Spy Story Research Articles

The Jeju Massacre, National Allegory and Cultural Revolution in Kim Sok Pom’s <i>Karasu no Shi</i> (1957)

What can a spy story tell us about the effects of neo-colonial nation building on diasporic subjectivity? Kim Sok Pom’s 1957 <i>Karasu no Shi</i> [The Death of the Crow] illustrates the lived experience of postcolonial subjectivity in a contested site overrun by competing imperial powers. The novel focusses on the 1948 uprising on Jeju Island, the subsequent division of the Korean peninsula, exile and diasporic identity. It confronts official accounts of Korea’s post-war past and turns a forgotten history into cultural memory, a central task of national allegory; indeed, the article champions an allegorical reading of <i>Karasu no Shi</i>, despite divergent views outlined herein. In Kim’s text, principal characters are situated allegorically on the Korean stage after Japan’s defeat; they personify varying cultural and political attachments or paradigms. Each exists in a state of profound overlap, with the spy as the linchpin. The spy’s divided state of being resonates allegorically with the experiences of <i>zainichi</i> Koreans in early post-war Japan. Saturated with personal and political meaning, the novel contributes to the fabric of <i>zainichi</i> Korean history with threads that tie to the story of a continuing underclass and disrupts enduring notions of a homogenous Japan. Kim ultimately articulates possibilities for survival.

Secrets, leaks and the novel. Writers, British intelligence and the public sphere after World War Two

This article makes a pioneering effort to explore the relationship between spy fiction, intelligence and the public sphere in Britain after World War Two. The secret British achievements of code-breaking, atomic science and deception in the World War of 1939–45 were outstanding. Similarly, the British contribution to spy fiction in the twentieth century has been seen as exceptional. However, the complex interconnections between the history and fictions of intelligence in the post-war decades have never been closely examined. This is a period during which the British state aggressively sought to suppress memoirs and histories written by wartime secret warriors. Other writers who chose to disclose aspects of their intelligence work through the idiom of spy fiction, however, met with a rather different response. In this period, we argue therefore, the relatively unpoliced spy story emerged as a tolerated form of leakage for wartime secrets. The public reputation of the British security establishment underwent a serious decline in the post-war years, in the wake of successive scandals and defections. British intelligence made a number of attempts to repair its battered image in this era, for example publicising a key case involving a Soviet double agent working for the West. However, fiction remained a key terrain on which an ongoing battle for the reputation of British intelligence continued to be fought out. From the early 1960s a significant new form began to emerge: the ‘New Realism’ of John le Carré. Widely accepted as an authentic image of the British intelligence ‘circus,’ these stories portrayed the British secret state in a strikingly harsh and revealing light. Working directly in response to le Carré, writers like John Bingham sought to counter with an altogether more positive impression of secret service. Again, the spy novel provided a key platform on which struggles over the public image of intelligence were fought out. In this way the essay draws together the history and fictions of the post-war decades to reveal an intimate correspondence between writers, secret service and the public understanding of intelligence.

Review of Serhii Plokhy. The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story.

Review of Serhii Plokhy. The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story.

Deciphering Mary Stuart’s lost letters from 1578-1584

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archive collections. There is evidence, however that other letters from Mary Stuart are missing from those collections, such as letters referenced in other sources but not found elsewhere. In Under the Molehill – an Elizabethan Spy Story, John Bossy writes that a secret correspondence with her associates and allies, prior to its compromise in mid-1583, was “kept so secure that none of it has survived, and we don’t know what was in it.” We have found over 55 letters fully in cipher in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which, after we broke the code and deciphered the letters, unexpectedly turned out to be letters from Mary Stuart, addressed mostly to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. Written between 1578 and 1584, those newly deciphered letters are most likely part of the aforementioned secret correspondence considered to have been lost, and they constitute a voluminous body of new primary material on Mary Stuart – about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England.

