On Episode 55 of the Spybrary Podcast, guest host Matthew Kresal talks to the writer and director of Red Moon, a cold war thriller audio drama. Produced by Wireless Theatre Red Moon is an alternate history story about what would have happened had the Soviets landed on the moon before the Americans.   If today's episode has piqued your interest, Wireless Theater have kindly made Episode 1 of Red Moon free for you to try out. PHASE ONE: MOONRISE London, 1979. As American and Soviet moonbases aim their nuclear missiles at targets across the planet, former MI5 officer Eddie Sloper is about to uncover a deadly secret.  

Welcome to Episode 54 of the Spybrary Spy Podcast! Recently we received some intelligence suggesting that two well known Spybrarians and Spy Book bloggers Matthew Bradford and Jeff Quest were  planning a meetup in Los Angeles. So we sent some of our agents to tail them for the day, thankfully they did what every self-respecting Spybrarian would do. They met up and hit some book stores, picking up a stack of first editions and signed copies. Mind you Quest has the knack of discovering signed copies everywhere he goes!!! Then they retired several pubs, to drink some beer and chat spy books. Quest and Bradford are two extremely well read guys when it comes to spy literature, can you imagine being a fly on the wall of that conversation? Well today you can be. One of our agents was able to place a listening device in their vicinity (we can't reveal where, secret tradecraft)  so you can hear Bradford and Quest talking all about the Red Sparrow Trilogy with special focus on The Kremlin's Candidate, the final book of the Red Sparrow trilogy written by ex CIA man Jason Matthews. This is a no holds barred conversation, no kid gloves with this one as you would expect with two Spybrary heavyweights such as Quest and Bradford. -----WARNING----- Our transcribers tell us that whilst the product is gold., there is a spoiler alert towards the last segment. Don't worry the chaps give fair and clear warning,  so if you are like me and you have not read The Kremlin's Candidate yet you can still tune in to this transmission.-------WARNING---- The audio is not studio quality, our engineers have worked on the file and it is intelligible just not crystal clear, occasional background and interference as our targets move from place to place in LA in an effort to evade our tail.  Please send any audio complaints to Q branch and not to us. Seriously though, a big thanks to Jeff Quest and Matthew Bradford for taking the trouble to record this chat for us. I think you will all enjoy it! Fans talking spy books in a bar over a pint? This is quintessential Spybrary!

We talk to the man behind Spy Guys and Gals, the biggest spy book resource online! Can he whittle down over 7000 spy books to just 5! Its Dead Drop 5 time!

