Secret Agent Books

Ted Bell has written five books featuring British spy Alexander Hawke, a man who with flair, flash and fire thwarts evil plots and ruthless villainy. In Spy, we meet Hawke as he is trying to escape a slave labor camp in the Amazon rain forest. Middle Eastern jihadis have combined forces with Latin American drug lords and others in a plan to strike a vicious blow at the United States government. Hawke is more or less a private operator, but his skills and wealth have made him a useful worker for Her Majesty's clandestine operations. He's aided by many, including agents who work directly with him and a small-town sheriff in the middle of all-out skirmishes on the U.S. - Mexico border designed to shield the terrorists actions and ultimate goals. How much of the day gets saved is up to Hawke, and he goes about his business in a fine Flemingesque fashion.

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As long as people keep writing suspense thrillers which use ancient Biblical texts, knowledge and such as the handle for their various MacGuffins, there exists the chance that some book will get it right. Steve Berry's 2007 The Alexandria Legacy is not that book. Former U.S. Justice Department agent turned rare book dealer Cotton Malone is swept into a web of intrigue when his ex-wife Pam visits and tells him their son Gary has been kidnapped. It seems a shadowy organization called The Chairs knows Cotton can find the Alexandria Link, the only way modern people can penetrate the web of secrecy surrounding the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Supposed to be the largest library of the ancient world, this collection of texts was destroyed and rebuilt several times over the course of the last century B.C. and the first six or seven centuries A.D. Although it survives today in an undisclosed location, only those that the current caretakers deem worthy are invited to share in its knowledge, and only after they complete a potentially perilous quest. Cotton finds himself being thwarted by other forces within The Chairs as well as agents of the Israeli government. The Israelis fear that the Alexandria Library may contain documents in a form of old Hebrew that show the ancestral home of the Jewish people was not in Palestine, but rather in the southwestern Arabian Peninsula. They believe such a discovery would undermine the Israeli claim to the nation they now hold and cause even greater turmoil throughout the Middle East. Berry's writing is serviceable but rather stale, although he does create high-energy action sequences. His hook for the Israeli actions rests on the dubious work of Dr. Kamal Salibi, then a professor at the American University in Beirut who wrote a book in 1985 called The Bible Came From Arabia. Dr. Salibi's theories are not widely accepted, and in any event, it's hard to see any of Israel's friends or enemies being greatly affected by what some ancient documents might have said about where God originally told the Israelites to live.

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Len Deighton's XPD squeezes in between his alternate WWII-history SS-GB and his nine-volume series focusing on British agent Bernard Samson. Set in 1979, it details the efforts of a group of West German businessmen to secure documents that describe a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. The papers were hidden in a mine in the last days of the war, but the mine's contents were secretly looted by some of the American soldiers who were supposed to store them. In addition to the gold and other treasure that's made them rich, they scooped up the documents, only later learning what they showed. British intelligence worries that the meeting could harm England's relations with its allies and damage Churchill's reputation, so operative Boyd Stuart is dispatched to get to the papers first. Along the way, though, attempts on his own life make him wonder if he's being set up, or if he's gotten too close to the knowledge the papers show and he's been marked XPD, or "expedient demise." An interesting feature of the book is that even though it's published in 1981, the work of two computer hackers using phone lines and such to steal information from a bank plays a major role. A military historian, Deighton knows the intelligence game is often played by some pretty mundane people for whom real-world issues and personal agendas may take priority over their spy work. Neither his villains nor his heroes are archetypes but turn out to be "regular folk" that happen to be involved in an irregular business. His storytelling is crisp, clean and lively, and only the small-by-today's-standards monetary amounts and the technology date XPD as a thirty-year-old thriller; otherwise it would fit in happily with lesser works that hang out on the bestseller lists today.