Reimagining Blighty

This article examines the relationship between aesthetics and pedagogy in two recent historical novels for children about the British Home Front during the Second World War: Letters from the Lighthouse (2017) by Emma Carroll and Our Castle by the Sea (2019) by Lucy Strange. It argues that the representation of civilian life during the war in both novels is conditioned by recent socio-political events in Britain, namely, the recurrent appropriation of the wartime past in support of nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric. The texts discussed in this article seek to counter this narrative, foregrounding immigration as a vital part of Britain’s wartime past. Drawing upon historical fiction studies and cultural analysis, the article begins with an exploration of the aesthetic treatment of wartime Britain in the texts more broadly, arguing that Letters from the Lighthouse participates in and subverts idealised visions of the Home Front, while Our Castle by the Sea rejects nostalgia entirely. I conclude my discussion with an examination of the use of the wartime spy story as an aesthetic template for exploring concepts of xenophobia and prejudice in the two novels. Ultimately, this article contends that literary aesthetics perform a pedagogic function in both texts, presenting the contribution of immigrants and refugees as crucial to the story of the Britain Home Front.

Between Passion and Compassion: The Story of the Stone and Its Modern Reincarnations

This study reconsiders The Story of the Stone as a literary exemplum of the “Buddhist conquest of China.” The kind of Buddhism that Stone embodies in its fictional form and makes indelible on the Chinese cultural imagination simultaneously indulges in and wavers from the Mahāyāna teachings of the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. The dialectics of truth and falsehood, love and emptiness, passion and compassion, which Stone dramatizes and problematizes, continues to stir the creative impulses of artists in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China. This study features three of Stone’s modern reincarnations. Tale of the Crimson Silk, a story by the amorous poet-monk Su Manshu (1884–1918), recasts at once the idea of Buddhist monkhood and that of “free love” in early Republican China. In Lust, Caution, a spy story by the celebrated writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995), a revolutionary heroine is compelled to weigh the emptiness/truth of carnal desire against the truth/emptiness of patriotic commitment. Decades later, love and illusion dwell again at the epicenter of a fallen empire in the director Chen Kaige’s (b. 1952) 2017 film, The Legend of the Demon Cat, in which an illustrious poet sings testimony to the (un)witting (com)passion of a femme fatale.

The Military Techno-Thriller: A History

This paper attempts a comprehensive history of the techno-thriller in English, from its nineteenth century emergence through its post-World War I decline; its evolution of such derivatives as the spy story, war-themed post-apocalyptic fiction and military science fiction; and its revival in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so the history emphasizes the connections between developments in fiction and developments in political life, while also examining manifestations of the form in other media, most notably the multimedia efflorescence of the genre in film, television and video gaming from the 1980s on.

Thunderous Silence: The Omission of the Sinai Pericope in Philo of Alexandria

AbstractOne of the most surprising omissions in Philo’s retelling of Moses’s life in hisDe vita Moysisis the Sinai pericope. The Alexandrian omitted Exod 17:14-Num 20:13 with the exception of the spy story (Num 13:1-14:45). There appear to be three reasons for the omission. First, Philo recognized the doublet of the story of the water from the rock (Exod 17:1-7//Num 20:1-13). This provided a narrative rationale for the omission. Second, he routinely omitted place names from his narrative, anars narrandithat helped to universalize the text. Third, the omission enabled him to avoid the association of Sinai with the covenant. Philo retold the story of Moses, but turned Moses outward into the larger world rather than inward to his own community.

The Decline of the Spy Story and the Transformation of the Thriller in the 1990s: The Data From the Bestseller List

It is the conventional wisdom that fiction about spies and espionage became less popular after the Cold War, but this is generally claimed in a casual, intuitive way. This paper attempts to check this wide belief against the data provided by the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly bestseller lists, and finds considerable substantiation of this view there, reinforced by the evidence those lists also provide of the increased predominance of other types of thriller (for example, legal and forensic thrillers) in the popular fiction market.

Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900: The Changing Enemy by Oliver S. Buckton, Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner

Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900: The Changing Enemy by Oliver S. Buckton, Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner

