Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you haven't seen it yet you might enjoy Le Bureau des Légendes.
Yep, fun series
Another spy series is Deutschland 83, 86, 89. Very good in my opinion.
John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
111–120 of 123 posts
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's maybe one of the 3 best drama series of the last 20 years, and easily one of the 5 best. For a (nonfic) book in the same vein, try The Billion Dollar Spy.
I assume The Wire and Breaking Bad are on your top 5 list. What else is on there?
If I gave my actual ordered top 5 I'd be begging for a tangent thread here, but: Saul, and then I'd have to think about Leftovers vs. Mad Men for 5.
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tom Clancy was my favorite author, I think authors sign contracts that let some entity use their name and it turns into a brand. The Jack Ryan books after he passed or had other writers weren’t that good. How far can you go after the main character becomes President? I did stumble onto one of those authors, Mark Greaney, who wrote The Gray Man series of novels (the netflix movie is not a good representation at all).…
Yeah they should stop that "branding" rights thing IMO. The books after he died were pure drivel. Like they were secreted by the authors from some kind of gooey gland in their brain. All kinda the same, like that op center and rainbow six stuff. The reason I read a few of them was that I didn't realise they were not written by him at the time and I thought they'd get better. But they didn't of course, they only got w…
I thought and continue to think early Clancy is excellent — basically everything that became a movie with Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin, plus “Red Storm Rising” — but even before he brought in the ghost authors, his reactionary politics started to get in the way of the stories. Yeah yeah, I can stand a feckless Democratic pol who just cares about getting elected as a dramatic fool/foil, but as I recall his last solo works went way beyond that and just got kind of tediously offensive for anyone who didn’t share his particular politics (even accounting for the typical politics of the average writer of military fiction).
It was actually kind of a surprising turn, because Tom Clancy on TV on the day of 9/11 was one of the most level-headed commentators about the vast majority of Muslims (i.e., not terrorists). And there’s a video of him presenting at the NSA in the mid ‘80s that shows him to be a very bright, very funny, very personable guy. Got the sense that in his later years, American politics just started to make him angry, and in my view it adversely affected his work.
But at his peak, he was damn fine at his craft.
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#114Anyone have any recommendations for other classic spy novels like le Carre’s? I’ve read some Greene and Deighton, which were both mentioned in the article, so I suppose I should revisit those, but would be interested in any other works with a similar scene and setting. One of my favorite le Carre tidbits - apparently in the UK and US versions of “Tinker, Tailor,” a character in one version takes a ferry in Hong Kong,…
The Soul of Viktor Tronko by David Quammen (1987) - from the heart of the Cold War. American interrogators try to figure out if a Soviet defector with startling revelations is telling the truth. Quammen has become well known as a writer on nature and the environment, but he started his career writing spy novels. His earlier novel The Zolta Configuration (1983) is set in the atom bomb project during WWII. I recall Opp…
Great suggestions! I read those after I read a spectacular book by Quammen about either pandemics, or the pandemic. I think it must have been more general, but I read it during the pandemic, so it blends together. (If you don’t know the book I’m referring to, I highly recommend it - look up quammen and pandemic, and it’ll be at the top of the list. Part of the book I remember best is where it tells a fascinating factionalized story of how HIV may have moved out of Africa.)
I don’t think I finished reading Zolta, though. I should pick that back up.
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume The Wire and Breaking Bad are on your top 5 list. What else is on there?
If I gave my actual ordered top 5 I'd be begging for a tangent thread here, but: Saul, and then I'd have to think about Leftovers vs. Mad Men for 5.
Right on. I somehow just skipped over Better Call Saul. Figure I'll have to pull an 'Americans' on it.
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah they should stop that "branding" rights thing IMO. The books after he died were pure drivel. Like they were secreted by the authors from some kind of gooey gland in their brain. All kinda the same, like that op center and rainbow six stuff. The reason I read a few of them was that I didn't realise they were not written by him at the time and I thought they'd get better. But they didn't of course, they only got w…
I thought and continue to think early Clancy is excellent — basically everything that became a movie with Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin, plus “Red Storm Rising” — but even before he brought in the ghost authors, his reactionary politics started to get in the way of the stories. Yeah yeah, I can stand a feckless Democratic pol who just cares about getting elected as a dramatic fool/foil, but as I recall his last solo…
Yeah I thought Cardinal of the Kremlin was a decent book too. Had a bit of a spy who came in from the dark feel to it.
