half-asleep/half-awake state when your identity feels like a mirage, so you could really get into something to do with spies: Of course, you can't go wrong with another viewing of The Third Man, set in Allied-occupied Vienna and starring Joseph Cotten as pulp western writer Holly Martins and Orson Welles as his childhood friend, Harry Lime. We could argue whether it's the best-ever espionage movie. In Éric Rochant's 1994 film, Les Patriotes (The Patriots), Ariel Brenner (Yvan Attal) leaves his home in France for Israel on his 18th birthday. There, he joins Mossad and loses his idealism in a morally fuzzy world. Naval commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) takes up with Susan Atwel (Sean Young), the mistress of US Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman), in 1987's No Way Out. Susan's murder cues the spinning of a web of deceit. This is a re-make of a terrific 1948 movie, The Big Clock, with Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, and Maureen O'Sullivan. In the German movie, The Lives of Others, it's 1984, and Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is compelled to launch an investigation of the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) by a man who has designs on Dreyman's girlfriend. Don't you love wheels within wheels? 

Make sure you leave the butter off your popcorn if you decide to watch your spies on the page instead of on the screen. Don't waste time piddling around when you're tired; go straight to the British novels. What is it about MI5 and MI6 that makes seeing them under the microscope so diverting? We'll think about that while we cringe at some of these British writers' disdainful depictions of the CIA "cousins" as demanding and inept, throwing around cash, bigfooting joint operations, and screwing them up because they think about short-term payoffs rather than long-term consequences.

I kept a stiff upper lip about the cousins and enjoyed Charles Cumming's A Colder War (St. Martin's Press, 2014). It's the second series book about Thomas Kell, an MI6 agent disgraced during the Witness X affair, whom we first met in the 2012 Steel Dagger winner, A Foreign Country (see review here). Kell has now once again been hauled out of the cold, this time to investigate the death of Paul Wallinger, head of the SIS station in Turkey, in an airplane crash. MI6's Amelia Levene thinks three recent intelligence disasters point to a mole in the SIS or the CIA.

Yeah, looking for a mole is nothing new, but Cumming does a good job with it. He takes his time; there are close to 400 pages. Notable are the clarity of the writing, use of locations, and the charm of the descriptions. It was a pleasure to learn what Tom is reading and to see what's on his shelves. Cumming once worked for MI6, and I liked his knowledge about how the agency works (the extent to which personal relationships affect spying is interesting) and his familiarity with spycraft. The life of a Cumming spy definitely isn't for everybody. Their careers ruin their family relationships and make keeping their stories straight––to themselves, as well as everyone else––almost impossible. They are betrayed by ass-covering superiors and ambitious colleagues, and they need a good night's sleep and sweet dreams as much as anybody. At least a gorgeous young woman falls into bed with Tom, a lonely man in his mid-40s. You might roll your eyes at this, but, hey, while Tom's no James Bond, he's not John Gardner's cowardly Boysie Oakes of The Liquidator fame, either. I'm looking forward to seeing Tom again on a night I can't sleep.

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.

The Socialite's Guide to Fascism

The Spy Wore Red: My Adventures As an Undercover Agent in World War II, by Aline, Countess de Romanones, was on my radar screen for eons, but somehow I didn't get around to reading it until this summer. It wasn't what I expected. I had an idea in my head that the Countess was born into European nobility and had used her position to spy on Nazis. Well, not exactly.

It turns out she was born Aline Griffith in Pearl River, in upstate New York. She was working as a model in New York City, but didn't drink or smoke, didn't go to clubs and wore saddle shoes and schoolgirl clothes when she took the bus to and from work.

Aline's younger brothers were serving in the armed forces during World War II and she complained that she wanted to be in the war, too, but hadn't been able to find her way in. At age 19, though, she complained to just the right person: the brother of a friend, who worked at the War Department. He told her she might receive a call and, after a couple of weeks, she did. She was soon receiving intensive training at the "Farm" (later used, famously, as CIA training grounds), and working with other agents, all of whom knew each other only by their agent names. Aline's was Tiger.

