Of all things Geek. I am…
The nature of the business of espionage in Michael Brady’s new book Into the Shadows: Assassination Corps is like the businesses of laws and sausages… You want the results, but perhaps, you’d better not look at the mess that created them.
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Red Sparrow is a great addition to the world of cinematic spy fiction. And yet, because the film is so good and so close to the origins of Marvel’s Black Widow, it’s hard to see this as anything more than Marvel being painted into a corner.
But before I get too far into the weeds on that, let me first talk about the film on its own, based upon a novel of the same name by Jason Matthews which I haven’t yet read.
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It’s a rare and out of print book, but I kept an eye out for it on eBay for a while… Then it popped back up on my radar and within a price, I would reasonably pay.
It’s interesting that I had read the parody or spoof of this book How to Archer first, but there’s something about reading the straight-laced version, especially in today’s social and cultural climate that makes this feel almost like a spoof of itself, more so than what Archer did. However, it’s just a relic of its time.
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From the dry desert of the African Sahara to the wet fields of Ireland, the crisp winters of New York City and Washington D.C. to the humidity of Miami, Len Deighton’s Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy is a global jaunt following the implications and repercussions of a defected Russian scientist named Bekuv, his wife, Major Mann, Red Bancroft, and our lead Frederick L. Antony.
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Spies work together; in teams, in networks, for organizations, and sometimes for themselves. But what happens when one of two former associates is assigned to spy on the other? That’s what happens in Len Deighton’s 1975 classic Yesterday’s Spy.
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