The books are tedious but fascinating. The authors are unconvincing but certainly intriguing. Still, as literary experience, this new genre must be reckoned with. Plots more simple than Old Westerns have been infused with meanings more obscure than the New Poetry. The result leaves heroes, villains, authors, and readers alike to wonder who has done what unto whom.
Espionage is threatened today, as never before, by technology.
The human spy, menaced like all artisans by obsolescence, must find new domains for research and new outlets for his reportorial talents. This exchange of literary missiles can be traced directly to the Berlin swap of a certain Gordon Lonsdale for one Greville Wynne in 1964. Obviously, the partly public trials of each in Moscow and London had failed to satisfy the new promotion requirements of their respective intelligence services and the outsized egos of the principal plotters. Lonsdale, whose credentials from birth forward are still in dispute, had been the central figure in a ring spying upon British naval research. Six months after his return to Soviet custody, he made himself available to a British publisher and spy adventure writer in East Berlin to dictate a memoir of sorts.