Aline on just another weekend
in the country

Aline had a decent level of conversational French and Spanish, and was chosen to travel to Madrid, where her cover was working at the US oil mission. But her real job was to get into Madrid society, a good many of whose members hobnobbed with Nazis in neutral Spain, and gain intelligence about the Third Reich's plans.

Aline's entrée was her contact, Eduardo, aka Top Hat, who was a foppish regular in society and the clubs around town––not to mention, a kleptomaniac. He had a large collection of jewelry and other gewgaws that he'd lifted from his society friends. Soon after her arrival in Madrid, Aline was spending evenings at society dinner parties, at nightclubs with one of the country's most popular bullfighters, and weekends at the country estate of Count von Fürstenberg, and his wife, the drop-dead gorgeous Gloria.

Aline, licensed to kill

Looking into the background of this book, I learned that quite a few people have questioned its veracity. I don't know for certain whether Aline's story is true to life, but I will admit that some bits of it seemed at least improbable. For example, Aline writes about incidents in which she was targeted for death by Nazi operatives, but she escaped, by chance or wit. These incidents sounded straight out of a B-movie screenplay, where the depths of the Nazi agents' evil are rivaled only by the profundity of their incompetence.

Aline reports that on her very first day in Europe, she's taken to a casino in Estoril, in Portugal, where she almost literally stumbles upon a man in full formal evening wear who has just been murdered with a stiletto. Quite an introduction to one's first spy assignment! And people were forever sneaking into Aline's room to tell her she was the only one they could contact with vital information to pass on to the American government. Seriously? A 20-year-old girl who was supposed to be a clerk at an office? Some of those confiding people ended up dead; some Aline claims to have unveiled as German spies.

Now, I take my World War II history very seriously, but this is one of those times I decided I just had to forget about my doubts and go with Aline's tale. Why? Because it's such a hoot, that's why.

I'm not sure what Aline's up to with all these sheep

Remember how Rick's Café Americain in Casablanca was full of the most colorful characters, from every walk of life, and all around them swirled questions about who was loyal to whom, and who might be a betrayer? Well, Aline's wartime Madrid is just like that, only on a larger scale. Here is Aline uncloaking a society spy for the Germans, who was only too ready to flip and become a double agent for the Americans; finding the corpse of a murdered field agent inside his own piano; going on a mole hunt within the OSS's Madrid station; careening down a mountain road in a car with no brakes, with three heavies in hot pursuit. These are just a few of the scenes, worthy of the most overheated Hollywood spy thriller, that you'll find in Aline's memoir. See what I mean about it being a hoot?

I'd be laughing, too, Aline, if I had those rocks

A little further research indicates that after the war, Aline married one of the grandest noblemen in Spain, Don Luis de Figueroa y Perez de Guzm'n el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla, who later inherited the title Count de Romanones. She became a fashion icon and continued to hobnob with high society, including international celebrities, like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn.

Now I have to go find Aline's follow-up books, The Spy Went Dancing: My Further Adventures As an Undercover Agent, and The Spy Wore Silk (with the same subtitle). Since Aline, born in 1923, is apparently still alive, who knows what other stories she may yet have to tell.

Aline was hardly the only woman whose memoirs describe using her position in the social world to observe the inner workings of Nazi operatives. And not the only improbable woman to be in that position, as a couple of other tales demonstrate.

You'd think it's never a bad time to be born a princess, but how about 1917 in St. Petersburg, Russia? That's when and where Marie Vassiltchikov came into the world. It's not surprising that she and her family left the country after the Bolshevik revolution. The family members wandered around Europe, and in 1940, Marie (usually called Missie) and her sister Tatiana moved to Berlin, where Missie's friends and her polyglot language skills got her a job at the German Foreign Ministry's Information Office, referred to in her memoir, Berlin Diaries 1940-1945, as the A.A., for its German short name, the Auswärtiges Amt.

