The Spy Who Came In From The List

The greatest of active American spy novelists – Charles McCarry – has a list of his top five espionage novels in today’s WSJ. It’s a fine, classic list and several of them (Ambler, Kipling, Maugham) would certainly be on mine. (I hadn’t realized Churchill had warned Maugham to burn his stories for fear the author was violating the Official Secrets Act.)

Missing for me were two of my Cold War favorites – LeCarré’s The Honourable Schoolboy and Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin. But ask me on another day and I’ll give you a couple more. It’s just a list, after all.