The Pentateuch: Exodus–Deuteronomy

The PentateuchExodus–Deuteronomy Christopher T. Begg, William J. Urbrock, and Michael W. Duggan 280. [Exodus 1–2] Catherine Vialle, "Des femmes à l'origine de la libération des fils d'Israël: Le rôle des femmes et des filles au début du livre de l'Exode," MScRel 74 (3, 2017) 5-17. The first two chapters of Exodus narrate how the children of Israel, having migrated to Egypt during a time of severe famine, increased and multiplied and were ruthlessly enslaved by Pharaoh. In the course of his campaign of genocide against the Israelites, the king ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all male babies at birth, but was thwarted by the midwives acting out of their "fear of God." Thereupon, the king commanded all his people to cast every newborn Hebrew boy into the Nile. These are the circumstances in which the Hebrew child Moses was born. The future liberator of the Israelites owed his life solely to the group of women featured in Exodus 2. After reviewing the depiction of women in the two Genesis creation narratives of Genesis 1–3, V. focuses on the major female characters in Exodus 1–2. Specifically, she considers in turn the women figures of this highly ironic narrative, with its focus on the role of women, i.e., the two midwives (the only characters to be called by their names), Moses' mother and sister, and Pharaoh's daughter and her maids. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 281. [Exod 4:24-26] Michaela Bauks, "Exodus 4:24-26—The Genesis of the 'Torah' of Circumcision in Postexilic and Rabbinic Discourses," Ṣedaqa and Torah, 148-67 [see #697]. In her essay, B. points out that in rabbinic times circumcision was a central, albeit not exclusive, Jewish identity marker and a sign of the fulfillment of the entire Torah. Since, however, the symbol of circumcision did not originally have such a delineating and marking significance, in order to assume that significance it needed to be associated with the blood of circumcision whereby it is linked, as a sign of the covenant, with the Sinai Covenant and the blood rite that was part of this (see Exodus 24). The only Hebrew Bible text that mentions blood in connection with circumcision is Exod 4:24-26. According to B., the vagueness surrounding this passage made it possible to associate it with both Exodus 24 and Genesis 17. Rabbinic tradition expatiates on the "covenant of circumcision," seeing circumcision as a sign of the covenant by means of which identity and atonement are brought into connection. Circumcision is thus considered by the Rabbis as fulfilling all the commandments of the Torah, and is accordingly called by them the "Torah of circumcision." In this context, the term "Torah" refers to the single commandment of circumcision among other commandments; above all, however, it designates commitment to the covenant, which, in turn, brings about identity, atonement and ultimately a blessed life, and the sign of which is the rite of circumcision. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] [End Page 92] 282. [Exodus 32–34; Numbers 13–14] Fabrizio Zandonadi Catenassi, "A misercórdia em meio à violência no Israel pós-exílico: Ex 32–34 à luz de Nm 13–14 [Mercy in the Midst of Violence in Postexilic Israel: Exodus 32–34 in the Light of Numbers 13–14]," EBíb 33 (2016) 19-31. The story of the construction of the Golden Calf and the eventual divine forgiveness and renewal of the covenant is one of the most dramatic stories of sin, but also of mercy, grace, and goodness, in the Bible. The purpose of Z.'s article is to contribute to a fuller understanding of the theme of God's mercy as portrayed in Exodus 32–34 with particular attention to the theophany depicted in Exod 34:6-8 and the connection with the "spy story" in Numbers 13–14. Z. studies the Exodus 32–34 text on the basis of a social-science and literary approach, which highlights its postexilic structural features that are part of its development of the themes of divine wrath...

Cast in Deathless Bronze: Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire by Donald Tunnicliff Rice

