The Quiller Memorandum: Adam Hall

Quiller is a British secret agent for a covert organization of spies, unacknowledged by the government. He is very unusual (for a hero of spy fiction) in that he doesn't smoke, drink, or carry a gun. At the point that the book begins (in the 1960s), he is in Berlin and has finished a long string of assignments to find Nazi war criminals and bring them to trial. He is planning to return to England the next day, but is enticed into a new assignment when another agent is killed.

This novel is also unusual in that the plot is taut, a straightforward telling of Quiller's relentless search for Heinrich Zossen, a Nazi war criminal who Quiller detests. It does have a good bit of action with  tense moments of suspense but still a cold, often matter-of-fact story.

All of these descriptions are negatives, yet I liked the book quite a bit, and I like the character. Maybe because he is so believable. Spying is not romanticized. The first person narration pulled me in immediately.

For me this book doesn't rank up there with those of Deighton, le Carré, or McCarry but then I have only read one book in the series, so maybe I will be won over in future books. The style is unique. There are another 18 books in the series, written over 30 years, and I will definitely be reading more of them.



This book was originally published in 1965 under the title The Berlin Memorandum. Adam Hall is a pseudonym for Elleston Trevor, and you can learn more about him at The Unofficial Quiller Web Site.

There is a film adaptation, starring George Segal, Alec Guinness, Max Von Sydow, and Senta Berger. I did not find that the film measured up to the book. It was a very loose adaptation, and I thought the story was confusing. It did move pretty fast but it seemed to be more of an art piece than an action film. However, there are many fans of the movie and I would love to hear other opinions. I will probably be watching it again. The director was Michael Anderson and the screenwriter was Harold Pinter.


See these sources for more detail and other opinions:

• Book review at Tipping my Fedora; Film review by Sergio Angelini at BFI Screenonline.
• Review at Past Offences
• Review at Existential Ennui
• THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM REVISITED at Crime Fiction Lover
• Review at Col's Criminal Library

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Publisher:   Tom Doherty Associates, 2004 (orig. pub. 1965)
Length:      220 pages
Format:      Trade Paperback
Series:       Quiller #1
Setting:      Berlin
Genre:       Espionage 
Source:      From my TBR piles; purchased in 2014.

To Say Nothing of the Dog: Connie Willis

Ned Henry, a historian working in the Time Travel department at Oxford, has made too many trips to 1940 in search of the Bishop's bird stump, and has been prescribed a week or two in Victorian England to get some rest and relaxation. He thinks he is there to recuperate, but really he has a new mission to pursue, and he has no time to relax.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis is at once an adventure story and a romance, with time travel thrown in. It is the second novel in the Oxford Time Travel series. I am reading that series in the order of publication, but from what I have read, the first two novels can stand alone. I read Doomsday Book first. Where Doomsday Book was sad, To Say Nothing of the Dog is humorous with some elements of a mystery and more than one romance.

This book alternates between 2050, when time travel is possible and used by academics for studies of the past, and Victorian times (1888), with a couple of short trips to the 1940's (all set in England). The focus in this book is finding the Bishop's bird stump, which is an ornamental piece that once existed in the Coventry Cathedral. The Oxford time travelers are more interested in learning  history than finding this piece, but they continue the quest for the Bishop's bird stump because Lady Schrapnell's donation will keep the time travel project funded.

I loved this book just as much as Doomsday Book. They each have their strengths. In my opinion, the characterization is not as strong in this book as in Doomsday Book, but there were still very many interesting characters: Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are the primary time travelers in this book, but some of the secondary characters in the Victorian timeline are a lot of fun: Tocelyn "Tossie" Mering, an ancestor of Lady Schrapnell, and Baine, the butler in the Mering household; Mrs. Mering who is into spiritualism, and Colonel Mering, who collects exotic goldfish.

This book is more frenetic, and has much better pacing than Doomsday Book. In fact at times it can get confusing. I may have zoned out during sections of the book, but I had confidence at all times that it would be worth the read and that the story would come together to a satisfying ending. Which it did.

Another thing I especially loved about this book were the animals. A bulldog named Cyril and a cat named Princess Arjumand are very special characters. Although this is a humorous book throughout, it was the scenes with Cyril and the cat, especially toward the beginning of the book, that made me laugh out loud. In the near future world of this book, where time travel is possible but not perfected, cats are extinct. A disease has killed them off. So the time travelers are both charmed by the cat and so unused to the behavior of cats that they don't know how to deal with them.

With regards to the title, there are references to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat in this novel, but not having read that book, the references did not mean that much to me. There are also references to Golden Age mysteries and to other authors but, to be truthful, I am sure I missed the majority of those references. Regardless I enjoyed the story immensely. I think that the references add another layer of interest for those who appreciate them.

And what comes next? Blackout and All Clear are two very long books that are connected. From what I have read, we once again meet with Dr. Dunworthy and his time travel team and Colin Templar who was just a boy in Doomsday Book. Members of the team go back to various locations and events in World War II. Reading these books will be an ambitious undertaking -- they are both very long -- but I am looking forward to it.

