The Debrief Recommends: Existential Ennui

A few months ago, I chanced across the blog Existential Ennui because it contained a very interesting guest essay about Dennis Wheatley by literary critic Michael Barber (whose excellent Paris Review interview with Kingsley Amis from 1975 can be read here). I was intrigued not just by the essay but by the subject matter of the blog, which seemed to range over a great deal of British and American fiction, including some rather obscure thriller-writers.

The site is run by editor and bibliophile Nick Jones. And as Nick has since very generously reviewed my own work, so I thought it was high time I pointed out his own. Today he has posted the first part of an exclusive interview with spy novelist Anthony Price - this is a real coup, as to my knowledge there are no other interviews with Price online, which is somewhat surprising considering how prolific he was. Price, like Joseph Hone, Adam Hall, Geoffrey Rose and several other brilliant British thriller-writers, has been sadly rather forgotten since the end of the Cold War, and it's fascinating to read his thoughts on publishing days gone by. Price also holds a secondary role in the thriller genre, I think, as a reviewer: I have dozens of books that have quotes from his Oxford Mail reviews on the covers. Indeed, as he tells Nick, it was through his reviewing that he came to fiction. Price's novels were, I've always felt, very English, and Nick's interview with him almost reads like a scene from one of his novels. In the second part, he has some great stories about the likes of Kingsley Amis and Terence Stamp.

Anyway, bookmark Existential Ennui if you're interested in thoughtful reviews, interviews and insights into book collecting and 20th-century publishing and design. You won't regret it.

The Debrief recommends

I've been doing this blog for a few weeks now, so I thought I would step back for a moment. One thing I want to do here is to develop a body of articles, essays, pieces, posts, snippets – words – that look at several aspects of spying and spy fiction. I think the espionage genre is looked down on in some literary quarters, but deserves serious research and critical consideration.

This has been done in theses, journals and books, of course, but I feel that increasingly the arena for it will be online, or in digital form. One of my inspirations for this blog is an excellent site by a British academic, John Fraser, which contains Thrillers. This is effectively a hyperlinked book on the genre, and it's somewhere you can get lost for hours, and learn a lot. Some of the pieces perhaps suffer a little from academic-speak, but on the whole I think what shines through is Professor Fraser's deep knowledge and passion for the genre, his gentle wit, and his great insight. If you're a fan of Donald Hamilton and haven't been there yet, you really are in for a treat. But whoever your favourite thriller authors are, I think you'll find a lot to enjoy here, a lot to think about, and perhaps some new authors to discover.

Along slightly similar lines is Bradley On Film, 'the cinematic musings of Matthew Bradley'. While not strictly espionage- or thriller-related, this blog offers some fascinating insights into cinema history from a widely published author on popular culture, and an expert on the work of Richard Matheson (I Am Legend). Mr Bradley also had a long career in publishing, and was a friend and 'shadow publicist' for Elleston Trevor, alias Adam Hall. If you're a Quiller fan, you really must read his pieces on Mr Trevor. Start here.

Finally, I highly recommend a brand new blog, Markham's. Subtitled 'A Few Notes On The Thriller Genre', this is the brainchild of 'Q.R. Markham', the alias of Quentin Rowan, an American journalist, poet, critic and book-lover who has been published in The Paris Review and elsewhere. Mr Rowan is already offering some very astute insights into spy fiction, with the promise of more to come. There's a lot of food for thought in this deceptively simple and elegant looking blog.

Mr Rowan is also a novelist, having just completed a spy thriller set in the late Sixties (which shows excellent taste), which is currently seeking publication. Here is its compelling synopsis: 'Spy Safari follows Jonathan Chase, a man ensnared by an insidious line of work – espionage – that threatens to take over all aspects of his life. Chase has survived the undercover killing grounds of the Cold War and imprisonment in Manchuria. But now, in 1968, throughout Europe, U.S. agents are being kidnapped and brain-drained by a mysterious organization known only as Zero Directorate – and what begins for Chase as a global manhunt swiftly turns into something far closer to home.' I am already salivating at the prospect of reading it.

There are many other excellent spy fiction-related blogs out there, some of which you will find linked to in the right-hand column, but these are my top three tips for today. Tell them The Debrief sent you!