The Quiller Memorandum

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Summary: What the Sex Pistos did to rock music...
Review: ...this author did to the spy thriller--don't be put off by the number of pages, each is fast-paced and the writing style is both accessible as well as being completely original--with all the hoopla over Brosnan quitting the Bond series, Broccoli and co. could do no wrong using this character and series as a template--HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

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Summary: Spy Classic back in print
Review: Bravo Forge for reprinting this classic; I pray they have the rest of the Quilliad in their sights and mean to rectify the disgraceful lack of availability of this brilliant writer.

What can one add about Quiller that isn't said in the rest of the reviews? Except that Amazon can now remove those gloomy references to 'Memo' being out of print.

Let's hope this signals a revived interest, not just in the pseudonymous Hall canon but in the whole of Elleston Trevor's superb writing. A likely start will be the remake of 'Flight of the Phoenix', rumored to be gracing our screens this very autumn.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece for the spy fiction fan
Review: Quiller, the shadow executive for a British undercover agency is sent on a mission to Berlin that requires him to uncover the plans of Phoenix, a Nazi group. Quiller is beaten and battered but finally uncovers several planned exercises in terror. The novel is a synthesis of a James Bond novel with the best of Len Deighton. There is plenty of action for the Bond fan, but taut believable plots for the more serious spy aficionado. No supervillains, but a shadowy ominous realistic group of villains. Quiller Memorandum gives you the best of both worlds.

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Summary: An Edgar Award winning classic of espionage fiction.
Review: When it was first published as The Berlin Memorandum in 1966, this novel won Elleston Trevor the Edgar Award for mystery fiction. Trevor, whose other literary credits include The Flight of the Phoenix and Bury Him Among Kings, was spurred by his success to write a nineteen-book series about Quiller's further missions under the pseudonym of Adam Hall. Although the books have had a loyal following, especially in Britain, none has received the acclaim which greeted this first novel in the series. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it was eventually filmed as The Quiller Memorandum with George Segal and Alec Guiness.Quiller is a "shadow executive" for an officially unavowed British intelligence agency known only as "the Bureau". The novel opens in post-war Berlin where he has been working with the Z police, a German agency devoted to the prosecution of war criminals. War-weary from an undercover assignment at a concentration camp during WW II, Quiller is due to return home. The Bureau convinces him to stay, however, by revealing to him that a forming neo-Nazi movement in Berlin may be headed by Zossen, the commandant of the concentration camp from which Quiller had helped Jews escape. Working alone in a faceless city which presents hidden threats at every turn, Quiller accepts the assigment that has already left one agent dead -- stepping into, as his field director puts it, a gap between two mobilizing armies which cannot see one another in the fog. Hall's writing is consistently terse and compelling. He is at his best in evoking the tension of working for a manipulative secret beaurocracy whose motivations remain obscure, but whose local culture seems vitally real and believable. Quiller is a soldier at work for an army that he knows only from the ranks, whose generals are shrouded in shadow. It is in evoking this culture that Hall's writing transcends the genre, exploring complex themes of loyalty and disillusionment, and the specifically 20th century Kafka-esque relationship of an individual to the beaurocracies that determine his fate. But the real strength of the novel lies in its pure ability to entertain. Hall manages to maintain a level of tension and suspense worthy of comparison to any of espionage fiction's masterpieces, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to The Ipcress File. If some of the writing now seems cliche, that is because to a large extent THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM created the cliches. It has had hundreds of imitators both in print an on the screen since its publication, but anyone going back to the original (even thirty years later) will likely agree with the New York Times Book Review that "no one writes better espionage than Adam Hall."