I did not go into much detail about the story so if you want to read more about that and read other opinions, see these sources:

• Academic Time Travel at Tor.com
• Clothes in Books
• In so many words
• Becky's Book Reviews
• Simon's Book Blog

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Publisher:   Bantam Books / Spectra, 1998 (orig. publ. 1997)
Length:      434 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Oxford Time Travel, #2
Setting:      England 
Genre:       Time Travel
Source:      Borrowed from my husband.

Inner City Blues: Paula L. Woods

From the description of this book at W. W. Norton:

Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very racist Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a potentially lethal beating from some white officers — only to discover nearby the body of one-time radical Cinque Lewis, a thug who years before had murdered her husband and young daughter. Was it a random shooting or was Mitchell responsible? And what had brought Lewis back to a city he'd long since fled?

Published in 1999, Paula L. Woods' debut novel won the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery in 2000. This is an excellent mystery which also gives us a look at what it felt like to be on the police force protecting the city during the riots and what it felt like to be black during that time of heightened tensions over racial disparities in the legal system.

I am not overly fond of detectives that come into a book with baggage, and Charlotte has a lot of that. She lost her husband and young child in a drive-by shooting, and ten years later she is still mourning them. Yet she is proud to be a police detective, even though the choice wasn't a popular one with her upper class parents and siblings. She is a believable and sympathetic character. Some of the harassment by male officers that comes her way is as much because she is a woman as that she is  black. I like the way Woods uses the structure of the mystery novel to insert subtle social commentary without preaching.

I have a weakness for series that use song titles for the book title. Two others I like are Martin Edwards' Harry Devlin series and Ed Gorman's Sam McCain series.

These are the remaining titles in the Charlotte Justice series:

Stormy Weather (2001)
Dirty Laundry (2003)
Strange Bedfellows (2006)

In Stormy Weather, Charlotte investigates the death of black film director Maynard Duncan, a pioneer in his field. I look forward to seeing where that story takes her.


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Publisher:  Fawcett, 2002. (orig. pub. 1999)
Length:     318 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Charlotte Justice, #1
Setting:     Los Angeles
Genre:       Mystery
Source:     Purchased at Planned Parenthood book sale, 2015.

Love & Treasure: Ayelet Waldman

This is a story about World War II, its aftermath, the Holocaust, displaced persons in camps, and the looting of the belongings of Jewish families.The story begins with a Prologue set in 2013 when Jack Wiseman is dying. He passes a pendant that he took from the Gold Train collection on to his granddaughter, with a request to return it to its rightful owner. What follows is essentially three linked novellas, each a self-contained story, depicting some events related to the pendant.

The first section follows Jack in Salzberg as he is assigned to catalog and guard the items that arrived on the Hungarian Gold Train. He meets and falls in love with Ilona, a Hungarian refugee and survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau. During his assignment in Salzburg, Jack wrestles with the dilemma between his duty to the US Army and his belief that the items on the train that were taken from Jewish families should be returned to the rightful owners. The middle section features Jack's granddaughter, Natalie, as she works with Amitai, an art dealer who recovers lost World War II art pieces, to determine the provenance of the pendant. The last section is the most bizarre, but also the most entertaining and disturbing. Set in 1913 in Budapest and told from a psychoanalyst's point of view, we see the early history of the pendant. That section is especially interesting because it focuses on two young women of the time who are interested in having careers, and also are working towards women's suffrage.

There are so many things I liked about this book. First of all, the writing. Without good writing, the experience might be educational but boring. The story itself is told beautifully, and the characters in each section are fully developed and I cared about them.

I like the structure of the book. By dividing the book into three distinct stories, each provided some illumination of different topics related to Jewish life and anti-semitism over the course of 100 years. Although my favorite section dealt with Jack and the aftermath of the war in Europe, the other two sections expanded on the themes and gave the story more depth. There are no tidy endings here, and I liked that too.

I learned so much about World War II and its aftermath without it feeling at all like a history lesson. I have read The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, but the focus of that book is on art treasures that were saved, and this book focuses on the everyday belongings (watches, jewelry, silverware, china) that were confiscated by the Hungarian government from Jewish families. I had known nothing of the Hungarian Gold Train until I read this book. Plus the section set in the early 1900s was especially interesting, a time period I have read little about.

Other resources:

• For more about the history of the Hungarian Gold Train, see Beyond the Book: The Hungarian Gold Train at BookBrowse and an article at author James Twining's website.
• Also see reviews at Clothes in Books, Ms. Wordopolis Reads, and Mostly Fiction.

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Publisher:   Alfred A. Knopf, 2014
Length:       331 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Settings:     First part in Salzburg, Austria; 2nd and 3rd parts mainly in
                   Budapest, Hungary. Also some of the 2nd part was in Israel.
Genre:        Historical fiction
Source:       I purchased my copy. On my TBR pile since 2014.