Missie's timing in life sure is lousy, isn't it? She couldn't help when and where she was born, but you'd think she might at least have suspected that Berlin in 1940 wasn't the greatest choice. Still, her social life in Berlin was active and glittering, despite the war. Soirées and tea parties at various embassies and society friends' homes were a near-daily event, at least in the early part of the war. The amazing thing is to see all the nationalities of her friends: German, Russian, French, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several more, and the stunning array of titles.

Missie and Tatiana are no longer wealthy, so she does have to spend her days working. She's not crazy about some of the blowhards at the office, and wishes she could have taken the job at the American Embassy she was offered just days too late. She has access to lots of top-secret information and, one day, having been given by mistake a sheet of the special yellow-top paper reserved for particularly hot news, she decides to amuse herself with a made-up story that there had been riots in London, resulting in the king's being hanged at the gates of Buckingham Palace. She "passed it on to an idiotic girl who promptly translated it and included it in a news broadcast to South Africa." Oh, those girlish hijinks!

I shouldn't give the impression that Missie was just some ditzy dame with a useless title, though. While on the job, she met Adam von Trott zu Solz, an English-educated lawyer, with an American heritage (his grandmother was a descendant of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court). Trott was part of an active anti-Nazi group within the A.A., and he became Missie's boss. Missie's memoir doesn't reveal much about the group's activities, which resulted in the unsuccessful "July 20 Plot" to kill Hitler, but she clearly knew what was going on. She does describe her reactions and those of friends and family when many of the plotters were arrested by the Gestapo, including her visits to the Gestapo to plead on Trott's behalf until a sympathetic man there took her aside and warned her not to return. Soon afterward, Trott was hanged at just 35 years old, leaving a wife and two small children.

Probably the most riveting parts of Missie's memoir are her graphic descriptions of the air raids on Berlin, particularly the extremely destructive raids of November, 1943. She sees a young girl on top of a pile of rubble, picking up bricks, dusting them off and throwing them away. The girl's whole family is under the rubble. As Missie laboriously climbs over smoking ruins to get to work, she sees chalked messages on the walls of wrecked houses: family members leaving word in hopes they will lead to a reunion with their families and friends. When she is out with Tatiana, trying to locate friends, the streets are full of refugees, pushing their meager remaining belongings in baby carriages. Tatiana's favorite antique store is still burning, with the silks and brocades making for a "pink glow [that] looked very festive."

After Trott's execution, Missie thought it best to leave Berlin. She moved to Vienna and became a Red Cross nurse. While there, she met Peter Harnden, an American Army intelligence officer. Missie and Peter married in 1946, and the pair moved to Paris, where Peter became a successful architect. Missie was widowed in 1971 and moved to London, where she died of leukemia in 1978, leaving four children.

Alright, so we've got an American model as OSS agent and a White Russian aristocrat working in the German Foreign Ministry with anti-Hitler plotters. How about an even more unlikely inside observer of the Nazis and their allies? Bella Fromm, a Jew, was a society reporter who kept right on reporting on Berlin social life until she fled the country in 1938, several years after the Nazis came to power in Germany. How the heck did that happen?

Bella was a society columnist for the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung. She became well-known in Berlin during the Weimar era, and was a regular at parties given in high society which, once the Nazis took over, became dominated by political figures. Her friendship with several politicians, and especially foreign members of the diplomatic corps, seems to have provided her with some protection. Still, she was savvy enough to send her daughter out of the country in 1934 and, while she continued to be invited to parties, her columns no longer appeared under her own name after the Nazis had been in power for about a year.

Fromm finally fled Germany for New York in 1938, where she published Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary in 1943. She begins with a description of her life in Germany before Hitler came to power, then with what she claims are her diaries for each year from 1930 to 1938, wrapping up with a epilogue of her last encounter with the Nazis.

Questions have been raised as to whether Fromm's memoir reflects actual contemporary diary entries or have been amplified with the benefit of hindsight. Either way, it's still fascinating––in the way watching a snake can be––to read about the cast of goons suddenly elevated to the heights of Berlin society. This reaches an absurd level in Fromm's description of a 1933 party during which the new Führer kisses her hand and makes small talk with her; of course, having no idea that she is Jewish.