Reviewed by: Cast in Deathless Bronze: Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire by Donald Tunnicliff Rice John Lawrence Tone Donald Tunnicliff Rice. 2016. Cast in Deathless Bronze: Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-943665-43-3. Andrew Rowan played a small role in the American invasion of Cuba in 1898 by taking a message to Calixto García, the commander of Cuban insurgents operating in eastern Cuba, related to his assisting troop landings at Guantánamo and Daiquirí, just east of Santiago. I didn't know there was much more to the story until I read this enchanting book by Donald Tunnicliff Rice. Rice is actually writing about three separate things: Rowan, an article about Rowan written by Elbert Hubbard, and the Spanish-American War. On this last subject there are better books, and some readers may find themselves shaking their heads and skimming portions. Where the story of the war and Rowan are closely linked, Rice is on solid ground, and skillfully interweaves the two narratives. He provides interesting details about García, and the chapters on the war in the Philippines are very good. Nevertheless, readers are better off turning elsewhere for analysis of why the United States went to war with Spain, why Filipinos resisted the American occupation of their homeland, and other important subjects. That criticism aside, Rice is both authoritative and entertaining when dealing with his main topics: Rowan and the pamphlet written by Hubbard. Rowan, though a little-known historical figure, merits this [End Page 236] extended biographical treatment. Sometimes getting to know the minor characters in a story can be revealing, and that is the case here. Recounting Rowan's time at West Point, Rice tells us a lot in a few words about how the place operated in late 1870s and early 1880s. Upon graduation, Rowan served in dreary frontier posts with little hope of advancement, until a chance came to work for the Military Information Division (MID). Rowan became a spy, and everyone likes a good spy story. Rowan gathered intelligence across the border in Canada, then seen as a potential threat to the United States. He later participated in surveying a route for an intercontinental railroad to unite North and South America, a project never completed. He mapped the northern border and then created maps of Cuba on the eve of the Spanish-American War. While he was there taking his "message" to García, Rowan gathered intelligence, especially on roads and topography. The information he brought back went largely "unheeded" (87) and had very little impact on the outcome of the war, but it had a huge impact on Rowan himself, who rose to become a captain in the 19th Infantry, and was deployed to the Philippines in August 1899. There he participated in the hellish and shameful counterinsurgency campaign to crush Filipino independence. Rowan, like many other U.S. officers, commanded soldiers to make war on civilians by destroying crops, livestock, and homes. Likely he knew of the "water cure" (much like water boarding) and other tortures committed against suspected insurgents and their civilian supporters. Rowan continued to gather intelligence and to map the area under his command and seemed to be particularly effective at organizing his zone of occupation politically. By the time all this happened, Rowan was famous, because Elbert Hubbard, a "long-haired megalomaniac," had written "A Message to García" for the March issue of his periodical, The Philistine. I found the best parts of Rice's book to be those about Hubbard, who later recalled (112) that the article on Rowan "leaped hot from my heart." A mixture of almost no knowledge about Rowan or García and the inventions of an over-heated imagination, Hubbard's article never added much to our understanding of the war in Cuba. As Rice points out, many other people, especially journalists, had been embedded with the Cuban insurgents for some time and had been getting messages back and forth. Cubans in New York, Washington, and Cuba itself did the heavy lifting to make...

The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story. By Serhii Plokhy. New York: Basic Books, 2016. xii, 367 pp. Notes. Index. Maps. $28.99, hard bound.

The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story. By Serhii Plokhy. New York: Basic Books, 2016. xii, 367 pp. Notes. Index. Maps. $28.99, hard bound.

The Lost Map of Matteo de’ Pasti: Cartography, Diplomacy, and Espionage in the Renaissance Adriatic

The sculptor Matteo de’ Pasti left Rimini in 1461 bound for Ottoman Sultan Mehmed ii’s court at Constantinople with gifts from Sigismondo Malatesta. When his ship stopped in Crete, Matteo was detained by the island’s Venetian authorities on charges of espionage. Contemporaries report that he carried with him a map, now lost, but assumed to be a strategically valuable one of the Adriatic. Discussions of Matteo’s mission claim that it attempted to supply the sultan with essential intelligence for an invasion of Italy. Yet, this spy story finds little confirmation in historical sources. Indeed, our knowledge of the map’s very existence derives from the reports of Sigismondo’s enemies. I examine this prominent embassy as a means to reconsider attitudes toward the utility of maps in the scholarly imagination and the role of art and artists in early modern diplomacy. Revisiting documentary evidence and the claims scholars have grounded therein, I explore how we have told the tale of this journey in ways that conform to our own shifting expectations, sometimes at the expense of fidelity to the sources at hand. Overwhelming focus on the absent map has obscured both Matteo’s role as envoy and the distinctive place of evidently skillful and delightful visual culture in this attempted exchange.

Looking for the Balkan (Br)other: The National Gaze in Dzhanik Faiziev's The Turkish Gambit

Dzhanik Faiziev's 2005 The Turkish Gambit, based on Boris Akunin's novel of the same name, presents a spy story unfolding against the backdrop of the Russo‐Turkish War (1877–78) in the Balkans (today's Bulgaria). Bulgarians occupy a particular place in the Russian imagination. During the Russo‐Turkish War, Bulgarians entered the Russian cultural space as southern Orthodox Slavs in need of help. This image changed during the Soviet period, when Bulgaria was considered one of the most faithful Soviet satellites and also a favorite vacation spot which comforted with its familiar culture but offered enough differences with exotic southern touches. The post‐Communist era, the turn of the twentieth century when the novel and film were created, brought more unexpected alterations to the Russian perception of Bulgarians. Analyzing the representation of Bulgaria and Bulgarians in Faiziev's film, I contend that the seemingly reassuring sameness is marked by awkward otherness. I utilize scholarship on Russia's imperial experience in relation to the Caucasus and its patterns of artistic othering in my analysis in order to shed more light on these patterns and reveal their persistent nature. To complicate matters further, I argue that Alexander Etkind's concept of “internal colonization” sheds some light on these alterations but falls short of fully illuminating Russia's post‐Communist national anxieties.