The Last Billable Hour: Susan Wolfe

Susan Wolfe is a lawyer, and in this book she writes about a Silicon Valley law firm filled with sleazy and / or very ambitious lawyers. She writes well about this subject; I hope she hasn't ever had to work in such a corrupt firm.

Howard Rickover is an inexperienced lawyer and has only been at Tweedmore and Slyde for a few months when one of the founders, Leo Slyde, is killed. Homicide detective Sarah Nelson enlists his help in uncovering the murderer by requesting that he keep an eye open at the firm and let her know if he hears or sees anything useful. That is not an orthodox approach but it works.

The story is very engaging. The first quarter of this very brief book (182 pages) is about the huge amount of work that Howard takes on in his first weeks at the firm, and the dog eat dog world of the legal firm he works for.  In fact, Howard's story was just as interesting as the mystery for me. It is pretty clear that everyone dislikes Leo Slyde, but when the police interview the employees at Tweedmore and Slyde, everyone but Howard says that Leo was loved by all.

I liked this book a lot, even though it is an amateur sleuth mystery. Yes, there is a police detective who plays a prominent role in the story, but Howard is the real star of the show. The book won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1990. It is a real shame that the author did not continue with more books about this pair.

I first discovered this book at Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan. See Bill Selnes' review there, and his later post on the author, who has now written a second mystery.

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Publisher:   Ivy Books, 1990 (orig. pub. 1989)
Length:      182 pages
Format:      Paperback
Setting:      Silicon Valley, California
Genre:        Mystery
Source:      I purchased my copy at a book sale in 2015.

Reading in January 2018

So in February it only took me until the 11th to get a reading summary up for January's reading. In January I stuck with crime fiction, although the first book I read in 2018 was a mix of fantasy and mystery.

I am reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo throughout the year as a part of a read along, one chapter a day. I really did not know what to expect, If I ever knew anything about the story I forgot it long ago. So far it has been very interesting, especially reading it in small chunks. Some days I get a bit ahead, sometimes I fall a bit behind. Check out the sign-up post at One Catholic Life for more details.


These are the nine crime fiction books I read in January and all of them were very, very good.

The Big Over Easy (2005) by Jasper Fforde

This is the first book in The Nursery Crime series. DCI Jack Spratt and Sergeant Mary Mary investigate crimes within the world of nursery rhymes. Here, they investigate the apparent suicide of Humpty Dumpty. The book is clearly a fantasy / mystery crossover with lots of humor, puns, and satire. My son read this first and recommended the book, and I enjoyed it very much. A review will follow... sometime soon. 

Grey Mask (1928) by Patricia Wentworth

The first book in the Miss Silver series. I was very pleasantly surprised. Book review here.

Hit List (2000) by Lawrence Block

Hit List is the 2nd novel in the Keller series. I read the first book, Hit Man, in December and liked it so well I started this one while reading another book. Keller is a hitman living in New York City; he gets his jobs or assignments from Dot, who works for a man who brokers (arranges) hits for his clients. As I said in my summary of Hit Man, it was a very enjoyable read but it is an adjustment to get used to a killer being the main focus.

Death of a Red Heroine (2000) by Qiu Xiaolong

The story is set in Shanghai in 1990 just after Tiananmen Square, with Chief Inspector Chen Cao as the lead character. The author was born in Shanghai, China, in 1953, but has lived in the US since 1988. I primarily enjoyed this book for the picture of life in Shanghai in the 1990s. I will be returning to the series.  

The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933) by Stuart Palmer

The fourth book in the Miss Hildegarde Withers series. It was a lot of fun because of the setting, on Santa Catalina island off the California coast. Book review here, with  some comments on the film adaptation.

Cold Cold Heart (2017) by Christine Poulsen

A medical thriller with two story lines: one set at an Antarctic research base, and the other set in the UK. I loved the detail of the daily life on the base during the winter months when no one can leave and no one can fly in. Review here.

The Whip Hand (1965) by Victor Canning

Although I have read only three books by Victor Canning, I have become a big fan of his writing. This book is along the lines of a James Bond thriller, although the protagonist, Rex Carver, is a private eye and not a spy. He does do some side jobs for a British secret service department. Carver is hired to track down a missing au pair in Brighton. 

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (2013) by Malcom Mackay

This is the second book I read this month about a hitman, a man who kills for a living. Calum Maclean has been an independent agent, taking jobs as he needs the money. Then he is offered a temporary job working for Peter Jamieson, head of a crime organization in Glasgow, while the regular hitman is having a hip replacement. The first in a trilogy and I will be reading the 2nd and 3rd books also.

Metzger's Dog (1983) by Thomas Perry

Chinese Gordon and his friends Immerman and Kepler break into a lab at the University of Los Angeles to steal some pharmaceutical cocaine, worth a lot of money. But Chinese also takes some papers a professor has compiled for the CIA, which include a blueprint for throwing a large city into chaos. The CIA decides that a band of terrorists has stolen the papers... and go overboard in their attempts to rectify the situation. Very funny at times, entertaining, with a wonderful ending.