Books like these remind me that memoirs can be so much better than history books, or even novels, if you want to get that feeling of being a spy on history.

Pandora's Box of Sorting Books

Summer is a good time to give the house a sweep. Books are taking over and some must leave. Others must go back onto shelves. Sorting takes all my will power because the temptation to sit down and read is almost overwhelming. Here are some of the books I've already sorted.

One of the characters in T. Jefferson Parker's The Fallen notes that a man's life can change in a moment. Something happens and life is divided into what went before and what comes after. For Det. Robbie Brownlaw, it's a fall from a six-story building. Afterward, he can see colored shapes that give away a speaker's emotional state. His ability to detect lies comes in handy when Robbie looks into the death of Garrett Asplundh, a member of the San Diego Ethics Authority Enforcement Unit that investigates corruption in civic leaders. Garrett was killed shortly before a meeting with his estranged wife, Stella.

In addition to Robbie, many of The Fallen's other characters have fallen in a life-altering way. Into a swimming pool, prey, in and out of love, from grace, into depression, from moral uprightness, under someone's thumb. Twenty-nine-year-old Robbie, who narrates this standalone, would make a great series protagonist because he's honest and insightful. We grow close to characters Robbie and Garrett as the murder investigation proceeds. I loved this book and I'll give it away so someone else will enjoy it too.

Mary Webb's Precious Bane, beautifully written in a Shropshire dialect, transports a reader to life in rural Shropshire in the early 1800s. Narrator Prue Sarn deals with the social awkwardness created by her cleft lip, while her greedy brother Gideon, who "eats" his father's sins at his funeral in order to take over the Sarn farm and house, bowls over anyone who stands between him and money. Reading Webb is more fun than Thomas Hardy. This is the 1924 book that inspired Stella Gibbons' blackly comic Cold Comfort Farm, and I'm lending them both to a friend.

Sometimes airplane reading demands characters who constantly chase each other around, like those in Once a Spy by Keith Thomson. It's narrated by Charlie Clark, a gambler who spends 364 days a year at Aqueduct Racetrack and is deep in debt to a Ukrainian heavy. Charlie very rarely sees his father, Drummond, but now Charlie gets a call from a social worker because Drummond is wandering around the snowy Brooklyn streets in his pajamas. Although Charlie thinks Drummond retired from a job selling washing machines, Drummond was actually a crack American spy. (The washing machine salesman/spy is homage to Graham Greene's vacuum cleaner salesman/spy in Our Man in Havana.) Drummond suffers from dementia and is under surveillance by the NSA, because his old colleagues are worried that he may leak top secrets.

Drummond isn't a "cranky old geezer" like some characters Sister Mary Murderous mentioned here. Instead, he's a sweetly forgetful man with startling periods of lucidity, brought about by deadly danger, in which he turns into a James Bond figure. Charlie and Drummond hit the road, pursued by spooks. It's nonstop action and double crosses but Drummond and Charlie now have a chance to build the father-son relationship that Drummond's career made impossible. Into the giveaway box this goes.

Michael Underwood is the pen name of John Michael Evelyn, who drew on his own career in writing his legal mysteries. I like his 1981 standalone book, Hand of Fate, which begins with the facts of the case against Frank Wimble, accused of killing his wife. There isn't much evidence, only a skeletal hand bearing a wedding ring. The puzzle is put together piece by piece in the courtroom.

I like to re-read my old British mysteries when I can't settle on what to read. This one isn't action packed. It's for times when you want reassurance that the world is a civilized place where reason and logic prevail. Back onto the shelf.

My sorting and packing will take forever and will be undone by new additions. Is anyone capable of quickly sorting books? Please share your methods.

