WHILE WE WERE collecting material for this book I went one day to a second-hand bookshop in London which specialises in old detective stories and thrillers. I asked the girl in the shop if they had any spy stories in stock. A look of suspicion came over her face. “What foreign government do you represent?” she asked.
I told her that I only represented myself and with some difficulty extracted from her the story behind her question.
They had had an order from the agent of a foreign government for any book they could provide, fact or fiction, which so much as mentioned a spy. The result had been between forty and fifty large parcels, which brought them in about £150 and completely cleared out their stock of spy books.
“I hope,” I said, “that they are enjoying the books in Moscow.”
“It wasn’t the Russians,” she replied. “It was the Germans.”
Remembering an incident in the Cicero case, I said I hoped the Germans would get some good ideas. For instance, they might consider the formation of a Waiters’ Underground as described in E. Phillips Oppenheim’s The Secret. “That,” she said rather unhappily, “was one of the books we sold them.”
So now, one can believe, parcels of William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim and many other authors represented in these pages are being opened by puzzled German Embassy secretaries and other less official agents all over the world. L. C. Moyzisch in Operation Cicero describes how one day soon after he had made Cicero’s acquaintance he received by carrier post from Berlin a somewhat surprising present.
“It was a huge parcel which, when opened, turned out to be an almost complete collection of books dealing with the more celebrated cases of espionage in the twentieth century. There were various White Papers and official files, together with quite a few works of fiction. I had not ordered these books and had neither the time nor the desire to read them. There was a covering note, in which I was more or less tactfully informed that a thorough study of these books would help me in handling Operation Cicero. I shoved them all firmly into the back of the bottom drawer of my desk and there they remained, an unread monument to German thoroughness.”
No doubt such parcels in the future will always include at least one copy of The Spy’s Bedside Book.
HUGH GREENE