Hi everybody it's Jeff Gelb I'm trying my hand at the brush pass to introduce you guys and gals to the wonderful world of Clyde Allison and his amazing character 0008  or Trevor Anderson who is Our Man From Sadisto. Believe it or not these books came out in the 1960s when I was a teenager and they were not sold at regular newsstands they were sold at adult bookstores! They were from a company San Diego based called Amber Library who also went through several other names. Clyde Allison was a house name as well. However it was really all the work of one brilliant writer named William Knowles who toiled in soft core porn obscurity. Throughout the 1960s and almost made it big time with some Lancer books in the late 60s but never quite broke through to a mainstream audience sadly even more sadly. He committed suicide in the late 1960s. It's quite a sad story. However his work in this series of books and there were 20 of them within four years. Think about that was brilliant and hilarious. The Our Man Sadisto series were spy fi sci fi sexy satires all incorporating science fiction elements and a heavy dollop of sexual innuendo. Now when I say that obviously you have to remember the times in the mid 1960s were not the early 2000's. You really could not get away with saying very much at all. So all of it was done by innuendo and all of it was hilariously done. Allison was actually a very brilliant writer who unfortunately just was never discovered by the mainstream press and I don't know why. But he obviously knew where he spoke in terms of spy novels he was well versed in what was going on around him at the time and he used characters and situations from other people's spy novels as satirical jumping off points. As I said there were 20 books in this series starting with our man from Sadisto in 1965 and ending with the Desert Damsels in 1968, nineteen out of twenty of these books have absolutely brilliant cover art paintings by an artist named Robert Bonfils who just died fairly recently. He painted dozens if not hundreds of paperback covers for these sleaze publishers in the 1960s and he was really quite brilliant himself. If you don't believe me please look up Our Man From Sadisto by Clyde Allison on the Internet and you will find all of his amazing covers. One of the things that was just great about these books for me as a teenager and still great re-reading them today is that they all included references to then current spy movies or book characters. There were frequent mentions of Our Man from Uncle, the James Bond character himself. Modesty Blaise and even more obscure characters like The Man From Orgy which by the way was a series that was nowhere near as funny or clever as the Man from Sadisto books were. The most famous real world so to speak character that Clyde Allison used in several of his books was a reference to the Our Man Flint movie because for some reason the Our Man Flint movie had flint reading a spy novel featuring 0008. It was of course a complete coincidence. I am quite certain that the writer of the Our Man Flynt movie had no idea there was a character called 0008. Because again these were never sold on the mainstream newsstands. However in the movie. Our Man Flint meets the triple 0 8 character and they have a scuffle in a French restaurant. If you want to go back and check the movie out you will see that scene.  It's very very funny. The books were hilarious. They were full of science fiction elements like machines that made people want to have sex nonstop stuff like that. There were maniacal super-villains who wanted to take over the world. There were constant references to all of the other spy characters of the time and they were brilliantly written.   Now in 160 pages which is all that Clyde Allison had to work with for each book I would say a good hundred pages out of 160 were usually sexually oriented material. However again we're talking about sex as defined in the mid 60s. And so what he had to do was to continually reinvent the wheel in terms of how he described his characters having sex and that in itself is hilarious. I loved these books as a teenager and have recollected them. As a person in my mid 60s and I still find them hilarious and well worth reading and collecting. They're very rare. They're very hard to find. If you can find any on the Internet. Grab one and have the experience of a lifetime. Be prepared to laugh out loud. And don't be drinking anything while you're reading the book because you might spit it out when you start laughing. Seriously. Clyde Allison was an amazing talent. These are all very funny books. They are of course very much of their time. But that was a really crazy time. These are really crazy books and they're really worth trying to find. I don't believe any of these are currently available. I believe they're tied up the rights for these are tied up somewhere so that they cannot be legally reprinted although I noticed that a couple of them have been reprinted anyway and you can pick them up on various Internet websites for under fifteen dollars. Again these may or may not be legitimate reprints but if you want to if I have whet your appetite whetted your appetite at all to listen to. Sorry to read the adventures or the misadventures of the greatest spy lover of all time Trevor Anderson of Sadisto better known as triple 0 8 then please do yourself a very big favor and pick one of those up. And I am almost positive you'll agree with me that these are some of the funniest books you will ever read.

Charles Cumming - British Spy Writer talks about his work on the Spybrary Spy Podcast   Welcome to Episode 51 of the Spybrary Spy podcast today we have a stellar interview lined up for you with British spy writer Mr. Charles Cumming David Craggs, our man in the U.K. goes to West London to interview Charles Cumming about his latest book called The Man Between ( The Moroccan Girl in the USA.) We know Charles has a large following among our Spybrary listeners, so we go on a journey through his other spy novels including the Kell trilogy, Typhoon, Trinity Six etc  Not just a top notch spy novelist, the Ink Factory have drafted Charles Cumming on to the writing team for the much anticipated second season of The Night Manager.  Wonderful to hear that the master himself John le Carre has given the sequel his blessing which must give Charles and the team a lot of confidence (and daresay we say it added pressure) to produce a thrilling sequel.

Follow in the steps of Bernard Samson - Len Deighton Meetup - Berlin Listen to a special message that Len Deighton has sent us on Episode 50 of the Spybrary Spy Podcast! Rob Mallows from the Deighton Dossier returns to the show to talk with Spybrary Spy Podcast host Shane Whaley. We talk through our schedule for the day walking in the footsteps of Bernard Samson from the classic spy novels written by Len Deighton. Join us in Berlin on August 4th.

On this episode of the Spybrary Spy Podcast, Shane Whaley hosts a round table discussion on the life and books of spy writer Frederick Forsyth. Author and spy, yes spy, Frederick Forsyth has been writing for over 50 years. The former Reuters man is best known for his debut novel 'Day of the Jackal' as well as The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and The Fourth Protocol. He has written almost 30 books with a new novel The Fox due out later this year. Shane is joined by Tom from the Literary 007 website and writer David Holman. Think of this episode as a primer on Fredrick Forsyth as it is impossible to do justice to a master storyteller who has been writing for almost 50 years.  On this round panel we discuss: How did David Holman and Tom get into Frederick Forsyth's work? What is so appealing about Forsyth's writing? What Frederick Forsyth and John le Carre have in common when it comes to research for their spy books Which Forsyth novel should those new to his work start with. How does Frederick Forsyth's later work stack up? The movie adaptations of Forsyth's novels and which of his books does David reckon is crying out to be adapted for the big screen. And Much More!

