#1936 Club: The Dark Frontier by Eric Ambler

The time is the mid-1930s. The moment when Robert Oppenheimer would declare grandiosely: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" is still a decade away. A young man writing his first novel, however, envisages the atomic bomb becoming the most coveted weapon of destruction and unscrupulous men fighting to get hold of it. …

Forgotten Book: Black-Out in Gretley by J.B. Priestley (1942)

Already he was somewhere else, muttering explanations in a German I couldn't follow. Suddenly he smiled, as if they were all friends again wherever he was and had begun playing Mozart, and a minute later he was dead.I stared from one to the other of these dead Germans, so far from anything they really understood, …

Forgotten Book: The Fever Tree by Richard Mason

Richard Mason (1919-1997) was a British author who served in the RAF during the second world-war and fought on the Indo-Burmese front, later becoming an Intelligence officer. Best known for his 1957 novel, The World of Suzie Wong, Mason also wrote a handful of other novels, two of which, The Wind Cannot Read (1946) and The …

Forgotten Book: Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler

The only kind of spy stories that I am fond of reading are where the world is not divided between those wearing white hats and black hats and where the emphasis is on the emotional estrangement and entanglements of the secret service agent(s), something like Somerset Maugham's Ashenden or Graham Greene's The Human Factor.And thus …

Forgotten Book: Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928)

Virendranath Chattopadhaya, the younger brother of the Nightingale of India, Sarojini Naidu, came from an influential Bengali family settled in the state of Hyderabad. A man with a flair for languages (According to Wikipedia, he knew more than 12 languages), Chatto (as he was fondly called) was also a man devoted to the cause of …

Forgotten Book: The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The popular image of a spy is a James Bond like figure - handsome, dashing, a man of the world who can get any number of dames into bed (and earn bonus points when the villain's moll too falls under his charm). Extremely quick to draw his gun, he can also put away enormous amount …

Napoleon’s agents in Regency England: Georgette Heyer’s The Reluctant Widow

Blame it on Yvette! There I was thinking that I was through with Georgette Heyer and her Regency romances but she wrote one interesting post after another so that finally I caved in, picked up one, and read it at one go (though the review is much delayed) . To my surprise, The Reluctant Widow …

H is for Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes

Michael Innes (J.I.M Stewart) is one of my favourite Golden-Age writers and there was a time when I read his books one after the other till I ran through all the titles the various libraries (I frequent) had on their shelves. After all these years, the titles and the plots are a little hazy but …

As the War-Clouds Gather: E.P. Oppenheim’s The Double Traitor

The Right Honourable John William Hebblethwaite took the hat from his footman, stepped into his car, and was driven rapidly away. He leaned back among the cushions, more thoughtful than usual. There was a yellow moon in the sky, pale as yet. The streets were a tangled vortex of motorcars and taxies, all filled with …

Chasing a Crooked Shadow: Eric Ambler’s Dimitrios

Colonel Haki was slowly turning the pages inside the folder, and on his way was a look that Latimer had not seen there before. It was the look of the expert attending to the business he understands perfectly. There was a sort of watchful repose in his face that reminded Latimer of a very old …