What is a good cold war book? Spy book?

Question

I've become very interested in the cold war lately and I was wondering if anyone knew of any good books about it? It doesn't matter if it's fiction or not, I would read either. Spy books are also something that I would like to read. I would be grateful for any suggestions.

Answer 1

No one's better (or even as good as) at cold war spy thrillers than Le Carre:

A Murder of Quality
One day Miss Ailsa Brimley, editor of a small English newspaper, receives plea for help and advice from a subscriber which intimates that the letter writer's husband may be about to kill her. Brimley consults her former colleague and friend, the retired British secret service agent George Smiley, but by the time he agrees to look into it, the letter writer is dead -- brutally murdered. Smiley takes the train out to Carne, and its exclusive school for upp...

A Perfect Spy
Magnus Pym, a British intelligence agent, has disappeared after his father's funeral. His agency, tries to cover up the fact that he is missing, while searching for him. He has hidden in a small English seaside town, where he begins writing a long narrative about his life for his son. He tells him about his relationship with his own con man father, how he became a spy and then a double agent. Le Carre alternates between the search for Pym and the...

A Small Town in Germany
It is the early 1970s in Bonn, the small and provincial capital of West Germany. A very minor bureaucrat in the British Embassy named Leo Harting has disappeared, along with many top secret files, including the most sensitive of all: the Green File, in which records of negotiations with the German government over its potential entry into the Common Market and NATO are kept. The Foreign Office sends a tough invesigator named Alan Turner from London to loo...

Absolute Friends
Ted Mundy, son of a disgraced Indian Army Major becomes involved with left wing student activists while attending university in Berlin during the late 1960's. A life long friendship is formed with Sasha, one of the stent leaders. Falling foul of the German police Ted is thrown out of Germany. Spending several years aimlessly trying to find his niche in society, Ted finaly becomes a very junior diplomat. While on a trip to East Germany Ted is reunited...

Call for the Dead
By the late 1950s, veteran British Secret Service agent George Smiley does mostly quiet work back in England. Two days after he conducts a routine security check of a Foreign Office employee named Fennan -- a man Smiley is sure poses no risk -- the man turns up dead, an apparent suicide. His widow, Elsa, a Jewish escapee from the Nazis, tells Smiley a few lies that don't add up. Smiley suspects Fennan was murdered, but his superiors want him to just let ...

leCarre booklist

Our Game
We all, lovers of John Le Carre's spy thrillers thought that the collapse of the Soviet empire, end of cold-war, and emergence of a unipolar world, will make writers like Lecarre unemployed, and deprive us of any more interesting books. Not so. Great, creative writers like Lecarre, can never be unemployed, can never let down their fans. This is one of most fascinating books that I have ever read. It's not a typical Lecarre, but all the specialties of ...

Single & Single
A search for a banker tied up with drug dealers....

Smiley's People
Information falls into the hands of Britains MI-5 (counterintel) that a spymaster for the KGB, codename KARLA, has a mentally ill daughter, secreted in a Swiss institution, without the knowledge, or permission, of KARLA's superiors. This information is used by George Smiley, an introverted, recently cuckholded (by a KGB mole, nonetheless, placed by KARLA) to blackmail KARLA into defecting to the UK. ...

The Constant Gardener
Tessa Quayle, an activist and wife of mid-level diplomat Justin, has been found raped and murdered in the upcountry bush of Kenya along with her driver. Arnold Bluhm, a black physician who accompanied her and was widely thought to be her lover, has disappeared. As mild-mannered Justin begins to investigate her death for himself, he learns about corruption and collaboration in and between the Kenyan government, a huge multi-national pharmaceutical corpora...

The Little Drummer Girl
The story opens in an affluent Bad Godesberg a suburb of Bonn, in Germany, with an explosion that tears apart an Israeli diplomat's house. Thinly disguised as investigators a small group from the Mosad, led by Kurtz, quickly discovers that it is the work of a Palestinian terrorist organization. They know the bomb manufacturer, whose handiwork has wreaked havoc in several other incidents. Marty sets up a plan to capture the perpetrator. Charlie is a p...

The Looking Glass War
It is the early 1960s. British military intelligence sent Taylor over to Finland to pick up a roll of film that was shot over a suspicious area of East Germany, but he is hit by a car and killed. Another office man from the department, Avery, follows to pose as Taylor's half-brother and retrieve the body (as well as the film, if he can locate it). His trip arouses suspicion not only among the Finnish and East German authorities, but in "the Circus," as t...

John Le Carre list of books

The Mission Song
Bruno Salvador is an interpreter of Swahili and other African languages such as Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda, and Shi, the language of the eastern Congo. He is fluent in French and English as well, and works for large corporations, law firms, and hospitals, and also for the British Secret Service. He is a British citizen now, but was actually born in the eastern Congo, to a Congolese woman and an Irish missionary priest. He never knew his mother, ...

The Russia House
Barley Blair a bumbling stumbling literary agent, receives classified information at a Moscow book fair. The classified info is from a "super" scientist (named 'Goethe') inside the Soviet weapons bureaucracy. Goethe says all Soviet technology does NOT work and that the arms race is futile: the West has already won. The key issue? Can MI-5 believe this source? Getting in contact with the source forces Blair (Sean Connery) to return to Russia, walk t...

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
The Berlin office under Leamas has not been doing well. One of their best double agents, Karl Riemeck, was gunned down at the border, probably on the orders of the head of the East German spy section, Mundt. Leamas is called back to England for one last job: to "turn" over to the communists himself and get close enough to Mundt to kill him. To do this, he acts as if he's been disgraced -- drinks a lot, assaults a grocer, and lands in jail -- so as to app...

The Tailor of Panama
Harry Pendel is tailor to the rich and famous of Panama; his skills are renowned. Few know that they were gained from spending some quality time in a British jail for arson. Panama is a hot bed for drugs, gun running, and maybe even worse things. The British secret service would love to have access to some human based intelligence from Panama. What better candidate than the tailor to the politicians and crooks. Harry is recruited into the murky world ...

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Another great masterpiece from the master of spy stories. This too is a George Smiley's story. British Government receives a sudden jolt when they wake up to the situation that a Soviet mole has penetrated innermost layers of Secret Service(referred to as “circus”). In house investigation is impossible since nobody knows who or where the mole is and at what level. George Smiley, the retired spy master who was ousted in disgrace at having hinted at ...

Answer 2

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Answer 3

Anything Ian Fleming would fit that bill. Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, Goldfinger, Dr. No ...You cannot beat James Bond for cold war spies ... You might also like to read something about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - real spies killed in NY for spying for Russia.

There are some great contemporary spy authors out there. Daniel Silva and Nelson de Mille come to mind. C.

Answer 4

One of my favorite Cold War novels is John le Carre's "The Spy who Came in From the Cold", I first read it some 35+ years ago and found it most readable, enjoyable and horrible regarding the hero worked as a spy in East Germany. You'd like it especially the last scene depicting his attempt to cross the Berlin wall but failed, it is fantastic whenever I reread it.

Answer 5

If you want to expand from the cold war, and read about spies in the Civil War, check out On Secret Service, by John Jakes. It is Fiction, but with a lot of real life thrown in.

http://www.johnjakes.com/onsecretservice.htm

Answer 6

Fiction?

I'd go with early Tom Clancy, like "Cardinal of the Kremlin."

Non-Fiction?

"Reagan's War" gives a good big picture view of what the Cold War was about, and how we won it.

Answer 7

Try "Jack Higgins", "Ken Follett",