Late to the Party

Surely I'm not the only one who's never caught an episode of American Idol, seen the movie Titanic, or read The Hunger Games. And maybe you, like me, have found your head spinning while binge-watching Mad Men episodes out of sequence or reading a series book when you haven't read any of the ones before it. Sometimes, if you skip even one or two series books, you have a brain-bruising task just figuring out what the heck happened since you last checked in.

This is my current experience with Brian Freemantle's Red Star Falling (Thomas Dunne Books, 2013), sixteenth in the Charlie Muffin series that began in 1977 with Charlie M, and third in the Red Star Trilogy after Red Star Rising and Red Star Burning.

It's been several years since I spent any time with the wily and insubordinate Charlie Muffin. He's a British Secret Service agent, a Columbo type whose rumpled clothes and stretched-out Hush Puppies enable him to blend into any crowd, shadow his man, or disappear. There's no one better at spycraft. Yet, because he neither looks nor acts the part, he's been the target of Machiavellian maneuvers by MI6 and the CIA almost as often as the FSB (formerly, the KGB), who's been after him for 30 years.

David Hemmings plays Charlie M

As Red Star Falling begins, MI6 and MI5 folks are sitting around a table. They're attempting to fix the blame for Charlie's wounding and capture at a Moscow airport. Before the airport fiasco, Charlie had uncovered a triple agent in an FSB plot against America so audacious, I laughed out loud. Now, the intelligence services of three countries are furious, and they're juggling the fallout like spinning plates on hand sticks. Charlie's secret wife, Natalia Fedova, who is an FSB colonel, and their daughter, Sasha, as well as a couple of other high-value Russian defectors, are in the hands of the British; an FSB agent is being held by the CIA; and Charlie and several other British agents are prisoners in Russia.

It's a sophisticated case of wheels within wheels, and much of the action consists of talk. MI6 director Gerald Monsford, an inveterate schemer, wanted to have Charlie, an MI5 agent, killed; now he tries to pull the wool over wary MI5 eyes, much to his own deputy's disgust. Similarly, the CIA and FBI distrust each other. Natalia, of the FSB, wants to help her husband, Charlie, but her English handlers wonder about her loyalties. Charlie tries to outwit his Russian interrogators and figure out whether his wife and child are safe and who at home betrayed him. After this brain food, I'll head back to the first two in the Red Star Trilogy.

Sometimes my desire to read the most recent book in a series makes me read the first series book first. I want to read Oliver Pötzsch's fourth book, The Poisoned Pilgrim (translated from the German by Lee Chadeayne, and published on July 16, 2013 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), so I read the first, The Hangman's Daughter: A Historical Novel. It creates an amazingly detailed picture of life in the Bavarian village of Schongau in the mid-1600s and features appealing main characters.

German writer Pötzsch descends from an ancient and famous line of hangmen, the Kuisls. The hangman was considered such a dishonorable profession—despite people's avidity when it came to watching people executed—that hangmen's children married into other hangmen's families, and the job passed down through generations. In the book's prologue, we meet one of the Kuisls, 12-year-old Jakob, witnessing his father botch the execution of a young woman in 1624. It was almost too much for me and Jakob, who swears never to take up his father's vocation. But 35 years later, Jakob is Schongau's executioner and the town council's torturer.

In the late 1500s, Schongau executed 69 witches.

When the dead body of a young boy is pulled from the river, village residents are horrified to see a
witchcraft symbol on his shoulder. Because the boy was known to visit the local midwife, Martha Stechlin, suspicion quickly falls on her, and she is jailed. Town aldermen have many reasons—social, political, and financial—to want Stechlin to quickly confess, but she refuses, and Jakob is instructed to make her confess before the secretary of Bavaria's Duke-Elector arrives in several days. Jakob believes Stechlin is innocent, and he sets out to prove it with the help of Simon Fronwieser, the local doctor's son, who is love with Jakob's beautiful daughter, Magdalena. As more children bearing the mark die or disappear, the tension increases exponentially until the book's satisfying finish.

I can now happily read later series books, including The Poisoned Pilgrim.

