The Miernik Dossier

On his experience being a deep-cover agent for the CIA: "It's one of the most boring occupations in the world, punctuated by moments of ecstasy. You sit around for days, sometimes for weeks, waiting for something you think you have made happen, to happen. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it does......more

Here goes a maverick: the possibly dullest spy novel in existence, ever, which paradoxically makes you read it till the very end. And the plot? It goes like a bad joke: a bunch of spies from different countries enter a bar... only in this case they keep doing that all the time, they meet and travel.......more

This time I was not as dubious. The first time I encountered a novel fashioned solely of various reports from a variety of sources, it was a book called The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders, and I responded in part: “I have to admit I had my doubts: a novel told entirely through the transcripts of......more

I must confess that after the Berlin Wall came down, I had this feeling that that was it for the Cold War spy novel. So I was truly happy to find this book, which was written in 1971, so I could once again relive the Cold War spy experience. The Miernik Dossier (the first of the Paul Christopher ser......more

This is a pretty remarkable book. The Miernik Dossier indeed takes the form of a case file, told completely through incident reports, CIA cable traffic, police logs, interview/interrogation transcripts, diary excerpts, etc. - an early example of the type of epistolary writing which has become increa......more