num_pages: 304
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 savage butchery. It also discusses contemporary anarchist activity in the UK, imperialism, and Conrad's narrative techniques.
language: English
title: The Secret Agent
titlecomplete: The Secret Agent
characters: Winnie Verloc, Comrade Alexander Ossipon, Mr. Vladimir, Sir Ethelred, Stevie, Michaelis, Adolf Verloc, Chief Inspector Heat, Karl Yundt, the Assistant Commissioner
genres: 20th Century, Thriller, Novels, Espionage, Crime, Literature, Classics, Mystery, British Literature, Fiction
ratings_count: 22115
places: London, England
publisher: Oxford University Press