Lantern Network also shows off many of Allbeury's best traits. There's the theme of the past coming back to haunt the present, something that appears in a number of his works (including in The Twentieth Day of January) is present here. Also evident is his quickly drawn characterizations, here minus some of the caricaturing he...

Fiction and Espionage series introduction by University of Edinburgh's Penny Fielding and Simon Cooke. Spybrarians, we are in for a real treat. Our good friend Professor Penny Fielding and her colleague Professor Simon Cooke of the University of Edinburgh bring us 5 spy lit podcast episodes which are recorded by students of their Fiction and...

One of the joys of listening to and being involved with the community around the Spybrary podcast has been discovering books I might never have heard of otherwise. Clive Egleton's The Russian Enigma (aka Pandora's Box) is just such an example of that, having been posted about by C.G. Faulkner whom I had the pleasure...

Philby. Burgess. Maclean. If you're a student of Cold War spies (and if you're at Spybrary there's a decent chance you are), those names will be very familiar. The latter pair's 1951 defection helped to make public the most famous spy scandal of the era. In the decades since, they've also inspired countless works of...

If you're a fan of the spy-fi side of spy fiction chances are you're a fan of The Avengers. With Patrick Macnee as the debonair John Steed alongside fellow agents such as Diana Rigg's Emma Peel, it's become a quintessential piece of 1960s British television. Indeed, the series was part of my teenage years as...

Having read and very much enjoyed The Fever, the opening salvo from Michael Brady's Into The Shadows range, I was eager to dig into the second volume. This one would take the firmly established CIA non-official cover (NOC) officer Michael Brennan to Asia in what seemed to be another tale potentially ripped from the headlines....

First appearing nearly thirty-five years ago in the pages of The Hunt For Red October, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is arguably the closest thing to an American James Bond. Not only with a highly successful series of novels but also a trilogy of successful films in the early 1990s. Recently, however, the CIA analyst has...

Having heard Shane interview author Michael Brady on the show nearly a year ago, Into The Shadows: The Fever has long been on my radar. It wasn't until Spy-Con this past spring that I finally acquired a copy of the novel in question and only in the last couple of weeks that I've had the...

  I am quite fond of the saying that “truth is stranger than fiction.” As those of us who read spy fact (and those fiction works which blur the boundaries between the two) know, it is often the case. The film The Good Shepherd, directed by Robert De Niro and released by Universal Pictures in...

Transmission received from Spybrarian Matthew Kresal: Review of The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carre. One of the familiar tropes of the spy genre is an intelligence agency recruiting a civilian into an operation. In fact, one might even say it's become a cliche at this point. So perhaps it comes as something of...