Brush Pass is back and so is Matthew Bradford from Double O Section who tells us more about Matt Helm. Episode 49 sees the return of Matthew Bradford, a man who has watched more spy movies and read more spy novels than I have had hot dinners! He returns to Brush Pass to tell us more about the character of Matt Helm and in particular the novel The Interlopers. (Check out Matthew's Spy Blog and add it to your bookmarks.) Some of you may remember the Matt Helm movies from the 60's and Matthew gives you the low down on those too.

Thrilling, evocative and hugely controversial, Codename: Hero blows apart the myths surrounding one of the Cold War's greatest spy operations and potentially it's greatest spy Oleg Penkovsky In the late 1950s the USSR appeared to be winning the arms race: their 1949 nuclear test  signaled a direct challenge to the West, changing the face of the Cold War overnight. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, and fear escalated in the US and UK. Amidst this climate, KGB Colonel, Oleg Penkovsky desperate to defect, came knocking on the doors of the CIA and MI6. The information he provided as a double operative would change the course of history. Pour the whiskey, get cozy, and buckle up for an eye-opening, mind-blowing look at Oleg Penkovsky, the KGB Colonel-turned-double-agent. Author Jeremy Duns, taking break from writing fiction, has penned a reinvestigation of the Penkovsky Operation, titled Dead Drop in the UK and Code Name: Hero in the US. Those of us unfamiliar with this 'spy who saved the world' are in for a wild ride as Spybrary Host Shane Whaley and Jeremy Duns consider a world without Penkovsky's aid to the West: Would we have descended into nuclear war? What would the outcome of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile crisis have been without Penkovsky's crucial information? Those of us well-versed in Cold War history will thrill to hear Duns' original take on the Cold War's most dangerous operation. In fact, Penkovsky's information was so good, the CIA had to convince President Kennedy it came from multiple sources, lest the Commander-in-Chief worry that they were relying too heavily on one agent. This episode is satisfyingly chock-full of juicy information, including: Penkovsky's deft use of spycraft: learn how he circumvented surveillance to pull of the most famous brush pass in espionage history. How the Penkovsky trial has influenced popular culture: from 1960’s TV spy series to the Avengers. The balancing act the CIA and MI6 had in dealing with Penkovsky's difficult personality. Other double agents of the time: the sad, lonely life of Greville Wynne; and Pyotr Popov, who turned double agent for the KGB to save his life after being caught, and who, like Penkovsky, was ultimately arrested, tried, and executed by the Soviets. How the CIA tried to prevent Jeremy Duns from publishing some details of his book.  

Forever and a Day review by the Spybrary Podcast. Listen to our round table of Bond fans who give you their review of the latest Anthony Horowitz 007 novel 007 is dead. Long live 007. The heavily anticipated James Bond prequel, “Forever and a Day” by Anthony Horowitz is finally out, and Shane has brought together two Bond super-fans to discuss it. If your copy hasn’t arrived yet, fear not! Sit back, relax, and enjoy a spoiler-free round table chat with David Craggs, who joined Shane for Episode #23's Dead Drop 5, and Tom, who runs literary007.com, and featured in one of Spybrary’s earliest episodes, appropriately, #007. In exploring this latest edition to the Bond canon, David provides an in-depth comparison of Horowitz's Bond continuation novels to several previous authors of the series. Who captures Fleming’s tone and character the best? Find out why Tom thinks Fleming’s style is so hard to capture. Does the book follow ‘Bond lore’ accurately?  Shane suggests author Mr Horowitz should hire David to be his Bond expert fact checker as David reveals details that don’t quite match up with established Bond facts! In true Spybrary fashion, David and Tom are not afraid to critique the book's weaknesses at the same time extolling its strengths, which are far more numerous. With the depth and breadth of knowledge worthy of true Bond aficionados, our panelists take a seriously deep dive into Fleming as an author, intelligence official, and human being. Why are Fleming and le Carre so often compared? How does the character of Bond hold up in today's #metoo era?