The last time I was in Portland, Oregon, I picked up Volume 3 of Russ Kick's The Graphic Canon. This three-volume anthology depicts some of the world's greatest literature in comics and visual art by 100 artists, such as Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, Roberta Gregory, Yeji Yun, and Vicki Nerino. (See here for a complete list of featured works and artists.) Volume 3 begins with Robert Conrad's Heart of Darkness and ends with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It was much too beautiful for me, and I also needed to ooh and aah my way through Volumes 1 (The Epic of Gilgamesh to Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos) and 2 (Herman Melville's Moby-Dick to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray).

But enough from me. Take a gander at Volume 3, below, as editor Kick kindly flips through the book for you. You can also view Volumes 1 and 2 on video, too.

Trying to make sense of a series book when you haven't read its predecessors can be trying, but in a way, it's like meeting an interesting person and getting better acquainted as he or she shares history and adds more information. It's impossible to get to every party right on time, or to read every series in order, but don't let that prevent you from partying anyway.

Review of Jason Matthews' Red Sparrow

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews

Who says the Cold War is over? Sure, the Berlin Wall came down, the USSR is fractured, and Russia is no longer a communist state, but that doesn't mean the US isn't watching Russia very carefully––and vice versa.

Vladimir Putin, that old KGB operative and apparently now President-for-Life, has plenty of tricks up his sleeve––and I'm not talking about this week's news that he purloined Bob Kraft's Patriots Super Bowl ring. Vlad the Cad plans for Russia to return to being a superpower, and for that he needs excellent intelligence on the US government. Even more important for right now, he needs somebody to find out who is passing Russian secrets to the CIA's young agent, Nate Nash.

Enter Dominika Egorova, the former ballet dancer, turned into a spy by her conniving uncle, Ivan Egorov. Egorov, the slime, sends Dominika to "sparrow school," where Russian intelligence trains agents in the most effective techniques to seduce their targets. Nate is Dominika's target, and their dance begins. The first half of the story details this slow seduction and the development of Dominika's position within the Russian security apparatus.

It's unusual for espionage fiction to feature a female agent, but this is Dominika's story. She begins as a fervent nationalist, naïvely trusting that the servants of the motherland share her honor and devotion. Her own uncle's callously manipulative actions are just her first clues that Russian intelligence is a dangerous place. Dominika has some special help maneuvering through this snakepit. She has a form of synesthesia that gives her the ability to see colored auras around people that clue her into their real character or state of mind.

The second half of the story raises the stakes, as both sides play a no-limit game of Mole Hunt. The Russians need Dominika to get Nate to reveal their mole, while the Americans are in hot pursuit of someone highly placed in government who is funneling secrets to the Russians. Author Jason Matthews, a retired longtime CIA agent, constructs a fiendishly clever plot, filled with characters painted in all shades of gray (or, for Dominika, yellow, brown, red, blue and purple), including one especially colorful love-to-hate villain.

Particularly for a debut novel, this is just a bang-up tale of modern espionage, with all the appeal of an old-fashioned Cold War yarn. Matthews does commit a few rookie errors. He uses too much alliteration in character names, he's not great with physical descriptions (what's a "willowy smile"?), Dominika's synesthesia can get a little gimmicky, and some plot elements rely on stupid mistakes.

More troublesome is Matthews' depiction of all FBI agents as jumped-up beat cops, and incompetent ones at that. I don't have any inside knowledge of the FBI, but the law of averages alone would suggest that it can't be 100% incompetent. No, this smells like a dramatization of the well-known animosity between the two agencies, told by a biased party, and it interferes with the story. Relatively speaking, though, my criticisms are nits. Matthews is a powerful storyteller and this is first-rate espionage fiction.

I don't want to forget to mention one of the most unusual aspects of the book. Every chapter ends with a recipe. Sure, we've all seen that plenty of times in cozy mysteries, but this is a first for me in serious espionage fiction. I've even made copies of some of the recipes and already prepared one of the dishes (a delicious soubise).

I hope Jason Matthews continues Dominika's story in future books––and keeps his readers stocked with new recipes.

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