description: Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a full and up-to-date bibliography, a comprehensive chronology and a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a "monstrous town," a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques.
language: English
title: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
titlecomplete: The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)
characters: Stevie, Winnie Verloc, Chief Inspector Heat, Mr. Vladimir, Sir Ethelred, Comrade Alexander Ossipon, Adolf Verloc, Michaelis, Karl Yundt, the Assistant Commissioner
genres: 20th Century, Literature, Crime, Classics, Espionage, Novels, Thriller, Fiction, Mystery, British Literature
ratings_count: 22117
places: London, England
publisher: Classic Books