What's New
The last ten major changes to the site.
- 05/24/2022 - For today's entrant into the compendium, we take another big leap back in time to 1936 and a popular British weekly magazine, The Hotspur, for the strangely titled . There are 20 short stories about Alan Ross, son of a British Secret Service agent. Young Ross has a terrific knack for breaking codes and deciphering messages so the department makes frequent use of him. Naturally for literary reasons only, he cannot let anyone at the prep school know about this so his occasional popping off to crack another code often results in a school Master cracking a cane on his backside. Odd times!
- 05/22/2022 - Leaping back from the past with the last entrant to modern times with today's, I present a 3-book, 4-short story/novella series about a kick-butt British agent named . She is definitely not someone to mess around with because she will decidedly mess you up.
- 05/20/2022 - For today's entrant into the compendium we head back in time just shy of 90 years. That is a lot of years to travel but for the most part this series is worth it, if you can get hold of any of the 18 adventures that were published about . His tales were penned by Stephen Maddock, a pseudonym by J.M. Walsh over the span of a dozen years for this series as well as a handful of Inspector Sloane mysteries.
- 05/18/2022 - I have a dual entry for today though it is one character, sort of. I present to the readers entries on and . Both of these very interesting ladies are Peggy Carter but they are both quite different and, in my opinion, each worthy of her own page.
- 05/16/2022 - Today I bring into the compendium a very enjoyable six-book series involving a British homicide detective who will get involved in a strange case which will result in his changing professions and locales to become an operative for a secret Japanese intelligence group. makes it work! (Well, okay, the author, Mark McKay, makes it work but you know what I mean). Give it a try, if you haven't already.
- 05/14/2022 - Just shy of two decades ago, highly successful author Andy McNab teamed with another fellow, Robert Rigby, to give us the 4-book story of Danny Watts, aka , a sometime agent for MI6. I finally got around to checking the books out and thus young Watts becomes today's entrant.
- 05/12/2022 - For today's entrant into the compendium, we head back to the mid 60s and a British graphic adventure series about , an operative with The Finger On The Trigger by which the writers mean that it is he who is determined to assassinate Adolf Hitler. It is a, well, frankly, pretty boring twist on Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male. I was not impressed.
- 05/10/2022 - As I wrote in the My Comments section of today's entrant into compendium, "Having an author have more than one series is not unusual. ... To have two series that have earned a A or higher grade by me is, however, rare. This exceptional author has done so." That author is Christopher Reich and the newest series of his to join this collection is that of . He is a former thief and former investment banker and now a man who runs a small business restoring ultra-expensive automobiles. And doing a bit of freelance cloak and dagger work on the side. There are so far four excellent adventures to savor. I strongly recommend them all.
- 05/08/2022 - Back in the mid-80's a fast-action guns-a-blazing was one of the many men's adventure series filling the truckstop paper spindles. It was about Jack Sullivan, aka The Specialist. Nearly a dozen books about him came out. I read 'em and enjoyed 'em. Well jump ahead to last year and suddenly two books about hit the digital bookshelves and this fellow has inherited land from that Sullivan and is pretty much getting into the same sort of troubles that the first guy did. Action packed excitement, if you like that sort of thing (I do!).
- 05/06/2022 - The last entry I added, with a good deal of chagrin, a rodent secret agent. At least that fellow had the decency to have an organization he reported to and a bunch of cool gadgets to use. Unfortunately, 15 years before that big-eared chap came on the scene, there was another with the same name but this guy made, to me, absolutely no sense. This had "Secret Agent" tacked onto the name but why is something I do not know. There was nothing 'secret' about him nor was there anything the least bit 'agent-y' about him. He hung around a neighborhood engaging in a standard cat-mouse feud that had nothing to do with cloak & dagger stuff in the least. Still, because he was called a Secret Agent and he had a series of (lame) adventures, he is listed here. My apologies to all.
More
What's New!
SPY FICTION!
Say the word SPY to most people and they will respond with James Bond,
with good reason as he is the best known of all fictional spies. With 20+ blockbuster movies over the last 40+ years,
along with the standard movie hype, virtually the entire world knows about 007 and his License To Kill.
Of course, James Bond is by no means the only spy in the world of fiction, just the best known. Who are the rest?
Who has his or her own license to kill, thrill, or chill. How do these agents stack up against each other? Who would
you want beside you in a car chase, in a knife fight, in a dark alley, or beneath the covers?
This site is dedicated to the many, many men and women who, at least in fiction, have defended our freedoms against all forms of enemies, foreign and domestic. Well, granted a few of them were just in it for the money and many were only after the excitement, and sex played a huge role in the motivation of more than a few. But still, their actions helped not only preserve our way of life (on paper) but also brought us, the readers, many hours of escapism and vicarious pleasure.
So, who are these people that I have slaved so diligently to present to you? They are the men and women of spy-fi about whom there is a series. Single-book characters need not apply. There has to be at least two books. Two's the minimum but the more the merrier.
Moreover, I have confined membership to the English language. If it wasn't put into English so I can read it, I haven't worried about it.
Each spy has his or her own page. Click on the "Characters" button to go to a listing page. Click on the letter the
character's last name starts with (or a more common moniker like "Death Merchant" if appropriate). That will take one
step further into the labrynth. Finally, select the character's name from the list and, voila!
Have fun!!