There’s a little story behind my reading this book, extremely trivial, but I’ll tell it. Back in the mid-1970s, the big TV networks all decided to throw caution to the wind and extend their broadcast schedules late into the night, time that had mostly belonged to local stations up till then. Various experiments were made as to how to use that time – though eventually they all just settled for degenerating attempts to re-create the Johnny Carson show – and lo, these remain, even unto this day.

One show I caught on late-night TV during that period was an English series called Quiller, about a spy who was the hero of a series of novels by Adam Hall (a pseudonym for Elleston Trevor, who wrote, among other books, The Flight of the Phoenix). I remember thinking, when I saw it, “Wow, they took an American character and made him British.”

In this, as in so many things, I was wrong. I thought of Quiller as an American because I’d seen The Quiller Memorandum, a pretty good 1966 movie that starred the American actor George Segal.

But that casting decision was made by an American studio. Years later I picked up a couple of the Quiller novels, and discovered that he was in fact an Englishman.

Recently I found the Quiller TV series on YouTube, and have been watching it (I have it on at the moment, in fact). That made me curious to read the original novel, The Quiller Memorandum (first published as The Berlin Memorandum). And this is my review.

“Quiller” is a code name. The agent hero’s actual name is never given in the books. He works for a shadowy government agency called “The Bureau,” which does not officially exist. All Bureau agents are entirely deniable, and will never be rescued or exchanged. (This scenario is kind of a cliché today, but I suspect it was fresh when the author came up with it.)

Quiller is the most independent of the Bureau’s independent agents. He likes to work without a net, so to speak, keeping his contacts and support to a minimum, and he never carries a gun or any spy gadgetry. To him it’s a game of wits.

The Quiller Memorandum begins with Quiller returning from a long job, eager for a rest. Then he’s told that one of his fellow agents has been killed in Berlin. And the hook that drags him in is the information that that agent was hunting an ex-Nazi officer named Zossen. Quiller has a particular interest in Zossen, whom he witnessed performing an atrocity during World War II.

When Quiller arrives in Berlin, his presence is quickly detected by Phönix, a secret organization committed to re-establishing the Third Reich. Quiller is not surprised or dismayed by this development. His purpose is not to stay secret, but to engage in a strategic battle of wits with the Phönix leaders. They play out their moves and counter-moves like a fencing match or a game of chess, each side waiting for the other to make a fatal mistake. Quiller is a danger junkie. He lives for this.

In many ways, I found The Quiller Memorandum fascinating. The descriptions of spycraft were plausible and intriguing. There was a fair amount of violence in the story, but the bulk of the action is cerebral.

Still, I found the book annoying in several ways. In part it’s because it’s an artifact of its time – World War II was recent enough that one could get away with making broad generalizations about the essential brutality and conformity of the German race; a lot of people believed that stuff back then. Perhaps they still do, but I’m allergic to arguments for ethnic determinism.

And the psychological aspects struck me as naïve. Some of Quiller’s strategic decisions are based on his predictions of how a traumatized woman will respond to various stimuli – I’m not sure it’s that cut and dried in real life. Few things age as quickly as popular psychology.

And, on a purely petty, chauvinistic note, I was offended by the way Quiller defends his decision never to carry a gun. He argues that guns make one overconfident (fair enough, though I still think it’s poor tactics to bring a knife to a gun fight), but then he goes on to disparage Americans and all gun owners in terms of sexual compensation. That, in my opinion, is pure condescension.

I’m told that The Quiller Memorandum is in fact the weakest book of the series, and that the later ones are better. I’ve actually read some of the later ones, and quite liked them, as I recall. But this one put me off so much that I probably won’t go on with the series.