Word: hunts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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During the past 30 years, 20 of them spent working for the CIA, Hunt has managed to write no fewer than 47 novels under a string of pen names: John Baxter, Gordon Davis and Robert Dietrich, as well as David St. John. His chief characters are Agent Ward, a younger version of Hunt himself (they both went to Brown University), and a casual, thrill-hunting Washington C.P.A., Steve Bentley, who describes the nation's capital as "a great town if you've got the stamina of a Cape buffalo and the wealth of a Punjab prince." Most...
While in the CIA, Hunt cranked out at least one, and sometimes three books a year, drawing on his knowledge of agency operations. Each time he was obliged to submit the manuscript to his superiors for approval. "I made a conscientious effort to fudge details, blurring locations and identities so they couldn't be recognized," Hunt told TIME Correspondent David Beckwith. But occasionally his superiors would censor a scene or a theme, he recalled, "and I'd learn that some episode I thought I'd made up from whole cloth had described an actual operation-one that...
...Hunt's newest novel, The Berlin Ending, is about a Willy Brandt-like character-Klaus Werber, West German Foreign Minister and notorious "anti-Communist cold warrior," perhaps to be honored with the Nobel Prize and the secretary-generalship of the United Nations. The gimmick: in truth Werber is a Soviet agent...
...published in September, Berlin is a longer and more elaborately plotted version of the Hunt formula and the Hunt style ("He was back, as the saying went, to square one"), but it is a notch above his usual work. Hunt's hero this time is ex-CIA Agent Neal Thorpe, who returns to the spy game to save Werber's beautiful stepdaughter Annalise (who knows too much). He loves espionage ("He was alive again") but loathes politics. When Thorpe snorts in disgust at a mere mention of the U.N., his mysterious CIA boss, "the man called Smith," replies...
...after a web of plots and counterplots, the mission fails, and Annalise decides to go home again and keep her mouth shut about her wicked stepfather. "God damn you!" cries Thorpe, who is facing a murder charge on her account. Everybody loses, concludes Hunt, "except Klaus Werber, who was, as the saying went, home free...