Back in the ’60s there was a gigantic spy craze, largely driven by the Bond books and films. Spies were all over the movie screens, on TV, and on book shelves. Many of these were as cartoonish and exaggerated as Bond himself, or moreso, but novelist Len Deighton found success with an anti-Bond character. His anonymous spy was much more of an everyman Brit, and the spy agency he worked for was far from glamorous.
In sum, Deighton’s spy was a civil servant who between the occasional episodes of violence and severe personal danger, spent his time filling out arcane required paperwork, dealing with office politics and getting harassed about minor entries on his expense reports.
Deighton’s spy went to the silver screen in the form of actor Michael Caine, back in his black boxy glasses era. Since it’s harder to do an anonymous character in a movie, the spy was dubbed Harry Palmer, after one of the false identities used by his novelistic counterpart. The first two Palmer movies (The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin) and are pretty damn good, but the third one, Billion Dollar Brain, sucks. Check out the earlier ones on DVD if you get the chance, though.* Meanwhile, thirty years later, Caine would return to the role in a pair of cable TV movies.
[*Hmm, sadly the Ipcress File DVD seems to be out of print and selling for exaggerated sums.]Anyhoo…a few years back sci-fi writer Charles Stross did a book called The Atrocity Archives, which melded Deighton’s mordent take on spies with Lovecraftian magic. In sum, mathematics is not only the universal language, it’s the pan-universal language, and what with computers and stuff world-threatening magic is getting easier to conjure. So a nerdy chap named Bob Howard learns when a program he writes nearly causes some extremely bad things to occur, and he is forcibly recruited to work for a very Deighton-esque spy agency to work on such matters.
As Bob says in the sequel: “The Laundry collects computer scientists who accidentally discover the elements of computational demonology, in much the same way Stalin used to collect jokes about himself (he had two Gulags full). About six years ago I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton, not to mention most of Birmingham and the Midlands, while experimenting with a really neat, new rendering algorithm that just might have accidentally summoned up the entity known to the clueful as “Fuck! Nyarlathotep! Run!” (and to everyone else as “Fuck, run!).”
I think reading that bit alone should let you know if this is the sort of thing you’d like or not. Now the second book in the series, The Jennifer Morgue, is out, and it’s great stuff. Bob has, sort of, a license to kill, but he’d prefer not to kill, you know, humans, and vastly prefers his unorthodox weapons, like Hands of Glory, to mundane guns and such. Bob is nearly killed a number of times in this volume, but the first time by the cheap little Euro-car the agency rents him to drive the German Autobahn.
The computer stuff is way over my head, but it sounds authentic, and the tech stuff doesn’t override the story, which is terrific fun. Again, tastes vary, but I myself can’t wait for the next book.
