Sun 16 Aug 2009
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: TED ALLBEURY – Shadow of Shadows.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[4] Comments
by George Kelley:
TED ALLBEURY – Shadow of Shadows. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1982. UK editions: Granada, hc, 1982; pb, 1982. (Shown is the cover of the paperback edition.)
Ted Allbeury started writing espionage novels in the early 1970s. He specializes in realism and the sense of desolation evident in the best contemporary British spy fiction.
What makes Allbeury’ s novels so authentic is his background: He served with British counterintelligence during World War II. In each of the dozen espionage novels he has written so far, Allbeury creates characters and plots so convincing that the reader can’t help but be caught in his webs of suspense.
In Allbeury’ s best book to date, Shadow of Shadows, the game is a battle of wits between Colonel Anatoli Mikhailovich Petrov, a KGB defector, and British Intelligence’s James Lawler. Petrov has been supplying valuable information — identities of double agents, locations of “safe houses,” and more — until suddenly he stops talking.
Lawler’s mission is to find out who or what silenced Petrov and to convince him to resume supplying the vital information to British Intelligence.
Allbeury’s novelistic skills are apparent in the relationship between the two spies — one Russian, one British — who find they have more in common with each other than they do with the spy masters who control them. The relationship grows despite Petrov’s suspicion that Lawler’s real mission may be to discover his secrets and then to liquidate him.
With this novel and The Other Side of Silence (1981), Ted Allbeury has written espionage classics.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Editorial Comment: My review of The Reaper, an earlier book by Ted Allbeury about tracking down ex-Nazis in Europe, along with some biographical data about the author, can be found here.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:24 am
I’ll make no bones about my admiration of Allebury. He wrote rings around John LeCarre, and unlike LeCarre he knew what he was writing about. Nor was he afraid to get a little action into the story as well as suspense and sharp characterization. He pulled off the spy novel equivalent of the hat trick — depth, complexity, and page turning suspense that could be read like a thriller as well as a novel.
August 18th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I completely agree with you, David. I’ve always felt that LeCarre was overrated and Allebury was underrated.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
I like LeCarre, but unlike Graham Greene, whose anti-Americanism was accompanied by genius and a sense of humor as well as an inability to create a character who wasn’t a rounded human being, LeCarre beats this hobby horse into the ground and in many later books it really hurts the story. Even when I agree with him he is so heavy-handed with it I find it boring.
And I really haven’t forgiven him for stealing the plot of Our Man In Havana for The Tailor of Panama and never once mentioning it as far as I can tell. All it would have taken was a note, a single sentence. That’s pretty shabby behavior for a writer who sets himself up as a judge of everyone else’s questionable morals.
September 15th, 2010 at 8:18 pm
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