Rappresentazioni inglesi del terrorismo nord-irlandese: dai complotti al Complotto

Since the end of the Sixties, the so-called Irish Troubles have inspired in Ireland many literary works and films that have been studied at length. Less well known and often analyzed together with the Irish production are those English novels and action movies that exploit a Northern Irish setting, with scarce or no interest for the political facts of the conflict or, according to some critics, with a focused and deliberate use of stereotypes. However, Irish Troubles have recently brought forth in England a series of film and novels showing at the core of the events a conspiracy by the British intelligence. Therefore a fictional genre that in the past has been basically escapist, and often with a reactionary bent, like the thriller and the spy story, may also be seen and used now to denounce the false statements and undermine the official truths of the establishment.

Foreword from the Associate Editor [Historical Corner

Recently, I read a novel, L'anomalia [The Anomaly] (Figure 1), edited by a major Italian publisher and authored by a colleague of mine, Massimiliano Pieraccini (University of Florence). The book can be defined as a “scientific thriller.” It obviously deals with a murder and an investigation, but all the rest is absolutely “scientific.” During a conference in Erice, Sicily (Figure 2), a scientist has a sudden illness and dies. Shortly before, he had declared that he was dealing with the Catt's electromagnetic “anomaly.” This is the beginning of a spy story where the science and its paradoxes are the protagonists. The book has been a bestseller in Italy and is under translation for the foreign market.

Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece (review)

Reviewed by: Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece Nota Pantzou Susan Heuck Allen . Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. xiii + 430. 24 illustrations, 2 maps. Cloth. $40.00. Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece, by Susan Heuck Allen, describes the adventures of American male and female members of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) just before and during their tenure with the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. The book unfolds in an almost cinematic manner to tell a rather obscure and definitely heretofore relatively unknown chapter of the history of ASCSA, of American secret intelligence, and of the field of archaeology in general. Even though archaeologists and archaeological schools' involvement in espionage during World War II (and earlier) has been confirmed by several scholars' memoirs and other accounts, this is the first detailed and well-documented study of this kind. Allen, an archaeologist herself, studied under the late John L. Caskey (University of Cincinnati), director of the Lerna and Kea excavations, from whom she drew inspiration for this book. Her professor's narration of an anecdotal World War II spy story, one summer night on the island of Kea, gave Allen the impetus to initiate this research, which lasted for almost a decade. In compiling this comprehensive and thorough account of American archaeologists' secret intelligence activities in World War II-era Greece, she consulted numerous institutional archives, as well as private collections. Fortunately, Allen's research coincided with the declassification of archives and, as a result, she was able to reconstruct events and sketch out the leading figures, engaging in what she describes as an "archival excavation." This study was further enhanced by the memories of people who befriended, are related to, or had worked with the protagonists. These first person accounts attribute to Allen's book its immediacy and freshness. The book comprises an introduction, fourteen chapters, an epilogue, and four very informative appendices ("Internal Assessment," "Who's Who," "OSS Greek Desk Missions," "OSS Bases and Secret Harbors or Coded Targets"). The first five chapters follow closely the story of Rodney Young, a Princeton graduate and later Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. By narrating his wanderings as a volunteer ambulance driver at the Greek-Albanian front in 1941, his injury and subsequent hospitalization at Evangelismos Hospital in Athens, his return to the United States, and his eventual recruitment by the [End Page 345] Foreign Nationalities Branch, the author delineates the events that led up to these scholars' involvement with American intelligence and the efforts to set up the Greek Desk of the OSS. From chapter six onwards, the biography of "the Greek Desk" unfolds. Allen discusses the missions, hardships, and successes of a community of men and women who embarked on an audacious journey from 1942 until 1945. Their stories are supported by historical information, allowing the reader to picture the Mediterranean theater of World War II operations, the alliances, and the pre-Cold War political upheavals. The clear and vivid descriptions of the bold undertakings of this group of archaeologists offer fresh insight and an alternative perspective into major World War II events such as the Battle of Crete (1941), the Greek army's and government's escape to Egypt (1941), the Dodecanese Campaign (1943), and the Dekemvriana events in Athens (1944). Most important, Allen's research reveals female archaeologists' vital part in OSS operations at a time when both archaeology and intelligence work were male-dominated. She concludes her book by briefly citing the post-war whereabouts of Caskey (University of Cincinnati) and Young (University of Pennsylvania), along with Jerome L. Sperling, Dorothy Cox, and Margaret Crosby (all three at Yale University) and Virginia Grace (Bryn Mawr College), among others. So why do archaeologists make good spies? According to Allen, the skills that archaeologists had developed through excavation and research, along with the experiences and deep understanding of the place and its people that they had acquired while in the field, made them ideal candidates to become secret...

