Word: agent
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BIRDS FALL DOWN, by Rebecca West. In her first novel in ten years, Dame Rebecca dissects that most unscrupulous of all traitors, the double agent-although she does not add substantially to readers' understanding of the meaning of treason...
...clarify the doctrine of scienter (to know), the requirement that a smut seller must have "guilty knowledge" that his wares are obscene before he is criminally liable. In a New York case, Times Square Bookstore Clerk Robert Redrup was convicted of selling paperbacks titled Lust Pool and Shame Agent to a plainclothes cop who asked him why he sold such "garbage." Said Redrup: "There's worse stuff around." Redrup argues that his comment failed to prove scienter...
Cloak & Cricket. The double agent is Alexander Kamensky, a minor functionary in the household of an Imperial Russian count living in Paris in the 1900s. Kamensky arranges the murder of czarist leaders, while he fingers his revolutionary comrades for the Czar's secret police. Dame Rebecca hints of his duality, but she is in no hurry to expose him. After all, the effect of a double agent depends partly on the ability to wear his ambiance like a cloak...
This engaging traitor steals the show from Kamensky-but not without blunting the purpose of Dame Rebecca's book, which was to explain the double agent's rationale. Kamensky had a real-life counterpart, one levno Aseff, who operated around the turn of the century, accepting missions from Russian revolutionaries as well as from the Czar. The abstract motivation that Dame Rebecca gives to Kamensky would have baffled such a man as Aseff...
...Guns of Navarone and H.M.S. Ulysses would have done. They were tightlipped, quietly efficient men who were repelled by heroics, and obviously wanted nothing more than peace and quiet after their hazardous call to duty ended. In this book, however, MacLean has smashed the mold. Secret Agent Philip Calvert, his new hero, must have got his basic training by watching James Bond movies. Calvert is simply too incredibly dumb to be taken seriously. Assigned to track down pirates in the Irish Sea, Calvert stumbles on the gang right away. But instead of sensibly going for help, he hangs around long...