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?

Consequence of Fear - Ted Allbeury

 Ted Allbeury (1917-2005) was that rare thing among spy writers - a real one.  Yes, John le Carre and Ian Fleming were spies but not in the sense that Allbeury was.  Fleming, for example, was never in the field.  Allbeury on the other hand, was SOE, parachuted into France and remaining there until the end of the war.  Le Carre (David Cornwall) was in the field during the Cold War and therefore risked arrest.  Allbeury was actually captured by the Russians in the act of recruiting agents.

As to writing ability, Allbeury is certainly much better than Fleming.  He lacks Fleming's ability to fetishize the trappings of spycraft but perhaps makes up for it with better ideas for world threats.  In Consequence of Fear, for instance, written in 1979 and thus substantially before Chernobyl, the focus is a nuclear disaster which the Russians have covered up for two decades.

James Boyle was a spy in the war.  As such he ran Otto Lemke, a German spy captured in Croydon with a radio set, who for the rest of the war broadcast false material to his homeland in return for a train of young women willing to sleep with him.  Thirty years later Boyle is a QC who has just been offered a judgeship.  Lemke is an East German sports journalist who has somehow got hold of detailed documentation about the nuclear spill.  He is willing to trade this for asylum in the US with his latest teenaged girlfriend.  On one condition - he wants James Boyle to manage his defection.

So, under cover of offering legal advice to a TV company planning to broadcast the Moscow Olympics in 1980, Boyle heads for Russia.

I was impressed with how easily Allbeury guides his reader through the very convincing intricacies of Cold War political posturing.  The story does not develop as would generally be expected (and here Allbeury comes close to the standards of mid-career le Carre) and the end came as a complete surprise.  I shall certainly read more.