LIT LISTS: Ten spy novels to read before you die

Friday, April 28, 2023

Ten spy novels to read before you die

Patrick Worrall was educated in Worcestershire and King’s College, Cambridge, UK.

He has worked as a teacher in Eastern Europe and Asia, a newspaper journalist, a court reporter at the Old Bailey, and the head of Channel 4 News's FactCheck blog.

The Partisan is his first novel.

At Publishers Weekly he tagged ten spy novels to read before you die, including:

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953)

Fleming comes with a warning, too: for most of my life, I believed you really could murder someone by covering them with gold paint. "Skin suffocation," you see. I was also aghast when Sky Marshals, armed cops posing as airline passengers, became a thing in the early 2000s. A shootout on a plane, where a hole would depressurize the cabin and suck us all out into oblivion? Hadn't the authorities read Goldfinger?

The bad science of Bond is symbolic of the whole series: very silly, as soon as you stop to think about it, but utterly irresistible.

Imagine reading a first edition of Casino Royale in 1953, in smog-bound London, with wartime rationing still in force. The cocktails, the easy sex, the baccarat tables. The Taittinger ’45 with dinner, something called an “avocado pear” for dessert. Why Casino Royale and not the (demonstrably better) From Russia with Love? It's the brevity, the nastiness of the torture scene, and Bond's vulnerability and subsequent coldness, captured beautifully in the book’s brutal last line.