As a writer of spy fiction Ted Allbeury has always relied on that apparently easy air of authenticity which comes from experience. Like several other leading British mystery authors, among them Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, and David John Moore Cornwell (John le Carré), Allbeury was himself a spy. He served in the British Intelligence Corps from 1939 to 1947, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He described his experience in a pleasantly humorous vein in an article in Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader's Companion (1977). Unlike the Guy Burgess-Donald Maclean-Anthony Blunt stereotype, Allbeury was not recruited from Oxford or Cambridge; rather, he was one of the first "grammar school" volunteers. Accordingly, his forte is not the world of le Carré's Smiley, a top professional "control" who makes the large decisions, but that of the subordinate agent, operating in the no-man's-land between the superpowers, as much exposed to...