The Singular Affair of the Two Companions

The Singular Affair of the Two Companions Cushing Strout (bio) Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley, eds., A Companion to Crime Fiction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 648 pages. $209.95. Mystery stories are often set in academic milieus, and professors not only read them but may even write them. The news is that they may now be on the professor's list of required reading for students. Two signs of this development are serious reference books about crime fiction: The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (1999) and Blackwell's A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010). The Oxford collection came first, followed by the Blackwell collection. They differ in format: the Oxford book is alphabetically organized, with asterisks used to indicate a cross-reference to another entry, while the Blackwell tome, heavy as a door-stopper, is topically organized, except for a section entitled "Artists at Work," which is in chronological order. Both books have many contributors. Their dust jackets are revealingly different. The Oxford Companion shows a corpse in black clothes lying flat on the floor of a well-stocked library. The Blackwell Companion shows a couple in a fast-moving convertible; the woman is driving and her male companion is firing a pistol at some persons ahead whose bullets have cracked the windshield of the couple's car. Present violence is the active experience of the couple in the car. Past violence in the refined and quiet setting of a library provokes the classic questions of Who, How, and Why. This is also the difference between the detective story and the private-eye story. Somewhere between these types, and drawing on both genres, is the spy story, with its investigative protagonist and credible political context. Detective stories have been for me a recreational pleasure and a change from my day job as an American intellectual historian. The connection between these interests was dramatized by Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951) in which a hospitalized inspector enlists the help of a graduate student in critically examining the historical tradition that Richard iii murdered the princes in the Tower of London. Full disclosure: after I retired from teaching, I joined the conversation about mystery stories by writing the entry War in the Oxford book, commenting on a dozen stories linked to war and having a puzzle requiring an inquiry, both intellectual and dangerous. I hope to be fair-minded in this review, but it should be clear that, as the saying goes, I do have a dog in this hunt. The Blackwell introduction hails the moment when "the detective plot [End Page 668] made it so much more interesting to theorists of language, form, and representation—to narratologists, structuralists, and postmodernists—than crime fiction in general." In Blackwell there are pages on Derrida and Lacan; and while both the Oxford and Blackwell books recognize Poe as the inventor of the detective story, only in Blackwell is there an interest in crime narratives that "marginalize the figure of the detective or in which the investigative element disappears entirely." That may be true of the crime novel, as the entry sleuth in the Oxford book concedes, but for the detective novel "the presence of a sleuth as the central figure is obligatory." A Blackwell essay on Conan Doyle warns against the politically correct trend of seeing him as upholding "imperialist, parochial, and orthodox values"; he was "both a man of his age and a critic of his age, not to be casually stereotyped or labeled." Rosemary Herbert in her Oxford introduction explains that the collection is not only designed for solid scholarship but also to celebrate the playful in a literature that is meant to be entertaining. A good example of the playful is Dorothy L. Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) with its satirical premise about a member who, apparently sleeping for days in his chair under a newspaper, is actually dead. Playfulness is missing from the Blackwell essay on Sayers, because it is mainly biographical, and the commentator reads her backwards—in the sense of seeing her in light of the theological concerns she wrote about, only after she had stopped writing detective stories. This strategy...

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II. By Ben Macintyre; Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat. By Denis Smyth

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War II. By Ben Macintyre; Deathly Deception: The Real Story of Operation Mincemeat. By Denis Smyth