Last year, Tim Shipman, the Sunday Times journalist and author of All Out War and Fall Out, wrote up a list of his favourite 125 spy novelists for the website of the Spybrary podcast. It’s a tremendous piece of work, with all sorts of information – and indeed authors – I knew nothing about, and it will keep espionage aficionados occupied for years to come.

One writer who appears surprisingly high on Tim’s list, at 20, is Sarah Gainham. Some may know I’ve been banging the Gainham drum for years, and wrote about her quite a bit in Agent of Influence as I think she is one of the great spy novelists and has been unjustly forgotten. She had a masssive bestseller in the Sixties with Night Falls on the City and its two sequels, but her spy fiction is scandalously obscure. If you enjoy the work of Eric Ambler, Grahame Greene, or John le Carré, I urge you to try to read Gainham.

I say ‘try’, because her spy novels are all out of print and are often hard to find. Tim’s list has possibly even steered prices upwards. I wonder if a publisher like Faber, who were so successful with their 2015 reissue of Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights and who now seem to be reproducing some of that success with Emeric Pressburger’s superb forgotten novel The Glass Pearls, couldn’t reissue Gainham’s forgotten spy gems. The obvious one to start with would be The Stone Roses, as it’s a terrific thriller (probably her paciest) and has immediate title recognition thanks to the band taking their name from it.

Regardless, there is so little information available about these books around that I thought it might be useful to give a quick potted guide to Sarah Gainham’s spy fiction.

Time Right Deadly (1956)

Her debut, shortlisted for the Gold Dagger. Who murdered British journalist Julian Dryden in the Soviet sector of Vienna, and why? This is a crime novel, but it has spy skullduggery built into its DNA in the same way The Third Man does, and clearly owes something to that film considering the setting of foggy post-war Vienna and the mysterious dead man. It’s also reminiscent of another Carol Reed film, The Man Between. There’s a detective character in this who I wished I could read other books about.

The Cold Dark Night (1957)

What a great title for a spy novel. Lives up to it, too. Set in Berlin during the Four Power Conference of 1954, it follows a group of Western journalists covering the conference from the city’s Press Centre, and a curious espionage case that impacts them all. It’s atmospheric and, like all her work, beautifully written. Offering a great depiction of Cold War Berlin, it’s in the same vein as (the later) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The Mythmaker, aka Appointment in Vienna (1957)

A somewhat more old-fashioned novel, this one, and more weighty than her first two: a wider cast of characters, a lot of plot. Set in Austria in 1946, the protagonist is Christian ‘Kit’ Quest. Half-British, half-Hungarian, he is sent by British intelligence to Vienna to find Otto Berger, Hitler’s devoted personal servant, who is believed to have escaped the Bunker in Berlin and hidden a cache of platinum and precious stones to be used to fund a neo-Nazi revival: the book ends with a chase through a tunnel in the Alps. The plot echoes her husband Antony Terry’s reporting on Martin Bormann and other escaped Nazis planning a revival of the Third Reich, but the book also seems to contain a light critique of Ian Fleming, who Gainham knew as he was her husband’s boss at the Sunday Times. The name ‘Kit Quest’ sounds like a pastiche of James Bond, as well as being a play on the tradition of gallant spies fighting for God and country. As with Bond in Casino Royale, Quest is a handsome, somewhat arrogant young agent who ruthlessly uses women for his own pleasure with minimal emotional commitment, who falls unexpectedly in love.

The Stone Roses (1959)

Good title, isn't it? But this deserves to be remembered as so much more than a fun bit of music trivia. It’s set in May 1948 in Prague, three months after the Communists have seized power. Toby Elyot, a British journalist who was a highly effective agent in the war, is sent into the city to find and exfiltrate a missing local asset, whereupon he becomes entangled with the missing man’s sister. Like a weird prototype for a Quiller story in places, and the closest she came to writing something like a straight ‘spy thriller’. Elyot has elements of both her husband and Bond, and there’s also a terrific villain, Colonel Franciska Horak, a chilling young Soviet agent who wears full motorcycle leathers and passes for a man. This is first-class stuff, and it’s a crying shame so few people have read it.

The Silent Hostage (1960)

Like Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy, this is set almost entirely in a sleepy hotel, here by a beach in Yugoslavia, where the widow of a British spy realises lots of people aren’t who they seem. There’s a rather nasty English spy in this who reminded me of The Sandbaggers’ Neil Burnside. This one probably grabbed me the least, in part because the plot never becomes quite as exciting as it promises to be. It still contains some fantastic writing, though, and a great scene where the peaceful hotel suddenly erupts into violence.

The Tiger, Life (1983)

This is my favourite of her novels, and I included it in my pick of my top ten spy thrillers for The Times in 2020. Everything just clicks into place in this one. This is the most obscure of what is already a scandalously obscure oeuvre, perhaps because by this point her publisher was not as keen or the public were no longer interested in the early Cold War and she’d had her go at rivalling Ambler et al and hadn’t made her reputation that way. I think it might have had a very low print run: copies are scarce and tend to be expensive. Mine has no dustjacket. But what a novel. The setting is similar to The Cold Dark Night, focussed on the British press pack in Berlin in the early Cold War. Rose is married to eminent British correspondent Freddie Ingram, and is meant to just sort out furniture for their flat, smile prettily at their dinner parties, and not go out alone. Against the odds, she starts to uncover some very shady stuff. The insights into the ruins of the city, the politics of the time, the characterisation, the plot, the prose... it’s a great, great spy novel.

A quick guide to Sarah Gainham