The Quiller Memorandum

by Adam Hall

Book Overview

You are a secret agent working for the British in Berlin. You are due to go home on leave, but you are being followed-by your own people, or by the enemy. A man meets you in the theater and briefs you... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 076530967X
• ISBN13: 9780765309679
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Forge
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

breathless story-telling

You will be hard put to find any writer who can jack up your heart rate the way Adam Hall manages to in these relatively few pages. His story is a marvel of relentless pacing. With sentences that read something like Hemingway under the influence of bad speed - a steady drumbeat of monosyllables, phrase after short phrase linked by "and," an economy of language - and a first-person voice that Hall maintains pitch-perfectly from start to finish, this book is one of the best-written thrillers ever. It doesn't resort to bloated descriptions of technical gadgets or exotic locales; nor is its protagonist a super-hero. (He is smarter than the average bear, and physically tougher, too, but believably so.) It does use the Nazi-comeback formula - imagine how many millions of paperbacks in how many hundreds of airports the ancient swastika image has helped to sell all these years! - but I imagine that in the early 1960s, it was actually one of the first books to explore this now-overused plotline. Hall's description of Quiller's foe-induced, near-psychotic drug experience is particularly gripping - I've looked repeatedly, and I still don't understand how he made this description so convincing that it would likely persuade any reader to just say no. I look forward to reading more in the Quiller series.

Compelling Spy Novel - Among the Best of this Genre

Whether of not you've seen and enjoyed the movie version of "The Quiller Memorandum," you are in for a rare treat. The novel is different, but in many ways even better than the film. Adam Hall's Quiller is a cold-eyed realist (colder, more introverted and more introspective than that played by George Segal) working for an unnamed and unacknowledged British agency in Cold War-era Berlin. Ordered to infiltrate and expose a ring of old and neo-Nazis, Quiller attempts methodically to probe the depths of a secret organization that is bent on resuscitating the Third Reich. This work is dangerous, and is made more so by the uncertain allegiances of some of the characters. Although the novel takes place twenty years after the end of World War II, it was still unclear where certain characters, even those in high government positions, stood. The detailed descriptions of Quiller's reasoning and analyses demonstrate the workings of the mind of a master spy. What makes Quiller so compelling is that while he is brilliant, he is flawed. Quiller makes mistakes, sometimes tragic ones, sometimes avoidable ones. I disagree with the view that the characters lack depth and are one-dimensional. Inga, for example, is as complicated a character as one is likely to see, for biographical and psychological reasons that are well-explained. Rothstein is not quite what he appears to be on the surface, either. But the true joy of this novel is its detailed descriptions of the "how" of spycraft -- how messages are transmitted; how they are received; how the emergency backup works; how one loses a tail; how one endures interrogation under pressure. The psychological reasons why certain characters behave as they do are also intriguing. Yes, the references to the "id" and the "ego" are a bit dated, but the kindergarten-level Freud-speak does not detract from the real mind games that the characters are playing here. Overall, "The Quiller Memorandum" is an outstanding spy novel that is one of the best of its genre.

What the Sex Pistos did to rock music...

...this author did to the spy thriller--don't be put off by the number of pages, each is fast-paced and the writing style is both accessible as well as being completely original--with all the hoopla over Brosnan quitting the Bond series, Broccoli and co. could do no wrong using this character and series as a template--HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

A masterpiece for the spy fiction fan

Quiller, the shadow executive for a British undercover agency is sent on a mission to Berlin that requires him to uncover the plans of Phoenix, a Nazi group. Quiller is beaten and battered but finally uncovers several planned exercises in terror. The novel is a synthesis of a James Bond novel with the best of Len Deighton. There is plenty of action for the Bond fan, but taut believable plots for the more serious spy aficionado. No supervillains, but a shadowy ominous realistic group of villains. Quiller Memorandum gives you the best of both worlds.

An Edgar Award winning classic of espionage fiction.

When it was first published as The Berlin Memorandum in 1966, this novel won Elleston Trevor the Edgar Award for mystery fiction. Trevor, whose other literary credits include The Flight of the Phoenix and Bury Him Among Kings, was spurred by his success to write a nineteen-book series about Quiller's further missions under the pseudonym of Adam Hall. Although the books have had a loyal following, especially in Britain, none has received the acclaim which greeted this first novel in the series. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it was eventually filmed as The Quiller Memorandum with George Segal and Alec Guiness. Quiller is a "shadow executive" for an officially unavowed British intelligence agency known only as "the Bureau". The novel opens in post-war Berlin where he has been working with the Z police, a German agency devoted to the prosecution of war criminals. War-weary from an undercover assignment at a concentration camp during WW II, Quiller is due to return home. The Bureau convinces him to stay, however, by revealing to him that a forming neo-Nazi movement in Berlin may be headed by Zossen, the commandant of the concentration camp from which Quiller had helped Jews escape. Working alone in a faceless city which presents hidden threats at every turn, Quiller accepts the assigment that has already left one agent dead -- stepping into, as his field director puts it, a gap between two mobilizing armies which cannot see one another in the fog. Hall's writing is consistently terse and compelling. He is at his best in evoking the tension of working for a manipulative secret beaurocracy whose motivations remain obscure, but whose local culture seems vitally real and believable. Quiller is a soldier at work for an army that he knows only from the ranks, whose generals are shrouded in shadow. It is in evoking this culture that Hall's writing transcends the genre, exploring complex themes of loyalty and disillusionment, and the specifically 20th century Kafka-esque relationship of an individual to the beaurocracies that determine his fate. But the real strength of the novel lies in its pure ability to entertain. Hall manages to maintain a level of tension and suspense worthy of comparison to any of espionage fiction's masterpieces, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to The Ipcress File. If some of the writing now seems cliche, that is because to a large extent THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM created the cliches. It has had hundreds of imitators both in print an on the screen since its publication, but anyone going back to the original (even thirty years later) will likely agree with the New York Times Book Review that "no one writes better espionage than Adam Hall."