But yeah his politics oozing through everything in later books (even written by him) also put me off.
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
After reading that book I could not shake the feeling that Gordievsky’s defection was “too good to be true.” The intelligence he exfiltrated (with very few exceptions) was hugely beneficial in creating a back-channel between the USSR’s leadership and the West; his “arrest and interrogation” in Moscow was completely inept and even the use of truth drugs didn’t work, and the KGB somehow managed to leave him free to esc…
It's a lot harder to fake incompetence and failure and besides why would you? It would look, as you say, even more suspicious. At the time, Soviet intelligence services were counting how many windows were lit up after hours in US government buildings chasing signs of plans for an entirely imaginary first nuclear strike. A dude landed a plane in the middle of Red Square. The Soviets fucked up just like everyone else.
Maybe someone in the KGB thought that Operation RYAN was creating a real risk of a nuclear war and wanted to create a channel to the West to try and defuse things?
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a lot harder to fake incompetence and failure and besides why would you? It would look, as you say, even more suspicious. At the time, Soviet intelligence services were counting how many windows were lit up after hours in US government buildings chasing signs of plans for an entirely imaginary first nuclear strike. A dude landed a plane in the middle of Red Square. The Soviets fucked up just like everyone else.
Maybe someone in the KGB thought that Operation RYAN was creating a real risk of a nuclear war and wanted to create a channel to the West to try and defuse things?
Since this is a thread about spy novels, it’s worth pointing out that there is a Tom Clancy book from 1988 (right around the Gordievsky defection) that in retrospect is obviously inspired by the Able Archer/RYAN Gordievsky story, and describes the US and USSR narrowly averting a nuclear war due to a top-level leak from within the Kremlin. I don’t want to spoil it (it’s a silly fun read) but the ending of the novel is very, very different. Ever since I read The Spy and the Traitor I’ve wondered if Clancy was just enjoying a bit of dramatic license, or if he was subtly nodding to real barroom gossip he’d picked up from his contacts in DC. It tickles me to think that disgruntled folks in the IC might use fiction to say “we all know what you did” to their counterparts in Moscow, and I bet it would have tickled Clancy as well.
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's maybe one of the 3 best drama series of the last 20 years, and easily one of the 5 best. For a (nonfic) book in the same vein, try The Billion Dollar Spy.
I assume The Wire and Breaking Bad are on your top 5 list. What else is on there?
For me:
1. The Wire
2. Breaking Bad
3. DarK (German)
4. Halt and Catch Fire
5. Bosch
Others- True Detective S01, S03, Westworld S01, Generation War (German), Happy Valley, Mindhunter, Mad Men, Silicon Valley, The Sopranos, The Fall, Band of Brothers, Rick and Morty, Veep, Babylon Berlin (German), Arrested Developtment, The Americans, Narcos (Spanish), Fauda (Hebrew-Arabic), Black Mirror, Bojack Horseman, Vinland Saga (Japanese, Anime), Fargo S01, S03, Kleo (German), Freaks and Geeks, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mozart in the Jungle, Tales from the Loop, Panchayat (Hindi), Paatal Lok (Hindi), Broadchurch, Yellowstone, Tales from the Loop, and Charite (German).
Re: John le Carré's 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' is the ultimate spy novel
#120"The story of The Spy was really a story of loneliness…" My wife and I just finished watching all of The Americans on Hulu, and this really resonates with me. Somehow, I managed to completely miss the show when it ran from 2013-2018, and was only reminded of its existence after watching and enjoying The Diplomat on Netflix, which also features Keri Russell in a starring role. The Americans is about pair of deep cover…
Tangent: is anyone familiar with a good app to help make a note of what shows you want to watch later? I know Letterboxd sort of does this for movies, but ( last I checked) they ignore the existence of TV. Each platform has its own short implementation of watch lists but they’re all pretty half baked. Is there good 3rd party app?
Showly.
Syncs automatically to trakt.tv.
There's also Letterboxd.
I am thinking of just moving to a G-Sheets document.