Palomino Blonde - Ted Allbeury

 This is billed, ludicrously, as Tad Anders Book 2 when in fact Tad Anders is barely a bit-part player.  The hero here is Ed Farrow, who lives on a boat moored on the Thames in the heart of London.  The focus, however, is James Hallet, a young science prodigy who has made his fortune from a single patent but who has now, accidentally, stumbled on a super-weapon, codenamed Omega Minus, which every superpower, East and West, is itching to get its hands on.  The trouble is, the technology only costs a few pounds; the secret is intellectual, locked inside Hallet's head or possibly in his computer.  This being 1975, the computer is not exactly portable.

Agents from the KGB and CIA head for London.  Hallet meets a beautiful Danish girl, the titular blonde, for whom he would happily give up everything he has - wife, family, fortune, even Omega Minus, which becomes the stake when the KGB under  rising star Sergei Venturi kidnap Kristina Olsen, take her to the Polish Embassy (then, of course, part of the Soviet bloc) and torture her.  It becomes Colonel Farrow's task to prevent Hallet giving up Omega Minus and rescue the girl who, of course, has been planted on Hallet by the CIA.  This Farrow does in a remarkably brutal but utterly convincing way.

Allbeury, we must remember, was a real long-serving spy.  Thus his descriptions of how the secret service agencies work comes across as 100% credible.  He is clearly on top of the technology involved and in Ed Farrow he has a character as compelling as James Bond or 'Harry Palmer'.   Personally I was taken with the politicians in Palomino Blonde: proper, hard=as-nails professionals who mean exactly what they say and who have the authority to deliver.  Whatever happened to them?

Trinity Six - Charles Cumming

I don't understand why Charles Cumming isn't promoted on the same scale as John le Carre, because he certainly is the frontrunner to inherit the great man's position as number one scribe of British spycraft.

Trinity Six is closer to home than most of Cumming's work, Britain-based, albeit his protagonist, UCL lecturer Sam Gaddis, gets about during the course of his fictional journey. He kind of inherits a project about the much-mooted sixth man of the Thirties communist cell at Trinity College Cambridge. He meets the man in the know (or is he?) and begins his research - only to see a key witness gunned down in front of him, only for Gaddis himself to gun down the assailant.

It seems the British SIS is not the only organisation of its ilk with an interest in suppressing the Sixth Man story. The revelation of why is splendid when it comes. The working out of the plot - a fine example of the biter bitten - is masterly. What is wrong with British TV? Why is nobody snapping up Cumming's work for must-see broadcasting?