Spybrary Spy Podcast

Spybrary Spy Podcast with Matthew Kresal After a rejuvenating few months at Shrublands our Brush Pass Reviews makes a welcome return to the Spybrary Spy Podcast. Matthew Kresal’s brush pass has been decoded. Tune in and hear his transmission where he gives us his rapid briefing on the Battle for Bond, a book written by Robert Sellars. ‘In 1963, Ian Fleming, the creator of the 20th century’s greatest fictional character was in court, accused of plagiarism. The screen version of James Bond was not Fleming’s creation. It was the creation of Jack Whittingham, who was employed by maverick producer Kevin McClory to adapt the character to the big screen. Had this screen character never been developed, James Bond might have been just another minor fictional spy character. Battle for Bond – Robert Sellars The Battle for Bond is a tale of bitter recriminations, betrayal, multi-million dollar lawsuits and even death. It is the fabled story of Kevin McClory’s 40 year legal battle over the rights to the screen version of James Bond, which he and Whittingham had created. The first edition of this book was banned by the Ian Fleming Will Trust. But the truth never dies! This second edition features a new foreword by Len Deighton.

On this episode we talk to 2 Tom Clancy fans about the Jack Ryan Amazon TV series! 'Jack Ryan Is a Patriotic Nightmare' Watching this show feels like falling down a Fox News rabbit hole. Vanity Fair's Jack Ryan Review   Review: 'Meet the New Jack Ryan, Same as the Old Jack Ryan' New York Times Jack Ryan Review   'Gloriously macho: For too long the leftie-dominated entertainment industry has been ignoring the truth about our world' The Spectators' Jack Ryan Review These are 3 polarising headlines written about the Jack Ryan Amazon TV series. Taken from Vanity Fair, The New York Times and Spectator Magazine. We tackle these reviews and more on the Spybrary Podcast Episode 57

Berlin Game -Len Deighton - Spybrary Book Club Edition   Spybrary listeners voted overwhelmingly for Berlin Game to be the first spy book to be discussed in our first ever book club Spybrary edition. Listen to an in-depth conversation on this spy classic with Spybrary host Shane Whaley, Deighton expert Rob Mallows and newcomer to Len Deighton's work but not the spy genre Peter Newman. WARNING - Please do not listen to the Berlin Game Book Club edition of Spybrary if you have not read the book. Unlike other episodes of the Spybrary Spy Podcast this episode if full of Berlin Game spoilers. It is a book club edition so we cover lots of aspects of the book including many of the twists and turns.   Spybrary Host Shane Whaley claims that this is one of the top 3 spy books ever written, if not the best! 'Not just a multi-layered spy novel but also a love letter from Len Deighton to Berlin' he says. Rob Mallows says Berlin Game is the book that got him hooked on Len Deighton. Peter Newman delivers a fresh approach as this was his first time reading Berlin Game. What did our panel think of the plot, the characters, the writing, the conclusion? Tune in to find out! 'Fleming made spy fiction globally popular, but it took Deighton in the Sixties with novels such as The IPCRESS File to make it hip. His finest work, though, came later, in the Eighties, with this trilogy (completed by Mexico Set and London Match) about the disillusioned SIS agent Bernard Samson. Less exuberant than his early books but more subtle, Berlin Game is a terrific feat of plotting that out-le-Carrés le Carré in its sardonic portrait of Secret Service office politics. Tarantino (who had Max Cherry read a copy in Jackie Brown) should hurry up and film it, like he said he would.' Jake Kerridge - The Telegraph.   Notable Quotes from Berlin Game by Len Deighton 'How long have we been sitting here?’ I said. I picked up the field glasses and studied the bored young American soldier in his glass-sided box. ‘Nearly a quarter of a century,’ said Werner Volkmann. His arms were resting on the steering wheel and his head was slumped on them. ‘That GI wasn’t even born when we first sat here waiting for the dogs to bark.’ Bernard Samson ----- 'Do you know some quiet restaurant where they have sausage and potatoes and good Berlin beer?’ ‘I know just the place, Bernie. Straight up Friedrichstrasse, under the railway bridge at the S-Bahn station and it’s on the left. On the bank of the Spree: Weinrestaurant Ganymed.’ ‘Very funny,’ I said. Between us and the Ganymed there was a wall, machine guns, barbed wire, and two battalions of gun-toting bureaucrats.'

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!