20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Edgar Award winning classic of espionage fiction., March 8, 1997
By A Customer
When it was first published as The Berlin Memorandum in 1966, this novel won Elleston Trevor the Edgar Award for mystery fiction. Trevor, whose other literary credits include The Flight of the Phoenix and Bury Him Among Kings, was spurred by his success to write a nineteen-book series about Quiller's further missions under the pseudonym of Adam Hall. Although the books have had a loyal following, especially in Britain, none has received the acclaim which greeted this first novel in the series. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it was eventually filmed as The Quiller Memorandum with George Segal and Alec Guiness.
Quiller is a "shadow executive" for an officially unavowed British intelligence agency known only as "the Bureau". The novel opens in post-war Berlin where he has been working with the Z police, a German agency devoted to the prosecution of war criminals. War-weary from an undercover assignment at a concentration camp during WW II, Quiller is due to return home. The Bureau convinces him to stay, however, by revealing to him that a forming neo-Nazi movement in Berlin may be headed by Zossen, the commandant of the concentration camp from which Quiller had helped Jews escape. Working alone in a faceless city which presents hidden threats at every turn, Quiller accepts the assigment that has already left one agent dead -- stepping into, as his field director puts it, a gap between two mobilizing armies which cannot see one another in the fog.
Hall's writing is consistently terse and compelling. He is at his best in evoking the tension of working for a manipulative secret beaurocracy whose motivations remain obscure, but whose local culture seems vitally real and believable. Quiller is a soldier at work for an army that he knows only from the ranks, whose generals are shrouded in shadow. It is in evoking this culture that Hall's writing transcends the genre, exploring complex themes of loyalty and disillusionment, and the specifically 20th century Kafka-esque relationship of an individual to the beaurocracies that determine his fate. But the real strength of the novel lies in its pure ability to entertain. Hall manages to maintain a level of tension and suspense worthy of comparison to any of espionage fiction's masterpieces, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to The Ipcress File. If some of the writing now seems cliche, that is because to a large extent THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM created the cliches. It has had hundreds of imitators both in print an on the screen since its publication, but anyone going back to the original (even thirty years later) will likely agree with the New York Times Book Review that "no one writes better espionage than Adam Hall."
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling Spy Novel - Among the Best of this Genre, August 6, 2006
This review is from: The Quiller Memorandum (Otto Penzler Presents...) (Paperback)
Whether of not you've seen and enjoyed the movie version of "The Quiller Memorandum," you are in for a rare treat. The novel is different, but in many ways even better than the film. Adam Hall's Quiller is a cold-eyed realist (colder, more introverted and more introspective than that played by George Segal) working for an unnamed and unacknowledged British agency in Cold War-era Berlin. Ordered to infiltrate and expose a ring of old and neo-Nazis, Quiller attempts methodically to probe the depths of a secret organization that is bent on resuscitating the Third Reich. This work is dangerous, and is made more so by the uncertain allegiances of some of the characters. Although the novel takes place twenty years after the end of World War II, it was still unclear where certain characters, even those in high government positions, stood.
The detailed descriptions of Quiller's reasoning and analyses demonstrate the workings of the mind of a master spy. What makes Quiller so compelling is that while he is brilliant, he is flawed. Quiller makes mistakes, sometimes tragic ones, sometimes avoidable ones. I disagree with the view that the characters lack depth and are one-dimensional. Inga, for example, is as complicated a character as one is likely to see, for biographical and psychological reasons that are well-explained. Rothstein is not quite what he appears to be on the surface, either.
But the true joy of this novel is its detailed descriptions of the "how" of spycraft -- how messages are transmitted; how they are received; how the emergency backup works; how one loses a tail; how one endures interrogation under pressure. The psychological reasons why certain characters behave as they do are also intriguing. Yes, the references to the "id" and the "ego" are a bit dated, but the kindergarten-level Freud-speak does not detract from the real mind games that the characters are playing here. Overall, "The Quiller Memorandum" is an outstanding spy novel that is one of the best of its genre.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Still gripping, but a little outdated, June 22, 2005
This review is from: The Quiller Memorandum (Otto Penzler Presents...) (Paperback)
As a reader, I've always been fond of thriller, police and crime stories. They are often - undeservedly - considered a lesser genre, none the less they present an extraordinary opportunity to test logic skills, appraise different possibilities and sometimes also exercise in virtual history.
The Quiller Memorandum is no exception.
It has even a pedigree, as winner of the Edgar Allan Poe for Best Novel in 1966.
Basically it is the story of a secret agent employed by the British intelligence in the '50s to track down former Nazi criminals hiding under respectable new identities, who comes to confront a dangerous German neo-Nazi secret association, the Phoenix, trying to regain power.
Many of the situations described bring to mind "The Odessa File" by Forsythe and "Fatherland" by Robert Harris, and I guess that this novel has been an important inspiration - if not source - to both of them.
None the less both "Fatherland" and "The Odessa File" are far more consistent and superior.
I believe the book is a bit out of date to the modern reader and shows the marks of time: under some aspects it is a typical product of the late '60s, with its faltering hopes and gloomy expectations.
The hero is James-Bondlike but not so successful and formidable, and neither so optimistic: unlike Bond he doesn't seem able to be able to control the outside world, while is an expert in self-control, that is psychoanalysis (there are some dull remarks about Es and Ego), mnemotechnics and psychology.
There's pervasive pessimism in the usefulness of reason and logics and a suicide-like attitude in many of his actions (the mythological image used is the Greek tauromachia, the man who fight the bull with his bare hands) that is kind of self-destructive mysticism.
His adversaries appear to be all-pervasive: they are ghostlike and always in advantage, but they too finish to act irrationally.
Unlike classic thrillers, this is mostly the description of a nightmare. The scene is reduced at minimum (we know it happens in Berlin), the individuals are reduced to primeval pulsions (pure masochism in Inga, sadism in Oktober, multiple personalities in Zossen, revenge in Rothstein and so on), time can contract or expand according to the needs and logic may be faultless but of no use to forecast what will happen.
With these cautions, the novel is still readable and can offer a few hours of interesting time off
I hope my impressions may have been of help to you.
You are truly welcome if you can suggest other readings or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.
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