(Maugham had French and German.) “If you do well you’ll get no thanks,” R. Writers make good joes (as Herron might say): they’re keen observers, and they tend to know languages.

During the war, Maugham had been a spook he was recruited after “Of Human Bondage” came out. In 1927, W. Somerset Maugham wrote “Ashenden: or, The British Agent,” about a writer who is recruited into British intelligence by a handler called R. Spy fiction got good and going in the years before the First World War, and took flight afterward. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels-the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest-he does not have Wi-Fi. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony.

The other two are firmly in the spy fiction genre, and also very entertaining.Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. Of the three, Down Cemetery Road (2003) featuring Zoe Boehm is my favorite. I have now read three books by Mick Herron and not one of them has disappointed me. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade’s circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, though, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, on a bus outside of Oxford, far from his usual haunts.īut the head of Slough House, the irascible Jackson Lamb, is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. The disgruntled agents of Slough House, the MI5 branch where washed-up spies are sent to finish their failed careers on desk duty, are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. From the description at Penguin Random House:

Mick herron dead lions review