Author Description

The redline of a laser gunsight split the darkness and targeted the wall next to his head. There was a muffled sound like a dry cough and a bullet thudded into the wall above him. He slid forward under the bed.... Graham Greene's classic spy tale "A Branch of the Service" leaves the heart pounding and nothing to the imagination. On the run during a fictional mole hunt of the mid-eighties, Greene's spy faces an uncertain fate at every turn. Indeed, the dashing spy on the run is one of the great icons of twentieth-century fiction, reflecting the shifting currents of national and international politics for a century and more.This anthology offers a panorama of the best spy stories which have forever fixed the concept of espionage in the popular imagination. In 29 tales of political intrigue, wartime heroism, and peacetime scheming, we see the spy at work and at rest, sometimes the romantic savior of a nation's secret, more often an embittered loner, wracked with disillusion and uncertainty. The stories--by such famous authors as Ambrose Bierce, W. Somerset Maugham, Frank O'Connor, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, Graham Greene, and Edward D. Hoch--range from traditional thrillers with the spy as hero to explorations of the metaphoric potential of espionage and the moral, political, and psychological issues that such an activity brings into question. Together with Michael Cox's fascinating introduction, they form a wonderfully entertaining literary insight into a world of intrigue and deception.